Can you remember growing points in your life? I don’t mean the marks on the kitchen door frame that your mum kept of your height, but those realisations in your life that you were turning a corner into something new.
I remember reaching a point in my conscious journey of faith, when I realised that I would not get what the child in me hoped and wanted, and those needs had to be transformed in Christ. I came to see that what St Paul says about ‘thinking like a child’ really has to be faced and surrendered. I guess its like the child that has to surrender its dummy, and find that it has a life beyond that immediate comforter.
The outcome for me of this surrender was a recognition that God wanted all of me to live for Him and His purposes, and not have a part of my subconscious time and energy seeking my own comfort. I had to let go of self-pity and the lies of the world telling me, ‘I deserve it,’ and trust that God would provide for my needs. This is where the faith comes in. I had to face all my lovelessness, and self-despising, which had been covered up by working hard, denial, junk food, coffee, and vain hopes.
What did God want me to do with all this? First I had to learn new ways of looking at events; I was not being punished, and things that had happened to me were not my responsibility. But I needed to embrace the truth that my reaction to them is my responsibility as soon as I became/become aware. Just as those who suffer through the sickness or death of family or friends, need to recognise they are not being ‘punished’ by God, and they are not responsible for the sickness or death. In childish thinking we often think we are. But we are responsible for the responses to our suffering.
One of the Beatitudes preached by Christ to the crowds, tells us God is with us in our suffering, and God may use our open, hurting hearts to call us closer to His love and provision in order to give us more of His love.
“Blessed are those that mourn for they will be comforted.”
But this makes it clear we have to choose to face our losses and mourn them, and through prayer be open to receive comfort to strengthen us. Similarly we may need to mourn lost jobs, or health or dreams etc, which cannot be healed and overcome without facing what has been lost. As we mourn our losses, eg facing rather than denying the pain, even of lost childhood, or good parenting, we are brought comfort, and renewed vision and understanding.
But if we simply cling to the dream of what we’ve lost, we tend to think that God has left us because we’ve lost our false image of God. We conflate the love that we received from those we have lost, or the hope in ‘what everyone else had’, with God’s love. So many Christians cease to be Christians through faith, because they like the “heights of Christ’s love,” but not “the depths.”
Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise: “For yet a little while, And He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul. Heb 10:35-39
I also needed to recognise the childish attitudes which relate to giving. On the one hand I had a subconscious pattern of thinking that if I ‘was good and did what I was told’ God would give me what I wanted. But God is pure and will only provided what is good for me – today – and I had to learn that indeed God is God and I must live in the gentleness of His moment, not in the striving of my desire for some sense of control. OK this comes from my powerlessness as an abused child, but I can choose now to live in Love and trust, and hope in God for the future, rather than live out of the attitudes that stemmed from the past behaviour I experienced.
Unless I choose for this change, every man who crushes my sense of being, (a frequent occurrence!) is perceived as an ‘abuser’. I choose to respond with wisdom, patience and love, in Christ, withdrawing from the situation if necessary, treating him with kindness and forbearance. Such an incident happened yesterday, and by prayer and God’s grace the suffering I re-experienced yesterday, this morning had been replaced by compassion. Also this morning the person in question apologised for his bitterness, and explained his lack of control and frustration caused by the conversation he’d been having for the previous hour with someone else.
On the other hand of childish thinking about giving is, ‘all or nothing’. I tended to think I had to do everything, and fill everyone’s need. Underneath that was a fear I was worthless – stemming from me as an unwanted foetus, and the unwanted girl child at birth. Facing this sense of ‘worthlessness’, in Christ, and owning His death on the Cross as one’s own experience of those in authority wanting to kill you, is a very painful, but healing and Spiritually uplifting experience. But it also brings me back to the grounded experience of ‘doing what the Father asks of me, or what I see Him doing.’ I do not have to do everything for everybody. I need to see what IS…..and what needs to be prayed about, done, worked on, studied, read, TODAY…….. and let go of all worry …’I am beautifully and wonderfully made and God loves me!”. Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief’!!
So let us today take up our crosses, those things that have caused us pain and a sense of loss, and accept them and go forward in Christ in hope and love. Glory to God, I have come to at least an understanding of St Paul’s position: ‘I count every loss as gain, in knowing more of Christ‘. I confess, with the lived reality, I still frequently fall with the weight of my cross when I forget that Christ’s burden is Light and I start striving again. He promises He will not ask more of us than we can bear, with His help! Its my forgetting and therefore striving on my own, that causes pain.
When we remember that all our suffering brings us back to Christ, and our Oneness with Him through the Cross, we have no burden that is not in His hands, and therefore in the Father’s Heart and will. Praise and thanksgiving are our responses, and trust in what we are asked to do. May we rejoice that we have Faith in our suffering. ‘All manner of things will be well’. Amen. Lord we believe, help Thou our unbelief’.
