“What if…”: An ungodly belief

It’s hard to put into words what the last few weeks have meant to me, it has been a bit of a profound time to put it lightly.

For a little context, since lockdown and all that went down, I have been yearning for some time away. In solitude. With just God and some of my big questions. 

I have been needing a little bit of oasis and quiet to process some of the bigger issues of life, because I could feel my compass pulling a little. Subtle, but importantly away from God and goodness and general peace. I would wake up most mornings with a low level concern that would gnaw at my edges. “What is the point?”

Life is fleeting, here today and gone tomorrow. Literally. 

Man creates and destroys on a floating, spinning rock, with a fervence that defies logic for a creation that is heading to ultimate destruction. 

We believe that all will be restored, and that at the end of time God will make all right again. But in the day to day, in the face of suffering, that belief was starting to feel a bit more like a fairytale than anything else. And the effect was deeply derailing me. Like a bath with no plug, good and healthy things were being poured into my life, but without wrestling with my core understanding of God and the meaning of life, it was all just running away from me as fast as it was being poured in.

I was in desperate need of a reset. And not just in between nursery runs and last minute food shops.

I had been yearning for a while, and then in February my sister-in-law and I took our girls for a week away just to hang out and spend some good time together. It was in the after hours chats with her over that week, that I found I could be honest about how deeply that depression was affecting me. She is a fearsome prophet of a woman and she saw straight through all of my carefully constructed facades. She prayed and recommended a ministry that her friends in Wales were involved with, and the wheels were set in motion for some intentional time out to wrestle with God at RTF.

RTF stands for Restoring The Foundations. It was established in 1990 and I had heard of it a few times before. My Dad had been for a week’s session in the years prior and it was beneficial for him. So I was tentatively hopeful.

Skip forward to the end of August, (the ministry has a six month waiting list) and I drove myself the four hours off to the Breacons for five days of little responsibility and a lot of time to think. 

I was initially pretty nervous, I had put a lot on this time in terms of figuring out all of life’s issues, but it actually didn’t disappoint. It was just a lot less dramatic than I thought it would be.

Everybody’s experience of a ministry time like that would obviously be different, and it probably isn’t for everyone, but in five daily sessions of a few hours each, with a two-on-one approach, we journeyed through some of the places that the enemy might have gained some legal ground. Going through generational sins and the resulting curses, ungodly beliefs, soul hurts and demonic oppression, it all sounded a bit intense, but as we spoke it was all very peaceful andlogical, and honesty pretty normal. No real woohoo or tears at all. The thing that really felt revolutionary for me though, was uncovering my ungodly beliefs.

Sarah and Mike, the ministry leaders, had previously prayed and identified some areas in which they felt I had believed some ungodly things. 

Basically big fat lies. 

Maybe more small, subtle, life changing lies. 

For example, the belief that God’s blessings will one day run out. That there was somehow a cap to his blessings. A seemingly small lie, but when left unchecked I’m out here living my life with a spiritual limp, limiting God’s ability and the things I ask for without realising it, even though he clearly says that “he has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” (Ephesians 1:3) 

You spend some time identifying these things, then some time repenting of them, then some time letting the Spirit replace it with truth. In this case God showed me waterfalls, “Do these ever stop flowing?”. He showed me bountiful harvests, “Does the earth ever stop producing food?” We basically spent a while going through the things that never run out, as He compared His blessings to these things, with the promise that he is not a frugal God. 

A life changing axis shift.

And then they identified the ungodly belief of “What if…?”

What if what?

