an interaction with a saint of God

I always love the interaction I sometimes have with an elderly gent of my acquaintance;  a saint of God;  one of Nature’s Gentlemen.  He has a self-effacing and gentle personality which manifests itself sometimes in a slight stutter if he gets nervous or stressed.

He’s a man of very modest means, evidenced by his very ordinary house, in a less-than-desirable suburb.    I had occasion to call on him recently to get him to sign a document.  When I knocked on the door, I noticed his Christmas wreath still hung on the screen. Well, it’s only April, after all. It was an ancient thing of faded baubles and plastic holly;  probably purchased in the 60’s.  I picked it’s vintage because we had similar Christmas decorations which were hung in our house year after year, until my sister finally said they had to go.  They were for us, as for him, humble markers of a make-do-and-mend lifestyle. All the same, I chuckled gently to myself, at the thought of him putting it there in the time-honoured fashion of Christmas, and then just forgetting it was there for months afterwards.

I could hear him hurrying to the door at my knock.  He was effusive in his apologies for the mess of the place.  “Don’t worry! It looks fine to me….. for a “Bachelor Pad” I quipped.  He chortled gently at the joke.  He is indeed a bachelor, albeit an elderly one.  His house, though, far from being the sleek and urbane dwelling usually conjured up by such a phrase, is full of his wife’s touch; the pictures of their children on the walls;  the slightly jaded furniture showing evidence of his continued care;  the pot plants on the verandah still watered and nurtured.  It’s the same house all his children grew up in;  the same house in which he cared for his wife, until her death 6 years ago, from cancer.  I remember the date, because it was only a few months before my son's death.  My very first acquaintance with this godly man was a conversation about losing loved ones.  I don’t know if he saw the grief in my face, but I certainly saw it in his. I heard it in his voice too, as he spoke of his wife with love and respect; and of how much he missed her.  He told me “the sicker she got, the more I loved her”. We sat in a silent space then, and cried for our absent loved ones.  
I can always sense the noble traces of the spirit of Jesus on this lovely man. Go in peace, saint of God, go in peace

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.

a personal sharing

I was a child of the 50’s.  My parents were farmers.  They taught by example, and gave me an enduring demonstration of honesty, hard work and commitment to “the golden rule”.  I took on my mother’s Christian faith at an early age, and it has shaped and enriched my life. 

In 1975 I married a man who professed Christianity, but over the ensuing years, this façade fell away to reveal a manupulative and emotionally cruel man, and, in 1992, he left, leaving me to care and provide for our 3 children, without support from him in any way.  I went out to work and took out a mortgage to pay him his share of our home.   Thus began some very dark and difficult years, hallmarked by unrelenting hard work, lone responsibility and very frugal living.

I was working full time and I was alone.  I was breadwinner, home-maker, mother and father. During these years, there was the emotional turmoil of trying to come to terms with my divorce; there was the strain of coping with my increasingly hostile ex-husband and his troubled relationship with our children;  there was the death of my father;  there was much upheaval and persecution at work at one stage;  .  There seemed to be no part of my life which was happy or easy.   I felt marooned in a sea of undeserved dishonour and unrelenting difficulty. This continued year after year.

My life was like a little boat.  My children were precious cargo.  And I was rowing through a dark and terrible storm.  All around the waves crashed;  the lightning terrified us;  the thunder muddled my senses.  Still I rowed.  Eventually, my children grew into happy, strong, caring adults.  In 1996 I moved to another place and finally, there were mornings of sunshine and evenings of peace. .

My son, the oldest child, became a cabinet-maker, then embarked on a very difficult learning curve and became a policeman.  One daughter became a midwife and the other, an Occupational Therapist. 

My children and I become a very close family;  a closeness forged by commitment and hardship.   It was the delight and joy of my life, to see them together. They were the best thing I had from my dreadful marriage.

Then, in November 2006, my son was killed in a work accident in Sydney.  He was 27. I have no words to express the crushing grief of such news.   Yet even in those early moments, there was peace;  there was God saying “it’s OK, he’s safe with me.  

