What is the purpose of deconstruction but reconstruction?

A lingering vacant stare out the window. No words. All cried out. Empty. Lost…

… until energy would flow in once again for more tears and heartache.

I took the photograph above moments before Sarah and I left the hospital room where we had spent four days being with our deceased son, Nathanael Marcus. As many of you know, he was stillborn. He never took a breath. He never cried aloud. On October 30, 2014, sometime between 3:30pm and 6:30pm he slipped into the arms of Jesus, without a soul even knowing.

For those who don’t know, we discovered 19 weeks earlier he was on a collision course with death, and so for 122 days we made weekly visits to the hospital — including eight amnioreduction procedures — to keep him alive and Sarah safe.

It was the most stressful time of our lives, but please let’s be clear, losing Nathanael wasn’t all that we were dealing with at the time… not by a long stretch.

You may not notice in the photograph,
but Sarah in the moment was haunted
by more grief that you can imagine.

The moment was dawning on both of us that we had to leave Nathanael at the hospital, just a couple of days before his funeral, and we were on our way home. We could not stay in the hospital any longer. We were ready to go, but we were gutted to go.

It was a day littered with countless fragments of intangible grief.

Neither of us said much, which is unusual even for me. We knew business had to be done, so we took as many photos for memories as we could, left the room, I placed our bags in the car, and we then went for one last goodbye with Nathanael. We were planning on another visit the next day, but we didn’t want to miss a single opportunity. We took nothing for granted. Leaving him there alone was heartbreaking.

It was a time when saying goodbye didn’t seem real. It seemed not final enough and too final to comprehend all at the same time. The moments of goodbye were underwhelming and overwhelming all at the same time. Why is it in grief that the mind is so confused and confounded?

That was then.     This is now.

Five years. Of the many times I interact with pre-schoolers in my work as a school chaplain, I’m reminded, “Ah, Nathanael…” Fortunately, I have an “arrangement” with grief now; I welcome sorrow as God is palpably right there, in it, with me!

We are no longer afraid of grief when the worst experiences of life have rattled our cage. It’s like the chat I had with my eldest daughter recently; she has experienced enough over the past 15 years to crush her heart many times, yet she’s kept a soft pliable heart despite it all, which I call a miracle, and certainly a gift from God. Much credit must go to her, too, because in being continually deconstructed, and in keeping her heart soft, she’s been continually reconstructed to become a better and wiser version of herself.

Many of the people I have the honour and privilege to work with in a counselling room are facing deconstruction, not unlike the biblical Job. They’re enduring great loss, hardship, despair and perplexing circumstances.

Ultimately what happens when they do not give up, but they press on in within their pain, keeping their hearts soft and attuned to what they’re really feeling, is they’re patiently resurrected and restored.

We’re never certain of this at the time of grief, but God is present when we feel the whisper of hope that gently susurrates, “Don’t give up!” We don’t know why we keep going when the journey of deconstruction is so long and arduous, but the hope of being reconstructed and restored compels us to keep stepping.

To keep stepping forward when everything in us is saying “Quit!” is the testimony of absolute faith.

Now, as I look back, there is only joy for the sorrow still alive in my heart for Nathanael; joy for what we learned in that season, for the continual assurance of God’s presence with us, for what we were able to tap into in our brokenness, for the fact we will see him again, and, for the facts of experience, where hope said, “You can do this,” and to discover that not only could we, but we actually did it.

This is a reliable rule of life: when life crushes us, if we resist the temptations of escape or attack in the deconstruction that inevitably takes place, God will most assuredly, in time, reconstruct us.

~

Happy 5th heaven day, Nathanael, for tomorrow. Thank you for what your life has taught us. We thank God for the time we had with you. We will love you all the way until you welcome us home.

Worry less about forgiving the abuser, focus on God having understood you

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour,” said Viktor E. Frankl, the psychiatrist holocaust survivor. It reminded me of a few situations that have occurred to me over the past five years.

The truth is, when we’ve blindsided by some action done to us through an abuse of power, whether it’s in our marriage, at our church, at the workplace, or somewhere else, it’s easy to forget something—as Christians I mean.

The immediate thing we’re faced with in our abnormal “reaction” is shame for behaving in a way we would not have normally. But we forget that we didn’t instigate the action that provoked the reaction. We may have had no idea what was coming.

