Wonderfully and fearfully made

May 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Psalm 139: 14 says that we ‘are wonderfully and fearfully made’.

Indeed, the ebb and flow of our faith in life and ourselves passes through many stages. And you might personally know the paradox in this psalm.

Why I cannot seem to eradicate fear completely from my heart is a burning question that has caused me to turn toward God and, at times away from God. I am wonderfully and fearfully made.

I suppose I have reached a point where I keep unconsciously asking myself ‘is this it?’ The question and the answer have caused me great pain. I am at odds to explain who I am and what I think I would like to be.

The fear has grown alongside the loss of trust both in myself, in God and in those around me. I am told that in this place faith is….somewhere. That God has not left me and that I will be a better man for the experience. But pain has a way of persuading otherwise. I feel the cancer of my emotional conflict.

But here I am, fearfully and wonderfully made, like it or not. I reach out to you my friends….our God, and bid you goodnight wherever you are.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

keep on keeping on

May 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

Simple but true slogan.

Sometimes life seems pretty easy and at others pretty difficult. What used to work yesterday, might not work today. And on it goes. Our job is to keep on keeping on. If we do there will always be a break in the cloud, a sign, some realisation, that will change our course.

Things never quite work out how I think. There are always unplanned for and ‘illogical’ coincidences that make my life different.

My part in recovering from nervous illness is to find a way where I will be happy living with myself. When things do not seem that clear it is vital that we just keep on keeping on.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Thoughts from the twilight zone

April 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

And I gazed upon my own life

from the edge of the mountain.

If I fall

it is only into myself.

Further unto God

the prayers of a dying man.

Rested where death is,

upon a plinth

in the halls of the great king.

Victory fades as the wreaths

are strewn before me.

I will stand before him

who has also stood

at the mountains top.

Wrote that last night. Not sure what it was about really. The mystery of one’s self is a great pastime. Although can be melancholic. Have a good day wherever you are.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Pride/depression

April 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

My friends, pride is a great wall that isolates a person. Or perhaps it’s fear (I suspect that they are the same things anyway), I have recently spent some time in hospital with severe depression. And although this blog is important to me it was not at the top of my ‘get around to list’.

I suppose the main reason was that I didn’t think that I could look you all in the eye and speak honestly (in a cyber look in the eye way). Having spent so much time trying to post messages that had some amount of progressive meaning in them, I suddenly felt troubled to say anything at all. Depression and all its hangers on have been with me. I have decided to take the advice and the medication that has been offered.

After many years of not even taking an aspirin it is time to bite the bullet and accept the help at hand. My thinking is temporary in this regard but we shall see how it goes. Horror has a way of persuading a man to change tack. Pride (if that is what it really is) has a way of changing that same mind into resistance. But pride has been losing this fight….pain has made it so.

A thought has come to my mind on a recurring basis. I suppose it is me thinking about what it is to be a whole person and not just bits sown together like a cheap garment. Sometimes I get the feeling that there are 3 parts to who I am. Mind, body and soul. This gets awful confusing when I am trying to work things out. Perhaps a mistake in itself? If there are these things, separated from each other then what do I ever say that I am? Yes my friends, Plato and the rest have left us a chestnut alright.

Anyway. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden keeps coming to my thoughts. Before the ‘fall’ God calls to Adam and Adam replies ‘here I am’. This response occurs other places in The Bible as well. I will leave you to find out where for your homework. But something happens after they have taken from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Again God calls but this time there is no reply. Instead Adam hides himself away, knowing that he was naked.

I find this a very profound story. What happened to him that he would say ‘here I am’, all of him, his whole being, and then not reply at all?

It is the ‘here I am’ that has given me much to think about. In my depression and pain, in my fear, in my painful thinking, I am trying to say ‘Here I am’.

This blog gets about 10-20 hits per month. To those who land here by mistake or those that make a point of it….I salute you!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Dual personality

February 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

You ever get the feeling that you are just being who you really are!! If you know what I mean? And if you do know what I mean then you would find this passage interesting Romans Ch7: 14-25. And yes it is from The Bible. But although it is a complicated passage, depending upon the translation, is it not in principle so true?

