Turning the Page

What’s your shape? I’m not talking about your body shape, i.e., weight, tall, thin, short, or wide. I’m more interested in who you are under the skin. What has happened to shape you into the person you are? 

What is your personality like?  What do you like to eat? Favorite music tastes. Are you a cat person or a dog person, or neither? Where were you born? What do you do to relax? What are the multiple facets that make you wonderfully different from someone else?

Who are you? 

“Today you are you!

Shout loud, “I am lucky to be what I am!

That’s a great thing to be!

I often like to share with people that I support the concept of the ‘I,’ ‘WE,’ WORK’ shared originally to me by psychologist Renier Greef. It’s comprised of four circles. 

The first circle is that of the individual. The ‘I’ refers to you. Who you are. 

It’s not a perfect circle. It’s imperfect. It’s freehand drawn to represent how unique and irregular we all are. No two circles are the same. 

But this circle contains all of who you are.  

You may only know a small percentage of what is within your circle. Much of the essential information is subconscious. It can be discovered if you want to go there. That subconscious below-the-surface flow of heart talk has been in the shaping process from before birth. 

Every one of us has ‘I..’ It’s what makes us uniquely human. You have a shape full of delight.

Your neighbor does, also.

Jesus was in conversation with someone who had been shaped into having a litigious personality. They loved a good argument and getting their opponents tied up in knots. 

This expert in the law enjoyed making people feel small and foolish by using their intelligence and cunning. There was no gentle curiosity in them. It was more a legal ‘I win, you lose.’ 

He asks Jesus a question. 

Just then, a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”

He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”

He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”

“Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”

Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?” Luke 10:25-29

You can sense the tossing of words back and forth. A question is asked, and a question is given in response. The legal and correct answer is given.

Another question is presented. This is a question of defining who is in and who is out. Who is a ‘neighbor’ and who is not? What shape of persons are acceptable?

But actually, it’s a question of lines. Who will I cross a line for and love, and who I don’t have to cross over to know. 

Jesus answers the question with a story. 

There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. Luke 10:30

Those listening to this story would have immediately noticed that Jesus was telling a parable and that the primary character, the one that this parable was about, was the first person mentioned in the story. It was a man. It was an ‘I.’

Jesus invited them to view everything about this story as if they were this man. They were to look through his eyes. 

They knew nothing about this man other than he was a man and that he was traveling. 

But this man had a shape to him. He was human.

Jesus tells them nothing else about the man with which they could box him within. Jesus said nothing about his ethnicity, wealth, marital status, age, or occupation. Nothing that we might be able to codify or label him with. Nothing from which we could decide if he was in or out of the ‘acceptable’ shapes to mix with. 

He was simply a man on a journey. He could have been any one of us. 

And that’s the first point Jesus was making. This anonymous man is us. It is you. This is someone in the shape of you.  

Jesus tells us that he was on a road and that he was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. 

Those early listeners would have known this road well. It was a steep road from Jerusalem in the heights to Jericho in the plains. It was scorched and arid.

Eighteen miles long, this road was a major route for trading caravans, military personnel, and the pilgrims who visited Jerusalem multiple times each year. It was a busy road. 

But it was also a dangerous road where bandits and robbers would attack travelers. There would have been many hiding places and escape routes into the desert where no one would pursue them.

This road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a dangerous route. 

Whats your road been like? 

In the shaping of your ‘I,’ what has happened on your pilgrim’s road?

I once walked the Camino de Santago pilgrimage in Spain. On the very first day of the walk, I encountered some robbers and thieves. They didn’t come with fists and fury. They were more subtle. They wanted a signature on a petition and a donation to a cause. They were sly and cunning to the many innocent travellers.

On the journey I met other similar scam artists preying on the vulnerable.

They were willing to cross a line of truth to elicit some funds. I found out later that there was a gang supporting their deceit.

Have you ever experienced being robbed?

For the most part, the fellow pilgrims on our path are helpful, friendly, and respectful.

This is our journey, and it shapes us.

What has shaped you?

How do the lines around your ‘I’ look from the pilgrimage so far?

Our road through life is the same. We will have others with us. We will connect the shape of us with the shape of them. Lines around us will intersect. Some will enhance our shape, while others will rob and bring harm.  Many will bring both.