For long years after my divorce, it felt like there was a wasteland of broken ground inside me;  there had been such betrayal, such conflict;  so much call on all my resources;  so much unfulfilled hope;  so much disappointment;  so many oft-repeated prayers which seemed to remain unanswered.  God took a long time to heal this brokenness.  But He did.  I had to be healed all over again after my son died.  I am still walking that shadowed path really. God is still with me, and He is good.  But I want to tell you the other strategies I learned as well.

Preface

This blog will be written from personal experience.  I will be adding to it as I am able.  It's all in my head and heart. I have no degrees in psychology or human resources  This blog has been lived.  If you have had awful stuff happen to you and you don’t know how to cope or what to do next, or how to stop being scared, then this blog might help.

 Because I’ve been there too.

I speak of God in this book.  I want to make it very clear that when I say “God”, I mean a higher power.  My aim here is not to advance or preach the cause of any organised religion or faith.  Like people who attend AA, it’s good to have the assistance of a higher power when we are grappling with very complex and painful issues. 

I also need to be true to myself.  So I’m telling you that for me, that higher power has become very real to me through the presence of Jesus Christ and his “rules for living”. But if you have had a negative experience with the organised church, then this concept of God might be painful for you.  You may find a Buddhist God or a Hindu God more approachable.  If you are more comfortable with a “creator God” or a “Shepherd God”, then stay with that. I urge you to entrust yourself to a higher power;  the great Being who is the Alpha and Omega;  the intelligence behind this beautiful planet and all it’s wonders.

For me, the loving friendship of Christ has brought me through some of the worst experiences a human being can encounter.  But the purpose of this blog is not to preach at you, or convert you.  The purpose of this blog is simply to help you.

Doubt is not always a bad thing

Doubt can be a bridge between the Jesus we thought we knew, to Jesus as He really is.  If we stay with an intellectual, textbook type Sunday school image of who Jesus is, we have a powerless hard-to-live journey of following Jesus.  If the disciples had stuck to their idea of Jesus as a political King;  a leader of their people, they would never have realized His whole purpose of coming, dying and rising, to take on Himself all of our wretchedness.    It’s the same for us.  If we never question the Sunday school image we have of Jesus, against our own experience and existence in the real world, we won’t come to a relationship with the living, risen Christ.  He will remain a dead, intellectual figure that we really don’t understand at all.  He will remain a “head knowledge” God, without any interaction or connection with us in our everyday lives.

When we are in some trouble or anxiety, and we begin to doubt God’s care or purpose for us, it is not an easy time.  It’s accompanied by fear and turmoil and these things are very disturbing and by their very nature they are tyrannical.  They grip us with such intensity.  It seems we don’t have a moment’s rest.  We have on the on the one side, our picture of Jesus as a loving God of mercy; a generous Father figure;  a gentle shepherd who gathers his lambs and protects them.  And then, on the other side, we have whatever malady or circumstance has happened to us, and we can’t seem to reconcile the two. They seem to be incompatible.  How can God let this happen?  We wrestle with these questions.  We begin to cross the bridge of doubt.  It seems a perilous journey, filled with confusion and searching and conflict and perplexity. 

How can God be loving and caring yet allow our loved ones to suffer?  How can God be a God of justice when we have been blamed for something we didn’t do?  How can the gentle Shepherd allow a little child to suffer in the hands of a ruthless abuser?  Why does God not intervene when something bad is about to happen?  These are the big questions of life.  We don’t like tackling them.  We don’t like to question.  We don’t like admitting we have these dark mutterings in our hearts.  And our responses will perhaps be the same as the people in the Resurrection story. 

We, like Mary, can be overcome at first, with sorrow.  But you’ve got to also be encouraged by her story.  Jesus appears to her and she is ecstatic.  She runs to tell the others.  This can be our journey too, even in the face of sorrow, when we allow the presence of Jesus to come to us.  I think Mary of all the followers was the closest to understanding what Jesus was all about.

Or we can react with fear, like the disciples in the room with the doors locked.  It’s understandable, when confronted with a big life event, to be afraid.  Fear is crippling; it can be overwhelming.  It reduces us to jelly.    How can we not be afraid when we are confronted with serious illness or when our children are in trouble? But the most frequent command in the bible is “Do not fear”. We can tell Jesus we are afraid.  We hear him say to us as he said to the disciples in the locked room “Peace be with you”.  God’s peace is one of the best gifts he gives his saints. 

