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This past weekend my wife Carolyn and I moved two of our college aged children out of the house. My son, Seth, to Nashville for his junior year and my daughter, Danielle for her freshman year at Western Kentucky. It was a busy weekend and an even busier month. It has been a month closely associated with loss. Along with the kids moving out, my mother passed away this month. She was 94 years old and ready to move on to be with our Lord. Loss is something we do not usually think about until we experience it but maybe we should be more aware that it is part of our every day life.
It has often seemed to me that having a Christian world view means that we exist in a state of loss.
Timothy Keller in The Prodigal God agrees and reading his book reminded me of our existential state of homelessness. I touched on this in my previous blog concerning our fear associated with being homeless. How often do we think of our selves as homeless unless we are literally without a home? And yet according to Scripture we are without a home. Jesus' words: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head” is a commentary that this life on earth is not our home. It is a central message of the Gospel of Christ that we are lost and then found. But how aware are we of this state of loss, homelessness, and fear? I really do not go around feeling lost and afraid 24/7, until something happens to remind me of it.
Most of us have been homesick at one time or another. My daughter is experiencing a good dose of this at college and it is something she did not expect. Homesickness is that feeling of being “a stranger in a strange land.” Our identity, our sense of security or who we are is very much tied to a feeling of being at home. Jesus' message is that we are not truly at home until we find our home in Him.
Maybe it is because of God's mercy that we are not always aware of our state of homelessness. Most of us have places of refuge where we do feel at home with our families or our spouse. We do have loving relationships that can give us a sense of security, a feeling of belonging. We could not survive a constant state of alone unless we did. But we also need to be reminded of our vulnerable state. My daughter said she did not prepare to miss home. She was caught off guard by feelings of vulnerability and she does not like it. None of us do.
And yet it is probably the best place we can be, knowing our vulnerability so we can know our need for connection. My daughter, like all of us wants to be in control to avoid vulnerability because of feelings of fear associated with it. We spend most of our energy and effort trying to avoid feeling vulnerable and afraid by being in control, in control of our finances, of our relationships, of our career, of every moment of our day. But what would it be like if we embraced our true state of affairs? What if we let ourselves experience our vulnerability and thus our need for security, for one another, for God? I think if would really be good.
I don't know about you, but I always feel safer when I am around someone that is not trying to control everything but is able to live in a place of trust, like Jesus in the wilderness. He believed and trusted in the provision of the Father in spite of his deprivation in the wilderness. In the wilderness, he did nothing, even though he could, to provide for himself, to control his environment or even get out of it: “It is not good to live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds form the mouth of God.”
Maybe an awareness that we live in a wilderness of homelessness helps us live a life of vulnerability to one another and to God. It forces us to confess our need, to turn to each other and to God and thus to discover that we never really are alone and on our own.
Most of us are simply trying to do the best job with the life that we have. Most of us are working and taking care of someone, whether it is children, parents or someone in our life. We are tying to do what is right, to do our part and gain some measure of security, peace and enjoyment in life. Some of us are struggling to just survive and security, peace and enjoyment seem unreachable. Life is hard and difficult with out many good things happening like a stable job, good health, safe people that love you and care for you and are there for you. Even then, most people are trying to do the right thing and live the right way; at least the ones I know.
Some of the people I have gotten to know I have seen in my counseling practice. Some of them have mental health issues but most of them do not. Maybe some mental health professional would say they do but I think we over diagnose in our field and what looks like mental health disorder is more the effect of a life that has lived poorly loved. They might have many of the symptoms of a disorder and even benefit from medication but the genesis of their disorder is not physical, biologically based in the sense that “they were born that way”. It is more that “they were raised that way or treated that way”. And even if there are genetic, biologically based reasons for disorders in living, when someone is well loved it makes all the difference in how they live with their disability. Love really does make all the difference.
You might be thinking “Duh! Of course love matters! What an obvious thing to say.” Maybe so, but it seems to me we are not very good lovers of one another. We have lost sight of love as a priority, what love is, what it means to love one another and how to do it. In my last few blogs I have commented that much of what goes wrong with marriage and family relationships is related to“doing what works for me” versus “doing what works for us”. We do not understand that what is best for us individually is grounded in what is best for us collectively so that when I am responding in the best interests of you I am benefiting. It is a principle or truth we seem to have trouble remembering because we have lost sight of what love is. I think loving well is the single most challenging thing we have to do in life and we need to be focusing our efforts on how to better love one another. It is the primary thing that can begin to turn the tide of improving our most important relationships. So many things seem to get set right when love is present; so many things go wrong when it is not.
