Enduring the Worst Day of the Year

COMING around as if it were Groundhog Day is the day of calamity past!

For some it’s Mother’s Day or Father’s day. For others, it’s the anniversary date of a loved one’s death — where we still reel with lonely aberrant longing. For others, again, it’s a date in history that is wished was never part of history.

If there is one date that marks the worst of my life it’s October 4, 2003. (And yet, over a decade on I have only a story of God’s faithfulness to tell. I see that I’m fortunate.)

Every year the same dates and events and milestones come. And they may frustrate us continually, or we deny their power, or we wrestle with them. Some months or seasons can be loathsome, just as some are joyously anticipated.

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How can it be that life has struck us such a cruel blow?

It’s an event of sufficient magnitude to send rushes of sound waves into the future so as to rock impending events. And seemingly we are without control. Not only have we been blindsided in the historic genesis of this pain, we may be backwashed into the corner of a present dilemma of soul. It’s not just one cruel blow; it’s a series.

If we are to settle present events, so as to invest in the down-payment of future poise, we need to revisit those events of past. But we don’t valiantly go there without being vouchsafed with the Presence of God.

Healing Presence, is this about.

Going back there with intention — the intention to be back there safely, and to feel secure in planetary hell — is anticipated and, therefore, some planning and preparation has gone in.

Understanding that God heals us by his Presence — a phenomenon transcending time — because God comes from eternity — we go back there with the full assurance that God is with us; yes, even back in that historical traumatising moment.

It is not the point that God didn’t stop it. God will not work that way. But the Lord was as broken for us as we were. Imagine a perfectly holy God in the midst — as a witness — of such evil! Imagine how God feels about us in our absolute vulnerability, subjected to the tyrannical mess that was, in those horrendous moments, about to sweep over us, to wreak such destruction.

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In the pain, God is with us by his Presence, back in that very moment.

He who has promised in the Ancient of Days to never leave us nor forsake us is eternally with us, and no less in our darkest moments.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

The Paradoxology of Endurance

ENDURANCE can include giving up many times.

In word and deed, actually, I think that that is the very thesis of endurance: the practice of giving up many times, yet to ultimately return once more often.

Endurance is a paradox in practice. The process is not the same as the outcome.

In theory, endurance is the grit that keeps on keeping on. And that’s how we see our path of enduring a groaning path — we only recall the times when we said “Yes!” There were, as a matter of historical fact, almost as many times when we said, “No!” and “I cannot do this!” and “Leave me alone, Lord!” “It’s just too hard!” and “Let me give up.”

We are really very apt to think boldly of our own strength when God’s grace has helped us twofold: 1) we were given strength not of our own; strength from a mystery, and 2) at a later stage, we forgot what we were actually given. And so we take the credit for what God has done.

If we are able to endure it is simply because God helped us take another try at that which we needed to keep trying at. Sometimes we never had the option; we just had to keep at it.

This is a truthful principle:

Endurance, this is true:

To get to breaking point, and there,

Over the cusp and into Despair,

Is the point at which we need to get to.

We achieve nothing of endurance unless we actually break the breach of hope and enter more fully into a suffocating despair; a thing that literally kills our hope at the time. Until we get to the point of giving up we learn nothing and we learn no endurance.

So, giving up is a very important part of the process of curating endurance.

If we don’t ever fall over we never have the opportunity of picking ourselves up again and dusting ourselves off; which is the decision to keep going.

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By faith we will be made stronger,

If we can just learn to hold on a little longer.

By faith we will be made kinder,

If we can be our own soul’s finder.

By faith we will be made wise,

If we don’t give up in our own demise.

By faith we will be taken deeper,

If we will allow ourselves to be a weeper.

By faith we will be made humble,

If we don’t give up when we stumble.

By faith we will execute courage,

When we don’t get too concerned about demurrage.

By faith we have courage enough to care,

And that’s God’s compassion to share.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

As the Soul Looks Into Its Own Loneliness

TEARS streamed down and tears knew not why.  There was a soulish disconnect.  Not soul between soul, but soul within the soul.  The soul cries out to God as a condition of its nakedness.  And naked is the soul that has been stripped bare.  But the soul is on a very good course when it: 1. Is ripped from the grip of the world and from its reliance on its own power and hope, and 2. Comes to rest lowly and in loneliness with God repetitively enough.

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A Poem: Quintessential Questions

Oh lowly and lonely soul,

How would you release your grip?

Over life when it takes its toll,

When life would decide to strip.

