Turning the Page

Do you keep making the same bad choices over and over again? You can change, and it all begins with a decision to change the way you think and act.

It was New Zealand’s worst airline disaster. On November 28th, 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 flew into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica. All 237 passengers and 20 crew died.

I remember the first news reports coming in on TV in the evening, saying that the flight was overdue and that contact had been lost. We woke the next morning to a tragedy.

Initially, it was concluded that it was pilot error, but a Royal Commission was set up to dig deeper. It found that two factors caused the accident. A correction made to the coordinates of the flight path the night before the disaster and a failure to inform the flight crew of the change.

The result was that the aircraft was being guided by the computer in a direct path toward Mount Erebus.

.

Surely you would think the pilots would be able to see the mountain in front of them and steer to avoid it, but they were in whiteout conditions.

Outside there was a layer of clouds that blended with the white of the snow-covered volcano, forming a sector whiteout – there was no contrast between the two to warn the pilots. The effect deceived everyone on the flight deck, making them believe that the white mountainside was the Ross Ice Shelf. Mount Erebus disaster

Then there was the attempt to cover up the causes of the disaster. Justice Mahon, chair of the Royal Commission, accused Air New Zealand of presenting “an orchestrated litany of lies.”

I’ve known a few disasters in my life. I’ve also seen others have crashes. Many of them preventable.

Then there are those crashes that are repeated time and time. You keep on doing the same thing, expecting different results, but wind up with the same disaster on your hands.

You blame other people. Accusations fly. You hide the facts and twist the truth.  You orchestrate a ‘litany of lies’ believing them to be true. Deep down, though, it was you that was making the same decisions.

It’s like you have an onboard computer with wrong coordinates loaded into it, flying you towards an inevitable disaster.

Then there was a time of momentous change in the history of the world, but for one man, it got extremely personal. He had his inbuilt computer brain telling him to always respond to a situation in a certain way.

Even though he had been a follower of Jesus for three years, and had listened to everything Jesus had said, seen all the miracles, he still had the disaster.

Peter denied knowing Jesus, and suddenly his world collapsed.

Later he was forgiven and restored, but this was a pivotal moment in Peter’s life. It was a time of course correction. He had to change his thinking and acting.

Later, that is his message to an equally misguided group of people.

Change the way you think and act. Acts 2:38 3:19

Change is a course correction—an alteration in your thinking, which leads to new actions and behaviors.

One of my favorite quotes is from the French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist Simeon Weil.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. Simone Weil, Waiting for God

We all have turned our gaze in the wrong direction. All of us have some disastrous coordinates programmed into our neural pathways.  Often these are there from childhood. Early conclusions we made about life steers our ship.

Every day we have experiences that subconsciously reinforce our belief that …

• The world is a dangerous place

There is a dance that we are invited to participate in. It’s a dance of ‘course correction’.

When I was in school, we had square dancing. We would choose a partner, and then four couples would stand in a square. The frazzled teacher (frazzled after herding children) would put a record on the record player and out would come some scratchy American folk singer encouraging us to take your partner, swing them to the left and right, dosey doe and go to someplace called ‘Red River Valley’.

It was rhythm and patterns, and you got to dance with that pretty girl!

I believe we are all in a course correction dance with partners who are perfect in every way, know the exact steps to take, and are very gracious about our stepping on their toes.

My little logo for Turning the Page symbolizes this.

Four dancing spirals, or Koru. God as Parent, Jesus the Son, and Spirit is inviting us to change the way we think and act.

I get invitations to course-correct every day. Some I ignore and some I explore. Some I take in and make them part of my thinking compass.

I don’t want you or anyone else to keep on heading towards disasters – large or small, but it requires a willingness to change the way you think and act.

Mental Health is ... accepting that we need to change the way we think and actCLICK TO TWEET

• Metanoeite, or change of consciousness, can only come with time. Patience is the very shape of love. Without it, religion is merely about enforcing laws and requirements. Richard Rohr Patience

1. Do you ever have moments where you mutter to yourself, ‘Why do I keep on doing that’?

What Swiss Cheese has taught me about Forgiving Myself and Others

How to Develop a Compass for the Brain

Mental Health is … You Taking Ownership of You

Barry Pearman

Photo by Vandan Patel on Unsplash

Stress can add up to be too much, and we can have a mental health breakdown, but when we break it down like in the story of David and Goliath, we can find a way through the chaos.

Stressful times can feel like a massive avalanche of overwhelming pressure. The keyword in that sentence is ‘feel.’  You have a feeling of living in the overwhelming shadow of something that could crush you.

It was like an overflowing river of complaints.

It took her an hour to express all her problems and pains to me. She had not been listened to for some time, and all the fear, anger, sadness, frustration, and plain tiredness had to be released. I think she thought I had some sort of magic prayer wand that could be waved and all the problems would disappear.

