Thank you all for reading and commenting. So until that next post I wish you all the best.

- dh

By way of disclosure, I do get a free year prescription for anyone who uses this link to start using Penzu (there is a free version) but that’s really not why I’m posting this.

I just think it’s a good product. If you try it, let me know what you think.

And yet… And yet…

There are times when even a creature wired for self-preservation can contemplate suicide.

I want to die.

I wish I were dead.

I’d be better off dead.

Then what?

I should tell you that if you are currently feeling like dying, you are not likely to lose that feeling while reading the rest of this post. But, I do think you may be able to look at your suffering (and yourself) a little differently by the end. First some straight-to-the point answers for those who are at risk of actually acting on the feeling:

• Follow the plan that you have worked out with your mental health professional or doctor, if you are in treatment.
• If you are alone, don’t be. Get people around you. If the feeling is still strong, tell someone.
• Go to an emergence room.
• Call 1-800-suicide (800-784-2433) or 911 or any other crisis line you have been provided with.
• Avoid situations, places, and objects which would be used for suicidal purposes.
• Especially if your thinking goes from contemplating to planning or intending, tell someone.
• Feelings pass usually and so if a professional is helping you and it has worked in the past, do something, anything to take your mind off the inward focus and on to something else. Notice the things outside you more that the feelings inside you.

Now, the above advice is for people in crisis who are not just feeling like dying but also planning and intending to do something that they are able to do, and that will work to end their life. I want to talk about those other times, when there is just the feeling, or what mental health professionals call “passive suicidality.” In other words, you are not going to take any actions prompted by those feelings but still you say inside where no one can hear,”What if I feel like dying?”

• What does this mean about you?
• What does it mean about your life?
• What does it mean about who God is and how he works?

Consider the model for suffering that we have in the Old Testament, Job. Many theologians see Job as offering us an answer to the question, “How should we handle suffering?” There is so much material in the Book of Job about suffering but I want to just point out a few verses and the context. Job is suffering and expressing it graphically, and his friends are not handling it well. Here are a few of the verses where Job describes the intensity of his suffering and what it leads him to think of.

Job 7:13-15

New International Version (NIV)

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

I regret that I spent time with my kids.

The issue I have with spending time with my kids has to do with the word “time” when what it should be is “life.”

There is an old saying that time is money, but life comes much closer to being money than time does. When we accept employment somewhere we are agreeing to give away slices or chunks of our life.

No matter how old or young, healthy or sick, each of us is in the process of spending out our life.

Our life will be all poured out someday. We cannot hoard it, though we act as though we can.

Much of the anxiety and depression that I see in my clinical work has an element of wrestling with the issue of pouring out our life.  When we deny that something is happening, when we try not to be where we are, when we hold back on today flowing into tomorrow, when we can’t accept the reality of a trauma or regretful action in the past… we are trying, futility, not to allow our life to be poured out.

I remember when I was in elementary school in a small town in the central valley of California, selling tickets for a pancake breakfast, or trying to sell them. Before I began, I could imagine all the houses I would go to and all the tickets I would sell. But once I actually went up to that first house, they might say no and there would be one less house that could buy a ticket. I hesitated to start. I was trying to stop something from pouring out, trying not to spend something that had to be spent. I was trying to hold something back from happening, wanting it to go the right way, I suppose.

That particular holding back had something to do with my idealism. It may be something else with you. But life will pour out. We cannot stop it. We can only cause ourselves and those around us more pain by denying the process and trying to spend it in a miserly way.

I want to think that, sometimes, in my best days, I am not spending time with my kids but that I am pouring out my life for them and with them, spending my life on them. I think of holding a flask of priceless liquid and pouring it out lavishly on my children, soaking them in it until it pools around them. It is not mine to keep. Sadly there are times when I am only or mainly thinking of spending time, not my life.

I regret I spent time with my kids.

I don’t want to regret continuing on blindly with this plan to post my top 10 regrets. So, I’ve decided to skip #9.

(Although, as the perspicacious among you have noticed, I haven’t really skipped it, since I wrote this.)

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

I regret that I held it together.

Consider these words from the wisdom of Solomon, especially the phrases in bold.

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away, 

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

 

When you picture someone “holding it together” do you picture someone weeping? someone laughing? someone mourning? someone dancing?

Think about an admonition like this:

“Hold it together, boy. Stop weeping!”

Now replace “weeping” with laughing, mourning, or dancing. Now we have four behaviors we may refer to as losing it.

DANCING A person dancing is certainly not holding it together. The dancer is in fact letting something out, not quite so under control that they stand motionless. They allow their body to express emotions, usually positive ones, but not always. When did you dance last spontaneously? When did I?

WEEPING I don’t know about you, but I don’t have everything under control when I’m weeping. I’m pretty sure that I even make some sounds I don’t usually make. I can’t see very well and probably shouldn’t be driving or working with heavy machinery. I am taking a break from holding it together when I am weeping. When was the last time you really wept? When did I?