There is something about you that has divine imprinting. Like the masterpiece artwork with the artist’s signature in the bottom corner. It’s a picture of your journey, and it has all the heights and all the lows. 

The battle scars are seen for the story they tell. Callused feet and well-worn clothes. There is a ‘Mona Lisa’ smile that no one can truly work out. It’s there, and it tells its own story of completion. 

I want to hear the story. The footsteps of your journey from Jerusalem to Jericho. I have my own experiences that may help you. You will help me. I’m in love with the shape of you. I’m interested in your ‘I.’

As I finished writing the above sentence, I received an email from someone unknown to me. A fellow traveler to Jericho. 

I’m suffering so bad with mental illness, I am a Christian and want to trust God has a plan for me, I just can’t get through this and I want so bad to go be with Christ. I feel so rejected and alone, and see no hope for my future. 

Something has robbed this traveler. I can see through their eyes and know the dark hole. They have a shape to themselves that God is in love with.

• Love is the outbound movement that trains people to heal injustice and kindly embrace the world. Norman Wirzba

1. What has happened in your pilgrimage to shape you into who you are?

Barry Pearman

Photo by Mohammad Hoseini Rad on Unsplash

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We all have lines around us. Mostly invisible. People cross the lines, and we are hurt, but we also cross the lines of others. 

The line had been crossed so many times that they were losing their own personal identity. Bullies, thugs, robbers, and thieves had crossed over into their personal space so many times that there was nothing left of who they were.

They felt like they were simply someone others used for their pleasure: a punching bag, a toy to play with, a commodity to be used and abandoned.

Lines had been crossed that were never meant to be. They were an object to be used and then discarded. No glory in them, no beauty inside. Impotent of purpose, much like a speck of dust in a corner.

For them, it felt much like this account from an abuse survivor.

I always felt that I was like a sort of Martian-I wasn’t from this planet.

I was never meant for this earth. And I was waiting to die, basically, just waiting for the day … I was waiting to die.

And I couldn’t relate to anybody. I felt so inferior and all the negative things, you know, so unworthy, or not worthwhile-without value.

And nobody would want to know me anyway and things like this.’ Peter Dale, John Allen and Lynda Measor, ‘Counselling adults who were abused as children: Clients’ perceptions of efficacy, client-counselor communication, and dissatisfaction’, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 26(2): (1998), 146.

It had started as a child, but it was still being played out in the whispers of today.

I don’t think there is anything more harmful to the core of a person’s existence than to be used as an object for others’ gratification.

To be treated as something less than fully human.

To be dehumanized is to be deprived of human characteristics or attributes, to be made inanimate, and to be treated as an object.

The other is used to vent one’s anger, to play out one’s fantasies, to rob, steal and destroy.

The other is no longer someone made in the image of God. They are now someone to be used, abused, and left for dead.

The outcome is traumatized people.

Every one of us has had the experience of having a line crossed.

It could be in the extreme, but it could also be in the small and seemingly insignificant. Little cuts add up. We play down and minimize some wounds because we don’t want to examine the core terror of being hurt.

We also cross other people’s lines. We say things, do things, and behave in ways that are abusive to others. Often we don’t even realize that we might be crossing someone’s line.

Recently, someone said something to me that cut me to the core.

They didn’t realize how much they had peeled off an old scab and that I was being re-traumatized. They went on with their daily business, but I’m still thinking about it daily.

We are indeed broken people living in a broken world where broken choices are made. But we hold on to the hope of God making all things new.

I’ve met many broken people, but in everyone, I have seen something unique, beautiful, and powerful. Someone wanting to be known, loved, and held.

I don’t think we understand simply how glorious we genuinely are.

We are so curved in on ourselves that we don’t have a good view of how much we are image-bearers of God.

I genuinely love sitting with people and asking God to reveal how this human bear’s something of Genesis delight. I look for sparks of firework creation. I notice the smile, the humor, the sparkle of some garden long ago. I want to smell the wafts of Eden’s creativity, touching my senses.

Where you focus is where you will go.

It’s in every one of us.

Read what C.S. Lewis writes.

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. …

It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit. … Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

What would change in you if you were to see your neighbor as a holy object? Someone of God’s divine creative expression.

And then looking into the mirror and seeing yourself as a holy object. Someone who has infinite God beauty and presence radiating out of your being.

Impossible, you may well say. Nothing of God’s delight is to be seen here, yet there is. Under all of what we think we are, there is something bursting with life.

