The Necessity of Hope

“It gets better.” Twice recently I have been challenged on this statement. I understand why. When you live with a condition or life circumstance that causes you chronic pain and suffering at best this can sound like a glib, easy response from others who don’t understand the perseverance and depth of your pain, allowing them to feel better, at worst it can sound like a dismissal of your experience, a minimising of the extent of your suffering. Attempts to bless can become a curse so easily in the mouth of someone who has not taken the time to truly listen and try to understand your pain.

The challenge to “it gets better,” is a challenge from a place of pain and deserves a tender and thoughtful response. For sufferers of long-term, chronic pain, mental or physical, false hope can feel like a bitter lie, a glass of water just outside of your reach in the desert, a callous reminder of there being no escape for you although there is for others, a fearful warning that the patience of others may one day expire, even at times a condemnation of your failure to get better.

However, in spite or even because of this I will defend hope to my last breath and without compromise. I will give 3 reasons why I believe whoever we are and whatever we face we can in some measure appropriate “it gets better” for ourselves and then explain why I think it is absolutely essential that we do.

1. Your suffering will not always be this bad. Miley Cyrus was on the radio today talking about her new single and one of the lyrics in it that means the most to her. She talks about the way that we torment ourselves with forever. Almost everyone with a chronic condition, or even a deteriorating one, has times of better and worse. Even if better lasts a day, or an hour or a minute, there are moments that are slightly less horrendous. And at the moment when the pain is so bad it feels unendurable, hope says, it will not always be like this. This may return, it may even get worse, but it will not always feel exactly like this. 

Even if it is temporary, even if it is incomplete, there will be a break in the clouds, a breath of fresh air, a candle in the darkness, a moment of peace. And, in particular, the situation that feels right now like a car crash catastrophe that is all you can see or think about will certainly not always feel like this. Everything changes. Nothing in this life is permanent, and if that is true for good things that we cannot hang on to, it is also true for the awful things we fear we can never escape. 

Can I say just how important this is to believe and hold onto for people with BPD. We who experience BPD are so prone to black and white thinking. Pain creates a tunnel of darkness that seems to be without end. It is so easy to believe that how I feel right now is all I have ever felt and all I will ever feel. But it isn’t. Good days happen. Good weeks even. With help we can escape from situations that trigger us and there are people out there who will show us the love and kindness that we crave, even just for a moment. It gets better does not mean it gets perfect or it never gets worse again. But it does mean it gets better than this.

2. There is always hope for change. Although BPD can often be used as a punishment diagnosis or feel like an excuse to chuck people into the scrap bin, condemning them to a lifetime of untreatable anguish and inability to function, this is not true. The Bible insists that while we are not guaranteed healing from any or all diseases and damage, over time - and sometimes a very, very long time - the way we experience suffering can be transformed. The pain may never get better, but I can find purpose in it, comfort. 

And most importantly, to the extent that my suffering is exacerbated by my own sinful responses to it – something that is true of every single person who has ever lived apart from Jesus – as I learn to walk with the Lord, to ask him to show me my hidden faults, to believe his truth over the lies of my heart and mind and the lies of the world and others, to renounce the idols I am living for which fail me so relentlessly and cause me such pain in the failure, it can and will get better. God is in the business of changing all of us. Having BPD does not exempt us. We may always face crisis, panic, pain, brokenness, but we are not condemned to being stuck in the same place forever. The Holy Spirit is at work. It can get better. 

3. There is eternal hope. One day he will wipe every tear from our eye, we will be his people, he will be our God, we will live in perfect, unbroken relationship with our bodies, other people and the Lord. Because of the Lord Jesus’ work for us on the cross, our eternal hope is secure and unyielding. One day there will be no more pain, no more brokenness, no more heartbreak, no more struggle. There will be perfect rest, perfect peace, perfect wholeness. We will be exactly who we were made to be and we will experience perfect love as we meet face to face with our Lord. 

Even if pain in this life was constant and without hope of change, we can persevere, knowing something better is coming and it will redeem every drop of agony we sweat and transform it through God’s incomparable goodness into blessing. In the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a character lives by the motto, “It will be OK in the end. If it is not OK, it is not the end.” The transforming, joyful, hope-drenched truth of the gospel is that this aphorism is true. In the end it will indeed be OK. Before the throne of the lamb, surrounded by the presence of the Lord it will be better.

So why do I insist upon hope? Why will I not compromise on “it gets better”?

Firstly, because I know the power of it in my own life. The older I get the better I get at enduring pain simply because I have learned to remind myself that it gets better. It may take an hour, or a week or a year or a decade, but things immediately become less unendurable as soon as they have the hope of an end.

Secondly, because if we believe it gets better, we act in ways that make it better. Telling ourselves “always” and “forever” tend to cut off attempts to improve our situation. What is the point? There’s no hope. And yet, when we let hope push us to keep trying, trying once more to trust someone, once more to put yourself out there, once more to cast your cares on the Lord, once more to cry out to him in prayer for relief, one more counsellor, one more treatment, one more leap of faith, it is in the trying that the capacity for better happens.

Thirdly, whenever the Bible talks about how we endure suffering it talks about hope. In fact, I would argue that there is no way to endure suffering in a way that can have meaning or dignity or purpose without hope. There is no way to persevere in suffering as a Christian without the firm knowledge that it gets better. Christ has died for us and has secured our place in heaven, so as we run through the difficulties of this life, we run for a prize that can never perish, spoil or fade. We cannot be separated from the love of Christ, he has overcome every possible power in heaven and on earth than can separate us from him, even our own sin and God’s own wrath. He intercedes for us, God’s own precious son, pleads his own precious blood on our behalf. He gives us his Spirit to transform us more and more into the likeness of the Lord, promising change as we seek and submit to him. The Bible points us relentlessly to hope, because we are creatures of hope. We cannot endure this life without it. But with it, our experience of suffering becomes transformed.