LAUGHING There are many different kinds of laughs, I think Mary Poppins and friends say it best.

When was the last time you really had a good laugh? When did I?

MOURNING Mourning may be a a little harder for us to see as not holding it together. We picture adults standing solemnly, and silently by a casket, wiping the occasional tear. I said tear, not tears. But, it was not uncommon for people in the past and in other cultures today to rip their clothes, put a covering on their face, dump dirt on their heads, roll themselves in the dust or sit in a heap of ashes, wailing loudly. Most of us would not consider that holding it together. We might even go so far as calling it “losing it.”

Often when psychologists meet with a patient for the first time, they document if the person’s emotions are blunted, constricted. In other words, does this patient hold it together a little more that they should. There are times and situations in life where holding it together is exactly the wrong thing to do.

According to Solomon, a wiser man that I, there is a time to lose it.

There have been times in my life when losing it in one of these four ways would have been the right thing to do, but I didn’t.

I regret that I held it together.

How here, where grace allowed, for a season,
the loved to endure unthinkable treason
by our twisted motive, and our broken reason,
could we sire bedlam from what has been made
so earth’s seams now are torn and edges are frayed?

How here, where ancestral seed, in the garden
of Eden, was granted undeserved pardon,
could we lust for darkness, allowing to harden
our hearts to hideous acts and to crave
things of the night, and the pit, and the grave?

How now, among history’s pages of greed
and corruption and vice and every misdeed
from malfeasance to terror, from squander to need,
could we not, though shrouded in gathering pall,
as one, ache for final Redemption of all?

I started to spout off some in reply to a reader’s comment and thought they might deserve a post of their own. (Thanks, Amy!)  I have to admit that as I wrote these, I became aware of changes I need to make in my own prayer life.

I will be trying these. Are you willing to try along with me?

1. Look at your child sleeping in bed as you pray for that child.
2. Look your spouse in the eyes as you pray for them.
3. Look at yourself in the mirror as you pray a prayer for God’s blessing or as you offer yourself to God.
4. Look at the person sick in the hospital bed as you pray for God’s healing.
5. Look at the people walking, sitting, standing, or begging, the poorest people in your city or town, as you pray a prayer of thanksgiving or a commitment to self-sacrifice and service.
6. Look around your office, or whatever space you work in, as you pray to be used by God in your workplace.
7. Look at the words of scripture as you pray to absorb the message God has for you.
8. Look at a pile of money, or a pile of bills, as you ask God to help you handle your finances better.
9. Look at a gravestone in a cemetery as you pray for God to make the most of your life.
10. Look at the place your enemies live or work as you pray for them and for grace to forgive them.

As always, please leave a comment on how these 10 suggestions worked out for you. I really want to know. Or tell us other ways that you have found to open your eyes in prayer.

Please don’t underestimate the importance of your comments to me and the help they are in my writing. And if you have found these helpful, share them with a friend.

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

Regret #6: I sang along in church.

This may be a very simple observation that you all have made before so forgive me if I have been slow to catch on.

I was a voice major in college and have always enjoyed singing in church, choirs, etc.. So, I always sang along in church. I liked to do it. And also felt like it would be rude or give the wrong impression to not sing along. I’ve been up on stage before leading singing and know that seeing people just standing there (or sitting) and not singing did not do anything good for the overall level of energy in the room.

But then there came a time in my life, a few years ago, after a significant loss when I was grieving and didn’t feel like I could sing. It just didn’t feel right and I don’t know if I was physically able to sing along – there was something that drained the energy out of me at just the thought of it. There was no song in me.

So I didn’t sing.

What I did do was something I had never done before – it never crossed my mind as acceptable behavior. As the people gathered around me, young and old, sang together, I alternated between looking around at others singing and closing my eyes to just listen. I was allowing myself soak in the community of worship I was in the midst of. I allowed the church, the body of Christ, to worship for me and feel myself being carried along by the community. It was almost like being baptized into the worship experience. I felt thankful for the expression of faith and commitment, the worship, that was being expressed all around me while I could just bathe in it. There was something about it that I may not be able to explain well. I think the closest I can come is to say that something lifted me and carried me at a time when I needed to be lifted and carried.

I wished that I had allowed myself this experience years before. If you have not allowed yourself this experience I encourage you to try it.

I regret that I sang along in church.

I know I have 5 more regrets to cover but I thought maybe it would be a good time to throw in some variety. I came across a blog lately that I think some of you might like. I haven’t been reading it for long but it looks worth checking out.

It seems that  Loxlia is acquainted with pain and working hard to be acquainted with grace in the real world.

Take a look.

Here is how Loxlia introduces herself:

 I am a mess. A beautiful, simple mess. I cling to Grace. Each day I discover more of my immeasurable need of Him.