It’s all contained within some lines.

Invisible lines. Some people have strong lines like concrete walls that shout, ‘Stay away. You’re never going to see the real me.’

Others have tissue thin lines that seem not to be there at all, and people ignore them. Abusers walk through as if there is nothing there at all.

Lines are needed, and they are always built from the inside out.

• There are no little people in God’s sight, so there are no little places. To be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants him [or her]—this is the creature glorified … This is the way of the Christian: he [or she] should choose the lesser place until God extrudes him [or her] into a position of more responsibility and authority. Francis Schaeffer No Little People

1. Where have lines been crossed in your life?

Barry Pearman

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

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You may feel alone, but you have a purpose, and that is to co-create with God, so lets L.O.F.O.

Recently a friend asked me to pray for them. It caught me by surprise, but as I listened to the struggle they were facing, I felt it was a privilege to listen to the coalface experience they were inviting me into. I held them and prayed. Later they said it made all the difference. I co-created with them.

What a privilege we have to be able to co-create.

We use the word co-create sparingly, but it means working with someone to create something. So there is an invitation to a partnership.

I received an email the other day with the question. ‘Why won’t God let me die’? My immediate thought about their pain was that ‘God needed them for something.’

Why would God need us?

The God of infinite power that can speak a universe surely doesn’t need us, but God does need us, and there is an invitation to co-create.

I look at the garden and see a rose I planted years ago. It’s flowering now with generous white blooms.

I prune, feed, and water it, yet I do not control this beauty. I have limited power over its glory.

It will most likely be there in fifty years, blessing someone else. I am co-creating with God for future generations’ enjoyment. I am simply a steward of the now for the hope of the future.

The early church leaders Paul and Apollos co-creator with God.

Paul co-creates words in a letter to his friends in the city of Corinth.

 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each.

For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. 1 Corinthians 3:5-9

I don’t think Paul was suicidal, but I do believe Paul desired to be somewhere else, and that somewhere else was to be with Christ.

If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer.

I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. 

Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again. Philippians 1:22-26

I believe Paul carried a heavy load of shame and guilt for how he treated the early church. It was his ‘thorn in the flesh,’ but God had not finished with him yet and desired to co-create with him. Read – Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh and its Meaning for You. 

It was ‘fruitful labor’ that held him firm. Those times when he was able to co-create with God and others and see something good grow from a seed into a flourishing rose bush, filling God’s world with beauty.

We co-create when we L.O.F.O. and act on them.

L.O.F.O. is an acronym for Look Out For Opportunities. 

It’s straightforward. We look for opportunities to co-create with God. Little things.

• Picking up a piece of rubbish and putting it in a bin.

This list could go on forever, but its little things done with love help co-create this world. It’s the antidote to suicidal thinking.

It’s the thinking that this world was created out of and for – self-giving love.

• Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. Mother Teresa

1. How does it feel to be a co-creator with God?

Barry Pearman

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Photo by Jake Thacker on Unsplash

Writing blog posts over many years teaches you many things,  but what are the key learnings? Knowing these can help you create words that connect.

This blog post recognizes the momentous occasion of publishing 500 posts. Some posts are from guest writers, but most are from my authorship.

Five hundred posts are a lot of words, and when you create something of worth for an extended period, you begin to hone the craft. You pick up skills and techniques that work for you.

So I am going to share nine key learnings since I started writing in July 2012.

Do you want to create something meaningful? These pointers will help.

1. Everything starts with listening.
   

Nine learnings from 500 blog posts. There are many more I could share, so I am writing a book about writing. I hope these nine gleanings have helped you.

If you have questions or would like to talk more about your writing, please feel free to contact me.

Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread. D.T. Niles

Barry Pearman

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Read this further at https://turningthepage.co.nz/nine-key-learnings-from-writing-500-blog-posts/

One tough moment after another can bring you to the question, ‘Does God hate me’? But I want to know more, so I sit with those at the coal face and grow in my knowing.

No one knows coal like a coal miner. I could go to a scientist and get a scientific explanation about coal. A commodities dealer could tell me the dollar value of coal. Someone cooking over a coal fire would give me another limited view.

But for me, if I wanted to know about coal, I would go to a coal miner. One of those old-fashioned coal miners who has entered the bowels of the earth and dug away at the dark. Covered in the dust, there is noise, danger, and fear, but there is a camaraderie among fellow miners.

