unravelling – Unravelling Space

October 5, 2018

Unravelling Pain: What I’ve learned from birthing babies and sciatic pain.

A few weeks ago I went to bed with some dull aching pain in my hip and woke up in the middle of the night with currents of cramping pain shooting down my leg. If you are familiar with sciatic pain you know exactly what I’m talking about!

I suffered for a few days and could not find relief so I sucked it up and went to the chiropractor. As it turns out, after x-rays and a subsequent MRI, I have some herniated discs in my lumbar spine that are touching the nerves and this is what had caused the pain. Thank the Lord, the chiropractor has helped a lot (don’t worry…he’s adjusting me in a specific way to avoid further damage to the discs).

But this isn’t exactly about that. I mean, I’m not writing this for sympathy or advice on how to deal with herniated discs or sciatic pain or what have you. Rather, in a more general sense, I have had some reflections on pain because of the experience.

To begin, I have a couple of disclaimers.

First, the pain I experienced those first few days before seeing the chiropractor is nothing compared to the chronic pain I know that some of you deal with. To you with chronic pain, trust me when I say that I have always admired your strength and determination. I pray for you in a new way now. I fully admit that I am no expert in pain, either physical or emotional.

Second, I’m going to be comparing the pain of childbirth and sciatic nerve pain and I need to start by letting you all know that I had two really fantastic birth experiences. I don’t say that to brag, by any means, but rather to recognize that my experience may not be your experience. I do not deny that some of you laboured for days and endured much longer than I did to hold onto that babe, nor that some of you have even experienced birth trauma, miscarriage, D&Cs and stillbirth. I am not trying to minimize your experience. I am merely going to be comparing my experience of the two most difficult experiences of pain I have lived through.

Getting back to the story – as I lay there with shooting pain filling my entire left leg, I found myself wishing to give birth to a thousand babies rather than experience that particular pain. Obviously, that is physically imposible and I was hyperbolic in my delusional start. I will say, however, that I have given birth naturally, without medication, to two babies, and I am willing to state flat out that the sciatic pain of a few weeks ago is the worst pain I have ever felt. Reflecting on why that was the case is what prompted my current reflections on pain. Why was this new pain worse than my experience of childbirth? In reality they were similar pains – muscles in a large portion of my body involuntarily clenching in a very painful way. What made this particular pain so much more unbearable?

This is my hypothesis: pain, when it is purposeful, is ultimately bearable. Giving birth is one of the most purposeful pains one could endure – it is towards the end of holding that tiny babe in your arms. Or for those of you who can’t relate to that, think of training hard for a sport, or doing an Iron Man race, or climbing Everest. All of those things require sacrifice and pain but that sacrifice and pain has a finality: being the best, the fastest, or reaching that goal or that mountain top. It is all purpose-full pain. Human’s can push themselves to incredible limits when that is the case.

On the other hand, when pain appears purposeless, when it seems like only pain for pain’s sake, that is where the will, the heart or the body breaks. When that pain is not reaching towards the fulfillment of a final purpose, when it seems nonsensical, or without end…who can bear that hopelessness? I’m sure we can all think of real-life, current situations that could fall under this category. We know bodies and minds that have given out under such circumstances.

Yet, at the same time, we hear inspiring stories of how people have experienced the deepest and most profound physical and emotional pain, lived through the most inhumane circumstances, suffered the profoundest losses and have survived. These stories exemplify hanging onto hope, even if only by a fingernail, and finding purpose, even if that purpose is purely to survive.

I have heard people express this platitude in Spanish, “No debes preguntar ¿por qué? Más bien pregunta, ¿para qué?” It translates to, “you shouldn’t ask “why” (which speaks to reason), instead ask “for what” (which speaks to purpose). It sounds like a cliché, and I cringe to think of speaking that into the middle of someone’s painful situation, however, I do think that maybe it is true. When we suffer, we can look into the past and ask, “why?” We can search for the reason why this thing has happened. We can shake our fist at the heavens and demand an explanation. There is no law against this by the way. Lament is a perfectly appropriate way to deal with pain and loss. The Psalms are full of lament. But the fact remains that we may never find an answer to that question that satisfies us. Our other response can be to look to the future, and perhaps even the present, and ask, “for what purpose?” This question can find an answer, even if it boils down purely to survival. But maybe it sounds like, “so we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 2:4), or “so that the works of God might be displayed” (John 9:3), or so that “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3-4). Or so that I can grow in empathy and compassion or gratitude; or no longer take things for granted; or get my priorities straight; or be a part of ushering in a better world.

