Lamentations 3:22

I talked recently with a woman I’d worked with previously, but whom I hadn't seen for years since I’d left the Institution we both worked for.  She still worked there and was interested in what I’d been doing since leaving (as was I interested to hear from her).

She knew I’d been bullied at this place, and she knew my son had died in the middle of it all.

She was very compassionate and really listened to my sad tale of how I’d had to resign because 

I couldn't go back to such a workplace, with the added burden of grief I was carrying.

Still, she entreated me “But you should have fought back Susan;  you should have stood up for yourself”.

But I knew I couldn't. I knew it at the time, and I know it now. 

As we talked though, I became conscious of really wanting to leave the angst of the bullying, behind.  There was so much anxiety at the time;  so much resentment of the injustice of it.

But I really felt that, not only did I not want to go back there now, in my head, but that my heart (at least as far as the bullying was concerned) was healed and I could no longer “feel” the anger, helplessness anxiety and betrayal which I’d faced, alone, back then. 

I was conscious of wanting to leave it where it rested – in the past. There was no grudge carefully nursed;  no path of bitterness wreaking havoc through my peace of mind.

I think God has healed me.  He truly does enable us to overcome our circumstances.

God can really transform us with His love and compassion – as long as we keep giving over the rubbish stuff to Him. ‘Consumed” is a terrible word when it’s applied to those negative reactions which threaten our spiritual and emotional well-being – you can’t be close to God when you are consumed by anger or bitterness or self-pity.  When these things hold power over you, God presence is subsumed by them.

But having said that, if you've been hurt or wronged very badly by someone, you can’t just put it away, without working through what happened and what you feel.  Those powerfully tenacious emotions like anger and rancour don’t give up without a fight! 

But they have to be dealt with or they fester and grow.  Pretending you don’t feel them doesn't disable them either.

But God, through His transforming presence and mercy, can take them from our struggling, burdened souls and we are not consumed by them. We keep giving them up to His redemptive power and He keeps tempering them, dissolving them until their power over us is gone.

Rather, the negative destructive forces are themselves transformed in us, by God’s astonishing power to work evil things to our good, and the very circumstances and hurts which threaten to consume us, give us empathy for others who have been similarly hurt and diminished. Not only that, but this grace enables us to pray for those who have hurt us, and when this point is reached, God’s power is set to work to redeem and heal the other also.

God’s power knows no bounds when it is released by our obedient application of His precepts in our lives, even in the face of pain and suffering.

This promise of grace holds us in dignified and ever-renewing strength – that of allowing God to heal and transform us, so that we are never consumed by anything which happens to us in this life.

Amazing.

Self Esteem... a different approach

Many of you will be familiar with the traditional folk song “There is a ship”.  One of the verses goes like this:  There is a ship, and it sails the sea, it’s loaded deep, as deep can be;  but not as deep as the love I’m in;  I know not if I sink or swim”. 

There have been many times in my life, when I have been so desperate, so downcast, so despairing, that I didn’t know if I was sinking or swimming.  In fact, there have been years on end in my life, when I was only just keeping my head above water, in every sense of the word;  emotional, physical, spiritual and mental. And I want to tell you, very briefly, how I emerged from this dungeon into the sunlight of the best self-esteem I’ve had in my life.

A big cause of all this angst was my marriage breakdown.  God has created us all with a unique “self” – a blueprint of who we are, and it’s one of the most precious things we are given.  Lots of things build on that blueprint – life experience, parents, friends, even place.  To have that crushed and manipulated and denied, is a terrible thing.  This is what my husband tried to do to me over many years. He did it by alternate, deliberate episodes of carefully crafted apparent care, thoughtfulness and love, then terrible vengeance, deliberate hurting, rejection and dominating criticism. This emotional blackmail is a terrible form of control and destruction. It leaves the victim anxious, demoralized, bewildered. In those final, terrible days, before he left, there was only a fragment of my self left.  My ex husband took it, trampled on it and walked away.  It left a great hole in my inner being which was spent, empty, unrequited;  a wasteland of broken reeds; a mourning which was unsoothed and uncomforted. But I don’t want to dwell on that. To be fair to him, I don’t think he realized he was doing it.  He was acting out his own terrible form of selfish instability and rebellion.  I never understood why he felt he had to treat me in this way, or even more, why he went on to treat our children in this way too. I don’t care any more;  it’s no longer important.  But when he found, after 17 years of marriage, that he  couldn’t be the complete keeper of my soul, mind and spirit, he threw me away. After all that, one of the last things he said to be was “you were never good enough”.  Yet, here I am today stronger, self-reliant and with a much larger, more defined and healthier self esteem than I’ve ever had.  How can that be? So after all that rejection and anguish, how can I possibly stand here and tell you about self-esteem? There are many paths to self-esteem;  indeed self-esteem is a multi-layered thing, existing in our personal thoughts about ourselves, our ability to relate to people and our ability to perform our jobs. It’s influenced by many things, not the least of which is our experience in childhood, especially from our parents.

