There are no heroes, only survivors

In Beyond Thunderdome, Tina Turner bellowed, “We don’t need another hero, we just need to know the way home…” Just such truth right there!

This truth was echoed recently when Amanda N, who said this:

“God have mercy.
There are no heroes.
Except for the survivors.”

Since the #MeToo movement began only a few years ago, a litany of public corpses—heroes of millions and of milieus—have been rolled out from the red carpet and onto the street to be savaged for their sins. People from Harvey Weinstein to Bill Hybels to Kevin Spacey to [now] Martin Luther King. We’re coming to time when there will be no more trust left for the ‘champion’ in a public space; notwithstanding the brilliance of their performances or rhetoric. There will only be trust reserved for the genuinely servant hearted as it should be.

Of course, the fantasy that plays out in society is representative of this great truth: there are no heroes, only survivors, and indeed the survivor is the only trustworthy hero.

When redemption is woven into the very fabric of society’s psyche, we readily see, no matter who we are, that the ones who deserve our honour and our praise are those who have paid the price, who have sacrificed, who have suffered, and who have won their way through.

These are the heroes. Not somebody who has all the right rhetoric, but the person who has silently gone about their business, and have endured their hard and hurried life.

And please don’t ever hail me or anyone else who speaks the truth a hero. I and we are all such fallen creatures. Just because we create with words or pictures or have certain gifts is no credit to any of us.

There’s such a fine line
between loyalty, admiration and respect,
and the reverence and awe
we should save for God alone.

Let’s not nudge that line.

Think about your heroes. Who are they? Sports heroes. Heroes of the faith. Movie stars. Pulpit heroes. Singers and songwriters. Great authors.  TED speakers. Do you know categorically that they’re worth the weight of esteem you give them? How can we really know?

A good way of checking this would be to imagine anyone you adore being revealed as the sinner they are. Do we elevate anyone above their rightful standing? We do all the time. People can only disappoint us if we hold them above where they should be.

This is why I thank God for the #MeToo and #ChurchToo era. Any and all of us only need to be a little introspective; think about what God knows about us; the deeper thoughts that are unbecoming, the quietly lustful,  covertly greedy, hideously prideful yearnings, the secret acts we’ve all engaged in.

There are parts of us all that we’d never want broadcast over the front page of a national or even local paper, even if we aren’t a Weinstein or a Cosby or a Rolf Harris.

Let me do just one for-instance. I would never rape any woman (or man) but have I had inappropriate sexual thoughts? Yes, of course I have! Lust is just one such example. Doing a Step 4 rigorous moral inventory as part of the Twelve Step Program 15 years ago highlighted to me just how immoral I can be—I see it when I’m honest.

Fortunately these days I have Spirit-led-and-empowered strategies (provided I continue to nurture honesty), and a modicum of moral wisdom that helps me acknowledge my limited capacity, that hold me a little further from temptation. But the temptations never vanish.

The point is this: the true hero is the one who has suffered without fault or cause—the survivor of trauma! Having been a reviewer of an Australian version of the Bible recently, in reviewing Galatians through Hebrews, Paul states this numerous times; blessed is the one who suffers persecution amicably without causing others to stumble.

That’s the real hero; someone who’s suffered yet hasn’t caused others to suffer. The suffering stopped with them. And perhaps we can extend our admiration to those who, like this, have suffered, but have also committed their lives to the practice of advocacy so that others don’t suffer what they themselves suffered. That the cycle of trauma ends with them as far as it depends on them.

It reminds me of the only person who ever did that to perfection: Jesus.

Here’s a fact: the more we live fully focused on the Lord, the less our admiration of others gets out of hand.

~

There are no heroes
other than those
who have survived suffering
and haven’t used their suffering
as a means of making others suffer.

~

Just one final word. You probably know this already, but sometimes, and indeed often, the most skilled, the most gifted, the most charismatic of people, are the least trustworthy, for they have learned that they’re self-sufficient. Those who don’t need God can be most dangerous of all.