Instead, I suggested that we, together, break it down before she had a breakdown. Then I told her a Bible story.

It’s the story of David and Goliath. You can read the story in full here, but it’s the story of a little guy taking on a bully, and when we look further into the story, we can glean some ideas of how to handle our stress.

When looking at stressful situations, there are a lot of ‘and’s.’ This problem and that problem and then this situation and then that issue and of course this crisis and then that situation. Lots and lots of ‘and’s.’

The story of David and Goliath is full of ‘and’s.’

A fearful King.

Do you see how the ‘and’s’ add up? They keep adding and adding and adding until we lose sight of the individual components. It all adds to it being one HUGE PROBLEM.

But there was a young teenage boy, David, visiting his brothers.

For every problem that feels overwhelming, there is a ‘but.’

It’s time to take action.

Therefore David fell back on the confidence and faith that he had developed when facing lions and bears.

David went in ‘the strength that he had’ much like Gideon was called to do (see Three Bible Verses to Reassure when You feel Stress)

Much of the stress we face can feel overwhelming, like a Goliath, but it can be broken down into smaller and smaller components.

At times we need to get quite pragmatic about our lives.

• What is in my control and what is not.

When we breakdown the problem into manageable chunks, we can then tackle each part of the problem in bite-sized pieces. As they say, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time’.

What taunts you? Is there something that seems overwhelming and huge that you are facing. Does it feel too big for you to cope with?

Break it down before it breaks you down.

Mental Health is ... learning how to be pragmatic and to breakdown problems, before they break you downCLICK TO TWEET

• A goal without a plan is just a wish.― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

1. Thinking of a situation you are facing, what are its parts?

7 Mental Health Benefits of Having a ‘Can Do’ Task List.

How to Help Others Solve Problems in 8 Steps

Three Bible Verses to Reassure when You feel Stress

Barry Pearman

Photo by Kylo on Unsplash

Learn more about A, B, T – And, But, Therefore writing from Randy Olson.

There are times we feel stress, but there is the hope of reassurance when we meditate on some Bible verses.

One of my favorite bible characters was someone who seemed to need consistent reassurance when under stress. He was anxious, unsure, and seemed to want to argue with God. I like that because it means he was much like many of us.

He was human, and that’s important to remember. God chose someone like us. God still chooses imperfect people to do great things. His name was Gideon.

Imagine, if you can, that an oppressive all-powerful military force has invaded your land. You are in hiding and no longer living in your home. Instead, you are living in caves and hiding in the countryside. You grow some crops only to have them destroyed. Any animals you have, get slaughtered by the army.

You are living in fear and always looking over your back, wondering when the next attack would come. You cry out to God for help and wait. This was Gideon’s life.

He was so full of fear that he chose a winepress, somewhere he couldn’t be seen to grind out a small amount of wheat.

But in that hidden place, an angel appeared.

The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. Judges 6:12

Whatever is stressing you out, there is a greater bigger story going on.

We can get so captured by the human reality of the situation that we lose awareness of the bigger story. That God is with us and that God has a different view of us and what is stressing us out.

When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” Judges 6: 12

The phrase ‘The Lord is with you’ is repeated throughout the Bible, and when we come to taste the awareness of presence, then our perception of ourselves is invited to change.

The angel gave Gideon the truest version of himself – ‘Mighty warrior.’

I wonder what an Angel would say about you as the truest version of yourself?

When you are sitting in the presence of the eternal, then the present reality loses its power over you. You begin to feel held in something bigger than your version of what’s going on.

To prevent horses from seeing to the rear and, in some cases, to the side, blinkers are placed near the eyes.  These are little flaps placed near the eyes. They have a ‘blinkered view’.

Their world is captured in what they can see.

When under stress, our perception of things can become so narrow and tight that we lose sight of anything else. Our version of reality becomes fixed.

Gideon had a blinkered version of what reality and God was meant to be like. We all do. His version was much like ours. ‘God, you promised this and that, why haven’t you come through on my terms of what blessing is meant to look like’.

“Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.” Judges 6: 13

I think the angel could see his blinkers. No debate was ventured into, no apologetics lectures were given, and no arguing over various texts. Logic was not going to change his heart, but perhaps a millimeter faith step would. 

I was once publicly shamed by a pastor from the pulpit. He didn’t say my name, but enough people knew that it was me he was referring to when he talked about people not having enough faith to go on the mission field. I was in a leadership coaching group he was leading, and it was a topic I brought up the previous week. So much for confidentiality.

‘The Lord’ ( no longer an angel) speaks to this blinkered hiding man. Try and see yourself in Gideon’s shoes. 

