Turning the Page

To Keep No Record of Wrongs

We pick them up. Little hurts, big hurts. But how do we learn not to keep a record of wrongs that clogs the arteries of our life?
I visited a friend the other day, and they invited me into their home.
As we wandered from room to room, everything was immaculate. Paintings hung perfectly, furniture was set at the right angle, flowers were on the table, and everything was clean and supposedly in their control.
But as we walked down the hallway, a door was shut. It was locked. I tried to open it but to no avail. Finally, my friend said I wouldn’t want to go in there as it didn’t contain anything of interest. But after some gentle words and assurances, they took the key from their pocket and unlocked the door.
I stepped in and saw a single wooden chair in the center of the room. The walls were covered in post-it notes. I walked around the room and read some of the notes. All the hurts and pains of their life were written—list upon list.
Many were written in child-like writing. Some of them had math on them, but that was wrong in the summation.
2 x 3 = 10
4+9 = 49
Mummy is angry; therefore, I am bad
Daddy doesn’t talk to me; therefore, I am not lovable
The walls were full of notes.
All the wrongs had a list. What they had done and the shame shadow of the event.
Some had been written over and over again—the same note but with a bolder pen.
The notes had been categorized into themes and conclusions. Some colored notes meant a different theme, while others meant another.
They had brought these notes to whatever home they lived in.
I looked at the wooden chair and saw that it was well-used. Beside it sat a small table with fresh new post-it notes and a pen ready for new expression and confession.
I asked my friend how long they spend in this room.
It was most of every day. They sat in here and memorized every post-it note. Line upon line, they had observed and recorded, and rehearsed.
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Why Was I Even Born?

When you’ve hit the brick wall, the question may arise. Why was I even born? But over time, new depth may come through. A new birth may evolve.
I want you to imagine that you have a bungee cord tied around your waist. You are flying through the air, and that bungee chord is loose and free. You are alive, fully alive. It is scary but good. Life couldn’t be much better than this.
Then all of a sudden, the bungee chord tightens. You have reached the limit of its extension, and it pulls you back. But this time, the bungee cord pulls you back completely the same length in the opposite direction. There is no gravity to slow you down. You are heading directly for a brick wall.
You smash into it with the same force you had when flying in all happiness.
You’re broken, destroyed, and you ask the same question millions of people have asked before you even existed.
Why was I even born? 
It’s the extremes that hurt the most. From the highs of happiness to the lows of misery.
You sit crumbled below the wall of a dead-end street and wonder what this life is all about.
Why was I even born?
What’s the purpose of all this?
Where’s the logic, the reason, the knowing?
Worst still are the friends and family who supposedly come to your aid and ask further ‘Why’ questions. You don’t know why, fully. You can’t even offer any explanations though they demand you do.
So they draw their own conclusions and begin to shoot the dying body.
Why do we shoot our wounded?
Because we don’t like their story. It makes us uncomfortable, and life is meant to have order, peace, and harmony. Not ditch-dwelling dehumanization like a man beaten up and left to die on the side of the road.
 
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I curse the day I was born

We can get angry to the point where we want to curse the day we were born, but being held in our anger allows us to go through and not around the pain.
It was about time they got angry.
As the words vomited at me, through me, and around me, I thanked God. Finally, they were letting some of their real self be seen. No more holding back emotions for appearance’s sake. Now it was raw, unfettered, and verbally violent.
It wasn’t just the irritation of the current painful situation. It was the culmination of stuffing down the resentments of a lifetime. It was anger at me, anger at God, and anger at everyone in between.
And I encouraged the outflow. They needed to express themselves and get it out.
Afterward, they would be tired, perhaps ashamed they had been so angry, but they needed to know that it was safe and that even God, full of love, mercy, and grace, can be angry like this yet not lose the mark of love.
Sometimes I am angry like this. I want to throw rocks, punch the wall, and smash things. It’s ok.
Life doesn’t run the way I think it should, so I lose it inside. I rage with a smile on the outside but boiling on the inside. Not good, not healthy when I religiously repress.
What do you do with the pain of being human?
What do you do with emotional pain that entombs you in a dark hole?
 