The Lord Jesus endured the worst suffering we can imagine. He was slandered, misunderstood, dismissed, betrayed by those he loved the most, beaten, mocked, humiliated, shamed, homeless, hungry, condemned and murdered and the wrath of God was poured out upon him in our place, his eternal relationship of perfect love was broken through no fault of his own. How did he endure? How was he able to persevere in obedience to the Father? Hebrews tells us, “for the joy set before him”. Because of hope.

Despair lives in the darkness. Despair holds us in the darkness. But despair is a lie of the devil. However hard it can be to believe it, however painful hope can be, ultimately despair does not win. God is in the business of hope. However dark it seems right now, I stand by my statement, I insist on it, I will believe it for you when the dark gets too overwhelming and you can’t. If you trust the Lord, you are not condemned to suffer indefinitely. It might not be on the timescale we prefer or the way we want it. But absolutely, unequivocally, indisputably, I will fight to be dying breath to affirm, “it gets better”.

Identity Snakes and Ladders

Right now life reminds me of a board game of snakes and ladders that we had when I was a child. 12 years ago I started out at the bottom of the pit. I had failed at the game of life. I hated and despised myself, I had no church, no friends, no job, no emotional control and every day I was in such pain I longed for death. Then I met someone who started to teach me that I was not who I thought I was. 

Identity is a key issue for people with BPD. The complete lack of a sense of self, of your own secure identity, and therefore a tendency to see yourself entirely through the lens of what others say about you and what you think they are thinking about you is one of the common features of the condition. 12 years ago I saw myself entirely through other people's eyes, usually determined by a highly skewed interpretation of their behaviour towards me and I was filled with toxic shame. I hated myself with a passion and I was filled with a longing to destroy what I loathed and despised. That self-destructive longing is still visible uncomfortably clearly on my skin. I hated myself, more than anything for my lack of emotional control and the fact that I was unworthy of love or kindness. I believed I was evil scum and I punished myself accordingly.

Then someone came into my life who, first persuaded me to trust them enough to begin to admit to them the way I saw myself - no small feat as admitting you see yourself as disgusting to someone else gives them a lot of power - but also to challenge this way that I constructed my identity. I began to learn that the people to whom I was giving power to define me should not in fact have that power. That only one person was entitled and worthy to tell me who I was, and that was the Lord Jesus. It was his right by right of creation, of love and of conquest. He had made me, he had loved me to the point of sacrificing his life for me, and he had risen victorious over death and Satan, redeeming that which was already his own back entirely to himself to call his own entirely and absolutely. To allow myself to be defined by anyone other than the Lord Jesus was to deny him that which was rightfully his. My identity did not belong to anyone else and least of all to me. 

That was the beginning of my snakes and ladders journey, the quest to learn a new identity shaped not by the way others treated me but by Christ's words about me. Roll the dice and move, sometimes you hit a ladder and seem to skip over several sections of road, sometimes you hit a snake and go sliding back many spaces and find yourself despairingly recovering ground that you felt you had already won. 

In common with many versions of the snakes and ladders board game, the one we played as children had a nasty feature. A huge, vicious snake that sat on the 99th square out of 100. You were so close to winning the game, roll a 6 and you have won. But roll a 5 and you hit this snake which takes you all the way back down to the first square on the board, all your gains are lost and you must start again on your journey. This year, in my quest to define myself by Christ's words I feel right now like I have hit this snake. I had learned so much, leaped up so many ladders, I felt so close to having a life unweighed down by the burdens of other people's opinion. I could taste and see freedom coming. And then I hit the snake and down I have fallen, back, back, back to the beginning of the game again. Back in the same welter and mess and mire that I started with, utterly submerged by the fear of other people's judgement. 

I have felt this intensely, but it is a vastly imperfect analogy I am beginning to be aware. For a start, my feeling of closeness to victory was probably illusory. I thought the game went up to 100, but actually it goes on beyond, to 1000 at least, in the great scheme of the game, the fall is less catastrophic than it seems. There are vast freedoms to be attained beyond the one I thought I could taste. Secondly, however intensely I feel I have slid all the way back 12 years to the bottom of the board, that feeling too is an illusion. I have been set back, no doubt, I have met a situation that was able to utterly overwhelm my new identity in Christ and put me back into the power of defining myself through the eyes of others, but the foundations of my new identity that I have laboured alongside Christ to build, defined by what he sees when he looks at me, may have been temporarily obscured by a tsunami of shame and fear but they are not destroyed. As the wave ebbs, they will emerge, needing repair, restoration, but by no means reconstruction. I may have been swept down the board by means of a giant snake but the game I am playing has changed, there are fewer snakes, more ladders and the dice is weighted towards the higher numbers.  

That said, there is a reality to the feeling I have lost. From a place of feeling secure in my identity and a profound sense of contentment that came from that, I have encountered a situation where the truth that I know and have felt deeply of my identity in Christ stands in disconnect from the emotions of shame and fear I have and am experiencing from seeing myself through others' eyes. The identity that had been built and had started to stand firm against many storms has succumbed to a hurricane, or rather, it is still there, but I have been caught out and cannot seem to get back to its shelter until the storm abates. And the effect has been losing once again, it seems, my job, my church, my emotional control and being plunged back into a world where the only prayer I can find the strength to utter is "Help me Lord, or let me die." 