The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand.” Judges 6:14

Why I brought up that personal story is that faith and confidence grow little by little and step by step.

Gideon is encouraged to ‘Go in the strength you have’. He wasn’t told to be a Superhero, to fake it until you make it, to be something he wasn’t, to leap, and wait for the net to catch him. You can’t be someone else. You can only be you, so start there.

Instead, he was to start where he was. Faith steps begin from where you are and move to where you can be next.

When under high-stress, I like to be very pragmatic and down to earth. I break the problems down into the smallest tiniest little steps to take and then ‘Go in the strength that I have’ to resolve them.

I never thought that I would have a website with weekly posts about Mental Health and Faith. I had a blinkered view, but God didn’t.

Gideon is given an empowering question. A question that moves him to think about the blinkers constricting his life.

“Am I not sending you?” Judges 6:14

Out of everyone available, God chose Gideon. We think we have to be a specific type of person or have various qualifications to be of use to God. God looks at the heart and starts there.

This is a Bible verse that chooses you to consider choosing yourself. Can you do that?

All of us, from time to time, have difficult, stressful times. Periods where we feel alone and anxious. In a winepress doing the daily grind. In those times, it’s important to meditate on these three Bible verses.

1. “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

• We cannot attain the presence of God. We’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness Richard Rohr

1. What would an angel say to you about who you truly are?

5 Steps to take when the Panic button has been pushed

How to Develop a Compass for the Brain

Fight, Flight, or Freeze. There is a Mental Health invite Underneath.

Barry Pearman

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

Cast your bread. You can hold it to yourself, that special thing about you, but it is better for everyone if you ‘Cast your bread.’  Focus on the micro gifts of today.

Even in winter, the children still ask if there are strawberries to pick.

I manage a large vegetable garden at a primary school here in Auckland, and it always amuses me when the children ask me if there are any strawberries. They don’t yet fully understand the concept of seasons and having to wait.

That there is a time to sow and a time reap.

I enjoy harvest time. It’s so good to be picking fresh fruit and vegetables straight from the garden. One of the delights at the school is to pick some fresh ripe tomatoes and then slice a section and give it to a young child.

The taste is so much better than store-bought. Maybe because it’s been grown in soil, without vast amounts of chemical fertilizers and sprays, but also perhaps that the children are involved in the planting and the picking.

Today it’s a world of immediacy. With the quickness of internet speed, we expect to get what we want when we want it.

We go to our supermarket shelves in the middle of winter and can find summer fruits and vegetables.

Perhaps we have lost some sense of waiting with patient expectancy.

Rhythm is built into creation, and the problem with the modern world is that you can get tomatoes at 2 am Rob Bell

There is a strange little verse in the Bible that genuinely makes you scratch your head.

Cast your bread upon the waters,

I see myself with a loaf of bread, throwing it into a river and then it coming back to me after a few days as a soggy mess. Now that is weird!

So we need to go back to what the first readers would have heard—their interpretation of this cryptic passage.

Cast – to cast something was to spread it out. Typically in those times, it referred to seed.  A farmer would go and ‘cast’ his seed out into the fields. In these modern days, we have machines that are very precise and will drill or sow the seed to precisely the right depth and placement for optimum germination. In the days of old, it was random, rough, and ready.

Bread – another reference to seed. Bread comes from milled grain. The grain is the seed. Every year at harvest time, a portion of the crop was set aside to be sown at a later date. When the season came for sowing, there better be enough seed. So, in essence, you were sowing your bread.

Waters – You don’t sow seed into water, but you do sow it when you know that the soil will become wet with rain. In Israel, the early rains come in October / November to loosen up the sun-baked dirt. A farmer would go out and cultivate the soil ready for ‘water’ to fill furrows. The seed would then be cast into the ‘waters’ and germinate.

Find it after many days – that little seed, sown in faith, would grow and develop and create seed itself. This would take ‘many days.’ There was not an exact date when the harvest would take place, but more a season.

So many factors come into play as to how well that cereal plant would grow. Many unseen and unknown factors express themselves on that growing plant. There is a mystery, and much of its growth is beyond our control. 

Harvest is a beautiful time. It is that moment where you know the fruit of your labor. You taste it and enjoy its freshness. You want to be forever living in that emotional happiness of reward and satisfaction.

That buzz or thrill can become addictive.

I want it all, I want it now, and I don’t want to have to do the work to get it. We want the delight of intimacy, but we don’t want to do the risky work of relationship building. Please relieve my emotional pain relief, but without the hard work of discovering what’s under the pain.

For most of our days, we are cultivating, sowing seed, and waiting. We trust, and we hope. Confidence grows year upon year, harvest season upon harvest season.

I think there are many ‘Snake Oil salesmen’ in our world. They offer a quick fix, a panacea to our problems.

