Redemption after 7 years on the road to recovery

My favourite Bible verse, if I had to pick one of the hundreds I love, is Galatians 6:9, which has saved my life many times.  Paul, the apostle, says to the Galatians and to us (in my own words):

“Do not grow weary, despondent, or lose all hope, 
in your doing good deeds and relating well, 
because you WILL reap a harvest of blessing 
at the proper time—at God’s appointed time—
if you do not give up completely, 
and ultimately keep getting up and keep going.”

There was a time, a season in my life, 18-19 years ago, when that was plastered on my fridge, and it stood between me and the dire consequences of the despair my life had become—with little other than my three daughters, my parents, and my family, and my fledgling faith keeping me from doing the drastic deed.

But there has been a different season 
over the last seven years where I have faced 
a completely different ice age of the soul.

The depths of that winter started when winter actually started—June 2016, the hardest month of the hardest year of my life.  I won’t go into why it was so interminably hard, apart from the fact that I was losing a career calling that was only a few years old, yet I didn’t know it at the time.  I was to face seven years of rejection, unable to get back into that craft in any serious role, and yet through it all was a silver lining of God’s indelible hope in the two or three doors He did open—for so many were slammed shut.

During the second half of 2016 I began a rebuild of my life, working initially as a maintenance person at a school I eventually became chaplain at, I was also offered two days per week casual work delivering meals for my ex-wife’s catering business.  Interesting how when I was at rock bottom it was my ex-wife who proved again the friend she is when there were others I would have called friends who weren’t.  Such is life, as they say.

Right throughout the past seven years I’ve nudged burn out so many times because of how hard I was sowing.  Sowing in faith not knowing what God’s next move for me was, I was reticent to miss it.  Yet, the school chaplaincy and the peacemaking work I subsequently engaged in were experiences of great mutual blessing—significant portions of redemption no less.  And yet, to coin the phrase of the U2 song, “I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.”

The church I began preaching at in 2017 to complete my Master of Divinity studies invited us to join and soon invited me to become one of the Elders.  In 2019, I was invited to become Associate Pastor.  For someone who received the call of God in September 2004, I was just so delighted to be invited back into formal ministry again.  God literally saved my life out of the brokenness of 12-months earlier (September 2003), lifting me out of my dark night of the soul that lasted six months, giving me the very purpose that I had received—the love of men and women who showed me the care of God.  My purpose from that moment onward was to care for and help people—to become a shepherd, a leader in God’s church.

Seven years to the week, having ‘regressed’ back to health and safety (an honourable career but just not me like it was 20-25 years ago), after having been exposed to regressing into other job roles I’d had in previous iterations of my life (maintenance, courier driver), I have been given an acting role that proves to me that God has delivered me out of the seven year season.  In recapitulating into all the careers I’d once had, God has shown me I was on my path back to the calling of my heart: pastoral ministry.

Seven years it has been toil and despair 
yet tinged with amazing things that have happened.

Opportunities to serve as a Secretary on a Board, serve the homeless through organised street and church ministry, serve as a leader on a national leadership team for a charity, counsel a few dozen couples and many individuals, conduct a couple of dozen funerals, and spend time invested in my son’s school.  All opportunities I would not have had otherwise.

Ultimately during 2020, I serendipitously joined the State’s fire and emergency services, and have since had Incident Management Team roles at massive bushfires, been a culture strategy workshop facilitator, worked closely with subject matter experts on height safety and rope rescue, and been a lead investigator on high profile safety accidents.

Seven years, and this week I started in an acting role I never dreamt of filling, a role that reflects my calling, a role that others believe I’m capable of doing, a role I’m determined to succeed in, especially because it is a role full of opportunities to serve.  I feel immensely supported, and I want to be an immense support.  Whether it lasts a short time or not is immaterial.  God has spoken.

