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Making Sure Someone is There Before You Scream

Steve Brown makes the point that honesty in prayer is a key component of our relationship to God. We tend to forget that he already knows what we’re facing before we bring what we’re facing to him. As if we can cover up our suffering, shame, and pain. The good news is, his always being there, and knowing and understanding what’s happened, frees us up to be honest:

Childlike honesty doesn’t just include honesty about one’s feelings. It includes telling God where it hurts. The next time you see a child fall and scrape his or her knee, watch what happens. The little girl or boy will be picked up by mom or dad, and in that moment there will usually be silence before the storm breaks. Do you know what is happening? The child is making sure someone is there to hear – that he is in the parents arms before he screams.

-Steve Brown, Approaching God: Accepting the Invitation to Stand in the Presence of God, pp. 84-85

He’s there. You can scream if you need to.

He looks at us in our suffering as he would have looked at Jesus had our sin not been imputed to him

I’ve written about this before HERE and HERE, but here’s another angle on it. Calvin on 2 Corinthians 1:5:

Verse 5

2 Corinthians 1:5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

For as the sufferings of Christ abound — This statement may be explained in two ways — actively and passively. If you take it actively, the meaning will be this: “The more I am tried with various afflictions, so much the more resources have I for comforting others.” I am, however, more inclined to take it in a passive sense, as meaning that God multiplied his consolations according to the measure of his tribulations. David also acknowledges that it had been thus with him:

According to the multitude, says he, of my anxieties within me,
thy consolations have delighted my soul. (Psalms 94:19.)

In Paul’s words, however, there is a fuller statement of doctrine; for the afflictions of the pious he calls the sufferings of Christ, as he says elsewhere, that he fills up in his body what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ. (Colossians 1:24.)

The miseries and vexations, it is true, of the present life are common to good and bad alike, but when they befall the wicked, they are tokens of the curse of God, because they arise from sin, and nothing appears in them except the anger of God and participation with Adam, which cannot but depress the mind. But in the mean time believers are conformed to Christ, and bear about with them in their body his dying, that the life of Christ may one day be manifested in them. (2 Corinthians 4:10).

Samuel Bolton states a similar idea in The True Bounds of Christian Freedom:

…God has mercy for ‘can-nots’, but none for ‘will-nots’. God can distinguish between weakness and wickedness. While you are under the law, this weakness is your wickedness, a sinful weakness, and therefore God hates it. Under the Gospel He looks not upon the weakness of the saints as their wickedness, and therefore He pities them. Sin makes those who are under the law the objects of God’s hatred. Sin in a believer makes him the object of God’s pity. Men, you know, hate poison in a toad, but pity it in a man. In the one it is their nature, in the other their disease. Sin in a wicked man is as poison in a toad; God hates it and him; it is the man’s nature. But sin in a child of God is like poison in a man; God pities him. He pities the saints for sins and infirmities, but hates the wicked. It is the nature of the one, the disease of the other.

The main take-away I got from Calvin today is that God the Father somehow views the sufferings of his people as their share in the sufferings of Christ. In other words, the Father poured his wrath out upon Jesus in his suffering so that he could sympathize with us in our suffering. He looks at us in our suffering as he would have looked at Jesus had our sin not been imputed to him. He sees our failings and pains as weakness, not as wickedness. In doing so, he is the “God of all comfort.”

As Manure Belongs to a Fruitful Garden

Another thing: to minister fruitfully (and God does not call us to anything else) we must minister as those who have died. This is really the same point as the last, but it has total ramifications in the life. It is only out of a life that is dead not only to sin (obvious) but to self in all its various and subtle aspects, that God will bring resurrection to others. Death works in us, but life in others (2 Cor. 4:12). That is the profoundest and most practical principle in the Bible. Every time we essay to minister there must be a new death. ‘Deaths oft…I die daily,’ said Paul. It is the glorious agony of those who are used of God amidst the oppositions of the world, the church, and certainly the devil, that we are ever dying men and women…

You can see what a death this is to die to those who think you are nothing if not popular. If we are not prepared to suffer (and suffering is not fun nor is it meant to be fun), we shall not reign. The two belong together, as Peter says over and over again in his first epistle. Hurt and fruit, death and life, sorrow and joy. They belong together, as manure belongs to a fruitful garden.