My frame of reference for love is Jesus. I think most of the new in the New Testament is Jesus' presentation of God as love. The New Testament is new precisely because of its focus on the love of God, rather than the wrath of God (this is not to say that the Old Testament misses the love of God). A significant purpose, if not the purpose of Jesus' life is to usher in a new kingdom based on love. In other words, love is what is most real. It is the thing that really matters because love is as elemental and basic and necessary as air. We cannot survive or thrive without love; it is what we are made to be and do. Everything about Jesus' life was (and is) an expression of love in action. And he asked his followers to do likewise: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love is to be the priority in our lives. It is amazing to me how often and easily and quickly we lose track of this most basic and beautiful thing and fall back into “doing what works for me”.
One of the things that John, a follower of Jesus said is “We love because he (Jesus) first loved us.” Our love begins with the love of Jesus/God. Just because Jesus is my example does not mean that I always or even regularly love well. But I do have a reference point, someone to remind me what matters and a life to follow showing me how.
David Benner in Surrender to Love says "the deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation." He then says we attempt to compensate for our isolation through "people, possessions, and accomplishments." That is, we attempt to soothe the pain of separation with the balm of earned recognition from what others think of us, from what we have, and from what we do. This never fully satisfies the ache because it does not address the fundamental problem of feeling separated and alone.
How many of us believe this is our problem? Do you feel isolated or do you know in your heart that you are loved, valued, and cherished? That you are or have been the recipient of another's time, attention, and concern where you are more important to them than they are to themselves? This is the cure for the ache of isolation. It is love.
If the answer to that question is "no" or "I don't know" then you probably question the power of love in your life. You experience a restlessness and agitation that might not always be visible but runs in the background like a computer virus gumming up the works and slowing down the system. Dr. Benner asserts that "to be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine". I believe he would also agree that to be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with one another. That is, there are two great love relationships we must fully experience to be as we are designed to be; the love of our creator and the love of one another. The great commandments of the scriptures are to love God with all of your self and to love one another as your self. This is the dynamic of the cross, vertical relationship with God and horizontal relationship with one another. If the death and resurrection of Jesus are true, then this dynamic dance is foundational to who we are. If we are not participating in both movements of this great dance of love we are going to experience that virus of never being fully comfortable in our own skin.
One of the paradoxes of love is that you cannot fully love another without being fully loved yourself. One might think that would encourage a focus on self, but the paradox is that we only become truly unselfish when we have been totally and unconditionally loved. 1 John 4:19 says we love because He first loved us. Because we have been loved, because we know the reality and power of love in our life, we are able to love ourselves and others. It is when we have not experienced the wonderful and joyous presence of love that we become consumed with a self trying to find satisfaction and contentment in a disconnected world. The first order of business then is to be loved. But of course that is not up to us and that is where we become trapped in the striving to earn love. We know we need it, we have not experienced it, our soul aches for it, so we push to find it.
There is another verse in 1 John 4 that is rather startling and illuminating. Verse 10 says "This is love: not that we love God but that He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." It is not about what we do, it is about the love God has for us. We are all so driven by the failures of love in our life that we have great difficulty wrapping our souls around the fact that God loves us. This is the nature of love, this is the nature of God, to love us; He cannot not love us. We are loved and once we fully wake up to this fact life becomes a lot easier and simpler; the only thing that really matters is love.
Are you standing in the ballroom watching others dance, maybe resenting the joy on their faces? Do you believe that the dance of love does not include you? This is the ache of your soul yearning for connection and belonging. Listen to it as an invitation to the dance. We all have the same need and you will be welcomed. God loves you.
Easter is the most important, significant, and meaningful remembrance of Jesus. And yet it receives much less publicity and celebration than Christmas. This might be because generally it is much easier for us to become excited and celebrate a baby's birth than a man's murder. The birth of a baby is also common to human experience; crucifixion thankfully is not. People can get excited about buying gifts for each other and our economy has grown dependent on the spending that goes on during the Christmas season. There are lots of reasons that Christmas gets more press than Easter, not the least of these is getting our arms around Jesus' resurrection from the dead. And yet Easter is the religious ceremony of the Christian faith. As Paul suggests, without Easter, we have no Christian faith.
Easter helps us remember and celebrate the greatest expression of God's love. I cannot do justice to such a subject in such a short space, but we cannot separate Jesus' resurrection from his crucifixion. His death and rising are the heart of the Christian experience. One deals with sin and the other with a new order of creation. Dr. Robert Mulholland, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, calls it "God's cruciform love". Simply, God's being cannot do anything else but crucify himself on our behalf so that we might participate in His nature. In other words, God created us to be with Him so He removes what separates us from Him.
