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."

  

By his wounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persevering in pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet:

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

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

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

Romans 8:22-30

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

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

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

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

“For your sake we face death all day long;

 we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

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

Romans 8:31-39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is love

Here’s the thing about getting better from a serious illness. You have setbacks. But every time you have a setback you learn something new. As you clear away the layers that have built up around your illness and your response to it over the years you start to see the deeper issues. The stubborn ones that started it all off in the first place, the ones that will be hardest to shift. Also, the physical processes that are underlying the mental ones.

I once described getting better as like digging up dandelions out of your lawn rather than cutting the tops off, now it feels more like uprooting a tree. There are thousands of smaller roots which you can cut off quite easily but they all feed into 2 or 3 great big gnarly roots that go miles down. To get to them you need to clear out the little ones that are gripping the ground all around, solidifying them in place. Then you can start to dig down through the rocks and soil and get hot and sweaty and exhausted, so you can loosen them, see them clearly to start chopping them into pieces and pulling them out. Which is a long-winded way of saying it’s actually much harder than uprooting dandelions and it turns out it’s all connected.

Anyway, recent events have created some clarity on the massive, gnarly, deep roots of my illness and although the process has been agonising and exhausting as usual, I’m quite excited about things that I have understood. They feel like things that once dealt with will bring really good change. One of them is recognising how much I am driven by relational fear. Which is ironic because I would have told you a few years ago that relational fear was something I didn’t possess. People who knew me well would have told you that too. I offer up intimacy without strings or reservations to anyone who comes along, I expose my vulnerabilities, I trust people and expect the best of them and I get beaten and wounded time and time again by the sinfulness, selfishness and self-protection of others. I learn the hard way every time that most people will take advantage of your generosity and then kick you to the curb when they no longer have need of you, but never seem to retain that learning into the next situation. It used to make my mother despair.

But it turns out that all that behaviour is actually driven by fear. Completely understandable fear. It is behaviour that I learned as a child to survive. By the time I was 6 years old I had a fixed understanding that I was fat (untrue at the time), ugly, stupid and unworthy of kindness. On reflection, all of those things were untrue, but they were the core of my self-understanding.  My parents were going through a nasty separation and there was no adult in my life who could understand or help. In fact, without meaning to, they tended to make it much worse. I retreated and was excluded and this reinforced my sense of being unacceptable to others. But then I discovered something. If you make yourself emotionally available to people in distress they are nice to you. I was blessed with empathy and I could use it to make people like me. It didn’t last, people recovered from their distress and rejected you as unnecessary and went back to the centre of a group of people who had no time or interest in you (as a best case scenario). But for that while, being the person who understood and cared and gave compassion without stint insulated me from isolation and rejection and abuse. It was my safe place.

For decades it was the only way I knew how to do relationship and it left me vulnerable to rejection over and over again. In some ways it is still the only way I know how to do relationship, in that the habit of making myself available and emotional vulnerable to people and engaging in empathy is a habit I have never learned to break. The only thing that has changed is that I no longer need it to feel acceptable to people, that the beliefs that underpinned it as the only way that I would be worthy of kindness and attention are gone. And it can be a phenomenal gift. A blessing, I respond automatically to the mood of the people around me and that makes me, I have been told, good company. I mirror your feelings which makes talking to me a comfort, I mirror your interests, which is flattering. I am emotionally open with my friends which makes them feel they can be open with me and trust me. All these things are good things.

But there is a hangovers from this mode of existence which is far from good for me. It is that my default setting is to use empathy as a tool of manipulation. It seems like it is about you but actually it is about me, making me safe, even in the short term from being despised and rejected by you. Something that looks kind is actually fundamentally selfish and ugly. That motivation is and always has been deeply enmeshed with the actual love that I have for people and the real desire to make others feel better. But it is there, and the evidence of that is when I can’t do anything to make you feel better or what you need is beyond my ability to give I tend to get stressed and panicky. My tendency to become overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of others has its root in this sin.

Praise be to God that through the gospel of grace I am able to look square in the face of that fact that one of the things I have always liked most about myself and that others like about me has an ugly, nasty root in sin. In fact, more than something I like about myself, it is something of a pillar of my identity. I am a person who cares and understands, I’m intuitive and empathetic. It’s also something I look to still to give me a measure of security in relationship, I may now expect you to like me for myself, or not and that’s fine, but there is part of me that looks to the fact that I make you feel good as source of security in our friendship. My tendency to get insecure when I am a bit low and be afraid to spend time with people in case they get fed up with me is evidence of that.

