January 2018 – Unravelling Space

January 26, 2018

Unravelling Anxiety: Out of Control

Because these days I need the reminder…

I live in a place the shook violently 4 months ago. And in the shaking, something sifted to the surface that I had not been aware of in my life for a long time. Fear.

There is something about firm ground rolling and sturdy buildings twisting and creaking and clunking that changes your perception of reality. Fear, in this case, is a God-given reaction, a tool for survival, a physical hormonal response to a threat that is healthy and good. In the days and weeks after the earthquake I had physical and emotional reactions to physical stimuli that were practically reflexes – they seemed to bypass the rational processes of the brain and just happen. This is a normal part of how the body works through trauma.

Then fear gave way to anxiety. It was disconcerting to the say the least. Sure, I had been anxious before, we are all familiar with worry, but these sudden bouts of heart-pounding, near hyperventilation were far from my normal experience. Although I knew this was a normal physical response to fear triggers, I hated it, because I felt powerless. I felt out of control.

I think that is what fear and anxiety usually come down to: lack of control. We do a pretty good job, under normal circumstances, of fostering an illusion that we are in control. We actually convince ourselves that we are in control, that we can manage our realities and construct our own futures. So when something threatens this illusion, we feel fearful or anxious. When we realize that the ground can roll like water and that cement can bend and twist, our carefully managed reality is exposed for the facade that it is.

Or when we lose a job.

Or when cancer strikes.

Or when people don’t respond the way we had hoped they would.

The truth: there is always very little within our sphere of control. And that is okay because we were really actually made for dependence anyway. I like how Paul put it when he was speaking in Athens:

God intended that they [humankind] would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ Acts 17:27-28

Living in dependence rather than grasping for control requires some things though. We need to trust that God is in control and we need to trust that God is good, even when circumstances seem to say otherwise. Sometimes believing those things is easy and other times we have to engage every fibre of our faith muscles. When we are living in fear or anxiety we can recognize them and receive them like the flashing red warning lights on a dashboard. Where am I not trusting that God is in control? Where am I not trusting in His goodness and love toward me? These are opportunities to return and to rest, to have our being in Him.

One morning while I was in the thick of it God gave me a picture that has been His invitation to me ever since. It’s not going to sound very spiritual if you know the movie, but it was imagery that captured me. In the movie Signs there is a scene where the family is hiding/trapped in the basement and because of fear the boy is thrown into an asthma attack. They realize they don’t have his medicine, it is upstairs beyond their reach, so the father takes the son in his lap so that his son’s back is leaning against his chest and he breathes and invites his son to rest into him, to fall into rhythm with his own deliberate and steady breath. The son’s clenched fists as he fights for every breath eventually relax and let go of the fight he his breathing normalizes. This is what God showed me: me, in the midst of anxiety and fear that I could not control, sitting in his lap and letting His breath and his reassurance wash over me as I relaxed into His embrace and my breathing settled into His pace.

He is patient and loving and he will hold us until we can let go.

January 19, 2018January 25, 2018

Unravelling Identity: The One He Loves

I’ve been hanging out for awhile in John’s gospel, reading it alongside some friends. I’ve always loved this gospel because of it’s intimacy. I love how John refers to himself: the disciple whom Jesus loved.

In the other gospels we see a more detailed picture. John was a fisherman who worked alongside his brother and on a team with Peter and Andrew. Jesus referred to him and James as the “sons of thunder.” He was a part of what people call the “inner three” who along with Peter and James were privy to some of Jesus’ greatest and most difficult moments, like the transfiguration, the healing of Jairus’ daughter and his anguish in the garden.

We are also privy to some slightly les flattering moments. He angrily wanted to call down fire from heaven to smite people who had refused to welcome Jesus in their Samaritan village. He complained to Jesus when some outsiders were casting out demons in Jesus’ name. He and James vied for special seats in heaven to the left and right of Jesus’ thrown.

But although we get a glimpse of an eager, easily-angered, perhaps power-hungry or at least positionally-striving disciple who let his special friendship with Jesus perhaps go to his head a little, we get none of that in his Gospel. We hear only of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and he never even mentions his actual name.

And this is precisely what inspires me about my kindred spirit John.

I believe that time with Jesus began to form and inform him, that the resurrection was a turning point and that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost revolutionized his life because all of the sudden so much made sense. It always boggles my mind to think of all the things the early believers of Jesus had to figure out along the way with the help of the Holy Spirit.

If the John I described above, from the other gospel accounts is more like the before picture, John’s gospel and his letters are the after picture. What I see is a man who encountered the love of Christ in such a profound way that it completely rewrote his identity and priorities. I see a man that took Jesus at his word when we talked about abiding and experiencing union with God. I see a man who came to understand all who Jesus said He was and discovered what that made him. I see a man who came to realize his identity, not as James’ brother, Peter’s friend, right or left-hand man, inner circle-dweller or one of the powerful elite, but simply as the one whom Jesus loved.

May our false identities have the same encounter with Jesus, I am, the Bread of Life, the Water of Life, the Gate, the Great Shepherd, that John had and may we all come to know ourselves, first and foremost as the one Jesus loves.

