Failing Well

Last year I failed. What’s more, ever since I have been carrying around the feeling, wrapped up tight in a little packet of anger, that God failed me. I reached the end of my strength, the end of myself and I turned to him and he didn’t show up. He let me fail. Heck, he set me up to fail. Those are my true and honest feelings. I feel let down. Betrayed. And because he let me down I ended up battered and bruised and gingerly picking myself up off the floor. I lost things and people I love. And I left other people bruised and battered too.

I failed and it was calamitous. I failed and it smashed my life to pieces. I failed and all of the doors that had opened up to use my gifts to serve God in a way I had hoped and dreamed of for years came shuttering down. Called to surrender all of my ambitions, hopes and plans again not because of any external circumstance but because of weakness, inadequacy, lack within me. Because I failed.

Cast back out into limbo, into the place of questions, what should I even be doing with my life? Should I pursue the calling I feel so intensely it’s more of a demand, when whatever I try to do falls apart, is snatched away. When I meet failure over and over again. Should I give up? Settle for not selling out for the gospel, for a life more ordinary.

Several people, non-Christians, have said to me recently, yes sure, that thing, that needs doing, someone should do that, but not you. You are too fragile, too unstable, too vulnerable. Let someone else take the risk, someone else carry the burden. Retreat to where it’s safe. And I wonder, are they right? Is that what God is trying to tell me? Stop seeking out the least and the lost with the good news of the gospel, stop giving everything you have away because it breaks your heart to see all the people who have even less than you. That’s for other people, not you. You are too weak, too riddled with sin, too broken. All you do is fail and lose and fail and lose and what good does that do anyone? And if God wanted you to do these things, why does he let you fail and fall and kick around in the dirt? Why does he give you this compassion and empathy and passion for communicating the gospel with one hand and such weaknesses so that they are next to impossible to use with the other? What do you have to offer when the best you ever have to offer is a job half done and usually a mess left behind?

The place of failure is a place of questions. Questions for yourself and questions for God. I can’t answer all of my questions. I don’t honestly know what God wants from me. I don’t know if my indwelling sin and brokenness disqualifies me from doing anything good or lasting or worthwhile with the gifts and desires God has given me to serve him and to love others. If the mixed motives behind the desires themselves, the piece that wants others to admire me, the piece that wants praise of man, the piece that wants to define myself by my good deeds, my self-righteousness, means that there is anything good left in the things that I do because I want to honour and obey, because I want to love as Jesus has loved me. Do I fail because I bring nothing but my own desire for glory, so God never honours my efforts or uses them to glorify himself and bless others? And if that is true, why won’t he fix it? I can’t. And do I just stop trying until he does?

Looking inside there are no answers, only more questions. But even when I’m so mad at him I could spit, God’s grace doesn’t stop and his voice isn’t silent. And as I’ve tuned in to listen again a little, set aside my toddler tantrum and my sniffy fit of pique, here are some of the things he has been saying to me.

1.       I don’t need you.

One of the frustrations of having to walk away is the thought of things left undone. Of the people you left behind, the shattered relationships, the promise unfulfilled. The frustration of the ways you might have shared and helped and discipled others, the work still left to do but in which you no longer are able to take a part. The harvest field ripe and the workers one man short.

There are many answers to this feeling. One is simple, you are not indispensable. God closed that door, you have no control over its opening. Well, he is the God who can cause the stones to cry out, he can make a donkey speak his word if he chooses. He doesn’t need you. 

2.       I care more than you do.

The people he gave you to love, who you have next to abandoned because of the gate slammed shut behind you, they don’t belong to you. You might worry for them and their well-being, but like Jonah, you did not plant the seed or make it grow. God did that. They are his, the work is his. You are angry because God has taken away the work he gave you, well it was never yours. He lent it to you for a time in trust, now he demands it back. He loves them more than you do. He will provide for them. Surrender cheerfully into safer hands than yours, he cares more than you do.  

3.       I want your obedience not your success.

I was in a seminar where this was said recently and grabbed me by the guts. My ideas about failure and God’s are not the same. I sought to obey God with every ounce of strength that I had. To trust his word, to seek his presence, his truth about me, to listen to him over the voice of my fear. I failed, crashed and burned. But I strained to abide with every ounce of strength I had, with every resource I was given. And I have been angry because God ‘didn’t show up’, as if he wasn’t there, all that time. Of course he was, he was there, he just didn’t give me what I wanted. Because what I wanted was not to fail. To defeat my sin of fear, to fix the mess and to keep the life I loved.