In 2019 the most popular searched item on Google was ‘Disney Plus.’

We want our diversions, our harvest of buzz emotions. We want to be told ‘nice things,’ things that will make us ‘feel better.’

“They tell their preachers,

We want the harvest without the sweat of cultivation and the casting of our essence to the unknown. Sowing to something beyond our control. To faith, hope, and love.

What if we were to take a joyful approach to the daily grind of a little movement each day.

I enjoy sowing seeds. I get my little packet of seed, open up the tinfoil wrapper and sprinkle the seed on to some seedling mix compost, cover them and water and wait.

The seed, in a sense, dies to its former structure. In that small dry husky shell, some water reaches in and begins the magic. Cells divide and multiply, and before long, a root comes out. Then bursting through the soil a shoot emerges. 

There is already a harvest of growth and change. It’s exciting. Given a few more ‘many days’ and I will be picking tomatoes and slicing cucumbers for children dulled by supermarket immediacy. 

I also sow seeds every week via this blog. I cast them wide and far. Some touch down on good soil and reap a harvest multiple times over. Some seed lands on stones and paths and rocky places. Parable of the Sower

The important thing is to keep on sowing because there is a joy in the seed landing and taking root in people’s lives.

Those early subsistence farmers had a choice. Do I eat the seed or not? How much I do keep for myself and my family, and how much do I set aside for sowing?

The same question is ours.

How much of the good are you holding in yourself? Keeping it in and not sharing what you have been given.

That giftedness you have. That unique quality or skill or knowledge you alone seem to have.

My mother made beautiful knitted garments. Many hours she could be seen knitting exquisite baby clothes. Her great-grandbabies wear them now, and maybe even their great-grandbabies will wear them too!

Now that is what I call a harvest from casting to the waters.

What would you most like to harvest in your life? Is it joy, peace, happiness, contentment? Focus on the ‘cast’ of the moment. In ‘many days,’ and maybe even not in your lifetime, there will be a harvest.

Mental Health is ... celebrating this present moment of the microscopic 'cast your bread upon the waters' knowing that there will be a harvest in the future.CLICK TO TWEET

• I’ve got this thing in my heart

1. What little micro ‘cast’ can you make today?

How ‘Going the extra Mile’ Flips the Power Dynamics

Life’s not Fair! There is a Mystery to be Known

God is Pruning Me for Love, Joy, and Peace

Barry Pearman

Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

There are many barriers to getting the help we need for our Mental Health, but the barriers can be taken down, and new hope can be found.

Today as you read this blogpost, approximately ten visits will be made to read the blog post ‘I’ve Had Enough, Take my Life God, I Want to die.’ 

Since writing it in January 2018, it has been read 9000 times. The page comes up as the second offering on google for the search terms ‘take my life God I want to die’.

People all over the world, in the privacy of their pain, are coming to Turning the Page for help.

That scares me. Not that I don’t think I have something to offer them, but that they are expressing their pain to a machine and not a person.

Ok, maybe those that type ‘God I want to die’ into google have reached out to another human soul for help. I hope so, but even in reaching out, there will be other barriers to push through.

There is a barrier. Something is stopping the movement to honesty.

I’m struggling to find the perfect word to describe this barrier. Could it be the word ‘pride’?

Pride is one of those words that gets a bad rap because it takes our mind to the term arrogance, an over-inflated sense of the self. But pride is more devious than that.

Pride says in confident tones.

‘You’re not like everyone else. You’re different, and you’re ok. You don’t need help to walk this path.  You can solve this problem. There is nothing in you that needs help.’

There is an interesting little story in the Bible about a senior Jewish leader and his communications with Jesus. His name was Nicodemus.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night John 3:1,2

There was a desired hiddenness to the movements of Nicodemus. He didn’t want to be seen by others in his approach to Jesus. In today’s world, he may well have kept his anonymity, and his soul questions private by searching on Google.

We come at night because we are uncertain about the reception of our honesty.

Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other similar recovery type groups begin with a ruthlessly honest assessment of pride.

‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’

What do you privately type into Google? What, in the secrecy of coming to Jesus at night, would you ask?

I have a short survey form that occasionally people leave their ‘at night’ private comments and questions.

They don’t have to leave their name or any contact details, but it is helpful if they do because often I have some gently curious questions I would like to ask.

I think if you look at the life of Jesus, he asked a lot of gentle and curious questions, especially to those who came by night. I want to be like that.

So here is my ‘and he came by night’ super confidential survey.

Another common barrier that stops people from getting the help they need is money. They don’t have the money to be able to afford counseling or therapy. Books and courses cost too much.

That is why Turning the Page is funded on a ‘Pay What You Want‘ basis. I don’t want finance to be a barrier to people getting help.

