How God Restored the Train Wreck of Our Lives

Sometimes the curveballs life throws at us are almost completely our own doing. Sure, there might be some bad circumstances or nuances of injustice in our stories that predisposes us to a cursed life. But there is no reason why we should accept the hand dealt us and, hence, make excuses why our lives are ruined.

If our lives have turned out as a train wreck it is not life’s fault (or God’s). We can still get in there with a recovery team and salvage it. We can transform the wreck into something new; something different; something genuinely purposeful.

So there are no excuses. Many of us have had rock bottoms, which a friend described to me recently as being as close to death as you can be without actually dying.

***

I’ve been guilty of enabling bad behaviour by rescuing people from situations of their own making. The father of the Prodigal Son did no such thing, but was ready to receive him in unconditional love when the Prodigal Son was ready (desperate enough to come back in humility). The father did not run after his son. He allowed his son the dignity to undignify himself – something many of us have needed no help with.

The troubled person needs to be allowed the indignity of the fullness of their God-appointed and God-anointed rock bottom. It sounds too tough but it’s the only way many of us were able to be helped. But what must underpin it is love. We never give up on them, but we must wait patiently for the miracle of the receipt of God’s grace in their lives.

***

From relinquishing our weakness to resolving afresh in strength, in that gap, is God Himself. From one point of dire hopelessness to that very God-defining victory, against the odds, there is Jesus.

We need to take personal responsibility for the circumstances we find ourselves in; the majority of the reason we are where we are is our decision-making. Only when we take responsibility for where we are at can we resolve the right motive and action to make something of ourselves. Excuses only hold us back, no matter how true they are.

God restored the train wreck we made of our lives when we decided to own up to our responsibilities, day after day, month after month.

Excuses take us far from God, but when we acknowledge the truth God feels very near.

God has a massively purposeful present and future for everyone who grasps full responsibility for their own life.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

Blessed Freedom of Grace In Salvation

Salvation is more than repentance. That was the premise of the recent theological discussion I was involved in. Whilst repentance is a key component in the Holy Spirit’s working of the miracle within a soul by convicting that soul of his or her sin, just as much, if not more, a role grace plays in that soul; a person, like each one of us, who needs God’s unconditional acceptance.

We all need God’s love of unconditional acceptance – and we have it through Jesus Christ.

That’s what grace is: God’s love of unconditional acceptance, with one saving caveat – to believe upon Christ. Nobody truly needing God, and admitting that same need, would foreseeably have a problem in committing to trust God.

Repentance is one half of the story – to know the need of God – and grace is the other half. One we bring to the table in simply turning toward God. The other only God can do. Even if we are poor at repenting, we are not beyond God’s unconditional acceptance. And nobody who is ‘poor’ at repentance is any worse in God’s saving estimation than someone who repents as a mature Christian does. Repentance is just one half of the story. Grace is the too untold other half – welling up to interminable love. We really cannot know the end of it!

***

Trusting God is our opportunity. When we understand grace – that we are authorised to fellowship directly with God – because of Jesus’ obedience on the cross and his resurrection – we are no longer hamstrung by our sinful nature. We wish to be further sanctified, but we are no less purified by the blood of Jesus shed for us. We were purified, once-for-all-time, when we chose to follow Jesus.

As we trust God, in the full measure of courage, by the fortitude of faithfulness, we experience the blessed freedom of grace. This is the experience of salvation; of knowing we are saved once-and-for-all-eternity.

This grace that we have full assurance of is unfathomable. It is more incredible the more we experience it. We cannot hope to know the height, or the breadth, or the width, or the depth of such a thing. Grace is amazing and what one human being can experience is closer to nothing than the fullness of grace. Yet it means everything to us; our guilt and shame has been taken away. It clings to us no longer. Indeed, we glory in the fact of our sordid pasts, because God has made no eternal consequence of them.

***

We, who are saved, are greatly enjoyed by God, though we may not enjoy ourselves. God loves every one of us, even if we struggle to love ourselves. Grace makes it possible that we might know that unconditional acceptance of God’s and, so, actually experience it through peace, joy, love...

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

The Problem of Decisiveness in Depression

Negative self-talk was always incessant whenever I suffered depression. It seemed I couldn’t get out of my own head and my heart fed my head with feelings my mind couldn’t reconcile.

A cycle of worthlessness, fatigue and overload seems to recur to the point that, overall, hope for breaking out is vanquished much too much of the time.