Too easily we can be fooled into thinking we need to be a good Christian and repent of that reaction by quickly forgiving our abuser. We don’t like the feelings that course through our bodies for having been betrayed. We feel we can control the situation; if we forgive them, they’ll own what they did. But then they don’t.

And when they don’t own what they did, we’re subjected to a significantly worse abuse. A trauma bond occurs in the original abuse not being reconciled.

In situations where an abnormal situation of abuse provoked an abnormal reaction from us, we’d be better advised to worry less about forgiving the abuser—to try and bargain for a reconciliation (that they’re not interested in, remembering that if they abused us in the first place they will not be sorry about it)—and focus more on the fact that God understands our abnormal reaction.

Read that again: God understands and forgives the abnormal reaction.

Even though we’re sorry, God requires no apology, because we are sorry. He knows our heart.

God understands it, because, quite frankly, he knows that we’ve just encountered evil, and any encounter with evil will be such a traumatic experience that we won’t be able to help our reaction.

As we imagine receiving God’s pardon for the behaviour we feel ashamed about, because it doesn’t meet with our ordinarily high standards for the respect of people, we imagine that God reminds us, “You are human, and pure of heart to the point that you could not have expected what happened to you… I lament the situation you faced… and know that I was with you.”

Worry less about forgiving the abuser. We ought to be more concerned with getting support for how that abnormal situation affected us. Worry less about the abnormal reaction.

Photo by Casper Nichols on Unsplash

Patiently enduring as the gentle grieve

One news report has 39 dead in a shipping container. Another, a little girl found in a dumpster. Thoughts spring to unfathomable pastures of grief for the loved ones affected. And there we are, the sensitive ones who bear witness to the evils in this world.

The truth is none of us are unaffected by these evils. They permeate our lives from half a world away, and so they should. We should forever grieve the capacity of humanity to make pain and to take life.

But in being affected, many of us are left with no way to process this vicarious grief. The more sensitive among us will struggle to contend with the inner anguish these events evoke. And some, perhaps very unknowingly, will be so affected by the violence that they too will be violent, and maybe not even with other people.

We may look at our loved ones and somehow see them impacted in some future crime done against them, shudder the thought. We cannot imagine that thought, or even the possibility of such evil.

We all carry around a constant background level of worldly grief for the death and mayhem amid global issues that continues to bombard our outer and inner worlds.

If we have been impacted by some hellish incursion of darkness, a veritable blight against our senses of rationality and reason, our gentle spirits need space to grieve.

If we have been assaulted again by atrocities that are too much for loving hearts to bear, we must then be honest with ourselves; we will need time to ponder and to placate our troubled souls.

If we cannot comprehend when a child or vulnerable people are vanquished, if it’s all too much, then we ought to find the distraction we need in order to be reconnected to the ideals of ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’

Respect for sorrow calls for time to be still, as hearts contemplate that God is bigger.

We patiently bear what would crush the gentle soul. We learn that this world’s cares cause us to cast our hearts toward the one who cares from the world of heaven.

From there we’re satisfied that all will be well and justice, for these cases, will be swift and unstinting.

Photo by Nishta Sharma on Unsplash

Bearing the burden of love is not a lack of faith

There are some burdens, many in actual fact, that we cannot let go. Indeed, truth be told it borders on being an abuse to tell someone who is mortally concerned for a loved one, “Ah, don’t worry about it; let go and let God.”

Well, of course, when we hear such advice from a trusted source, we think, “Well, I should give it a go… I shouldn’t lack faith.” But is it a lack of faith to not be able to let go when we have a genuine mortal concern?

It’s not a lack of faith at all. I would go so far as to say, it’s the epitome of faith that we continue to bear the burden we’re so willing to carry for love. This is a loved one. Or, a precious soul dependent on us. Is it even appropriate not to be concerned; to let go of the burden that God in all glory’s wisdom has given to us to bear?

Sorry if this isn’t good for your anxiety. But the fact is we are tried beyond what we can bear. God does give us burdens that are too strenuous. Not that we would simply fall at the foot of the cross and throw our burdens there, but that we would bear the burden that cannot be changed… for love.

Yes, we bear the burden that causes panic to occasionally cripple us, where we’re cast headlong into vulnerability, not because we lack faith, but because we love so very much.

Can’t we see that bearing the burden we’re carrying, and how it wears us down, is a trophy of our love? Can’t we see that this has cost us because we love so very much? Can’t we see that we love so much because we’re willing to bear such a heavy cost? If we didn’t love so much, we would not bear the burden we do. We would be able to, “Let go and let God.”