 I want more. More of my Heart. More of who I was designed to be. I want to Love with His love. I want to pour it out.

Here’s an except from a post.

when your knight won’t fight

You can click here to read more. Oh, I should tell you that it’s one of those web pages that starts playing music when you load it. So, if that kinda bugs you. (It does me even though I have to admit it is a good choice of music.) Just turn down your sound before you click over to read the blog.

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

Number four is… I regret I tried to love God.

What ever could be wrong with that?

The love between God and His child is a unique type of love. It is the love that we know is characteristic of God Himself. It is an attribute of God. It is God giving Himself to us. We do not bring it to the relationship. We do not manufacture it or grow it or develop it in the relationship. We participate in it and partake of it.

Think about the sun and the moon… and light.

The moon does not try to light up the sun. The moon participates in the light of the sun. The moon does not grow it or develop it. And yet the moon provides light in the night sky, not by trying, but by receiving the sun’s light and reflecting.

If I am trying to love God, I misunderstand the difference between the sun and the moon. What I can do is turn my face toward Him and allow him to love me. I can come to know His love and experience his love and reflect it back.

Have I allowed myself to be loved by God, believing that He will never love me any more or less than He does right now? Believing that He is the one that generates the love that I reflect back to Him (and to the rest of the night sky).

Have I really opened myself up that widely to Him? Really faced Him? Reflected back His love?

I want to constantly turn my face toward His love for me, knowing He brings love to the table… not me.

I regret that I tried to love God.

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

My second regret is that I tried to control my tongue.

Why would I regret that I tried to control my tongue? I’ve posted quite a bit on this blog regarding controlling the tongue, as I made a case for better communication, especially in couples.

See, for example:

The Freshwater Challenge from James,

I can’t talk to my husband!

 I can’t talk to my wife!

Just learn to talk to each other? Really?

But, yes, I regret trying to control my tongue. Here’s why…

But, the tongue speaks the things that overflow from the heart.

I regret trying to control my tongue in place of trying to control my heart, passions, and desires. Controlling these other things takes a little more work and a little more time than controlling the tongue. OK, actually it takes a lot more work and a lot more time, but I don’t want to scare you off from something that is so worthwhile.  It takes some inner searching and honesty about motivations, dreams, and attachments. I hesitate to tackle that.

It’s one thing to realize I have said a word that is… unattractive? But it is another thing to find twisted and broken things deep inside me, ugly things, maybe at times, evil things. In the Psalms, David opened himself up to this kind of searching and asked for God’s help to go through the rubbish with him. David was not asking for help controlling his tongue.

So, my car is belching out black smoke from the tail pipe. I go to my mechanic to “control” it. I can’t be driving around with black smoke billowing out of my exhaust pipe! What would people think? My mechanic finds a cork just the right size and jams it into the end of my exhaust system. The outlet has been sealed, controlled, but we all know my car is no better off, and probably worse, in a way that my limited auto mechanics knowledge cannot explain. (But for a VERY short time I will look better going down the road.)

That mechanical shortcut would be like me only getting a better and better filter for my mouth, evoking observations like “I’ve never heard an unkind word out of his mouth!” It does give me a perceived advantage when I get to condemn the ill-chosen words of others, which is a closely related regret of mine that I’m sure the person still remembers.  But never being willing to look at my heart, passions, desires, motivations, dreams, and attachments? That will only help me look good as I go down the road of life and I’m in this to win the right sort of prize.

I don’t want to look better as I go through life. I want to co-create with God a better life. This will require that I examine and better control my heart, passions, desires, motivations, dreams, and attachments.

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting

I regret that I tried to control my tongue.

1. I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.
2. I tried to control my tongue.
3. I hugged my wife when I came home from work.
4. I tried to love God.
5. I cared about other people’s problems.
6. I sang along in church.
7. I closed my eyes in prayer.
8. I held it together.
9. I kept going.
10. I spent time with my kids.

This post is about regret #1: I believed the sun would rise tomorrow.

I have almost always taken it for granted that I would wake to a new morning, sun and all.

Of course the sun will rise tomorrow and I will be here to see it, right?

William Tyndale was the first to translate the scripture from Latin to English so that people other than church leaders could read it. Translating scripture into the common language of the people was a crime in England and wherever else papal authority had enough influence.  Even so, I’m pretty sure we would count “Bill” as one of the good guys. Still, after fleeing his home country, working in secret, and being betrayed more than once, this good guy was tied to a stake, strangled, and burned.

Bill was not here to see the sun rise tomorrow. (Yes, I think I know where he was, and is still, after he was here, but not the point right now.)

Now, I am not illegally translating anything  from Latin (though secretly it sounds rather exciting, except the part where I have to learn Latin) and I think I could even find some people willing to put me in something other than the “good guy” category.

