Suffocated by our Emotions

We are sat in the Soul Survivor Big Top listening to a story of a teenage boy who had previously self-harmed 64 times before the appeal from the stage touched his heart, compelling him to come to the front for prayer. Mike Pilavachi prayed over the assembled people, a simple prayer of acceptance: accepting who we are in the eyes of God. We live in a world where self-image is very important. The very real emotional and physical responses we make of ourselves when we view our image in the mirror or against the standards of the world, determine how we think and feel about our appearance while pondering what others are thinking of us.

The judgement we make of ourselves is often through the distorted view we have of ourselves through the pressure placed on us by the media, our perceptions of self and the judgements we think our peers make of us. We live in a world that needs new ideas and fresh inspiration in its search of some hidden Nirvana that we long to get to. We are always dreaming and always hoping for a better life or more favourable circumstances but we live in a broken world. It is not easy to find an inner peace that can transcend all that life can throw at you. Perhaps this is why young people perceive others to have a better life than they do, particularly when casting their eyes about them and making comparisons.

When dealing with the pressure of what we think we are, rather than what God thinks of us, we find ourselves wanting something more than we have. Self-harming, like the boy who came forward for prayer, is one way in which some young people deal with their inner thoughts. Emotions are translated into physical actions aimed at relieving the pressure exerted on our lives by the stress and strain we feel within our own bodies. The anxiety, depression or loneliness that triggers this type of behaviour becomes a barometer to the pressure of what is going on in our everyday experiences.

We see our blood pumping in our veins and feel our hearts pounding in our chest, metaphorically similar to the hydraulic fluid that activates a JCB; operating a vice like grip on our emotions. Our overactive minds act like the compressor, pressurising our emotions and pumping our heart full of blood, suffocating the oxygen that we are breathing in; suffocating us of life. With our ears ring with each heartbeat and our breathing becoming shallower, we begin to panic as our fear builds and we want out.

As we dig the dirt of our lives, it is as though our emotions pumping our hearts like the hydraulic fluid of a JCB. The pressure builds until it is ready to force the bucket open and shovel the dirt of our lives into an even higher pile than it was before. As we shovel our own dirt, or have it done for us by our peers, more often through social media these days, we add daily to our trauma. The metaphorical 'slag heap' of negative emotion, a by-product of mining the fruit of our lives, stand as stinking heaps, festering in the corners of our subconscious. We often have no outlet for the emotional heartache we feel when our well intentioned plans collapse, trudging on in quiet dignity while what we hold dear seems to be falling appart about our eyes.

For young people, grappling with the fall-out of adolescence and the turmoil of their home lives, they finish their schooling in the season of examination results. Success or failure is determined by the magic ‘C’ qualification denoting in polite society, that our children can pass into adult occupations and further study. We spend 11 years of formal schooling in the UK to arrive at this time in our lives, which has long term consequences for our employment if we get it wrong.

Expectations are high with the price of failure, seemingly difficult to rectify, as our time has been and gone. We reflect on how we might have missed our opportunity to grasp our future; the ‘what could have been’ spins around and around in our heads, reminding us of what might have been. Our sense of failure takes no prisoners in its journey towards destroying our self-esteem.

The hydraulics of the JCB, like our bodies, is a closed system. Emotional strain and stress adds an extra drain on our emotions, demanding more than our delicate psychology can deliver. Trying to maintain this status quo becomes harder with each added pressure or knock-back we experience and it becomes harder to celebrate joy. The solution arrived at by those who choose to self-harm, is to use bloodletting to help release the build-up of pressure in our cardiovascular system, in order to find balance.

So in the Soul Survivor Big Top where 7,500 teenagers in their school years sit listening to Mike as he stands on the stage inviting God’s Spirit to touch their lives, the response is overwhelming. Many respond to the call of God in order to find release from the slavery of self-harming or any other negative influence that traps us in unhealthy life choices.

In the same morning that those who self-harm came forward for prayer, a call also went out to all those who had verbalised a desire to end their lives; to commit suicide that very day. The tension among the 7500 people was palpable as more and more children and teenagers, stood up and walked to the front. I’m not sure that there were many dry eyes, I know I had to swallow a lump in my throat, unusual for me with ‘Vulcan’ like emotions. It takes courage to walk to the front of a stage with so many eyes watching, but in rising to our feet and walking to the front of the auditorium, often with the support of a friend, the psychological grip of fear that locks us into habitual behaviour can be loosed.