But that wasn’t the success he was looking for in that situation. He was looking for the success that comes in failing well. In clinging to him through the storm, in surrendering everything you have and everything you want to do for him, in obedience to him. In accepting that when he doesn’t answer your prayer it isn’t because he doesn’t hear or doesn’t care but because he has decided that it is his good timing to move you on and he wants you to count it all loss for his sake. He wanted me to surrender of all my good things to him, the only truly good thing I have and he wasn’t willing to grant his peace and power over my sin of fear until I had given them up to him.

I have not been gracious in my surrender. I was stubborn, reluctant to let go. I have resented the price exacted. I have been angry with the people who failed to help me. I have seen only the failure and not the obedience demanded. I repent of that. I could not have done anything different to change the outcome of what happened. God is sovereign, he gave none of us the strength, the wisdom, the grace to deal differently with the situation, in a way that would have avoided the mess and the loss; therefore he required the sacrifice of me, the faith to say, “Thy will be done”, to give it all up to him and walk away.

He requires that same obedience now, obedience in the face of my fear of loss, when he wants me to pick up my broken tools and climb off the floor with my painful bruises and start again, knowing that whatever and whoever I may invest in loving and serving, he may at any moment require the surrender of it or them. The obedience to put myself under the authority of the church leadership by investing in serving my church, knowing that the situation may repeat and the demon of fear of authority might return, that God may allow the loss of another family, another place of belonging.

I have no promise in this life of overcoming my sin and brokenness, of becoming immune to the risk of abrupt loss of all I love because I cannot overcome my fear, of ceasing to be at the mercy of the wisdom and insight of those in authority over me. As long as I choose obedience, that is to trust and follow him, I choose risk of failure.

But as long as I choose obedience I also enter into the great and precious promises of Romans 8. Nothing is wasted, in all things he will work together to conform us to the likeness of Jesus; and he will not leave me, I have his love and nothing in this world or the next can steal that from me.

My life may look like one of constant and repeated failure but the yardstick of the world is not the yardstick of God. In his hands, failure becomes just another means of grace and another part of the journey to glory.

4.       Give thanks for your suffering.

Today’s lesson and perhaps the hardest of them all. I had a sin of fear of man that I could not defeat, by any means of grace given to me. I had a sin of fear of man it pleased God not to defeat until it had robbed me of many things that brought me joy in my life. I had a sin of fear of man which led to loss and pain and failure and defeat.

But had that sin been more easily overcome, I might not have seen it in all its depths of ugly, dangerous, destructive and overwhelming power. And I would not have had the knowledge, that such a sin as that lives in my heart, and from such sins as that have I been forgiven, and from such sins as that will I one day be delivered.

Conviction of sin is a blessing, conviction of our powerless before sin is grace, conviction of our need of Christ’s atoning death to crush the power of sin within us is mercy. Revelation of our helpless, abject failure before our sin is a mercy for which we can give thanks, for she who is forgiven much loves much. Each time God enlarges my view of my sin and allows me to be overthrown and fail before its power is an opportunity to understand better his grace and to love him more.

Further than humbly accepting his purpose and plan and my non-indispensable-ness, beyond cheerful surrender of all my good things and accepting the risk of failure as the price of obedience, God wants me to so orientate my view that my defeat and failure results not in anger, resentment and bitterness against him but rejoicing and thanksgiving. For to me as a Christian, revelation of my sin and its power is only a greater revelation of Christ’s goodness, mercy and power seen through his death to forgive and overthrow that sin within me.

“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

¹² Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

How to help the suicidal

A friend of mine has helped me by excellent example of their behaviour to me to formulate a template for what to helpfully say and do with someone in mental health crisis.

1. I love you and Jesus loves you
2. You matter to me and to God, it’s important to me that you are safe
3. This isn’t your fault
4. I know you are trying your best
5. This is going to get better

I have found this a really helpful formula to teach friends to say to me when I am in crisis and have found it effective to say to others in crisis.

If you take away nothing else from this blogpost, I will be happy. But below I have spelled out a bit more in detail what some of these things could look like in practice for church and church family.

Please don’t do that. It would make me sad.

This is the most glaringly obvious thing that most people don’t do. I understand why they don’t. Suicide is scary. It is scary to think that someone could make the decision to live or die based on not wanting to hurt you. It is scary to think that someone may die if you say the wrong thing. You don’t want to seem to be panicking or judging them or doing anything that would push them ‘over the edge’. It seems right to be calm, neutral, to give them space to make good decisions for themselves. So people are falsely calm, they act like it is no big deal. Although this may be better than panic and judgement it also sends a really dangerous message to the person in crisis. That message is, I really don’t care that you are suicidal, I’m kind of OK with you hurting yourself.