January 12, 2018

Unravelling Striving: Routine

Today marks the first real Friday of January. Why do I say “real” Friday? Well, I don’t know about you, but for our family Christmas vacation was a wonderful escape from our normal realities and a much needed break from all obligations other than spending time together. On Monday the boys headed back to school and we all re-engaged with normal life and, therefore, in my mind, it is the first real Friday of January.

And since it is the first real Friday of January, I am here. Because this is something I have committed to do. Listen and process and sit and write and enjoy and experience God through this discipline I am leaning into. (To read more about how I came to this decision you can check out my first couple blog posts over in the Archives of November 2017.)

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Before Christmas, I was living la vida loca. No, not the Ricky Martin kind, the kind which I’m sure we’ve all experienced at one time or another where things are so entirely busy that we are holding on for dear life and doing whatever we can to avoid a head on collision with a million little and big obstacles that pop up every day. I hate that life because it is super stressful and, as it turns out, those little obstacles are often the people in my life who I normally love and care for.

So I was living la vida loca and holding on just praying that I could I survive until Christmas break when I knew I would finally have a breather. And by God’s grace we all made it to Christmas break and had some wonderful days of family-focused time: play and rest and connection. But as we rounded the corner to the last week of Christmas vacay I started to kind of freak out about returning to “normal” life. How would I return to normal life without getting sucked, again, into the vortex of crazy? How could I organize and arrange and micromanage in order to do everything I needed to do while still maintaining enough time to pursue health and wellness and rest? They sound like good goals, and they probably are, but here is where God began to do a bit of unravelling in my heart. (To read more about this idea of unravelling, check out my home page.)

God began showing me about how my desire for routine as I entered a new year, no matter how noble the desire seemed, was really a desire to take control of something that felt out of control. When I have this desire to control I have two options. The road most often travelled, let’s be honest, is that of striving and living out of my own strength (or rather, weakness). The less travelled road is the road of surrender and trust. Surrender to God, to my limitations, to my lack of control – which was only every perceived control in the first place. Trust in the God who is in control and is working everything out in a grand conspiracy of love.

Striving. It’s one of those graveclothes. Something that, in the already/not yet of sanctification, God is gently and persistently untangling from my new life in Him.

So, my question back to God? How do I create healthy rhythms in a way that does not feed into the need for control and all the striving of an un-surrendered life? The word that came to mind: liturgy. Now, for those of you who come from the more liturgical traditions of the Christian faith, I’m not talking liturgy in the “work of the people” sense of corporate worship. I’m referring to the “customary repertoire of ideas, phrases, or observances” sense of the word. Perhaps living a liturgical life and routined life look a lot alike from the outside, but let me tell you the difference that I felt in my spirit as God gave me that word. It is all about where my attention and focus lie. In the routined life I was seeking, I was in control or striving for control – the focus was me. In the liturgical life I felt God calling me to the rhythms and routines of life were a tool for handing over control and continually drawing my gaze away from me and onto Him. It is about living life in a way that draws my attention and affection and worship back to Him. Because I long to live in dependence on Him. I long to live the abiding life that Jesus talked about in John 15, a life of remaining and intimacy and power and fruitfulness. None of that happens very well when I am in control and striving for it.

You might be wondering what this looks like for me now. I’ll share, but don’t think I’m any kind of expert. Okay? Primarily this looks like a morning liturgy and a bed-time liturgy.

Both of these time periods are no-phone times because it usually only distracts and steals my time and attention. This includes putting my phone into do-not-disturb mode. I have already noticed a decrease in the mindless scrolling even throughout the day when I am not specifically going phone-free.

Both of these time periods include focused time of connecting with God though prayer or reading my Bible, or both. I’m currently working on a 90-day challenge (wanna join me?) because it has been a long time since I read straight through the Bible and I usually get bogged down somewhere around the later half of Exodus when I try the Bible in one year plans out there. In prayer I want to listen as much as I talk and occasionally journal or draw as the Holy Spirit speaks to me.

Other than that I also have a couple of alarms set throughout the day to remind me to turn my focus to God in whatever I am doing at the time and I am observing a weekly sabbath on Fridays. Sabbath for me means a day of rest – disengaging from the rush and finding ways to delight (thus writing on Fridays). This practice, as old as creation, is another way to turn my attention to God, remembering that He is the one that holds the world together, not me, and simply enjoying Him and life and community.

What I have found so far is that these practices have been turning my attentions and my affections to God. And when my heart wanders, each time I engage in these liturgies is a chance to return once again to Father. I’ve also noticed a bit of a trickle down effect into other areas of discipline in my life, healthy habits that have often eluded me: namely, going to bed on time and exercising. Because I have my bed-time liturgy, I am in bed without scrolling through Facebook and I am sleeping better. Sleeping better makes it a wee bit easier to get up early in the morning, which gives me time to exercise so that I can be alert and less sleepy while I engage in my morning liturgy.

It is by no means all going perfectly. But that’s not what this is about anyway. Because 2018 is about intimacy and abiding, not perfectionism and striving.

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How about you? Is your control-freak showing as we begin 2018 with all sorts of resolutions? How are you intentionally turning your attention to God?