Mental health is ... understanding the barriers we face and seeking a path through themCLICK TO TWEET

• One of the greatest barriers in seeking help is the stigma that comes with needing it. Courtney Subramanian

1. What barriers hinder or stop you or others from getting help?

Barry Pearman

Image cc: Matthew Garoffolo

There is a resistance we all face into, but with the presence of others, we can know hope. So let’s listen.

It felt to her that she was the only one having struggles. Every day, as her eyes peeled open, there was an instantaneous thought ‘Can I do this’?

As someone who works outside in the wind and rain, I notice that the ambient surroundings have an effect on me. It might be the heat of the summer or the cold of winter. The mud that clings heavily to my boots in the winter or the brightness of the sun in the heat of summer. There is always a resistance I have to push into.

But it’s the wind that truly takes it out of me.

Working in a strong wind feels like life is being gouged out of me. You have to push into it to do anything. There is a resistance to movement. It’s tangible and real, but also unseen.

Having a mental illness can be like that. It’s always there and you have to push through it. It’s the thoughts and feelings that whistle and roar around your life, but you push on and you awake the next day to face it again.

I want to say well done.

Writer Steven Pressfield talks about resistance in his book ‘War of Art’.

“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.

There is a resistance that every writer has to push into. Its the push back words you hear in your head ‘Who are you to write anything’. The wind of ‘I don’t have anything to share’ and the hail storm of ‘Who is going to read this anyway’.

Right at the place of movement, there is a resistance. Will I move forward or will the wind push me back into nothingness.

To every moving forward in life, there will be the sensation of a push back.

Those winds that strike us every day can eventually wear us down. Like an autumn leaf losing its grip on the tree, it floats away and is lost.

Many of the readers of this blog have at times faced hurricanes. The stress load wind storm was too much for them and it crashed them to the ground.

Then someone minimized the storm you faced. Given so-called ‘wise advice’ after the tree had been torn from the ground. And now, with the roots ripped out from under you, any little breeze can echo storm warnings.

So many times I want to reach out and say a few words.

You’re doing OK

I get annoyed and saddened when people consider me as being religious.

What I hear them saying is that I am one of those ‘God followers’ who follows all the rules. That religion is all about rules and regulations, having a set of behaviors that you must do. Going to Church on Sunday, reading your Bible, etc.

Yet, in terms of following rules, I think every one of us has a religion we follow. A set of rules and beliefs we adhere to. Codes, ethics, and standards are found everywhere, not just in organized religious ‘church’ contexts. Your workplace has a religion to it, so does your sports club.

When Jesus sat down in ‘Church’ with his dirt under the toenails followers he said these words.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus was one who knew all about resistance. He had it in supernaturally large quantities. Every day he was facing into some sort of hurricane.

If you want to get all fancy with words, he did it vicariously. That word is a wonderful life-giving word. To be vicarious is to do something on behalf of another.

I want a relationship with someone who has been there done that. I don’t want a religion with them.

Jesus has broken the wind, like the bow of a ship breaking through the water. We can ride in behind knowing that he has and is going in front of us.

Many many people simply need to know that they are not alone. That’s all that is required.

To have someone say to them that they are doing okay. To not have any heavy burdens or expectations laid on them. To be graced with grace.

Can you do this for someone you know?

Mental Health is ... understanding the resistance you face and going through it with someone else. You're not alone in what you face.CLICK TO TWEET

• Deep happiness is conditional – it doesn’t simply happen. Success in mental/emotional health must be worked at. D. Riddell

1. What does the word ‘resistance’ mean to you?

Image cc: KARTIK GADA

We think our lives have a strength to them, but remove a few Jenga pegs, experience a shock, and we can easily topple to the stress. So we build with each other and find new resilience. 

A couple of mornings ago, my son said ‘Nice Jenga Dad.’ I was puzzled, for a moment then I realized he was talking about my dishwashing Jenga.

Jenga is a stacking game using perfectly shaped wooden blocks. Then one by one, a peg is removed and placed on the top of the tower until it topples over. It’s a game of skill and engineering.

Since the kids were little, we generally wash the dishes and stack them in the dish rack to be put away the next morning.

Now some of those dishwashing Jenga stackings can be mighty impressive. Its an art form to squeeze in a pot or two. Chopsticks can be poked in anywhere, but a large serving platter requires courage, wisdom, and a certain level of creativity.

Fortunately, where we live, we don’t have earthquakes or many large trucks passing by. So the Jenga stays secure.

We all have a Jenga—a way we stack the various parts of our lives.

The pegs might be who cooks the meals, washes the dishes, pays the bills. What route you take to work. When you clean your teeth, wash your clothes and the way you stack your groceries. You have preferences, likes, dislikes.