So, this is something that I look to for identity and security and it has to go. But here as always it gets tricky. A behaviour you developed as a survival strategy at 6 and have perfected throughout your entire life, a behaviour that is utterly entangled with good and loving parts of you that you have no wish to lose, a behaviour that was for many years the only safe place you have known in relationships, how on earth do you even begin to tackle that?

Well, of course, the beginning of the answer is that you don’t. You can’t. But there is someone who can. An expert gardener who knows just where to cut and how hard to pull to take up the sinful root but leave the healthy, loving plant free to thrive. Which is a metaphorical way of saying the first and last thing that needs to happen is prayer. My father has shown me I have a problem, and my father wants me to bring it to him to fix.

And there is truth I can listen to, to help the process along, there is the sword of the spirit, the gardener’s tool for cutting out the sin. Firstly, I need to love people more, not less. Loving them means making our relationship about them, not about me. Loving them is finding my safety and security in the Lord and not in their needing me or making them feel good. Loving them means being free to say hard things that they need to hear, means being able to hear their pain and not be incapacitated by it and so unable to help, means trusting them enough to be myself and letting them decide whether I am a person they want to know or spend time with.

But where do I find the power to love like this? I can only love like this when I am utterly safe relationally, so that although relationship always gives people the power to hurt you, it cannot destroy you. What we all need from relationship I think really boils down to this: knowing and being known. This is where true security lies. This person knows me. They know the good, the bad, the ugly and they still love me. They still want what is best for me, they are still on my side, they still accept me. My best friend is the person who knows me best and doesn’t turn away in disgust. 

Jesus is the one who can give us this. The only one. The verse that comes back again and again is “then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”. I am fully known by my God, and one day I shall know him fully. Even more “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”, the more I see him as he is the more I shall be like him, and one day I will see him fully and completely and that will make me love as fully and completely as he loves. This is how to love: to become like Jesus. And how to we become like him? We see him as he is. 

We see him the man, the human and all the details of his life and the way he interacted with people and the way he loved people. We see him the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, the chosen one who will rule as God’s king over God’s kingdom forever. We see him the suffering servant, who humbled himself under the unjust judgement of sinful man, submitting to death on a cross, enduring God’s curse and wrath so we can enjoy God’s blessing. We see him the resurrection and the life, reigning in heaven, interceding for his people, with them always by his spirit, gathering in his children and preparing his bride for the wedding feast. We see him, the God who knows us fully, living, serving, dying, rising, reigning for us, who hated, rejected, despised, betrayed and abandoned him. This is intimacy. This is security. This is love.

In the eye of the beholder

I hate photographs. I know I am not the only one, and these days, for the sake of others who want to capture memories I submit without too much open protest to being photographed in groups. Friends who know me well are merciful these days and usually don't insist too much if I quietly demur or offer to take the picture in group situations. I still occasionally have friends who find it hard to believe that I really don't like it or who with the best of intentions will send me photos of myself.

To close friends I am often brave enough to admit now that, at the wrong moment, unexpectedly being confronted with a picture of myself will make me feel physically sick. That's not hyperbole. Literally, physically, sick. Independent really of the situation or my relative appearance. I don't see what they see when they look at the photograph and they don't realise that I only manage to exist and enjoy my life because I constantly, consciously don't think about what I look like. Being confronted with a picture reminds me that other people have to look at and relate to what I physically look like all the time.

It's why I hate any occasion for which I need to get dressed up. I have to think about what I look like, the physical me that people have to relate to. In order to start enjoying myself I have to get to the point where I have 'lost' myself again, when I can forget that I physically exist and what it is that people are looking at when they look at me. Being dressed up also often involves fitted clothes which constantly remind you of their existence. It lies behind my insistence that if I ever get married I will do so in jeans and with no photographer. The wedding dress is the ultimate expression of clothing that is designed to focus attention on your appearance. Most of my friends don't really understand the extent of the misery and discomfort looking at myself causes me, so they don't understand why I would be willing to sacrifice convention, propriety and being the centre of attention in order to avoid constantly being reminded on a supposedly happy day what it is that others are looking at.

Self-image is so wrapped up in layers and layers of shame for me, that I am reluctant to admit how I feel about what I look like. I am ashamed of my shame. So over the years I have cultivated deliberate self-forgetfulness. Forget about what you look like, dismiss the thought, consciously reject thinking of yourself as a physical person, or in fact thinking about yourself at all and then you don't have to be self-conscious, you can be focussed on others. Photos, mirrors, reflections in shop windows, getting dressed up, thrust that physicality back onto you and you have to push it away, reject it again before you can be comfortable. I can never accept myself, only forget myself.