Additionally, I am haunted by the question which sits in the background of deep suffering for most of us. The unanswerable question. The most painful question of all because it cuts to the heart of the relationship we need the most when we are enduring the unbearable. The question, of course is Why? Why Lord? Why when I have come so far can I be cast back to the very start? Why when I was finding happiness in living for you do I find that destroyed? Why when I had felt a sense of love and belonging and family among your people, that was based on a freedom to love rather than a desire to be needed, has that been wrenched away by the javelin of shame finding the gap in my armour? And even more pernicious, what is the point of me trying to do anything if I find myself dashed against the walls of my own weakness and starting again from scratch so often that I never feel I manage to actually achieve anything meaningful? It feels so pointless, so painful. 

Instead of being a blessing, I have once again become a burden on my friends, my cries to the Lord to help me believe what he says about me over what I hear from other people in my emotions seemingly unheard and I am storm-wrecked even to the point of death. Because the temptation to take into my own hands the only means I can think of to stop the fear and the pain sits with me every day, and sometimes my rational mind is so overwhelmed by panic and pain that the temptation becomes almost a compulsion. 

Despair sits very close, the despair of feeling that there is no point to me being in this world. That I long to serve the Lord but every good intention is thwarted, every bright start ends in dark failure, every hope shattered by my weakness and failure to be the person that I want to be, that I long to be. I can do nothing because every good intention is undercut, undermined by this fatal weakness, the failure to make my emotions bend to the will of my rational mind or come into line with the truth that I know. My dependence on the understanding and grace of others to be able to say the right thing at moments of stress and crisis, without which the emotional hurricane is unleashed which overwhelms rational control. My powerlessness to control my emotional reactions to certain stimuli or to persuade others of how to help or at the very least how not to hurt. And added to this, the cloying shame of failure. Of seeing the person I should be, that I want to be, the faith I want to have and knowing that however much I want to blame others, it is my weakness and inadequacy that causes the problem. I am too weak and too broken to do any real good in the world, to use the gifts that Jesus has given me for his kingdom. My own ingrained sin poisons every attempt and all my prayers for redemption from it seem to fall on deaf ears. 

But this is not Psalm 88. I do not end on the darkness as my only friend, although there have been days recently where that has felt like the ending all this will reach. I am lead to two places in God's word because two good friends have spoken them into my darkness. 

Firstly, this passage, speaking here with freshness into this despair:

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinth 12:7-10)

I am weak, God knows. I am so weak I despair that I can do anything of worth. Satan torments me with his lies and defeats me, raising the hurricane in my emotions again and again. God knows why, I do not, that he allows this. But here is hope. Hope that in spite of all the times I come crashing down, in spite of having to start again and start again, that the Lord is more powerful. Paul knew that his weakness was there to keep him from pride, maybe mine is too, I have enough of that, but that I don't know. What I do know, is that what was true for Paul, must also be true for me. His grace is sufficient, and in my weakness his power is made perfect. My weakness may make it feel like I have nothing to offer, but God says, you don't know what you can't see. And what you can't see are the things I can make out of the broken, poor, short and curtailed efforts to serve me you are able to produce. You are weak. You are the weakest of all, but in your weakness my power will be seen all the more. In fact, your weakness is not a handicap in being useful in my kingdom, however you may feel. It is a strength. You believe you are insufficient, inadequate, too poor and mean a thing to have any contribution to make to my kingdom. Good, you are right, now serve me anyway with all the strength you have and watch me glorify myself by bestowing sufficiency by grace. 

The second passage that has brought comfort is Psalm 143.

Lord, hear my prayer,
    listen to my cry for mercy;
in your faithfulness and righteousness
    come to my relief.

Do not bring your servant into judgment,
    for no one living is righteous before you.

The enemy pursues me,
    he crushes me to the ground;
he makes me dwell in the darkness
    like those long dead.

So my spirit grows faint within me;
    my heart within me is dismayed.

I remember the days of long ago;
    I meditate on all your works
    and consider what your hands have done.

I spread out my hands to you;
    I thirst for you like a parched land.[a]

Answer me quickly, Lord;
    my spirit fails.
Do not hide your face from me
    or I will be like those who go down to the pit.

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love,
    for I have put my trust in you.
Show me the way I should go,
    for to you I entrust my life.

Rescue me from my enemies, Lord,
    for I hide myself in you.
 Teach me to do your will,
    for you are my God;
may your good Spirit
    lead me on level ground.

 For your name’s sake, Lord, preserve my life;
    in your righteousness, bring me out of trouble.
 In your unfailing love, silence my enemies;
    destroy all my foes,
    for I am your servant.

The psalms are of course a treasury to the suffering, but often we don't know completely what to do with the cries of the Lord for vengeance against our enemies we find there. It feels indecent, inappropriate to appropriate these to the sin we personally face, to be inconsistent with mercy and forgiveness we are called to show to our enemies, and for me with the good intentions of many of the people who hurt us. Typically, therefore, I have tended to read these psalms exclusively through Messianic lenses. Jesus (and David as his prefiguring shadow) is God's king in God's world. His enemies who refuse his offer of salvation will justly face the wrath and vengeance of God for persecuting and oppressing his people, by which they are really by persecuting himself. In this interpretation we can call down God's wrath against the sin, evil and oppression of this world in general, but the hurt done to us peronally is excluded. As a result these passages have always felt a little remote to me, not particularly helpful in facing personal suffering. 

