Pathways to Healing: Seven Effective Pathways to Personal Healing and Growth

 

The Book of James: Theology From The Pews Commentary

 

The Letters of John: Theology From The Pews Commentary

 

Do You Have Faith the Size of a Mustard Seed?

 

A Cup of Living Water: Encouraging and Empowering Spiritual Reflections for Daily Living

 

How Do Disciples Respond When God Appears Silent?

 

How Do Disciples Respond When God Appears Silent?

 

How do you respond to God’s apparent silence?  The Psalter asks this penetrating question of faith.  The opening verses of Psalm 22 teaches us that hard questions are necessary in the journey of discipleship.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day and you do not answer, by night but I find no rest.”  Instead of being disrespectful and sacrilegious, these questions reflect a deeply intimate relationship between God and the Psalter.  In addition to David, other notable biblical characters including Hagar, Gideon, Job and Jeremiah ask similar tough questions.  God’s inactivity and absence contradicts everything they were taught about His character and power.  Giants in the history of Christendom like Charles Spurgeon, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively pondered God’s inertia during industrialization, worldwide poverty in the prosperous twentieth century and intractable American Southern segregation.  Average disciples ask their personal versions of the Psalmist’s provocative questions.  Are there times when your life’s circumstances equate with incontrovertible evidence that Almighty God has forsaken you? If yes, how do you respond?

 

These startling questions are so aptly worded that they speak for any disciple experiencing a difficult time.  The Psalmist straightforwardly asks God, “Why have you forsaken me?’  Immediately, childhood Sunday School lessons resound within our ears.  “God does not leave nor does He forsake anyone who believes in Him.”  There are as many Old Testament verses that affirm this assertion as there are New Testament ones.  Consider Deuteronomy 31:8 and Joshua 1:8. Still, lingering unemployment compounded by sporadic health challenge and accompanying medical bills and intractable age discrimination combine to eclipse God’s presence.  Then, there is mounting bewilderment when a disciple prays fervently only to see his situation worsen.  How do you explain that irony?  How does a disciple pray faithfully and earnestly for God’s favorable intervention only to be on the receiving end of further silence and indifference?  Asking about being forsaken by God seems a reasonable response.  The Psalter also asks what explains God’s delay in saving him from drowning in the quicksand of emotion and being overwhelmed by the sudden and formidable rush of mighty waters.  What is the distance between the Psalter’s laments and shouts of anguish?  It is as if he sits and cries burning, angry, salty and countless tears and God does nothing.  After a while, those tears turn into bitterness and cynicism.  If God is indeed loving, gracious, kind and faithful, how can He be so indifferent to the Psalter’s pain and suffering?

 

Chances are billions of disciples relate daily to the Psalter’s feelings as they survive a global pandemic.  With the deaths of more than 260,000 Americans and comparable losses in other countries, grief and loss form a huge canopy over the Earth in the year 2020.  Death on the macro level inevitably becomes death on the micro level.  Each of these decedents belonged to families. Easily, bereavement permeates the lives of millions and tens of millions of citizens.  Those dark clouds block the sunlight of divine grace.  More personally, they intensify feelings of demoralization.  In lesser concerns, some disciples linger in the morass of aimlessness and agony.  These despairing feelings eventuate in feelings of mutual contempt.  God’s apparent absence and silence breeds such harsh feelings in a disciple as he suspects God has shown equal contempt for the disciple.  The Psalter indicts God with his eloquence.  “My God, I cry out by day and you do not answer, by night but I find no rest.”  Contemporarily, the Psalter views his life as a cruel joke by day and a never-ending nightmare during the hours of the evening.

Adamantly, I detest and resist the current impulses in Christian circles to squash questioning.  People who refuse to entertain hard questions of faith tend to characterize fellow believers who do as weak, insubordinate and faithless.  In some instances, fellow disciples yell at people who question God and biblical truths when their lives are incongruent with traditional spiritual promises.  Nevertheless, the Psalter’s questions were not accidentally included in the Bible.  There are times when disciples rightly resolve that God has forsaken them.  The corollary question remains, “How do disciples respond when God appears silent?”  As much as I disregard an unwillingness to wrestle with complexities, ironies, contradictions and mystery in believing in God, I disdain simplistic formulas and uninformed cliches.  Simple answers rarely satisfy complex questions.

 

To that end, I offer several experiential suggestions in response to the Psalter’s question.  First, gratitude always yields an affirming perspective.  Thankfulness focuses upon what a person earns and appreciates as opposed to concentrating upon what a person lacks.  Dwelling upon what is missing hardly emboldens anyone.  It forces disciples to compare themselves and their situations with other people.  As everyone is unique, personal differences are not comparable.  Consequently, acceptance of life’s realities is the first step towards resolving challenges.  Acceptance creates open-mindedness to God’s guidance and counsel from other disciples.  Third, clearing the mind and heart of resentments, failure to forgive and other toxic emotions is necessary to become a channel of God’s love and peace.  Harboring poisonous emotions and thoughts distorts a disciple’s perspective.  This regrettable state of mind prevents personal growth and spiritual progress.  Like cannibals who feed upon their own kind, negativity consumes the mind, heart and soul of its bearer.  Refusal to forgive victimizers particularly eats away at personal health, peace and well-being. 