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Living in the shadow

When you are living in the shadow, you may feel unseen, but that place of the hidden may be the best place to be, so let’s make the most of it.
One of my favorite plants lives in the shadows. It can live in full sunlight but does best and shows off its brilliant flowers when it’s under the darkness of larger plants.
It’s the Clivia, the Queen of the Shadows.
In the spring, when I’m walking past some tall shady trees, I often see the Clivia with its dark green leaves and bold, bright red flowers shouting out to me that it has its place and role in the garden ecosystem. Little bugs will be living in the soil under it, turning over the decay and building soil life for the Clivia and other plant life.
It’s a system, a community, and a home for everyone to enjoy.
Living in a shadow
Sometimes I feel like I live in a shadow.
Do you feel like that too?
You feel undervalued, overlooked, discarded, and second-class. Everyone else is getting the attention, and I have little value and purpose. So where is my place in the sun?
My Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ.
I’m an introvert, which may seem strange to you, seeing as though I have a blog, Youtube channel, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. So it would appear that I am pretty extroverted, but it’s more about where I get my energy.
I prefer alone time rather than being with others. So give me solitude to refill my cup rather than a busy mall or party.
But I have a message gained through solitude: I simply must get out into the world. The brilliant colors of the Clivia shine out from the dark contrast of the shade that speaks to the world. Alone time can shout life into the darkness of other lives.
 
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Every Saint Has a Past Every Sinner Has a Future

Every Saint Has a Past. Every Sinner Has a Future. So what choices of forgiven acceptance are you making in the moment of the now?
The source of the phrase ‘Every Saint Has a Past Every Sinner Has a Future’ comes from Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance.
It is spoken by Lord Illingworth, a self-serving, pleasure-seeking, and dishonorable man. In the context of the play, Illingworth thinks that saints are fools for giving up self-centered lives of pleasure, while sinners still have much more pleasure to come. Source
So let’s be ‘sinners’ and do whatever we like, and to hell with the consequences. 
But there is another way of looking at this phrase. 
It’s about owning our past and choosing in the moment of the now to define our future.
I have a little coffee coaster on my desk. It’s solid glass, and underneath, you can place a picture.
Through the glass, I see the words …
My past does not define me. It is the decisions and choices I make today
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To be Fed by a Diet of Words

Like a steady stream, a diet of words can shape us in ways unintended, but what if we had someone feed us good words? Perhaps then the heart would find a new course to flow from.
As she climbed a couple of lectern steps to read the passage, I wondered if she would be able to read the words. She was short in stature but powerful in voice. She seemingly hid behind the eagle lectern.
For this Sunday, it wasn’t a text from the Bible that she spoke but some poetry. (You can read it in the quotes section below)
I listened, watched, and feasted. I opened my heart, and it was fed.
As she spoke, she engaged herself with the words. At times she would lean around and seemingly look directly at me as she said the final words of a sentence.
She finished reading and slowly returned to her seat right behind me.
We have a section in our service where we can greet each other and pass the peace. We turn to our neighbors and wish each other peace. I turned around, clasped this dear lady’s hands, and thanked her for how she said the words.
Words had fed me.
Anyone could have read those words, but she had chosen to serve them with gentleness and purpose. This was not a robotic, A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) rendition of a text. No, this was more an ‘I’m going to feed you some words to nourish your tired heart.’
It’s not only what you say; it’s how you say it. Words can sing together and shake the world.
 
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The Tangible and Tactile way to better Mental Health

Are you out of balance? Perhaps what you need for your mental health are more activities that are tangible and tactile.
In the 1980s, my father and I spent many months building new fences on the farm.
We would clear the old post and wire fence away and make a new fence. First, posts would be driven into the soil, wires run out, stretched tight, and nailed to posts. Then, wooden battens would be fixed to the wires, and we would be done.
But not quite.
Then we would stand by the fence, look at it with wires so tight you could play a tune on it, and admire our work.
Something good here needed to be noted and nourished into our souls. We had created, and it felt good to look at our handiwork.
We improved at the craft every time we built a new fence line.
But the absolute joy came when you would come to that fenceline years later, and it would still be there. Proud and true, you could say with some pride, ‘I built that.’ It was tangible and tactile, not intangible and abstract.
It’s forty-plus years since I built that fence. I don’t know if it’s still there or not. I have moved on, and the salt-borne winds have probably eaten away at the shiny steel to the point it will have needed replacing.
But I often think about that fence because here was an achievement that Father and son accomplished together. I remember pausing for a moment to let it sink into our brains and nourish the good.
 
