Your mental health is sacred, never to be judged

It is hard to understand mental health struggles.  An additional challenge is others may completely misunderstand us, our situation, what we need, etc.  This is especially painful because it comes at a time and situation where we have the least amount of cognitive function, insight, and energy to deal with such challenges.

First and foremost, what we need most in order to reconcile the above the best we can in our limited capacity is to understand how pervasive judgement is and reduce it as much as we can.

Judgement, whether it’s from within, perceived from others, or actually received from others, is like a toxin to our mental health and to our recovery.  Essentially, when we struggle with our mental health, our defences are down.

When our defences are down, we are even more susceptible to the emotional and spiritual body blows that delay our recovery.  And it’s a vicious cycle, because at the time we can least afford to be struck, is the time we are most likely to be struck.

When a person is in the midst of a personal crisis, they often seem to battle most with their harsh inner critic.  This cutting and condemning voice can be relentless in its pursuit of our confidence.  It seems to notice everything that we think, say, and do wrong.  And it doesn’t account for factors that would speak to our defence.  Confidence plummets.

We may also project this inner critic of judgements regarding our relationships and living situations and imagine everything and everyone is judging us.  It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Can you see how challenging the inner, most visceral environment is amid mental health struggles?

What I’m hoping to achieve in this article is not only empathy for your struggle, but to show you and anyone who reads this just how bewildering mental health struggles can be.  It’s not until you arrive at such a place that you recognise just how confounding it can be.  I’ll never forget the psychologist I counselled 10 years ago who arrived at depression for the first time in his life at the age of 50.  Once he had recovered, his passions shifted from the psychology of exercise science to the psychology of keeping men and women alive.  We just do not know until we know.

Suffering teaches us that there are some circumstances over which we have no control.

And when we have lived lives where we seemed to be in control, where we weren’t ever assailed by the harpoons of loss, or change, or betrayal, or grief, or trauma, we had no bearing for the kind of living situation that many find themselves suddenly plunged into.

Not to take your agency away from you, but I’m saying it as it is because this truth is grounded in reality.  We never consider it a gift to suffer, but to have our eyes opened to the possibilities of trauma beyond our control is truly a gift of awareness.  Our capacities of empathy expand.

If you’re in that place, or you can cast your mind back to when you were, I’m sure you can see how damaging it is to feel or be judged enter self-judge.

Whenever you’re in the throes of the dark night of the soul, grappling for hope and on a wing and a prayer by faith, rather than judging yourself, you ought to see how courageous you really are.  I know, I know, you’ll probably say it feels impossible, because of that berating voice in your head and heart.

That’s why I’m hoping these words are something you can read to be reminded.  You’re striding over sacred ground.  A future version of yourself will praise you for the poise you have right now as you battle to recover.

Finally, be aware of judging yourself for judging yourself.  Just go gently ought to be the way.

Forgiving yourself for not having ‘arrived’ yet

The greatest triumphs are the biggest trials overcome, and the biggest trials overcome involve those things battled at times for years.  The very things we’ve often been most ashamed about, because they haven’t shifted, inevitably end up being our most prized achievements—because of the tenacity we had in not giving up.

In context of this article, let’s define ARRIVAL: it’s “the action or process of arriving.”

Emotionally or spiritually speaking, it’s transcending a thing: the acceptance of a loss, the healing of a core wound, a person to forgive who hasn’t repented, recovering from an addiction, etc.

One of the biggest challenges we all face is having not ‘arrived’ at a place of healing, acceptance, recovery, forgiveness, contentedness, etc.  Just like it is for the stages of grief, we may seem to arrive for a time, until we slip off the wagon again into patterns of ‘non-arrival’.

Maybe you’ve been promising yourself for years not to be so ‘nice’ to those who never return your kindness.  Maybe you’ve been promising them boundaries.  But every time you initiate them you feel their wrath and you can’t be bothered with the fallout.

You’re trying, aren’t you?  You haven’t arrived and that’s okay.  Your best is good enough.

Maybe you’ve been working on yourself with varying levels of success all these years.  You do well for a while and then a bevy of challenges assaults you, and then you’re back to square one.