God meets us where we are. The simple prayer: ‘Come Lord Jesus, come and have your way’ is a statement of faith. We know that God is at work; we know that God wants to heal and restore that which is broken. He wants to build relationship with us but like the prodigal son, we have to take that step towards the Father as he runs to us with abandon and envelopes us with his love. It takes courage to change, to turn-about; to repent; as we turn from our own path we follow God’s lead instead of our own. God meets us in this change of direction by revealing his love to us, filling our understanding with his gift of grace and through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, healing our broken hearts.


 

Why put the word repent here? We have to accept that we get things wrong. When we put our own nature, our needs, and our wants before that of others and ultimately, before God, we become selfish in our behaviour. We can place our faith in anything before recognise our need for God. In our secularised society, we are encouraged to bury sentiment and emotional turmoil in favour of a professional façade: Deal with your stuff in private; if you can’t hack it, then get out of that position of responsibility and let someone who can do it take over; complaining is a sign of weakness… real survival of the fittest thinking. Of course, our service is valued through employment related peer assessments, but these are mere tokenism to organisations wanting to present a persona of care, yet using the very tools to support the employee, to bring them to account and reprimand their behaviour or failings in their performance.

As a teacher, I spend my first day at school after the summer holiday, accounting for the students I taught in the last academic year. Just as the student receives their qualifications on results day, teachers receive performance criteria for how well they have taught over the last year. Expected grades are placed alongside actual achievement, with the teacher having to account where the student might have lost marks and failed to reach their potential… explaining why we failed to see the warning signs if things don’t go so well. I have an envelope at home, sent to me the day after the examination results were published, with data to help me prepare an answer for my performance. It remains unopened until I am ready to face up to the criticism within its pages.

In my first day at work, the performance management system will determine my suitability as a teacher. I then spend all year trying to prove myself to a system that operates in the vacuum of child development, political determination, performance league tables and the clock. The child can often be lost in the scenario, but so too can the emotions of the teacher. I can tell you that I spend the entire academic year fearful of being found out as a fraud… fearful that my colleague observing my lesson might deem that I am not good enough as a teacher.

There was a time when these things wouldn’t worry me at all, believing in my calling into the profession and in my desire to offer something to teaching; to make a difference; to bring hope to those who felt helpless… to do God’s work in my community. I have burned-up my youthfulness and now depend on my wisdom, or lack of it, depending on who has performed the observation of my skills. These interactions determine my identity as a teacher within my profession, and as a person. As my vocation is intertwined with my identity, if I only hear negative responses for my endeavours,  I can be left feeling inadequate, a failure.

This is why I need God’s grace in my life. God has made me how I am and he doesn’t make mistakes. If I seek God for affirmation, I know that he affirms my calling and sustains me with a Godly stamina that starts when I am willing to follow his lead. It is not easy to transition from one experience to another, particularly when life becomes increasingly complex. Christianity is a hard lifestyle to follow as we live in the tension of knowing God’s grace and love, while striving for holiness and integrity.

We can falter at different stages in our voyage, getting lost in stormy seas. When we follow our own bearings, rather than the calmer waters which God had planned, we can encounter all kinds of drama. When we fill our sails with our own hot-air, we can feel full of confidence when it all goes well but when our sails stall or we run out of energy, we can be left reflecting on our performance, looking about ourselves for help, while being too proud to ask for it. We keep driving ourselves forward in our turbulent journey when in fact, we should be seeking the direction that God originally intended.When we turn from our own plans, we will find the Father waiting to receive us whilst knowing how to equip us for journeys end. 


Staying close to God requires discipline and perseverance, with a good dollop of resilience thrown in for good measure. God responds to our faithfulness by equipping us with the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has our counsel in mind, nurturing our faith through filling us with his presence and healing our internal conflicts so that we are made complete in him. When we align ourselves with our heavenly Father, we find that God’s plan is actually better for us than any plan we could have envisioned by ourselves.

This can be a messy process as we expose our hurt to God’s grace, in order for it to be healed by his love. God knew us before we were born, before we were knit in our mother’s womb, before the universe began, God had a plan to prosper us and not to harm us (Jeremiah 29:11). His intimate knowledge of our being, our journey so far and the path we are yet to take, reassures us of his love. When we are able to see through the fog of our emotions, we can more clearly see that what God wants for us is more wholesome and more satisfying than what we intended in our own strength.

