Turning the Page

Fear can be like a shadow creeping up and over you, but what do you fear the most? Understanding what you fear the most can bring assurance.

It was a simple wire bridge on a confidence course. Not very high, the three-wire bridge was a challenge for some and not for others. When I was a pastor to a group of people with serious mental illnesses, we would go away for weekends to a campsite with a confidence course.

People would climb to the top of the 2-meter-high platform. Then they would look down the wires to the other side about 15 meters away.

Taking the first step onto the single wire was hard. Afterward, you would stretch your hands to the wire on the left and the right and then creep across.

The trick was to keep an eye on where you were going and not necessarily where your feet were landing.

Others would be speaking encouragements, and some would hold the wire still for you, but this was the walker facing the fear of what?

• Falling?

It was the brain saying that this was dangerous. That it was different from normal walking.

It was the brain doing what it was supposed to do. Protect you.

But what if you did this three-wire bridge every day? That it was part of your daily commute?

You would eventually get very confident because the brain had been trained to accept living outside the norm.

When the worst thing you could imagine happens, and you survive and possibly even thrive, a new understanding of security grows in you.

If you fear drowning, then learning to swim helps calms you.

Perhaps it’s cancer, but as you go through the dark valley, you come to new places to experience God’s closeness.

Maybe you have feared a relationship breakdown, but going through it, you learn new trust and experience God meeting you in new ways.

You realize how much fear has controlled your life

You probably don’t know what you fear the most. It’s buried away in subconscious land and will only surface when your lifeboat begins to rock, and water comes in over the side.

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We want God to answer our prayer our way, but there is a larger story going on, so we wait to see the way God answers prayer.

Most weekends, when my children were young, I made buns for lunch. First, I would make the bread dough in a breadmaker, then take the dough out, cut the dough into the number of buns needed and then stretch out the dough before twisting it into a bun.

Then I would let them rise before putting them into the oven.

Fresh hot buns for lunch. Yum.

The stretching and folding of the dough add strength to the bread. In addition, all those gluten networks are helped to develop.

Within my prayer life, I sometimes wonder if God is stretching and folding me. It is developing me into someone with deeper glutenous faith networks that give me strength and texture.

I keep praying, but my prayers seem to go unanswered because they don’t get answered in the way I want.

Is God listening? I keep praying, but nothing seems to change.

It’s so frustrating. You seriously wonder if God is there, does God care, and does prayer make a difference.

Surely if God loved me, then God would change the situation?

I have concluded that God does answer prayer, but maybe the answer is not what we expect.

Maybe God’s hands are tied, as such, because of the free will God has given humanity to choose whether to follow God or not. There is a stubbornness in all of us that flexes its muscles against God.

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Sighs and groans can come with such ease, but inhaling is also necessary. So we take note of our diet of breath. 

‘That was a deep sigh,’ he said to me.

I hadn’t noticed it, but he was right. I had let out a long deep sigh into the safety of our conversation. It was a release of something within me that needed to be exhaled: tiredness and exhaustion.

Bound-up tension had relaxed, and breath had escaped and flowed like water.

Somewhere, deep in my soul, the groan escaped as a sigh. Long and deep.

The body has a way of expressing the soul that we have limited to little control over. Noticing the involuntary communications of another can help us with connection to their deepest places.

Can I sigh and find an inhalation of hope? Is there something that I can take in to help me with the next few moments?

There is exhaustion. Physical tiredness from the work of the day.

But there is soul exhaustion from the long journey of struggling in a broken world. We breathe out and breathe in.

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You wake up and see a new day, but you didn’t want to wake up. So it’s a call to endure and go deep with God.

They want the pain to end. The struggle of the journey has become too much.

That’s the underlying theme of many of the emails I receive from people every week. They have taken the vulnerable step of reaching out to a stranger who wrote about someone like themselves.

They will use various phrases to describe their situation and their prayers.

Some of them relate to wishing to die in their sleep. That they would not wake up. They don’t want to take their own life. Instead, they wish for their departure to seem quite natural.

Have you ever been in this dark and sad place?

It’s the prayer of suffering.

It’s heart knowing only pain.

You sleep, but you wake to light. The new day shines through the window. Light flows around the misery one is in, and you ask why?

This is where we find our friend and fellow human struggler, Job—the one who knows endurance.

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We pick them up. Little hurts, big hurts. But how do we learn not to keep a record of wrongs that clogs the arteries of our life?

I visited a friend the other day, and they invited me into their home.

As we wandered from room to room, everything was immaculate. Paintings hung perfectly, furniture was set at the right angle, flowers were on the table, and everything was clean and supposedly in their control.

But as we walked down the hallway, a door was shut. It was locked. I tried to open it but to no avail. Finally, my friend said I wouldn’t want to go in there as it didn’t contain anything of interest. But after some gentle words and assurances, they took the key from their pocket and unlocked the door.

I stepped in and saw a single wooden chair in the center of the room. The walls were covered in post-it notes. I walked around the room and read some of the notes. All the hurts and pains of their life were written—list upon list.

Many were written in child-like writing. Some of them had math on them, but that was wrong in the summation.

• 2 x 3 = 10

The walls were full of notes.

All the wrongs had a list. What they had done and the shame shadow of the event.

Some had been written over and over again—the same note but with a bolder pen.

The notes had been categorized into themes and conclusions. Some colored notes meant a different theme, while others meant another.

They had brought these notes to whatever home they lived in.

I looked at the wooden chair and saw that it was well-used. Beside it sat a small table with fresh new post-it notes and a pen ready for new expression and confession.

I asked my friend how long they spend in this room.

It was most of every day. They sat in here and memorized every post-it note. Line upon line, they had observed and recorded, and rehearsed.

