The loneliness of sleepless nights

Sleepless nights – they’re coming back and I’m frightened. I hate them. My mind churns round and round with unresolved stuff. Last year for several months I woke earlier and earlier until I got no more sleep from about 2.00am. Now, once again, I’ve become increasingly restless: last night I woke at 1.51 (digital clocks!). And the problem? I feel so alone; so dreadfully alone.
What can I do?
Today I picked up Henri Nouwen’s book, ‘Beloved’. He says that there is a fact – we are alone. We can respond either by feeling lonely or by embracing the solitude.
Jesus embraced solitude. And He was equipped to do so because His Father had told Him – and He had heard – that He was the beloved.
I know the theory, and could quote with my lips how Scripture tells us (me) over and over again that we are beloved by God. But how can I feel it in my heart? HOW? There is no switch to switch so that I feel as loved as God says I am.
This morning I’ve looked more carefully at Jesus. I’ve been intrigued that He wasn’t told only once that He was loved by His Father. We know about His baptism at the start of His ministry. But it happened twice more: I wonder why? Could it be that Jesus needed to hear again the voice from the cloud? At the transfiguration (He’d been talking about painful stuff), and yet again when His heart was ‘deeply troubled…’ (to use Jesus’ own words – oh, I can relate to John 12:27!).
Do I hanker after a voice from heaven telling me that I am His beloved? Do I imagine that that would make it easier to hear Him?
Nouwen suggests that we spend too much time trying to do things to persuade ourselves that we are loveable. He reckons that we thereby miss the solitude.
By contrast Jesus, by resisting His temptation, resisted making Himself look clever (turning stones into bread), or dramatic (having angels catch Him if He jumped off a tower), or as if He possessed all the land. Instead, He stayed quietly knowing Who He was: the beloved.
Now here’s the rub for me.
Given that I haven’t (yet) heard God’s voice in my sleepless nights, could I instead ponder how Jesus used to get up at night to pray; to commune with the One Who calls Him His beloved? We’re not told that He felt lonely. I guess that He went deliberately, to embrace the solitude. Hence He could say “I am in the Father and He is in Me.” He knew – because of His silent times between Father and Son.
SO... could I follow Him – if I can’t actually do it myself, then follow Him in my mind by reflecting on His example?
Well I won’t make it sound easy. After all, Jesus had to climb a mountain for His night-prayers. I reckon I know that feeling…

Being falsely accused (2)

I’d always thought that, if I got life right, I wouldn’t be mocked. I’d always imagined that, if others were laughing at me, I must have set myself up for it. Asked for it.
Always I’ve believd that, if only I didn’t make such big mistakes, I wouldn’t be accused of stuff that wasn’t true. Not to my face or (more scary) behind my back.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday, Good Friday, the penny dropped. For the first time in my life, I realised that none of the above is true. Because Jesus, Who was perfect, got mocked, derided, laughed at, even spat upon – all for stuff He hadn’t done.
So: being mocked is not a reflection on me. It’s a reflection on those who do the mocking.
That is very comforting.

Being falsely accused (Good Friday)

Everything was up in the air and thoughts swirling threateningly already – thoughts about the way in which some people are trumping up lies and twists and ugh, HORRIBLE compromises to integrity… But I suddenly found a grain of hope (it’s ironic, this) when, at the Good Friday procession, I heard that Jesus had had to endure all of this sort of thing. Indeed, never have I heard what happened to Jesus so clearly as I heard it today, all because of how torn my own heart is as I listen to the story of His trial. He had to stand there, knowing He was innocent, and watch His accusers try to find people to trump up lies in order to bear false witness against Him. How positively awful. I say that with conviction because I’m experiencing for myself how I feel with others fabricating stories in order to shore up ghastly accusations. It’s a terrible feeling. It leaves me with a bitter, bitter taste; and how on earth are we supposed to love people who behave in such an underhand way? It all feels impossible… yet here, in the Gospel, we are told that Jesus did love them. “Forgive them,” He said, “because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
I heard earlier today somebody describe forgiveness as ‘understanding’. “I prefer to use the word ‘understand’,” she said, “because forgiveness seems too big.” Yes, I would echo that wholeheartedly.
So if I am to love people who are lying against me, can I find some understanding of them? I sighed at the computer at the very idea. It’s all so daunting. I suppose (suppose) that people who are bent on bringing false accusations against a fellow human must feel desperately insecure. They must feel horrible inside themselves, so what we see and describe as ‘lies’ and ‘twists to the facts’ – they are signs of a pressing need to be right. Their own needs have rushed to the fore until they cause a blindness; they can no longer see what they are doing, nor imagine that they are damaging the life of another. If I try really hard, I can glimpse, just glimpse, a cause for compassion.
Did Jesus struggle to find His compassion? We are not told. I find Scripture as fascinating for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. We know that He was silent in the face of His accusers. Why? Could His silence have been despair? Had he lost hope, I wonder, and was He resigned to the inevitable consequence? He had been caught in a pincer grip, and the Jews were so hell-bent on having Him killed – did He sense that there was no point in fighting? Or was He spurred on by something more positive; what we refer to as our “calling”? Did He know that He had come to die, and this was the moment, and therefore could His outer silence have been because of His inner work of prayer: communing with His Father?
If so, what appalling, utter bitterness when even His Father withdrew. In His time of greatest need, the One to Whom He was closest – His greatest hope, His beginning and His destination; His Alpha and His Omega – HE withdrew. I can scarce take it in.
I can only imagine the incomparable dismay of abandonment in His voice when He cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
I’m no theologian; this may be heresy. I merely share how it hits me. I sit weeping before my computer at the thought… it is all too real, since I came to this day with the knowledge that I’m being accused falsely, and I feel like an endless battle. Endless loss.
And yet Jesus could conclude: “It is finished.”
Amazing.
As the person closest to Jesus declared: “Surely He was the Son of God.”