When our heads are a chattering away about unnecessary stuff our conscious capacity is compromised so severely the simplest task(s) become arduous. And when that chatter is constantly “you can’t do this” or “you’re no good” or “it won’t be good enough” or “they won’t appreciate you” or “they don’t like you” – usually at an unconscious level – then we quickly become our own worst enemy. We suddenly don’t have the faculty for being our best asset and investment. That’s a very scary thought.

Empowerment is found in self-efficacy – wherever we get it from.

Self-belief can be a bane. It takes us into narcissistic pride at one end of the continuum, but it also ensures we give ourselves no chance of living a capable life at the other end. Many people are also given to functional depression; their lives are lived in a double-reality – who they are that is incredibly successful and ‘the other person’. Some are affected by “can I do this?” whilst others are constantly saying “what’s the point?”

One of the sternest problems in depression is a lack of decisiveness, whether it manifests by doubting decisions made, regretting them, or in struggling to decide in the first place.

Mindfulness can help if we keep the tasks simple. As the task of decisiveness encroaches, we make suitable space to be able to decide with the information we have at hand. We give ourselves freedom to change tack (without fear of feeling like a failure) as we also give ourselves freedom to continue when we doubt the decision.

It’s important to understand how indecisiveness robs us of our self-worth when we are feeling vulnerable. We need to back the pressure off ourselves. Space is incredibly liberating.

***

Decisiveness is a challenge in depression. As the threads of confidence wear thin and threaten to snap, it’s important to give ourselves space and the freedom to choose the way and to change our minds without berating ourselves.

Depression can be a vulnerability that forces us to doubt every good thought we have. It is good to give ourselves freedom to fail and freedom to change our minds. Being gentle with ourselves is experiencing God’s grace.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

When Being ‘Real’ is the Only Deal

It is well. In the present season, with all its uncertainty (and its tragic sense of certainty), we ask ourselves, “How are we going, really?”

All we can do is take life as it comes. It’s all any of us can or should do. But we didn’t just arrive at this point without having done some significant grief work through previous seasons of life. Many moments of irreconcilable sadness we have met. Even my earliest experience of a well-met loss was a great training ground. With the carpet of life pulled from under me, my only choice was to rely fully on God. And because that rug was pulled so far away from me I had to learn how to live without it; I learned to live by grace alone. Reality was no longer the villain, it became my safety.

Many people run from reality. It is too harsh for them. Many realities are too harsh, but when we learn that every reality can be endured, patiently, with grace, in temperance, then we have a priceless spiritual gift that underpins our mental and emotional health.

Being real is the only ‘deal’ we should ever be interested in. As the truth makes its way over our consciousness – as it involves us emotionally – and as we attempt to reconcile it – we have the choice to run and hide or to face up to it. We dare not be the aggressor, but why also should we submit?

If we stabilise ourselves – especially in loss – knowing that strength will come, as we rely on God, we brace for a faithful reality with a faithful God.

We have nothing to fear in life when we analyse life.

If we do not fear the losses that will come against us, those we imagined, those that blindsided us, and those that were simply too incredible to conceive, we know we have plied our faith well.

Suffering is relative to the work we have put in, as well as our theology; if we see suffering as something of a proving process we resent it less. We receive it with more grace. We have the ability to be real.

***

Where God wants us so far as loss is concerned is at a point where we can reconcile reality. When we can handle the truth, and yet we are also broken in sadness, then we have the correct basis for grieving well.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

The Power of Truth in Depression

Depression is worsened by denial. It may get a little better with some safely released anger. But depression is helped most by learning to grieve our losses; those that are real, abstract, imagined and potential.

Learning to grieve our losses is about honouring the truth of our realities.

There is no benefit to any of us in denying what is patently visible; if someone could see right into us they would see what we can see. Why do we not acknowledge those things that continue to sting us? There is power in truth, especially via the agency of empowerment we feel when we have validated our own losses, however bad this makes us feel.

But the truth is, a loss grieved – no matter how embarrassing it is, or how guilty or ashamed we feel, or how much we miss the person – is a loss we can learn to live with. Somehow there is grace given by God to accept what we can no longer, in any way, change.

Depression, itself, is nothing to be guilty for or ashamed about. No mental illness is our fault. Our biology and our upbringing have caused us to grow up a certain way; our experiences have forged a hard-track and depression may have appended itself to us. Nobody wants to be depressed or to have to deal with depression, especially the clinical variety.

Much depression can be drawn to losses where grief was never entered into. Then there was a second loss, and then a third. Before long, the bag of our losses is far too heavy to carry. Well, there is One who can carry such a load! He is God.