-William Still, The Work of the Pastor, Kindle Loc. 1191, 1210

That’s great use of imagery. Suffering and joy, etc. go together as manure and a fruitful garden go together.

 

 

Honesty that Dismantles Your Own Sense of Self

Do you remember the first class?

HEMPEL

Vividly. The assignment was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” And everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was. We found out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell. No half-measures. He thought any of us could do it if we wanted it badly enough. And that, when I was starting out, was a great thing to hear from someone who would know.

-Amy Hempel, from The Art of Fiction No. 176, The Paris Review (Read it online HERE)

This is Amy Hempel describing her first class with her teacher, and a famous author and editor, Gordon Lish.

As I’ve devoted much of the last year to reading (so-called) minimalist authors, Amy Hempel has not only risen near the top of that list, but near the top of my list in general. The fact that she now teaches at an SEC school doesn’t hurt either.

Her short stories are worth the purchase price for the first lines alone. The first line of Tom-Rock through the Eels is one of my favorite sentences: “Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?” The Harvest beings with, “The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.” The story she’s referencing in the interview above,  In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried, has an equally good first line: “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.” I recommend her collected stories as highly as I recommend anything.

I want that to be the line in my comments section instead of ‘Your Thoughts:’ Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.

The disciples of Gordon Lish, and his literary descendants, use the trauma of their lives to fuel their stories. They do not necessarily tell you about their own lives explicitly, but they will hide their lives within stories. Tom Spanbauer refers to this as “dangerous writing.”

Let me get back to the quote from her Paris Review interview (there are a ton of great interviews at that site by the way). Imagine walking into a classroom/workshop with a teacher you greatly respect. Now imagine that that teacher required that you divulge your deepest darkest secret. You can read about Amy Hempel’s in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried.

Here’s the deal as a Christian. What we do is this: we try not to tell lies. As long as we’re not fibbing we convince ourselves that we’re honest. But honesty may well involve much more than how we speak. It has to involve how we deal with ourselves.

Personally, I am so prone to bury all of my hurts, fears, and anxieties and pretend that they don’t exist. If they start creeping up I tell them to go away.

One of my good friends is going on this journey through minimalist literature with me. We each read things. We share what we read. We share how the things we read help. And so we help each other. He preached a sermon recently on 2 Cor. 1:3-5: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”

He actually referenced the above Amy Hempel quote in the sermon as evidence of the fact that some writers solicit more honesty of students than the church does of its disciples. The point of the sermon was that if we’re not honest about our hurts, then God cannot bring comfort. And it is through the comfort that God brings, which we often miss, that we are actually able to minister to others. You can listen to the sermon HERE.

In their own ways, the ‘minimalists’ use their hurts in their writing both for catharsis and to help others.

Here’s the thing for Christians, or at least for me: Are writers at writing workshops more honest than Christians? I tend to bury my pain and anxiety. I stick my fingers in my ears and say la la la really loud and hope that they’ll go away.

We are scared of digging up things that will ‘dismantle our sense of self,’ that will expose us, make us vulnerable. We think that ‘thou shalt not lie’ simply means that we don’t tell fibs. We never consider that we ought to be honest with ourselves.

We bury old hurts, they become scars, if you scratch them they start to bleed. We don’t want that. We want them to stay buried. Who would risk the danger of dismantling our sense of self?

The thing is, since we’re so content to bury it all as if it never happened, we never leave opportunity for God to truly heal the wound. Like a man with a gash that needs stitches, and he bandages it and refuses to see the doctor. We won’t dismantle our sense of self, and so we never really figure out who we can be. We never open up the possibility of the God of all comfort ministering to us so that we can minister to others.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Circumstances and Perspective

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.’ Thus Martyn Lloyd-Jones quotes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

That is where the Christian message is of such help to us. It does not change the circumstances, but what it does is to change us…

The glory of our message is that circumstances, surroundings and ‘the stars’ remain exactly as they are. We can, however, maintain our composure because our attitude is different. It is a change in us which enables us to view these things without – dare I say it? – having to go to consult a psychiatrist!…The glory of the Christian position is that it puts us right. ‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature…all things are become new (2 Cor. 5:17). Now, in what sense is this true? it is in the sense that he sees them differently. It is the secret of Christian life and of living.