We tend to think these days that self esteem is given by how we look, the kind of job we do, the sort of car we drive, our place in the community, and especially by how much money we have.  The more of all these we have, the better we should feel about ourselves.  Thus says the media, the motivation gurus, our  society, even our friends.  

Here I am;  someone with none of the generally accepted requirements for self-esteem.  I have no status (in fact, I have what I call anti-status, because I’m a single parent).  I perform an essential but mind-numbingly ordinary job; I have no wealth;  I drive a fairly  old car and up to a few years ago, I lived in a fibro house.  In the world’s eyes, I have failed at marriage.  I should feel bad about myself.   But still, despite these things, there has been this rising of self-worth, like a clear calm stream; an awareness of true self-worth, falling on my battered senses, with the cadence of a beautiful and serene melody.

How can it be that my sense of worth increased, rather than decreased? Let me share with you just a few things I’ve learned:  And we could spend ages on this topic but let me give you just two.

1 Bring all that happens to you, to the cross of Jesus. I had to try and understand why it was that this man could treat me like a doormat.  It was not a pleasant process and it took years of prayer and pondering and ploughing through my life, my attitudes, my Christian beliefs. I knew I had lots of very good qualities in my character, but I also learned how vulnerable I was to people who would bully and hurt me.  To be absolutely honest, one aspect of the Christian ethic, (ie wives should be submissive to their husbands) if taken the wrong way, can breed a terrible sort of man, and they will always be drawn to a woman who takes the “treat others better than yourself” verses more to heart. But I don’t want to dwell on these verses, but rather on our working with God, to  achieve all that he wants for us and for his glory.

What is important is to be honest before God, and bring him all that’s happened to us, and ask him to help us cope with it.  Some people find this difficult and perhaps if we didn’t have times of suffering, we would never be forced to look deep into our own hearts and discover all the imperfections there.  People who are not self-aware are the worst kind of selfish people.  They deny their faults and blunder through life, hurting anyone who gets in their way.  Jesus loves us no matter what faults we have, and when we become aware of them, he is able to heal us.  One pitfall of examining ourselves is that we can get stuck in it and become too introspective and become overwhelmed with what’s happened to us.  If you only look at this aspect, you’ll trudge down the steps of self pity and it will become harder to trudge back up again into the light of healing.  You need to be kind to yourself but not self-indulgent.  You have to be willing to get to know yourself, warts and all, and in the presence of God, allow him to begin a healing process. God’s strength is made perfect in weakness.  Listen to 2 Cor 12:9-10. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2  Make God’s precepts your own value system and stick to them, no matter how others treat you. The getting of true self-esteem involves more than just pampering ourselves, and stroking our own ego;  it has nothing to do with positive self-talk (although that has it’s place);  it has nothing to do with retail therapy;  it has nothing to do with power over others;  it has nothing to do with the house we live in or our address.  It has nothing to do with “things” at all. Rather, it requires a personal resolve to stay true to our own value system, when it would be easier to cop out and behave with no personal integrity.  It requires digging deep into who we are, building a set of values, and living according to those values.  It requires conviction, courage and tenacity to stay true to our value system, when life’s unkind face would have us compromise and behave less gallantly. 

When we resolve to face the ravages of life with goodwill and a strong desire to do the right thing, as dictated by our own value system;  When we behave with personal integrity despite the injustices, the hardships, the terrible jostling of our souls;  when we  endeavour and endure with our own set of ideals when it would be far easier to give in and become lesser people,  we reap the reward of a quiet, growing confidence that we matter, that we can achieve; that we are people  who can face some of the storms of life and emerge stronger. We like who we are.  We have earned our own respect. This is why God commands us to live this way.  Priceless treasure.

