Each Life’s Most Crucial Task

As a goal for the best life, my years have taught me this: 

Each life must take personal responsibility
for its thoughts, words and deeds…  

… not another’s responsibility,
just one’s own…

For many — those who are clearly disadvantaged — there is a preceding task to facilitate this; to heal from trauma that prevents them taking their personal responsibility.  

Taking one’s personal responsibility — and not one iota of another’s — is the key task to become a functional adult human being.  Anything that impedes such work needs to be identified and resolved or regret will be our life.  

Taking one’s personal responsibility is truly the key task and goal of the Christian life, where God helps us bravely face truth through insight.  

Sure, much truth is hard to face. 
But no truth that we face can break us.  

A precondition is vulnerability; courageously sitting with our emotions, knowing as Mr Fred Rogers would say, “No emotion is unmentionable or unmanageable.”  

When finally we can face all of life’s stark truths knowing none of them threaten to castigate us back into the debilitating shame outbound of trauma so we can live the abundant life we were placed here to live.  

~~~

Let’s consider one example of the power in the abundant life available for simply facing and accepting one’s personal responsibility:

Why would we allow another person’s behaviour to influence our response?  How could we let another person — who seems to have no interest in us or our care — influence our response, simply because they’ve behaved a certain way. 

It would be easier to do the proverbial ‘smile and wave’ and to allow the other person to have no impact on us.  Easier in this way: once we get over the initial trigger to REACT, we simply “kick the dust off our feet” and let them be them.  

When we experience situations where people put us in troubling circumstances, we still have the agency of options.  

At least we still have the choice to rebuff them — and perhaps to be seen as taking offense — or we can choose to give the other person their way (letting them be irresponsible and face their consequences).  

But such a choice must come because we wanted to in our heart — otherwise we lie to and betray ourselves.  

However illogical it may seem to WANT to give a protagonist their way that has troubled us is beside the point.  The point is agreeing that we CAN do this, and that we WANT to do this – it must come from a heart in agreement or we betray ourselves.  

It comes from the decision beforehand to extend patience for crudeness, kindness for cruelty, love for hatred or indifference, peace amid conflict.  

This is about accepting and owning our response is up to us, it’s our choice, not allowing another person’s unkempt attitude and behaviour draw us into thoughts and actions that do not meet our own moral code.  

Ultimately, as a Christian, I see it as a power that comes from God, to extend a grace knowing all the incomparable graces that have been extended to me!  

Power for the abundant life is available to the measure of simply taking account for my personal responsibility — taking a lower place that I may gain a higher place by a choice of spiritual supremacy, giving up the material and temporal for the spiritual and eternal.  

Why is this stress affecting me?

It’s a conundrum for many who are suddenly afflicted with mental ill health — “why is it that this [that has never affected me] is affecting me?”  “Where is my control, my strength, my confidence — I feel shattered.”  “Where on earth did this come from?”  “Why am I defenseless here?”  

Whatever the diagnosis is or could be, there is a growing impending realisation —  as quickly the situation of crisis has descended is almost as bad as the affliction itself.  

It can feel like a chicken-and-egg scenario: what came first?  

Grief as a response to the circumstance 
we’ve been cast into, or the mental health crisis
that arrived without warning that casts us
into the grief process outbound of loss?  

In many ways, the grief process mimics every malady of mind and spirit imperilling the soul.  This is because the descension always feels like a plummet, the floor of our hope has fallen away as much as we feel we’re sinking without resistance.  

This is about the scariest existential reality known to humankind.  

This is because our whole person feels the presence of interminable dread.  

It doesn’t help us when a person will tell us that “what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger” however true that is.  

It also doesn’t help much that a person would simply sit there with us — it helps us helpers to know and accept this.  Then we do not bother with endeavouring to ‘fix’ anything.

It means something that a person sat with us, because it shows how much they care, but the limit and strength of the help is precisely that: it matters more that a person genuinely cares than it does they try to help.  

