Turning the Page

Does God Hate Me?

One tough moment after another can bring you to the question, ‘Does God hate me’? But I want to know more, so I sit with those at the coal face and grow in my knowing.
No one knows coal like a coal miner. I could go to a scientist and get a scientific explanation about coal. A commodities dealer could tell me the dollar value of coal. Someone cooking over a coal fire would give me another limited view.
But for me, if I wanted to know about coal, I would go to a coal miner. One of those old-fashioned coal miners who has entered the bowels of the earth and dug away at the dark. Covered in the dust, there is noise, danger, and fear, but there is a camaraderie among fellow miners.
No one knows God like someone who has been at the dark coal face of life.
I suppose that is why I am drawn to people who chisel away at the coal, face the darkness of life, and find God there with them. It’s not the theologians or the pastors that pull me in. More so, those who, in all the struggle of daily life, have found something like a diamond amongst the coal.
I would rather sit and shed tears with them for hours because that is where I believe Jesus the Christ would be.
Does God hate me?
If someone was to ask you that question, how would you answer it?
Would you give an intellectual answer, quoting scriptures such as John 3:16?
For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
They are in a dark place and want to know heart truth, not head knowledge.
First of all, I think they would want to be known. To have their world explored and not sidelined. Maybe connection is the best word.
I would like to know how their understanding of what God is like was formed. Was it through various church experiences or parental influences? We’ve all got to start somewhere, so where was their starting point? What winds have blown across their path that has shaped their course?
Whenever I hear the words’ God hates me,’ I am filled with a kind of sadness for the person and the journey they have been on to get to this point of expression.
Quoting scripture upon scripture and getting into intellectual arguments rarely helps. This is because they need to hear words from the heart, not the head.
Our great problem is trafficking in unlived truth.We try to communicate what we’ve never experienced in our own life. Dwight L. Moody
Alongside ‘God hates me,’ other words are often spoken, such as ‘God is punishing me’ and ‘God doesn’t care.’
I have found that there are at least three ways that people express this belief.
Three expressions
God never answers my prayers. I pray for all sorts of things, particularly those that cause me a lot of pain. I pray for others, but those prayers don’t get answered either. I pray, but nothing happens. Everyone else seems to have prayers answered for a better life but not me. God must hate me. God withholds good things from me.
God didn’t stop that from happening. I’ve been hurt, and God could have stepped in and stopped it from happening. I have been injured in so many, many different ways. Where were the angels? Where was the ‘deliverance’ all those silly church songs sing about? I feel like God overlooks my struggle. God simply allows terrible things to happen to me. I wonder if God gets some perverse delight in watching me in pain. God must hate me.
I can’t reach God’s standard. I believe God has a performance standard, and I can never reach it. He hates my pathetic attempts. Everyone else is accepted, but I’m not. I try and fail.
They go on to say other things.
Look, I know you will tell me that God is love. I know you can quote all the scriptures about God being love. Then you will sing all those sappy songs about God being good.
But my reality is that I am in pain, and I want relief. I can see right through your intellectualism head knowledge, spiritual bypasses of avoidance, and coping strategies. It’s either God is really like Santa Claus, a Sugar Daddy, or a Disney’ wish upon a star’ God or not.
You see, at an early age, I was told that I am nothing, no one, a simple consequence of a couple of cells saying, ‘Howdy, doody.’
Then out I popped. I cried in pain, and I have cried ever since.
What sort of cosmic joke was my conception?
I think of the Christ of Jesus hanging on a cross and crying out ‘My God, why have you detached from me.’
The songs of lament and darkness from the coal miners of the Bible sing back to me.
I’m on a diet of tears—    tears for breakfast, tears for supper.All day long    people knock at my door,Pestering,    “Where is this God of yours?” Psalm 42: 3
Broken
I have a little sentence that I play around in my head that helps me make sense of things.
I am a broken man living in a broken world with broken people making broken choices.
But I am comforted by the coal face knowing of an unbroken God who is in the business of making all things new.
I still have the wafts of perfume from the Garden of Eden filtering through my existence. A beautiful sunrise, a bird that sings, a smile on a face, and then, at times, some droplets of joy touch my face washing the coal dust away.
I am caught between Eden and Heaven. We are a broken and fragile people living in a broken and fragile world, so of course, coal dust will clog our arteries.
I need others who know their brokenness but have somehow learned to dance—people who aren’t ‘happy-clappy’ or who live in theological fundamentalist squares and boxes.
I need people like Marva.
Marva Dawn dances
I once took a paper called Spiritual Formation. It was a week-long intensive, and the lecturer was a visiting theologian called Marva Dawn.
Into the week, she danced.
Let’s be clear; she didn’t physically dance. She wasn’t able to because of the many physical disabilities she had, and she actually danced into the fullness of God’s presence on April 18, 2021.