No one knows God like someone who has been at the dark coal face of life.

I suppose that is why I am drawn to people who chisel away at the coal, face the darkness of life, and find God there with them. It’s not the theologians or the pastors that pull me in. More so, those who, in all the struggle of daily life, have found something like a diamond amongst the coal.

I would rather sit and shed tears with them for hours because that is where I believe Jesus the Christ would be.

If someone was to ask you that question, how would you answer it?

Would you give an intellectual answer, quoting scriptures such as John 3:16?

For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16

They are in a dark place and want to know heart truth, not head knowledge.

First of all, I think they would want to be known. To have their world explored and not sidelined. Maybe connection is the best word.

I would like to know how their understanding of what God is like was formed. Was it through various church experiences or parental influences? We’ve all got to start somewhere, so where was their starting point? What winds have blown across their path that has shaped their course?

Whenever I hear the words’ God hates me,’ I am filled with a kind of sadness for the person and the journey they have been on to get to this point of expression.

Quoting scripture upon scripture and getting into intellectual arguments rarely helps. This is because they need to hear words from the heart, not the head.

Our great problem is trafficking in unlived truth.

Alongside ‘God hates me,’ other words are often spoken, such as ‘God is punishing me’ and ‘God doesn’t care.’

I have found that there are at least three ways that people express this belief.

1. God never answers my prayers. I pray for all sorts of things, particularly those that cause me a lot of pain. I pray for others, but those prayers don’t get answered either. I pray, but nothing happens. Everyone else seems to have prayers answered for a better life but not me. God must hate me. God withholds good things from me.

They go on to say other things.

Look, I know you will tell me that God is love. I know you can quote all the scriptures about God being love. Then you will sing all those sappy songs about God being good.

But my reality is that I am in pain, and I want relief. I can see right through your intellectualism head knowledge, spiritual bypasses of avoidance, and coping strategies. It’s either God is really like Santa Claus, a Sugar Daddy, or a Disney’ wish upon a star’ God or not.

You see, at an early age, I was told that I am nothing, no one, a simple consequence of a couple of cells saying, ‘Howdy, doody.’

Then out I popped. I cried in pain, and I have cried ever since.

What sort of cosmic joke was my conception?

I think of the Christ of Jesus hanging on a cross and crying out ‘My God, why have you detached from me.’

The songs of lament and darkness from the coal miners of the Bible sing back to me.

I’m on a diet of tears—

I have a little sentence that I play around in my head that helps me make sense of things.

I am a broken man living in a broken world with broken people making broken choices.

But I am comforted by the coal face knowing of an unbroken God who is in the business of making all things new.

I still have the wafts of perfume from the Garden of Eden filtering through my existence. A beautiful sunrise, a bird that sings, a smile on a face, and then, at times, some droplets of joy touch my face washing the coal dust away.

I am caught between Eden and Heaven. We are a broken and fragile people living in a broken and fragile world, so of course, coal dust will clog our arteries.

I need others who know their brokenness but have somehow learned to dance—people who aren’t ‘happy-clappy’ or who live in theological fundamentalist squares and boxes.

I need people like Marva.

I once took a paper called Spiritual Formation. It was a week-long intensive, and the lecturer was a visiting theologian called Marva Dawn.

Into the week, she danced.

Let’s be clear; she didn’t physically dance. She wasn’t able to because of the many physical disabilities she had, and she actually danced into the fullness of God’s presence on April 18, 2021.

Here is an extract from a tribute.

Dawn’s joy came amid a lifetime of struggles with pain and illness. She faced battles with cancer, chronic pain, blindness in one eye, a kidney transplant, and problems with a foot that made walking difficult or impossible. Remembering Marva Dawn, a Saint of Modern Worship

I remember watching her hobble up to the lectern and clinging to it so she could teach. Words flowed from the coal face.

She authored more than 20 books in her lifetime, covering topics like Sabbath-keeping, the vocation of ministry, suffering well, and sexuality. Still, my favorite is Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity.

Read this

We do not understand how God accomplishes using even our brokennesses for the fulfillment of the Trinity’s purposes for the cosmos, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit does.

Just one little example will suggest much wider possibilities than we could ever imagine.

Before embarking on one trip for a speaking engagement, I was complaining to my husband because a problem with my feet had put me in a wheelchair.