Seven years.  It has felt like an eternity throughout, and yet because the days are long, but the years are short, now it feels like it was all worth it.  Not that there is an option to bow out when we’re called, but so often I’ve hit the wall and needed to go gently with myself to recover.  So many dozens of times I’ve despaired, you’d only need to ask my wife who has endured so much.

Over 2,550 days, seventy percent of my son’s life thus far, I have felt in various stages of being in the wilderness of the in-between, liminal space land, of not knowing whether it would all work out.

Many times I continued onward without hope, and Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” truly resonated as an anthem verse, especially every seventh day on average in the past two years.  And yet, also in the past two years I’ve experienced peace that transcended my understanding more than ever on those other six days.

Life is an adventure, and we learn nothing 
in the comfort of not being challenged.

It is normal to despise the process of feeling crushed,
but looking back, afterward, redemption is the sweetest.

I hope in your reading this reflection you’re encouraged to keep going if you find yourself in the in-between.

IMAGE: one of my Incident Management Team roles, introducing COVID-19 safety measures during a bushfire community meeting in regional Western Australia at the height of the pandemic.

Joy, hope, peace, hidden in plain sight

Even though there is very little between the appearance of happiness and true joy they can be worlds apart, and it all comes down to the heart.

When a person strives for peace—seeking it for all their worth—but they cannot find it, often it is the case that they’re trying too hard.  When a person is burning out, they crave peace more than ever, but they’re trapped within an unrelenting lifestyle.  They may attempt to make all sorts of adjustments that seem reasonable and logical when a complete attitude change is required, because transformation and step change is required.

Ironically, everything we ought to know that needs to be held lightly is usually held too tight.

Joy is a gift that can only 
be enjoyed without pressure.
It’s the same for peace. 
Peace comes with letting go, 
with accepting what we cannot change. 
Hope is not hard if our expectations are realistic.

One of my favourite quotes is by a devoted Christian missionary who died in his 20s.  Jim Eliot once said, “A person is no fool who gives up what they cannot keep to gain what they cannot lose.”

There is incredible wisdom in this pithy saying. 

The key to be learned is that only as we let go and insist we don’t have control over that which we would love to control do we stand to be at peace.  That’s right.  

Give up on striving for peace 
and suddenly peace is in sight.

It’s the same for joy and hope, and indeed as I’ve often said, peace, joy and hope coalesce.

Joy comes when we focus on the simplest things to the exclusion of the overwhelm we could otherwise get lost in.  The overwhelm comes from chasing joy in a myriad of different things that would, of themselves, never deliver any joy.  For hope, we subconsciously chase higher expectations on things than are possibly delivered.  Our idealism betrays us.

Many things in this life promise joy, hope 
and peace, but end up just being hoaxes.

Centrally what this is all about is the heart.  What on earth am I talking about?

Women will often understand this quicker and better than men.  Men tend to be pragmatic and fixers of things.  Men might typically ‘organise’ themselves some peace, but may be very quickly undone when they find themselves in situations where they cannot control outcomes.

This is a concept that breeds hope, 
joy and peace without any effort: 
when there is nothing left to lose, 
there are few expectations, hope, joy and 
peace suddenly come sharply into view.

What is the key facilitator to this attitude that procures peace, hope and joy?  It’s just that.  It’s a heart attitude, and just about the only way to this place of being is, paradoxically, grief and suffering, i.e., when we experience unrelenting loss.

Grief lays siege to the idea 
that we are in control over our lives.

Grief teaches us that our default thinking is wrong; 
we are not in as much control as we think we are.

Grief withholds external peace, hope and joy.
Grief insists that we find peace, 
hope and joy from within.

The greatest thing about adversity is that it teaches us to look deeper into the source of real peace, real hope, and real joy.  Adversity causes us to search passionately for that which cannot be found any other way.

Grief is the antecedent of action.  It forces us to find what we’re looking for in places we don’t know exist.  Such pain undoes us, but in the unravelling we find ourselves.  Grief causes us to go deeper in our understanding, deeper for answers, deeper for peace, hope and joy than we have ever been.