Relationship stress with other Jengas also plays a part. How secure, or insecure, those Jengas nearest to you impacts you (pun intended!).

You stack it all up, and there is your daily/ weekly life. Mostly it’s pretty secure. It can stand a bit of a wobble, a slight knock here and there.

But under pressure, one’s Jenga can take a topple.

I once knew a man, John, whose life Jenga at one stage was a pile of psychotic pegs thrown about in an Inpatient Mental Health Unit.

He had been going well in life. Wife, kids, job, and supportive church life. Loved and respected by all. Sure there were times when he had some thoughts and ideas that seemed to be a bit out of the normal. His wife had some concerns, but then things got back to normal.

Then he lost his job. He got made redundant and found he wasn’t needed anymore. The fragile Jenga began to move.

It swung, swayed, and eventually crashed. He started to lose sleep. He walked and paced. His sentences didn’t seem to make sense, but he thought he was perfectly OK.

‘Nothing wrong with me,’ he said with grandiose gestures, but there was, and everyone could see it.

He was unwell.

We like to think we are invincible, that we can handle anything that comes our way. WRONG.

We are all particulates of clay. Our Jenga isn’t perfect, and everyone reacts to stress in different ways.

For some, when placed under a huge stress load, it might be high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, headaches. For others, it could be sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, and even psychotic breaks.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made, but we are also fragile in our clay.

If I was to sit down with you and a pile of Jenga pegs, what words about you would you write on each peg.

• Job

Now, let’s break those categories down even further.

The pegs become

• Work goals

and many other pegs.

As you see, the tower grows higher and higher and increasingly fragile. For the most part, you have it all together. Life is good, it’s manageable. But then a knock, a wind, a brush with someone else’s fragile Jenga, and you begin to wobble.

A severe enough shake, such as the death of a loved one or a loss of a job, and the tower can shake violently and even crash.

It’s then that the tower, with the help of others, has to be rebuilt. We pick up the pieces, examine them, and craft them into the new rebuild.

It’s an ‘And next to them’ project.

‘Nehemiah and the Jenga Builders’ sounds like an 80’s rock band, doesn’t it, but they are more a recovery group.

In my book ‘Broken to built,’ I share devotionals about how an entire city rebuilt their Jenga walls. It’s the story of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.

Next to them Rephaiah son of Hur, ruler of half the district of Jerusalem, made repairs. 10 Next to them Jedaiah son of Harumaph made repairs opposite his house; and next to him Hattush son of Hashabneiah made repairs. Nehemiah 3:9,10

It was a Jenga wall recovery movement of thousands of ‘Next to them’ relationships.

Every one of us is standing next to someone’s Jenga and they next to ours.

Are we helping them to be secure? Are we working on knowing ourselves and our vulnerabilities to stress? Do we have good strategies in place for reaching out and getting help when it’s needed?

Our mental health is probably more fragile than we would like to admit to, so we need to build ‘and next to them’ relationships that foster resilience for when the storms come.

John, with the help of others, recovered and rebuilt his Jenga. He now had a more honest and grounded reality in his life. He understood his vulnerabilities and accepted them. His faith was less ‘Woo woo’ and more earthy and honest. He had to review many of his beliefs about God and faith. As he did, he began to become more balanced, stable, and secure.

Mental Health is ... knowing your Jenga and the Jenga of others. How can you build a strong structure?CLICK TO TWEET

We think our lives have a strength to them, but remove a few Jenga pegs, experience a shock, and we can easily topple to the stress. So we build with each other and find new resilience.

• Assumptions are what make the world go round, but they can also create hell-on-earth until they are exposed and carefully examined. D. Riddell

1. What are various Jenga pegs in your life?

A Particulate of Clay takes on COVID-19

We open the heart and then find our trust is broken, but trust is fragile at the best of times, so we are wisely careful with the gift.

It’s those secret little internal vows we make that can cause so much damage.

As I wrote some words upon a whiteboard, I could see her affirm what I was writing. ‘I’m never going to trust again’.

She had opened her heart to someone, and it had got broken badly. She had trusted someone, shared the deep stuff, and now that part of her was locked in a coffin of her own making and was nailed down tight. A vow had been made.

The thing is that this exposure wasn’t the first time.

Many times as a child, she had reached out in vulnerability only to have her hands slapped. Every time this happened, she formed a belief that this world isn’t safe to venture one’s heart into. The vow was repeated.

There are secrets we all carry. Heart stuff that we don’t tell anyone, especially not those closest to us. There is too much at stake. We have a recurring question.

‘If you knew me, would you love me.’

An internal vow is made, and that vow is repeated over and over again by that small inner child within us.

We don’t go out to play because its easier and safer to stay inside, where it’s familiar and has controlled sterility to it. But locked rooms become stuffy. There’s no fresh air flowing in.

