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.

What do we do when people hurt us?

What do we do when people hurt us?  How do we cope with the wounds?  How do we go from brokenness to healing?

Perhaps our first instinct is to hit out at those who have hurt us.  We want to hurt back.  This never worked for me.  I didn’t really take this path when I was battling my own hurts from people I trusted.

I tended to become introspective, and that’s not a bad thing in itself, but I spent too much time being bitter, self-pitying and wanting justice.  The justice thing is difficult.  It’s natural to want justice;  to have our name cleared, or to be vindicated.  It’s also natural to want to be recompensed for what we’ve lost.  But when we stray from wanting justice, to wanting revenge, we are entering a cavern of self-destruction.

But there are better things than revenge, and in my experience justice and vindication can be hard to achieve because it often depends on others and you can’t change others. 

Better than justice, is healing for you, regardless of what happens to those who’ve hurt you.  It may be good to try and get justice for yourself, but this isn’t always possible.  Healing, on the other hand, is something which allows you to triumph, no matter what has happened to you.

You being healed, happy and strong is the best kind of justice and retribution.  Hankering after “getting back at people” is one of the most destructive forces you can foster.  But it won’t destroy them;  it will destroy you.

If you find a way to hurt your abusers, there won’t be the relief you crave.  Or if there is, then you are a long way down the journey to becoming just like them.  Are you sure that’s what you want?

My advice to you is to spend your emotional energy on finding your own self. If you don't want to repeat the pattern, you must understand what mistakes you made, or why you trusted the wrong people or became vulnerable to victimisation. Sometimes these things are out of our control.  It's been my experience that some people will hurt you because they like doing it, and because they can.  They must face that on that Great Day when all will be revealed and all will be called to account.  But you must concern yourself only with yourself.

Use your energy in positive and constructive ways.  Leave the resentment and hatred of those who’ve hurt you, with God.

There may be people reading this blog who find the image of a Christian God unacceptable because of some hurt or abuse suffered at the hands of some phoney person in the organised church.

Go past them and find an image of God you are comfortable with;  whether it’s a gentle Shepherd Jesus, or a father figure God, or even a dying Jesus, asking forgiveness of His killers.  Put your negative emotions and feelings into the hands of this God.  Get them out of your soul and into the heart of the great Being who made us all. Acknowledge it’s there – acknowledge the destructive emotions, then say “I’m not listening to you. Go away”. And give them to God. Imagine them flying off from your mind and body, into the great Cosmos, and there they dissolve. You may have to take this action over and over again.  It may not feel like it, but each time, you are leaving a little more of it behind.

I also cannot stress enough,  the benefit of physical occupation during times of grief, anxiety or agitation. The physicality of moving or using your hands, especially if it’s creative, somehow provides a channel;  a mechanism which “uses up” or releases the negative emotions.  Find something you like doing;  something which makes you live in the moment. It might be gardening, or playing golf – any occupation in which you are only thinking about doing that thing. This also releases good chemicals into your body which helps you stay happy and balanced.

For me, it was bushwalking. I wore out at least two pairs of stout shoes tramping through the beautiful mid north coast environment of NSW in Australia.  I walked, with a social group, every Friday, through beach scapes and forest;  climbed the Fire Lookout at Comboyne plateau – it felt like I sat on the top of the world as I looked out across to the valley below.  Gardening was also a wonderful diversion;  knitting, sewing;  these too kept anxiety at bay. You are a strong, resilient person;  you can find strength you didn't know you had.  I did.  Peace be with you.

Of poverty and Providence; of being content with what we have.

I fall so easily to feeling sorry for myself.  These past few weeks have been so busy and I never have great reserves of strength, so I get depleted easily.  If I'm not careful, depletion can lead to depression, simply because I haven't the strength to throw it off. It wasn't helped by a man who has a three times the income I have, telling me about his lovely holiday, which was at a Beach Resort, and for which he only had to pay half price.

 

The arrow of comparing my life with his, struck home and I felt that God must love him more than me, because I can't afford a holiday every year, certainly not one at a Resort for half price! 

 

It is never wise to compare our lives and our losses with other people's, who seem not to have much go wrong. When I indulge in this self-destructive activity, it always brings me low.

 

There are certainly people of my acquaintance who seem to fall in this "comfortable" category.  I often wonder why this is so, and how this equates to a Providential God.

 

But I don't actually want to debate if God is providential or not, in this blog.

 

It led me to think of other people, whose lives have been defined and cauterised by loss and suffering, and great want.  People caught in the trap of Hitler's evil madness;  people who lived through the Great Depression;  the Irish through the famine; the servant class in England;  the outcaste in India;  the poor in Africa.  And I realize how lucky I am.