God wants us to own our truth, and he gives us the capacity to endure such horrible realities because of his grace, which is the most amazing love anyone could contemplate.

When we value the truth enough to be counselled to grieve our losses, then God can heal us. We give God nothing if we cannot come before life in the glory of its truth.

It’s no biblical cliché: the truth will set you free. Jesus actually said those words. We can trust them. Sure, it will take courage, one day at a time, and soon we will experience what so many claim to have experienced: healing.

Choosing to live courageously enough to admit the truth opens the door to healing losses that need to be grieved.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

Tears Shed in Sorrow Fall From the Heart

“Tears shed in sorrow fall from the heart.”

— Mary-Ann Hay

***

Some tears are heart-laden, some are not. Tears that are heart-laden are healing tears, yet not all tears are healing tears. Those tears taken to God, those prayerful tears, whether by anguish or despair – sorrowful tears – are of eternal value, in the realm of the world and all dimensions-of-good beyond.

Some tears, indeed the vast majority of tears, are perhaps more from bitterness and pride and resentment; these do not come from the heart, unless they fall from a hardened heart. They may come from a stubborn mind.

In the breadth of an article like this I speak of the heart as the seat of our intentions – our life force – the very substance of our perseverance. I speak not of the flesh weakness of the heart or of a heart of stone.

Tears shed in sorrow fall from the heart that is connected to the Presence of God. Such a heart is fully vested to faith that strides forward despite the bleak outlook. Such a heart believes more in the unseen than in the seen. Such a heart refuses to give up and pours out tears of truth in the hope of healing. And God will give us a foretaste of that healing as we recover from our sodden bout.

Tears shed in sorrow fall from a heart indistinguishable from the Presence of God within.

Such precipitation of the soul is productive. It’s not ‘poor me, poor me, poor me... pour me another drink’; it is the ability to surrender whatever we have in our hearts, through the modulation of tears, for God to mould and to use to his glory. For, it will be to God’s glory when we sob because we have abided faithfully in our irrepressible, unrelenting truth.

If we are prepared to be vulnerable in our weakness before God we will most certainly experience his grace. But if we are proud and refuse to learn we will waste our emotions and only become exhausted by it all. We can see that suffering well is actually quite an easy choice.

If we can allow God to humble us, God will exalt us in his own way and time. But if we disallow God to work, we stand in our own way, and no good blessing can be received.

***

When tears fall from the heart surrendered to God sorrow is ameliorated, and we truly experience the Presence of the Lord in our plight.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

The Choice Between Death and Life

Will we live or will we die?
Will we shirk the work or get up and try?
When there’s addiction,
We really need to know,
It’s honesty that will free us,
Only through recovery will we grow.
The key to success,

Is how we’re perceived,

So pray to God Almighty,
And stop being deceived!

***

Every article I write has an intention, whether I know it at the time or not. One of the most powerful truths in all of life is this one; the fight of evil to steal and kill and destroy the good:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

— Words of Jesus from John 10:10 (NRSV)

Addictions steal, kill and destroy our lives. Jesus makes all things new, welling up to the abundance of our lives.

Addiction is a thief. It has no good purpose. It will steal our hope, kill our joy, and inevitably it will destroy our relationships.

Addiction steals our hope. When our hope is stolen we no longer have a viable vision for the present or future. Addiction substitutes true hope with a deluded vision. Addiction will make us so confused we will begin to believe ardently and aggressively in the deluded vision and we won’t even know the true hope has been substituted. There can be no good outcome.

Jesus is the true hope we can build our lives and our future on.

Addictions kill our joy. What may have given us happiness, previously, no longer does. We look forward to the wrong things and we begin to hate right things; virtue begins to disgust us. Envy reigns. And we strive even harder to pretend we are happy, when we are actually the saddest we have ever been.

Jesus shows us how we can redeem joy even out of hardship.

Addictions destroy our relationships. Suddenly, without warning, we cannot get on with people as we used to; this is certainly the case as far as substance abuse is concerned. People become more pawns for the addict’s exploitation than individual persons to be loved. To the addict people are either enablers or enemies. Sooner or later relationships will be burned as if they were never valuable.

Jesus gives us the ability to love those we find it hard to love.

***

The antithesis is the abundant life that Jesus promises for those who will truly dedicate their lives to him, our Saviour and Lord and King, one day at a time. But God can only work where there is a full and consistent and unconditional surrender.

The Hope of the World is the one and only living God; Heavenly Father, his slain, resurrected, and glorified Son, and the Holy Spirit living in the believer – the Godhead three-in-one. God will deliver every honest and committed disciple. And, still, their best hope is to come!