It forgets that we are relational people, that someone in crisis is not operating under any kind of logical conditions and that they are fighting the screaming voices that tell them that they are worthless and useless and everyone would be better off if they were dead. You can join those voices or contradict them. I’m going to tell you something that will probably scare you. The biggest challenges to my self-harming behaviour have not come from people calmly accepting it, they have come from people saying, don’t do that, it makes me sad. I stopped cutting because someone in my life was brave enough to say that and keep saying it.

Cutting was an expression of my feeling that I was evil and disgusting and toxic and deserved to be punished, needed to be defaced. It was an act of self-degradation to make the outside match the feelings on the inside more than anything else. And my friend said to me, don’t do that. It’s not OK. Not because you are bad for doing it, as other people said or implied, because it is a sign you are a bad person trying to manipulate others (simply and utterly untrue) but because Jesus tells me you are precious and lovely and that is not how you treat something precious and lovely. You protect it, you don’t damage it. She wanted me to stop cutting because it hurt her to see me damaging something precious. And her sense that I was precious because God said so became my sense that I was precious, firstly because she said so, then learning from that human example what it meant and felt like that God said so.

And that is something to understand. We are mediators of God’s grace to one another. We are not God and we are not Saviour, but the way in which we express our love and value for one another can teach us, in fact does teach us what it means that God loves and values us. That is the meaning of family and church as family. Most people (not all) with mental illness never grew up with that. They didn’t have family that taught them that they were precious and lovable. So they struggle to understand what it means that God loves them and calls them precious to him. Church family, slowly, painfully, patiently, faltering but persistently can re-teach that lesson. It’s about the only thing that can, it being God’s means of grace for that purpose.

The response to insecurity, to suicidality, to neediness is not to pull away but to go in closer, to increase intimacy, to commit and commit and commit until they start to believe that you are not going to abandon or reject them, and understand what it means that they have a God who won’t abandon or reject them because they are ugly or dangerous or damaged or evil or anything. Like anything that means anything in the Christian life, loving the very broken is both incredibly sacrificial and profoundly transformative for both parties to the relationship. You may feel completely out of your depth, afraid to say something wrong, but if that leads you to push someone away ‘for their own good’ you are going in the wrong direction. All they will learn from that is that someone else has rejected them, has found them not good enough, too broken, too sinful, too ugly. The people who have helped me most effectively to know Jesus have heard me say, you hurt me and now I want to die and have responded by pulling me in closer and telling me that they love me.

I didn’t start to look at many of my deep hurts until someone loved me so radically that I truly believed I could trust them. Until they had such unbelievable grace for my brokenness that I had to believe they were on my side. That gave me a space where I felt safe to have the courage to really look at my own mess and sin and not be rejected for it. Not everyone can do that, but we are all called to give to one another what we can. And the very least we can give is the assurance to someone that they matter, that the world will be a poorer place without them, if for no other reason than the fact they are God’s child. That we do in fact see them as God sees them, as precious and lovable because they are valued and loved by him.

I have always lurched into suicidal thinking when experiencing emotional pain and panic, but for the first time that reaction is becoming seriously undermined although not yet completely stopped. And that is because several people have started saying, please don’t do that, it would make me sad. One person has always said that to me. But one voice can be ignored as an outlier, two is louder, three is a shout that starts to rival the lying voices in your head. One time Jesus spoke to me directly on the verge of a very serious suicide attempt and said, don’t do that it would make me sad. It stopped me. But lately that same message has been spoken into the fog and confusion of mental health crisis by his people, with the same effect.

You should get some medical help sounds like a rejection, a ‘go away and be someone else’s problem’ statement. Suicidal people leave behind their pain for others to bear is a condemnatory statement that never feels true in the moment of crisis (no one will actually care that much if I die is a necessary pre-condition to suicidal thinking). It is a guilt trip. Don’t do that, it would make me sad, is a statement of relationship, of love. It can’t stop the pain but it can reduce it by challenging the lies and it can guard the passes against suicide as a pathway out of it.

I am keeping my phone on through the night because I want you to call me if you are going to hurt yourself.

You may be anxious about this, you may need your sleep and there may be individuals who will take advantage of this in distress for what feels to you like trivial reasons, or excessively because they are not self-aware in their consuming distress of their impact on you, but with the right people this can be an incredible act of protection. There are 2 people who as thoughtful adults have done this for me. Number of times I have used their offer = 0; Number of times it has been a protective factor to help me cling on to not hurting myself in the middle of a long, dark, painful night = dozens; number of times the thought of it has stopped me in the middle of actively and seriously attempting to take my own life = 1. Those stats seem to work for them as being worth the inconvenience.