You’re trying, aren’t you?  You haven’t arrived and that’s okay.  Your best is good enough.

Maybe it’s the loss you simply can’t accept—it still rips you apart at times.  You face the pain well enough (you can’t not!).  You battle the ongoing grief and the triggers.

You’re trying, aren’t you?  You haven’t arrived and that’s okay.  Your best is good enough.

Maybe you’ve sensed for a while that you’ve experienced a breakthrough, and just when you begin to get excited that the miracle has finally occurred, you backslide a little.  You’re tempted to throw in the towel.  You can’t bear for your hope to be crushed once more.

You’re trying, aren’t you?  You haven’t arrived and that’s okay.  Your best is good enough.

The spiritual journey is not about arrival, and the paradox is we need to accept this before we can genuinely contend with the possibility of arriving at a farther point along the journey.

What if ‘arrival’ is hardly the point, and that what we can learn is that grace is even more copious than we could ever dream.

What if the fact that we haven’t arrived, and that we observe how others haven’t arrived, is evidence in itself that grace would have us just accept that our will to do better is enough—that we’re rightly motivated.

What if there’s something to be learned in accepting ourselves in a state of pre-arrival?

What if we don’t need to ‘arrive’ to be accepted.  Imagine being good enough as it is—as we are—not needing to change to be loved, appreciated, valued, accepted.

Again, the paradox is we need to arrive at non-arrival, accepting we never arrive, to journey farther along the way.

A peace mindset based on protection and provision

Herein are two key ingredients to peace within our individual lives.  We all desire to receive protection, just as we all desire to receive provision.  The harsh reality is we need both, but what do we do from a faith perspective when we don’t receive what we need?

Protection is the BAD we DON’T get.
Provision is the GOOD we DO get.

Let me explain:

PROTECTION

My life verse for protection is Isaiah 52:12, which says, “... for the LORD will go before you, the God of Israel will be your rear guard.”  Another version has it that, “The LORD your God will lead you and protect you on every side.”

People talk about and many believe in guardian angels.  Faith commends to us the idea that even as we live in the physical realm there’s is a spiritual realm beyond what we can see.

Our belief in divine protection over our lives and over those lives of our loved ones must run beyond our circumstances if our belief is to prosper to the extent of feeling protected.

This is a mindset of peace that transcends all our circumstances.  The mindset is of feeling protected beyond our circumstances where the very nature of them can lead us to feeling exposed.

This is where we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Show me a faith that continues to expect good from God amid catastrophe and I will show you a faith that people notice.

Importantly, having lived this personally, what is needed is the belief that won’t let go of the promise of the goodness of God whatever happens.  This is the faith of Jacob from Genesis 32—(which is another article entirely).

The fact of our faith boils down to this, that our prosperity is not limited to our circumstances in this physical life, but that our prosperity is linked to the unchanging circumstance in eternal life.

Beyond our feeling exposed in this life, our protection is eternally assured from the aspect of eternal life.  When we borrow this eternal life mindset, and it’s ours in the blink of an eye, we literally feel beyond fear for what may happen.  We smile at the wind.

Put another way, when we feel exposed and especially vulnerable we remember our divine protection from another world, we thank God for it, and we keep moving in hope as much as we can.

Protection, overall, is about praying for what we don’t want to get.
Provision, on the other hand, is about praying for what we do want to get.

PROVISION

My life verse for God’s provision is Genesis 22:14, which is literally where Yahweh-Yireh is said in the English, “The LORD will provide.”  The concept behind this verse is a mindset of expectation that does not fail for faith in the provision of what we need.

But as per the protection mindset, we must continue to believe in this provision mindset even when, and especially when, we are deprived of provision.  Do you see the power in this mindset?  Such a mindset cannot be conquered.

What faith asks of us, or better put demands of us, is the ability to believe for provision especially when there is none.  Yes, I know, this doesn’t make sense in a worldly way, but remember the concept is an eternal concept.

Put another way, if we don’t receive what we believe is necessary provision, we can ask ourselves if we really need it, or if we can survive without it.  We can survive without many things we might previously have thought were essential.