I’m going to continue chewing on this one, and I invite your thoughts and comments below. I’ll leave you this from Hebrews 12:1-2:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses [see Hebrews 11], let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

March 30, 2018March 30, 2018

Unravelling Power: An Easter Reflection

I’ve been wrestling a lot lately with the power games we human beings play, the ways in which power is abused even in the Church (#churchtoo), the ways in which power has distorted the way we live out our calling as Image Bearers, the way power and position seduce my own soul. So, it is no surprise to me that as I read through the accounts of Last Supper to resurrection in the gospels that the Holy Spirit is drawing my attention in new and fresh ways to how God loves to “chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful” (1 Cor. 1:27).

Take for instance the thief on the cross. I was mind-blown in the way that you can read something a million times and then one day POOM! Think of this, the disciples themselves still don’t really get it, they have scattered, they have denied, they are hanging in the periphery, they are disillusioned and confused, and this thief condemned to death confesses his guilt and proclaims, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom” (Luke 23:42). How in the world does this man get that Jesus’ Kingdom is not a political kingdom of this world?

Or the Roman officer, a gentile, an oppressor, despised. He worships God in the moment of Jesus’ death, exclaiming “This man truly was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39) and “Surely this man was innocent” (Luke 23:47). Isn’t that incredible?

And there are the women, who seem to stick closer during Jesus suffering, death and burial than the majority of The Twelve. It is to them that the news of Jesus’ resurrection is first revealed. Later it is Mary Magdalene who first sees the risen Jesus. Totally upside-down considering that Jesus is entrusting the very first evangelist with a testimony that would not have been considered valid or trustworthy as women were not considered competent witnesses in that time.

Finally and with exclamation point emphasis we have the very example of Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:6-11

March 10, 2018

Unravelling My Story: That Time I Cried Watching Wonder Woman

In honor of International Women’s Day yesterday I’m gonna go there.

When I watched Wonder Woman I bawled. It came from a deep place and surprised me, but I did.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Diana, who has trained her entire life for war finally steps onto war-torn soil. She is surrounded by suffering and injustice and every cell in her body is feeling the need to respond. But those people are not the mission. There is nothing that can be done for them. Or so she is told repeatedly by her male colleagues. And finally after being told no and reminded of the mission many times, she has finally had enough. She can’t not do something and so she ignores the pleas of her colleagues, she sluffs off her cape like she sluffs off their expectations. She takes up her weapons and steps into No Man’s Land. As she pushes in on the enemy and the others rise to follow and do battle alongside her I am struck by the beauty of the thing and I am almost ugly crying in the theatre. I’m not even sure why. As Dan and I walk home I begin to process what it was that produced that response in me.

I believe men and women are different and that that is a gift. I don’t necessarily believe that there are personality traits that belong to only men or only women. For example I believe that there are gentle and nurturing men and that there are strong and ambitious women and that there is nothing wrong with that. However, I do believe that the way a gentle and nurturing man will express those traits will likely look different than the way and gentle and nurturing woman expresses those traits and so forth. I think this is the case because our brains and bodies work differently, we interact with our worlds differently and the social realities that form us are different (i.e. both nature and nurture make us different). So without going to much farther down the gender theory path, because that’s not where I’m going with all this, my personal view is that men and women are different and our diversity is a gift.

So, what did I see in Wonder Woman that lead me to cry for the beauty of it? I saw a group of warriors out to do battle against evil. I saw the strengths of Diana and the strengths of her male counterparts. They both had the same goal – end the war – but they approached that in different ways. The men were focused on the mission – this is the one thing we have to do to get the job done. And there was Diana, who absolutely could not put blinders on to the suffering she was seeing. She was moved by what she saw and she had to do something about it. When she made that decisive step into No Man’s Land in order to take back the town from the enemy, she was responding to a call that the men had not heard, but when they saw her leaning into her purpose they jumped up and they supported her and they decided to fight alongside her.

Dare I say that we have often characterized the “emotion” of women as a weakness, a liability, a distraction? What if we could view it as a strength?What if we released women to feel deeply, to perceive injustice with prophetic vision of how things ought to be, to be burdened and to mourn for their communities, or the communities of another, to dream of a better way and to be moved into action. What if we released women to pursue their calling with the gifts and strengths and abilities that God knit into them while they were in their mothers’ womb. And what if it wasn’t just some little side-show (how sweet!) but that we actually got behind them as they charged the darkness in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Of course we needed Steve too. We needed his focus and his drive toward the thing that he was called to. We needed his form of conviction and bravery. We needed him to fly that plane in the sky sacrificing himself for the sake of the village to which they had just brought liberty under Wonder Woman’s calling. We need him and his strengths just as much as we need her and her strengths. And while I’m advocating for women here, the broader point is this: we need one another.

Imagine if all of God’s sons and all of God’s daughters were included in the fight, armed to fight in the battle and freed to lead the charge on the hills to which He has called them. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12), and the battle is too big to leave any one of God’s soldiers untrained and unengaged and doubting that they are called to push back the darkness because someone else hasn’t already taken the first step. I am compelled by a vision of us, men and women both, leading together in our God-given strengths and gifts and abilities and differences.

