Prayer for seeking the face of God

Life is made more simple and good
if only we honour what’s right
resisting the battle to flee and to fight
living as only we should.

O God of my best rest, who supplies only what replenishes me, in direct correspondence with my willingness to face truth, even as I seek Your face, knowing I cannot look at You without seeking truth, encourage me now by helping me to dispel anything that denies reality.

Thank You, Lord, that in facing You, in seeking Your face, that You shine Your face on me.

Thank you, also, for showing me the folly of turning away from You, of dissociating from You when I enter temptation for sin.

Thank you that I can only face You when I know I’m right in Your eyes; when I’m seeking Your face.

Help me to recognise when I am turning away from You, and I’m about to enter a great and heinous sin.  Help me to see my shame and guilt that is before me, for what they are and for what they represent, in not being able to face You.  Help me to know that in not facing You I am hiding, and in my hiding, I am sinning not only the against you, but against myself, not to mention others.  Help me to remain convinced that turning away from You only causes harm.  Help me to see that there is no joy, no peace, no hope, no courage, and no freedom in hiding from Your face.

Show me, even as I seek Your face, living out the truth the best I know how in the moment, without needing to hide, that this is the direct path to Your power and to the experience of gratitude.

Show me, even as I embody the truth and the truth embodies me within my mortal being, that such a position of gratitude helps me to say YES to Your leading when I otherwise might shrink, through cowardice or pride or laziness or some other temptation of turning away.

Show me, in this moment afresh, the incredible wisdom in seeking Your face.  Show me that this is how I enter the narrow gate.  Show me how You hide me beneath Your wings when I covet the truth jealously.  And show me how this is the totality of Your will for me — You abiding in me as I abide in You.  Thank you that as I attach to You, I enjoy a Garden-of-Eden experience.

Confirm to me, each waking moment, Lord, of the centrality of truth, and of seeking Your face, and of committing and recommitting to the truth, over and over, and how this is my divine workmanship, my covenant worship, my ascribing to You, Your worth in my life.

Thank you, that as I remain in the truth, that as I reside in the lap of your will, that I’m safe from the designs of the enemy, that there, in seeking Your face, You shine Your face upon me and give me peace.

Thank you in the name of Jesus!

AMEN.

This is a disciple’s prayer that when prayed acknowledges all power comes from God, but only when we humble ourselves to the truth which sees us able to face God.  We can only face God when we know we’re abiding in the truth; otherwise we hide, and in hiding we can have no part in God because we have chosen to separate ourselves from God, not the other way around.  God faces toward us eternally in Jesus.

Photo by Bobby Johnson on Unsplash

Dealing with those Depressed Days

As I looked through the pages of an old journal from 2008, I was astounded as to how many red flags there were. Green flags for good days. Red flags for bad days. Some days are so bad there is nothing written in those pages. Like I’d vanished from my life. Other red flag days I was overwhelmed, swept up in busyness, agitation, complaint, and the need to escape. Other red flag days there were external issues I couldn’t handle, perhaps the struggles my children have had — aged 16, 13, 10 at the time. Still other days I was just unsettled in my spirit and confused beyond belief, full of a mental fog that would not lift for hours. Of course, some days were full of fear-and-frustration-intuiting conflict. And some days I was just so sick of myself for one or a couple of many reasons. There were so many red flag days in that year, but there are possibly many red flag days in every year (and still we get through), just as there are very many green flag days, but we hardly fear those. We are more likely to take those for granted. Or, be thankful for the sweet breeze of reprieve.

In a monthly pattern of life, these days, there are at least two single days where I feel flat. Where there is no hope nor life nor reason, and all vision of positivity simply vanishes. I put these experiences down to a mix of spiritual warfare, an unbalanced focus on my desires, and perhaps the return of past hurts and disappointments, as they fleetingly dare to dash punitively across my psyche from my memory.

Some of these days it’s just a few hours. Rarely are these days consecutive. And still I hate smiling and lying about how I feel. It makes me more depressed, and yet if I know the person well enough who is before me, I aim to trust them in being honest about how I feel. I cannot add to their burden, of course, but I do recognise that many people are encouraged to know, that as a helping person, I too have my own fragilities. Most if not all of us do.

No matter what you do,
and no matter how you feel,
what you do and what you feel,
are okay any way.

Let nobody take this away from you.

