Turning the Page

People say you need boundaries, but what do you want to protect? When you know your ‘YES,’ you will be able to express your ‘NO.’

This website is founded on the word ‘Yes,’ but in order for the Yes to be realized ‘No’ has been said multiple times.

I have recently been watching the Tour de France. That incredible bike race through the French countryside where we see riders struggling up mountainsides and then racing down the other side at breakneck sp eds. Alongside the route are spectators. They cheer the rider on, particularly on those tough uphill climbs.

What we don’t see are the millions of moments that the rider has had to say ‘No’ over the years because they had a greater ‘Yes’ burning in their soul. It was the ‘No’ to certain foods, parties, late nights, and generally living what we would consider a normal life. Instead, a greater YES got them out of bed early in the morning to ride hours and hours by themself with no applause or accolades.

What is the YES you have burning within you?

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We are faced with struggles, so we try to control the uncontrollable, but this brings even more stress. Better to stay in the zone of what we can control – ourselves

It was out of my control. The decision on how they would treat me was beyond my control.

Have you ever been in that situation?

You are at the mercy of other people’s judgment of you.

We see it all the time in the legal system. The defendant awaits the decision of the judge. Everyone in the courtroom has an opinion, but none of those opinions matter because the judge sitting in their seat of power has the final say. Guilty or innocent.

But we are all judges to some degree. We all make judgments about various people. We are presented evidence, and we weigh it against our own experience and values. We pronounce a verdict.

It’s a verdict that we will hold on to until we are presented with more evidence. Then we have to retry the defendant and of course, because we have already made a judgment changing our opinion involves an acknowledgment that we had got it wrong.

‘Know me before you judge me’ is a line from a Mental Health promotion we had here in New Zealand many years ago, but how many of us are genuinely willing to get in the ditch of another life and know the story that shaped the soul.

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It surrounds us all the time. Ambient stress. We probably aren’t even aware of it, but we can do something about it when we recognize it. 

I have one of my favorite and most cherished items on the wall above my desk. It is a barometer that measures the pressure of the environment around me. To be more precise, it measures air pressure.

I cherish it because it was originally my father’s. So on this old beauty is a little plaque that has these words.

Presented to MR B PEARMAN from Glenbrook Sunday School Pupils & Teachers. 1949

It also has a thermometer to measure the temperature.

I remember my Dad often looking at the barometer to see what was happening in the weather world around him. The little needle would move as the weather, and air pressure changed.

A little move to the right would mean the weather would get drier and less likely to rain. A move to the left would indicate possible rain and storms. All very important to know when you want to decide on whether to shear the sheep or not or cut the hay crop or not.

There is pressure bearing down on us all the time. Air pressure, but we have become so used to it, and the pressure changes are so subtle that we hardly notice it all. With the barometer, first invented in 1643, we know something about the ambient pressure pushing against us.

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Every one of us needs someone to help us with our stress load, but the best person is someone who has been there, done that, got the scars to prove it —Jesus of the scars.

Take the stress away. Essentially that’s what many of you and I pray for. We want the pressure that is upon us to leave. We want the miracle to happen, so we no longer have to be under the weight of it all, and sometimes it does.

Stress relief that’s what we want.

I like to read biographies—the stories of people and how they lived their lives. Most likely, they are the stories of the well-known. The sportswomen and men, entertainers, politicians, and adventurers, but what about those who are more like us.

Like one of us.

If God had a name, the human name would be Jesus.

For a microdot of time, a mere 30-plus years, he walked the dust-filled existence of being fully human. In the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we have Spirit-led observations of his human life. Four biographies, but they are incomplete in the sense that you don’t hear every story and every challenge. You have the highlight reel with some lowlights too.

I would like to know more, and there is more.

The last verse of John’s biography of Jesus says this.

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. John 21:25

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Grief is hard, but grieving alone can be a torment of anguish, so we sit with the broken; we are silent and Shiva to the tears.

When my father cried loud and hard, I experienced a kind of solidarity in my grief. A child had died, and a funeral was had. I placed a small small casket into a tiny hole. It’s still there now.

Friends and family gathered and shared the loss. Yet, it still catches me whenever I drive past the resting place of one who never drew breath.

Life in this broken world can hand you questions and harshness that no answers can satisfy.

There is a time for everything.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: A time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep, a time to mourn, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to be silent and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes 3

But some people don’t know the times and the seasons for being quiet and sitting with brokenness. To sit with the sorrow of loss.

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We are happy to accept good from God, but what about trouble? There is something deeper available when we center on clinging to God.

As a gardener, I work in all kinds of weather. Rain, sun, and wind – both light and strong. In the extremes, I complain.