 

I think there has always been the privileged and rich few, and the poor disadvantaged masses.  To be fair there will also be a great multitude who are in between to varying degrees, but who basically have enough.  And even though I am down the lower end of my country's income-level, Australia is one of the most affluent countries in the world, so I certainly have enough. 

No matter which system governs, it will always be the same - there will always be, to varying degrees, the few rich and the many poor, because this is what money does - it divides people to classes.  There will always be, in the heart of man, the desire to accumulate more and more wealth.  This is an original flaw - an indelible line on man's carnal blueprint.  The opposite trait is also there;  the desire to help and ease the burden of the poor, but this is grafted on by God's influence.  It is a tenuous, fragile vine, susceptible always to the decay of greed and self-interest.  So, money and the business of getting more of it will always be the deciding factor in how the world's people live.  Those who love money the most, very often end up with a great deal of it.

   

The only sure thing about our lives, is death.  It's absolutely indisputable.  But we spend our lives pretending it isn't going to happen.  We hurtle, unprepared and in denial, towards our own demise.  We spend our whole life's energy amassing as much wealth and status as we can but when we stand at death's threshold, a higher power will tell us we can't take our stash beyond;  that it is not viable currency and that another measure will be used to weight our worth, stamp our passport and determine our destination. 

So it's better to give thanks for what we have, live simply and with contentment for what we have been given by a Providential God, without comparing what we think he's given others.

Time heals

I got a message on my voicemail that my Doctor wanted to see me.  I had done a bowel screen test about 6 weeks ago, and, because I didn’t know why she wanted to see me, I jumped to the conclusion that something must be wrong, either from the results of the bowel screen or the blood test I had for kidney function, about the same time.

When you’ve had quite a bit of bad stuff in your life, it’s very easy to think the worst will happen, because you’ve experienced the worst before.  You know awful stuff can happen.

I didn’t have a lot of time to get worried or upset about the Doctor;  I made the appointment yesterday and I saw her this morning. Nevertheless, I could feel myself start to think “what if this is serious illness looming?”.  I had lots of depressed, resentful thoughts, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to face serious illness, and all the negative emotions which would accompany it.  I shouldn’t have worried – she just wanted to do a review of all my meds.  The bowel screen was negative and the kidney function was fine.

It struck me today, when I was thanking God that nothing serious was wrong – I suppose if there WAS something serious, I would have eventually thanked Him for that too (give thanks in all circumstances)…. Anyway, I thought that time is a very valuable healer.  I am able to much more easily throw off negative thoughts because I am further away from the traumas of 2006.  I feel stronger now than I did then.  When you are in the thick of pain or suffering or anxiety, you don’t have the same “choice” to throw off negativity and stay afloat.  It’s harder to do, because the thoughts are darker, more intense, stronger and come more often. You are living in a stressful arena, coping with anxiety and pain from many fronts, whereas when the trauma or cause of the anxiety has passed, time begins to heal and gradually, as you face what’s happened, the positives begin to expel the negatives.

So now, in the last 6 months or so, I feel like my life’s arena is a brighter place – my brain chemicals are much recovered since the death of my son, Ben.  It’s been a gradual process, but negative and sad thoughts are the exception now, where once they were the rule.  There was quite a sustained period in my life, after my divorce, when positives were the exception and I had to deliberately think of them.  They didn’t reveal themselves – I had to search for them and it was only after Ben’s death that I realized this, and resolved to find the positives, even in his death.

I used to feel like my life was a page with my story written on it and great ink blots of terrible things were creeping down over it, obliterating all the good stuff.  Even before Ben's death, my life had been fairly difficult year in, year-out, for many years.

When I look back over the nearly 7 years since my son’s death, I can see the healing which has taken place.  Some things, like regret, disappointment, abuse etc, are things you have to actively try and heal by facing them, forgiving people, shouting them at God, even.  But grief is something which just has to be walked, a day at a time. In my case there was not a lot of other stuff (like a broken or dysfunctional relationship with Ben) to deal with.  So, as I met and touched the great chasm Ben’s death left in my life, there was a gradual climbing up the cliff of grief.   I can see that I’m much closer to the top now and can see over the other side. I have more capacity for joy now and am learning again to look forward with anticipation, to simple enjoyments. 

I will always be well acquainted with how precarious life is and how bad stuff can happen to me, and that brings it’s own price;  if I’m not careful I can easily imagine the worst possible scenario in any situation - as in the trip to the Doctor – it IS easy to imagine that life might deal me another body blow. It’s a sort of “mended frailty”;  wounds, newly healed can be broken open more easily.

But in general, I have a happier outlook and that’s because the wound and grief of losing Ben, the terrible bullying and the ill health that all happened at the same time, in 2006, has healed a lot.