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God, I need a Miracle

God, I need a miracle, but perhaps I need something more, and that is what God offers me and you. Something of depth and hope.
There are times in life when there is a cry from the heart for a miracle. It’s that diagnosis, the loss of a job, a relationship breakdown, a financial loss. Search your heart, and you will know the times when you have cried out, ‘God, I need a miracle.’
What’s a miracle?
One definition describes a miracle as ‘an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs—eg the healing miracles described in the Gospels.
The word miracle comes from words such as mīror (“to wonder at”), from mīrus (“wonderful”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)meyh₂- (“to smile, to be astonished”).
A miracle should cause you to be astonished, smile and wonder. It should cause you to think about something beyond yourself.
Take note that in these definitions, there is no sense of a time frame. We add the time frame, which is usually in the impatient NOW!
We, like impatient demanding toddlers, want it all, and we want it now.
But we look at the stories of Jesus and see the immediacy of people being healed, bread and fishes being multiplied, people being raised from the dead, etc.
We see the outcome, the cessation of struggle, and we want it now, now, now. Yet in God’s poetic economy of time, ‘a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.’ 2 Peter 3:8
Still, we pray and beg and plead for miracles. We sing, fast, give, and stand on our heads. We are much like those prophets of Baal dancing around the sacrifice, thinking that if they dance more, their God will do the miracle. 1 Kings 18:26-29
Perhaps that version of God has to die or at least be told to leave the building.
Something sad within me gets touched when I sense people are waiting for the miracle to happen. They use language that speaks to some sort of magic God. They are waiting for God’s magic wand to be swept over their problem so that with an ‘Abracadabra,’ the problem disappears.
I want a miracle, but actually, I want to know God more than the relief of earthly struggle, and that is where the tension is. Better life or deeper knowing.
The miracle may not happen according to my terms of reference. The cancer may not go away, the marriage may continue to crumble, and a hard heart refuses to soften to grace.
 
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Can you Take in the Good and Let it Nourish?

So many good things go unnoticed, but when we learn to take in the good and let it nourish, then our whole direction of a life can change. 
My neighbors have some small children.
Yesterday, while walking in the garden, one of the little boys ran up to me to say hello. I then led him over to where some grass seed was beginning to come through the soil. We both got down on the ground and looked at the little seedling poking its way into the world. We were taking in the good.
Then we went over to the roses, and there were multiple rose buds about to burst their way into the world. We were taking in the good and letting it nourish. Finally, we saw a rose that had come out displaying its beauty. I picked it, and we smelt it—no perfume, which was a letdown.
I suggested he give it to his mother so she could take in the good and let it nourish.
I went into the orchard and saw a plum tree ablaze with flowers, then a Kereru (New Zealand Native wood pigeon) landed in the tree. So I stopped and took in the good and let it nourish. That was until I found out it was eating the flowers, which meant I wouldn’t have plums in a few months’ time. So today I am putting some net over the trees.
 
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Two Things Needed after a Mental Health Breakdown

It’s a breakdown, a mental health breakdown, and it’s happened again, but there is a way to recover, and it’s something you can achieve.
The end result was exhaustion. They were empty of life and totally drained. So it was no wonder they were depressed and simply wanted to die.
It’s a story I hear all the time.
The body can only take so much. After that, it begins to break down.
Nervous Breakdown
You don’t hear this term so much these days, but it was pretty common to be told about someone having a ‘Nervous breakdown.’ For me, it meant someone not being able to cope. To crash into a wall of complete mental exhaustion. Unable to do much at all.
“Nervous breakdown” isn’t a medical diagnosis. But, it’s a type of mental or emotional health crisis. You may feel an overwhelming amount of stress, anxiety, or depression. In turn, you’re not able to function in daily life. Cleveland Clinic
These days we might use the term Burnout to describe what has happened.
But it’s that zone of existence where you have nothing left to go on.
It’s the heap of metal on the side of the road, commonly called a car, but it has broken down. It’s run out of fuel, blown a radiator hose and all the tires are flat.
It has no use to anyone other than being an obstacle to avoid. You’re that old heap of a car pulled over to the side of the road and have come to the end of your ride. You’re depressed to the point of wanting to die.
 
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