However a friend recently suggested an alternative way of reading these imprecatory psalms which have opened up a depth of richness to reading psalms like Psalm 143. That is in remembering that in living in this world as Christ's new creations, born again of the Spirit of truth, we have two identities. A new and perfect identity in the Spirit being created and an old and sinful identity in the flesh being put to death. Therefore the enemy against which we can call down God's wrath and might to defeat and destroy utterly is in fact within ourselves, the flesh that holds within it all of the curse of sin inherited in our human nature. 

Suddenly verses like "The enemy pursues me, he crushes me to the ground; he makes me dwell in the darkness  like those long dead", possess an immediacy and emotional resonance as prayers. This psalm has become a cry to the Lord for liberation from my own sinful nature and broken body which crushes and binds me as my enemy and makes me dwell in the darkness. I have a new, powerful vocabulary of prayer with which to share my despair at my own weakness and sin and my longing for God to make it right. 

I don't have any easy answers to the question of why. I don't have any easy answers to how change is going to happen, or how I am going to find the courage and strength to start again or what that will look like. But this I do know. I might feel like I have nothing to offer because once again everything in my life is broken and all the things I had begun are left unfinished, but God's grace is sufficient to make use of even the little I have to offer. I might feel like I am cast back to the beginning, that in truth I have really learned nothing because I was not able to enter into my identity in Christ to shelter from the storm that rages in my emotions. But God is working to defeat the brokenness and sin within me, that however many times it seems to triumph there is no winning for the enemies of God and nowhere to hide from him. He will pursue my sin, destroy it and silence it. I may weep with frustration at my seemingly unanswered prayers and the prayers of the many others praying the same thing, that I would find my identity secure in Christ, a shelter against the raging storm of emotion. But as a preternaturally wise young friend says, when I cry that God doesn't answer, "I guess that means we have to be patient then."

  

I am Simon

I am ashamed. I started this blog with a vow not to be, not to be defined by my illness, but I have failed. I do not feel guilty. I know well enough that when I am at my most severely ill I am not in any way responsible for my actions and the rest of the time, although I sin, I am forgiven. But every time that someone looks at me and sees my illness and not me, every time I feel someone is judging me and finding me unworthy because I am broken, every time someone decides I am incapable, or unreliable, or untrustworthy, or too fragile, too difficult or too dangerous to invite into any responsibility I feel shame.

And my shame crushes me. It tells me you're too weak, too broken, too ugly, too unloveable to be entrusted with anything that matters. People despise you and pity you, you're not capable of anything difficult or important. Often, as the church is the place I invest myself most deeply, it is the place I feel most shamed. I feel told relentlessly that I have nothing to contribute, no one is interested in what I have to say, I have no valuable contribution to make.

Some of that is to do with how the church deals with mental illness. A future blog post is in the works thinking about the problems with the way church leadership approaches the functional mentally ill. This blog post is more interested in why I feel this way and what I can do about it.

Some of the shame I experience comes from my own head. I fear judgement, scorn and pity from others, so I see it where it does not exist. Sometimes the judgement is real but my reaction is always disproportionate and extreme. I panic when I feel judged and treated as without value and I experience extreme pain and anger. This leads to extreme and confusing behaviours, which in turn drives behaviour in other's that is judgemental or easily perceived as so, setting up a vicious cycle of reaction and counter-reaction.

The reason why I cope so poorly and experience such deep shame in situations where I feel judged, excluded or despised are obvious on a few moments of thought. I was chronically bullied as a child and I went home each evening to a place where I was told that people treated me badly because that is what I deserved. People don't like you because you are unlikeable, people bully you because you are weak, people exclude you because you are difficult and can't be trusted. When I became an adult it was, your friends don't ask you to be a bridesmaid because no one wants a fat girl in their pictures, you haven't got a boyfriend because you're disgusting, you're too intense, too pompous, too clever, too awkward. Every time I experienced a knock back or rejection it was my fault, my failing. Time and again I would go back to the poisonous well hoping for a different answer, a reprieve, some comfort. My understanding of myself made me insecure, withdrawn, self-absorbed in my fear of being found inadequate, which did in fact make me quite difficult to like and led to situations that reinforced my self-assessment. It took me far too long to be able to question and discard that analysis of myself and my life, in fact it took until a different and more powerful voice came in and told me a different story.

I suppose it is therefore not surprising that I am an adult with an intense fear of being judged, excluded and told that I am worthless. And that I panic when I fear that is happening and react with intense shame, because you see, it is all my fault.

Shame permeates my existence, it leads to affirmation-seeking behaviour and boasting on one hand as I try to avoid negative experiences of judgement and panic, hysteria and anger when I fail to avoid being shamed. Shame is a vortex of infinite gravity that threatens to swallow me whole. And I am ashamed to admit that I have it as I feel it reveals a faithlessness that shames me. It is a mobius. I remember learning what a mobius was and whimsically writing down everything about myself of which I felt ashamed on a strip of paper and turning it into one. I didn't realise then how appropriate that was.

Shame is so pernicious that I recently realised that I am ashamed of being ashamed. When I react with fear and shame to feeling judged or excluded, I feel ashamed that I am not strong enough to reject the negative interpretation in favour of Jesus' words about me. I feel I should be able to endure experiences of rejection because of Jesus' acceptance, experiences of being judged because Jesus, not the person sitting in judgement of me defines me, experiences of exclusion because I am living to serve Jesus and not for the approval of others. But as usual, guilt and shame have no power to change me. Feeling ashamed of my extreme reaction to shame does not in any way help to change that reaction.