In my last blog, I quoted Thomas Merton that at its root sin is a failure to love. God never sins and always loves; it is who He is. In another blog, I quoted Henri Nouwen that love means "intimacy, closeness, mutual vulnerability and a deep sense of safety". While there is a tremendous amount that can be said about what love is, this definition captures the relational aspect of love. Easter reminds us that God has made an open door to participate in His love. He has made it possible for us to be intimate, close, vulnerable and safe with Him and therefore with each other. Easter affirms that God is love and that His love is the greatest force imaginable that it raises the dead. His love gives new life where there is no life.
Please consider where in your life there is deadness or failure to demonstrate love. Who are you struggling to love? Does your marriage feel dead? Does fear dominate your relationships and your life? Do others feel unsafe with you? Do you believe that you don't need others? Do you think that you have to live life manipulating and maneuvering to get what you need? All of these are failures to love; please consider that God gives new life where there is none. Easter reminds us that nothing is hopeless, nothing is dead forever. Celebrate Easter in your life!
I visited my website recently and was struck by the word transform. I was impressed by this because I know I do not have the power to transform anything. I hope I have not given the wrong impression and promise something that I cannot deliver. There is change in many of the people I work with in counseling. There sometimes is transformation, which means to "change something dramatically, especially improving…" Often there is not dramatic change but improvement. But I am confident that seeds are planted that may lead to transformation, that is to dramatic improvement.
Transform can also mean "to change completely for the better". Complete change, dramatic change, this is describing change that is obvious. These are powerful statements of what many people hunger for; it is something you and someone else can notice like when the stock market increases by three or four hundred points in one day or you lose 30 or 50 lbs and the change is obvious, and better. You don't look like the same person. You are dramatically and completely different, in a better way.
Have you had an experience of transformation in your life? Have there been occasions or experiences of your life becoming completely different and better? As I look back over my life I see profound and dramatic change that warrants use of the word transformed. I am completely and dramatically different and better from the person I used to be. An important variable is "as I look back". Becoming a transformed person is not like the stock market where dramatic change happens in a day or even a few hours. Becoming a transformed person is a process or journey with dramatic or meaningful occurrences along the way that have a cumulative, life changing effect over time.
Transformation is possible. What experiences have you had that have contributed to your transformation? Who were the significant people involved? How have you dramatically or completely improved?
Do you wonder how all of sudden you are in an argument that you did not see coming? You are upset and agitated before you know it and embroiled in a disagreeable disagreement with someone you love. Literally, you can be having a casual conversation and within milliseconds you're in emotional turmoil. To borrow a phrase from Dr. Sharon May, you have been hijacked by your emotional brain. This happens when you perceive a particular situation to be threatening or stressful and your emotional brain kicks in gear taking out your prefrontal cortex or thinking brain. We are created to react rapidly when confronted with threatening situations and thinking slows our reaction time down.
This works great when you are confronted with a real physical threat and you either run (flee), attack (fight), or stand like a doe in headlights (freeze). You are dealing with danger in an adaptive, life preserving manner. The challenge for our relationships is we also react this way when we are confronted by what we perceive as emotional threats, and that is a different flavor for each one of us. Dr. Joseph Le Doux from the Center for Neural Science at New York University has mapped out what parts of the brain are affected by information coming in from our senses and obviously how we perceive what we are taking in is critical to which "brain" reacts, our "thinking/reflecting" brain or our "emotional/reacting " brain.
We are in an argument before we know it, and depending on how each of us responds determines how long or intense the argument is. We are all different, with different histories and temperaments that affect how we react. For those of us who are "quick responders" we need to learn how to slow our system down and engage our thinking brain. We can escalate a disagreement to proportions not expected and the argument quickly becomes something no one wants.
Interestingly, even the "slow responders" who remain calm on the outside are reacting exactly the same way on the inside by either freezing or fleeing. These folks are the ones that shut down and withdraw during conflict. The important point is that while they may seem reasonable and in control, their thinking/reflecting brains are not engaged so problem solving and compromise cannot occur.
For either type of "responder" the situation and person are not safe so self preservation not communication and reconciliation is the rule of the day. It is only when our thinking/reflecting brains are processing information that we can work through our differences. We must work to make one another feel safe; then we can connect and communicate.
Pay attention to what trips your trigger and how you react. Learn to distinguish between your emotional responses and your more calm thoughtful ones. Allow each other to come back to level before reengaging and trust that your loved one is not the enemy.