The Necessity of Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to help the suicidal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Identity Snakes and Ladders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second passage that has brought comfort is Psalm 143.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

I am Simon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By his wounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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