It’s helped a lot to let go of all the bitterness I felt at my bad marriage and divorce.  It was such a long process – years and years of feeling so impacted;  so bitter.  I can hardly bear to think about what a struggle it was to overcome the grief of it. If I’d kept clinging to those thoughts of loss and injustice and resentment (anger, really), I would have still been so unhappy now.  I suppose a positive outcome of it was that when Ben died, I knew I didn’t want to go down that anger/self-pity pathway again, and resolved not to.  (How I did that is for another blog).

Time heals. It really does. But you have to give it the right environment.

he who loses his life for my sake, will find it. Matthew 10:39

Sometimes I get tired of being a disciple of Christ because it seems I’m  always walking against the tide of world opinion;  sometimes against natural inclination.  It would be so much easier to just do what my ungodly self sometimes dictates – the cross word, the judgemental attitude and so on.

I’ve realized at last, that to take up the cross, you must indeed lose your own life and follow one whose steps led to the cross;  to  injustice, conquest, loss, pain, defeat, albeit in a temporary time frame and arena.

And yet, even as I write, I know again the call of Christ on my life. I know that I cannot live, ignoring the promise of heaven’s sunrise. I’ve tasted the Spirit Life and now it invites me to plunge into that different stream and be swept along in it’s gentle current. It means leaving the shores of earth- attitudes and living in communion with God’s Spirit;  of letting Him have the upper hand in my will and life.  It’s a very peaceful way to live, whatever the circumstances. God’s peace does indeed, pass all understanding. 

There is along with this, the accompanying experience of my feet touching the leaden earth and all the weight of my “real world” cares still rest on me.  But in a wonderfully inexplicable way, I carry these “world weights” much lighter, when I am allowing the Spirit the dominant presence in my soul.  It’s a very light, unobtrusive presence, yet it’s very powerful.  It is not all razzamatazz and signs and wonders;  it is not an excitable presence;  it is the abiding divinity of God being shared with my heart and soul. This is what makes living as a Christian not just “do-able” but easy, when it’s God's character in me which lives and acts in Godly ways.  It enables me to love and forgive people, even those who are unlovable and hard to forgive. (Forgiving takes time but is much easier when the Spirit of the merciful Christ is in my vision and resolve).

But still, sometimes, there is this hesitation to plunge in and “seek first the Kingdom”.  I’m afraid of being too different;  I’m afraid of giving up the control of my own life, even though I’ve been unhappy and frustrated in the past by wanting my life to produce what I think I need from it;  income, husband, security etc. Because sometimes, it still seems like a surrendered soul is one which is un-noticed and unacknowledged;  as though I’m living out this authentic faith and it doesn’t bring anyone else closer to God. But I know there is a vast unseen sea of things which my prayers and my life have done.  I wouldn’t want to be more than ordinary. And it’s been this very attitude of surrender which has given me wings to soar out of the dungeon of my own self-pity at all the rejection, abandonment and bullying I’ve experienced at the hands of others.  It’s been this surrender to the Spirit life which has given me self-esteem, strength and empowerment. It’s another of the parodies of the precepts of God:  the one who loses his life for my sake will gain it;  not just in heaven, but on earth too;  a rich, calm, steadfast, meaningful life.

So surrender doesn’t mean to be bowed and beaten;  it means giving over the blueprint of who you are, and all you think you need, to the One who gave up His life, and set an example of humility leading to honour, for us all to follow. It means harvesting a great crop of the fruit of righteousness which beings peace, integrity, strength

hurl your anger at God

I have a friend whom I’ve known for years, yet hardly know at all really, because she never reveals enough of her true self to anyone, including me.  I don't think she trusts people enough, to reveal to them who she really is.

She gets quite depressed and angry about things at times, but I struggle to know how to help her, because I don’t really understand her, or know the triggers or the causes of her distress. She seems to have a lot of self-loathing. Maybe she feels like she’s never living up to expectations others have of her. I suppose we are all a bit like that because we all grow up wanting to please our parents.  We all suffer a bit from feeling we have failed their expectations a little.

But my friend’s anger seems very deeply ingrained and is, I suspect, tied to her sense of value as a person, ie she feels worthless as a person because she isn’t living up to what others expect of her. Perhaps she feels she has to gain their approval in order to gain their love. She can be quite callous though;  almost verging on cruel.  She’s caustic and harsh and unkind sometimes.  But then I think she feels guilty about that;  she doesn’t like who she is when she’s like that, and that reinforces the self-loathing. I’m not sure how you overcome that.

I think she doesn’t actually let the spirit of Jesus walk with her.  She has a “set of rules” faith and is trying very hard to be loving and gracious but fails, because a) it’s not an inherent part of her blueprint, but something she feels she should be as a Christian; and b) you can never really live the precepts of Christ, unless you let his spirit rule in your heart.  She doesn’t get it, that obedience to Him is not just “obeying” a set of rules, but handing over your will to His will;  subsuming your nature to His; letting go of it and allowing Him to live through you.

