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.

What do you expect?

First a disclaimer - this post is about the expectations we have of one another within church of real, deep and meaningful relationships, not our expectations (which are idolatrous) of a specific person being available to meet a specific need at a specific time, or having a knowledge and understanding of us they can't possibly have.

Expectations is a dirty word. A word we use to beat each other up when we feel inadequate before another’s needs. A word we use to express our frustration and disappointment at the people that let us down. You need to expect less of people, you can’t have expectations, it’s not fair to expect…

Relationships in a fallen world are painful, difficult things. We’ve all been hurt. We’ve all felt rejection and loss and betrayal. But I have never found anyone who has been helped by being rebuked for their unrealistic expectations, or who having said they have lowered or changed their expectations has ceased to really long after real, deep committed relationship.

Because that is what we are made for. Real, deep, committed relationship. Garden of Eden relationship where we can be naked, known and accepted and feel no shame. But however much we long for these relationships, we feel how inadequate we are at giving them. We think with shame of the friendships, at one time so close, that distance, circumstances and sin have allowed to fall into neglect. And we hide ourselves and our selfishness behind the rhetoric of expectations. You can’t expect that of me, surely?

Furthermore we do it to ourselves. We start to feel that friendships like that are for other people, there’s something about me that means people just can’t love me that way, and if I don’t expect it, I can’t get hurt. It doesn’t work though, our soul cries out, even through the bitterness and pain that pushes others to arm’s length, for intimacy and security.

What is it exactly that we shouldn’t expect of each other? Should we not expect each other to keep promises? Should we not expect each other to care? Should we not expect our family to give us relationship in real and meaningful ways? That is what Christ tells us we are in church, family.

At this point I want to point to my limitations, I do my best, I’m just so busy, there are too many people, too much going on. To that I say to myself, yes, I am limited and I am busy but mostly that is my choice. Like the time I waste, not resting, not refreshing myself, just waste. And the times I let my guilt at failing you get in the way of loving you. And the times I run after my own needs instead of thinking about yours. And the times I am angry with you but don’t want to admit it. And all the times I make choices based on what looks good or makes me feel good instead of actually being faithful. Not to mention the times and times I waste my physical and mental energy not trusting God with things in my life so I have few resources left over to love. I feel guilty, and rightly so, because however limited I am, I hurt you infinitely more because I am sinful. Which is uncomfortable as it’s much easier to blame your expectations of me.

The answer is, as always, not more guilt but more grace. Guilt puts up more barriers, makes it harder to step over and begin to love you again. Grace says what I really should be saying is “I am sorry”. I am sinful, frail and selfish. I know what you need from relationship because it is exactly what I need: consistency, patience, grace, perseverance and love, but I just can’t give you that. Because I am inadequate, because I am weak, because I am, deep down, wicked and I don’t want to. The problem is not yours, it is mine, and I cover it over by blaming your expectations of me.

Real relationships start with grace. They start with the fact that I will let you down, I won’t love you the way that I ought. And when that happens I need to ask God’s forgiveness and yours, not blame you for expecting me to love you. Real relationships start when I know you won’t always be there for me, that you will choose your happiness over mine, that I have to let you make promises of commitment and love, and trust you to keep them, and forgive you when you don’t because that is where real relationship happens and if I cut myself off from that, I cut myself off from part of my humanity. A really good part too.

And of course this is all missing the obvious. These real relationships can only happen in Christ. Only when I am freed from my guilt in Christ can I be free to see my sin, say sorry and start over. Only when I am clinging to Christ for ultimate security and intimacy can I dare to expose myself to your frailty and sin in intimate relationship.

So think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “they expect too much from me!” Recognise you have probably sinned against them. Recognise that what they need from you is real relationship, which can say sorry and start over, which isn’t enslaved to guilt and fear. Recognise that Christ has set you free to love them and continues to do so every day as you continue to sin. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

And think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “I can’t trust them again, they have let me down too many times,” or even for some people “I can’t trust anyone, they will always let me down, I will just never have that kind of deep friendship.” Recognise that in Christ you are utterly loved and safe and secure. Recognise that people are sinful and weak. Be brave. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

We all long for relationships that are deep and real. We all live in a world where relationships are broken and messy. But the miracle of the church is that by grace broken and messy relationships can become deep and real whilst never stopping being broken and messy. God is just that good. So don’t give up.