Here is an extract from a tribute.
Dawn’s joy came amid a lifetime of struggles with pain and illness. She faced battles with cancer, chronic pain, blindness in one eye, a kidney transplant, and problems with a foot that made walking difficult or impossible. Remembering Marva Dawn, a Saint of Modern Worship
I remember watching her hobble up to the lectern and clinging to it so she could teach. Words flowed from the coal face.
She authored more than 20 books in her lifetime, covering topics like Sabbath-keeping, the vocation of ministry, suffering well, and sexuality. Still, my favorite is Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity.
Read this
We do not understand how God accomplishes using even our brokennesses for the fulfillment of the Trinity’s purposes for the cosmos, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit does.
Just one little example will suggest much wider possibilities than we could ever imagine.
Before embarking on one trip for a speaking engagement, I was complaining to my husband because a problem with my feet had put me in a wheelchair.
I did not use this specific vocabulary, but basically groaned that my “dream” of ease while fulfilling my obligations for that particular assignment was “shattered.”
During the conference a somewhat cynical man came to me after one of my later lectures and said, “I wouldn’t believe a word you say—except that you are sitting in that chair!”
I’d had too small a dream.
I just wanted my life to be easier by being out of that wheelchair; I hadn’t asked God to fulfill His larger purposes of deepening someone’s faith precisely because I was in it. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity
Does God hate you?
No, God doesn’t hate. Quite the reverse there is so much love for you that it is vastly more than you could handle or even come into comprehension of.
God is with you at your coal face, in your ‘wheelchair’, and is in the business of making all things new.
Quotes to consider
Reality is what we notice on the surface – what we feel or see, what superficial perspectives we might gain, for example, from television’s evening news. Truth is much larger. It encompasses everything that genuinely is going on. The reality might be that our world looks totally messed up, that war and economic chaos seem to control the globe. But the truth is much deeper – that Jesus Christ is still (since His ascension) Lord of the cosmos, and the Holy Spirit is empowering many people to work for peacemaking and justice building as part of the Trinity’s purpose to bring the universe to its ultimate wholeness. The reality might be that you do not feel God, but the truth is that God is always present with you, perpetually forgiving you, and unceasingly caring for you with extravagant grace and abundant mercy. Not only that, but the very process of dealing with our lack of feelings and our resultant doubts about God is one of the ways by which our trust in the Trinity is deepened. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity
 One of my biggest problems in dealing with the breakdown of my body is that I keep looking in the wrong direction. I look to the past and the capabilities I once had, instead of looking to the future and what I will someday become in the presence and by the grace of God. Perhaps that is the strongest temptation for you too. Unfortunately, our culture reinforces that mistake by its refusal to talk about heaven, as if it were an old-fashioned and outdated notion. We also intensify the problem by craving present health (as limited as it can be) more than we desire God.A friend once said to me. “This is so hard getting old—there are so many things we can’t do any more. I guess the Lord wants to teach us something.” Indeed, our bodies will never be what they previously were, and we find that difficult because we miss our former activities. But God wants to teach us to hunger for Him, our greatest treasure. Instead of rejecting the notion of heaven, we genuinely ache in our deepest self to fill that concept with a larger landscape of the Joy of basking in God’s presence. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We’re Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity
 In contrast to our society’s mistaken emphasis on positive emotions in our relationship with God, the great Spanish mystic and poet John of the Cross (1542–1591), who is most famous for his reflections on the “dark night of the soul,” also wrote a piece called “Advice on Disregarding Spiritual Sweetness.” In this work St. John compliments the person who loves God without feeling any emotional sweetness, for that individual is focusing on truly loving God and not the feelings. To set our will on gratifying and soothing sensations, to concentrate on capturing them and basking in them, is simply to set our will on what God has created, instead of God Himself. Thereby, we turn those created feelings into the end instead of a means—and a non-necessary means at that. According to St. John, we are ignorant if we suppose that because we fail to have any sweetness or bliss God is failing us. Similarly, we are uninstructed if we presume that in having such delectable emotions we have God. But the height of ignorance, he claims, is if we would follow God only to seek the sweetness and consequently stopped our yearning for God to wallow in delightful feelings when we acquired them. Marva J. Dawn, Being Well When We are Ill: Wholeness And Hope In Spite Of Infirmity
Questions to answer
Have you ever felt that God hates you? What formed that idea?
How would you answer someone who felt that God hated them?
What coal face experiences have shaped your beliefs?
 