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You are connected all the more to God through loss

Depression, anxiety, loneliness, abuse, trauma, mental and emotional instability, spiritual attack, and the list runs on. There are so many forms of loss. Let’s leave it at that as a concept—even as I proofread a section of God’s Holy Word; Philippians 3:7-11:

The Apostle Paul (I capitalise ‘Apostle’ because Paul was a true apostle) states in the preceding verses that he had every privilege this life could afford him. Yet, it’s nothing to him. He considers it all ‘dung’! That he may gain Christ.

We experience loss in life and it converts our understanding to this: there is no possession in this life that comes even close to knowing God and to having Him present in our lives through the Holy Spirit. And how does God achieve this in us? Through loss. 

Through loss, all the gifts of His compassionate grace are bequeathed to us.

Through depression all is stripped away, yet the refined remains, in accordance with our surrender and seeking of Him who can and will help. At our depths we learn so very much. As we skate along the surface we miss the mysteries of grace that are ever for the picking. Our depression is a gateway to the glories on high when we are lowest. As we hold on in our anguish, pray for reconnaissance of memory, that one day you will call back to this harsh and brutal time, and thank God He got you through it! I can tell you right now, this is a prophetic word that has been true in my life and in so many lives of those I know. Trust it.

Through anxiety we no longer trust our mind to comfort, and being assailed in the body, we commend our soul to Him who alone can rescue us. We do not stop searching for a way we can be healed, and as we approach that healing, and as we experience it, we laud the One who is coming for us!

Through loneliness, we reach out and up to the only One who will never leave us nor forsake us; who knows even more acutely as we know Him all the more firmly. One moment in the gifting of His Presence will be security of His pleasure for the rest of our time. One moment, when this God makes Himself real and known to us, and we will never ever believe He doesn’t exist ever again.

Through the abuse we survived, we have a Pursuer, who does pursue justice for us, and healing for our trauma. As we hold out hope that God is reforming His church, He is preparing hearts to hear what we have to say. We will have our justice in this life or in the life to come.

Through mental and emotional instability, through the alienation of those who would malign us, we’re granted possession of a grace of compassion that they do not possess.

Through all forms of loss, the greatest comfort is the door to faith has been opened wider, all the more, in compensation. In loss, God has come close. In loss, His invitation has been too compelling to discount. In loss, we have found all that matters. And in loss, finally, when all is lost, and when we’re lost to the world, all will be found in an eternity that is waiting for every single one.

In loss is true gain.

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The Heart is the Miracle Behind Behaviour Change

I’ve often been mystified as to what it is that underlies change—true, life-giving, sustained change.

We change because we desperately want to change, because we see that we can no longer bear not to change, or because changing seems the only way—where to survive is to thrive.

It’s like the idea that a person who is challenged against their will is of their original opinion still. Things don’t change unless they change.

And change must come from the heart.

Last night I wrote about the issue of apology, and that if there were no action, i.e. sustained behaviour change, that the apology was null and void.

But that article begged a more fundamental question: how do people change? I know when I’ve changed, when I’ve been convicted that I had to change, there was a groundswell from within; I could no longer be who I was.

Like when I committed to bodybuilding to firm up a soft body as a twenty-year-old transformed in a year. Or, when I gave up smoking. Or, when I became a teetotaller. Or, when I became truly Christian after playing the game for more than a dozen years to my own peril. And, most virulently, when I decided I would no longer, not ever again, live a lie. I was convinced that the former life held no attraction for me. It was as if it repulsed me. I had to leave it. That life had to leave me.

Each time it happened, my heart changed. God had done open-heart surgery.

The very best of these times in any of our lives is when we’re so convicted and convinced our way was wrong that we want never ever again to live for ourselves. That we were ready to live for God, sold out to His purposes, and were entirely ready for Him who is all to replace that heart of stone we had with a heart of flesh that could only come from Him.

Such a miracle took place in and from within us.

We changed. And anyone who reads these words who doubts, I pray that this change that springs upon us like a thief in the night would happen to you, too, to make you a believer; that God alone, who stirs the stars into cycle, brightens hope at His merest suggestion.

Change must come from the heart. As someone looks at us having had our hearts changed, they stand as witnesses that the old is gone and that the new has come. And only God could do it. Only God does it!

So, if someone is to apologise from their heart, in all sincerity, to be able to change themselves even as they’re changed, they probably need to be intersected by God.