Can I come and get you? Do you want to come over? Can I come and stay with you until you feel safe?

This is another one that could seem scary. It doesn’t feel safe to invite a suicidal person into your house. It may be inconvenient, you may have kids and be concerned about their welfare. And of course there may be times you need alone time or family time or it feels too stressful and too much pressure and you just can’t do it. You are not the Saviour and ultimately pointing to your own weakness and inadequacy to keep someone safe, whilst pointing to his can be very helpful.

But the reality is that a safe place is what I need the most when I am suicidal. There are a number of reasons why the home of a friend is the safest possible place to be. Firstly, suicidality is a place of hyper-stress and adrenaline. It is a place of terror. Imagine being in a room with a mad-axe-murderer. Then imagine that that there is no possible means of escape. Your life is in danger and you are trapped with the person endangering it. For your rational mind, this is a place of ultimate fear. This keeps your adrenaline flowing and your amygdala (fear centre) in a state of hyper-arousal and stops you from thinking rationally and self-calming. The thought of killing yourself becomes a stimulus so great it stops you from being able to manage it and the state of panic escalates until suicide seems both the problem and the answer because it will at least end this unbearable state of panic and pain. Being in a safe place, a place where you feel people want to protect you, allows the de-escalation process to begin.

Now ideally, a lot of people would like this to be a medical facility. Suicidality is so scary, the fear you will say something wrong and provoke someone stops a lot of people from offering to help. Better to let the professionals deal with it. There are two reasons this reasoning is faulty. Firstly, although medical services can serve as a safe place for de-escalation and in fact should be sought in the last resort, our mental health system is utterly broken. Emergency mental health facilities are rubbish, you are frequently left for hours in unsecure places like waiting rooms, or A&E, non-mental-health staff can treat you like a bed-blocking waste of space, these spaces are inherently stressful places to be and you are in such a state of panic if you encounter a person who seems to indicate you are a problem and they wish you would go away that feels like a confirmation that you are wrong to seek help and may lead to impulsive behaviour.

Secondly, chances are if you are suicidal you are exhausted. Sleep and mental health crisis have a complex chicken-and-egg relationship. Sleeping poorly leads to an increase risk in crisis, in fact is a necessary condition for it, but crisis puts you in a state of adrenaline which makes sleep next to impossible at all. This becomes circular. But the effect is that when you are in crisis you are fairly inevitably exhausted. The idea of sitting for 8 -12 hours in A&E trying to calm down is overwhelmingly unattractive. If there is no other possibility and it will keep you safe you may go there, but it is always hard to believe anything will make you feel better (although you know it will really) and it is the path of least resistance to lie in bed and think about killing yourself. A friend’s house usually has a bed where you can lie down and feel safe at the same time, allowing de-escalation but without costing too much effort. You are more likely to want to do it, so more likely to seek help from that source.

Thirdly and probably most significantly, in order to be seriously suicidal you have to believe that your life is worthless, that everyone would be better off if you died, that you are a toxic burden on the world. Your brain is telling you this. Screaming it at you in fact. When someone says, I care that you are safe, come here and I will try and protect you, that speaks very powerfully to the scream in your brain. It is true that you can’t stop someone from committing suicide who has absolutely decided to do it, but by saying ‘can I come and get you? Or do you want to come over? You immediately introduce a protective factor, even if you aren’t taken up on the offer. It says quite simply and without fuss a whole load of things the suicidal person needs to hear to bear their pain. I care, you matter, I understand. Even if you aren’t able to invite someone over, saying that you wish you could but explaining why you can’t because of your limitations or other commitments can in itself be very protective. Medical professionals are paid to help you stay safe, a friend’s voice provides a counterpoint of truth against the screaming lies much louder and deeper and calmer than the voice of someone you don’t know.

And a corollary to all this is that you don’t actually need to be afraid to invite a suicidal person to your house. It is not tantamount to offering suicide watch, you can go out and leave them, you don’t need to be afraid for your children. Most suicidal people are trustworthy. They won’t want to hurt you or your kids when you have shown them love. I physically cannot hurt myself in a house with children, it overrides every other consideration even in the deepest place of crisis. But mostly, just by inviting them you have probably de-escalated the situation to the point that suicide or self-harm is a far less likely outcome. You have provided a place of safe de-escalation, an affirmation of care to speak against the lie of worthlessness that drives suicidal thinking and offered a place of rest for those processes to take effect.

I can see that you are hurting, it makes sense that you feel that way.