Two men look out through the same bars:
One sees the mud, the one the stars (F. Langbridge)…

They are looking at the same things, but their reaction is entirely different. This is what the Christian faith should do for us – if we will only practice it.

(Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Healing and the Scriptures, pp. 101-102)

Lloyd-Jones’ quote deals with a Christian way of dealing with stress. Most jobs are stressful, but I turn to the job of a professional football coach to illustrate his point. As a football fan I was always impressed with the demeanor of former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy. You could never tell the score of the game by looking at his body language or facial expressions. They could be up by 20 or down by 20 but he always stood like a rock on that sideline. After the Colts won the Super Bowl in 2006, Dungy published his memoir entitled Quiet Strength and revealed quite plainly that the reason for his solid demeanor was his solid faith in Jesus Christ.

That book influenced me. Having watched the Colts, as a fan, for many years, and having seen his unflappable posture, and having read his book and seen his reasons behind it, I made this a point of emphasis in my own life. I do not want to come across as a robot. I do not want to be without passion or emotion, not at all. But what I want is to be in the midst of a storm and find that faith in my Savior allows me to stand calm and firm.

A few years ago I stood, literally, in the midst of a tornado that ravaged by neighborhood. Later I stood and watched as my daughter broke her arm. Only shortly after that I watched as my wife had a miscarriage. And in the midst of all this I stood daily in a stressful workplace, and regularly at the bedsides of sick church members.

The question in all of those situations comes down to this: where is God in the midst of it? Where is Jesus in the midst of it? If he is there, then I can be there too, and be there with a quiet strength that is not my own. The situation must not determine our actions – it is our perspective that must determine them. The question, then, is What is your perspective? As my friend Timothy pointed out, it should be that of the Book of Revelation – that in the midst of the bowls of wrath, trumpets of judgment, and cries of woe, Jesus walks in the midst (Rev. 1:13), as he did with those Hebrew youths of old (Dan. 3:25).

All things become new, says MLJ, in the sense that we see them anew, we see them differently. A miscarriage with God is different from one without God. A tornado with God is different from a tornado without God. Strive to see things right, and thereby strive to be unflappable. And, I suppose, that means that this is not just a matter of demeanor. Rather it is a matter of the soul. It is possible, and my own demeanor attests to it, that you can look calm on the outside while inwardly you are quaking – like a duck, who looks still on the water, but underneath his feet are very busy. Instead we want to be in the position of the psalmist:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
 But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me (Ps. 131:1-2).

That By Which He Would Be Delivered

Ken Myers shared this quote in a recent talk (HERE). The author is referring to Marcion’s early dualistic Christological heresy, which stands in direct opposition to the truth:

Human nature, or the condition of having a material body and participating in the change and suffering of the creation, was that from which man had to be delivered, but not that by which he would be delivered.

-Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 76

I have noted elsewhere the notion of so-called religious asceticism which is actually worldly. You could call it dualism as well. This quote rings true to that idea. While Christians should yearn for the life of heaven, because it is life in the immediate presence of God, and while they should denounce the works of the sinful nature, we should never think that physical matter is innately bad. We can say with Paul, ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’, but we must not forget that it was God taking on a body and dying that brings life to this dead body.

In other words, when you start to look down on this early existence, the frailness of life, and the persistence of suffering, rather than thinking that these things are somehow evil or unfitting, remember that it was through these very same means that Jesus Christ redeemed you. And so thank God for them. Thank him for the fact that he has given you a body, and that his Son took on a body that your body will not stay in the grave.

We feel the need to be delivered from our flesh, it was a man in the flesh who delivered us. We feel a need to be saved from suffering, but it was suffering that saved us. Take comfort in the gospel.