Nope, just what if…

This was a bit of a big one for me. And once again it is a bit more than I am able to unpack in a single blog post, as well as the fact that I am still walking out the truth of this one, and what it actually looks like in my life. But in essence, if God has said, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” and goes on to say “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:25-27) Then when we worry, it comes directly against what God has commanded for us. Worrying about the ‘what if…’ immediately says “God probably won’t, or can’t”. An ungodly belief.
It isn’t about the thing we are worrying about. “What if our cat dies?”, “What if this birth is difficult again?”, “What if I’m spending too much money at Rockwater?” It’s the subtle questioning of it all. It takes the conversation away from God, and into trusting things into our own hands. What has God said about our cat? I will believe and trust in that. What has God said about this birth? I will believe and trust in that. What has God said about our finances and extra croissants at Rockwater? I will believe and trust in that. 

As a concept this is scratching the surface of some deep and theological explorations, but it was very simply summarised for me when I asked God what to replace this derailing lie with.

He said “Lou, what’s the best that can happen?”

The challenge to spend my time meditating on that, over the worst that can happen. 

So simple. 

Yet the walking out of it is actually, tangibly changing my day to day life.

I hear it in my head all the time. “Dr. Pepper, what the BEST that can happen.” The nineties jingle reimaged. And I am trying to think about those things, and ask God for them, and honestly it is going great. 

There is so much more to share, so much more revelation and life and day to day peace. I no longer wake up in existential anguish over the meaning of life. Depression no longer lives at my core. I don’t spend my days endlessly worrying about all things, (maybe some things, but I am working on it) And all it took was some intentional time with the Spirit. Yay!

And now “What if..” Is slowly being replaced with, “What is the best that can happen.” And it is honesty making my internal world a much nicer place to be.

Praise be to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ever ask or imagine.

A semi biblical book review

It was my birthday last Monday. Woohoo! And my lovely man got me some lovely books. Well done to him.

Gifts mean the world to me, and among the many different categories of things that I enjoy, second hand books have to be pretty close to the top. Fiction in particular. Something I can temporarily lose myself in, with no real consequence other than stretching of my concentration again, past the three second facebook reels that manage to so constantly shrink it. And the first of the bunch was ‘How to Stop Time’ by Matt Haig. A really grounded and interesting read, if anyone wants to borrow it, I have a second hand copy!

Obviously I’m not here to ruin the whole book, but it says it in the blurb, so I feel confident to share the premise. The protagonist Tom is aging at a decelerated speed, to which fifteen years counts as one for his aging. The book finds him in the modern day, looking to be in his forties and actually having lived for four hundred odd years. And over his fictional four hundred years that travel true to our actual history, one of the most interesting tangents for me was chewing over the concept of the Witch Hunts of the 16th century.

Left field I know.

It has had me quandering over how little everything really ever changes. 

“Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!” 

The musings of the Great Teacher in Ecclesiastes.

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” 

I was astounded by the consideration of how fear and the struggle for power has, throughout all of recorded human history, caused us to scapegoat and call names and just generally impose the concept of ‘evil’ onto another human being in the name of self-righteousness. To be able to punish that ‘other’ person, creates a sense of rightness within ourselves. That we have been able to right a wrong with our actions and somehow, incorrectly, make the world a better place in the doing so.

Ben wrote last week about reflecting the Creator God through our own humble pursuits to create. Something that is a difficult and life-giving pursuit. And yet interestingly, throughout history, we have managed to try and reflect aspects of God’s nature that we were never meant to aspire to as well. God is judge, perfect judge, and to judge in His place has caused so much pain it is truly unspeakable. 

I think mainly in the present with the ominous battle against the ‘other’ of the refugee, and the riots that are erupting around our nation. Issues that are so multifaceted and complicated that no single blog post from me will shine any real light on them. Yet it has made me stop and think this week, about how wrong we, as a people, as a church, as supposedly Jesus loving people, have historically been when it comes to executing judgment over others, and how our calling was in fact the complete opposite.

Do not get me wrong, I am all here for a healthy boundary, but that is a different blog post. To actively judge, and create an ‘other’ out of another human being is a sad thing indeed.

I would like to think we have moved on from hunting witches, but I think the same evil may have just shifted faces. 

I want to add some conclusionary sentence here, about taking this thought away this week, taking it for a proverbial walk around the park, and figuring out where we can fight to be the change in our own spheres of influence.