Further reading
 
Barry Pearman

Where Do You Find Delight?

Life can go on and on from day to day, but when we stop to notice little moments of delight, something profound can begin to grow—hope, joy, and thankfulness. Bible stories come alive.
For me, there is nothing quite like sinking my teeth into a perfectly ripe Black Doris plum and tasting the fullness of flavor as its juices flow across the taste buds.
As I write this post, it’s mid-January in New Zealand, and it’s summer. The Black Doris plum tree has come to its time of harvest, and I gorge myself on its delight daily. I have pruned this tree, given it fertilizer, and watched it flower.
I have longed for this harvest time whenever I have walked under its canopy. It’s the moment of tasting and seeing that Lord is good. God has provided a tree full of delight for me and others to enjoy.
This is a time of delight.
It is the little things that I need to train my brain to focus on.
The sip of coffee first thing in the morning.
The attention my grandchild gives to the story I am reading her.
The way a mother bird feeds a demanding chick hopping around behind her.
Where do you find delight?
It’s too easy to find dismay. Far too easy to find rotten fruit, bitter moments, anguish, hardship, and despair.
The brain is trained to have a magnetic pull to the dark.
Delight yourself
The songwriter of the Psalms sings these words.
Delight yourself in the Lord,    and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4
What does the word ‘delight’ mean in the Bible?
In Hebrew, the word delight is ‘anog’ and has the meaning of to be soft, delicate, and dainty. To be pliable and tender.
Something good for the brain happens when we stop and notice that which is soft, delicate, and dainty. There is an element to delight that is fleeting. You will miss it, and it will cut you unless you stop to take it in.
As I write this, my thoughts wander to the story in the Bible of Jesus feeding the five thousand.
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 
When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ 
Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ 
Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 
And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. Matthew 14:13-21
All those loaves and fishes being multiplied and given out.
Questions float through my thinking about the delight of this moment in the Bible.
I wonder what the fish tasted like?
What sort of fish were they?
Was the bread soft or chewy?
Was there anything unique about the flavors?
Did anyone slowly roll around a piece of the fish and morsel of bread in their mouth? Delighting their brain in the flavors?
Delighting in something takes a conscious noticing and slowing down.
Now my mind is wandering to the delight of connecting a few words together that might help you, the reader, find new ways of living. The gift I am giving is vulnerable. You could easily skip over the words and not take them. I will write anyway because I find delight in them.
I take delight when someone emails me and shares their life with me.
How do we grow delight?
Open yourself to notice. You probably don’t realize how many moments of delight are happening around you. Open yourself to noticing.
Be intentional in your quest. Have an intentionality in yourself to look for the delight. Make it an exercise every day to notice little delights.
Take delight. When you find something to delight in, go for it. Immerse yourself into that taste, smell, beauty, and feeling.
Soak in itSoak yourself thoroughly in the delight. Be with that delight for 30 seconds or more. Give the brain the message that this is something that is deeply meaningful. Take a deep inhalation of that rose’s delicate scent. Taste all the flavors of that piece of fruit deeply.
Give thanksBe thankful to God for those gifts of delight brought to your attention. God delights in us finding delight.
Ask questions.Why is that object of delight so meaningful to you? What’s the invitation God is offering you in this delight?
RepeatContinue to practice this enjoyment of delight every day. Notice the little things, take them, and give thanks.
Journal the delightWrite about the delights you have found in your day or week. Writing helps to strengthen this discovery.
Perhaps as you discover the world of delight around you, you will also find the way God gives you the desires of your heart.
Quotes to consider
The key to growing any psychological resource, including compassion, is to have repeated experiences of it that get turned into lasting changes in neural structure or function. Rick Hanson
The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. [This] shades “implicit memory” – your underlying expectations, beliefs, action strategies, and mood – in an increasingly negative direction. Rick Hanson
Most of the things we need to be fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest. Mark Buchanan
In the inner stillness where meditation leads, the Spirit secretly anoints the soul and heals our deepest wounds. John of the Cross
Questions to answer
What stories in the Bible offer us a moment where people would have experienced delight?
Where do you find moments of delight?
How can you cultivate moments during everyday to rest your mind in delight?
 