I know I am relatively extreme, but not unique in any sense. It is an aggravated degree of something many people, particularly women, experience all the time. As humans we are constantly bombarded with messages about who we are. From the subconscious clues of the way people relate to us, to the images and representations that surround us, to the actual words that people use to describe us. We absorb and assimilate expectations, judgements. We are constantly being told who we are and who we should be by the world around us. Physical self-image is bound up with moral judgements on ourselves, when I look in the mirror I don't just see what I physically look like and the accompanying physical judgements, I see all of the world's judgements and my own judgement's reflected back at me.

Until I was 22 or so, those judgements would be profoundly uncomfortable for a stranger to listen to. Physically what I saw was ugly, disgusting, unfeminine. More generally I was worthless, dirty, unloved and un-loveable. I had absorbed the world's judgements about myself. Self-mutilation was easy, self-disgust could fuel days and days of not eating. I wanted to cut my face, to write the judgements I had absorbed in plain sight for others to see, to destroy what I loathed and made me feel sick. I managed not to do that, in the end my shame at how I felt overcame the desire for public exposure of it.

I know this makes uncomfortable reading. It makes uncomfortable writing. So why am I writing it? Because of course it is not the whole story, only the beginning of it. I am friends with Jesus so it's where I start, but not where I end. The world told me a story that if I wanted to be loved I needed to, "Be beautiful, Be funny, Be smart but not too smart, Be successful, Be smiley, Be popular, Be fashionable, Be desirable, Be thin, Be quiet". And then it told me I was none of those things. I was a failure. But praise God he took me in hand and told me a different story. It was a simple one, just this, "You are mine".

It's the claim to silence all claims. The judgement to end all judgements. What and who I am is not the world's to determine, it belongs to God to say. He made me, then he bought me with the blood of his precious Son, only he is worthy to tell me who I am. His is not another voice in the competition of voices telling me who I am, his is the voice. Only he is worthy to tell me who I am. To allow that right to anyone else, including myself, is to dishonour and de-throne him. It may not have been my fault, the things that happened to me that created the voices of judgement in my head, but that I allow them to sound above the Lord's voice, to take his place, and of that I need to repent.

So having allowed that the Lord has the right to define me, to tell me who I am, what is it that he says? Does he have another list for me of things I need to be? No, the Lord Jesus had for me words that would set me free from the weight of the judgement of the world. Isaiah 43 became the scaffolding on which I could start to re-build my identity, re-shape my view of myself into the reflection of who the God made me and died for me told me I was. "Because you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you", began to replace the solid foundational truths of my understanding of myself. I could not be worthless if God said I was precious, I could not be dirty if I was honoured, I could not be unloved if my Lord said, "I surely love you".

Over time the rock of Jesus' words about me became more and more the foundation stone of my identity, I gave up more and more of my judgements of myself to him. I accepted myself because I believed I was accepted, not on the basis of my merits, but by the love that said while you are dirty and guilty and my enemy I will lay down my life for you. On the basis that, "This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins". It's not a completed work, it never will be this side of heaven, there are days that I hear the world's voice as the loudest in my head, coping strategies that I run back to under pressure that reflect the old identity rather than the new.

One thing that remains is the visceral antipathy to my physical appearance. The belief that I am ugly and disgusting and weak because I am overweight, the only thing that I see when I look at a photo, or a reflection. The constant battles with dieting which, like for most people, has absolutely no long term impact. The constant reminder that when it comes to physical appearance I am a failure and it's my own fault, a failure of will, self-discipline, inner strength. I am learning to tame the excesses it leads to. I no longer often skip meals, starving myself part in punishment, part in desperate attempt to make an impact. It never worked anyway. I try to at least start the academic year with the concept that time to cook and eat in my life is a necessity, not an indulgence that I don't deserve. I buy fruit and vegetables that I like, even though it seems like a waste of money to spend on myself, because I am more likely to eat them. I try to remember that however I feel about it, my body is not my own, because I am not my own, I was bought at a price, so I try to take care of it.

But I know the Lord is pushing me on. Challenging me to see not what the world sees, or what I see, but what he sees when he looks at me. Not perfect, not worthy in itself, but acceptable because he accepts it, lovely because it is loved, beautiful because he has found beauty in it, the beauty that he has put there by choosing to love it and therefore giving it some of his own worth and beauty. Pushing me to believe that the inner things are more important than the outer, the unseen is of more value than the seen, that charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but that a women who fears the Lord is to be praised.

I'm not there yet. I still hate photos, still struggle to look at them, but it no longer hurts to hear the verse a dear friend once gave to me inscribed on a bracelet and which I could not read for years and years because I couldn't accept it. Slowly, but slowly the Lord is changing even that deepest truth that I have believed from a small child, that I am ugly. Slowly I am letting him be the arbiter and learning to accept his words when he says: "The King is enthralled with your beauty, honour him for he is your Lord".