A suicidal person is irrational. Pretty much always. They are scared, in terrific pain or numb because they have shut down the pain and with it all emotion. They are confused, because they are flooded with stress chemicals. Arguing with them, challenging their negative thoughts, words or actions about others is probably not going to lead to any good right now. There is one piece of advice for those that work with people with BPD which is very counterintuitive but incredibly important. People with BPD feel the discrepancy between the stimulus and their emotional reactions and they fight their emotions, hide them, feel ashamed of them and fear them. That leads to a heightening of stress and self-judgement and shame which feeds the emotions themselves and maintains the state of crisis.

The first and necessary pre-condition of de-escalating those emotions is acceptance of them as a real, valid and reasonable response to the stimulus. It’s super counterintuitive. It seems that rationalising and arguing against the excessive emotional response is the right way to help reduce it, but that is exactly what they have been trying and failing to do and they are exhausted by it. If you join in it adds your voice of judgement of the emotions to their own. It validates the feeling that they are bad because their emotions are bad. Instead if you validate the emotions themselves the pressure suddenly lifts. The vicious cycle stops. This is how I feel and it is OK. And relax. Now I can actually start to look at the emotions themselves. I can start to apply rationality, justice, proportion, love. All those higher brain functions that get swamped out by the pain caused by the shame and hatred of the emotions themselves.

The mentally ill in church: you are in control, but I am here to support you to make good decisions.

People with severe mental health crisis have lost control of their mind and their behaviour. That makes them feel ashamed and very afraid. It is very tempting to step in and start to attempt to re-establish that control for them. To share their personal information with others ‘so they can better help’, to restrict their activities to ones you feel are safe and low stress, to protect others that you perceive to be vulnerable from them, to protect them from things that you fear might trigger them. The effect of all of these things however, if not handled extremely carefully is to further increase their sense of shame and lack of control. They feel toxic, dangerous, and you are subtly reinforcing this message. They feel ashamed and like their ability to control what other’s think of them is impaired – unable to hide and that others will see what they see - and again you can easily reinforce that message.

People in crisis need autonomy, as far as it is possible to give. And where it is not possible they need very, very clear explanation of the motivation. That means that if you want to talk to someone about them to help them you should ask them first what it is OK for you to say and not to say. If you are concerned someone or something is unhelpful you should talk to them about it but leave them to make the final decision and where you really believe that is not possible for their safety or for others, in extremis, explain that keeping them safe is the motivation for your action.

Really listen, things that may seem likely to you to be stressors, may in fact be protective factors. And be prepared to believe that what looks from the outside like bad and sinful behaviour may in fact be motivated by things that you can’t understand or sincerely repented of although it may not appear so because they may trust God’s forgiveness but fear your condemnation. Avoid statements that imply judgement with someone in crisis. They are already ashamed and they will hear condemnation very easily. There may be sin that needs to be addressed but now is not the time, both because you may be wrong that it exists and because they are in no place to address it right now.

Be quick to listen, humble to believe you have misunderstood and change your decision, slow to act unless there is an obvious and direct risk of harm. Counterintuitively, the harm of overdoing things for someone in mental health crisis is probably far less than the risk of driving them away from church by shaming them. Before you rush to judgement and church discipline on sin, be careful to ask non-judgemental questions to find out the motivation for the behaviour and whether it is repented of, remembering that repentance may be present but concealed because of shame. So be patient in trying to find it out. Remember that someone in mental health crisis has lost the ability to hide, has lost control. Their sin is obvious and exposed but that doesn’t make it worse than yours or any less repented of than the secret sins that you conceal so effectively behind a barrier of niceness.

You may feel responsible to protect other congregation members from the ‘harm’ of being exposed or having to deal with a person in distress. I can’t see any Biblical warrant for this unless there is abuse. You can support people and empower them to understand their own limitations and not to attempt to be a Saviour but I can’t see that anyone’s role is to protect us from loving one another in costly and painful and difficult ways. In fact, I think it is to facilitate that. You might find a person’s problems complex and overwhelming but that doesn’t mean that a seemingly fragile person, who may in fact have much greater understanding than you do, will. Or that the process of being overwhelmed and finding a situation challenging may not be what God intends for that person to learn to depend more on him.

Don’t underestimate the power of believing that someone will do the right thing. Someone in mental health crisis may be writing a script for themselves where they are a failure who will inevitably fail, hurt people and cause a mess. They’re behaviour may look messy and destructive, but usually they desperately want to do the right thing and are trying with all their energy to fight their chaotic and harmful behaviour. Tell them you believe that. It will challenge their script, actively lift their shame instead of adding to it. Make them part of the conversation about how to support them and how to support and love people who support them. They care about those people profoundly. They don’t want to hurt them. Help them to be the person who loves others in Christ by expecting them to.