But try not to attack people because you, yourself, are low. Have the courage to be honest. Be vulnerable. We never know when our vulnerability will be an encouragement to someone. It’s always a good surprise to discover that. When we’re honest, we’re more likely to experience the empathy of friends and strangers alike. If you share with someone and they do not get you, try not to allow that to be license to spiral further downward. Adjust your expectations. In rejecting your invitation to know you more, which is a holy trust, they are the ones with the problem, not you.

If we have issues with our mental health, we have more community around us than we know, for we are all ‘normal’ until you get to know us. Think of the pedestal we put people on before we get to know them. Know them and we relax, and so do they. We don’t know who is struggling in our midst. And even those we look up to do not have the dream life that we often think they have.

Embrace the fact that life is an up-and-down exercise of endurance. It is easy for no one. Everyone finds life tough occasionally. And there is much more anxiety in the normal run of life than we ever realise.

So the wind of change occasions the opportunity — be much of peace even if depressed.  Things won’t be down forever.

Image: of journal pages tabbed green and red.

Denial doesn’t work, nor does raging about loss, so what does?

Life is perplexing for a reason.  That short six-worded statement would seem unhelpful if only we had no way of reconciling it.  But we do have a way to deal with what occurs to us; the traumatic events of life that leave their impression upon our bodies and minds.

We know denial doesn’t work, and if anything, it only prolongs the agony whilst we engage in behaviours that further complicate the grief we experience.

We know that raging about it doesn’t work either.  Have any of us ever felt more at peace having taken our anger out on something or someone?  It can often be a temptation to justify that behaviour, but truly it doesn’t lead us in the right direction.

There has to be another way for adequately treating the losses we experience, particularly those ones that we find have been traumatic.  How do we bring our bodies to peace and our minds to a satisfactory order?

Rather than responses of fight or freeze or flight we are invited into function.  All we want to do when we’re stuck in fight or freeze or flight is to be able to function again.

Amid the turmoil of loss, it’s such a temptation to panic, to lose it, to say to hell with it all, or to avoid, run, depart. To the worst extremes, temptation exudes power, convincing us its way is right.

So the temptations of attack and escape never work out. The third way is the only way. The third way is to believe in the narrative spoken deep into our heart of a hope that can transpire if only we give God the room to move, to work, to gently and patiently grow something from nothing.

It seems nothing will ever work out.  I know this.  I’ve been there.  I’ve tasted that kind of season twice in the past sixteen years, and both times I had to insist on holding to the vision God had given me of redemption. In both cases, redemption took three years to the day (which I’m not suggesting is the way it will be for others, just that God has shown me divine faithfulness to this level of specificity.)

Let me take you deeper.  Both times, my worst year was absolutely foundational and pivotal, but only as I looked back with the wisdom of hindsight.  I was fortunate in one sense, that the first of these times I did sense that every time I gave something up materially, I was somehow blessed spiritually — that God was faithful to the degree that I was rewarded spiritually even in the dearth of a calamitous season.

We can only hope when our hope is shattered, because hope is all we have, recalling what the Bible says; faith is the expression of a hope that is unseen but believed upon.  It is totally foreign to not believe in our hope, and the effect is it makes us into tyrants of a temptation’s manipulation.  So we hope or we despair.  That’s not much of a choice.

None of us, backs pushed against the wall, willingly go the third way, which is to reject the overtures of temptation to run and hide or attack from unsteady footing.  But we must overcome the grappling desire to have things righted our way, in our time, exactly to the degrees of comfort and satisfaction we demand.  Whoever got what they wanted from life simply by demanding it?  Life doesn’t work like that.

See how that’s a good desire; to have justice done; to have our day of redemption; to be restored.  God wants to restore us, but when we get in the way of the passage of divine grace, we destroy the Lord’s plan — thankfully, our Lord is patient, and none of us have cooperated anywhere near perfectly.  Yet it works out for our good and for God’s purpose.

In the between time, we must continue to hunt with the passion of the truth-bearer, honestly sacrificing, through godly sorrow, our own desires for the better will of God, who wants the best for us, but in ways we hardly reckon are even good.

We must stick with God, trusting divine purpose in the madness of moments we have no control over.  Sure, we must stay safe and not be around toxic people.  God blesses our healing when we strip away negative influences that only goad us into reacting and wrong responding.  We cannot recover if others continually assert themselves abusively.  We do need a clear way.

