Turning the Page

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We often question ‘Am I on the right path’ but learning to hear the shepherd’s voice gives us an assurance to know and trust the good shepherd.

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Recently, I have been listening to the audiobook version of Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. Lewis.

I like to listen to audio books and podcasts as I do my gardening work.

This book is a memoir or autobiography of C.S. Lewis’ early life.

If you want to get to know someone, explore their early life and come to understand what has shaped them.

He writes this.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. C.S. Lewis.

Two sentences. One long and one short takes us to those elements that, when multiplied together, have produced a C.S. Lewis.

We could put it this way.

Long corridors

Of course, there are many other influences or factors that have gone into the shaping or the product.

In the book, he talks about his parents, being an atheist, life in the trenches of World War One, relationships and many other things.

But what is interesting to me is that he sums up himself as a product of the environs he found himself in.

These are places where we can go to ourselves.

We know what a long corridor looks like. Empty sunlit rooms have a certain feel to them. Attics, those places you go with a torch and have to brush away cobwebs, have a sense of adventure and hiddenness.

For some, the thought of ‘endless books’ might be overwhelming and even repulsive, but for someone like C.S. Lewis it would have been like sitting down to a banquet.

From all these factors being multiplied, we have probably the deepest and most profound theological writing of the 20th century.

We have the beauty of Narnia and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The depth of Mere Christianity and wit of Screwtape Letters.

If you were to write a paragraph containing 36 words that described the factors that have shaped you, what would you write?

The mind has a negative bias. It can so easily drift to the traumas, the hurts, and disappointments. C.S. Lewis had plenty of those.

Instead, look to the environments that you inhabited. Where you immersed your time and felt most comfortable in.

You may find hints in the environments that your parents embraced or took you to.

I was rummaging through some old photos the other day and I came across this photo taken of me in my early twenties.

I am sitting on a hill, which was above my family home, on our farm just outside of Wellsford.

It’s a summer’s day. I have my guitar, and I am looking out over the countryside and sheep are in the background.

I can’t remember what I was playing. Probably something from John Denver! – Country roads, take me home …

But in this one image, I think I capture many of the environmental factors that shaped me.

I am a product of the outdoors, warm summer breezes, musical notes, solitude and silence. Soil, sheep, pastoral care and animal husbandry. The small things inhabiting the large and conversations with earthy depth.

 Not as eloquent as C.S. Lewis, but you get the idea.

We often come to times when we ask the deeper questions. Places of decision where we question our purpose.

In these times, it’s healthy to reflect on the environments that have shaped the deeper parts of you.

Are there patterns and places where you most feel ‘at home’ in?

What are the environments that have gone into shaping the ‘product’ you are?

How do these reflections inform the choices you are about to make?

Questions? 

• Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. Dr. Seuss

1. What were the environments that influenced you as a child?

• Craft a sentence or two where you express the environments that have shaped the ‘product’ you are.

Barry Pearman

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I want to forget some things. But does God forget? Does God choose not to remember and if so, how does this help me heal?

I once visited the ancient ruins of Olympia, Greece.

The tour guide told me that in the entrance to the athletic stadium there were once pillars and inscribed on them were the names of people who had cheated in their events.

Not only that, but alongside the athletes’ name was the name of the town they came from.

It was a simple message of shame and guilt for all the world to see. The athlete and the town now had a reputation.

What would it be like to have your crimes and sin etched in stone for all the world to see?

Who would be your friend when everything about you was exposed and known?

Maybe only someone who has experienced the same level of humiliation and exposure.

I would like to forget some events in my life. Things that people have done to me and also things I have done to others.

I seem to be able to forget my shopping list, where I put my keys, and what I had for dinner last week. But it’s harder, much harder, to forget what seems to have been etched into my heart.

Those etchings have seemingly formed and shaped my life from an early age.

The bumps and bruises have pushed me this way and that.

Talk to anyone at a deep level and before long, we discover how early life events have forged deep and long-lasting conclusions.

It takes time to rewire some of those early childhood conclusions. Over the top, generous, grace-filled time.

But all of those events, good and bad, must be stored up in some cosmically vast data bank somewhere. Matter doesn’t just simply disappear.

I wonder if God forgets any of it.

I don’t believe God forgets anything.

That might frighten you because you’ve had experiences where people have dragged up past events to use as some sort of evidence against you. Instead, you would much rather those events to be forgotten and done away with.

But what if God recorded everything? The good, bad, joys, struggles, triumphs and the simply plain boring stuff of life.

All recorded without any judgment of right or wrong. It’s simply there as a recorded event.

Oh, yes, and it’s not just your stuff, it’s everyone else’s too!

You can see the entire story of everything – AND I MEAN EVERYTHING.

But we, in our humanness, have a bias towards the negative. We have a velcro tenacity to hold on to the bad and be teflon slippery to the good.

The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. [This] shades “implicit memory”–your underlying expectations, beliefs, action strategies, and mood–in an increasingly negative direction. Rick Hanson.