Now, there does come the time and the necessity to leave issues in God’s hands, but that isn’t a magical transaction that others know how to do, and we don’t. It’s a cliché! It simply helps us have language for an enigma.

What happens in actual fact is that we don’t leave these things with God at all. If anything, it’s the reverse. God gives us the burden to love, and it cannot be let go. We carry it all the way to grief. So, don’t feel guilty that you can’t let go of it. We aren’t meant to let go of it, but we can learn patience and perseverance even in it.

Rather, we ought to feel pleased that there is so much love in our hearts that we refuse not to love; and indeed, like God himself, we cannot help but love our loved ones and those we care for who matter so much to us.

See how the reality is the opposite to how we see faith a lot of the time? Bearing the burden of love is not a lack of faith, but it is a lack of selfishness and of the denial of what we care about.

So, if you’re genuinely anxious for a loved one, you show love and not a lack of faith, and that love trumps everything else.

Photo by Dmitry Schemelev on Unsplash

A process for coming to acceptance

The meaning of life. What could it be? Many will tell you it’s Christ Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead. I would proclaim that message. But there is another very pragmatic way of answering the question, that speaks of Christ in a completely different light; a fundamentally forgiving light.

The Light of the World came to shine his way as the beacon for our feet, to herald the path, to announce The Way. That way is the forgiveness of the Father, procured through the Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The rubber of forgiveness hits the road in acceptance.

What of this acceptance as it relates to forgiveness? The Father accepted the sins of us who rejected him, and the Son accepted the scourge of humanity’s punishment, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to be attached to us, for the purposes of forgiveness, through the bond of faith.

Acceptance is the capability of forgiveness as it applies to every facet of life that we do not like and may even come to despise. To be able to accept the perils of life, the betrayal of trust, the losses that send us to the abyss… these are not easy.

We need a process.

First, we need to accept that our lives, whilst they appear to be ours, are not ours at all. By recognition of the nature of this life—that we don’t have the control over it that we’d like to have—we are invited to accept a fact that cannot be changed. So we cannot control our own lives, and we certainly have even less control over others lives, particularly as they impact on our own lives. And if that isn’t enough to convince us, then there is the fact of the imminence of our deaths.

So, acceptance—the need of it—is academic and can be believed on face value.

Second, on top of knowing the need of it, the benefit of it, we start to imagine how we will work it out. We must somehow learn the application of it.

Quite frankly, if we don’t apply it we cavort with madness, and anyone thinking that’s a clever alternative for living life would be best not to advise others.

The process for coming to acceptance is simply the basic acceptance of the need to do it, mixed with the actual doing of the practice of it. The more we practice what might seem impossible to begin with, the more we find what seems ludicrous is actually not only possible but the only rational way. But we must practice it to see it.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The stewardship significance of self-care

Mental health struggles have certainly spoken into my life, and it took me some time to realise how much of a role my self-care played in the overall balance of my mental, emotional and spiritual health.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll recognise that self-care is pivotal regarding overall well-being. And I have discovered there are three crucial facets to a self-care that feeds vitality into my soul.

This article taps into the vitalising components of self-care for stewardship. Stewardship is little more than taking our own responsibility for ourselves—something we can never ask another person or others to do for us. Only we ourselves can do what we must do, to not only survive, but to thrive.

1.     DIET

Given that I gave up alcohol and cigarettes (among other vices) many years ago, and given that I’m firmly committed to Christ, I find diet is kind of the last frontier in terms of temptation of ‘substance’. When my diet is reasonably tight, and my fruit and vegetable intake is high, and my sugar intake is lower, I feel incredible.

But I lapse easily and quickly at times, and binging is still something that I’m occasionally prone to doing, especially if I’ve been triggered.

I have found the best ally to an effective commitment to diet is simple obedience to a sensible diet one day at a time, especially with regard to portion size and not snacking.

2.    EXERCISE

This is a bit like diet for well-being. When I’m exercising well, my mental and emotional health soars, and joy, thankfulness and gratitude can ascend through the roof. Yet, so often when I’ve felt irritable within, it’s taken me while to register, “Ah, yes, I haven’t exercised for a few weeks!”

Exercise is not only good for endorphin (good biochemical) release, but it’s great for our muscles, which gives our bodies a great relaxed feeling, and it also gives us a sense of achievement.