February 23, 2018February 23, 2018

Unravelling Cynicism: Living in the Already/Not Yet with Prophetic Vision

There is this Robert Munsch story called The Boy in the Drawer that was a part of my Canadian childhood. It is about this miniature boy that pesters and reeks havoc in the life of a little girl. Every time she gets mad at him and tells him to go away he grows a little. Finally at the end of the book (spoiler alert) the little girl and her mom and dad realize that when they show love to the boy he shrinks – so they shower him with affection until he completely disappears.

I have a cynic in me that acts a lot like that little boy. It grows and growls loud and obnoxious or it shrinks and become powerless, depending on my perspective.

Brokenness has been on prominent display in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida: the brokenness of individuals, systems, governments and societies. When it comes to the debate about gun control in the US, I just don’t get it. As a Canadian I don’t get it. As a Christian I don’t get it. It completely boggles my mind. And as I watch people fighting and posturing and rail-roading efforts toward justice with their own self-interest the cynic in me grows and grows and grows. I am extremely pessimistic when it comes to our human systems. I know some people feel called to fight within politics, but I just can’t be one of those people; although I have convictions that affect the way I view politics, I feel an overwhelming hopelessness and cynicism on the political front.

But the cynic in me shrinks and the hope in me increases when I take my eyes off of the man-made systems and catch a vision of the Kingdom of God. It’s like Elisha’s servant who is filled with despair as he looks out at the vast army surrounding them; it looks impossible until Elisha prays for his servants eyes to be opened and he is then able to see God’s invisible army all around (2 Kings 6:15-17).

We see this duality in the life of the prophets of the Bible all the time. They deeply mourned and even despaired of the brokenness they saw around them. They communicated messages of gloom and destruction. There is an aspect in which knowing God’s good heart shines a big bright spotlight on all that is wrong and broken. But always, at some point, God gave the prophets a vision of what restoration looked like. He always offered hope like an olive branch. Which is why in the midst of some of the most depressing books of prophecy in the Old Testament we have some of the most compelling pictures of hope lived out and seeping into all aspects of life.

On the other side of the Old Testament prophets Jesus breaks into human suffering and suffers the brokenness right along with us, all the while pointing us to the Kingdom of God, declaring the “year of the Lord’s favour”, jubilee, restoration. Jesus said the Kingdom of God was near and He said the Kingdom of God was here. Jesus died and rose again and He sits on the throne – everything is under his feet. He invites us to live in the upside-down reality of His reign. Where love motivates rather then fear. Where serving and sacrificing is the way to impact rather than position and posturing. Where giving up ones life is the way to actually find it. Where the poor, hungry, humble, weak, grief-stricken, peace-makers and persecuted are actually the blessed ones. No matter the earthly kingdom we find ourselves in, this is the beautiful reality that Jesus calls us to live out of.

We live in this tension – the already/not yet of the Kingdom of God. We mourn the brokenness and pray fervently for His will to be done on earth as at is in heaven. And we let the vision that Jesus gives of a world permeated with the power of the gospel motivate us toward the realization of it as we cling to the promise that he will be with us always and move in the power of the Spirit, operating in God’s economy.

I love the images of jubilee and shalom in the OT, and Zechariah’s vision of the old people hanging out while the kids frolic and play. I love the vision that Jesus cast as he preached on the side of the mountain and as he prayed on his last night before his death. I love how Paul called time and again for the Church to live out unity in all of their diversity. I love how John painted a picture of every tribe and tongue and nation worshipping around the throne of Jesus. I love that in the early church people sold everything and no one had need, that the Ephesians adopted abandoned babies, and that the gospel defied all the social cast systems of that day.

And I am inspired by the vision of the Kingdom that I see as individuals, in the power of the Spirit, live it out despite the governing laws and politics around them. I have friends who are punching human slavery in the gut as they slay the power of porn addiction in their lives or bring flowers and dignity and all their care to prostitutes in red light districts in SE Asia. I know people who put not just their money but all their resources where their mouths are, valuing human life enough to care for mothers in crisis rather than shaming them, and to foster and adopt so that there are other options. I’ve seen those who are moving in to rough neighbourhoods rather than moving out of them; people who have committed to teach in the rough schools in rough neighbourhoods with rough kids; people who have sponsored refugees. I have friends who work in microfinance projects and skills training so that people can leave the poverty cycle. I have heard story after story of radical love and communities transformed – and it is almost always from the bottom up.

I look to government and broken human systems and the cynic grows, paralyzing me with fear; I look to Jesus, to His vision, to His gospel affecting every sphere of life, to his Kingdom reality lived out at a grassroots level in the lives of Spirit-filled individuals all over the globe and I have all the hope in the world!

Let’s fix our eyes on Jesus and cling to hope and follow as He calls us to live out of His kingdom reality.

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 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.)

…

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?