The heart is the nerve centre of the human being and no change is sustained without it starting it, having been convinced it was the only way.

What is it that brings change? It is a change of heart. Nothing is behind repentance other than a change of mind that is sustained by a change of heart.

Languishing in the Waiting Room of Life?

In your suffering now, there are those doing life easy. It can seem so unfair. But over the years, life has a way of evening the score. In your suffering, rather than rage at the injustice, rest, and resolve to be equipped to help others who will be blindsided by grief in the future.

But how does one acceptably rest?

I love what Jodie L Alexander-Platt writes in comparing suffering to being in a waiting room in an emergency department of a hospital:

“We can wrestle with our suffering, be impatiently disgruntled that others are being attended to before us, or we can take the time to tune our heart to God’s good grace. In grace we rest. In His rest we have peace.”

Isn’t that eloquent? And true.

The worst days of our lives are punctuated by pain that seems so untenable that we cannot rationalise it as being within the realm of living experience.

Days such as these we have moments that hardly seem real for the pain we bear. And yet moments as these are surreal for how painful they are. We look with complete disconnection to others’ realities that seem normal and so far away from our reality.

Those who endure pain that very few humans bear, for that time, endure what is completely unreal, because it’s an experience of life they barely believe is happening, just as it’s an experience that nobody else can connect with. It is out of this world, and only God can comprehend it.

It’s what is so often termed being in liminal space. It’s an in-between time where we hardly feel alive, and may very well feel completely dead to all hope and reason and life. It feels as if our lives are over and it feels as if no hope remains. And it’s confusing, for every moment seems so unpredictable.

And then we flux into a sense of living in grief that at least can resent the reality for the fact of others enjoying life when we aren’t.

Tuning our hearts to God’s good grace, we choose to rest in this grace that we must begin to believe actually exists. Why? Because of the testimony of others, we know it must exist. So we choose to be open to it. We rest in this grace; to acknowledge that what we may not feel or experience is real, for others have experienced it as their truth, and we too know that there must be something more to this experience of suffering; that a good God would not leave us nor forsake us in this. And in that is peace.

If you find yourself in this way-station of life that feels like death, it won’t always be that way.

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Do not dictate the direction of another person’s grief

“The length of the grieving is determined by the griever, not by how long you, as a comforter, can stand to be sad. Your work is to be with them where they are, not drag them out where you are more comfortable,” says Diane Langberg, PhD.

Those who, sooner or later, insist on dictating terms regarding another person’s grief are unsafe to relate with. It would be better that we got limited doses of these kinds of people.

But we don’t always get a lot of say over where our help comes from. The hope is everyone who reads the Langberg quote, or these words of mine, might get the gist that grief is a slave to nobody—it will never be dictated to, so we are best not to dictate to those around us how they should be grieving.

Grief goes on far longer
than those who grieve can bear.
It’s just the way it is.

What adds to the burden of the one who’s grieving is the pressure others can place on them to ‘get over it’. It’s not about what’s sensible or logical or rational, as if the person who’s not grieving has a better barometer for these things—they don’t. For starters, they cannot see the world from the griever’s perspective, no matter how much they think they can.

Whenever somebody determines that they know how to direct another person’s grief journey, they sin, they do the wrong thing, and it is never done out of love and care for the grieving person, no matter how much they rationalise it.

We can do a great disservice to people
when we insist on helping them.

Myriad damage is done in terms of abuse when people manipulate or coerce others against their will, and they say, “I’m sorry it feels bad, I’m doing this for your own good.” Nah, sorry, it’s abuse!

If it were a case that we need care because we can’t make the decisions ourselves it would be different. But if we’re living a normal life and someone takes over, it’s just wrong. We see this happen very often as elder abuse, when the elderly person still has agency over their decision making.

There’s no question it’s one of the hardest things we can ever do, to bear another person’s pain. It takes a great deal of faithfulness, humility and intestinal fortitude to journey alongside someone who’s trying to be faithful, humble and gutsy.

In many ways, to journey with the grieving is to enter a journey of grief ourselves. This is about saying no to the things we would ordinarily have freedom to say yes to. Whenever we give up our control we experience loss. 