When all is said and done, when we don’t have what we need, our opportunity in faith is to continue our hope on expectancy that what we need will be provided at the proper time.  If we have resolved this as an attitude, we have resilience when the attitude can’t be shaken.

~

The idea behind this article is the combining of two concepts: the idea that every human being needs protection and provision, WITH the idea, which is situated against the reality of the first, which is when we’re deprived of the protection and provision we need.

Faith gives a person the capacity to be thankful for their protection and provision whilst giving the person hope when either or both are missing.

~

Those who have ever been counselled by me may have heard me pray the words at the end of a prayer that speak about the protection and provision of God as blessings.  I see these two, protection and provision, as vital in outworking of faith and life.

The only way to overcome injustice that will never be righted

Let me say upfront, before I get into the thrust of this, that my heart at this point in my life is in a very good place.  I feel I am able to observe just about everything at present and hardly become reacted at all by that pent-up anxiety that exists in us all.  From such a place I feel like I can offer something in the space of a person feeling perplexed about the injustices that have come against them.

Secondly, I need to say upfront that I validate that the injustice you suffered was reprehensible and should not have happened.  The first thing we all need when we’ve been swallowed by injustice is to be believed.

As I observe life around me, I see many people estranged to the concept of peace.  There just seems to be too much reactivity going on in our lives to be able to live INTO this blessed peace.

I’m sure you can see the connection between our anxiety and our lack of peace, even as we see injustices against us producing that anxiety.

If we take that just one step further, considering that peace is a cherished quality that so many of us truly covet, we may see that entering into the injustice is a poisoned chalice.  It feels right to go there, but it leads us into a dead-end street with nowhere to go with our anger.

We feel we must enter into this injustice, because if we don’t nobody else will, and of course it feels good to be validated.  But the more we enter into the injustice, the more we see with disbelief what has occurred, the more incredulous we get.  Can you see that this isn’t helping, and indeed it is hindering our process of embarking upon peace?

So what do we do?
Simply ignore what’s happened and sweep it under the carpet?

Do we forgive and forget (as if that’s even possible)?
Do we let bygones be bygones?

Just as entering into the injustice tends to get us nowhere, just the same ignoring it and pretending it never happened also leads us nowhere.

So what do we do?
We keep coming back to the same infuriating question.

One thing I can suggest that we could do—and this applies to any situation in life that we cannot control and aren’t there so many of those!—is we see what WE can impact, and we STAY in that place.  We stay in our stuff.  For our own protection, and for the protection of others we care for and love.  We stay OUT of things we cannot control.

We own our emotions and expectations, knowing that we cannot impact other people’s emotions or expectations.  We can bear no responsibility for what others feel (or refuse to feel) or expect.  We can only bear our own responsibility.

There is a freedom in this, even as we agree that we cannot change our circumstances.  It is just another factor out of our control that we must accept.

I want to suggest that it’s a good thing that there are many things out of our control, because every single one of them we have no responsibility for.  Can you see?  The direct relationship between what we are responsible for and what we can control.  The very moment we see this, is the great aha moment.

When I can observe others, who I cannot control, behave in ways that trouble me, I remind myself they are NOT my responsibility.  Even with our children we can do the right thing in our coaching and discipline, but it’s up to them as individuals to accept our instruction, tweak or modify it, or even reject it.  Our child’s choice is not our responsibility.  We’re free from needing to control that which isn’t our responsibility, even though it hurts when our children go against what we believe is the wise way.

It’s just the same with a co-worker or a boss or anyone who has done anything against us.

It’s good to be an advocate for others, but we can only be good advocates when we have done our portion of healing.  We cannot advocate effectively when we’re reactive.

One of the grand rules of life is making our opportunities to heal from those things that were unfairly done to us, including violence and trauma.  Most of us will need to deal with a person or people having violated us and the trauma that consists of what that brings.

It wasn’t fair that it happened, but now it is our responsibility to heal from it.  Sure, that’s another level of unfairness—true injustice—but unfortunately that’s life.

Those who accept the responsibility for changing what they can, will always make their advance upon peace.