Or we can be like Thomas, and be honest and say “Show me who you are Lord.  I doubt; I’m hurting; I’m afraid; I’m sad”  And do you see what happens then?  Jesus come to Thomas and shows him the scars.  He says “blessed are you Thomas because you believe”.  He encourages us down the centuries when he says “blessed are you when you don’t see and yet believe”. 

You can’t always believe unless you have first doubted.  And there’s a world of difference between a doubter and an unbeliever.  The doubter is an honest person seeking an experience of God even in the midst of his own perilous circumstances;  an unbeliever is never interested in any kind of experience of or conversation with, God. A doubter is a person struggling to live an honest life, who has many questions of God;  An unbeliever doesn’t care about those things.  And Jesus receives our doubts as willingly and as generously as he values our faith;  he is well acquainted with human misunderstanding and frailty.  Our journey with him will be at times as bewildering as it was for those first disciples.

They cowered behind locked doors.  We too hide in fear, or are beset by doubt, even though we know we have the Risen Christ with us.  But take heart, on the other side of the doubt bridge, our immature, incomplete, inaccurate picture of Jesus will be left behind. We will know a fuller Jesus, a more completely loving Jesus, a wise Jesus who knows what’s best for us, even if it seems He does not.  We will know a Jesus who will share himself with us;  a Jesus who will make our lives a joy to live;  A Jesus who shares his spirit of peace with us throughout all aspects of our journey.

He has given us the HS which is His presence with us. He didn’t condemn Thomas for his honest doubt, and he won’t condemn us either.  In fact, He promises never to leave us;  he promises that we are kept by the power of God.  He promises that he will complete His good work in us. And he says, do not fear, only believe (Mark 5:36). 

When we keep our faults and doubts safely locked away, we don't grow; we are like a seed which never swells with new life but stays a tiny lifeless thing in the infertile soil of untested intellectual faith. But when we honestly tell God what troubles us, He comes into our hearts and fills us with a deeper, stronger, more effective faith. He doesn’t rebuke us, but empowers us with peace, and we are able to answer not just our own questions, but bring resolution and peace to others as well. 

Doubting is not meant to be a comfortable exercise.   When you question things like “does God really care about me, or Is God really in control of the world, there will be turmoil and searching and conflict and perplexity. But if we are to come to terms with the awful things which happen to us from time to time, there is sometimes the need to get it all out before the Lord, and ask and pray and question and learn.  If we are to know God on a deeper level, we must be willing to risk stepping out onto the hard cobblestones of doubt. I can tell you it will not be an easy experience, but it will be one in which Jesus will be with us.

 

I would encourage you to use the figurative fingers of doubt and put them into Jesus’ scars.  Let him show you his real self.  Let him appear to you in His resurrected God-head self.  He will be as gentle and compassionate to you as he was with his first disciples. 

silver seeds

Not long after Ben's funeral, I prayed.   I don't remember what I prayed, but I remember that as I did, an image arose in my mind's eye. I could see all the people gathered at the funeral - 400 or so of them - and all these little sparkly things began to fall from the ceiling of the church.  The passage of their fall was marked by silvered tracers.  The light in the church was mellow and gentle, crafted by stained glass and high windows.  It was a beautiful scene.

The sparkly things alighted on certain people - there were a lot of them - like showers from a huge firework - but they didn't fall on everyone.

 

I didn't understand what they were at the time, but afterwards I wondered if they were the seeds of God's Kingdom alighting on some of the souls gathered.  You may think that fanciful;  just the imagination of a grief-stricken mother. Perhaps.

The thought that God would use Ben's death to plant the seeds of knowledge of Him in the hearts and souls of those present, was like a shaft of sunlight falling on a dark and rocky place. God brings good out of bad.  It helps me to embrace the mysterious sovereignty of God amidst the brokenness of the world. It helps me to make a small measure of sense out of Ben's death.

Lord God, I pray that your Kingdom will come on earth, as it is in heaven, concerning Ben's death.  Bring all the blessing you planned, to the people who need your presence.  Water the seeds that fell, until they are strong beautiful trees.

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.