Conclusion

This may feel like a radical call to action to the church, and it is meant to. It may feel like something that will pull you way out of your comfort zone, and it is meant to. The church is different to the world in that the last are first and the first are last, the least in the kingdom are the greatest and we are all accountable for how we treat the least of these. The mentally ill, like the refugees are without honour in our society and the church should be a place that welcomes them, not as I see with heartbreak all too often, drives them out through ignorance and lack of understanding.

We are not the Saviour. We are weak and limited. But we can be driven less by fear and more by faith, less by judgement and more by grace, less by self-protection and more by radical, sacrificial love for one another. More often than not our hearts are the problem not our resources.

Good fences make good neighbours

I’m not usually a controversialist but I have a controversial message for the church today. Boundaries are bad. Stay with me, I hope that by the end of this post I will have persuaded you.

Where do they come from?

They seem to me to be a toxic import from our secular Western, individualistic culture. Pop psychology’s answer to the phenomenon of a world full of need and a life full of responsibilities. How can I protect myself from the needs of others? I can have boundaries, they’re healthy relational things, the psychologists tell me so, sigh of relief. Except as far as I can see there is no basis for the concept of boundaries in the Bible. Where are boundaries in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet? Where are they in laying down your life for a friend? Where are they in the cross? It seems to me that communities of grace were supposed to be modelled on sacrificial love, on turning the other cheek, on letting relationships be costly, on a mutual inter-dependence. Jesus’ compassion for the sick and the suffering and the hurting had no self-imposed limits.

Boundaries in the secular culture come from an observation of co-dependency. This is where one of the parties in a relationship facilitates the helplessness of the other by enabling it. This places an intolerable burden on the person supporting. So Western individualistic psychology says, the needy person is the problem. They need to learn independence, to take responsibility for themselves. The co-dependent will help them by refusing to help them, by imposing a boundary.

The Bible has a different answer

Co-dependency is a real problem but it lies not with the needy person by with the facilitator. People have needs, real, physical and emotional needs. Some people who have suffered a lot have a lot of them. Supporting them can feel exhausting, draining, impossible. They may make demands that just can’t be met. But co-dependency arises not out of the need of the other but out of my need to be a saviour. If I think or am even subconsciously afraid of the fact that I am responsible for meeting this person’s needs I will be overwhelmed and push back against them. I will tell them that their needs are wrong. But the issue is not with them, as so often when we take a look, it is with me. I sense their needs are beyond my capacity to meet, and I am right, they absolutely are. But the point is, it is not my responsibility to meet their needs, it is simply my responsibility to love them with the fullest extent of my resources.

The liberating truth of the gospel is that we are all needy beyond the point of hope or help, but that we have a Saviour who came down to bear our burdens, to heal the sick, bind up the broken hearted and set the prisoner free. He alone can save. When I allow myself to believe that I am the saviour, that it is my job to fix people I will become afraid and overwhelmed and push back against people. I will hurt them. When I know that it is Jesus’ job to save and heal and set free, I am free also to love people in a sacrificial, generous way because their wellbeing does not ultimately depend on me. I can live in the reality that Jesus places us in relationship to love sacrificially, knowing that the point where I leave off because I have run out of resources, he will not because he never runs out of resources.

And incredibly, this is what my suffering, needy friend needs to hear too. Not that they need to take responsibility for their problems, that they are a problem that I need to manage with boundaries, but that there is a loving, heavenly saviour who has us both. And being unafraid of your need sets me free to do my part in meeting it, by showing you the kind of sacrificial love that you have learned not to expect from anyone and by simultaneously pointing you to the one who is the source of meeting all our needs, by saying “I love you, because he first loved us,” by saying my love, it is here for you because of his. When we cease to think we are the saviour, we are free to express radical acts of loving kindness and generosity, we cease to think of ‘you and I’ and begin to think of ‘we together’ being recipients of his grace and gifted with resources to love one another. And as we model that to our needy friends, as we show that we are unafraid of them and need, we will help them to understand what it means that there is a saviour who loves them and in whose hands and love they are ultimately safe and who has all the resources necessary to meet all of their needs.

Because when we become believers, God does not send us on our way, to follow him as strong, independent people. He gives us communities of grace to learn from one another what it means that we have a Saviour full of grace and love for us. A needy person may believe that they need you, the truth is that they need to learn that they need Jesus, but you won’t teach them that by sticking them out in the cold, by putting up boundaries for ‘healthy relating’. That is not the gospel way, the way of radical grace that is beyond human imagination for tracing out. A needy person needs Jesus, but the way that they will learn that is if you model that you need Jesus in your relationship with them. If you found it on prayer, if you point them to him as you love them as the source of your love, if you centre your relationship in scripture.