And yet I think instead, I am just left poignantly saddened. Saddened that we still seemed to be getting it so very wrong. And once again I am just left in that place of lament, crying out for the Saviour to come and set it all right.

Please.

Imperfect kindness

As I sit here and write this, I am 16 weeks and five days pregnant (apparently). And whilst this is definitely a season of great joy and immense gratitude, it would be insincere of me to say it is all happy days and bathing in the glory of partnering with the Creator to create.

I’m actually really scared.

For those who aren’t aware, I have been pregnant twice before.

My first baby passed to the other side of the veil when I was 13 weeks pregnant, and I look forward to the day where we are reunited with our first fruit, already on the other side of eternity.

And our second, is the beautiful Esme Kai, three years old and full of more life than I thought was possible! But that loss, and the prevailing Covid years, mixed with more loss and even more isolation, led to an immense mental breakdown for me when Ez was born. I was diagnosed with postnatal psychosis, a season of life that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And to spare the gnarly details, I was very very unwell for an extended period of time.

I write about this now, because I met with a mental health practitioner last week. She has been sewn into my pregnancy journey this time by my wonderful midwife team, to assess my risk of having another psychotic episode, and to create a web of care around me, to make sure it doesn’t get that bad again.

Now I am positive we, as a species, have no idea what is actually happening when we suffer any kind of mental breakdown. There are many people, much smarter than me trying to figure it out, but whether it is physical, spiritual, evil or ordained, there are so many people struggling with some kind of internal burn out, that I want to take this moment to explain, what I shared with her, when asked how I survived, and how I got better.

It wasn’t a specific cocktail of drugs, it wasn’t a stint in a psychiatric unit, it didn’t involve extreme CBT or the perfect therapist, and God most definitely did not heal me in an instant. It was very simple, and very free, and very accessible. 

It was the enduring strength of the relationships around me.

I came away from talking to my mental health nurse that day, and I had a sudden guilty worry that I hadn’t told her that God healed me, after I had told her in depth how I had recovered.

And I felt God say, ‘But I didn’t. Not in the way you want to say. I was present in the strength of the unity of the community around you.’

And He was.

That was the modern-day miracle.

That in this individualistic, self-centred, terrified-of-deep-vulnerability, society that we live in, it was an absolute miracle that those closest to me already knew me well enough and trusted the process and path of recovery that God lay before them, to jump into it with me.

Again, I will spare the details of what that looked like on the daily, or else this singular blog post could evolve into a published work, for the length of the word count alone!

But their care was intimate, and kind, and I was torn apart and rebuilt with the depth of the vulnerability I had to share. Yet week by week, they were able to weed out the lies, and whisper back truths to my broken heart, until I started to see light and colour again. Learning in the process, that when everywhere around us we are told to follow our heart, sometimes, we don’t actually know. But the One who made us does.

I am well aware that my story is somewhat unique. To grow up in a God-fearing, deeply loving, (but very much imperfect), household, with a family and husband that are so supportive it cured the seemingly incurable. And I know this, because whenever I have shared my story of that time, I am consistently met with stories of the hurt that people carry from others who didn’t turn up for them, and even worse, kicked them when they were down. It breaks my heart. There is a quote from Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book, ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, where he shares that over the years of his extensive studies, he has come to believe that “our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another.” In other words, “Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.” (Proverbs 16:24)

We are completely capable as a people of loving and healing each other through our words, actions and prayers. And they really don’t have to be grand acts. In the very worst of days for me, a random friend dropped by a bag of clementines, just because he was thinking about us. And I think about that pretty frequently, even now, years later. He had no words, no wisdom, no fix, and I don’t even really like clementines, but the simple act of being in his thoughts helped. Really helped.

I have come to understand that while there is such a thing as death by a thousand papercuts, there is also such a thing as resurrection by a thousand acts of imperfect kindness.