Oh lowly and lonely soul,

God, to what would you have me cling?

What now is to be my role?

Do I have any hope within to sing?

***

Only to the person who has been to such soulish depths can a person understand.

This is no soulish snobbery, for what souls wants that distinction.  Even less does a soul who has been through a seriously dark night want that.

Soul confusion attending to the ascension of confounding and perplexing realities; these leave us with these quintessential questions.  And there can verily be no answer that can mute our travail.

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Prayer:

O Lord

When words fail me and when sorrow overwhelms sorrow,

When I cannot rise from the depths of these sheets.

When I can do nothing at all.

Help, when chaos threatens to cause madness.

Help, when the hope of tomorrow is thwarted on waking.

Help, when I have given up hoping and praying and waiting on Your help.

Give me Your grace to sustain my wasted vessel.

Shower me with Your mercy.

Come now.

And help me understand, even as I don’t understand.

Bring me a sense for peace for this situation that can come only from You.

Highlight any way in me that hides or hides me from Your Presence and Your will.

By the Lord Jesus Christ,

My Saviour, My Rock, My Redeemer,

I pray.

AMEN.

Postscript: this article is written from memory — of a dark and ghastly time — but a time, all the same, as I look back now, that was the saving of me.  I have learned not to despise the dark night, but to appreciate the pain and loneliness for what it is.  May the reader be inspired, likewise.  The end of the selfish self is the beginning of the soulish soul.

The Problem of God AND Suffering (Theodicy)

ATTEMPTS to viably answer the prevalence of evil in our world, in the light of a thoroughly good and all-powerful God, have perplexed many, many thousands of suffering people. Believers included.

Here are three truths that prove, in tension, a conundrum: 1. God is all-powerful; 2. God is good; 3. evil is real. Evil leads to suffering.

It is such an enigma to anyone who believes in God that evil seems so often to triumph; this is especially the case when we see that evil is much more visible in our world than God’s all-powerful nature, and God’s goodness (unless we are especially blessed by spiritual sight for these, which we ought to pray for).

How do we resolve the evils in the world in the field of God’s power and goodness?

Evils come by nature — natural disasters — and by morality — those caused by people. God would certainly be implicated in the first, and yet we do not know the purpose of these evils. We may know beyond this life.

But the evils wrought by people into our lives and the lives of our loved ones perplex us; possibly most when so-called good people hurt us (though we are all capable of hurting people).

There is no answer that placates all people in the face of this suffering world, other than a perfectly knowledgeable truth: we cannot understand because we do not yet see it all.

To the problem of suffering, there is peace in this: Lord, help us to understand that we cannot understand.

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Prayer:

Minister to the Suffering, O Lord

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

Breath of the Holy Spirit,

Giver of Life,

Heal.

Provide, Lord, what we cannot do for ourselves.

Make this healing peace the foundation of our being — make this real.

Help us let go of pain.

Help accept the pain that is all too real.

Help make this pain of meaning in the broader expanse of life.

As I accept, this moment, what I hate, make space.

As space is made for new life, make me, O Lord, capable for better.

Purge me of the darkness of evil that assails; bring me through to the light of Your life.

Help us understand, we cannot understand.

Bring us that peace that can come from nowhere but You.

Revive us by Your Word of comfort so our world would not be devoid of You.

By the Lord Jesus Christ,

My Saviour, My Rock, My Redeemer,

I pray.

AMEN.

Blessings of God Right Where You Are

RIGHT where we are, there God is.

Right in our midst — in the struggles and the strains — there our Lord is. He is present. He has promised to never leave us nor forsake us. God is not in the practice of foreclosing on his promises. Where he has promised to be is filled with his goodness.

And it’s there we find our place of reality — in the liminal space — of our momentary situation. With all its problems.

Bringing two cosmoses together — the fact of God’s Presence, and the existential issue of our problematic realities — we have a dichotomy. Is God’s Presence so impotent to not regard our situations and not solve them?

When we think that God exists to bless us we come at God from the wrong direction.

Yet, it is true that if we are to be blessed it will occur right where we are.

Where God is present, where God has a role as witness and Lord over our circumstances, we can assume one thing with great assurance: it is God’s will that we wrestle with the truth of our circumstances so as to accept those truths in order to be set free. (Read John 8:31-32 in this way.)

What are we being set free from?

From the shock of how life is. From the anger that hijacks our peace. From the lies of bargaining a way out of our own life. From the lack of resilience against which depression would detain us in prevailing weakness.