So if shame cannot vanquish shame, what can? Because I am tired of shame. I have lived with shame and its effects and consequences long enough. I am tired of living in fear of being found out for being worthless, I am tired of the fear of man.

The place that draws me when I think about how this can change is Luke 7, the story of Simon the Pharisee and the sinful woman. That sentence may have started a bit optimistically. I am feeling a little hopeless to be honest, as I feel so ashamed that a recent incident which others would find relatively trivial has completely up-ended me again, prompting this blog. Shame is a friend of despair. But I will look at Jesus, because where else have I to go?

This is a story about 2 people who are seen very differently by the world. One is a powerful, respected and judgemental man whom all the world sees as righteous. The other is a condemned, unclean and despised woman whom all the world sees only as a sinner. The man treats Jesus with suspicion, arrogance and pride. He offers him no honours in keeping with hospitality, he is quick to stand in judgement over him and over the sinful woman who comes into his house. The woman has no dignity upon which to stand, no good works to bolster her, no reputation, in fact a terrible reputation such that it was shameful to be touched by her. She offers Jesus broken-hearted, humble adoration. She kisses his feet, washes them with her tears and her hair and pours out her richest treasures upon them. The distinction could not be clearer. She, the despised, is content to humble herself to the dust before Christ in love, he the strong and respectable will not deign to treat him even as an equal and will sit in judgement upon Jesus for allowing her to do so much as to touch his feet.

Who leaves that room vindicated? We all know the end of the story. Jesus honours her in front of all those powerful men who would consider it a dishonour for her to wash their feet. Jesus honours her simply for loving him and acting out of her love and gratitude. Jesus forgives her sin - expunging her guilt - and honours her love gift, small though it was.

When I started writing this blog post I thought it would end differently. I thought the help I was going to find in the Bible was the honour that Jesus gives to the weak and dishonoured, in the way he takes our shame. But as I prayed with friends this evening, and as I re-read this passage, I think what God is saying to me lies in another direction. The woman overcame the fear and shame she must have felt to enter that house and face those judgemental accusing eyes because she felt such a compulsion to love Jesus, to serve and honour and thank him however she could. She left with his peace, not because she was shamed and they proud, nor because they were somehow more sinful than she, in fact the very opposite Jesus says, but because she knew how much she had been forgiven and she could not resist the desire to serve him in whatever way she could. I have wanted to be vindicated against the people who I felt shamed me, but I hear Jesus saying to me here and now, stop looking at them. Look at me. You dishonoured me and I died for you. You shamed me and I endured the pains of hell for you. You despised me and I took your punishment upon me. I remind you of this not to shame you. Shame is done with, you are forgiven. I'm reminding you of this because you need to remember is not about them, it is about me. The love I have for you and the love you have for me. Let them say what they want, keep your eyes on me and it doesn't matter. You can forgive them, they no longer have any power here.

Let me go further, Jesus is saying I'm not the sinful woman here, I'm Simon. I'm sitting in judgement on the people who hurt me, I'm the one concerned for my status and my reputation, I'm the one sitting in judgement on Jesus and thinking he owes me. Stop that. This blog just got hard to put out, because what I need to do is repent. Repent and look at Jesus. Nobody wants to be Simon. But I am Simon. And suddenly I don't feel so hopeless. Look at me, look at me, don't look at them, look at me, Jesus is saying. Look at me whom you crucified and give me your love gift because you are forgiven. Now, those judging eyes, they're not so scary anymore, are they?

And he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."

...And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you: go in peace.

By his wounds

I have taken my time about writing this blog, some 4 months in fact, partly because it has been so hard to put what happened into words even when talking it over with friends and partly because of the sheer preciousness of it, which has made me want to hold it close and share it sparingly. It’s still as precious and as hard to articulate, but I have decided to attempt to write about it.

From January to April this year I was very, very unwell. Perhaps as unwell as I have ever been. Certainly dangerously unwell. Something happened in January which for most would have come under the heading of life sucks and rubbish things happen, cry, lick your wounds and move on. With my special brand of emotional volatility combined with acute sensitivity to rejection it caused an injury that disabled me for months, that but for the event I am going to share here would probably still be disabling me today.

I experienced a rejection, one that I was aware was largely constructed in my own head, rather than in reality, but a profound one nonetheless. A thoughtless and rather serious mistake was made, I felt rejected and as a result as though someone had hollowed me out with an icecream scoop of any self-worth or identity I had ever possessed. Intellectually I could tell myself that my worth was in the way Christ saw me and treated me rather than in the way other people did, but in my heart there was a void that proclaimed my nothingness, constantly, agonisingly.

While I was with others often the emptiness could be covered over, distracted or temporarily filled with their love and regard, but as soon as I was alone it would drain away through the still open wound of rejection and I would be beset with obsessive, intrusive, relentless thoughts of ending my life to make it all stop.

I felt mortally wounded, beyond help. Objectively I knew the insanity of it, that my reaction was ridiculous, insane, utterly sinful. That I was taking man’s judgement, and in my better moments I knew not even an accurate version of that, over God’s judgement of me and allowing it to rule my emotions to the point of incapacitation.

I prayed, wrestled, cried out for the strength to believe, to subdue my fierce idolatrous emotions, to hear God’s voice over my own and the world’s, but I was failing, drowning. I checked into a secure crisis inpatient facility for 10 days, and spent the time reading the Bible, journaling, sleeping and praying, forcing myself to eat regularly, although I had by then fasted to the point that eating had become painful. I left feeling a fragile peace, hoping I was on the way to recovery but within a week I was back rocking on the brink of desperation and suicide.

