When I wrote this post months ago, it didn’t seem the right time to publish it. Like it was out of season or something. Today, I’m sensing it is time. Whether due to world events or Lent or the normal stresses of life, I’m encountering numerous friends who find themselves in a wrestling season – wrestling with doubts, fears, circumstances, health concerns, ministry challenges, and the like.
Perhaps now it’s time to share this.
I write to help people navigate the edges of life and faith. We can choose to play it safe, or we can follow the God who calls us beyond our comfort zones. Even apart from our calling, we can find ourselves on the uncomfortable edge.
Sometimes that edginess has to do with faith. Do I stick with what I know or venture into the unknown? Is this God calling or something else? We may discover that the edges we avoid, based on the belief systems of our own making, aren’t necessarily what God has called us to avoid.
Sometimes that edginess has to do with the way we see others living out their lives. They profess faith, but, boy, do they not live it! And their inconsistencies shake us.
Sometimes that edginess has to do with trauma – sufferings brought on by our own decisions or sufferings brought on by circumstances quite apart from our own making. These “Why, God?” moments create mental and emotional imbalances that leave us reeling, overwhelmed.
After a lifetime of experiencing such edginess, I’ve come to realize three things:
- It’s okay to have unanswered questions
- It’s okay to be angry
- It’s okay to be sad
Growing up, I had come to believe – either because of what I was taught or because I had come to my own conclusions – that these options were unacceptable. Then, my belief system and what I encountered came colliding into each other like a storm front over the Ozarks.
When our kids were little, we flew a small commercial prop plane into the Springfield airport. My wife and I and our kids were all sitting across the back row of seats. Our kids had jetted around the globe since they were infants; we were flight savvy.
But just as we came to Springfield, we hit a vast wall of dense, dark clouds. “Hit” is the operative word here. When the plane shuddered, the pilot veered the craft around to try again. Approaching the cloud wall the second time, the plane again shuddered as if it was going to fall apart. The pilot made one more attempt and then gave up, flying off in a different direction.
The motion of pushing up against this impenetrable storm bank and the shuddering of the plane made just about everyone sick to their stomachs. Barf bags were all pulled out – and the collective sound of vomiting caused even more to wretch. We were a collective mess.
My young son, Stephen – he must have been 4 or 5 – was sitting next to me. As the plane was approaching the cloudbank and beginning to shudder, he exclaimed, “Wow, this is fun!”
Then he too threw up.
I really do not know how long it was before we landed. But when we did, we certainly were not in Springfield. The flight attendant must not have been looking out the window, for she gave her standard speech: “Welcome to Springfield.”
Awkward pause. “Oh wait, this is not Springfield. Sorry.”
The Midwest can experience intense storms. They occur when one airmass crashes into another. On a hot summer day, a cold front can collide with a warm high, building clouds to towering heights, and unleashing wind, lightning, thunder, hail, even tornadoes that pummel both sky above and land below. Such was the case that day.
And such are the collisions that can happen inside ourselves. We hit experiences that cause every bone in our body and every cell in our brain to shudder.
Such was the shudder of the impact between my childhood faith and the faith challenges I experienced in college. I had grown up confident in my faith, steeped as I was in the experiential intensity and doctrinal vitality of my Pentecostal upbringing. Like the Apostle Paul, I could count off a litany of commitments to faith that put me in the firmest of the faithful. I had honed my contesting skills on the high school debate team and in Sunday school classes. I was as hard core as they come.
But I was not as prepared for college as I thought. I anticipated my professors to be dismissive of my Pentecostal background. But when they questioned everything else, well, I realized my answers weren’t standing the academic rigor my professors required.
Their challenges didn’t throw me as much as did the reality that I didn’t have answers that would crush their questions. And that left me off-balance.
So too it was with life experiences that were conflicting with what I knew of a sovereign, all-loving God. Really, God?
Slowly over time, I came to realize that conclusive answers aren’t always available. When other like-minded believers tried to provide solutions, their answers sounded cunning only to those who already believed. To the unbelieving or to the struggling, they rang hollow.
I began to realize that answers weren’t always the solution, that I didn’t always have to have them. That I could actually sit with ambiguity and discover that my faith would not be shaken.