***

Addiction is a thief. It will steal our hope, kill our joy, and inevitably destroy our relationships. Jesus’ abundant life is the only answer.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

When You Want to Give Up, Step Up

It’s frustrating when we know,
What we want to change,
When we’re desperate to grow,
And for life to rearrange.
‘How’ is about hope,
When you are ready to give in,
Harness faith alone to cope,
And soon enough you’ll grin.

***

The will and the way are two entirely different concepts, sometimes as far from each other as East is to West.

We have desires to change well before we are likely to achieve the change we seek to make.

A process must be entered into, and, before that, a vision and a plan that directs the look and feel of the process. Sometimes, too, we are so gifted the miracle of being able to do something we previously found impossible: deliverance by the Holy Spirit, alone.

The heart must catch up with the head. We have the idea – the concept comes firmly in mind – or the vision is so wonderful – but then the tenacity to do the thing abates before anything is done. What frustration!

The only thing we lack is resolve; to persevere; to be patient enough in holding onto the desire long enough to learn how God will work. With faith that suggests “God will work” and “God is entirely faithful” we bring an earnestness that Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for. It’s not as if we do it in our own strength, but we lend our surrender to the strength of the Spirit, and we find we can do almost anything.

If we do not let go of something we are drawn to we will certainly take hold of that which we currently don’t have. And when we want what God wants, and we want it enough, it shall certainly come in God’s good time.

When we are tested most, when we want to give up easiest, then we are opportune to step up, grin a little more with delight with our present calamity and go on into a space reserved for the children of God.

God has ordained that we get through the tests and trials and temptations that come against us; we join our faith with his. It’s as simple as that.

***

You may not have everything you need right now, but, if you hang in there, and work hard, at the right time everything that is good for your purpose will be put into your hand.

Don’t give up when you know what needs to change. God will give you ‘the how’ at the right time if you persevere.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

The Spirituality of the Chicken or the Egg

How can we love others,

If we do not love ourselves?

Our spouses, children,

Our sisters and brothers,

How can we love others,

Until our good God delves?

***

Eleven years ago this very day, October 4, 2003, the very worst day of my life to date, was the day, I, for the first time, seriously contemplated suicide. I won’t go into the sordid details, because that would, I have no doubt, disrespect others. Suffice to say, if the news I received twelve days previously didn’t rock my world, the news I received on the day in question shook my world like an earthquake. Add to the fact that I went three or four days without sleep, I then had a complete emotional breakdown on October 8. Anxiety and depression were in full swing. These were within a continuously long series of rock bottom days. That October was a horrendous month. November 2003 wasn’t much better. This October, on the other hand, is its polar opposite; I live with far more hope than I could have ever dreamt of back then.

Having been blindsided by marital separation and divorce, I finally woke up to myself. God had brought critical information about me, in the context of my family, to my attention and I could no longer ignore it. I needed to repent. And such repentance wasn’t a once-off activity; it continues today. The Christian life is a penitent life. We are always trying to outdo ourselves in love. Others must be the benefactors.

I was unable to do this only because of the lack of experience of one fact: knowing, for the first time in my life, God’s unique love for me, his child, helped me love myself. And only as I was able to love myself was I able to love others appropriately – my children, and, of course, my former wife. Before the epiphany of my salvation I could not love myself and, therefore, I didn’t understand how to love others in a sustainable way.

My former wife deserved a better husband than I was when I was married to her. I was not an abusive husband, but I certainly was inattentive, and, at times, neglectful. Spouses should only need to put up with that for a time. I missed the mark in terms of love. I didn’t love her enough because I didn’t love myself enough deep down.

Some people might say “Why didn’t you change the way you were while you had the chance?” This is where the chicken or the egg comes in. I couldn’t possibly love anyone the way they deserved to be loved until I met Jesus and experienced the empowering to love of the Holy Spirit. And the only way I could have met Jesus was to have my life crushed, because that is the only way God was getting my attention. I had too much pride, was too ambitious, had unreconciled anger, and lacked woefully in the area of self-control. So, until I could see it was too late I would not have been prepared to turn my life upside down; which I did the moment the marriage was over.

Sometimes we need to be shaken up. And praise God if we respond.

But sometimes the consequences of our past actions in the flesh remain, despite all our good intent for the present and future.

Inevitably we will need to miss the mark in areas of our lives before we learn the lessons God has for us. It’s not the end of the world. God can shine hope upon every hopeless situation. Our only appropriate mindset is the best is yet to come.