For the Christian, this goes against all the worldly advice about self esteem.  Bless those who curse you.  Forgive those who wronged you.  Pray for those who spitefully use you.  Can you imagine the corporate world giving this advice to their people?  But, when we do this, we are changed;  we learn to value what’s happened to us less, but value ourselves more. Where’s the sermon I did about as we do God’s precepts we are changed? 

The other less travelled path to self esteem is the old fashioned notion of living with regard to how we treat others.  This goes against all the modern preaching about demanding MY rights, pursuing MY dream, protecting MY interests, grabbing as much money and status for MYSELF as I possibly can.  Could it be that this kind of thing actually encourages bad self-esteem?  Depression, which has connections to self-esteem, is almost to epidemic proportions in this country.  Could it be that we’ve lost sight of a nobler belief system which values how we treat others and nurtures  our own personal self respect at the same time?

What if the very fabric of our self-esteem has nothing to do with money or class?  I mean the very deep-down blueprint of what makes us who we are and how we value ourselves.  Money, status, power;  these are outward things, imposed or gained, or given or worked for, or even taken.  These are open to decay by shifting fortune, illness, chance even.  These things… status and power are so closely linked to wealth.  And wealth is such a fickle, deceitful thing.  Wealth is fool’s gold.

What if true self-esteem grows out of something less tangible, yet more within our control?  We can choose our own value system;  we can choose to follow it.  It’s the following of it when it would be easier not to, which ploughs the ground of our character, and produces a great crop of the beautiful flowers of self-value.  For me, there will always be a little wasteland of barren ground inside me, which is my divorce and other painful things. We all have these patches of wasteland inside us. But there is also a verdant garden of these beautiful flowers, and they will always self-seed, as long as I continue to water them with the living out of my personal value system. 

This holding on to God and His precepts in times when the world wants to kick our heads, is what makes us strong;  it’s like a quiet, life-changing journey… I call it a low miracle.  God is able to take something so negative and so destructive and turn it into an unbreakable confidence in His power;  a sense of self which is not selfish, but whole and  strong and nourished;  it’s this kind of self esteem which can put others’ needs first, without feeling down trodden;  it can develop healthy relationships with others because it’s not super sensitive to criticism.  It can assert it’s right to be treated properly, without feeling guilty.  It doesn’t come from asserting our rights, it comes from living out God’s precepts in the face of what others do to us. 

If someone says to us “you were never good enough”, what would God have us do?  The easy answer is hate that person and use every means available, even our children, to get back at that person.  It’s would be very easy to plunge into recrimination and self justification.  But what does God bid us do?  The answer is one of the hardest things you’ll ever be asked to do.  It’s Bless those who curse you and spitefully use you;  it’s “do not return evil for evil”, it’s “turn the other cheek” and most importantly, it’s “forgive those who’ve wronged you, as Christ as forgiven you”.  This is not easy and there will be hills and vallerys;  the road will be rough and stony, but I guearantee, when you obey God’s word in the face of what people do to hurt you or dominate you, it will be a road that leads to a new confidence, a sense of self-worth which is deep and powerful , not based on the world’s fake, skin-deep offering sof “Your’re worth it” or “it’s all about me”.

What to do when things go wrong; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Lamentations3:19-26

I’m sure all of you will be familiar with the books “Anne of Green Gables”.  Perhaps the blokes won’t be so familiar with them, but I bet some of the ladies will have read them when they were girls.  Or, the younger generation may have watched the TV movie of the books, made in the 80’s.  My girls loved this;  they watched it over and over.  I too, loved it.  I love a good, happy ending. There’s a bit in the start of that where Anne (who is the heroine) and prone to catastrophe, says to Marilla, who adopts her from the Orphanage where she has spent her early childhood years. Anyway, in this scene, Marilla and Anne are heading off up the stairs after some disaster or other in which Anne has been to blame.  Anne says to Marilla, something like “that’s what I like about going to bed;  when you wake up there’s a new morning, with no mistakes in it yet”. 

And that’s a truth which can serve us well too.  In a way, it’s almost a paraphrase of the reading from Lamentations 3: 19-26.  Let me just read you these few verses again “The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall.  My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.  But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope;  The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The verses in the whole book of Lamentations must be some of the most harrowing in the bible.