Read it and dwell on it for a while. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water just because this truth is from a religious book. Instead if it speaks to you in some way then you know that what you are doing and what you are, are sometimes so far apart that it is that very apart-ness that causes you, us, the pain that it does. Anxiety is a natural thing, but only to the point that it serves a purpose. After that it becomes destructive. To seek out the hidden roots of our dis-ease is to start to overcome it.

Filed Under: Personality Disorder, Uncategorized

Seems that way.

February 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It’s not true of course. But sometimes it does feel like that. Take heart.

If I may, a Proverb: Trust in The Lord with all your heart, and rest not on your own insight. Turn away from evil and He will make straight your paths. Prov 3:5-6.

Breaking the link of fear in our thinking is the thing which sets us free. Once that link is broken the thoughts that once disturbed us become harmless because that have no value of association anymore. We struggle with them less and so they last shorter time. Then we sense that these thoughts are transient and powerless over us.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Being honest with self.

February 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Being honest with self seems to be a modern buzz word. But strangely it is juxtaposed against the pathological need for modern man to have little part of any contemplative discussion with conscience.

It is easy to put up the shop front of a personality and then trade away until the rapacious creditors of conscience and belief come knocking for their money. And if and when they do come, what will your answer be to them?

But I simplify the matter too readily for most people trade their themselves in good spirit. They don’t always know that their stock taking has not shown a shortfall and they don’t always know that they might need to draw on their savings in order to stay afloat.

When such times arise, as they inevitably will in this life,  a re-adjustment and re-evaluation of reasons, behavior and belief must take place. It is during these times that a person will need the to find what it is to be honest with self. One need not find out the whole truth of the situation, but to avoid nervous breakdown and ongoing neurosis a person will need the effort of persistent intent. It is the intent that provides the key to self. For intent allows guidance into one’s life.

Once that guidance has become established, and even within the anxiety it will speak, then one has to listen. A person might make many mistakes with what they think they hear or are led toward. But the intent of the will and spirit will make the pathway straighter than it otherwise would be.

Follow your intuition into healing. It may take some time (according to who you are and what problems you have) but you will be led to where you need to be. I have felt such a need lately.

The deeper runnings of my humanity occasionally shake my foundations. I feel like (but not exactly for I am not blind to it these days) I did many years ago. The emptiness of my previous life is presented before me. It is a belief that the child knew. Dread fear, abandonment and death. It is a call to give more of myself to God. It is a need to be honest with myself. Sometimes I feel that I cannot bear it, but I know that I will, because it is my calling. I call to myself, I call to God. I will find a way.

I realise that I must find more people like myself to mix with so that I can have the companionship and solace that I crave. I need to spend more time with people who have been recovering from their soul sickness, their personality disorder and alcoholism. It is to this that I believe I have been led. Now I will look for my new circle of friends.

In being honest with myself I see that my present support network is not what I had wished it to be. This is not a criticism, only an observation. It is only I that can change that. And so another chapter begins. I accept that I need to change and allow more of myself to be healed and freed from some of my beliefs.

This is the journey and my life. It is a conviction by and of the spirit that makes it so. Onward my friends.

Filed Under: Honesty

The fog of war!

January 31, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Old time muskets when fired, produced a cloud of white/grey smoke from the gunpowder that charged the ‘bullet’. From this we get two sayings still extant in the English language. One saying comes from when the gunpowder flashed but did not discharge the needed power, so when the hammer hit the pan nothing happened. Hence when something/someone seems to shine brightly for a short while then disappears into obscurity we say that he/she or it  ‘is a flash in the pan’.

Secondly, when some or many muskets were fired simultaneously they produced a great cloud of smoke. So much so that it was hard to see. This ‘fog of war’ made it very difficult to know what was going on.

Life can sometimes seem like the fog of war has descended and that one’s good days and successes are but a flash in the pan. But this thinking, however understandable it may be, is an error. We often fail to wait until the next breeze clears the fog from before our eyes. Instead panicking and thinking that we are again falling into the abyss of illness and despair.

Indeed this is a symptom of anxious and fearful thinking. That the mind will go towards the worst case scenario in order to protect itself from any sudden shock. This red herring then beguiles us into thinking that struggle is the best way forward. In turn this creates more anxiety as we go into survival mode and start to shut down. This ‘fog of war’ we all know.