As far as stewardship is concerned, being prepared to get out of bed early to hit the gym, or being prepared to suffer the ‘pain’ of feeling horrible when I’ve started my exercise regime, has shown me the value of taking responsibility for how my body feels.

3.    SLEEP

By far and away, the biggest, most crucial factor related to self-care is sleep. I know many of you will have sleep disorders or at least disordered sleep, so I don’t pretend that this is simple. But we simply must get enough sleep, and enough quality sleep, if we’re to be the stewards of our own minds and bodies.

I have found napping (<20 minutes="" or="">90 minutes) has been pivotal. But also knowing how much sleep between the 6-8 hour per night band that’s optimal is crucial. Also, getting to bed early and having the discipline to wake early is key, because these doing-things-early practices are key for practicing readiness.

~

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Self-care is a personal responsibility. It’s okay if we’re not good at it, because at least we recognise it’s something we yearn to improve. If that’s the case, we best plan; plan the work and then work the plan.

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

Grief status… It’s complicated

Grief would be okay if that’s all it was in all its painful purity.

But grief is so often not only multilayered, it is most often buried within another mountain of loss that we just cannot reconcile. It’s as if whichever way we look at it thwarts our understanding, confuses our hope, fatigues our vision, trounces our energy.

Anyone who has suffered protracted grief—let’s say longer than 12 months, which is pretty typical of any grief journey—will lose hard won friends, suffer ill-health and unexplained illness, experience significant negative changes in family dynamics, possibly lose their job or need to change their job, and on top of that be required to keep secretive some part of their lives they’d prefer to be open about.

Not just that, though; it’s the depression, the anxiety, the panic attacks, the fear, the confusion, and the seismic shifts in mood that descend without warning.

And not just that. Life is completely coloured by fear, even when there’s an absence of fear, for it crouches as an ever-present threat, lurking always on the horizon, threatening like a rabid dog because of the suddenness of its arrival.

I had a breakdown once that left me catatonic; wind the clock back one hour and I was fine. One experience like this teaches us that the floor of grief is an abyss. It’s the scariest thought imaginable.

When we know that that’s the potential outcome of a sock-full of fear, we live subsumed by the idea it could occur anytime—that’s hyper vigilance together with depression for the abject lack of security experienced together with a plummeting of purpose. Life without meaning is one step removed from, well… you know what. This is the unravelling of identity; total deconstruction of the essence of our being.

Not just that, either. If the above weren’t already hard enough.

As some of our most trusted relationships start to go south, our support systems are being completely overhauled, and we feel at the whim of a merciless nemesis. Betrayal is a byword, for what grief is there without some sense of betrayal, whether that’s someone expecting us to ‘get over it’ or a betrayal that led to the grief in the first place.

And then there’s the element of baggage; previous griefs we’ve not been able to reconcile; those unremitted invoices of sorrow and trauma. Many of these in many of us are unconscious and we may not readily recognise they’re even there.

So, the visible grief is tangibly the tip of the iceberg.

Most onlookers literally have no idea the level, detail, chaos and complexity of a person’s lot who has a grief status… it’s complicated. Even those close to them. And the grieving person would give anything to be understood, but they would never wish what they’re experiencing on anyone, because they still live in the shock that this level of pain should not be possible. This pain, compounded by the virulence of its sustained presence, completely undoes us.

The existential process of grief makes of the possible, impossibility. Everything that was once taken for granted as easy is now just about laughably and insanely unmanageable.

It’s to these cases that “What’s wrong with you?” needs to be changed to “What happened to you?” And to genuinely ask that question of someone backwashed in their grief requires an even mix of patience and perseverance that reassures the grieving person that such gentleness is safety.

A grieving person isn’t to be healed, as if healing could be procured in a worldly dimension of time, or care, or a prayer. No, grief is a confounding mystery.

The last thing a person with complicated grief needs is a further lack of safety. Even though they want IT fixed, they do not want to BE fixed.

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash

A prayer for help for those Coming Out and those being told

O Lord my God,

God of all You created, of every single being who has existed, who exists now, and who will exist, we give You praise that You have made us equal in terms of both our spirituality and our sexuality.

We are all, each and every one of us, made in Your image. May all Christians revere this truth. May You be glorified, even as we herald the wonder of equality in humanity.

But not all of us feel equal, Lord, and that must sadden Your Spirit no end.