The wholesomeness of this relationship compels us to do our best with the gifts and talents that we have; to make a difference in the communities in which we live and the occupations we are employed in. We also share these gifts with our Christian brothers and sisters in the wider church. In doing so, our perception of what is important changes. 


Christians choose to work hard to honour God in our workplace so that no questions are asked of our commitment to our work that might reflect poorly on our faith in Jesus. Similarly, Christians are called to have an interest in our world through politics, education, and social justice… to strive to protect the homeless, the disowned, the infirm, the downtrodden; to strive for honesty, fairness, justice but above all, to love our neighbour as ourselves.

I spent some time this morning on a prayer walk around central Southend-on-Sea. I sat in a coffee shop watching people go by the window and felt God was helping me observe relationships. I saw brothers, families, single parents, grandparents, friends and individuals all going about their lives but ultimately, it was their relationship to each other that God seemed to be highlighting in my observations. 



Each bond of relationship that we nurture, reveals how God has designed us to be socially connected rather than remain isolated and alone. It also became obvious that individuals seemed to be more self-conscious with their appearance when walking alone, either in their dress code or body posture, plugging into their personal media to break the isolation or simply walking with their heads down. It is true how we don’t seem so comfortable, alone.

We fill our lives full of noise too. My son can watch TV and play his Sony Vita with his headphones on while flicking the TV channels between adverts. It seems that we can have all sorts of entertainment and distraction available to us but still be bored. Our minds can also be easily distracted by social media and what happens to be trending at the time, idly sitting and scrolling through our friends or followers entries with the thought that we might have missed something going on. We can even resist doing that ‘something’ we know we ought to be doing, in favour of watching a re-run of something we have watched before. Why do we seem so disconnected from the outside world? It’s as though we are waiting for something amazing to happen.

Some plunge themselves into workaholic behaviours even around their homes in their leisure times; filling any apparent ‘dead-time’ with activities or a chore that needs to be sorted out in a kind-of unofficial to-do list. Then there are those who schedule their social time so carefully, that they can’t fit you in until next month. I read this week somewhere on Twitter, that the New York Times has as much content each Sunday as the whole of the New Testament and yet, those that read it each week may not as much as read even one of the Gospel stories.

Perhaps if we read every aspect of the latest news stories, understand every nuance of the financial markets, catch up with the latest fashions, music, drama, culture or the food we would like to eat, we might feel, well, more human? It simply passes the time in reality. This disconnected feeling we have with each other and the wider world at times, is a symptom of a deeper longing for something more. Hence our desire to trawl through the newspaper’s looking for nuggets of truth, or scouring social media to make sure we haven’t missed anything.

One such story, found in the Gospel of Matthew, records Jesus speaking of a parable about a King who arranged a wedding for his son and invited many to attend. We can read of similar stories in any of the tabloid magazines, with secret celebrity weddings that were only available in the exclusive images found in its pages. However, this Gospel story had a rather different ending. Instead of clamouring for an invitation so that we could be ‘seen-to-be-seen’ at the wedding of a royal heir, those who heard the invitation dismissed the offer, with some even going as far as to murder the messengers who bore the invitation.

Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’

But they paid no attention and went off--one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’ The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ "For many are invited, but few are chosen." (Matthew 22: 1-14, NLT)

This parable speaks metaphorically of the Jews as the chosen people of God who were invited to the wedding, which is a synonym for when the kingdom of God would be established on earth.  Indeed, since Abraham had pleased God in the land of Ur (Southern Iraq), millennia before Jesus was born as a man on the earth, the people of Israel were charged with cherishing Gods covenant he made with Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, and King David. To keep the people from wrong doing and dishonouring God’s covenant with the patriarchs of the Jewish faith, God empowered Holy men and women to rule over Israel and protect the people from becoming embroiled in unhealthy religious practice and ways of living that dishonoured God. They failed miserably, rejecting the advice of the prophets God sent to plead for their return.

In the parable, Jesus uses harsh words to describe how God’s army of Angels, would cleanse the earth of the wickedness of what they had done: the bloodshed, dishonesty and conceit they displayed as representatives of God’s people would be cleansed in preparation for a new beginning. We then read in the parable of a second invitation, given to those who were not originally invited. These people, who were picked up from all of the different walks of life found in the city, were invited to a banquet to which they were previously discounted. But even here, we are presented with the idea of a standard that we would need to accept as part of the deal; we would need to honour the king by dressing metaphorically in our finest clothes, as a matter of respect to the one who had given the invitation. We find that ultimately, this person failed to see the significance of what he had been invited in to, and was subsequently cast outside.