My relationships were all profoundly dysfunctional at this point, I needed the affirmation of others to keep re-filling my leaking self-worth and when my evident illness meant that I received the opposite at times it pushed me further towards the edge. Criticism and judgement, explicit, implied or imagined, filled me with incandescent rage and despair, I was building an infinitely fragile meaning for my life on my ability to do things for others, and anybody who threatened that was my terrible enemy. I knew it was all wrong but I felt completely powerless to stop it, I would try to fill the emptiness with the knowledge of God’s love but it would leak out, just as my friends’ love and care did, rapidly, through the jagged tear of rejection.

It felt pointless to talk about it, many around me probably didn’t know it was happening, or were maybe aware that I was unwell as I said so, but didn’t have any idea of the daily battle against self-destruction that I was fighting. Occasionally it would all explode as a torrent of rage and pain, meeting a range of responses from a completely understandable baffled helplessness in the face of my intractable feelings, to a compassionate understanding. One particular friend, who has my gratitude would poke fun relentlessly at my irrationality, which is a risky strategy, but happens for me to be an excellent way to de-escalate my turbid emotions.

In any case, I had been some months trapped, bleeding and not healing. I had sought refuge continuously, physically, spiritually, and found none beyond short, temporary moments. I would say I was at the end of my resources, but I had been living there for months, somehow day by day finding enough determination to fight when I felt there was nothing left to fight with and choose to live rather than die, to obey at least in that, to love God and others at least that much, little though it was.

I had been out of the crisis centre about a week when things had cycled up to the point they had been at before I had checked in and I was once more screaming internally with rage and pain as I lay in bed at night. I lashed out viciously by messenger, and not for the first time, at the person I blamed for the situation and felt shame but some small relief. And as I lay there, still in scalding fury and intense pain, relentlessly thinking about acting upon the urges to take my life, I once again cried out to the Lord. At first in anger, and then in humble, desperate faith, from ‘why won’t you help me and why did you let this happen,’ to, ‘I believe you have the power to change this, to heal me, to bring change.’

And then it happened. He came. He was there in the room with me. The risen Lord Jesus stood beside my bed. And just as once before he had said to Thomas he said to me, “Reach out and touch my side, touch my wounds.” I was full of wonder but not afraid. I did what he said. And as I reached out my hand to touch his side he said, “This is how much I love you.”

I felt it immediately, I understood what he meant. This, these wounds, this is how much I love you. I loved you to the cross, I loved you to death, I loved you to blood and agony. This is how much I love you. It flowed into me, his love, and blew away everything before it but what was like itself, good and holy and loving and lovely. It filled me from head to toes, as physical as my own terrible emotions had been a short time before, as gentle as they were violent but oh, so much more powerful. I was loved. I wept a little and rested in his love for a while. Then with curiosity, like the way we pick a scar or prod a bruise I looked at the thoughts that moments before had created the negative emotions that had ripped through me with such power. I saw them clearly, could acknowledge the wrong done to me, the sin of my response, I felt a gentle compassion for the wounds but there was no power in any of it to hurt me whilst I had his love. I had seen my Lord, I had reached out and touched his wounds, felt his love and there was no longer anything in the present, past of future, real though all of it was, that could cause me pain.

Sin against me had lost its power to harm, and in that moment sin had lost all its savour for me. It held no attractions, it had nothing to offer compared to the love that I possessed. I understood for the first time a puzzle that had occasionally bothered me in the past, how, given all that we suffer in this life and that we would remember it in heaven, would it not cause us pain? I understood then that we would remember sin and suffering, it would not become less evil or cease to matter but it would have no power to cause us pain when seen from the perfect safety and loving presence of our God.

This is the bit where my words fail me. I can’t quite convey the experience in language, it seems inadequate to express it. How can I describe a love that I have never felt humanly in human language? How can I explain how it did what it did? I can’t explain, I can only tell you and promise you that it is true, when I came face to face with the risen Christ and saw his wounds and felt his love, sin was in that moment utterly defeated in me and suffering lost its power to cause me pain. I experienced a taste of the promises of heaven but I am as defeated as the New Testament writers to explain how it is that the troubles and sin that press on us so heavily here will seem light and momentary there, and simply say that it is true and that it is by the love of the crucified and risen Christ that it is true.

I had no expectation that the feeling would last. It seemed clear to me from the outset that this was a short sojourn in heaven, meant to heal and equip me to persevere with life here, not a permanent ‘high’ to allow me to float above the troubles of life. Heaven is for the future, when he calls us home, and in this life we must have many troubles and much suffering. But there has been much fruit from the gift. Firstly, the wound was healed. The love of Christ I experienced was so great it utterly destroyed the lie that I was worthless. How could I be worthless when I had been loved like that? His wounds, the real, concrete, torn flesh evidence of his love for me, had healed me from the wounds of the rejection of man.

From that moment I began to get better. What I had known in my head I had experienced in my heart and although there may be many other feelings to work through as a result of what had happened, many other battles to fight and sins to slay and truths to choose to believe, at that point, my soul and mind had been healed stronger than it had been before it sustained the injury. Secondly, I now have a lasting and more tangible hope in which to lean in moments of despair. I have tasted the joy of the presence and love of my Lord. If I persevere until the end it will be mine eternally. When tempted by sin, or suffering now I can lean back upon the memory of when I tasted and saw that the Lord was good, when I understood, not only in my head but by my emotions the love that is expressed in his wounds.