We want and need fresh air to flow into our hearts, but the vows keep the windows shut. We socially isolate ourselves in our self made bubbles.

We want to die, and the desire is granted. Something within dies because we were always meant to receive something of life from someone else.

In this post perfect world (Eden), we still have the lingering wafts of complete intimacy (in-to-me-see). We still have that desire and longing for love and to be known. But it’s no longer a world without weeds. Thorns jag us seemingly every time.

People use and abuse. They don’t know how to engage with something so fragile as a heart. Our subconscious gets triggered by ghostly echoes of a former time and place. It happens so quickly and powerfully that everything runs into it. We lock down and lock-in.

Trust is a fragile gift. We begin to trust someone, and so we open ourselves to being known. We feel held, and a sense of love begins to grow. A question forms around opening yourself further, sharing more of the deeper stuff?

‘I just want to be held’ were the heart-wrenching words they said.

Yes, on one level, they wanted a physical embrace, but more so, they were wanting to held at a heart level.

Not everyone knows how to hold. Not everyone is equipped. Most people don’t know what to do and how to respond to the naked exposure of another’s soul. They want to fix, problem solve, spiritualize, and slap band-aids on the pain.

Not many people know how to sit in Shiva anymore.

Shiva (Hebrew: שִׁבְעָה, literally “seven”) is the week-long mourning period in Judaism for first-degree relatives. Shiva embraces a time when individuals discuss their loss and accept the comfort of others. Wikipedia

We all have a loss in our lives. It may not be related to physical death, but it might be the loss of a dream, a relationship, a career, an innocence, an intimacy so desired.

To sit in Shiva doesn’t have to be about loss at all. It’s about listening for the dirt gathered under the toenails of living in an outcast world.

How would you answer that question? Why do you find trust difficult?

You’re not alone, everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) holds a part of themselves within themselves where no one can see.

One of my favorite writers about inclusion is Miroslav Volv, who I think captures the spirit of Shiva in this passage.

‘An embrace involves always a double movement of opening and closing. I open my arms to create space in myself for the other.

The open arms are a sign of discontent at being myself only and of desire to include the other.

They are an invitation to the others to come in and feel at home with me, to belong to me.

In an embrace I also close my arms around the others – not tightly, so as to crush and assimilate them forcefully into myself, for that would not be an embrace but a concealed power-act of exclusion; but gently, so as to tell them that I do not want to be without them in their otherness.

I want them in their openness.

I want them to remain independent and true to their genuine selves, to maintain their identity and as such become part of me so that they can enrich me with what they have and I do not’. Judith M Gundry-Volf, Miroslav Volf. A spacious heart: essays on identity and belonging. (Trinity Press International, 1997, 58-59.)

In grounded reality, you are probably not going to find someone perfect in trust. The best-case scenario is that you’re going to find a flawed image bearer that is honest with their trust issues.

Maybe as you become a Shiva trust bearer, you will find someone who can be that to you.

The one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life. Galatians 6:7 The Message

I have found that when I sow tomatoes, I reap tomatoes. As I grow in my ability to be trustworthy to others, I find others who I sense that I can trust.

Trust is fragile at the best of times, so we are wisely careful with the gift.

Mental Health ... knowing who to trust and who not to. It takes time and wisdomCLICK TO TWEET

• The most powerful thing we can do to help someone change is to offer them a rich taste of God’s incredible goodness. Larry Crabb

1. What makes a person trustworthy?

Please. No Fixing, Advising, Saving or Straightening Out

Why I need to be Inadequate

Barry Pearman

Image cc: JJ Jordan

Storms of life can hit hard against our mental health, but we can learn to stand firm and even advance. Developing resilience is a practice of strengthing your inner Bulldog.

It was quite something as I watched this little goat headbutt a Bulldog. Repeatedly it launched itself at the Bulldog, but the dog stayed firm, resilient, and even advanced into the storm.

To me, it spoke of resilience in the face of adversity.

Resilience is one of those buzzwords that is popular in Mental Health.

Psychological resilience is the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. Resilience exists when the person uses “mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors” Wikipedia

For this post, it’s the ability to be a bulldog in the face of whatever stressor you are facing.

Recently I had a goat try and take me out. It was an old familiar shame pathway that I have been hit by many times, but I could see it and knew what to do.

I talked about the problem out and found my inner Bulldog strengthening its hind legs. I advanced, and the shame retreated.

1. Know yourself

The point is to have this little book readily accessible for those much needed quick reminders of truth. What worked then will more than likely work again.

Storms of life can hit hard against our mental health, but we can learn to stand firm and even advance. Developing resilience is a practice of strengthing your inner Bulldog.