Being frequently broken by an experience that is void of peace, hope and joy we wonder why our lives have become so hard.  And yet it’s not until we have been to such a place that we find the truest peace, hope and joy we have ever known.

We only get what we want in life when we 
refuse to insist on having what we want.

And, dare I say it, this is the Gospel life.

The direct way to this life is God.

When sorrow finally finds adequate expression in words

In the age of computers, still nearly twenty years ago now, I had a typewriter.

It’s okay.  At that time, I didn’t want the garish IBM laptop that my previous employer had supplied me, with phone and brand-new car (so they could have access to my entire life).  The typewriter did not come with obligations; it did what I wanted it to do.  With diligent percussion obedience it struck ink onto a single sheet of paper with the precise purpose that my emotional fingers conveyed.  So many times that typewriter subserviently acted as the mediator in my grief.

Having become a recently separated father, I’d lost my wife, my home, and worst, everyday access to my daughters.  I was a broken man and there was nothing I or anyone else could do about it.  I had to grieve, to pick up the pieces, to work hard at what I could.

Yet it’s only as I look back now at those sheets of sorrowful testimony that I see just what I often overlooked back then.  I would so often be frustrated by my lack of ability to appease my grief — little did I realise I could not escape what I could not run from, for grief and love coalesce anachronistically in events we cannot control.

The sharper the pangs of grief, 
the more love impresses itself on the heart 
for the loss that craves that love 
more poignantly than ever.

Grief contains those in their lament, 
and if we’re not broken, love shines forth.

Yet, grief reinforces the tragic irony 
that this ‘state’ cannot be fixed.

Such a realisation makes grief a hundred times worse in a moment.  And yet, out of these courses, stronger we somehow emerge.  Eventually.  Years later.  At times when the worst realities of all are realer than we could have ever imagined, somehow, we are given a supernatural portion of weakness to survive the tyranny.

There is truth in the idea that, for us to grow, 
something must just about kill us.

In the bitter throes of lonely reflection, alone enough to come face-to-face with my inescapable lack before God, I would sob and type, type and sob.  Even as I would sob, more emotion would come, and that would bring words that chiselled themselves onto the page.  Many of those pages were tear-stained relics of a time when grief threatened weekly to rip me apart.  I’d previously never contemplated that I had that many tears to shed.

Grief awakens us to unheard of realities.
Loss spills forth into stark bastions of aching numbness.

Looking out the window I’d wonder what had become of my life, which, until a short time earlier, had seemed so easy.  And yet this wasteland that had arrived on my doorstep, that insisted on residing in my life with me, was in the final analysis a friendly witness to what God was doing deep inside me.

Some of the newest minutes and seconds were utterly foreign and the hours were often from the pit of hell — hours that were entire days in and of themselves.  One hour could undo a day.  And some days were straight from hell itself.  But I had to find a way of expressing how I felt.  And that deep wish became a miracle manifest in the words that stay with me today.

There were literally a hundred or more heavy days, where my fullest expression seemed never to help, yet, by faith, I continued to engage in the truth of my losses.  I had no choice other than to do what I felt was the only thing that helped.  And realistically, I for one had no choice other than to engage in the grief because denial was not an option for me.

Then I found the truth in this:

Immersed in adversity, faith paddles tenaciously, 
and, in the pool of ambiguity, 
faith swims upstream toward the unseen origin of hope.

~

Rarely, if ever, does sorrow find adequate expression in words, but on the papers I have kept, I see now how those journals did help.

Although sorrow is the hardest thing to capture in words, we must attempt to engage, to make meaning, to traverse the chasm between grief and healing.

When we are suffering, especially when we are suffering, that is the time to engage, to commit to the earnestness of the journey and not flinch in one or more of many manifestations of denial.