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I’ll sit with you in the dark

Ever found yourself in a dark place? A simple state of sadness can throw you in such a place. At least l experience that often.
I used to be depressed, severely depressed, the kind of state that makes it hard for facial muscles to react to other people’s joyful interaction. Know the feeling?
Another indicator I find that confirms my sadness is when I walk through the yard after dark with the lights out: the dark strikes you even darker as it merges with the sadness inside, despite a wonderfully star-lit sky.
I often feel peace looking up at the stars. The sight of them makes me feel as if I’m in the company of close friends and closer to where I belong.
In my understanding, sadness happens as a reaction in our social living. A tone of voice can often be the simple trigger for sadness in the sensitive heart. Or maybe a broken relationship, or the absence of a loved one, can easily be the causes for sadness that will throw you in a dark place.
I’ve learnt not to ignore my sadness but it wasn’t always like this. Over time I learnt to acknowledge my inner state and act on it with some self-care actions. Washing my hair often helps. Or trimming my nails. These are very simple daily actions that can have an impact on how I feel. Do you have your own self-care actions sorted out for the darker days?
I often think of the time I find myself in the dark as a time of fasting. Not that I actually fast the sadness away but my state of sadness is equivalent to fasting.
In a way it makes sense as sadness prevents you from engaging in day to day joyful fuzziness. It’s a kind of emotional fasting.
 
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You’re not a Problem to be Fixed

Sometimes you can feel like you are a problem to be fixed, but you're not that. You may have problems, but not a problem. 
You're not a problem to be fixed. Neither are you a personality to be probed. You're not a diagnosis, a number, or a category.
You may feel like you are being analyzed so that you fit in a box, but No, you're not a tick in a box.
You are human.
They may have a file on you that is lifetime long, yet you're not that file.
You are not a disorder, an addiction, an anxiety or a depression.
You're not a mood or a melancholy.
You're not a problem to be fixed.
But it felt like I was another problem to be fixed and they had the solutions. 'Just do this and that, and life will get back on track.'
'Next patient, please.'
Have you ever felt that? That feeling that you are simply another problem to be solved. That you are interrupting somebodies journey, and they want to fix you as soon as possible so they can get on with life.
It's called dehumanisation.
That's a very big fancy word that means to deprive a person of human qualities. You are no longer a human. You are more of a problem to be solved, a number, a disorder.
I once wrote an essay titled 'Dehumanization and Sexual Abuse.' Not an easy read, but one that takes the reader to the story that Jesus told of The Dehumaised Man or what many call The Story of the Good Samaritan. 
It's the man in the ditch, dying from the abuse of robbers. They saw him for what he had, not for who he was.
 
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Before you Start the Year, you Need to Stop

 
We can easily go from one year to the next, but before you start the year, you need to stop the year. Stop it well.
As I write this, it’s the middle of the most interesting week of the year. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year.
Here in New Zealand, it’s summertime,e and for most people, it means the beginning of the summer holiday period. Most businesses close, and people often head to the beach for a swim. It’s a ‘kicking back’ time of year when all you want to do is to eat the leftovers from Christmas day, find a good book to drift off into, and swim, sleep, and relax.
Stop before you start.
In this week, I like to stop before I start. I like to stop the pressure of the normal, where it’s going from one thing to the next before I start the next year.
For me, this week is where I make sure to have time for personal reflection. I pause before I hit the pace again of another year.
It’s a time to note the changes, feel the losses, value the gains, and lean into the learnings.
This stopping before you start could be done any time of the year, but it requires some intentionality to hit the pause button. To slow down the machine of your life and retreat to an internal place of rest.
It’s allowing yourself to discover yourself and letting it catch up to you. You’ve had so many things happen to you that they are like little children tagging on behind, crying out for attention. They want to be seen, known and acknowledged. If you don’t, their wisdom for the next stage may well be lost.
So please stop before you start.
 
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And Joseph had a Dream

Confusion can tear our lives apart, but perhaps a dream can clarify. For Joseph, a dream tipped the balance to trust a Christmas mystery.
Have you ever felt like your brain is caught in a tug of war? You are pulled and torn in different directions. Your values, rules, expectations, and beliefs pull you to behave in a certain way, but you have a pull dragging you to another point.
Contradictions to the normal pull at you to step out of your comfort zone. To walk on water, climb a mountain to make a sacrifice, marry a prostitute and eat the forbidden food laid out before you.
The mind in turmoil needs a voice of security to cut through the tension of conflict.
Do you want to stay safe, or do you want adventure?
I feel for Joseph
There is a character in the Christmas story that I think goes under applauded. All the focus is on the baby and mother.
We read the story every year at Christmas, full of wonder and light. We sing joyful carols and celebrate a birth, but there are backstory questions that probably never get fully answered and tied off as neat as a bow on a Christmas gift.
 
