April 2018 – The middle …

Healing …

Last week I went to a meeting where the subject of healing arose.

As a woman of God, I believe that God Almighty is the ultimate healer. That He is able to heal any of us from anything. I’ve heard about those who have witnessed limbs grow, sight be restored and even epilepsy be healed leaving no medical trace of ever having been present. I’ve heard many such miraculous accounts of healings evidenced and confirmed by the medical profession.

Wow, wow, wow.

We all love to hear about the miraculous.

Who doesn’t love a good ending?

By good I mean, when things turn out the way we want and think they should.

But what about when healing doesn’t happen?

Isn’t it just as important to talk about this reality too? About the pain, disappointment, confusion, doubt, disillusionment, resentment and the consequent effect upon faith. I’m talking about how it can really be rather than the super holy gloss we can hide behind.

Refusing to talk about these situations simply leaves us to struggle in silence. And that makes us unnecessarily vulnerable and isolated at the very time when support and understanding are most needed.

The fact is that sometimes God does not heal. (Think Paul and his thorn whatever that was.)

At least not in any way or timing that we can see or understand. And as far as I’m aware, we don’t know why. I imagine we know only the tiniest fraction of what our God is capable of or of what is going on within the spiritual world that remains largely unseen by our human eyes.

I accept this reality because I have learned to trust God and I am continuing to learn to do so as this is an ongoing, lifelong lesson that is learned through experience. Especially the unwanted hard experiences.

Knowing intellectually who God is, is great if you want to know how to talk a good talk. But if you want to actually walk that same talk, you have to know who God is on a heart level. And that means knowing in your heart that He is trustworthy even and especially when we do not see, know, understand or like the situation we find ourselves within, in this instance in the area of healing or rather not healing.

So, what to say about when God doesn’t heal?

Aside from the superficial response of, ‘there must be sin in your life or you don’t have enough faith’, most people are left to suffer in silence because a lot of people don’t like to acknowledge much less discuss the pain of not knowing why healing doesn’t always happen.

Of course there is truth that sometimes there is sin and sometimes there is unbelief, both of which can block healing. It doesn’t matter how able and willing God is to heal if amongst an environment that does not acknowledge any need for healing much less a willingness to ask. Even Jesus was limited in his ability to heal when amongst those with no belief in Him.

But, whilst everyone loves to share and hear about the miraculous examples of healing, when faced with the unhealed individual, there can be an unhelpful silence.

What I see is that people can get very hurt by a refusal to engage in discussion beyond the superficial realm of pat answers. And when the reality that none of us has all the answers, is not acknowledged in a sensitive, wise way, the impact on the individual can be a damaging one. Heart level damage. On top of whatever healing need there was to begin with. And when that is not tended to, it starts to steal the appetite for the spiritual. Because as much as emotions are often treated as the enemy, if left unaddressed these can damage our spiritual health. (And our physical health).

The bottom line is that sometimes God doesn’t heal and we don’t know why.

We can either accept this reality (which doesn’t mean we stop praying or give up) and seek God for a way to live within it or we can continue to make up unhelpful, damaging human reasons as to why this happens.

We all prefer to think that such matters are within our hands hence we like the sin or unbelief approach because these are within our power to rectify.

What we don’t like to admit is that actually we’re all at the mercy of the Almighty and we simply don’t see the whole picture.

As much as it seems rather appealing, how much faith would be required to trust a God that revealed and explained everything to us?

When we really trust God, we make a choice to trust Him no matter what and we focus instead on the business of meeting Him in the midst of the unhealed situation/unanswered prayer or whatever it is.

The healing may be a question of timing or it may never come this side of Heaven.

Hard but true.

Yet there are many examples of inspiring individuals who have gone on to fulfil their purposes for God in spite of vast physical injuries or limitations that they refused to allow to restrict God from working through them regardless.

Check out the website of Nick Vujicic; https://www.lifewithoutlimbs.org/, a man with no limbs but seemingly no limits. An inspirational example of living fully with what you do have.

Or for those who love a film based on a true story, see Soul Surfer which offers an honest illustration of the unavoidable process that takes us from experiencing the unspeakable through a painful process of grieving and adjustment in order to fully re-engage with life afresh with what we do have.

But as was highlighted last week by the excellent speaker Mark DuPont, there are also times when the healing doesn’t happen because for God to do so would be detrimental. In his example, an open leg wound that refused to heal and that wasn’t healed by God, eventually led via various medical professionals to the discovery of a damaged vein. This required dealing with before the external wound could heal.