Personal experience

I can honestly testify to the truth of this gospel way, as a giver and as a recipient of gospel grace under the Lordship of Christ. I am one of these needy people, I have hurts and damage that scream for healing, I externalise my self-worth so that they way the last person treats me is the way I see myself, I can be desperately frightened by rejection and by authority and desperately in need of reassurance of people’s love when they have acted in a way that has triggered my fears. And I have experienced phenomenal change and healing, but never at the hands of ‘boundaries’, always at the hands of astonishing saints who have loved me in astonishingly sacrificial ways, whilst never ceasing to point me to the one who is the healer and the saviour and the true bringer of change. The ones who have never treated me as a burden because I am not their burden to bear, are also the ones who have loved me with a generosity forged by the certainty that it is not their responsibility to save me. Who have opened their houses, who have left their phones on through the night, who have offered to come and get me to keep me safe, who have invested time and love beyond the usual reach of anything but possibly close, loving family and who have relentlessly throughout told me of the one who is holding me and loving me and saving me and is still able to be there when they are not. Who have taught me to trust Jesus because they trust him with me. Who have told me constantly not that I must take responsibility for myself, a task for which I am singularly ill-equipped, but that Jesus has me and holds me and protects me and owns me and keeps me.

These people have gifted me a ministry that is able to be like them, generous to those in desperate need, without being afraid, because I am not responsible for them, Jesus is. So I can love them and not feel burdened by their pain and need, because it belongs not to me, not even to them, but to Jesus.

A new way of relating

So, what are some of the ways living this out looks like in practice. Well I would argue, one way is to move ourselves mentally away from the language of boundaries entirely, which has toxic, exclusionary overtones and instead to talk about limitations. Because boundaries are invented, but limitations are real, and very much a Bible concept.

The power of limitations are that they are about me, not the person in need. You have need, that need is real and genuine and matters but I will not always be able to meet it, because I am weak. And that is good, because ultimately it is not me that you need to trust for your needs, but Jesus. That does not mean I abdicate my responsibility to love you to the fullest of my capacity, that is my responsibility in Christ. It means that when I tell you ‘no’ it will not be because there is a problem with you and your need, but because there is a limitation in me.

We are finite, we have limited resources and many demands on them. I cannot meet every need that I encounter and I am not supposed to. But when I say no, it is not from a defensive posture, because I know that it is not my responsibility to fix you. It is simply my responsibility to love you as best I can alongside all the other responsibilities I have in my life. Including the responsibility to look after myself physically, emotionally and spiritually. Jesus took time out, he went away to pray and be with his Father because he knew that was what he needed to keep his perspective right, to keep living in the dependence on God which we need to model to the needy.

Suddenly our relationship transforms from one of power and weakness to weakness and weakness. I am not controlling my friend with my no, I am not sitting above them, telling them they are a problem, I am not ‘teaching them independence’. I am expressing my own weakness and needs. I bring myself down to their level and let them see that I too am human and that together we need Jesus. It takes humility to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you right now, I am too weak.” It can be hard. It takes humility to say, I love you but I can’t meet your need right now, but Jesus can. A ‘no’ in fear and hardness feels like a rejection, and in the wrong place can drive me into a frenzy. A ‘no’ clearly articulated in weakness feels like love.

Where boundaries can be right and good

Having gone into great detail for the case against boundaries I want to say that there are cases where boundaries are good and necessary. These cases involve abuse. Putting up boundaries against a needy friend – protecting yourself from their need – and putting up boundaries against an abusive person are entirely different things. Sometimes it is right and appropriate to protect yourself and it forms part of the self-care and dependence on God I was talking about above. When a person is attempting to physically or emotionally damage you, to deliberately hurt you, it is right to be very clear and firm with them that you will not accept that, and potentially take steps to prevent them doing so. That also reveals Christ, because it shows that you are his child and precious too him and will not accept someone else’s attempt to rob you of that reality.

In such cases it may be necessary to restrict access, to limit communication or a whole other range of measures to ensure you make it clear, as far as it is possible that you reject this person’s behaviour. However, this should always be held with grace, with a readiness to forgive, with or without repentance, and where there is repentance to restore relationship. Where abuse has been persistent, or there no true repentance, or there is evidence that expressions of repentance are being used by an abuser to re-establish control in order to abuse again, it may be appropriate for those restrictions to be permanent.