Peace always comes at a premium and it requires the sacrifice of leaving well enough alone to live in it.  What comes from peace, though, is the capacity to serve others who rely on us.  We all have the responsibility to be reliable and as non-reactive as we can be for those close to us.

QUESTION: can you think of any situation where you have responsibility for a person, a thing, or situation, but little or no control?  That’s an injustice difficult to resolve.

A little faith in a good hope is good enough

There are seasons in life where there is much prosperity, just as there are seasons where we are being refined.  Being refined doesn’t happen when life is spared of challenges.  The saving grace of hardship and grief and difficulty and trials and every other kind of setback is the hope we have for recovery.

Within a single day we may face the changing of seasons, for example, happiness morphed into sadness morphed into anxiety morphed into relief.  All in the one day or week—a mishmash of emotions of reality.

Within a single day we can also find ourselves cast into a season of refining.

These are seasons where we’re backwashed in a torrent of pain we cannot reconcile, where we find ourselves just battling to survive emotionally and spiritually.

And that season can last months.  If not years.  Hard to reconcile the length of those terms.

And what is it that characterises the particular season where life has plunged into death?

I don’t mean death from a literal viewpoint, of course, or death from an eternal life perspective, either, but I mean death to the old life.  That old life is gone.

Indeed, it could very well be argued by many of us that with the old life gone, a new life becoming, we have not plunged into death, on the contrary, we have been inserted into life; the only true life we were ever destined to experience.

Yet it’s hard, even impossible to the many who have been there and walked the other way.

Many found it all too hard, because the reality is, it’s a living hell.  Those who haven’t been there don’t truly know what such grief is like.  Pardon the language, it is shit.  (My word processor just suggested I don’t use that word because it may offend, and I apologise if it does.  Nonetheless, I want to convey that it’s that hard.)

And yet, what becomes most apparent, especially as we journey together with hope-filled others who are on that same distressing journey, we are living our faith better than we ever have done before.

Nothing says “faith” better than living bravely amid loss.  And nothing compels faith more than a hope in a realistic expectation for recovery.

There are many hopes we can pin our faith to, but not all of these are true and wise and realistic.  If our hope sails on the wind of convenience, of dreams that won’t come true, of expectations that are overblown, such a false hope will end our faith journey at some point.

But recovery is inevitably a good hope, because our expectations are based solely in what we will do as individuals.  See how this is a good hope?  Where we have agency, we have power, and that power is for change—the change we’ve always wanted to live into.

See how the hope of recovery is not contingent on other people or in situations that may not come true?  The hope of recovery is simply a hope that in recovery, by faith, we will survive, we will adapt, and inevitably we will overcome.  Recovery is a simple, achievable hope.  So long as we keep doing the basic things, we advance upon the path toward the objective.

A little faith in a good hope is all you need when you have nothing else, provided that good hope is based in the premise of reality.  Indeed, that’s the definition of “good hope.”  Good hope, as opposed to false hope, will see a person succeed on their journey of recovery.

~

The astounding thing about these conjoined concepts, faith and hope, is that hope will lead us by faith to the goal, even if that is years away.  Indeed, it is compelling, from a spiritual viewpoint, that the only way to genuinely live—the abundant life, I mean—is by such faith.

Isn’t it both interesting and paradoxical that we only start living by faith when we enter struggle street?  We don’t need faith beforehand.  Why is it that many are disinterested in God?  They either don’t need the divine presence, or they had a negative experience of “God” through a negative example of church or spirituality.  God is completely reframed to the positive through loss and grief when we recognise we need something completely external to ourselves.

Faith comes to the fore at the time of trial.  Until our lives have been turned upside down, we have a little reason to rely on God.

Yet the truth is God will be found when we need him most.  “Ask..., seek..., knock” and the knowledge of God is granted, but we are disinterested until we’re interested.

It is faith that will get us to where we need to go, yet it is a true hope that we need to have faith in.  If our goal is simply a content life, where we can be a blessing to others, that hope is a real hope that anyone can attain.