In other words, the invisible root cause had to be identified and addressed before the visible, surface level symptoms could heal. If God had simply healed on a surface level, the unexposed root cause could have led to other issues, such as DVT as a frequent flyer.

We don’t see or understand all that is happening.

But God is trustworthy no matter how things look or feel to us.

He’s definitely not a half a job bob kind of a God. And way too loving to heal the symptom without the cause. But sometimes we have to go through a process in order to experience the healing. One where lessons are learned about God’s goodness even in the midst of pain that we don’t understand. Lessons that are not learned on the mountain top but the journey to get there.

Hard lessons but lessons that continue to move our faith beyond the intellect and in to the realms of heart level knowing. From which corresponding actions are made possible. Let us acknowledge that the man/woman on the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.

I don’t know why God allowed Mark to go on a long, painful journey to find his healing. We can all come up with our own ideas; meeting God during unanswered prayers and pain, learning that God sometimes heals through people – emphasizing our need for one another, obedience even when things don’t go our way (maturity), the call to persevere in all etc etc but the fact remains that none of us have all the answers and just as in Job’s day, our God does not have to explain or justify Himself to us.

In thinking about all of this, I can’t help but reflect upon my own ministry; healing of the heart and mind, especially as it’s becoming more and more common for individuals to experience physical symptoms as an expression of internal, invisible mental and emotional pain.

If God simply healed these physical manifestations with no thought for the root causes, how loving would such an act of healing really be? Simply reducing the symptom to seek alternative expression via other physical symptoms.

Neurologists are constantly coming face to face with an ever-increasing number of medically unexplainable physical symptoms. An increase that appears to coincide with the decrease in understanding of the importance of emotions and emotional health. Our Society is so fixated on external productivity that we are losing our souls in the process.

Whilst many like to imagine that emotions are some kind of poor relation to intellect, it is often the denied emotions that hold the power to bring us to our knees. Physically and spiritually.

Mental and emotional health matters.

The current resistance to addressing the internal issues of the heart is costing much in terms of health and even in terms of our experience of healing and indeed of the Healer.

We all love to experience God as healing us just like that and without our being required to having any input much less any pain, patience or work. It’s human nature.

But there comes a time when we need to learn to actively participate in our own healing by doing our part.

How else will we learn to grow up?

The time has long been here to take mental and emotional health seriously. A refusal to do so simply saps the appetite for the spiritual and without that, we’re really in trouble.

Overall, it is true that sin and unbelief do block healing.

It is equally true that in the absence of these, sometimes God doesn’t heal the physical symptom because it is indicating a deeper heart level issue that needs identifying and working through. A bit like physio for the soul – painful and costly but with life changing benefits.

According to my last pastors, during their thirty year healing ministry, 70% of people who came for physical healing were actually manifesting heart level distress. A figure that requires our attention for these issues do not disappear because we’ve pretended they don’t exist, that simply gives them permission to grow, fester and cause more damage. These issues actually need addressing along with the ultimate healer’s help to do so.

As I’ve said it is also true that sometimes God does not heal and we don’t know why.

This can be an incredibly painful, vulnerable and isolated experience for anyone. One where what is needed is love (in word and deed), compassion, support, encouragement and prayers. No one needs or benefits from the self-elected spiritual elite Job style friends.

God is our ultimate healer but sometimes we don’t experience the degree or level of healing we may want, whilst this side of Heaven.

The question is, will you allow this to stop you turning to the one who wants to comfort and help you to be all that you can be, during or in spite of any unanswered prayers for healing?

The Workplace Prison …

Last week I noticed a clear and recurring theme emerging.

A disturbing one.

It’s around current work place culture.

The notion that you should constantly clamber the career ladder irrespective of personal cost whether to your own health or that of your intimate relationships. And that should you fail to do so, you’ll lose your place in the race forever.

A kind of keeping up with the Joneses, corporate style.

Where people used to obsessively compete and compare with their neighbours using their homes as a measuring tool, irrespective of cost, physical or otherwise, the Joneses approach has gone corporate by extending its reign of ridiculousness to the territory of the workplace. Culminating in a destructive culture of excessive hours and responsibilities along with poor personal boundaries seemingly all in a bid to prove you’re more able to perform in a robotic and inhumane way than the next poor colleague who has become ensnared in this life stealing mindset.

As a result of this, I hear of many people staying within jobs that actually result in their body’s physically manifesting illness, being unable to sleep, some are anxious to the point of throwing up as part of their morning routine and others can’t manage anything outside the office besides gazing at the TV.

Consequently, relationships falter, health deteriorates and overall quality of life disappears. Going through the motions like the living dead becomes the new norm. So subtly and so gradually that it often remains undetected for vast expanses of time. As in years.