These are stern words indeed. Firstly, it raises an answer to the often repeated question: Don’t all roads lead to God? In the parable, we accept that all are invited, but there are conditions to accepting the offer. In the parable, the Son is a metaphor for Jesus. He is the bridegroom and we, the church are his bride. Those who do not fully accept the bridegroom’s offer will not receive a place at the banquet.

This seems to stand against the universal ideal promoted by some, that all routes lead to God and all will be saved. In the culture of equality in which we live, this paradigm can seem intolerant of other viewpoints. However, God as the host of the banquet, asks that we honour the invitation by striving to live our lives by the standard that he asks of us. These conditions bring life to what we once knew, compelling us to respond ‘Yes Lord!’ Alternatively, we could adopt the position that the man in the parable took. He had not read the invitation properly so with a shrug of the shoulders, he had to accept the consequences.

‘In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.’ (2 Peter 1:5-7, NLT)

There is also an instruction in the parable for us to avoid taking what we think we should receive for granted; to avoid believing that your birth right is all you need to secure an automatic place in heaven. Secondly, we have to remain true to our calling if we are to receive all that God has intended. Just as those with legitimate invitations to the wedding found excuses and plotted against the King we too, in choosing the lives we want to live, can ignore the invitation that Jesus freely offers to all.

I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.’ (Philippians 3:12, NLT)

God knows us better than we understand ourselves, working through creation and our relationships with others, to draw us to himself. There are many circumstances to which coincidental occurrences enhance our experience of life, leaving us wondering how it seemed to all come together for our good. I can remember one evening where I was to lead worship in our house group and was told on arrival that a member of our church congregation had attempted suicide. It was odd that immediately on being told of the dramatic event, that I knew who it was. I had not got any of the details in that initial interaction to even have a hint of what was to come but it was almost as if God was preparing me to be involved in the emotional care that this person needed.

When things are going well, we can pat ourselves on our own back believing that we are indeed, masters of our own destiny. For others, we are often left to wonder what might have been, if all of those elements hadn’t come together as they did. When we apply this dawning sense of appreciation for how things come together to our understanding of how God is at work in our lives through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we can identify when it was that God was supporting our endeavours. God isn’t just at work among people who have chosen to honour him, he works throughout his creation to bring order to the mess we have made of it.

Sometimes we believe that our success in life is the result of our own intellect and self ambition to solve life’s problems. We can find solutions that benefit us or we can take defensive actions designed to protect our status but without God, we are truly on our own. What if the reality of life was that God works through these circumstances in order to bring to our attention, an intuition of his affection towards us. We often dismiss these thoughts or inspiration as fleetingly as they occur, as mere fantasy or simply, conjecture. Looking up to the heavens and the vastness of space or at the intricacies of a sea anemone filtering the sea water for nutrients, each points to more than an evolved sense of self.

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers - the moon and the stars you have set in place - what are mortals that you should think of us, mere humans that you should care for us? For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honour. You put us in charge of everything you made, giving us authority over all things - the sheep and the cattle and all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and everything that swims the ocean currents. O LORD, our Lord, the majesty of your name fills the earth! (Psalm 8:3-9, NLT)

It leaves some of us attuned to the notion that a creator instigated what we see with our eyes and understand with our mind, leaving us to wonder at the complexity of life. Are we just an evolved species or is the wonder of the universe, an amazing signature of the creator who has infinite possibilities within the confines of time and space. As people living within God’s creation, we recognise his signature in the heavens and the earth as the intelligence behind its design and purpose.

Let the heavens proclaim his justice, for God himself will be the judge. (Psalm 50:6, NLT)

There is a purpose for creation and as such, we derive a sense of purpose from our relationship with God. When we reject the synergy of this relationship, we are left, well, hanging. We can derive pleasure and balance through people and things, as I observed from the comfort of the coffee shop window, but it is when we are alone or in danger, that our personal anxieties can overwhelm us.

Our bodies are made up of our emotions, our minds and our soul. We feed our bodies with food, fill our minds with knowledge but are governed by our emotions as we respond to how we feel about life and our sense of purpose within it. But do we feed our souls? We have big hearts and a huge capacity for displaying emotional empathy towards each other but when this is reversed, the darker side of our humanity is revealed. People are very demanding, never really satiated by the desires of our hearts. We are always searching and always longing for experiences that expand our conceptual understanding of who we are.