The furnace of summer heat can be too much. Then in the winter, torrents of rain can stop me in my tracks. Sometimes the wind can blow so hard it’s dangerous.

But I know all this weather has both good and bad. In the summer, I long for the rain to water the earth and wash the dust off the trees.

In the winter, I long for the sun to warm me and the earth. Lighting charges the rain with nitrogen to be part of a cycle of blessing to the earth below. The wind keeps the flow of life from being stagnant.

I walk the gardens, and my mood’s pendulum swings from thankfulness to grumbling.

Throughout this, I have to remind myself that God is good. I have an eternal God that wants to help me in this broken mixed-up world.

Can you accept both good from God and trouble?

It’s easy to accept the good. The days when everything is going well, the sun is shining, you’ve slept well, and you know you have beauty and purpose.

But what about when the clouds are dark, tiredness and pain surround the heart, and you feel ugly and defeated. You want to hide or worse.

Acceptance is something we grow ourselves into.

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People can say some harsh things to us, but when someone close says ‘Curse God and Die’ you have to go to a deeper place of faith than they possibly have.

I was watching him wilt. He was once like a flourishing plant, enjoying water and sun and growing and giving out beauty. But now the water had dried up, the sun beat down like a torturer, and the once gentle winds were hammering and stripping him down to a skeleton.

Who will come

Who will rescue the ship

The first book I read about Mental Health and Christianity was ‘Why do Christians shoot their wounded‘ by Dwight L. Carlson. It’s a classic, in my opinion.

The author writes from a place where he has seen people with Mental illnesses getting wounded by well-meaning but ignorant Christians saying the mental illness was due to some sin in their life.

This ‘shooting of the wounded’ still goes on today, and it’s been around a very long time.

Whatever we don’t understand and are uncomfortable with, we attribute to sin. This calamity is because of something you’ve done wrong and God is punishing you.

It’s the law of retribution. You do something wrong, and you get the punishment. You do something good, and you get the reward. If bad things are happening, you must have done something bad.

But what if you have done nothing wrong and bad things happen.

That’s the situation of the biblical character Job.

Every measure of what we would call success had been taken from him. His health, his wealth, his children.

He goes to the place which feels the most welcoming to his heart. The local dump site. There he sits in the ashes of yesterday’s goodness and picks at his skin.

That’s what you do when life is hollowed out. You grieve and go to a cave.

Another response, one of many, as we will see, is to lash out, particularly at those close to you and God.

The first of the whip lashes was from his wife. She, too had seen the trauma and tragedy of her children dying (Job 1:13-19)

The tongue swings are wide and deep.

Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

Note that before she told him what to do, we see an affirmation of Job’s deepest quality, the one being tested. His integrity.

This word integrity (tummah in Hebrew) could also be translated as innocence.

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It can be so easy to lose hope. But when we ask, ‘How is it with your soul?’ an opportunity opens to journey to know wellness.

‘How are you?’ they asked. My response was polite, and I said that I was okay.

They repeated the question.

They wanted to know how it was with my soul at a deep level.

Eventually, I caved in to their gentle and persistent curiosity and shared a few more deep things. We hugged and prayed.

It was good. It was church.

But that’s a question that can challenge us. Do I go deep, or do I go shallow? Is this person safe to confide in, or someone to avoid?

There are a couple of people that I would have liked to have gone deep and known more about their souls.

One of them was named Horatio, and the other was named Job.

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You have a story. You are a story. To receive a story is to listen to the white space between the words.

I hear stories every day. You do too. But there are some stories I hear where I sense I am on sacred ground.

It’s when you feel that the other is taking some risk as they speak the hesitant words.

Words they may have told others and been rejected for.

So they have nailed the door of their heart that little bit tighter. Maybe even used super glue to seal any gaps.

But stories have to be told. Untold, they can eat away like a parasite feeding on its host.

There sits within all of us a need to be heard, known, loved, and embraced.

We were designed for oneness. That beauty of being known and knowing someone else. It’s a scent still lingering in us from Eden days. We want it, long for it. It’s in our DNA.

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We need a weight loss program for the heart, but we can’t do it alone, so a vicar steps in and declares, ‘You are forgiven. Be at peace.’  

I could feel a kind of weight leave my body. I had carried this tension and held this stress for so long that it felt normal. But once I heard the words ‘You are forgiven. Be at peace.’ it was like someone had lifted a huge burden off my shoulder.

We’re not talking about a few extra pounds of weight you might be carrying because you overindulged at Christmas. It’s more the emotional weight of events that have happened to you.

The kilograms of guilt, the burden of shame, the gravity of regret. It’s the anger and resentment festering away and eating at your soul. The bitterness that still snipes in your silence.

This burden can be so heavy that it feels like it pushes you into the ground. You groan under the yoke of what you carry.

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