My aspiration

I think this is who I want to spend my life being:

She is clothed in strength and dignity
She laughs without fear for the future,
When she speaks her words are wise
And she gives instructions with kindness.
She carefully watches everything in her household,
And suffers nothing from laziness.
Proverbs 31:25-27

Emotional Healing

This is copied in whole from Revelation magazine - an article by Malcolm Murdock called Emotional Quarantine - because I couldn't articulate better what I believe about God's healing power.
What does it mean to be healed? The Psalms say that God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147), but what does God’s healing actually look like? How do we get there? How do we go from people with wounded, hurting hearts to people healed and joyful, free to love and be loved by those around us as we abide in the intimate mercy of Christ?
The action of God’s spirit upon our hearts is ultimately a deeply mysterious thing, but it often begins with a simple willingness to admit our brokenness before him. A willingness to admit to the pain we so often shove into the most obscure corners of our souls, walling it in with emotional and spiritual callouses until we can hardly even tell it’s there. But the problem with the ever-popular “repress and ignore” strategy is that it renders us incapable of using—and enjoying—those quarantined portions of our hearts. When the part of me that’s able to trust and enjoy intimacy with other human beings has been wounded or betrayed, I may learn to function reasonably well without ever allowing the Lord to heal it, but my capacity for trust and intimacy will be forever crippled.
Un-healed emotional wounds are like a house with a locked and sealed room that’s filled to the brim with poisonous, toxic filth. As long as we stay away from that room (and don’t invite anyone else into that room) we can often get by OK. But to stay away requires that we become experts at avoiding our pain. Sometimes that means avoiding human relationships altogether, cutting ourselves off from the world and desperately seeking ways to hide, to disappear. But more often it’s somewhere in-between. We become like the cowboys in the old westerns, keeping everyone at a distance, never letting any one person get too close, careful to terminate any relationship that threatens to stir up our old wounds.
Of course, we would never admit anything is amiss (after all, denial is an important component of the repress and ignore strategy), so the ways we keep people away tend to become more insidious. Everything might be neat and tidy if we could simply tell people “I’m sorry, deep down I’m an emotionally wounded train wreck, and you’re getting threateningly close to my baggage compartment, so I need you to never speak to me again.” But alas, this would violate our first principle of denial, so instead we lash out at the people we care about, or we inexplicably withdraw, or terminate our romantic relationships out of the blue, or avoid our family, or keep our friends at arms length—whatever form it takes, it’s all designed for self-protection: doing everything in our power to avoid touching our un-healed pain. Sadly, this cycle usually does even more damage, both to us and to those we care about, who can rarely understand our behavior, since we don’t understand it ourselves.
So how do we break free? How do we take God up on his promise to bind up our wounds and heal our hearts? Where do we even begin? As mentioned above, the first step is often just a simple willingness to admit we’re wounded in the first place. After all, if a child has a cut on their hand, no parent can bandage the wound until the child shows it to them. Of course, God already “knows the secrets of the heart” (Psalm 44), wounds and all, but He is also not a God who forces us to come to Him, whether for healing, prayer, or simply to enjoy His presence. Time and again the scriptures show us the portrait of a compassionate and merciful God, eagerly waiting to take us in and heal us and renew our souls, but also a God who does not force, who wants the choice to be our own. As Jesus says in Matthew 23, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”
The beauty of a God who doesn’t force the issue is that we can start anywhere. No matter where we are on the path to healing and renewal, the Lord is happy to meet us there. One of my favorite things to do is to simply sit with the Lord in my unwillingness—toward anything: whether healing, growth, or some step of faith—to simply sit with the Lord in prayer and say “I’m unwilling, Lord, but I won’t shut you out. Please sit with me in my unwillingness.” And wouldn’t you know, like sunlight on a block of ice, the mere invitation to sit with Jesus in the presence of my wounded heart, with no willingness to go any further, slowly dissolves my fears, my guilt, my shame, everything standing in the way, and eventually I find I’m ready to take the next step.
But it’s rarely an easy process, and depending on the severity of our wounds, it’s not always something that can be done by simply sitting alone in prayer. To truly seek the renewed and healed hearts that God wants for us, we need to have the courage to recognize when further steps are required on the path to healing. Some hurt may simply require journaling, prayer and time. But often to truly find freedom we need to enlist the help of others. Pastors, spiritual directors and professional counselors can be tremendous tools for God’s healing in our lives. And though we often experience a Molotov cocktail of negative emotions—whether embarrassment, guilt, fear, shame, anger or anything else—at the thought of discussing our wounds with another person, it’s often one of the best ways to throw open the doors to that toxic baggage compartment in our hearts and finally start cleaning things out.
And it’s worth it. Painful and frightening though it may be, the joy-filled freedom of standing on the other side of the healing process, of being able to say that we have “thrown off everything that hinders” (Hebrews 12) and truly “cast our cares on the Lord” (Psalm 55) is worth every step of the difficult journey. To find our hearts free again to love and to be loved, whether in romance, friendship, family or any other relationship; to know the joy of God’s love filling those corners of our hearts we never thought could be healed; to see our past suffering or sin redeemed into merciful gratitude and joy at the God who can take even the ugliest wounds and make them new—these are the things that await those of us willing to seek the healing the Lord so desperately wants to give us.
So maybe this week we can all pray the Lord would show us those areas of our hearts that have yet to be healed, however old or new the wounds may be. And while we’re at it, maybe we can even pray He would give us the courage to take the next step in our journey towards freedom, choosing to trust that He truly is a God who is able to bind our wounds and heal our broken hearts, no matter how impossible it may sometimes seem.