I found for me, even as I peer back to those times nearly 20-years ago, there were many ways that I was provided for and protected even though I didn’t always see it at the time.

Faith in the time of trial can deliver us into the clutches of life itself.  We don’t see it at the time.  We see it later.  The key is to keep striding if not stumbling forward. 

Times of trial we may discern something giving us power or peace to carry on, and we don’t know why.  Rather than interrogate the feeling it is best to simply be thankful.  Gratitude does coalesce with suffering, as the time of trial delivers us to humility.

That faithful typewriter delivered me upon a miracle; precious words to that meant much.

Why it’s so hard to talk about grief or mental illness

My nearly 16-year writing career shows that I’m very comfortable sharing quite intimate details of my life, especially my experiences with grief, to a public audience.  My objective for sharing is I want to lead others in hope, in a faith method, and to model vulnerability.

But, and this so often happens, I’ve been curtailed by well-meaning friends who either want to rescue me or give me advice—the latter is ironic given that I’m a pastor and counsellor and I’m the one trying to help others.

I write to help people with the help I’ve received.
I don’t write to be helped.

It is frustrating when people can’t simply read, reflect, be moved, or move on, but they feel they need to reach out and offer a way out of the pain—when, of course, they can’t.  It is emotional bypassing because of THEIR discomfort and not ours, especially when we can SIT in our discomfort.

Sitting in the discomfort is the ultimate 
in spiritual skill when enduring any sort of pain.

Sitting in the discomfort is something many people find incredibly hard.  But ironically, grief teaches us how to do this when we have nowhere else to go but to face the reality of our losses.  The masterstroke and genius of grief is it teaches resilience through adversity.

This is something many people do not understand.  Because they do not understand, they need to rectify the situation for us when we really don’t want them meddling suchlike.  

Those who do not understand cannot be reasoned with; they may have no concept for the “resilience” we really do have.  They have no resources for understanding this, besides they may have their own motives (e.g., makes them feel heroic) for reaching out and insisting they help us.

When Jesus said, “I have food to eat that you do not know about,” in John 4:32, He was remarking about eternal life, and it was a ‘knowledge’ that the disciples knew nothing about at that time.  Just the same, when we have been through mental health struggles or deep grief, those who haven’t experienced those adversities may struggle to relate.  We have food they do not know about.  This is because grief takes us into the eternal reaches of otherness that this world cannot grapple with.

But those who have not wrestled with their 
grief or mental health struggle cannot understand.
They show this via their ignorance.

It is the domain of those 
who cannot sit in their own discomfort 
to offer us swift escape from ours.

The issue here is not just a lack of understanding.  The issue is also very much about the vocal minority of people who insist on “fixing” our “problems” for us.

The key frustration is it’s the last thing most of us want.  We know that it isn’t possible to simply “fix” grief and mental health challenges.  We know and accept this because we know through experience it’s impossible to shoot a magic bullet and slay the dragon.

The paradox that is operational in all this is this: 
the weak are the strong, and 
the supposed strong are the weak.

A person who pretends they are strong by insisting our struggles be fixed, denied, or avoided, cannot bear to think of our suffering, and they certainly can’t enter ours or their own struggles.  They appear strong but are actually weak.

Yet, the person who can bear their weakness, who has learned they can bear it over the months or years, knows that if this can’t kill them it will make them stronger.  Those who bear their weakness and refuse to fix, deny, or avoid it are strong.

See the paradox?  
“WHEN I AM WEAK THEN I AM STRONG,” 
says Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:10.

It is so difficult for those who are suffering grief or mental illness to share because their vulnerability won’t be respected and revered.  This, when in reality anyone coming close to a person suffering grief or mental illness ought to know they step on scared ground.

Those in their struggle are tired and have precious few resources.  Do they waste these resources on those who do not understand and have no interest learning?  No, they don’t.

They know they have experience in life that is like the food Jesus spoke of.  Some people have no idea about the food that opens up another world, because this food involves pain, and they are not about to go there.