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When you’ve hit the brick wall, the question may arise. Why was I even born? But over time, new depth may come through. A new birth may evolve.

I want you to imagine that you have a bungee cord tied around your waist. You are flying through the air, and that bungee chord is loose and free. You are alive, fully alive. It is scary but good. Life couldn’t be much better than this.

Then all of a sudden, the bungee chord tightens. You have reached the limit of its extension, and it pulls you back. But this time, the bungee cord pulls you back completely the same length in the opposite direction. There is no gravity to slow you down. You are heading directly for a brick wall.

You smash into it with the same force you had when flying in all happiness.

You’re broken, destroyed, and you ask the same question millions of people have asked before you even existed.

Why was I even born? 

It’s the extremes that hurt the most. From the highs of happiness to the lows of misery.

You sit crumbled below the wall of a dead-end street and wonder what this life is all about.

Why was I even born?

What’s the purpose of all this?

Where’s the logic, the reason, the knowing?

Worst still are the friends and family who supposedly come to your aid and ask further ‘Why’ questions. You don’t know why, fully. You can’t even offer any explanations though they demand you do.

So they draw their own conclusions and begin to shoot the dying body.

Why do we shoot our wounded?

Because we don’t like their story. It makes us uncomfortable, and life is meant to have order, peace, and harmony. Not ditch-dwelling dehumanization like a man beaten up and left to die on the side of the road.

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We can get angry to the point where we want to curse the day we were born, but being held in our anger allows us to go through and not around the pain.

It was about time they got angry.

As the words vomited at me, through me, and around me, I thanked God. Finally, they were letting some of their real self be seen. No more holding back emotions for appearance’s sake. Now it was raw, unfettered, and verbally violent.

It wasn’t just the irritation of the current painful situation. It was the culmination of stuffing down the resentments of a lifetime. It was anger at me, anger at God, and anger at everyone in between.

And I encouraged the outflow. They needed to express themselves and get it out.

Afterward, they would be tired, perhaps ashamed they had been so angry, but they needed to know that it was safe and that even God, full of love, mercy, and grace, can be angry like this yet not lose the mark of love.

Sometimes I am angry like this. I want to throw rocks, punch the wall, and smash things. It’s ok.

Life doesn’t run the way I think it should, so I lose it inside. I rage with a smile on the outside but boiling on the inside. Not good, not healthy when I religiously repress.

What do you do with the pain of being human?

What do you do with emotional pain that entombs you in a dark hole?

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When you are living in the shadow, you may feel unseen, but that place of the hidden may be the best place to be, so let’s make the most of it.

One of my favorite plants lives in the shadows. It can live in full sunlight but does best and shows off its brilliant flowers when it’s under the darkness of larger plants.

It’s the Clivia, the Queen of the Shadows.

In the spring, when I’m walking past some tall shady trees, I often see the Clivia with its dark green leaves and bold, bright red flowers shouting out to me that it has its place and role in the garden ecosystem. Little bugs will be living in the soil under it, turning over the decay and building soil life for the Clivia and other plant life.

It’s a system, a community, and a home for everyone to enjoy.

Sometimes I feel like I live in a shadow.

Do you feel like that too?

You feel undervalued, overlooked, discarded, and second-class. Everyone else is getting the attention, and I have little value and purpose. So where is my place in the sun?

My Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ.

I’m an introvert, which may seem strange to you, seeing as though I have a blog, Youtube channel, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. So it would appear that I am pretty extroverted, but it’s more about where I get my energy.

I prefer alone time rather than being with others. So give me solitude to refill my cup rather than a busy mall or party.

But I have a message gained through solitude: I simply must get out into the world. The brilliant colors of the Clivia shine out from the dark contrast of the shade that speaks to the world. Alone time can shout life into the darkness of other lives.

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Every Saint Has a Past. Every Sinner Has a Future. So what choices of forgiven acceptance are you making in the moment of the now?

The source of the phrase ‘Every Saint Has a Past Every Sinner Has a Future’ comes from Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance.

It is spoken by Lord Illingworth, a self-serving, pleasure-seeking, and dishonorable man. In the context of the play, Illingworth thinks that saints are fools for giving up self-centered lives of pleasure, while sinners still have much more pleasure to come. Source

So let’s be ‘sinners’ and do whatever we like, and to hell with the consequences. 

But there is another way of looking at this phrase. 

It’s about owning our past and choosing in the moment of the now to define our future.

I have a little coffee coaster on my desk. It’s solid glass, and underneath, you can place a picture.

Through the glass, I see the words …

My past does not define me. It is the decisions and choices I make today

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Like a steady stream, a diet of words can shape us in ways unintended, but what if we had someone feed us good words? Perhaps then the heart would find a new course to flow from.

As she climbed a couple of lectern steps to read the passage, I wondered if she would be able to read the words. She was short in stature but powerful in voice. She seemingly hid behind the eagle lectern.

For this Sunday, it wasn’t a text from the Bible that she spoke but some poetry. (You can read it in the quotes section below)

I listened, watched, and feasted. I opened my heart, and it was fed.

As she spoke, she engaged herself with the words. At times she would lean around and seemingly look directly at me as she said the final words of a sentence.

She finished reading and slowly returned to her seat right behind me.

We have a section in our service where we can greet each other and pass the peace. We turn to our neighbors and wish each other peace. I turned around, clasped this dear lady’s hands, and thanked her for how she said the words.

Words had fed me.

Anyone could have read those words, but she had chosen to serve them with gentleness and purpose. This was not a robotic, A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) rendition of a text. No, this was more an ‘I’m going to feed you some words to nourish your tired heart.’

It’s not only what you say; it’s how you say it. Words can sing together and shake the world.

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