Negotiating the grey areas

Sometimes these things will not be clear cut.

For instance, there may be occasions where there is genuine repentance and commitment to change, but relationships will still need to be handled carefully if your own weaknesses make you vulnerable to the abusive or sinful behaviour of the other person. But once again we are returning to the language of limitations, because I am weak and limited, I am struggling in these ways to deal with your difficult behaviour and its consequences in me, and to help me with that I need these restrictions.

An example of this is a friend of mine who taught me to recognise my anger. As I began to recognise it and express this emotion that had previously just been trapped inside me making me want to hurt myself, for the first time, I did not know what to do with it. On one occasion, whilst I was living with her, I deliberately turned a chair over in her kitchen in my anger. I was immediately repentant, sorry for my actions. I apologised and she forgave me and said she did not mind.

However, I am very fragile when it comes to the anger of others. If someone came into my house and turned over a chair in anger, I would probably be very afraid. I am also very fragile to feeling unsafe in the place where I live. Because of my weakness, I might therefore think it was appropriate to say to a friend who had turned a chair over in anger in my house that it would be better for my well-being if we no longer met in my house. This is not about punishing them, or teaching them consequences or assuming their repentance is not sincere. It is simply about my weakness and the real consequences on me as a result of their actions because of that.

You might call this a boundary, but it is not one that is expressed in terms of judgement, condemnation, superiority or distrust, but rather one expressed in terms of my weakness. Again, it doesn’t exclude, it says, we together, both, are weak, fragile people in need of healing by our saviour.

An appeal

I think if there is one take away message from this post it is this. Let’s stop being afraid. Fear is the enemy of radical love, and radical love is the way of the cross. We live in a world of pain and suffering, where the clamour of the needs of the world makes us want to protect ourselves, to say, this space here is mine, I have to look after myself, your needs are an imposition and need to be kept at a distance. We live in a world that says put yourself first, take care of your own, that idolises independence and shames and despises weakness. We live in a world that says one and one is two and I must maintain my boundaries to prevent you encroaching on what is mine and to teach you to stop others encroaching on what is yours.

The gospel says God is the provider, the meet-er of needs. It says to serve others is to be great in his kingdom, to lose is to gain and that one and one is one, the one body of Christ. The gospel says, you and I, together are weak. We need one another, we need Jesus, that everything we have and are come from him and are at his service and therefore at the service of one another, following the example that he set. We are not called to be strong, independent individuals, we are called to be a community of grace that takes on Jesus’ mission into the world. To heal the sick, set the prisoners free, bind up the broken hearted and call the sinners to repentance.

But we cannot live like this unless we are set free ourselves by our own dependence on the grace and provision of God, in our own lives and with the lives of others around us. Unless I know that there is one who meets my needs, your needs are a threat to me, unless I know you are not my burden, I will be afraid to start loving you or fall down in my attempt to carry you and run away from you because you hurt and exhaust me. We cannot live like this unless we are humbly prepared to admit that my weakness and limitations are the problem, not your need.

We should not be afraid that others need us. We should expect that. The size of their need should not deter us from offering what we have, whilst pointing to our own weaknesses and God’s sufficiency.

A couple of months ago I knelt in the street next to a man who was bleeding badly from his head. I held a jumper to his wound and reassured him that the ambulance was coming. He was coughing blood, he probably had internal injuries, those I could not help. But I could stop his bleeding and I could call out to the people who were equipped to do more. The man was a drug addict and probably a thief, he had been violently attacked. The world says protect yourself, walk by, you can’t fix this problem, he brought it on himself. But I could kneel by his side and hold a cloth to his wound and tell him, it’s OK, help is coming. The man who attacked him came back, threatened me, but I could not move, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference, but I felt that to move away was to say that this man did not matter, that his life was unimportant because he was weak and sinful and broken. And I couldn’t do it. The gospel crosses boundaries, takes risks and takes a stand against the lies of Satan.

People I knew passed by, but they had children with them, they did not stop. They were right not to stop. They had other responsibilities that meant they did not have the resources to help at that moment.

Needy people have psychological and emotional wounds, sometimes as serious as the wounds of the man on the street. It may be at times as foolish to say to them, ‘take responsibility for yourself, make good choices, call your own ambulance, heal your own wounds’ as it would have been to say that to the man who lay on that street that day. We do no service to ourselves, our church or the gospel when we put barriers up against the needy and hurting, when we hold them at a distance because we are afraid of their need, when we sit in judgement on them because they are weak in ways we can’t understand.

This is my appeal to the church. Do what you can. Tell them why when you can’t. Point them relentlessly to the God who loves you both.

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.

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.