Apologies from the authentic, more DARVO from the unrepentant

An author I greatly admire—someone who is likely to keep that admiration—has apologised for naming and lauding his minister in his books, because it’s now been revealed that this minister is an abuser.  What saddens me most of all, beyond the sadness that should be borne for the victims of this abuse, is the same pattern continues to be revealed:

There are apologies from the authentic yet just more DARVO from the unrepentant.

DARVO stands for Deny-Attack-Reverse-Victim-and-Offender.

DARVO occurs every single time a person with a claim of abuse makes that claim.  This is because the abuser is always unrepentant.  The abuser abuses and they continue to re-double the pain with secondary and tertiary abuse.  An abuser will always deny any wrongdoing, then attack the victim through a gaslighting narrative, thereby reversing the victim and offender.  They seek to be identified as the victim, and they are malevolently hellbent on identifying the victim as the offender.

Think about the dynamics of abuse for a moment.  Most abusers are that brazen they believe they’ll get away with their crimes.  Just like they argue their denials so compellingly that they have good people believe them.  All the while the victim, who can’t lie and cannot procure a wicked case against the wicked, finds themselves done over yet again.  They were done over in the initial abuse, that in just about every case wasn’t isolated in one event.  They were done over for years.  There was a real toxic pattern to the abuse that they endured.  They could not easily escape, and in many cases, it was a mountain to climb to finally get out of that place.

Having gotten out of that situation, finding themselves in a place of going to retrieve their justice, and they find they’re gaslit.  So the toxic pattern continues until that person is gone from their life all together.

As soon as the person begins the process of expediting their justice, they quickly find their abuser engaging in DARVO.  Sadly, it’s the last thing they expect, as abuse is heaped on abuse, and they find no avenue for justice.  Indeed, they find they have merely upped the ante.

This is evidence that the claims of abuse are real.  Any decent person would settle the dispute.  And the only way it’s settled is through genuine repentance, restitution, and reconciliation.  Only the reasonable person with conscience is capable.

The tragic reality is that the DARVO that the victim has been embroiled in is an internal reality as far as the public record is concerned—others do not see the DARVO.  In the private sphere, there’s often a tertiary abuse that is about as malevolent as it gets.  Revenge is sweet for the abuser, and it’s always a private matter, isolation being their fundamental tool.

The justice sought will cost the victim an immense amount that they had no idea about.  Another sign of a true abuser.

The process of the ongoing public DARVO is the tip of the iceberg, and what sits below the surface is the direct harm that is extrapolated against the victim by the abuser as they continue to abuse, and the direct harm caused by the supporters of the abuser.

We need to all become aware that any of us who identify as good hearts are prime targets for the abuser as they will seek to recruit us to their side.

The abuser is a master of image management as they curate a favourable impression on those they co-opt.  Remember that words and tears and promises ought to acquit none, but good and empathetic people are easy targets for sympathy, too quick to forgive and move on, and are too quick to get others to the moving on phase.  In the process, perhaps the most devastating effects are wrought by do-gooders.

So much damage is done by good people with good intentions who have no idea about the dimensions of abuse that have occurred.  They would be abhorred if only they knew.  But the abuser is a master masquerader.  The abuser masquerades out of necessity to maintain their modus operandi.  The worst abusers manipulate all persons and situations to their advantage.

If we identify at that “good person” who is capable of great empathy, we must imagine ourselves as targets.

We must also see ourselves as the ones who are quick to apologise when we get it wrong, because, as we find much of the time these days, justice is slow, but the truth is revealed eventually.

There is a rule to life: apologies come from the authentic yet there’s just more DARVO from the unrepentant.

~

What’s needed most of all when we suspect a person of DARVOing instead of meeting the claim of abuse is to simply ask the question directly, “What did YOU do?”  And “Please don’t deflect and just simply answer the claim.”

As soon as we do this, it may become evident who we are actually dealing with, when they either vigorously deny and plead their innocence rather than empathise with the abused person.  Even empathy can be feigned, and empathy can be veiled as gaslighting, for the master manipulator will appear empathetic even as they manipulate.  Additionally, we stand to create an enemy if we distrust them—even to the extent of being a target for their DARVO—which is further evidence of who we’re dealing with.