Listen to this from Chapter 1: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see.  Is any suffering like my suffering,  that was inflicted on me,  that the LORD brought on me  in the day of his fierce anger? "From on high he sent fire,  sent it down into my bones.  He spread a net for my feet  and turned me back.  He made me desolate,  faint all the day long. "My sins have been bound into a yoke;  by his hands they were woven together. They have come upon my neck and the Lord has sapped my strength.  He has handed me over  to those I cannot withstand.

These are harrowing words;  the writer of them was in a desolate and miserable place.  We’d rather not go there;  it’s too awful;  too uncomfortable.  But life is a precarious and fickle thing;  it rains on the just and the unjust and we wouldn’t be part of humanity if we didn’t experience times when we feel that everything goes wrong, and life becomes difficult;  when the fat hits the fan. If life gets tough enough, we might even question if God really cares for us at all.  It would be natural to do that; the writer of Lamentations did it;  the writer of many of the Psalms also experienced this kind of doubt.

It can be a time when our Sunday School idea of a loving shepherd, always looking after us, is shattered.  It doesn’t make sense;  we have all this bad stuff going on in our lives and where is God.  Why isn’t He doing something?  Why isn’t he picking us up and making it all better?  What do we do when we experience this kind of upheaval?  How do we cope with the difficult stuff? 

I’d like to give you just 4 things we can do:

 

1        The first is we can keep going.  There are heaps of references in the bible about perseverance and endurance:

1 Timothy 4:16:  Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.
Hebrews 10:36:  You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.
James 1:12:  Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
James 5:11:  As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered.

I guess this means that sometimes we just have to put our nose to the grindstone and doggedly keep going; to make up our mind to persevere.  We put our feet on the worn path we know, and we walk it, even when we don’t want to.  You might have to do this, for example, when you have young children who need your care and guidance.  I’m sure there were times when my kids were little when I’d much rather have been out in the garden or lazing on the beach, but that wouldn’t have done them much good. There are times in our lives when life will be a slog.   But listen to the verses in Lamentations… God’s mercy is new to us each morning.  His refreshment is always ready to revive us. And keeping on keeping on doesn’t mean we can’t tell God what we feel.  Is our life difficult and fraught with sorrow or hardship?  Keep going, but tell God you’re sick of it;  tell God you wish it was different;  tell God how hard it is.  Remember his mercy and faithfulness are always there. Keep your spiritual eye on Jesus, the perfector of our faith.  He is our example and friend.  Imagine that you are following his lead, placing your feet in the imprint of his footprint as his foot leaves it.  When all around is maybe crumbling, changing; is chaos or unknown we can  keep going, keep plodding.  I say plodding because sometimes life throws us burdens and worries which cause us to plod under the weight of them.

2        The second thing we can do is to keep on praising him and thanking him, despite what else is happening and despite what we are feeling. 1 Thess 5:18 “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” How hard is this?!   How can we thank God when we’ve just lost our job, or a loved one has died, or been given terrible news of illness?  How can we praise him just the same in the face of these things?  We are at a low ebb emotionally.  Every thing is bleak.  We stumble and fall, sprawled headlong on to the dirty floor of despair, looking at our circumstances or our loss or our anxiety.  How can we thank God?  This is very difficult and seems to contradict what I’ve just said about telling God what we feel.  Because when things go wrong, we won’t feel like praising or thanking!

But here’s the thing, you can do both.  You can say to God “I feel terrible, but because you’ve said to give thanks in all circumstances”, I will, even though I don’t feel like it. You are God and you own  and control everything;  everything eventually is or will be in subjection to you.  I chose to follow your word and the example of the Christ.  Thank you for the circumstances I’m in”

You can, in the face of awful stuff, actively look for things which are NOT so bad, or are good.  If you’ve lost your job, give thanks that you have some training or experience, which will enable you to get another job; or you might have savings you can fall back on for a while.  Give thanks for our welfare system which will provide for us for a while. How can you give thanks when you’ve lost a loved one?  You can give thanks for that person’s life.  I’m not saying this thanking and praising is easy;  it’s hard finding something good in all circumstances. What happens when we do this though, is that our will becomes stronger and our emotions follow.  Our mind has made the decision, and our emotions follow and it becomes a healing process.  It also takes time;  you can’t give thanks for something bad soon after it’s happened.  But over time, you can. And a word of caution here, this is not a magic bullet; or a wonderful formula;  it won’t make all the bad stuff go away.  You will still wake up in the morning and nothing’s changed, but God’s faithfulness is still there, and you will have placed a brick, to build a set of steps which you climb to overcome whatever has happened to you. You are building a relationship with the living God and will eventually sit atop the mountain of pain or regret or suffering.  And you will have gotten there by giving thanks in all circumstances.