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What Do You Fear the Most?

Fear can be like a shadow creeping up and over you, but what do you fear the most? Understanding what you fear the most can bring assurance.
It was a simple wire bridge on a confidence course. Not very high, the three-wire bridge was a challenge for some and not for others. When I was a pastor to a group of people with serious mental illnesses, we would go away for weekends to a campsite with a confidence course.
People would climb to the top of the 2-meter-high platform. Then they would look down the wires to the other side about 15 meters away.
Taking the first step onto the single wire was hard. Afterward, you would stretch your hands to the wire on the left and the right and then creep across.
The trick was to keep an eye on where you were going and not necessarily where your feet were landing.
Others would be speaking encouragements, and some would hold the wire still for you, but this was the walker facing the fear of what?
Falling?
Failure?
Injury?
Humiliation?
It was the brain saying that this was dangerous. That it was different from normal walking.
It was the brain doing what it was supposed to do. Protect you.
But what if you did this three-wire bridge every day? That it was part of your daily commute?
You would eventually get very confident because the brain had been trained to accept living outside the norm.
When the worst thing you could imagine happens, and you survive and possibly even thrive, a new understanding of security grows in you.
If you fear drowning, then learning to swim helps calms you.
Perhaps it’s cancer, but as you go through the dark valley, you come to new places to experience God’s closeness.
Maybe you have feared a relationship breakdown, but going through it, you learn new trust and experience God meeting you in new ways.
You realize how much fear has controlled your life
You probably don’t know what you fear the most. It’s buried away in subconscious land and will only surface when your lifeboat begins to rock, and water comes in over the side.
 
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Three Ways God Answers Prayer

We want God to answer our prayer our way, but there is a larger story going on, so we wait to see the way God answers prayer.
Most weekends, when my children were young, I made buns for lunch. First, I would make the bread dough in a breadmaker, then take the dough out, cut the dough into the number of buns needed and then stretch out the dough before twisting it into a bun.
Then I would let them rise before putting them into the oven.
Fresh hot buns for lunch. Yum.
The stretching and folding of the dough add strength to the bread. In addition, all those gluten networks are helped to develop.
Within my prayer life, I sometimes wonder if God is stretching and folding me. It is developing me into someone with deeper glutenous faith networks that give me strength and texture.
I keep praying, but my prayers seem to go unanswered because they don’t get answered in the way I want.
Is God listening? I keep praying, but nothing seems to change.
It’s so frustrating. You seriously wonder if God is there, does God care, and does prayer make a difference.
Surely if God loved me, then God would change the situation?
I have concluded that God does answer prayer, but maybe the answer is not what we expect.
Maybe God’s hands are tied, as such, because of the free will God has given humanity to choose whether to follow God or not. There is a stubbornness in all of us that flexes its muscles against God.
 
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A Diet of Sighs and Groans

Sighs and groans can come with such ease, but inhaling is also necessary. So we take note of our diet of breath. 
‘That was a deep sigh,’ he said to me.
I hadn’t noticed it, but he was right. I had let out a long deep sigh into the safety of our conversation. It was a release of something within me that needed to be exhaled: tiredness and exhaustion.
Bound-up tension had relaxed, and breath had escaped and flowed like water.
Somewhere, deep in my soul, the groan escaped as a sigh. Long and deep.
The body has a way of expressing the soul that we have limited to little control over. Noticing the involuntary communications of another can help us with connection to their deepest places.
Can I sigh and find an inhalation of hope? Is there something that I can take in to help me with the next few moments?
There is exhaustion. Physical tiredness from the work of the day.
But there is soul exhaustion from the long journey of struggling in a broken world. We breathe out and breathe in.
 
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The Call to Endure

You wake up and see a new day, but you didn’t want to wake up. So it’s a call to endure and go deep with God.
They want the pain to end. The struggle of the journey has become too much.
That’s the underlying theme of many of the emails I receive from people every week. They have taken the vulnerable step of reaching out to a stranger who wrote about someone like themselves.
They will use various phrases to describe their situation and their prayers.
Some of them relate to wishing to die in their sleep. That they would not wake up. They don’t want to take their own life. Instead, they wish for their departure to seem quite natural.
Have you ever been in this dark and sad place?
It’s the prayer of suffering.
It’s heart knowing only pain.
You sleep, but you wake to light. The new day shines through the window. Light flows around the misery one is in, and you ask why?
This is where we find our friend and fellow human struggler, Job—the one who knows endurance.
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