Persevering in pain

A friend came over to visit the other day. She was sad and although normally stoical, the struggles of life for once bubbled up and overflowed into the conversation. She is going through a difficult time. Real, hard struggles, not first world problems and I was privileged that she shared them with me. After she had given vent for a while, I attempted to validate her pain, to show I empathised, I said, “life is hard”. She is not a native English speaker and she responded in the negative, no, life was not hard, what was stronger than hard? I reflected for a moment, how would we say it in English more strongly? What is one stronger than “life is hard?” I tried, “life is very hard” and then my brain suggested, what about “life is pain”? I tried it out on my friend. We both laughed, acknowledging the hyperbole of it, but it was also a laugh with a layer of recognition. There was a reality to that statement for both of us.

In her life experience and in mine, for different reasons there is a validity in that statement. Life is pain. Of course it’s not the whole truth. For both of us, there have been moments of joy, of peace, of happiness and times of neutrality, where the business of living absorbs all the energy and focus and life is merely life, doing the next job, meeting the next expectation. But for both of us also, there have been an awful lot of very hard times. Lengthy periods when hurt and pain have been the dominant emotions, frustration and impatience, loss and loneliness. We come from different continents, radically different cultures, hugely different life experiences, and currently have immensely different circumstances, but we are united in that moment by a recognition of the fact, that life is easier when you accept as a basic fact that life is pain.

Life is particularly painful if you are a Christian. Does it surprise you that I should say that? I’m convinced from my reading of the Bible that it is true. Victory comes through suffering, before the crown comes the cross (Philippians 2), if the resurrection is untrue then truly we are to be pitied above all men (1 Corinthians 15:19). The pattern of suffering before satisfaction is the pattern of the gospel, the imitation of which Christ calls us to when he calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him (Luke 9:23). We often think that the suffering of the Christian is mainly to do with persecution, so if we are not faced with significant persecution within our culture we tend to think, “phew, dodged a bullet there,” that we don’t have to endure the suffering that Christ talks about, but I think this is a fundamental (and convenient) misunderstanding. The suffering of taking up our cross is the suffering of dying to self and our own desires. It is the suffering of doing battle against sin, of saying no to the temptations of the flesh which offer pleasure and comfort, of choosing Christ and his work rather than our own glory and success.

When you fight to rein in your tongue and use it to build up rather than knock down, forfeiting the chance to make yourself feel superior. When you earn your colleagues’ and bosses’ scorn and disfavour for refusing to lie for their convenience or benefit. When you say no to temptation to indulge in sexual fantasy or flee rather than flirt with relationships that you know could lead you into a situation where you will be tempted to sin. When you hand over your anger and your right to vengeance to the Lord and choose forgiveness. When you choose to believe God’s words rather than your own interpretation of a situation, forfeiting the sense of control that gives you and the comfort of blame, guilt, anger, envy or whatever other emotion you were allowing to rule you. When you sacrifice a comfortable income, time to spend on things you enjoy, personal comfort, to invest in the kingdom of God. When you learn the hardest lesson of all, to change your “why, Lord, why can’t I have the things I want, that I feel sure will make me happy,” into “Thy will be done.”

God’s way may be good, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. We beat our bodies to make them our slaves (1 Corinthians 9:27), we resist sin to the point of shedding blood (Hebrews 12:4), we pluck out our eyes (Mark 9:47) and cut off our hands (Mark 9:43), we turn the other cheek (Luke 6:29), love our enemies(Matt 5:43), go the extra mile (Matt 5:41), we make ourselves servants, slaves, the least (Mark 10:33-34), we put to death the lusts of the flesh (Col 3:5), we deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow in the path that Jesus trod before us (Luke 9:23). We die to ourselves, elevate others’ needs above our own (Phil 2:3-4), bear one another’s burdens (Gal 6:2), lay down our lives for our friends (1 John 3:16). Or at least we should, and to the extent that we are successful our reward will be that the world will despise us, put us out of the synagogues and believe that it does a service to God when it exterminates us (John 16:2).

However, to the extent that we are not like this, like Christ, a large extent let’s face it, our loving heavenly Father is disciplining us to make us more like him. So we endure pruning, knowing the outcome will be fruitfulness (John 15:2), we endure suffering which produces perseverance which produces character which produces a hope that does not disappoint (Romans 5:3-5), we endure discipline, which is not pleasant at the time but in season brings forth a harvest of righteousness to the glory of God (Hebrews 12:11).

Furthermore we live in a broken and fallen world, a world where we experience sin against us from the cradle, warping our personalities, instigating damaging interpretations of the world and harmful coping mechanisms and depriving us of resilience to the losses and injuries we will experience in life. A world where we are damaged by the selfishness and sinfulness of others, where we suffer from a creation bound over to decay that brings injury, disease and death to ourselves and those we love.  We suffer from the longings for intimacy of our creation nature thwarted by the impossibility between humans of truly knowing and being known due to the way we are compelled to hide from one another because of the ugliness of our sinful nature (Gen 3:10). We suffer injustice, oppression, isolation, indifference. And to the extent that our understanding of the gospel is imperfect we suffer the pain of shame, guilt and fear. As Christians we endure all this, knowing that we have a good God who has absolute power over all of these things, and yet allows them to continue. We have to endure not only the experience of suffering from the brokenness of the world but also know that God can act to end our pain but often does not.

Life is pain, particularly for the Christian. The pain of living in a broken world, fallen, sinful and labouring in the pains of childbirth of God’s kingdom. The pain of being broken people, bound to disease, decay, death, labouring in the agony of giving birth to new life as our flesh fights to hold on to its old desires and ways every inch. The exhaustion of doing battle daily against temptation, evil thoughts and desires, Satan, to take up our cross and follow in the way of the sacrifice, of Christ.