Security - founded on WHAT?

Security does not mean “no problem”… and it’s taken me over fifty years to see that.

As a child I absolutely loved a particular song: one that spoke of security for me and naïve glee for others who chose a path that led, inevitably, to insecurity. I took great delight in exaggerating the actions. When “the rain came down” and our teacher invited us three- and four-year-olds to “reach your hands up to the sky!” I took her literally. I would stand on my chair twinkling my little fingers higher than anyone else’s. When “the floods came up” and everyone reached towards the floor, I pushed my hands flat on the carpet. I derived utter glee singing that the foolish man’s house “fell flat” (resounding CLAP). No wonder (I reasoned) if he had built his house on sand! He got what he deserved.

Unlike him, I was building my house on the rock; my house would stay firm. Or so I thought.

Moreover, when we sang that “the house on the rock stood firm,” I pictured the sun always shining on his house on the rock; I imagined it standing high above the flood waters. Never once did I think that the wise man had a moment’s insecurity.

Only now do I see that I missed the vital point of Jesus’ parable. The wise man endured terrible storms. The rain lashed down, and the floods came up for him, too. The wind whooshed and the man could not have been anything BUT dismayed.

I notice all this now – now that I see that I had inserted my own wishful thinking there. Jesus gave no such promise. He was the realistic One Who told us that the wind blew wildly and the floods came up for both builders.

We do not feel secure because nothing bad is happening. Security comes from knowing that the rock on which we’re standing will remain firm. The key is in finding the rock.

So where, exactly, is this rock on which I can stand? Today’s problem – the place where the rain is drenching me and I feel miserable – is in coping with dismay over some people who do not want the truth to be told in a situation. Where’s the rock for that? I’ve sweated all night, wondering…

This morning I found it. I suddenly realised that Jesus knew that people couldn’t bear the truth. He accepted it; anticipated it, even. That’s why He spoke in parables. That’s why He was silent in the presence of people who couldn’t hear the truth.

T S Eliot said, “Truth is not the same as fact.” Indeed.

when overwhelmed...

Out for a walk yesterday alongside a bubbling stream in south Wales, I’m sure I ought to have been bursting with freedom and happiness. Instead, my thoughts were catapulted into one of The Big Questions of Life.

How do I live with a new diagnosis of cancer, AND keep enduring severe abdominal pain that’s gone on for years, AND cope with the many other supposedly 'little' things that can accumulate and trip one up?

So, how do I live with it?

The path towards spectacular waterfalls disintegrated into squelchy brown bog – not good for my Sunday-best shoes (silly me). Peter, one of three friends with me, overtook me. He in his walking boots (envy, envy) walked confidently. And suddenly I saw that he was doing the ‘work’ of finding the secure rocks amid the damp mud.

I started to plant my own my feet exactly where Peter had placed his and I did better. Much, much better.  The key was to keep very close.

As I concentrated on my task, a line from a well-known carol came to mind. ‘In his master’s steps he trod…’ That’s when the penny dropped.

When I placed my feet where Peter had gone ahead, it worked. I could walk. And suddenly I realised that God might enable me to walk my pathway through whatever ‘pain’ I may face if I follow God’s footsteps. I trust that it will work spiritually as effectively as following Peter beside the stream.

I do actually seek to follow God like this. But yesterday the question became:  “Er - HOW?! How do I see God’s footsteps? And how do I plant my feet in His print?” It’s not as easy in spiritual practice as putting my shoes where Peter’s boots had been.

I can’t answer the “how”s. What I know is that yesterday worked only when I kept very close. When I was right behind Peter I could put my shoe in the exact place where his boot had been. From even a couple of paces away I couldn’t put each foot where his had been.

That’s the only key I have with my spiritual walk. Keep close. Don’t worry about the specifics: just keep close enough.

So today I fling the challenge out to anyone who embraces adventure. When we don’t know how to follow God, or even pray (I can’t at the moment), how about aiming solely to draw closer? We just might find ourselves enabled to follow His footsteps ‘and in them plant our own’ – whatever that means. We could discover that God equipping us has something to do with the fact that He understands the difference between Him having boots while we have only shoes …