We are only set free when we abide in Jesus (verse 31 of John 8) — which is to be a disciple of him and his teaching. Such an abiding is a wrestling with apparent dichotomies where there is no ‘pat’ answer that bears the name, “truth.”

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Jesus sets us free when we accept the truth embedded in our current realities.

We are set free from anxiety, idealism, grief, and an external locus of control, not to name many others.

Only as we accept where God has us are we able to receive the good news: blessing is at hand.

Behold, God is in our midst! Look, through our eyes! Feel, breath enter our lungs!

Just three there are above in an infinite range of gifts that God rolls out to us every day.

Now we meet two present realities that collide every moment: God is present everywhere and his blessing is all around.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.

15 Definitions of Contemplation

FREEDOM comes at a cost, but such a concept of freedom has its own benefit. It’s the space within that awkward place of our soul’s that are wrought as divided, called liminal space.

Freedom’s paradox is that it is found in the place we are apt to run from!

Freedom is available only as we stand apart from ourselves.

Freedom is the by-product of a greater contemplation that takes our lives from existing to transcending.

Now we enter true contemplation.

Here are some disconnected and autonomous thoughts on what contemplation is:

1.     Contemplation is stepping out of the world into eternity whilst in the backyard of your own mind.

2.     Contemplation is drawing aside the flurry of life, to look to the left or right, and there see Jesus.

3.     Contemplation is being, for a time, invisible and inaccessible, happily watching the world spin and toil.

4.     Contemplation is knowing nothing in a moment — direct from a state of knowledge, where knowledge has value, to unknowing through seeking to unknow everything.

5.     Contemplation is the inexplicable grace of God through the losing of everything transitory for the gaining of the things of eternality.

6.     Contemplation is rest that forsakes leisure, laziness and luridness, for the untold features of the Spirit known eternally now, beyond the world.

7.     Contemplation is craziness in the quiet, stillness in torment, and the opposite of our response to things that tend to anger us.

8.     Contemplation is everything we cannot do in and of ourselves, where a true contemplation is a gift of God; an absolute miracle.

9.     Contemplation is reading a book by reading ourselves into the fissures of the metadata of the story, and, in that, God speaking to us.

10. Contemplation is taking a walk in the park, a swim in a river, or a drive down a lonely highway.

11. Contemplation is where God speaks and we listen; it’s where we have nothing to give and we are in the position only to receive.

12. Contemplation is a long warm hug when our souls are empty, three deep breaths between gear changes, and a trip to the bathroom during the early hours.

13. Contemplation is the grace extended to humanity in order for a human to again become human.

14. Contemplation is feeling to complement faith, hope that comes to mean happiness, and contentment even in the midst of calumny.

15. Contemplation is everything our whole lives ever needed to know, communicated in one nanosecond.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.

We Are History Makers – Whether It’s Accepted Or Not

EACH of us is writing our own history book, a day per page. Whether we write truth or a lie today, history will record our stories faithfully. Do we want to be known as persons of integrity or charlatans? We make that choice each and every day by the decisions we make in our relationships. Nobody gets to write their version of history.

Such truth makes us account for our day, our actions, our carefree words, and our silly deeds of indifference and laxity.

Negligence has a lot to answer for. So does pride. Too many moments in too many days we fall for Satan’s lie that life is unimportant; that we can get away with blue murder as if nobody’s looking.

Well, the universe looks on. Sort of like a cosmic version of Big Brother, we can imagine the starry host knowing the intimacy of our word and deed if God knows the grains of the sand he put into their place.

We get away with nothing.

We are writing the page of our day even as we contemplate how to get into something or get out of another thing. Our human condition is reprehensible, yet we have the ability to rise out of our slumber.

The page that is written is history, and yes, tomorrow’s a mystery, just as much as the present is. We inform that mystery quite persuasively. We are not without influence. Indeed, as we decide how we will use the moment before us, not only are we writing it as we go, we are also making our day a living hell or a joy replete with bliss. It’s up to us and nobody else.

Who in their right mind allows the pages of history to write them as a greedy narcissist? The one who does not believe they will be called to account. How does a person with an integrity problem sleep at night? They don’t really believe in the nature of history — what is true in secret will become true before God one day.

We cannot hide and we are foolish if we think we can.

Yet some still take the risk.

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We really do have the opportunity today to make the difference only we can, today. We are history makers. We are writing the page in live-time. We are on God’s time and we are supervised. It’s wise to imagine everything we do is seen.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.