Category: despair

Listening to the Disturbed

There is a tremendous need to listen to those suffering with mental illness.

Listening takes patience.

I believe it is a rule written somewhere, that self-centered people are simply not prepared to reach hurting people.  You might say they don’t have the capability to become a good listener. One thing is certain,  listening will change you.  The more you do it, the better (and wiser) person you will become.

Listening to the disturbed takes work. You can become that catalyst for healing and wholeness. But you have to set aside your own agenda to do this.

Typically the mentally ill are intense communicators. Sometimes they can be delusional and seem incoherent. But your patience will pay off. Trust the Holy Spirit to strengthen you.

“Spouting off before listening to the facts is both shameful and foolish.”

Proverbs 18:13

A Good Listener:

1. listens with spiritual ears open, hearing and understanding the spirit beneath the words;

2. listens with the heart and mind still and th e mouth shut;

3. listens with no personal agenda;

4. listens with compassionate spiritual eyes, maintaining involved eye contact;

5. listens with a compassionate heart;

6. listens with a committed heart;

7. listens with attentiveness;

8. listens without judgment;

9. listens without fear;

10. listens with faith, knowing that the Spirit of God is at work to will and do according to His good purpose;

11. waits patiently, quietly and prayerfully through times of silence, making room for the unfolding of things previously too deep and too painful to even know or express;

12. counts it a privilege to witness a soul in the process of transformation, even when it doesn’t look like it;

13. offers to explore options wisely;

14. offers to pray when the time of tears and sharing ends;

15. consoles with words of comfort and confidence in the faithfulness of God, which is usually all anyone needs to hear;

16. waits to give advice until asked;

17. offers a hug;

18. recognizes that these are holy moments of eternal consequence;

19. keeps all holy moments completely confidential.

20. doesn’t try to take the place of the Holy Spirit.

“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

James 1:19

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I have no clue where this list came from. But it is quite good and very thorough. I exhort you to really listen close to those with a disability. Forget about WWJD. Try HWJL.

(How Would Jesus Listen?)

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There is a Crack in Everything

“Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen,  Anthem

A crack in everything. As someone who has experienced brokenness in my life,  I appreciate the wisdom of these simple words. You see, I am intensely aware of being different then others.

I had a night job working my way through school frying donuts.  I remember clearly an incident were I overheard my boss telling someone that, “Bryan is one of the most eccentric people I have ever met.” Now I honestly was not trying to be odd, or eccentric.

To put this in perspective, I just happened to be taking N.T. Greek at the time and knew that the word for eccentric was a contraction, (of ek, meaning “off, or off to one side, and “centros”, meaning, “center”).  He was saying that I was “off centered”. That really troubled me because I always felt like I was intensely stable, and very much a well-balanced person. (But I was just 22.  I guess that fact alone explains much.)

Cohen’s poem tells us certain things. First, he describes bells that can’t be used, they don’t work anymore. Second, he tells us of our need to get real and to understand that “a perfect offering” is beyond our capability. Maybe 30 years ago, ‘naive idealism’ might have carried the day for us. But now I’m in my mid-50s  and I have tried to figure out a thing or two.   By then we start to see the cracks in everything, nothing has gone by untouched. We live in a fallen and broken world.

But the poet delivers a paradoxical truth, he states, “that’s how the light gets in.”

To learn this deeply, is to turbocharge your recovery. You’re a broken person. But that is actually a good thing. It summons up a discernment of how we grow spiritually.

I find it quite astonishing that the broken, weak, and the burned-out are closer to the Kingdom then the strong, the sure, and the gifted. This is a rich and an incredible truth, we are to see our brokenness and ruination in a whole different perspective.  We must see that that is how the light gets in.

“Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

Matthew 5:3

“God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.”

Vance Havner

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The Wind

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But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
~2 Corinthians 12:9-10 (NIV)

The Wind

Your love is a violent wind
Sweeping away my pain and sin

Your grace is a babbling brook
Soothing the chaos within my soul

You warm me when all I feel is cold
When my heart is frozen in dread and fear

Your consuming Spirit draws me near
“Hush My child, for you are Mine”

And like a tiny caterpillar
Released from its cocoon
I fly aloft on Your gentle breeze
I am free as a butterfly

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The Future is According to God

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“I say this because I know what I am planning for you,” says the Lord. “I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you. I will give you hope and a good future. “

Jeremiah 29:11, NCV

“So that for all future time he could show the very great riches of his grace by being kind to us in Christ Jesus.”

Ephesians 2:7

The word “future” is defined as “all that time which is to come hereafter.” It seems that it can never be held by us in a literal sense. In trying to explain it, I have come up with this idea or concept of something that will exist or happen in time to come.

People who struggle with a mental illness  often have a problem with the idea of having a personal meaning.  I remember reading this somewhere, “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”  I think  that many have issues with trying to make life work.  It seems that hopefulness has been brutally cut out of our hearts, and we think and believe that we’re lost and cursed.

It seems to me that this is one of my own problems.  Closely related are the twin issues of cruel despondency and a terrible despair.  When these two run rampant through my life it is sort of a “spiritual mugging.”  I’ve just been totally ripped off. I’ve been completely drained of hope.  I don’t anticipate life and grace, instead I have profound pain and incredible loss.  I feel terribly alone in an ugly void. My depression is all I can see. A relationship with an eternal God seems highly unlikely.

I believe that it isn’t so much me reaching out to Him— rather it is Him coming to me.

The promises God gives us are made to energize and propel us into life and meaning.  The Father completely understands me, and has purposefully given me “a future and a hope.”   I once worked out a plan to kill myself a couple years ago.  It involved duct-taping heavy weights to my ankles and jumping off the dock in the harbor.   I had reached the point of complete despair. Everything was without hope. And all I will say is that God prevented me and then gave me hope.

At times, our future is sometimes woven with predominently dark threads.  If we just look at the back side it makes no sense at all. But God works patiently and expertly, as a skilled Artisan.  We have His word that what He does will be a wonder and a marvel. And we will see an intricate and beautful work.

“Father forgive me for despairing. I know You control everything, and especially all that concerns me. Give me hope for my future.”

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