Of course the same corporate institution can evoke different responses in all but for many the current workplace culture has become nothing more than a prison. One that can lead to burnout, breakdown or a gradual robotization of our humanity.

Remember the saying, ‘If someone told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?’. It seems we’ve gone a step further and that the revised question is, ‘if Society walks off a cliff, would you follow them?’

I’ve been hearing that this destructive ‘quality of life stealing’ culture is even rampant within universities where it appears to be largely accepted that to ‘do well’, whatever that may mean, is to accept that a breakdown under the pressure to perform, is an inevitable part of the journey.

Recent stats around mental health suggest the problems are actually starting in primary age children – passed down through the generations and aided by a culture obsessed with external productivity. As if we are merely machines without a heart, soul or spirit.

Shocking.

And completely unacceptable.

When did we reduce our young people to becoming academia producing robots devoid of a healthy inner or emotional life or achieving fully rounded humanity?

And when did we forget that even machines can crash when overloaded.

Maybe when the adults fell in to role modelling this by remaining in any workplace that has become little more than a prison.

Do people really believe that ‘just because everyone else’ is doing this, that it’s normal? Or healthy? Or can even be passed off for living?

Is this where fear of the unknown, keeps people imprisoned by that old lie, ‘better the devil you know’.

Is it the tormenting taunts of said devil who whispers, ‘but you know the inside of this prison, you don’t know what it will be like out there beyond these prison walls?’ that keeps so many committed to their prison of choice?

Is it familiarity that keeps people choosing albeit passively, to stay within these types of prisons that steal quality of health, life and relationships?

Does it matter if you don’t know what life beyond your own particular prison looks like if you know the current one is destroying you?

Has our society really been fooled in to believing that life is one long prison sentence whereby we merely get to choose what we will allow to imprison us. In other words which particular prison we will choose to inhabit? Whether the workplace prison or any other institution or even that of an unhealthy relationship?.

I’ve been hearing recently that when one person finally reaches breaking point within their workplace prison, opens their eyes and realises that looking after their own life and health IS an option and IS more valuable than continuing to allow it to destruct within such environments, they quit. At which point, they are clamoured after by all and sundry, to stay. Suddenly pay rises are possible and all the stops are pulled out to keep the one who has decided to walk free, from doing so.

I just keep hearing this right now. Just as one person discovers the courage to open their prison door and start to walk free, the other ‘prisoners’ clamour for them as they go, making vain attempts to pull them back. It’s as if without the courage to release themselves all they feel able to do is to try and stop others.

And that’s the thing about walking free, once you taste it and I mean really taste it, you want others to discover it for their own lives whatever that may mean or look like for them. It’s simply too good not to share.

I realise of course that we all need to earn a living. Absolutely true for us all. But what exactly do we mean by ‘living’ because any job or other situation that destroys your health, relationships or life in general doesn’t equate to living. More, perhaps, to dying.

It is only when people begin to realise that however far back it was, it was THEY who had walked in to their particular prison and therefore it is THEY who can also walk back out again.

In doing so, people tend to go through an often painful, lengthy re-evaluation process which has allowed them to come out the other side to re train or simply to work in a totally different area or way. It usually but not always involves a reduction in earnings. At least initially. Something many would rather run themselves in to an early grave before they would be willing to do. But those who are willing to go through this go on to reclaim their peace, joy, health, sleep, self-respect, motivation and life itself.

In other words, they start living again.

I’m fortunate enough to speak from personal experience as one who left my own workplace prison some thirteen years ago. I’ve walked the path. And I’m still walking the path. It’s long, hard, messy, painful, uncomfortable and costly. But not as much as avoiding it. And I am immensely grateful for the many who have and who continue to help me along it.

Once free, it’s a natural response to help others become free because you realise that you’re not competing with those around you but walking your own path. And you discover from hard won experience that when one enters freedom we all benefit.

Life is short.

It can end at any moment.

Is it really worth choosing to spend whatever precious moments we are given, living in a prison of our own choosing and creation?

Of course, I’m not talking here about situations over which we truly have no control. That’s a whole different area over which we can control only our response. After all, none of us are actually entitled to anything in this life.
I think it’s too easy to forget that anything we are given is a gift, be it health, life, relationships, time, money, or anything else.

But if we’re really honest with ourselves do we sometimes write certain situations off as having no control over them when this is not entirely true? But more the whisperings of our fear?

Do you have the courage to release yourself from your workplace prison?