What’s most critical of all is that the one who was abused is believed.  I’m not talking about cases where one abuses the other and the other reciprocates.  This happens a lot.  And there’s little sympathy for both.

But there are also an immense number of situations where a person is abused and yet they have no capacity to reciprocate abuse.  This is a victim and they’re to be believed every time.  And in my experience, it’s the person who apologises and who is quick to see any wrongdoing in themselves who is a credible victim.  They have capacity for honest introspection where they don’t defend themselves.  Abusers don’t exemplify such honest humility.

Indeed, it’s the one who battles much guilt and shame who is paradoxically the victim.  See how they see their fault and even maximise it, all the while often minimising the faults of others, at times attributing such fault as their own fault.  For just one example, “It’s not their fault, it’s mine, I shouldn’t have put up with it for so long...”  See the minimising of others’ actions and taking others’ responsibility?  Abusers classically don’t take responsibility for significant things.

The entitled person on the other hand makes sport of the practice of exploitation, for they have no capacity for empathy.

Peace and joy for today, bright hope for tomorrow

I get annoyed when I don’t have anything to write about, so this might go nowhere.  The age old say goes like this: “Worrying does not remove tomorrow’s troubles yet robs us of today’s peace.”

It paraphrases the saying of Jesus, actually: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own.”  (Matthew 6:34)

There is so much wisdom in the idea of quarantining peace by the harbouring of joy.

Peace, by the very nature of the word, commands the present tense.  We talk less about peace in terms of yesterday or tomorrow, certainly as far as our personal inner peace is concerned.

I’ve said for a long time now that there is a coalescence in the triune concept of peace, hope, and joy.  When we’re at peace, we have access to hope and joy.  It’s the same whichever way you look at it with these three.

But let’s take a moment to press into the concept of the present, entreating joy that shimmers in the front of peace, buoyed by hope.

How exactly do we get there when we are despairing and anything but at peace?

Peace never seems to come at such a premium as when we are without it.  Indeed, it’s when peace is absent that we learn deepest of all its unequivocal value for our wellbeing.

A lack of joy today empties tomorrow of its hope, and both these reveal a lack of peace.

Peace evades us when we want stuff, recognition, to be entertained, to be someone else.  A lack of peace is centrally about not being satisfied with the status quo.

The ability any of us has to embody peace is directly linked to our ability to be content exactly how things are right now—even as if nothing would change.  This is far easier than any of us contemplates.  God taught me about spiritual peace most when I had nothing, when I felt most alone, when I frequently had nothing to do, when I was stuck in not being able to shift out of my circumstances.

Anyone can do this, to enter into learning how to secure peace when peace is absent.  In fact, that’s when peace is closer than ever.  When it’s absent and we truly crave it.

The reason is simple.  Peace is a decision.  A decision primarily of acceptance.  Which is humility.  Accepting what cannot be changed in the moment is one full portion of serenity.  It’s a smile despite the presence of the lamentable.  If peace can be attained in trial, nothing can stop us claiming it.

What is done with such a moment of sitting still in our circumstances, not bargaining for a better deal, is mastery of that moment.  Perspective arrives.  Seeing with insight gives us the capacity to see the good.  It’s only when we can see the good that we can be grateful.

Such sight is a gift, a miracle in its own right, a blessed spiritual possession.  Such a thought breeds gratitude.

It’s entirely possible to see the good in any circumstances we face, and none of this is about emotional or spiritual bypassing.  Whatever we face—and it could be the biggest hardship or suffering we’ve ever encountered—isn’t the whole story.  Indeed, it’s usually the trials that actually put us in touch with the parts of life we’ve so long taken for granted.  Trials are eye-openers, and it’s that truth that beckons freedom.

When we have peace, we have joy in the moment and tomorrow is full of hope.

Peace is closest by decision when we’re struggling, and we insist it’s possible by faith.  It may not be retrieved immediately, but by faith we will find our way to it.