Thank You, Lord, that we’re all broken vessels with which You pour Your life into. And, as equals, I thank You that our common brokenness extends to our sexuality, and whatever our sexuality, none of us is perfectly whole.

There is enormous comfort in that; especially for the vulnerable ones who feel like outliers, who have been ostracised, condemned, berated, rejected, abused, humiliated, simply for the expression of their sexuality, or for forces that seem or are out of their control.

For those who abide with this, with these words, we repent of these acts, whether propagated by ourselves in the historical past, or by others in the past, present and future. Help us be patient with all persons, even as we advocate for the sexually vulnerable, but make us to be steadfast for them in the Jesus way. Help us be genuinely penitent, and not in insincere, disingenuous ways. Use us, even us, in another’s healing.

May I be the one who honours the one coming out, whether they are LGBTI+, whether they have sexual or pornography addiction, whether they’ve been sexually or spiritually abused… whatever.

May they be listened to, attended with, believed, affirmed, supported, hugged if they want it, always in the provision of their safety.

May You give me the power to be present with them in such an hour of raw courage.

May You go before those who are coming out and be there with them as they say their words, and may they be Your words that teem out of their mouths.

May they find support, whether it’s parents or friends or pastors or anyone else, who will listen, affirm, support.

Most of all, protection, Lord—Your covering over them as they bravely say what they know needs to be said.

Thank You, Lord, that You are with them, 100 percent of the way, always. Thank You that You know them and accept them through and through.

Thank You for what those who are coming out are teaching us, Lord, about the nature of life, of struggle, of courage, of the biases in our responses, and even of You.

Give each one doing this most difficult thing, Your strength, Your grace and Your favour.

Most of all, Lord, may there be no damage done, and where there is, provide a pathway for redemption.

In Jesus’ all-loving, all-accepting and gentle name,

AMEN.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

The number 1 lesson in the school called Grief

If there’s one thing grief teaches us, it’s that grief is everywhere.

Somehow, until that fact dawned on us, however, we were not so blissfully unaware. Well, I know that’s how it was for me.

Until I suffered for the very first time, as a fresh-faced and still quite naïve 36-year-old, I really had no concept for what much of the world is like in this regard. Suffering is everywhere.

Everyone will experience grief. Everyone is floored by life at some point.

And then we have matriculation to enrol in one of the schools of hard knocks.

But the irony of life is there are those who insist on bypassing the school of grief in order to go to one of the other schools of hard knocks—one where there is no reprieve and no healing.

Everyone will be tested by the assessments of life taught in the school of grief.

Not everyone passes. Some turn to escape and fall into addiction, some choose extreme escape and leave this earth, some just avoid feeling any other way they can, while others get brutally bitter toward others, God or life itself, and they drag everyone around them who will go there with them into their journey of torment.

But if we sit in gentle, patient humility, accept the crushing, for that is what it is, we actually begin to answer the questions correctly on that bewildering assessment called grief. We recognise that to have no answer is the right answer. Grief is the only test where being bamboozled is the right response. 

Grief is everywhere, and when we first walk through grief’s doors we suddenly come face-to-face with this reality. It’s as if a whole new world—one we very reluctantly take tentative steps into—opens up before us.

Suddenly, we begin to notice suffering is everywhere. The entire planet is littered with it. It intrigues us if only we accept we need every resource available to us to get through it alive.

How do people cope? How do they survive? We begin to become intensely interested, because we ourselves need those coping mechanisms that we know must exist—for hope won’t let us rest without searching for them.

In an environment where survival is the key objective, grief teaches an urgency, and piques our attention like nothing else has and like nothing else will. It’s a primer for growth, simply because if we don’t grow, we don’t survive.

So, there you have it. Grief teaches us that suffering is everywhere. Little wonder then, that the wounded healers of the age to come will be those who are grieving now, and who attain their healing; for, those who are the wounded healers now have been those who reconciled their grief and cannot help evangelise the gift of healing.

Why are we so passionate about it? It’s because it works. We’re impelled to purpose.

There is a school named grief. Not everyone who is invited enters. Those who do, go there to deal with their pain, and they learn to feel, learning what they cannot learn elsewhere, and they graduate with honours in empathy and compassion, and are blessed in being a blessing wherever there is pain.

Grief teaches the lessons of pain in order that we might learn to sit and not fix, to attend and dwell with, not to advise, to continue to learn, not be know-it-alls.

Photo by Ana-Maria Berbec on Unsplash