Each Friday morning a small bunch of local ladies gather together to read, talk and eventually pray. It’s a small oasis in the midst of our otherwise busy lives and we join together to share bits of our journeys with each other.
It also means that I get to hang out with Rufus. Rufus is three years old and he has the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. When he looks at you it’s hard not to see the universe staring back.
A couple of weeks back he took a bad tumble and needed consoling. His mum Charlotte is currently expecting babies five and six so she has been around the block and really knows her stuff.
She asked Rufus what she could do to make it better and he wisely sobbed “nothing”. He just had to feel the pain and then let it go. The wonder of small children is that they can swing from being ecstatically happy to the depths of despair and back again within moments. It gives us adults whip lash but given Jesus adored small children and wished we could all be more like them - I believe he was trying to make a point.
He would rather us dripping in mud than not have us at all. We too would rather our kids make it home where they are safe rather than not at all. We would much prefer to ground our teenagers for bad choices than lose them to unknown streets.
Charlotte was explaining to us how each of her children are different - she has two that kind of run around in circles to run away from the pain. She also has two who go directly to her lap and they do not leave that special spot until they are returned to equilibrium again.
The other key thing that she does is to acknowledge their pain, she recognises it, takes it out and they examine it together. After that comes the mopping up of tears and finding a new helpful distraction.
Sy Rogers tells a great story about this concept. He was sexually abused when he was a very young boy by his mum’s boyfriend at the time. His Mum died and then his biological dad stepped in. With the best intentions in the world, he removed Sy from that home and sent him to live with family while he sorted out a more permanent home for them both. However, to Sy these people were not family - they were strangers.
Dad got his act together and collected Sy again and they continued on their lives. However, it left this small festering thought behind - “Dad abandoned me just when I needed him most and left me with strangers”. That was his truth and you can see how and why he came to that conclusion.
There is this utter misconception that when you turn your life over to God that everything will be butterflies, castles and rainbows. Quite the contrary- you often need to unlearn all the things you do to self sooth now for instance I love two or three glasses of bubbles on a Friday night.
However, all my new medication clearly states - ‘avoid alcohol’ so I’m going to do just that. Avoid it. It does not mean I can’t have a glass here or there; I’m still allowed to enjoy the things that give me pleasure, I just need to do it in bite sized bits.
Anyway, back to Sy and his dad - eventually years and years after becoming a Christian Sy realised that he still had ‘stuff’ he needed to sort out when it came to his dad. He too thought it all went ‘poof’ in a second and I do believe that God has the ability to do just that.
However, I think that the majority of us need to learn the hard way - by trial and error. I muck up on a daily basis but I know that all that matters to God is that I am trying NOT to.
Sy and his dad eventually had the conversation that they should have had decades earlier. He was able to explain how he felt abandoned and then the next bit is my point. His dad acknowledged the pain, apologised unreservedly and then asked for forgiveness.
There were dozens of excuses his dad could have given, many of them would have even been logical. None of that was the point - Sy needed his pain acknowledged because as he said “being molested at such a young age changed the direction of my life unequivocally”. Up to that point most of his fiends both Christian and secular had told him to get “over it” and move on. He didn’t need to get over this - he needed to go through it.
We all need to run to our creator when the world is too big and people are being nothing short of mean. It might be that your pain about something will never be acknowledged. In cases like those I believe God steps in to play the part of the missing character. If you need to be mad, bad, sad or resentful then lay it at Gods feet. If that person has passed then take it up directly with God. He loves a challenge - he made us which is proof of that fact.
He could have formed us as single cell organisms who do exactly what we are programmed - but he didn’t. He made us complex humans with huge brains and even bigger hearts.
I have moments where I genuinely want to ask God why he made it all so hard but I know exactly what his response would be. He would say that he didn’t make it hard at all but that between that pesky snake, the fruit and that bickering couple - He had His work cut out for Him!
He tried really hard to get us to step into alignment with him - we were not very obedient. He set aside a particular race of people, they too were very not very obedient and they wandered around a tiny desert for forty years. That desert can be crossed by foot in eleven days by the way. God literally had them walking around in circles for years while they unlearned and the relearned many of life’s big lessons.
Eventually God stepped in and sent a part of himself to do the job we simply could not. Jesus on the cross is God’s way of saying - I made it perfect, that went astray and now I’m going to fix it, once and for all. For all.