Humble strength from embracing weaknesses as blessed gifts

I want to be as transparent as I possibly can in this article.  I cannot speak highly enough of the theology of strength in weakness.  Of the paradoxical life.  Of the life that almost nobody lives, yet the life that stands dormant in overcoming strength—the strength of a “weak” Jesus nailed to a cross, rather than the marauding military leader the Jews expected their Saviour to be.

Weakness in the human realm is not hard to identify, because it’s in us, inherently in each of us.

There’s perhaps no better way of heralding this point than of investigating the study of those who undertake the Twelve Steps.  Principally, in Step Four, we find the gumption to undertake a searching and fearless moral inventory.  The way I did this exercise, and the way I coach people through it, is through the seven deadly sins.

The process of plunging deep into the sins of my past and present took me two months.  The paradoxical thing is, you’d expect it to be an excruciating process.  On the contrary, it was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done.  It liberated me from my fear, from my guilt, and from my shame.  It became a competition against myself.  The more that was revealed to me, the better I felt, because I realised I was being utterly transparent and authentic before God.  The longer the process took, the more that came, the more I saw my commitment was matched by God’s faithfulness.

The process of identifying and confessing everything I could think of led me to my first experience of being baptised in the Holy Spirit—four days later I had an experience of sheer ecstasy that lasted intensely for nearly half an hour, an experience that has been repeated since in smaller bursts.  These experiences I’d never ever experienced.  They can only come from God.

A process that I thought might have killed me was the making of me.

But let me be blunt about this.  This is a precis of the substance of it:

ANGER: though my anger has not caused mortal injury, or “murder,” in this life, whether by judgement or passive aggressiveness or rage, anger has so often had its way.  One of the biggest blessings I’ve come to see about my anger is it’s part of me, it’s a weakness, and when I see it as a weakness, when I’m not scared of it, when I accept it, I can harness it as a strength of passion.

SLOTH: this in the most general terms is the sin of laziness.  I always been more driven than slothful, but in an honest appraisal I was able to identify where I had been genuinely lacking in commitment to do the work that life required of me.  Again, the moment I recognised my lack of commitment in any serious quest of my life, the moment I recommitted, strength was added.

LUST: if there’s a more embarrassing weakness than the sin of lust, I’m not sure what it is, because lust depicts the weakness of a lack of raw self-control.  Add to this, the weakness that’s most embarrassing at all, the weakness of an exposed sexuality.  Sexuality is most embarrassing because it’s the most intimate thing and most exposing thing in the whole of our lives.  As I looked at my life, it took a lot of courage to admit my weaknesses, and yet when I considered in the cold light of day that these weaknesses are common to humanity, I was relieved of the majority of the burden of it.  The admission alone, I found, was strength enough to ward against most of temptation’s power.

PRIDE: oh, how much my pride got me into trouble.  Pride, a lot of the time, I have found in my life, stems from fear, and back 20 years ago there was a lot of fear driving my life.  Fear of failure, fear of not measuring up, fear of not achieving, and fear of not meeting people’s approval.  Yet as an utter irony, all that fear was veiled in pride.  Pride pretends it’s got everything when truly it knows it’s got nothing.  There’s nothing scarier than pretending you’re all over something when you haven’t got a clue.

ENVY: this is about looking over the fence and noticing how green the grass is.  We all struggle with envy, and perhaps my biggest challenge was envying the achievements of others.  There will always be people achieving more than we achieve.  There will always be people who have more than we have.  There will always be people who are more popular than we are.  Like all the sins, our opportunities to engage with them is at the level of confession and repentance.  Through honesty, we achieve freedom.

GLUTTONY: truth be known I’ve had quite a relationship with gluttony all my life.  I still struggle with it, and anyone who has the propensity toward addiction will suffer from it.  But knowing about the weakness is the invitation to strength.  There have been many times in my spiritual journey where I have fasted and prayed and engaged in the disciplines of abstinence and been blessed as a result.  Like the other sins, this one reveals the lack of control that in itself is an invitation to the wiser life.  The more we move away from our gluttony, the more spiritually blessed we become.