Vulnerable

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and luxuries, avoid all entanglements and keep it safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in the casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." CS Lewis The Four Loves

I've given my heart to men. I've given it to family. I've given it to friends near and far. I've had it broken by infidelity, I've had it broken by shattered hopes and dreams, I've had it broken by unmet expectations of friendship. No doubt along the way I've shattered others' hopes and let down friends' expectations of close relationship. And yet I refuse to see heart break as a position of victimhood but instead view it as a consequence of love - not an easy state to understand, even harder to control but a proof, if you like, of an ability to love freely, to relinquish control for however fleeting the moment and be vulnerable. I remain resolute that to love is to live, inspite of the risk of heart break because to live without love is to live without God and that I cannot do.

Patience

I haven't blogged for a while. What I have done is practised a lot of patience. I heard this today which was both a great encouragement and an admonishment to a control-freak like me:

"To be faithful is to be patience. Patience is what reminds us that we’re not in control. When the Son of Man returns will he find faithfulness on earth? My prayer is that the answer will be yes."

And so I faithfully wait and I rest and I abide in the Lord.

Walking humbly with my God

Earlier this year I spent time in a city that wasn't my home. I walked it's streets every day with people who weren't home, yet I grew to love. Every day we would walk to our destination together and return to the place we made our temporary home together, in unison. Stepping out along sidewalks, crossing highways and breathing in deeply the musty air of a city that never slept, we cultivated relationship. As this journey embedded itself into our daily rhythm, I began to realise something. If I sped ahead, taking charge, leading the pack, I lost a connection with my fellow travellers. And if I dragged behind, distracted by a fleeting attempt to capture this great metropole one identical snap after another, I too disrupted that most tender of human rituals: the gentle questionning of two individuals getting to know each other's lives and loves. Only when we were travelling at the same pace, walking in tandem, talking in hushed tones, glancing in sympathy, empathy and laughter, could we truely relate.

The Old Testament prophet Micah set out a beautifully simple aid to our lives in a trinity of commands to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. My daily journeys in a strange city resonated with this last command. Strutting out in front of God or being distracted by sights along the way both stop me from relating to my Father. I need to walk humbly alongside Him, sharing my day, listening to His tales of life and love and knowing that if I stick close to Him I'll remain on the right path that's ahead of us.

Stranger in our midst

I came to London to pursue myself. When my schooling finished I was off: out of the small town in Scotland where I had outgrown the system, the community and the culture. London offered limitless opportunities of self-improvement, education, anonymity, career and success. Yet I encountered loneliness, loss and self-doubt. I had hoped to find happiness in the achievement of academic prowess and purpose in a city paved with promise. Yet I found emptiness and shallow relationships in which conversations revolved around establishing tenuous links between people who neither cared nor engaged with the other. I was that Other: the Alien. My interactions were framed around this insistence that I was this Other, as if by identifying myself as different I could ease the pain of cultural misunderstanding. Instead of finding a commonality I focussed on the difference between us.

And now? London is my home. I have found fulfillment in the very things from my hometown that I shunned 7 years ago: community, family and a slower pace. I no longer feel or act like an Alien but instead enjoy encountering them in our midst. And yet, my eternal inheritance means I am not of this world, so in a way I remain a stranger, passing through. London is my mission field but it is also my home. Living here is my purpose but settling here is not. Encountering and celebrating difference is my lifeblood, even more as I do so from a place of experience of knowing that bewilderment at this city and her people.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

I spent yesterday with a group of feminists. Most of them were strong, all of them were female. We were discussing the ways in which NGOs could encourage women to become politically active. Somehow the conversation traversed through gendered obstacles to the crux of the matter: mothers need to bring their sons up to respect women. And so we returned to that age old expectation that “the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world”. Tails of choosing boys only schools for their sons were shared, each woman around the table nodding in agreement that their beloveds ought to complete their education in a girl-free environment, lest the girls tempt and distract their sons.

Eve’s curse haunts us still. Woman: the weak, the seductress, the vulnerable. Man: acts without taking responsibility. Where then does this leave our struggle with an unequal society? I would argue that in our efforts to create a level playing field, on which men and women can play and contribute to society, the perpetuation of the myth that men are superior to women has spoiled all our efforts. We strive not for equality, a thoroughly biblical concept, but instead for sameness. Women ought to have access to contraception and abortions because they must be able to be the same as men. Women must have an education so they can be the same as men. Women must rise to the top of business, academic and political structures so they can prove they are the same as men. However, I firmly believe men and women are different. Our bodies, our minds, our motivations are different. But our worth can be, and in God’s eyes is, the same. We should turn from perpetuating stereotypes of all women as temptresses (sure, some are) and men as weak victims in the battle of sexuality, for neither stereotype builds women and men into the pillars they can be within our families, communities and societies. Let us celebrate difference and affirm worth. Perhaps if we do this from a young age, our children might grow up to aspire to be the best women and men they can be and our society will accept that women and men and contribute in equal but different ways. Together: in community and in partnership.