This stuff that is suddenly affecting us that never did before reveals to us an important truth, a crucial learning — we never believed it could get THIS bad until we, ourselves, experienced it.  That’s the importance of ‘lived experience’.  We attest to a thing so many attest to — our compassion and empathy grows as a result.  

If only 2 percent of our focus, or 10 percent, or better still 50 percent, can be on the value of the adversity for later — for what is being learned, and can be learned no other way — then our hope is girded up and we have a way of surviving.  

A final word on the value of knowing someone truly cares, which is care enough in a world where so many arrive with knowledge and skills but not the power to help.  Humanity in a word — not contrived, no schadenfreude, no box ticking.  

There is something about authentic engagement with another human being who serves us with what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard — warmth, empathy, patience, kindness, etc, in the moment of peril.  

Simply Sitting with the Suffering

Care is an interesting phenomenon.  It isn’t important until it is.  Until we need it ourselves, we’re unconvinced as to its true value.  

Then, when we’re in the deepest need of our lives, one person’s care is enough to convince us that we, too, want to be able to offer this care when we get strong again.  

Having been convinced of the power of simply a caring person’s presence, engaging in the practice reminds us every time we do it.  

It is an eternal space, a liminal space, we enter, when we encounter a person suffering, having empathy for their carriage of pain.  

We know we have no power to change the suffering person’s circumstance, but we also know the power in care to hold space for the person — it’s the potential for significant growth that takes a person from adversity to a more fortified resilience over time.  

To sit with someone who is facing either a lot of self-judgement or the judgement or perception of judgement of others, and bring lovingkindness, is just what they need.  

To sit and be present, there is an intrinsic validation of their worth, which is especially powerful for a person who may with little doubt, or at times, be questioning their worth.  

To sit there when we may have other things to do is also refining our patience and empathy, and helping us practice otherness, which is the love endemic of a mature and whole person.  

We may not feel we have all the answers, and indeed more power is resplendent in the moment when we sit there accepting our powerlessness in and of ourselves.  Such a cosmic paradox, indeed.  

To sit there witnessing our own powerlessness and yet see the difference it makes to the vulnerable is powerful and humbling.  

Little wonder we can see the value we make for seemingly doing very little.  

As we sit there, together feeling rather inept for what to say or how to be with one another, there is courage on display, amid the chaos, to face the tyranny head on — knowing we do not need to ‘fix it’ but merely bear it.  

At one level nothing seems to change, and it shouldn’t be that much of a help, but for the one being helped, the legacy of being cared for is its own evidence.  

If you have suffered at all in life, and especially if you have received the help of someone simply sitting with you through it, and have grown as a result, you are perfectly suited to helping others.  I would argue it’s the noblest of all roles.  

Reconciling the Never-Ending Pain of Loss in Grief

Speaking with a widow of an over-60-year marriage recently opened my eyes afresh to the gnawing, unending, tremulous pain of loss in the grief.  

There is no going back in a situation
when there is also no going forward.  

No going forward to the way life was, those long-yearned-for hugs are gone, with not a one available — not even one!  The soft comfort of a smooth word uttered in symbiotic understanding all gone.  The sight of, the presence of, the hand-holding with that loved one — intransigently gone!  

I cherish a ministry where there are no words that appease a soul bereft of the ability to bargain.  A soul seemingly tortured by a pain that cannot be touched.  

Reconciling such a pain can seem impossible unless
we agree there MUST be a purpose in this pain.  

Think of it this way… 

Loss is the opposite side of the coin of love, and we were made to love, so in the grief of loss there MUST equally be a purpose.  

Loss forces us into a search to resolve the pain of grief — it forces us into the surrender of seeking help, and this necessitates connection with others who can provide such help.  Growth is thereby enabled.  

It doesn’t feel like growth but simply to survive grief is growth!  

Go there to grief outbound of loss and there you are, struggling just to survive, so much so that survival is victory, and such a victory is growth in the depth of the individual concerned; depths of empathy, compassion, open-heartedness, kindness, depths of humanity.  

To connect with our own suffering is to connect with another’s suffering, where suffering opens the eyes of our heart regarding suffering in our world.  Our powers to connect are not only deepened, they’re enhanced.  