She doesn’t seem to grasp the idea of a living relationship with God.

I suppose in the end we all have to find our own way of dealing with bad stuff.  I loaded it onto God – pleading, praying, railing at Him;  hurling anger at him; criticising Him;  doubting Him.  But at least I was talking to Him – and I was confronting the issues.  It was painful and took ages, but I was, all the time, actually leaning on Him and learning about myself;  the mistakes I made and why I made them, and just what makes me tick.  I was still inviting Him to share the travail with me even when I shouted at him “What the hell do you think you’re doing God!?!;  and “It’s SO hard to follow you Jesus and I’m sick of it being this hard!!”;  and “why don’t you sod off and discipline someone else for a change??!”. 

Sometimes, as Christians we seem afraid of our emotions and we deny them/sanitise them/divert them.  We don’t like confronting them, because we, like my friend, think that God will not approve. And it's painful to look at who we really are.

But God loves honesty;  he invites confession and listens as we pour out our poison to Him.  It’s been my experience that He rarely gives an answer immediately;  He seems to allow us to find our own time and would have us learn about ourselves in the process. 

When bad things happen to us, it’s natural to get angry, sad, depressed, disappointed;  a dozen other emotions may assail us. It’s when we bury these under the sniping face of unkindness and hard-hearted cynicism, or braying self-pity;  or shackling denial,  that we turn off God’s empowering pathway to wholeness and become bogged down in the nettles of festering bitterness and revenge, or destructive anger.  We allow what’s happened to fester and infect our hearts, minds, souls.  And we can’t connect to God, because we are holding all that anger inside.  We are saying (for whatever well-meaning, supposedly-noble motive) that we can fix it ourselves;  that  God will not love us if He knows we’re angry.

He knows anyway. Better to hurl it at Him.  It gets it out of our heads and hearts.  He can dissolve our anger because He will love us still, no matter how much we blame Him/criticise Him/doubt Him. He loves our honestly and can work with that to heal us.

I can see how God used the awful stuff in my life to actually heal me from the weaknesses and frailties to which I was prone.  I can see how much more self-esteem I have, for example, by having to plough through my husband’s abuse and rejection of me. I can see how I’ve developed and grown as a person – more rounded, secure and happy. 

Managing anger

For many of us, when bad, unjust things happen to us, one of the responses we feel is anger.

Anger is a most difficult feeling to deal with.  It can be extremely destructive, not only damaging the people around us, but destroying our own peace and happy state of mind too.  Anger and happiness do not go together.  I have found the only real way to deal with it is to tell God you are angry and why.  He’s big enough;  he can bear it.  Give it to Him;  tell him you don’t want it any more. Of course, that involves making a choice;  deciding that you no longer want anger to be in your heart.  While ever you hold on to it (bear a grudge) then God cannot take it from you.
 

For me, I became so unhappy, so bogged down in negative thoughts that the anger and self pity became like a great stone I was carrying around inside.  I wanted it to go away.  I didn’t want anger to have it’s terrible hold over me.  I surrendered my “right” to be angry, to God, and eventually, as I continued to do this, he eventually began to dissolve the anger. I’m not saying it’s easy.  I battled on trying to overcome it, being on an emotional see saw for years, but finally, I got so sick of my selfishness making me so unhappy that in the end, surrender became easier.

I realized too, that caring people can be angry because of the very fact that they care.  When you or loved ones suffer abuse or injustice, part of the caring is .... anger.  Seems funny put that way.  It's hard to deal with anger because it's an emotion;  if it was just a intellectual thought, you could just put it off.  But you feel anger in your soul and your heart and God is really the best one to deal with that. 

Seek counselling too.  Talking about it to someone else, preferably neutral, is good. Dealing with anger which has resulted from someone else's treatment of you is difficult too, especially if there has been no repentence or resolution from that person.  But you still have to deal with it, and when you hang onto the anger, you are letting that person win over and over again. You are letting that person rule you and your happiness.

Let it go.  Make the choice to face the anger, decide to let it go.  Then walk that path, gradually dropping the stones out of your pocket.

scars and healing

After the resurrection of Christ, the scars of His recently-crucified body were still evident.  He was still in His earthly body after all.

Sometimes the healed wounds of my earthly suffering still cause me pain.  But the still-evident scars on the body of the Christ help me to uderstand that complete healing will only come when I too, am given a new eternal body.

I have always tried to deal with the pain and the angst, then pack it away in the tin trunk of my heart, and don't open it again.  But it isn't always possible.  Sometimes the wounds ache;  sometimes I get tired of carrying them in my soul. 

But realizing that even Christ still bore the scars of his sacrifice, helps me to be gentle on myself and understand that some scars will never be fully healed until that Resurrection morning.