Or to say yes to going in search of that which brings you to life and gives you a reason to live. A purpose. An enthusiasm for parting company with the duvet of a morning?

Or will you live, or should I say exist alongside that old adage, ‘better the devil you know’.

Now, I’m not talking about constantly searching for greener pastures. The grass will be as green as you are willing to invest in it becoming. But if you know you’re in a situation that’s crushing the life out of you, what are you going to do about it? Because change takes work and work takes time and effort and usually a lot of help. And these things don’t just happen by themselves.

There is of course no such thing as a perfect job or even a perfect anything in this life but if you know your workplace has become a prison and you’ve allowed yourself to stay irrespective of personal cost because you’ve been backed in to a corner by the taunts of the fear promoting what if brigade, it may just be time to re-evaluate.

Life really is too short to allow a workplace prison to stop you living fully.

Rest and Rejuvenation …

I think it is so utterly important to regularly take time out to rest.

As a real home body everyone who knows me knows that I absolutely love my home. However, when it comes to taking time off work and needing good quality rest, I don’t always manage this at home. Because there’s always that bit of cooking or washing up or gardening to tend to, or the mail that demands your attention as soon as it enters your home.

It’s never ending.

And so I make sure I get away during my breaks. It doesn’t have to be far away or expensive. But I think the act of releasing ourselves from the daily grind is vital to our ongoing wellbeing. At least I know it is for me.

Last week I went to Suffolk where I arrived at 8.30am on Easter Monday having been accompanied for the best part of the journey by a lot of rain. I headed straight for my favourite seafront establishment where I settled myself on a comfy settee to enjoy a hot breakfast along with a coffee. I relished the treat of intermittently looking out to sea and reading the newspaper.

I was thrilled to be on holiday, to have gotten away from it all and a little bit or even a lotter bit of rain was not going to dampen my spirits! Freedom and spontaneity had my name on!

I did decide it was the kind of weather that demanded a visit to the cinema to check out Peter Rabbit though. Aside from sharing the cinema with an army of very small but champion standard rustlers, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And so wonderful not to be rushing straight out of the cinema to meet the needs of a pre-set schedule.

I had that most precious gift of all; unshackled time.

Returning to my favourite place from which to stare out to sea, I happily whiled away numerous hours relishing in the utter joy of being free to do nothing but well … be! It was heavenly. I read. I wrote. I captured ideas. I had visions. I ate a delicious Cajun salmon dinner that I hadn’t had to prepare. And I revelled in the delight of simply being alive.

During the next few days I did a lot of my favourite things. I ran along the beach at sunrise (the sun even put in an appearance from behind the clouds on two out of the three mornings), I started my day with the most enormous two course breakfast that was served to me at my B & B, I walked for miles along the sea front, I attempted to capture the beauty of my surroundings on camera, I caught up with a friend over dinner, I lazed on park benches relishing the first feel of the sun’s warmth on my face, I sat on grassy sea facing verges drinking tea from a flask (so middle aged and totally underrated), I got in to my pj’s and sea facing bed at 6pm, I drank copious amounts of tea and I read more newspapers than I’d usually manage in a month.

So overall, I managed to indulge in excessive amounts of eating, writing, walking, running, photography, reading, dreaming, sea gazing and simply being.

Gosh I love to get away.

It was utterly wonderful.

No work. No post. No email. No internet connection even. (My initial frustration about this quickly dissipated). No washing up. No housework. No gardening. No driving (I didn’t get back in the car from the moment I parked by my B & B to the moment I left. Such a treat.). No schedule. No commitments. No hassle.

The only exception was sleeping in a single bed. I always feel like I need to be half awake all night just so I don’t relax enough to roll over and out of bed. Not conducive to quality sleep. Never again will I make that particular mistake.

Following this four day coastal extravaganza, I returned via another part of the coast where the sun came out in full force bringing with it the masses. I’m not a fan of crowds so I was happy to start my drive home. And it felt equally good to get back.

I’d had the chance to step out of my ordinary daily life and in creating distance, the chance to view certain situations with a fresh lens. Meaning that I’ve returned home with a very different perspective on an important situation. It’s too easy when immersed in our lives to see them purely from the perspective of being within it. When stood at a distance, it is possible not only to observe the bigger picture but also to notice the same one from a different perspective.

Rest is so important.

We live in a society that fixates upon constant activity. Yet if we look to nature, we see that in the long term, more is produced following seasons of rest. If this is true of the land, how much truer for us humans?

Rest is vital.

To us all.

It may look different to each of us but if we eliminate it from our schedules we do so at our own risk. For far from leaving us to fall behind, a good rest can enable us to move forwards.