Mental Health is ... built by nurturing your inner bulldog resilience.CLICK TO TWEET

• You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. Margaret Thatcher

1. What are the ‘little goats’ that keep trying to break you down?

Barry Pearman

Image cc: Sébastien LAVALAYE

At times we can seem so small and vulnerable like a speck of clay, but joined together, we can take on the challenges such as COVID 19. Let’s bind together for our Mental Health.

‘Particulate’ is an interesting word. It refers to a minute separate particle. In a cup of flour, the particulates would be every little particle of flour, different of itself but essential in the whole.

Back in the eighties, I studied Agriculture, and one of the classes I took was soil science. We studied rocks and minerals, silt, sand, and clay. Out of the soil come the very foundations of our existence. ‘Healthy soil = healthy food = healthy people’ was the 1942 mantra of J.I. Rodale. 

I learned that clay is quite different from sand and silt.

First of all, a particulate of clay, the smallest particle, is super tiny.

The second aspect of clay is its unique shape. It’s flat, like a dinner plate or a piece of paper.

Its size and shape give clay its strength. All those plate-like surfaces can sit on top of each other, create friction, and bind themselves together.

Whereas the ball-like shape of silt and sand means that they have less surface contact with each other. So they can roll and not bind. Water passes through the gaps, hence silty and sandy soils are regarded as free-draining soils.

Particulates of clay bind themselves together to form the coffee cup you’re holding, the foundations of a bridge you’re walking on, and the bricks surrounding your home.

Clay is powerful, yet it also tiny.

When I was a pastor, I was invited into many clay awareness moments.

A loved one had died, and people were brought to the reality of their mortality. That the body is fragile and a container. With words such as ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ I accompanied people into an awareness of our grounded earthy existence.

There is a character in the Bible by the name of Job. His story is one of earthy mortality. He loses health, wealth, family. It was like a ‘cosmic courtroom drama’ (Mike Mason) being played out over his life.

In his clay, he speaks his existence and ours.

Behold, I am toward God as you are;

In talking with those who have come to an awareness of mental illness, the ones who make the most progress in their recovery are those who fully embrace fragility.

Not in a victim mode or a ‘Woah is me’ mindset, but in a healthy coming to terms with the truth.

They recognize that their bodies, the clay, can only take so much pressure/ stress and that eventually, the cup will break. The depression will swamp over; the psychosis will voice itself; the anxiety will shake its claw.

Those who recover and build resilience to future earthquakes are ones who embrace their earthiness. They know the limits of the body. They become aware of the need for sleep, exercise, nutrition.

As I write this, the world is in the torment of a pandemic. COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the clay of our lives. It is no respecter of man.

From Kings and Queens, Presidents, and Prime Ministers to the homeless and elderly, it is on a death march.

People are becoming aware that they are vulnerable to something they can’t see, feel, and touch. That something so small  (smallest particles are 0.06 microns, and the largest are 0.14 microns) can destroy us all.

That we are not gods, we have limited power, and we are vulnerable.

However, there is something we can do, and it’s found in the shape of clay.

That plate-like structure of a particulate of clay gives us the ability to be strong.

The power of clay is that unified it is strong. Sand and silt are like freewheeling rolling balls of individuality. Clay binds together.

We face a common enemy, and a common enemy needs a common approach.

So we all self-isolate. We stay in our isolation bubbles, wash our hands, and we pray that the God of clay who, with incarnational presence, got dirt in toenails, will help us all.

We may not be able to have our usual face to face, clay to clay conversations, but we can still connect online, on the phone, or singing from the balcony. There is a common humanity we need to share in.

Yesterday I took our rubbish up to the curb to be collected. A mother and her daughter were walking past on the other side of the road. The road was very quiet because of the lockdown.

I greeted them with a cheery and happy hello.

They responded with equal friendliness. Then they asked me if I was living alone. I was puzzled by this response but told them that there were four others living in my bubble with me.

Then I realized that they thought that I was being super friendly because I hadn’t seen anyone for some time. Lonely people, I have found, often talk a lot when given the opportunity.

I then explained that I like to be friendly, and it’s not every day these days that you can have a chat with a total stranger. We had a brief conversation, and then they continued in their walk.

That is what clay particulate joining with clay particulate looks like. Its a conversation across the balconies, an encouraging word to stay healthy, a video chat with a friend across the other side of the world.

Whatever you can safely do to connect with the clay of another will help.

Mental health is ... coming to terms with our clay and the clay of others.CLICK TO TWEET

• The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1. How vulnerable are you feeling at the moment as a particulate of clay?

and next to them

What the World needs now is Courage and Compassion

Love heals. Indifference Kills. What do you most need?

Would you Know my TRUE Name

Barry Pearman

Image cc: Austin Ban