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.

dungeon of my own making

The journey to self-pity, can take you unawares, travelled a thought at a time, down the steps into a dungeon of your own making.

I caught myself doing it recently.  It came after a conversation with an acquaintance.  She was telling me how strict her father was, and how much he ensured his family did all he told them.  Her father did indeed sound formidable.

My dad basically ignored us, unless we made too much noise.  He was gruff and disengaged from us.  He left all the parenting to my Mother. He was a good, hardworking bloke; a product of his own upbringing and the social norm of the time. And if he wasn’t the perfect father, I know he did his best.  I worked my way through my upbringing – good and bad – years ago.  His example gave me a lot of strengths, but there’s no doubt his parenting also had a negative impact on me.  It influenced who I married.

So, when she told me about her father, I thought “at least he took an active interest in their welfare. Not like my dad”.  One step down into the dungeon.

She married her husband because he was so unlike her father.  Her husband is a good man and she’s had a happy marriage. I married my husband also because he was so unlike my father.  But, I thought, ”my husband turned out to be cruel, manipulative and selfish. In the marriage lucky dip, she got a good prize;  I got a terrible, terrible one”. Two steps down into the dungeon.

I could have kept going;   comparing myself to someone who is better off than me.  In the past, this is how the thought life would start and I would get resentful, bitter, angry, powerless and unhappy. The impact of my bad marriage would eat away at me. But because I’ve gone down this path before, I’ve learned to recognise the signs.

I could have kept going.  The next thought would have been “Poor me. I didn’t even have Grandfathers as good role models”  The next one would have been “I married a terrible man, and when I finally have a good man in my life – my son – God allows him to die”.

I could embrace all that and trudge down the steps of the “why” and “poor me” dungeon, but I choose not to:

a)              Because I’ve been there before and it’s too easy to get trapped down there, peering out through the tiny dusty windows and wondering why I can’t soar like an eagle; and 

b)              It doesn’t do any good.  It doesn’t change anything.  Once you’ve worked through all the things that have happened;  once you’ve faced them and fixed them if you can; to keep going back over it, is self-destructive.

I had to make the journey into the past. I had to discover why I married my husband  (and to be fair to myself, I don’t think anyone would have picked how bad he would turn out to be).  I had to take the journey and discover who I really am; what makes me tick;  what my innate blueprint is.  I had to look honestly at my life and acknowledge how far below my expectations for it, fell. I had to find and confront all my own weaknesses and in the process, discover many many strengths too.  The expedition to self-awareness can be difficult and confronting.  But it’s also very empowering.

For a while, after I’d looked honestly at my life after my divorce, and counted all the shattered dreams, I could only see negatives, and I started to live in the dungeon.  I got depressed. It was only the realization that my negative thoughts had made me depressed, which gave me the impetus to break the cycle and counteract negative thoughts with positive ones. 

So, for example, when I thought of what the life-long impact of marrying such a man was, I would deliberately think “Thank you I’m not still married to him”.  And when I would think “I didn’t have a Uni education and now I’m trying to be a breadwinner on a Clerk’s wage” I would counter that with “Thank you that I at least have TAFE education and I have a job”.

So, the antidote for self-pity is thankfulness.  This is a Christian principle.  “Give thanks in all circumstances”  is what the bible says. It isn’t easy. I am glad I learned this approach before Ben died. Because in those early days when grief was a savage unabated roaring, I was able to say:

Thank you for Ben’s life;

Thank you that God chose me to be his mum;

Thank you that he turned into such a strong, steadfast, gentle man;

Thank you that we had a good relationship;

Thank you that he loved his sisters and me, and we loved him.

Some of these things are like “negative positives” or at least neutral;  they may seem like hurling lighted matches into a snowstorm.  But when you are dealing with terrible stuff, the tiny positives are bigger than they seem.  Viewed as intellectual thoughts, they probably are small.  But they hold emotional power. They are like toeholds on the sheer cliff of grief. You have to climb this cliff, so you need all the help you can get. 

And thankfulness for seemingly small things, is essential climbing equipment.

self pity and clean grief

 Because of my previous experience of allowing selp pity to drag me down,  after I lost my son, I decided not to allow those thoughts of self pity intrude and make me maudlin.

 

There is a fine line between self-pity, and being kind to yourself as you grieve. Self-pity is a selfish emotion and will lead to destructive rather than constructive thoughts and actions.  It's one thing to validate and accept suffering and loss, but if you allow thoughts to centre on feeling sorry for yourself, you so easily descend the steps to the dungeon of self-indulgence.  All sorts of things breed down there;  resentment and blame; envy of people who haven't suffered as you have;  despair, depression; bitterness.  Self-pity can be very disabling; it keeps you in your present trouble.

These things are not in the interests of your best emotional health.  It's very hard to trudge back up out of this mire into the sunshine of effective and positive emotions. 

 

You have to deal with thoughts of anger, hurt, betrayal, sorrow.  And they arise because you have suffered something which has affected you deeply;  to not feel these things would not be "normal". You have to learn to know when you are concentrating too much on the hurt, and not enough on looking to the future. You can't deny the feelings, but there comes a time when you have to accept what's happened and decide to let it go.  You may have to decide this quite a few times;  let the negative stuff go, a little more each time.

My son drove an old 1976 Holden Kingswood.  It's a very distinctive vehicle with a distinctive sound - a V8 engine. After he died, it came back to me on the back of a truck and sat in my front yard for months.  He loved that car.  Every time I came home after being out, I would round the corner, see the car and pretend for a nano-second that he had come to visit. Eventually the car was taken by his girlfriend (still don't know what she did with it!).  But every time I would see a similar car in the street, I would think of Ben and the grief would come back.  I continued to do this for years after he died.  But after a while, I realized that I had made this car a trigger for grief which was not quite natural.  I had made it a habit;  I was slipping into self-pity and being maudlin;  the grief was no longer just a natural occurence;  I had made it contrived and was perpetuating the lovely memory of my son and his beloved car, until it was no longer about treading a journey of natural grief, but about self-pitying neurosis.

Keep your grief clean.  Don't milk it for attention;  don't squander emotional energy on self-pity. Learn to know when it's time to let go whatever it is that has happened to you.  God bless.