One of the hardest things we can ever do
is bear another person’s pain.

So it’s very much the case that whoever journeys alongside the person grieving—much as the Holy Spirit comes alongside—chooses to enter a journey akin to loss.

This is why counsellors train around their own character deficiencies. People who help must know and be acquainted with their own triggers. This is a process that can take years of mastery. It often doesn’t mean they’ve brought everything into perfect balance and control, but they have learned to bear what is uncomfortable.

What a blessing it is for the grieving person to have the support of someone who can bear their own pain amid the sharing of another’s.

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The Goodness of Vulnerability When Overwhelmed

Burnout came with a rush in late April 2005. It forced me to embrace a new operating system. My brain changed the way it worked, overnight. It hasn’t been the only overnight transformative experience I’ve had (so many of us have had them!) but it caused me to immediately reassess how I lived and moved and worked. It forced me to become skilled at saying ‘no’, though I’m not always assertive enough in applying it. But when I brush up against my limits, I either need to be assertive in saying no, or the pressure quickly builds beyond reasonable levels.

One thing I’ve learned, because I’ve had to learn it, is that vulnerability (or surrender) in the moment of feeling overwhelmed is the counterintuitive response I most need.

I always feels very awkward
when I reach my limit.

It’s always hard to admit it
when I don’t have the capacity I wish I had.

It feels exposing and even embarrassing, like I do not like to be weak, and to feel like I’m a pushover, is crucifying for my ego. Pride never likes being humbled. Never, ever. We never get used to the process of surrendering, but we can learn invest in the bank of experience; to trust God’s faithfulness to hold us aloft and alive in our spiritual poverty.

To be spiritually poor is to be immensely rich.

It’s crucial we apply this strategy when we feel weakest and most vulnerable. If we don’t, we hurt ourselves and others.

Provided we’re safe, embracing our vulnerability is the answer when we’re overwhelmed. If we’re not safe, to get to safety is the major priority.

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Giving yourself permission to slow down

Sometimes we just need time. Not a huge amount of it. Just some moments to reconnect with who we actually are. If we don’t, we begin to become a shell of who we actually are. And that’s just sad.

Giving ourselves the permission to slow down is not selfishness, but courage, wisdom, humility, and diligence; courage to say no and stand one’s ground; wisdom to save precious energy and preserve one’s spirit; humility to know the world doesn’t revolve around us; diligence to do nothing when it would be easier to be doing something.

Life can get so hectic, that amid tasks to be done we forget about the people we are doing them for. We forget about the objective of life. And if only we could connect with another human being, and become vulnerable within the moment once more, embracing the simplicity of just being there, we would be reconnected with God too.

In the hustle and bustle of life, this life that is so frenetic, where people of every sphere work too hard, we place so much pressure on ourselves.

What if we learned to say no? Would we feel justified? How would we respond if people were to condemn us for taking our opportunities as self-care? Doesn’t the person who besmirches our need of rest offend love? Isn’t it the case of them failing us, not us failing them? Are we so easily exploited? Can we not take the day (or the hour) and disappear?

One of the best skills of self-care is to become inaccessible; to vanish off the face of the earth for a day, and find ourselves in a foreign spot, safe and secure, where we might meet God again. Of course, we need to know that our loved ones are adequately cared for or we tip over into worries and concerns that leave us imprisoned no matter where we are.

Giving ourselves permission to slow down is taking up the cudgel of immediate need. This spiritual health we so often take for granted is a key asset that we must protect.

Giving ourselves permission to slow down is not only about taking time out, of course, but it’s actually practicing a slower, more relaxed pace of living. The demands don’t change, but efficiencies are possible, and taking the courage to say no more often is the start of higher empowerment.

Driving slower, walking slower, breathing slower, eating slower; all these and more have direct health benefits, especially when we consider that we only slow down because we’ve deliberately chosen to.

In this uncaring age, the bravest thing you may ever do for yourself is take that chance on yourself to provide care for yourself. Such care is not entitlement as this world looks at entitlement; remember it’s courage, it’s wisdom, it’s humility, it’s diligence.

It’s virtuous.

Those who are brave and dare,
are those who do their self-care.

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