Yet we find that the reality is much less than the dream. We can place too much value in our experiences, particularly when we recognise that the conclusion to life, death, is not really how we would want to think our lives toil would end. Our bodies may grow old and we may grow tired, beginning to feel aches and pains, but we do not grow tired of living life. God has given us this huge capacity for life because only he can fill our hearts completely. We are constantly looking for fulfilment from what we can experience, when only a relationship with God can satisfy.

Our souls can experience a loneliness that only companionship can satisfy, hence our desire to form relationships that have the intimacy that we seek. To nurture these relationships, we treasure them more than any other aspect of our lives by giving all of ourselves to its cause. Left on our own, without the intimacy of a close relationship, we can find it hard to share our innermost thoughts and feelings. Maintaining a sense of psychological balance requires a great deal of emotional energy as humanity was destined to be higher than the animals and as such, as we read in the creation story, man could not live alone but needed the companionship of someone in whom he could relate to. (Genesis 2:18).

Eve was given to Adam as a wife to be his companion for life. God knew what we would need to live in relationship, if we were to have any sense of fulfilment in our lives today. His instructions to Adam and Eve was to work the land for food and to populate the earth, so that the glory of God would be proclaimed throughout the earth. Only with true friendship and cooperation, generated by the love of two people committed to honour the other over themselves, can true intimacy blossom. Anything outside of this relationship will be found wanting.

We can fill our emotional appetite with counterfeit experiences or through the consumption of stimulants to brighten our mood or dull our inner pain. Whether it be alcohol, gambling, sex, work, money, or any other actions that create habitual behaviours that lead to addictions, they are all detrimental to our well-being. The pain of young people as revealed in the drama of the big top, is always bubbling under the surface. As they answered Gods call on their lives and receive his touch on their hearts; experienced his love through the filling of the Holy Spirit; and to know the truth of God in an increasingly individualistic world, where even social media seems to isolate rather than unite.

Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). He has the keys to an eternal life through the sacrifice he made through his death on the cross. The invitation to his banquet, requires us to turn from our rebellious lives, just as it was for those in the parable, who rejected God’s invitation to pursue their own interests. Having Jesus living in us brings to our lives a depth of relationship that has no boundaries, sustaining us when life is tough and celebrating with us when we live in the freedom of his will.

‘And this is the way to have eternal life-to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth.’ (John 12:3, NLT)

The boy who went forward for prayer had an encounter with the risen Jesus. He was healed of his scarring caused by the mutilation of his body through self-harming. He was given a new beginning, without any trace of the life that he had left behind. His friends could vouch for this healing as they had seen what their friend had done to his body and there was no longer any trace of it.

Jesus keeps his scars as a reminder to all humanity that his was an eternally sacrifice that bought the freedom of mankind from the slavery of death. On earth, he endured 49 lashes that tore his flesh apart, one lash less than was deemed to kill a man. Incarcerated, mocked and led through the streets as a criminal, Jesus carries his own cross until no longer able to lift it. Physically exhausted, Jesus' hands and feet are nailed through the bone into the timber of the cross. With each strike of the hammer, humanities sin was nailed to the cross, not his own. It wasn't the nails that kept Jesus on the cross, but his love...

Jesus bore our sins in his body because only his holiness and his righteousness could set men and women free from the tyranny of sin, death. Death could not hold Jesus in the grave. He rose again to new life, just as he had demonstrated he could do with his friend Lazarus. But something far more significant was happening here. Jesus’ death and resurrection loosed Satan's grip on this world, ushering in a new Kingdom, Christ's Kingdom. As king, Jesus has ushered in a new covenant signed in his blood that proclaims to all that will listen, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have an eternal life.

This Jesus is whom the boy, healed of his wounds, met with in the big top that morning. Some of our wounds are physical symptoms of our emotional battle, like the boy who self-harmed and those that Jesus bears in his body, while some emotional wounds have far deeper psychological traits that require a great deal of care to resolve. Our sin separates us from achieving that which our soul needs the most, a relationship with our heavenly Father. God is more than able to work through whatever it is that you are struggling with. You only need to ask and he will meet with you as you read these words. As appropriate for a big top, we celebrated with this young man because our God is alive, drawing all people of every nation, and in whatever circumstances that we find ourselves, into his arms of Grace. He can work in your life too, all you need to do is ask... "Come Lord Jesus, come into my life and make me whole."