I did not use this specific vocabulary, but basically groaned that my “dream” of ease while fulfilling my obligations for that particular assignment was “shattered.”

During the conference a somewhat cynical man came to me after one of my later lectures and said, “I wouldn’t believe a word you say—except that you are sitting in that chair!”

I’d had too small a dream.

I just wanted my life to be easier by being out of that wheelchair; I hadn’t asked God to fulfill His larger purposes of deepening someone’s faith precisely because I was in it. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity

Does God hate you?

No, God doesn’t hate. Quite the reverse there is so much love for you that it is vastly more than you could handle or even come into comprehension of.

God is with you at your coal face, in your ‘wheelchair’, and is in the business of making all things new.

• Reality is what we notice on the surface – what we feel or see, what superficial perspectives we might gain, for example, from television’s evening news. Truth is much larger. It encompasses everything that genuinely is going on. The reality might be that our world looks totally messed up, that war and economic chaos seem to control the globe. But the truth is much deeper – that Jesus Christ is still (since His ascension) Lord of the cosmos, and the Holy Spirit is empowering many people to work for peacemaking and justice building as part of the Trinity’s purpose to bring the universe to its ultimate wholeness. The reality might be that you do not feel God, but the truth is that God is always present with you, perpetually forgiving you, and unceasingly caring for you with extravagant grace and abundant mercy. Not only that, but the very process of dealing with our lack of feelings and our resultant doubts about God is one of the ways by which our trust in the Trinity is deepened. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity

1. Have you ever felt that God hates you? What formed that idea?

Barry Pearman

Life can go on and on from day to day, but when we stop to notice little moments of delight, something profound can begin to grow—hope, joy, and thankfulness. Bible stories come alive.

For me, there is nothing quite like sinking my teeth into a perfectly ripe Black Doris plum and tasting the fullness of flavor as its juices flow across the taste buds.

As I write this post, it’s mid-January in New Zealand, and it’s summer. The Black Doris plum tree has come to its time of harvest, and I gorge myself on its delight daily. I have pruned this tree, given it fertilizer, and watched it flower.

I have longed for this harvest time whenever I have walked under its canopy. It’s the moment of tasting and seeing that Lord is good. God has provided a tree full of delight for me and others to enjoy.

This is a time of delight.

It is the little things that I need to train my brain to focus on.

The sip of coffee first thing in the morning.

The attention my grandchild gives to the story I am reading her.

The way a mother bird feeds a demanding chick hopping around behind her.

Where do you find delight?

It’s too easy to find dismay. Far too easy to find rotten fruit, bitter moments, anguish, hardship, and despair.

The brain is trained to have a magnetic pull to the dark.

The songwriter of the Psalms sings these words.

Delight yourself in the Lord,

What does the word ‘delight’ mean in the Bible?

In Hebrew, the word delight is ‘anog’ and has the meaning of to be soft, delicate, and dainty. To be pliable and tender.

Something good for the brain happens when we stop and notice that which is soft, delicate, and dainty. There is an element to delight that is fleeting. You will miss it, and it will cut you unless you stop to take it in.

As I write this, my thoughts wander to the story in the Bible of Jesus feeding the five thousand.

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 

When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ 

Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ 

Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 

And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. Matthew 14:13-21

All those loaves and fishes being multiplied and given out.

Questions float through my thinking about the delight of this moment in the Bible.

• I wonder what the fish tasted like?

Delighting in something takes a conscious noticing and slowing down.

Now my mind is wandering to the delight of connecting a few words together that might help you, the reader, find new ways of living. The gift I am giving is vulnerable. You could easily skip over the words and not take them. I will write anyway because I find delight in them.

I take delight when someone emails me and shares their life with me.

1. Open yourself to notice. 
   

Perhaps as you discover the world of delight around you, you will also find the way God gives you the desires of your heart.

• The key to growing any psychological resource, including compassion, is to have repeated experiences of it that get turned into lasting changes in neural structure or function. Rick Hanson

1. What stories in the Bible offer us a moment where people would have experienced delight?

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Ever found yourself in a dark place? A simple state of sadness can throw you in such a place. At least l experience that often.

I used to be depressed, severely depressed, the kind of state that makes it hard for facial muscles to react to other people’s joyful interaction. Know the feeling?