Trusting in the reality of our own redemption story is believing upon a hope that seems strangely disconnected from what even seems possible, but which is in fact intrinsically and divinely connected, and which must surely come to pass.

Remember we’re dealing in the realm of God, and God is in the business of doing the impossible.  Believe upon the ‘impossible’, be steadfast and true, and God will do it.  This is how towers of faith are built.  Only by seeing happen what is done that we can’t do.

Simply allow the Lord to do what only God can do, and it will be done, even if it takes a significant period of time.

Be as faithful as you can be in the meantime.

Photo by Wes Grant on Unsplash

Until we have met compassion, we cannot truly love ourselves or others

It happens in a moment and we hardly ever recognise what’s going on in our bodies.  We are usually so distracted or absorbed by life that we cannot feel what our soul begs us to feel.  And even if we did feel it, we commonly either reject it or deny it.  We far too commonly think that entering into our felt experience of life will be too costly or that it won’t benefit us enough.  In other words, we don’t think it would be worth it.

Could it just be, however, that we are missing the vital ingredient that would heal our lives, if only we imbibed life’s elixir?  Might it be the case that we need this elixir to be loved and to love others?

What on earth is this elixir, you may ask?  It is compassion.  It is a spiritual feeling of having been encountered, met, endorsed, validated, sponsored, encouraged, healed.

We may do it for ourselves, but truly if we don’t do it, we can never love other people as we are called to love them.

“We love, because God loved us first,” (1 John 4:19) but if we have not experienced this love, we cannot truly love others with the divine love that we ourselves have not yet received from God.  We need to taste and touch it first, and God’s love — God’s Presence — is felt in compassion.  God knows more than we do how much we need God.  And God’s compassion is founded on the principle that God knows our poverty intimately — how much we struggle with sin, which makes us hard to love, because (deeper down) we don’t feel worthy of love.  BUT, of course, we are.  Love equals Jesus Christ.

We need compassion, but compassion is like a ship passing silently on glassy waters in the night.  Compassion will ever evade us if we are ever evading it.

Our default is to haphazardly negotiate the bumpy passage of life, anxiously expecting snares at every turn, never truly realising that every one of those snares is an opportunity — to know ourselves better, to know more of God’s unique purpose, to experience God’s compassion deep within ourselves, so much so to feel the divine love for ourselves — that God is in love with every aspect of creation — in order that we may pass that divine love on.  God knows we need to know God’s love, so we can offer that divine love to others.

If only we can meet ourselves, and be comfortable in our own pain, even though that sounds barbaric, then, having experienced the love of God in our mortal bodies in such a personal way, then we are able to pay that love forward into other’s lives.

We cannot pass on what we know nothing about.

We must be able to suffer with ourselves, feeling the divine empathy, before we can suffer with others, where they experience a taste of divine compassion.  And this is more poignant than ever in these COVID-19 times.  Our needs and the needs of others, both tangible and intangible, are closer to the surface than ever.  Stress abounds upon stress even as we relate with others who are also stressed.  No wonder conflict occurs in a flash or continues unabated.  The easiest thing in the world to do these days is to go about offending people.

We must get back to the very basics of meeting our own bodies and enjoying the psychospiritual connection only we can establish with ourselves when encountering God.

In doing this with a mind for God in prayer, we begin to know the divine, as much as we experience compassion more intimately than ever.  This is much different to self-love, which might as well be self-pleasure, but the divine love is something that comes from outside of us even as it works deeply within.

This divine love is probably best considered a supernatural compassion where we know beyond doubt that we are accepted by God unconditionally.

If we want to love others well, to the best of our ability, we must love them with a divine love, and we can only love them with a divine love when we have been loved by the divine.

Photo by Laura Gilchrist on Unsplash

If you’re struggling more than normal, you’re not alone

Since about late February or early March, depending on the region of the world you live in, and depending on your family circumstances, and depending on whether you or your loved ones or friends were in different countries before COVID-19 hit, you can imagine feeling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually different than ever before.

What was slated to be a long grind certainly is not underwhelming in that regard. The rates of infection in various parts of the world are still alarming, and certain parts of the world are now experiencing some form of second wave, if in fact it isn’t the continuation or dregs of the first wave.

Within the three-pronged threat of COVID-19 (the medical, the social, the economic — all crises of massive proportions in their own right) there are all the hallmarks of a long-term crisis that can undo any of us, in several kinds of ways, at any point in time, from before now until whenever.