Such was also the shudder when in my early 50s, I finally faced my childhood abuse. Not face-to-face with my abusers, but just face-to-face with what they had done. I had wrestled with my abuse at other times but had never really called my abusers for what they were. It was not easy, obviously, or I would have done so years before.
It’s hard to face bullies. But these bullies were my elders, authority figures in my life, in a world where one respected one’s elders.
Having grown up in the midst of anger, frequently and arbitrarily expressed, I had found safety in fleeing anger (actually my response was more like freezing than fleeing). Oh sure, I could get angry. But I’d discovered that my anger was not to be trusted any more than the anger of these, my superiors. So I learned to shut it off, the anger that is, or turn it inward. I only allowed myself to get angry when I thought I could control it.
Like when my anger was pointed way out there somewhere. Where I could allow it to take the form of righteous indignation in a controlled, academic setting. At bullies in society who oppressed other people, for example.
Thus, perhaps why injustice became such a burning topic for me. It was one place where anger was acceptable and where I could develop scholarly and biblical arguments and proofs to declare how certain actions were unjust – and then ask why the rest of church and society weren’t doing something about it.
But then one day I woke up, literally, and said, “Enough!” I realized that by internalizing that anger I was letting it eat me up. That what had happened to me as a child was something that I could and should express anger about – and directly to those who had harmed me. It was okay to be angry with what they had done. It was okay to express anger toward them. Confrontation was made easier because most of my abusers were already dead. But even with the living offenders where it took time to formulate my thoughts, the first step was allowing myself to be angry.
Then there was the shudder when I faced up to my depression. Because of my childhood trauma, I have probably lived with PTSD much of my life. Back when I was younger, depression wasn’t talked about. People who admitted to feelings of depression were shunted off, institutionalized, treated with kid gloves, and in one stark example, removed from running for the office of Vice President of the United States.
If depression was unacceptable in the larger society, it was even more frowned upon in my faith community. It went against everything we’d been taught about trusting God and finding healing. Psychologists and, even more so, psychiatrists were unacceptable. And forget about depression medication.
But I was desperate. Providentially, I wound up working with both a psychologist and a psychiatrist who affirmed my faith. One a Baptist, the other Seventh Day Adventist, they warmly embraced my Pentecostal me.
Gradually they taught me that it was okay to feel down – to feel sad. I learned to cope with those feelings, even when they were overwhelming. There were tools at my disposal, including medication. I learned that being depressed for a long time and not having the right tools to deal with that depression had left me depleted in my own ability to fight off those down feelings. My body was wearing out.
Neither of these professionals was in my life all that long, though it felt long back then. By the time the therapy had concluded, I had come to realize it was okay to admit when I was feeling down. I had discovered much about the sources of my depression, had faced my abusers, and had learned what I needed to do when down feelings came on. Like understanding that feeling the sadness produced better results than avoiding the sadness.
Not long ago, I finally came off the depression medication. It had been some time since I had felt as down as I had earlier. And with semi-retirement there were fewer work stresses in my life. So, my doctor said it was a good time to wean myself away.
But after coming off the medication, I sensed the down feelings – the sad feelings – more often. At first it concerned me. Until I reminded myself that it is okay to feel sad. I have the tools to self-monitor and the skills to do what I need to do to face feeling down. I had learned that I can be filled with joy and experience sadness all at once.
I started off this post by saying that God calls us beyond our comfort zones, beyond just playing it safe. Flying in planes has never bothered me – even prop planes headed into Midwestern thunderstorms. But put me on the edge of a cliff? Arghh! Ain’t going anywhere near there. On a plane, my life is in another’s hands. On the edge of a cliff, I don’t trust myself.
And yet, there is something good about leaving our comfort zones, about leaning into all of life and all God walks us through.
I’m not saying we should all go cliff diving to show how much we trust God. But I do think God calls us into the unknown and the uncomfortable to show us we can trust God beyond what we have already experienced.
Generally, we don’t like finding ourselves on the edges of life. Even daredevils have their limits. But only when we follow God into the unknown and the uncomfortable, do we discover how much God loves us and how far God will go to keep us secure.
I trust this post has helped you. From time to time, I write about trauma and healing, all part of journeying in the borderlands. I’m not a professional therapist and, if you need professional help, I encourage you to get the right kind. But I am always open to hearing from you – you can reach out to me through the Contact Us! page on my website.
Public domain photo by Luci Correia
Be First to Comment