Another indicator I find that confirms my sadness is when I walk through the yard after dark with the lights out: the dark strikes you even darker as it merges with the sadness inside, despite a wonderfully star-lit sky.

I often feel peace looking up at the stars. The sight of them makes me feel as if I’m in the company of close friends and closer to where I belong.

In my understanding, sadness happens as a reaction in our social living. A tone of voice can often be the simple trigger for sadness in the sensitive heart. Or maybe a broken relationship, or the absence of a loved one, can easily be the causes for sadness that will throw you in a dark place.

I’ve learnt not to ignore my sadness but it wasn’t always like this. Over time I learnt to acknowledge my inner state and act on it with some self-care actions. Washing my hair often helps. Or trimming my nails. These are very simple daily actions that can have an impact on how I feel. Do you have your own self-care actions sorted out for the darker days?

I often think of the time I find myself in the dark as a time of fasting. Not that I actually fast the sadness away but my state of sadness is equivalent to fasting.

In a way it makes sense as sadness prevents you from engaging in day to day joyful fuzziness. It’s a kind of emotional fasting.

Read this further here

Sometimes you can feel like you are a problem to be fixed, but you're not that. You may have problems, but not a problem. 

You're not a problem to be fixed. Neither are you a personality to be probed. You're not a diagnosis, a number, or a category.

You may feel like you are being analyzed so that you fit in a box, but No, you're not a tick in a box.

You are human.

They may have a file on you that is lifetime long, yet you're not that file.

You are not a disorder, an addiction, an anxiety or a depression.

You're not a mood or a melancholy.

But it felt like I was another problem to be fixed and they had the solutions. 'Just do this and that, and life will get back on track.'

'Next patient, please.'

Have you ever felt that? That feeling that you are simply another problem to be solved. That you are interrupting somebodies journey, and they want to fix you as soon as possible so they can get on with life.

It's called dehumanisation.

That's a very big fancy word that means to deprive a person of human qualities. You are no longer a human. You are more of a problem to be solved, a number, a disorder.

I once wrote an essay titled 'Dehumanization and Sexual Abuse.' Not an easy read, but one that takes the reader to the story that Jesus told of The Dehumaised Man or what many call The Story of the Good Samaritan. 

It's the man in the ditch, dying from the abuse of robbers. They saw him for what he had, not for who he was.

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We can easily go from one year to the next, but before you start the year, you need to stop the year. Stop it well.

As I write this, it’s the middle of the most interesting week of the year. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year.

Here in New Zealand, it’s summertime,e and for most people, it means the beginning of the summer holiday period. Most businesses close, and people often head to the beach for a swim. It’s a ‘kicking back’ time of year when all you want to do is to eat the leftovers from Christmas day, find a good book to drift off into, and swim, sleep, and relax.

In this week, I like to stop before I start. I like to stop the pressure of the normal, where it’s going from one thing to the next before I start the next year.

For me, this week is where I make sure to have time for personal reflection. I pause before I hit the pace again of another year.

It’s a time to note the changes, feel the losses, value the gains, and lean into the learnings.

This stopping before you start could be done any time of the year, but it requires some intentionality to hit the pause button. To slow down the machine of your life and retreat to an internal place of rest.

It’s allowing yourself to discover yourself and letting it catch up to you. You’ve had so many things happen to you that they are like little children tagging on behind, crying out for attention. They want to be seen, known and acknowledged. If you don’t, their wisdom for the next stage may well be lost.

So please stop before you start.

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Confusion can tear our lives apart, but perhaps a dream can clarify. For Joseph, a dream tipped the balance to trust a Christmas mystery.

Have you ever felt like your brain is caught in a tug of war? You are pulled and torn in different directions. Your values, rules, expectations, and beliefs pull you to behave in a certain way, but you have a pull dragging you to another point.

Contradictions to the normal pull at you to step out of your comfort zone. To walk on water, climb a mountain to make a sacrifice, marry a prostitute and eat the forbidden food laid out before you.

The mind in turmoil needs a voice of security to cut through the tension of conflict.

Do you want to stay safe, or do you want adventure?

There is a character in the Christmas story that I think goes under applauded. All the focus is on the baby and mother.

We read the story every year at Christmas, full of wonder and light. We sing joyful carols and celebrate a birth, but there are backstory questions that probably never get fully answered and tied off as neat as a bow on a Christmas gift.

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