And yet:

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

Romans 8:22-30

Life is pain, the statement is true but thank God, not the only or ultimate truth. Because into this context God speaks his most profound promises, promises to hold us with hope through the darkness. First the promise of meaning. That what feels senseless and empty and full of frustration is actually achieving something profound and glorious. That into a pain that doesn’t even have words to express itself, God says all things including surely, particularly these things, are being worked together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. God redeems the agony of the battle, the pain of the sacrifice, the tears and the groaning by making it part of his good purposes, to make us more like Christ. To build us into the image of his perfect Son, to fill us with his goodness and ultimately his glory. There is no suffering that is without meaning, however apparently senseless, when as it is submitted to God it is re-purposed to bring his kingdom within his people, to grow his church.

It’s a communal blessing, not necessarily an individual one. All things work together for good for those who love him. The community of believers is built up by the perseverance, character and wisdom gained in suffering by each of its members. We can avoid being reductive and trying to identify a blessing of growth proportional to the suffering in our lives if we realise that the fruit of my suffering impacts far more than myself and ultimately contributes to the growth in Christlikeness of the body and through that the glory of Christ through the church.

This first promise re-orientates us away from introspection in suffering and points us to a greater meaning, that the refiner’s fire may blister and burn (Mal 3:2), but what is left when it is finished is the pure gold (1 Pet 1:7) of an inheritance kept for us in heaven that can never spoil, perish or fade (1 Pet 1:4).

31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;

 we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:31-39

The second promise spoken over us as we join the battle to live by the Spirit and put to death the sinful nature (Romans 8:13), a battle that will be hard and bloody and as long as life itself, is the promise of ultimate victory. In the last section of Romans 8, Paul systematically takes all of our fears, the things that may hold us back from committing to the war lest in the end we might find we fought in vain.

At the heart of the fear he opposes is the idea that there is anything on earth that might cause God to cease to love us. This fear holds us back from pressing on in the battle, from counting the cost rightly, from choosing the hard and narrow path to glory. Because if after losing our lives for Christ we might at last lose our reward, we are surely to be pitied above all men. The lack of conviction that at last the battle will be won, the moments of discouragement and despair, will rob us of our strength, courage and effectiveness as we labour to put to death the deeds of the body.

So Paul dismantles our fears, first a fear for our salvation, that any, including we ourselves can stand between us and God’s saving power for our lives. Paul wants us to be absolutely confident in our salvation, unshakeable in our conviction that we will receive God’s blessing and grace. Because only in this knowledge is there the power to wage war against the flesh. We have an obligation to the Spirit because of who we are, not who we want to be. We have been made alive in Christ, we have been given life by the Spirit, we have died with Christ and the evil of our flesh has been paid for. We are utterly and completely secure in God’s mercy and forgiveness, because the cost of our redemption was too great for God to think of giving us up. Christ has died. It is finished. Sin is paid for. How can God the Father fail to deliver the redemption for which Christ gave his life? What’s more once God has spoken all other voices are silenced. Where God has paid the cost and declared not guilty, who will dare to speak out in condemnation, not Satan, man, myself. And beyond this, that same Christ who died to secure my acceptance, stands even now in the presence of God to argue for us by his wounds, to claim us as his own and maintain his claim by his eternal presence in the throne room of the Father.

If sin cannot hold us back from salvation, from life, what then about the world. Can the suffering of hardships, pain, hunger, nakedness, persecution and death? Can homelessness, barrenness, statelessness, poverty, exhaustion, illness, unemployment? Can the enemies of God, the servants of God, the powers God has created, the painful past, the fearful unknown future? No, none of these things, nothing in creation, can rob us of the blessings purchased by Christ’s blood and sealed by his love.

There is nothing that can come between you and Christ, no sin of yours, no suffering, no power, not death itself can keep you from his love. His love is uncontainable, immovable, immutable. It is declared by the cross, guaranteed by the Spirit, it overwhelms all opposition and sweeps away all objection. You cannot overstate it or overrate it. And it is yours, now and forever. It secures the victory, nothing can stand in its way, not sin, not suffering, not creation. The most fundamental fact of your existence if you have declared your allegiance to Christ and trusted in his death for you and believed in his resurrection is that you are loved by your God. Loved to the cross, loved without limit and without the chance of relenting or defeat.

So do not be afraid to sacrifice it all for him whose love is so guaranteed to you. Your pride, status, money, security, ambition, hopes, honour, relationships, life. You can give it up gladly, because your reward is securely vouchsafed to you already. It is yet in your hand, the love of Christ is your own. You do not need to seek elsewhere for your security, your needs. Join the fight, put your idols and desires to death, sell it all and give to the poor and follow him. Don’t be afraid it won’t be worth it. Listen to the call of his love, listen and listen and listen again. For in it alone is the power you need to live the life to which you are called, the life of obligation not to the flesh but to life by the Spirit.

As long as you labour in fear, fear of God’s judgement, fear of his rejection, fear that ultimately you will be found unworthy, fear of his powerlessness you will be held back from the life of the Spirit, from the righteous life Christ has purchased for you, from your inheritance of sonship. As long as you doubt God’s ability to use all the circumstances of your life, to exert his sovereign power over pain to bring blessing more than equal to the cost you will hold back from the risk of a life lived in love.

Life is pain, and particularly choosing the road of the cross will mean pain, but it is a pain redeemed by God’s power and goodness, “to live is Christ” will mean loss but is it is a loss made up in surfeit by the assurance of his love. All things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus are the twin engines that power a life lived by the Spirit, a life lived for Christ, a life like his own.