3         The third thing we can do, is keep reading the Bible.  The bible is our instruction manual.  How do we know that God’s faithfulness is new and available to us every morning, if we don’t read it in his word?  How will we know that giving thanks in all things is a step to overcoming, if we don’t read it in the bible?  How do we find the courage to endure unless we find it in the bible?  Even these verses in Lamentations… they are so ominous;  we plough through them and all is gloom and angst.  Then we get to verse 22, (the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases etc) and we come upon them, like emerging from a dark tunnel out on to a grassy bank with a view of the sea beyond.  There is such wisdom and encouragement in the Bible.  If you’re like me, it can also be like eating a dry biscuit on a hot day; not so good.  But please persist.  It’s one of the ways we can stay close to God and a closeness to God is the secret to living a triumphant life.  So, if a set time works for you, then find a set time.  If it’s just when you get a few quiet minutes, then do it that way.  But find those quiet minutes and read the Bible every day.

4        The fourth and final thing we can do is adjust our ideas of how we think of God.  This comes back to what I said at the beginning.  We have a Sunday school image of God as someone who makes things better, looking after us.  And he does, but it isn’t always in the method we think he’ll use.  He uses the good and the bad in what is a fallen world;  a world over which we have scant control. As we negotiate our way around and through the various obstacles and events, we begin to see that God’s blessings to us are always ultimately spiritual ones, for our eternal good, not only for our temporal, physical or immediate enjoyment or comfort. God will always use the bad things to bring eternal good for us.  He will always bring good for evil;  peace after suffering;  relief from angst;  joy for sorrow and in the journey, we learn what’s good for our soul’s health.  This is always what is most important to God – our soul’s well being;  our “end game”;  our spiritual destination.  This is what 2 Tim 1:1 means “for the sake of the promise of life in Christ Jesus”.  That’s spiritual Life, with a capital “L”.   Without it, we can’t cross the great chasm of spiritual death that separates us from God. The constant will be God.  God to enfold us, God to surround us,   God in our speaking, God in our thinking.  God in our sleeping, God in our waking, God in our watching, God in our hoping, God in our lives, God on our lips, God in our souls, God in our hearts. God in our sufficing, God in our slumber, God in our ever-living souls, God in our eternity.  The life we have in Christ Jesus is what stands between us, keeping our faith, our ability to function when the bricks of our soul's house start to crumble through trouble or suffering.  It’s what gives us the victory when the world pushes us around and gives us grief. We can rise again, with the steadfast love of the Lord shining on our heads, new each morning.  Amen.

Auschwitz, Arthur Dodds, and the swans

Some time ago, I watched a programme about Auschwitz and the story of a man who had been a prisoner there.  I think it was featured on Songs of Praise.  It was the story of an English man, now very elderly, who had been held in the POW part of Auschwitz.  He had seen and heard all the terrible things which had been done to the Jews by the Nazis.  When the Russian and American troops came in 1945, he had been released by walking 700 kms to meet them.  When he got home to England, he had become very depressed by the horror of his experience.  He spent his time walking through the English countryside. 

 

One day, as he sat on the shore of a lake, he watched a pair of swans.  The male swan came up to him and put it’s beak on his shoulder, very near to his face.  He was wary because he thought that if he moved away, the swan would peck him, so he stayed there keeping very still. After a little while, he  began to feel a great peace come over him;  he felt the presence of God descend upon him.  He looked at the 2 beautiful swans and thought that if there were lovely creatures like this still in the world, what business had he to be so depressed.  He said it was as though the swan understood what he’d been through.  He felt the great burden of sorrow fall away.  It was a very moving story.  He was a man of faith and had been sustained through his ordeal by reading the Bible 2½ times over. His name was Arthur Dodds.

Thank you God for your gifts of beauty, resilience, courage, healing and faith.

“…… Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.  Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.” Rev 21:3b to 4