GREED: the spiritual life itself is the greatest strength in overcoming the covetousness of greed.  Quite possibly linked with envy, whose propensity to want and want and want, and never be satisfied, greed is a dungeon.  Just being honest about our greed is enough to herald a higher purpose: the more we give away, the more we gain.  This simply must be lived to be believed.

~

This is the hidden secret to life that many of us are afraid of opening the door to.  We are more often ashamed of our weaknesses than seeing them as avenues of strength.  When our weaknesses are displayed, we feel vulnerable and exposed, even embarrassed tending toward the traumatic, but what if we existed in communities that celebrated our weaknesses.  What if communities endorsed the very things that isolate us from being more fully known.  What if we were no longer afraid of our weaknesses and decided instead to see them as strengths.  Then nothing could conquer us.

Embrace weakness to overcome fear.

The compelling overcoming faith mindset

This is the first of two articles on an enhanced ‘faith’ mindset for life.  This first foray is set on a mindset that serves us as individuals in a life that can be hard, even excruciating.  The second foray will be on a mindset that serves us as members in the communities we belong to—a mindset that builds on the blocks of unity rather than a mindset that is sows into the lies of already fractured divisions.

First, I want to frame this in a certain way.  There are difficulties intrinsic to this life.  Jesus put it like this in John 16:33: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.  In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart!  I have overcome the world.”

“YOU WILL HAVE TROUBLE...”

“BUT...”

~

First, a little departure in what we should be about—the life, rather than splitting hairs.

While some argue the toss incessantly about points of irrelevant theology and harm-producing ethics, losing the battle for the minds and hearts in an otherwise compelling argument that “faith is an overwhelmingly better way to live,” others have decided to just live it and let their lives speak of that way.  That way is kindness, gentleness, and strength in authenticity and vulnerability.

There is little point convincing those who do not live by faith that their way is wrong when doing so only garners further division and mistrust of Christians.  It’s better to herald the obvious advantages of living by faith, by behaviour and by words of light and encouragement.

~

This is the irrefutable truth: there’s only one way to live this inherently tough life—by a faith that crushes despair through a humble acceptance.  This faith is also the way that the effects of trauma are adapted to and eventually absorbed and overcome.

People might think that this is a big call.  Trauma, for instance, is a massive thing to overcome.  But the key tenet of faith is living an upside-down reality—the spirituality that gives up what cannot be kept to gain what cannot truly be lost.  Trauma may therefore be seen as an asset of weakness that opposes the otherwise proud, self-sufficient life.

Inevitably, this is an exercise of letting go.  Paradoxically, it’s experiences of loss that teach us best how to let go of the things we inevitably can’t keep anyway.

What loss teaches us best is that we can’t 
keep those things that we cannot bear to lose.

And whilst loss is brutal it’s also instructional.  It takes us into the bitter blast of winter and sends shockwaves into our reality—but these are what we’re invited to adapt to.  If loss cannot crush our hope, literally nothing can.  

THIS is the abundant life that Jesus promised.

I’m convinced that it’s a travesty for ANY person NOT to discover this, this side of the death divide.  Yet, many Christians never experience this abundant life, let alone those who have resolved NOT to live by faith.

How could I put it that might convince you that what I say is true?

There is a place of being in this life where we 
can feel genuinely impenetrable yet grounded.

This is about the knowledge that whether life’s just normal OR whether life’s in crisis, the abundant life is about anticipating crisis, not anxiously but preparedly.  It’s an approach to life that’s constantly ready for whatever could or may come.  And if loss does come, it’s about insisting within ourselves that, especially in loss, opportunities abound.

It’s about agreeing beforehand to resist the default doldrums.

I don’t want to make this longer than it needs to be.

You can screen this through this Bible passage from James 1:2-8 (NIV):

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.  If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.  But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.  That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.”

Considering trails of many kinds as something of a joy is only possible if we believe it’s possible, and when we believe it’s possible, we hold out faith that God will show us in due course.  If only we believe in the sanctity of perseverance, that it’s worth everything to mature.  Even if we haven’t attained it, it’s a hope that draws us forward by faith.  And if we keep moving forward, advancing even when it feels we’re no closer to the light at the end of the tunnel, that irrepressible hope makes it possible to keep moving forward.