I would suggest that many of us, deep down, think God has a similar mindset bias. That God holds on to our list of sins and is ready to throw it all back in our faces, whilst negating any good.

This progresses on to the view of God that God is ‘checking a list to see who’s been naughty or nice cause Santa God is coming to town.’

One of the earliest writing tools we had as humans was slate.

In 18th- and 19th-century schools, slate was extensively used for blackboards and individual writing slates, for which slate or chalk pencils were used (wiki).

From this use of slate, we have the phrase ‘To wipe the slate clean’ which means to wipe away all the old stuff and to start anew.

In fact, here in New Zealand, we have the clean slate scheme as part of our legal system.

God has an even better scheme.

God says this.

I am He who wipes the slate clean and erases your wrongdoing.

Other versions of the Bible put it differently.

“I—yes, I alone—will blot out your sins for my own sake

I, I am He

God chooses to not drag up the past and to hold it against you.

God is capable of regurgitating all the muck and mess of your life, but because God is love and has a reputation of love to ‘kept up’ as such, chooses not to remember.

A ‘choosing to not remember’, is vastly different from a ‘forgetting’, which is a very human thing to do.

Why do we keep holding on to hurts? Why do we find it so hard to forgive ourselves and others?

I think these hurts can become like little thorns digging into the psyche. Poking, prodding, and causing us pain.

These little thorns grow into giant splinters, digging into every area of our life.

We compensate by avoiding certain topics or people because we know that will set the whole firewood pile ablaze and burn up everything and everyone around us.

But we hold on to it because someone has to pay.

We can’t let them go because we believe someone has to pay. It’s a debt and debts have to be paid.

We are the bookkeeper and everything is recorded for future reference in a court of law where we are judge, jury, and executioner.

Handing over of the pain and the memory to God is a risky business because you never quite know what God might do with it.

God may well not do what you want or think God should do (think of the story of Jonah).

It’s a process too. The brain wants to keep us going back to the old and familiar. But with grace filled prayer, it slowly changes and lets its grip slip away.

God holds all, knows all, and is full of justice, mercy, and grace.

Can you hand over those memories into safe and all knowing hands?

God forgives and chooses not to remember.

Can we do the same?

Can we give over to God a memory that haunts and holds us tight?

To say ‘I will never forgive …’ is to say ‘I will never be free.’

What’s takes more energy to maintain? A clenched fist or an open palm?

Can we trust God to clean us from things that hold us back?

If we say that we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth.

Questions? 

• Acceptance is not our mode nearly as much as aggression, resistance, fight, or flight. None of them achieve the deep and lasting results of true acceptance and peaceful surrender. Richard Rohr.

1. What have you learned from this post?

• Take one of the quotes above and journal a response to it.

Barry Pearman

We don’t want trouble, but when Jesus says ‘You Will Have Trouble’, there must be something to help us through. 

There are some promises I would like God not to keep.

I’m not sure if you can still get them or not, but you used to be able to buy a little box and in it there would be little pieces of paper with a scripture on written on it.

They were called promise boxes.

Each day, or whenever you needed a little boost, you would randomly pull out a verse and see what ‘promise’ God was giving you today.

I wonder if in that little box they had the promise ‘You will have trouble.’

How would you feel if you pulled out those words?

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It can feel very lonely when we don’t experience love. A sense of abandonment. To know that ‘I am loved’ is like the permanent embrace of presence. 

To be loved and know it deeply is, I think, the quest of every heart. According to early Church writer Paul, it is the greatest of all.

When you know you’re loved, there is a sense you are held and known. There is a completeness to who you are.

But, in all honesty, the love most of us have experienced is like store-bought tomatoes.

These tomatoes are seemingly perfect. Round, red, and full of juice. They may even have a label to make sure you know that it’s a tomato.

We buy them, use them, feel we know what a tomato is like and all is well in our tomato world.

I never buy shop tomatoes because once you’ve tasted a REAL TOMATO you’ll never go back.

What I mean by a real tomato is one that has been grown in soil, under the heat of the sun, fed with organic fertilisers and simply allowed to grow at its own pace.

I simply can’t explain the difference, but I will try. The flavours are powerful and strong. There isn’t much juice because it’s all flesh. They are beautiful to look at and watch as they ripen.

I regularly give away some of my tomatoes. I ask people to enjoy the difference. To slowly, even mindfully, eat the tomato.

Why am I talking about tomatoes?

What’s the connection to love?

We all have had tastings of love.

It might be a romantic relationship.

Perhaps the love of a parent to a child and a child to a parent.

Grandparents holding the newborn grandchild. Nothing sweeter.

Or it could be the love of a dog to its owner. Maybe cats, but I’m not sure 🙂.

It’s all love. It’s beautiful and good. But it’s all quite tenuous and has the potential of being lost.

We hope the love will last forever but it relies on everyone playing nicely.

This love is real and true, and it’s part of God’s good creation, but I am afraid it’s much like shop bought tomatoes.

