Wrongfooted

How easy it is for us to trip up. A respected Christian friend tells me we can tell the quality of our walk with God by the extent to which we suffer for it. I am alarmed. My face watches her lips move, as she tries perhaps to explain, but all my attention shifts inward, searching for something that might be labelled suffering for my faith.

My ordinary life with its usual stress and distress doesn’t quite measure up. So I am temporarily derailed. I have been on a relatively smooth track recently, oiled by a newly discovered take on the the concept of faith. Faith has come to mean the opposite of worry, working-out-what-next, and telling God what needs to happen and how. If I really have faith, I don’t need to do all that any more.

Except now my Achilles heel of self-condemnation has yawned, stretched and got dressed for work. Once again I have to force myself not to let it in. To trust that God is in control and He may be using this to keep me honest.

A friend once told me that she feels closest to God when things are going well. At the time, I was surprised and almost shocked. I had, I realised, associated closeness to God with crying out to him in adversity. I simply did not associate him with joy or success or any of the stuff that feels good. I thought that true piety equals pain. Painful pain.

When challenged to audit my life for suffering, I began to leave the secret sunny garden of childlike faith I had recently found to return to the cold damp cloister where discomfort demonstrates you’re on the Way.

Because of my earlier ideas about God this felt right, even if it was disappointing. Even if it seemed to reopen the wound of anxiety. Here was a truly enormous thing for me to worry about.

But then I remembered who I’m meant to be looking at. Not myself. Not even my pious sister. She may not be wrong. But she may not have the whole picture.

Not caterpillars forever

I have been looking over some of my posts of late. I seem a bit flaky, lurching from stability to crisis and back again. How come? How can I be sorted one minute and stressed the next? I travel in a straight line for a while, and then I stop and circle before I find my way back to the path.

Some days I just forget where I’m going.

There are two caterpillars sitting on a leaf when a butterfly flutters by. The first caterpillar turns to the second and says, ‘You’ll never catch me going up in one of those!’

I was prompted by this fine joke to look up the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. Pretty amazing by anyone’s standards. And also pretty instructive. The caterpillar eats, grows and sheds a skin. It eats, grows (anyone else relating to this?) and sheds. It eats, grows and sheds. You get the picture.

In a letter to the Christian community in Rome Paul talks about how believers grow as they respond to God.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you will be able to test and approve God’s will – his perfect and pleasing will.
Romans 12 v 2

I’m happy enough to stand out and not conform when it suits me, but I suspect that’s not what Paul, the apostle who endured shipwreck, imprisonment and torture, had in mind. But he also says that a life responding to God’s love won’t simply improve my morals or make me nicer, but transform me. My imagination is unable to conceive what this might look like. So I take it on faith that change is a given.

Whether it’s changing country or teacher, or job or house, change cuts us loose from normality; suddenly all things are uncertain, shifting, impermanent. Almost as soon as it starts, what you have known starts sliding away from you. What has been will never be again.

Christians are promised this amazing transformation but in the meantime, we just see more of the same. We shed some old behaviours or habits or addictions or whatever, we look forward to being different and yet… we look the same. We can begin to doubt that anything is really different. That God has made a difference. We don’t fly to work or see through walls or, at least in the circles I move in, raise the dead. We can forget we’re moving towards something glorious.

Releasing the old to make way for the new is not a pretty or comfortable process. Think of the caterpillar’s bulk morphing, somehow, into a butterfly. Much like us. Like the caterpillar, all our baggage feeds into the process that produces a butterfly. We just have to take it on faith. And keep going.

Yes. And No.

A poem by Roger McGough called The Leader neatly describes where my head was after I wrote The Confidence Project. Just substitute the word ‘Confident’ for ‘The Leader’ and you’ll have it. There I was, all dressed up with my great new attitude and nowhere to go. But then I began to say yes instead of no to things, some small, some more significant. Instead of panicking loudly at whoever is foolish enough to listen,  I started forcing myself to do things for other people. Make stuff. Turn up.  The thing is, I don’t like to commit. It puts me under pressure to live up to some expectation or requirement I’m not certain I can meet. But Confidence says yes where I would usually say no. I haven’t been this busy or satisfied  in years. It is possible that I have finally grasped the blindingly obvious fact that confidence isn’t a superpower that is imparted all in one go, fully formed, but grows gradually, as experience teaches you.  Replacing the long perfected and amusing excuses to say no with reasons to say yes is like learning a new language. That’s okay. I’ve learned new languages before.

And then there’s No. Starving myself of  my usual negative behaviours.  This means observing more and saying less. Trying less hard. Breathing out more. Allowing myself to relax before the event, not afterwards. Switching off the internal commentary. Relaxing for whole minutes at a time. I didn’t realise this until the church picnic I organised at the weekend. Tell you why. Because I fell off the wagon, big time. Instead of saying no to the first negative thought that sidled up to me, I let it in and shortly thereafter slid off into full-on sweaty-palmed panic at the thought of all that could go wrong (go wrong? At a picnic? Are you kidding? I hear you say…) no, really. It was a pitiful catalyst for an adrenalin overdose, but I felt powerless to stop it. And then I remembered to say no, enough. I shut my mouth and opened my eyes. These lovely people I was worried about were talking, laughing, eating, and playing games. In short, enjoying themselves. All was clearly well. Like it usually is.