Nothing whatsoever can appease the grief of the loss of a life partner or child or parent or significant other.  To appease such pain would betray the power of love we had for them who we miss terribly [insert better word than “terribly,” here].  

Reconciling what on earth has no answer can seem on earth to be an impossibility.  But just as we have lost our loved one to eternity — that is where we must look to reconcile it in our mind.  They are not gone, just elsewhere, in a place we Christians call eternity.  

We can only find a purpose for being beyond simply surviving if we imagine the best really is to come — when we, too, go over the cusp, giving up the mortal body for something indescribably better.  

Being a Student of Grief

Ever since I first grieved, I’ve called myself a ‘student of grief’.  

This is because grief schools us in things we cannot ever fully know.  

We grieve because we love, and with both grief and love we do not see either fully in this life.  With both there is an eternal hope that we’ll see all.  

Only with God, as far as I know, do we grieve with hope.  

That has been my experience.  To know, perhaps without always experiencing it, that a future hope will materialise sometime in the future.  

The essence of faith is belief that a reality that has not yet come true will ultimately come to pass.  That a good will come of it.  

Hebrews 11:1-2 puts it this way: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  This is what the ancients were commended for.”  

One way to keep the faith in grief is to take the posture of a student — becoming teachable, humble, accepting of the thing we cannot change, the thing we have no control over.  An approach that commands humility.  

Taking such a posture as a student is the exercise of faith.  

Suffering ought to captivate us in reverence for what we do not yet know rather than cast us into the futility of bitterness and resentment.  

Understandable as they are, bitterness and resentment are a dead end that lead to the death of a thousand cuts.  Alcoholism or other addiction for one.  A lifetime of depression is another.  A hard heart is still another.  

Being a student of grief is about being laid open, broken open; open to a healing that can only come spiritually.  

Being a student of grief is about going the opposite way to how the world expects us to go.  It’s the narrow road that few take, and it can be lonely.  

We take such a road by faith with a faithful God.  

Being a student of grief is casting our own common sense away for a wisdom that there is a better way — yet unattained, but believed for.  

Read Hebrews 11:1 again —

Faith is confidence in what we hope for
and assurance about what we do not [yet] see.  

The spiritual way is the way to be a student of grief.  The spiritual way defies what seems true but ultimately isn’t.  The spiritual way cuts crossgrain against the world’s ‘wisdom’.  

It seems to believe in a dream,
but so many times I’ve seen God
reward faith in a hope not yet seen.  

Being a student of grief requires weakness or it makes us weak; a weakness God makes strong — “For when I am weak, then I am strong” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 12:10.  

Being a student of grief will make you weak, but you won’t be hardened by it.  

Living and grieving (dying) at the same time

If I were my 47 year old self, I’d have given myself some advice, weeks after losing my son to full term stillbirth — 

LEAVE PASTORAL MINISTRY FOR TWO YEARS  

But I didn’t.  I white-knuckled it.  And it failed.  

It failed in some small part to my insistence that I was okay, when clearly I wasn’t really okay.  I felt okay in helping people, but I was vulnerable to anything negative in my life, particularly feedback.  

I was particularly sensitive due to the traumas of that previous season of complicated grief from an extended period of ambiguous loss.   

And I didn’t cut myself any slack — because I was morbidly fearful of losing my ‘pastoral identity’.  As it happened, I only put that process off 18 months and thereby slapped a six-year delay on healing properly the traumas that could have been dealt with in two or three.  

But I could not and would not be told.  

Today I am more honest about this.  Not a regret, a learning.  

Walking ahead through grief is one of the hardest things to do, because when your heart’s been crushed by loss, the trauma is undeniable — it bleeds out of us.  

Heart break is a life-ending experience.  Normally we could trust our mind, but in grief our mind is so thrown by the trauma of it, it takes us down the most insidious rabbit warrens.  

Hope, for instance, whilst it’s fundamentally a good thing, leads us to bargain upon impossible dreams that the old-normal is recapturable.  It isn’t.  That old-normal is long gone.  It can only be accepted.  

But that brings us to a terrible reality; it means facing our pain!  

Here is a bone-jarring irony: not the more we wish upon a star, not the more we revisit our pain, but the more we rationalise our idealisation, the better the chance we have of thinking straight in that moment.  

