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.”

Identity Snakes and Ladders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second passage that has brought comfort is Psalm 143.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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.