There is a love that I want to sit under and in. To be bathed in. A love that will hold me when the love notes of this world get tangled up and tossed aside.

It’s the full flavoured perfection of an organic tomato slowly grown .

All the other loves are signposts to a perfect love that I want and need to be immersed in.

When I know this deep love, in all its fulness of flavour and nutritional perfection, then I can face anything.

I can be stripped of my Mana (Maori word for prestige, authority, influence, spiritual power) and still return love.

I can be spat upon and crucified like the Christ, but still gift forgiveness to ignorance.

When we know this love surrounds us, we are unstoppable in the pursuit of wanting others to know this love.

We give tomatoes away and say, ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’ Psalm 34:8

Back to tomatoes.

Even in the middle of winter, I still have a focus on the growth of tomatoes.

When I am collecting Autumn leaves to go into the compost, I tell people I am growing tomatoes.

When I am collecting bamboo canes for my tomatoes to grow up, I am growing tomatoes.

I look through the seed catalogues in spring, and I am growing tomatoes.

Growing the sense of being loved is a constant daily meditative activity.

Everyone of us has a secret heart. It’s that place where all the thoughts and feelings spring up from.

We don’t let many come near it. We want to keep it secret, hidden, and locked away.

But we know it’s there, and often it betrays us. We share something that we wish we could take back. We allow it to become vulnerable because we know it needs connection.

I want my secret heart to be full of wisdom.

David, in his penitent prayer, says this.

You desire truth in the inward being;

So daily, on my pilgrim’s quest for truth, I hear the words ‘I am loved’.

I have a recording of ‘I am’ declarations that I want to anchor my soul to.

But the greatest of all these is ‘I am loved’ 1 Corinthians 13: 13

• Questions? 

• The antidote to stress, depression, anxiety, despair is to be on then off, work play, inhale exhale, summer winter. Rhythm is built into creation, and the problem with the modern world is that you can get tomatoes at 2 am. Rob Bell. 

1. Where have you experienced love? Even a small slice of it?

• Read the other ‘I am …’ posts in this series. Create a voice recording on your mobile phone with you speaking to yourself these truths. Listen to them daily.

Barry Pearman

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

It was disappointing when then they said it. In fact, it was surprising.

They said it with good intentions, but it displayed a kind of stereotyping or categorising of a group of people that deserve much more.

The words were these.

‘With your people, it’s two steps forward and three steps back.’

I lost confidence in his ability to understand what I was called to do in the ministry.

Then there was the person who described the people I was supporting as having ‘special needs’. I think she was confusing mental illness with people having an intellectual disability.

I took little guidance from her, either.

There’s some people you don’t want or need in your room.

Have you ever been categorised or labeled?

Maybe you’ve been pressured to change, ‘get better’, be different.

All you ever wanted was someone to walk millimetres beside you and to be a friend.

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow

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It wasn't so much a closed door, it was more a Christmas rejection. There is no place for you here.

I watched him as he told me he wasn’t going to his family’s Christmas party.

He had felt a lot of rejection from his family and now he couldn’t be bothered with all the politics. He was going somewhere else.

I believe he decided that ‘the corner of a rooftop’ was preferable to a delicious Christmas lunch with people who had shunned him.

It’s a version of what I think the writer of this proverb was saying.

It’s better to live alone

Or maybe it’s a version of what St. Kenneth Rogers of Houston, Texas sang.

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em

Christmas time.

A time for a sprinkling of sparkle dust over a simple story.

The Bible doesn’t mention a donkey that Mary rode on.

It doesn’t describe any animals around the manger.

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A crisis hits and the scaffolding around your life seems to shake, but you have a Mental Health Grab Bag, and so you know you can get through this.

An emergency hits, or maybe it’s just seeing certain family members. Something gets added to your stress load, and the brain spirals down and out of control.

There might also be times you have to go to a hospital for various medical needs. Maybe you need some respite time.

What would you take? How would prepare for the potential emergency?

I would suggest you need an Emergency Mental Health Grab Bag.

We are all supposed to have a grab bag prepared for the unpredictable events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and other extreme events, but what would you put into your bag?

Many of the items in my grab bag are what I would call ‘grounding items’.

They help me ground the self into the here and now. Items that are practical, tangible and tactile. They help centre me.

This is my list and you will see that many of the items have links to other articles I have written.

1. S.T.A.N. plan
   

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Feeling judged can make you want to hide. Why put yourself out there if people are going to judge you? What you want is a good conversation. 

They didn’t have the conversation because they knew they would feel judged. Feelings of being dismissed, ridiculed, ‘shot-down’, laughed at, mocked would land on the already fragile soul.

All they wanted was for someone to listen to them without condemnation.

Instead, like a snail retreating into its shell, they hid.

Perhaps an internet search would provide some answers. A place where you can get some answers (not always the best ones) without the risk of exposure to judgment.

It’s anonymous and risk free of being judged for having suicidal thoughts. Safe, private, and you’re in control.

So we type what longs to be heard.

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