Be encouraged all you who are heavy laden because there is access to a rest there that those who have never experienced such heavy burdens do not know exists.

When we have been to hell and back, or perhaps we are willing even though we are only halfway through, we have the desire to share our hope, and the new faith that’s birthed.

We want to pay the wisdom 
we have learned forward. 

Most human beings want to spend what they 
received in their suffering on helping others.

It is sad when there are pockets of our life who resist the love, support, and encouragement we are offering.  This is especially the case when these people pretend they have all of life together.

But, as they say, such is life.
Those who will be helped will receive.

4 reasons leaders contribute to a ‘leaving’ culture

One of the worst things to do is start something new—a new job or vocation—after a really unsavoury experience.  I know this from direct and bitter personal experience.

This is because we can at times be a little tender, and it is always safer to recover from trauma in safe places than potentially toxic ones.  And new environments are FULL of unknowns, which only compound the essential vulnerabilities we can carry from psychologically unsafe experiences.  I could go on but wish instead to redirect.

Here are four reasons leaders contribute to leaving cultures: 

1.             Burnout – tired, jaded leaders have nothing to give themselves let alone others, and their lack of resources is telling in how poorly their relationships are running.  Where there is a lack of vitality, a form of self-protectionism spills forth into seconds and days of one’s life.  It is a blessing to have experienced and recovered from burnout.  It takes us years to recognise it, and at least a year or two to recover.  The leader who is burning out is blessed in their honesty to commence the process of recovery.  The only way is up.  Hope for a burnt-out leader is they are probably not narcissistic, but fall into the opposite trap of taking too much responsibility.  Simply put, leaders must have reserves and resources above and beyond themselves.  Burnout plunders these resources.  Those who are ‘led’ suffer as a direct result.

2.             Non-reflexivity – a killer for all relationships is the inability in a person to examine their own feelings, reactions, and motives.  And it’s one hundred times worse with leaders because of the influence they have (or can/do exert) on/over others.  How do we teach leaders to look within, to learn to take not of their feelings, and importantly to be honest about motives, who are reticent?  The opposite reality, of course, is the leader who navel gazes—theirs is depression for failures they can’t forgive themselves for.  But with navel gazing leaders there is the capacity to enter recourse for decisions and actions in error.  Those who do not reflect and who do not confess and repent of wrongs lose people.

3.             Narcissism... in a word – I know this concept is bandied around too frequently these days.  People engaging in narcissistic behaviour whether they are narcissists or not.  But let’s tag the behaviour without pathologizing the person.  There is a sense of this in anyone, any leader, who lacks empathy, exploits people or situations, and whose attitudes are undergirded by a sense of entitlement.  These leaders inflict incredible trauma that can often ripple through the family unit in those who are victims.  Traumas such as these are not easy to undo—perhaps impossible.  This is why workplaces and churches must bravely do what might be unpopular to deal with such issues.  But the narcissistic leader just finds another environment to exert control, manipulate, and intimidate within.

4.             Ambivalence – this is the unfortunate leader who stands in a time of opportunity but does nothing to utter the prophetic into the public square of organisational culture.  To be clear, the role of prophecy, as opposed to the spiritual gift, is definitely a role of anyone and everyone in leadership; to usher forth truth whether it be listened to or not.  A passive leader contributes to the toxicity of a workplace.  It is in the domain of every human being to speak truth and to simply accept what we cannot change, which to keep within our own personal control—our thoughts, our words, our actions.  Leaders ought to be exemplary human beings.  Leaders must find a way to speak constructive truth.

There is, of course, the reality of some of these four (amid other factors) that collide and collude with one another.

It is good when we come out of such experiences to reflect, to take the time to ponder, to learn, to forgive ourselves, and to forgive others what they do not yet understand.

DISCLAIMER: this commentary is NO reflection of my present personal or vocational circumstances.