It may seem such an obvious thing to say, but if you are struggling more than normal, you are not alone.  In some ways this can sound like, “Don’t worry about it, because you’re not the only one.”  This is not what I mean to communicate.  I hope it is of great encouragement to you to know that if you’re not coping at the present moment, or if you’ve been overwhelmed, or at some future point you become overwhelmed, it is understandable, acceptable, and okay, even though you will hate feeling that way.

Massive change brings massive loss,
and in turn that creates massive grief.

There is no shame in feeling completely inadequate.  Many others are feeling the same way.  If you feel guilty for letting your family down, even if you know that feeling guilty makes no sense to you, give way to the absurdity of not knowing how to comprehend what’s going on.  There is no way we can comprehend the reason or the rationale for the present world situation.  Peace can come when we begin to admit that the problems we face are beyond comprehension.  Peace and maturity come from acceptance.  Work toward it.

We are in this together, and there are very many around the world who will either admit their overwhelm or deny it.  For those who deny it, we can understand their fear, even if we know it isn’t the best way.  But at least we can understand.  For those who are beside themselves with worry or anger, we pray simply that they would get the support that they need, so they can get through this period and be there for their loved ones.

If I assume that you are struggling with a level or several levels of inexplicable angst, my prayer is that you will be gentle with yourself, and able to simply acknowledge that you are doing the best you can, and one day at a time that is good enough.  You will get through this one day at a time.  Don’t expect too much of yourself.  Give yourself time and space and make some good things a priority.  Ensure that you have two or three things to look forward to every week.  This will give you hope and joy in your spirit, and peace will be the byproduct.  Also, make time to go deeper in your relationship with God.  Indeed, God is met in the mystery of now.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Revamping by understanding how to recover when emotional vampires exhaust you

I’m always amazed by how even a single word fires off something in my brain to connect with material that is already swirling around, which in turn connects to a concept to write about.  I’m a reluctant writer most of the time.  I would prefer to be doing my ‘ministry’ in other ways.  But such is life.

So, here’s the thought.  The word “revamp” reminds me of a concept I’ve been thinking on a lot of late.  Several of those who I’ve seen over the time I’ve counselled have battled with emotional vampires; those people who tend to suck lifeblood out of them.  These instances of vampirism, though they have proven exhausting, are also revelatory, if we will go down within ourselves to listen, to learn, to resolve.

I think I’ve received a four-stage process for inquiry that may help us in our method for revamping when we’ve been ‘vamped’: up, down, in, out.

§     up to God in faith that God has a method to heal and restore us.  

§     down then to our innermost parts...

§     in order to go in... deeply, through the process of inquiry

§     as a way of coming out... with revelation that God has for us.

I don’t know if that helps, but it seems a useful process to put out there at this point.

People-situations where we may be or feel vamped:

§     people who demand more of our time than we’re able or prepared to give, whether they openly insist upon this or not

§     people who we love but whom continuously bring contentious, even unsolvable issues

§     situations that involve too much time pressure to do something

§     situations that compromise our ability to do other things

§     situations that compromise our relationships

§     situations that require the compromise of our standards of what is right

§     situations that compromise what would be our boundaries – that force us to consider boundaries

§     people who continuously won’t take no for an answer

Ways in which we may be revamped having been vamped:

§     identify when it’s occurred...

o   the circumstances, including the environment where we may have surrendered our safety (or been required to surrender our safety)

o   the person or people, and what they demanded of us, and whether they demanded of us in an intentional or an insistent way or not

§     assess the methods of vamping that have exhausted us – especially those that present dire future risk

§     ask if there’s any way we may protect ourselves better in future

§     explore the methods we can use to recover from the exhaustion we may experience

§     be open to ideas around how our own neediness might have contributed to the process of our being vampirised – it’s okay to admit this, because we can’t improve if we’re not honest

§     be compassionate toward those ones who vamp us who will have no idea about the effect they have on us

§     be disciplined and purposeful toward those who may have every idea that they’re entitled to vamp us

§     be ready to inculcate upon the concept of owning the learning moment to protect ourselves in today’s energy market

§     investigate the actual costs of allowing someone to vampirise us

§     be aware of the hidden moments where we become unknowingly vampirised, and realise too late afterwards

§     pray for the insight to develop boundaries

§     pray for the courage to institute boundaries

Photo by László Glatz on Unsplash

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