 

Fourth, visualization of brighter, more rewarding and joyous days avoids paralysis and possible depression.  A disciple in crisis does not have to remain interminably in that predicament.  Envisioning the future with expectancy and hope are practical spiritual tools of progressing beyond today’s struggles.  Those spiritual disciplines are components of resilience which propels disciples toward mission, purpose and destiny.  Finally, hope as borne of affirmations spoken aloud, listening to music and hearing other people’s experiences of spirituality and faithful endurance is a powerfully stabilizing force when living through difficult and inexplicable days.  The belief that a disciple’s life can and will be better sustains him as he travels through “the valley of the shadow of death.”  Elsewhere, the Psalter boldly proclaims, “I am still confident of this, I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Summarily, he responds to God’s apparent absence and indifference with reaffirming God’s faithfulness which the Psalter wholeheartedly believes will emerge.

 

Seventh Pathway to Healing - Self-Acceptance

 

Seventh Pathway to Healing – Self-Acceptance

 

Recently, a coworker shared with me that he would turn forty years of age this year.  He asked me what it feels like to be forty.  I replied, “One of the best things I experienced in turning forty was realizing considerable lessening of many fears and freedom from concern about what other people think of me.”  Liberty from other people’s opinions creates greater self-acceptance.  This cardinal spiritual principle is one of the main objectives of spirituality.  Through DNA, fingernails, teeth and other biological distinctions, science and technology prove each human beings’ uniqueness.  Self-acceptance is the surest indicator of progressive healing and growth toward individuation. 

 

This inward journey includes reflection upon previous mistakes and termination of toxic relationships.  The resulting emotional health reignites a person’s ability to dream, create and achieve.  Healing remains dynamically contingent upon personal circumstances.  It is not etched in stone with a definitive date and time.  It is both an intrapersonal and interpersonal process that demands faithful practice of spiritual disciplines. Self-acceptance pragmatically empowers you to put the pieces of the puzzle together in ways that were previously impossible.  The life you imagine with new and amazing experiences, mysteries and joys is attainable!

 

Self-acceptance begins with unvarnished and unequivocal honesty.  It requires forthright recognition of hard and undisputed facts.  Examine life on life’s terms through the prism of reality not the fanciful myths and modern fairy tales of Hollywood.  For eighty-five years, the recovery community insists the beneficiaries of its twelve-step program unconditionally acknowledge their alcoholism and addiction.  To speak at meetings, attendees begin with a self-determinative introduction, “Hello, I’m Bill and I am an alcoholic.”  Whether sexuality, finances, education, cultural and racial origins, acceptance of these facts is critical to inner freedom and personal healing.  It is impossible to live with integrity and relate honestly with people without unconditional self-acceptance.

 

Stress arises when a person refuses to accept any situation for its hard reality.  Do you break into a damp and thorough sweat when you retrieve your daily mail?  Does the balance of your checking account exceed the sum of your current bills?  A negative answer undoubtedly causes paralyzing stress.  What explains the deficit between your financial resources and obligations?  Are you living beyond your means?  Your failure to accept this truth perpetually creates mounting stress in all dimensions of your life.  You are unable to fall asleep as you mentally juggle the payments of overdue bills.  Sleep deprivation undermines your job performance.  It threatens the quality of your driving.  It zaps your imagination.  It drains your energy to pursue your heartfelt dreams and goals.  It leads to repeated mistakes of judgement as you cannot clearly evaluate people and situations when emotionally depleted and physically tired.  Late payments result in higher interests, fees and lower credit ratings.  Those regrettable outcomes unsurprisingly compound your stress.  Unwillingness to admit unhappiness in a significant relationship whether personal or professional is a precursor to immeasurable stress.  Consider your sacrifice and intimacy toward someone or something that no longer enriches your life.  Simply stated, stress develops immediately when we fail to deal with realism.

 

Acceptance is the first step toward overcoming any dilemma.  Glare straightforwardly at your concrete circumstances.  Ironically, problems contain clues to prevention.  If we willingly embrace our problems, we learn to be more creative and effective.  In the Chinese language, the words, crisis and chaos, contain characters that hint toward creativity.  Natural disasters provide an opportunity to build better, safer and more durable homes.  Many survivors of Hurricane Katrina shared their re-evaluation of spiritual principles, personal values and everyday priorities.  Having loss every single material possession, these men and women stared at the abyss of destitution and realized they still had the most valuable things in life, love and relationships.  The need to rebuild their lives in the hurricane’s aftermath created a different set of values.