This is the only way to heal the mind so we can walk ahead — and function!  We can only heal the mind one thought at a time, training or re-training our mind to think logically, including challenging our thinking with balance and truth.  

Healing the mind one thought at a time is going gently with ourselves, recognising, as we walk forward one step at a time, that life won’t always be so etched in the acuteness of the pain of this actualised grief.   

One thought and one step at a time are both abundantly doable.  

Another paradox: we experience more comfort in the discipline of facing reality—because there is hope for a future there—than we do in emotional appeasement, which feels comfortable but takes us nowhere.  

We’re tempted to sojourn with sympathy, when just a little compassion is merely the instigating motivator toward something more empowering.  

Thoughts of reality must be nurtured and retained, whilst idealistic or caustic thoughts need to be identified, validated, and then jettisoned.  Because the mind is a rudder and idealistic and caustic thoughts will direct us toward spiritual and emotional compromise and hopelessness.  

Living while dying (grieving) can feel impossible, just functioning, with a limp in the gait.  

But life doesn’t ordinarily surface without death preceding.  Take the cross and the resurrection of Jesus as the archetype, but don’t forget the nature of crisis preceding resolution in every great story, movie and momentous event in all of history.  

Becoming a student of grief is becoming a student of death; death to the  hopes of returning to what was; death to dreams long held dear; death in many ways to our desires.  

Death as an antecedent to acceptance and life.  

Death in life is not altogether a bad thing, and indeed it can be a good thing.  

Such a state of grief in its interminability is lesson after lesson in the impossibility of control.  Could this not be life’s most polarising lesson: accepting much of life is beyond our control.  Indeed, I’d argue it’s one half of the wisdom of handling our living circumstances.    

Living and walking ahead while grieving (dying inside before learning how new life comes) can seem impossible, and it is certainly helped when we’re planted in a healing environment.  

If only we walk forward being able to grieve gently and live and learn and find a portion of compassion where we need it.  

But it is nevertheless one of the hardest things to do—to walk forward with vibrance whilst dying inside.  

After I’m Gone

The kookaburras will cackle…
After I’m gone…

The trees will remain…
After I’m gone…

Streets that were before me… endure…
Sometimes reshaped, but the land remains…
After I’m gone…

Those much younger than me will remain…
After I’m gone…  

After I’m gone…
All that was there before me…
Will still be there…

Is there a better opportunity to motivate our living purpose than ponder a time we’re no longer here?  

The funeral I attended last week, and the one I conducted the week before, are both funerals closer to my own.  Funerals are sobering.  Many of us will attend dozens before it’s our turn in the coffin.  

Humbling, it’s only a matter of time.  Giving each moment beforehand its significance, death promises an outcome none can bargain around.  

Death itself urges us to have a philosophy, a theology, that explains — or makes meaning of — life, its purpose, the reason for our being.  

Giving reflective thought space to death feels morbid for so many of us, yet is there anything like death that would motivate us to truly live our life.  

What is it to truly live this life we’ve been given?  

If life is to come from death, how are we to redeem life from the deaths of our dearly beloved ones?  It’s a good question.  They, like us when it’s our turn, go to a place beyond the pains of this life.  A place of reckoning, believe some, including me.  A place of truth and peace, in Jesus, is what I believe.  A hope that brings us peace.  That peace brings joy beyond anxiety, to know all is well even when, on this earth, at this time, it isn’t.  

… if our hope is (and theirs was) an eternal one, a good one.  

Funerals are gloriously humbling, where we will find the essence and purposes of life.  If we see, there, what is the purpose of our lives — redemption in the realities of our relationships — we will live motivated.  

… to make amends… to set straight what presently isn’t.  

After I’m gone — after you’re gone — what will they say about me and you?  Did we live for others and for love or did we live for ourselves?  

Were we kind when we could be?  Did we endeavour upon the insight to imagine, “What is the private battle of this person before me that I know nothing about — except empathise and give compassion toward?”  

We all make mistakes.  We all miss the mark.  Have we forgiven ourselves?  Have we forgiven others?  Have we sought forgiveness for our wrongs?  

After I’m gone, will I be known as someone who sought to correct the errors of my life?  Does anything else matter this side of eternity?