But there is another way. Fear need not be destructive or ‘negative’. In fear we are asked some serious and meaningful existential questions about who we are and what we are doing. We are asked to let go a little bit more and see what happens. If we do not answer this prompt in the affirmative then we stagnate in the here and now. We, who have know the deepest fears over the longest time, know that we cannot stay still in the fear itself. I do not mean keep running, both on physical and spiritual levels. I mean accepting that we, I, must, let more of myself go; into love.

It seems such a simple choice to make and yet I know as well as you that at times this realisation seems almost impossible. Better the devil we know! But this cannot be so anymore. Any people who have suffered as we have must accept that we change or stay the same. A person who stays the same gets what they got. Simple logic.  Let us all do our suffering justice. Do not have suffered for nothing. Realise that the ‘fog of war’ is but a temporary occurrence and that the wind of the spirit will disperse it before our very eyes. The successes that we have are real and worthy and no mere ‘flash in the pan’. These successes build up in a cumulative fashion and it doesn’t matter if they seem far apart in time and space.

Hope this finds you well my friends.

Filed Under: becoming

Quiet time

January 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Being anxious and uncomfortable with one’s self is a habit. It may or may not have been ‘helped’ along the way by various events, but being uncomfortable with self still becomes habitual.

One symptom of being anxious with self is the inability to sit and rest. Quiet time disappears and the day becomes filled with doing stuff, thinking stuff, and sorting stuff out. This is quite tiring and very distracting. It is part of resistance to an uncomfortable thought or belief. And so the cause of this inability to be quiet is not anxiety itself. Anxiety is a symptom, and an uncomfortable one at that, but it is still a symptom and not the whole story.

And so to remedy the symptom I must either have an idea of the cause – this is found in honest and open talking about what is going on; or take a course of action that will help relax my mind and body. Once my ‘spiritual’ anxiety is healed the rest usually follows. And even if some fearful or uncomfortable thinking remains, it will not overcome the relaxation and peace that we have found.

I have been recommended a book by Jack Winslow called ‘The Morning Quiet Time’. Yes it is religious. And it is about waiting on God during a time daily set aside for such. Even in the first few pages it is clear that the writer knows what he is talking about when he speaks of not being able to face the day because he hasn’t got the need ‘power’ to do so.

I have kept the quiet time over the years. Sometimes more than others. I feel that I need to look at this again. Light, peace and understanding has come to me through these times. But indiscipline and complacency, mixed with spiritual arrogance begins to creep in and to block the path rather than open it up. Accepting the warning signs of growing anxiety is a blessing. Angst and the like need not always be a ‘negative’ thing. It can be the push that we need to get back on track.

I hope this link might prove useful to some of you.

 

Filed Under: Quiet time

Fear

January 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

I have been reminded lately that fear is a part of living that cannot be removed. That does not mean that my life is about living with fear as a constant companion, just that it cannot be done away with like a wart or boil can.

And so I am left with the fact that fear is a part of human nature. This should not be depressing. In fact once we have the needed tools that same fear that once destroyed us, now becomes fuel and energy to be channeled into something more fruitful.

Yes I know I keep saying things like that….but I say it because it is true. Fear will buckle us or build us up. What is our reaction to be. Courage and that strange word ‘power’ can also be seen as strength in the midst of.

It has been suggested to me lately that I am embarrassed about my financial and social position and that I am not letting go of my fears around this stuff. I can add to that, that I have been arrogant. These things have obscured my spiritual pathway and I have begun to rely on my own thinking too much. This ends up in primarily in worry and apprehension. And these my friends can tire the mind and the emotions.

I have been advised to sit a little longer with myself and keep God in mind. And to take stock at the end of the day regarding my attitude and actions. Sitting around worrying about money and mental health can make things seem bigger than they are. As the picture narrows so the fears can increase. I need to widen the picture again.

This I hope to do over the coming time. Claire Weekes says that certain weaknesses in our character will help breakdown occur. It is finding what we need to address these blank spots that will build us up. In doing so we will build confidence and the fear will fall from us. I hope that this is so for me as well as you my friends. Onward.

Filed Under: Fear
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