But if, for some reason, somehow, I were to leave this earth between now and sunrise tomorrow, I could not rant against God and say, “Hey! You can’t do this! You promised me I would live a long, fulfilling, and reasonably comfortable life! Besides, I’m only… (insert an age here that seems, to the casual observer, to bolster my argument)!” I couldn’t do that because, of all the promises God has made, me being here tomorrow for the sunrise is not one of them.

I regret my belief, so strongly held. I have not nearly enough cherished the amazing gift that today is, that the world around me is, that the discovery of every minute is.  I have not nearly enough given consideration to the possibility that I may be speaking my last words to those in my life today. This even includes the gas station attendant who, upon seeing my obituary, thinks, “Oh, that guy came in here every week and I don’t think he ever said a word to me.” It especially includes any of the dearly loved people in my life whose last conversation with me was seasoned more with pepper than with salt.

I regret my belief the sun would rise tomorrow for me to start another day. Instead, in light of my regret, I plan to thank God that the sun rose this morning and that I got to be here to see it. (Actually I rarely see it, believing that if God wanted us to enjoy the sunrise, He would have made it later in the day, but, again, not the point.)

I hope if, and when, I compile another list of regrets, this one is not on the list.

Stay tuned because I think there may have been one or two regrets on that list that surprised you. I may get a chance to explain.

But… maybe not.

I also have begun to draw in some other writers to contribute under the name “Guest Author.” Some of these will identify themselves and some would rather not. Replying to your comments for these Guest Authors becomes rather complicated because of the… well, I won’t explain it all but the point is that they will usually not be able to respond to your comments except through me (167hours) and I will facilitate that when possible. But please feel free to leave comments for them. They will be read and the rest of us would like to read what you have to say also. So comment away! Please!

-David

Hurts come

• from others,
• from the self,
• from pervasive, systematic evil, and
• from sources we will never be able to name.

The hurts come

• by accident,
• through ignorance,
• in carelessness,
• out of malice,
• as an artifact of growth,
• from profoundly inaccurate mental images of basic things such as the self, the world, God and how He works

I am always curious to find the model a person has in their head of growth. Is it a line, a spiral, a roller coaster, a knot? Does this person even believe growth exists? or is possible? or is worth it?

Because of my foundational beliefs about the human creature, I use the word, growth, to be synonymous with “allowing God to  build us and write our story.”

As I’ve said in previous posts, the best of stories have very bad scenes, even bad chapters and stories within stories.

I’m writing this post because I am thinking of the particular hurt that can come from having a profound misunderstanding of how God builds us, which is the same as a profound misunderstanding of growth.

I’ve included a story below in a sort of free verse style. It should not be read as a complete story, or even a true story. But it is a common story and one found over and over in the Psalms.  Depending on our understanding of growth it can be felt as a story of disappointment, despair,  injustice, or tragedy. And felt in that way, it becomes one of the common sources of deep hurt like the ones I’ve listed above. And some version of this story shows up with great frequency in my office when hurt people are ready to tell it. But it is like one of the common optical illusions you have seen where the same picture can be seen as an old woman or a young girl.

I believe what is written below to be a story of growth, a story of God building someone.

How do you see it? And… are you willing to try to see it differently?

this path to lose

Little feet. Little steps.
The first. The few.
Close.  Near. Small.
No path. No need. No lost. No new.

First questions.  First answers.
Important words for him.
Who?  Why?  How?
A path? Careless words from them.

Going. Finding. Taking. Giving.
Building. Dreaming. Longing. Choosing.
A sense of me. A range of them.
His path. more of finding, less of losing.

Gathering. Grouping. Attaching. Risking.
A thought of we. A team. A cohort.
A man leaving behind the alone, the boy.
Our path. Larger steps. Rising import.

The hard. The bad. The wrong.
Surprised. Unprepared. collecting pain.
Resolve. Faith. A tighter grasp.
A sometime path. Sometime disdain.

Spent. Fatigued. Drawn out.
A plot. A lie  Their plan.
To shame. To crush.
What path? What light? What remnants of the man?

Though seeking the close, the safe, the known.
Isolation. Fear. An evil ploy.
Though calling, searching, clawing, finds
No path. Only a boy.

In writing it I was surprised to find many aspects which seem analogous to any interpersonal conflict that grows intense enough.

To Reputation Cling

Now, I hear the calm breathing of three children as they sleep in the living room. I listen closely and I still hear the waves pulsing. As the condensation slips away on the window overlooking the ocean I hear the “whispers” of a 11 year old boy playing a 5 year old boy in a game of “Sorry”. The coffee pot drips quietly, steadily, finally producing the smell. The smell of a new morning.

Read the complete post.

Sometimes it’s a gentle pull, other times the force is enough to lay you flat on your face. The undertow. The pull of the ocean. Ever since I can remember the ocean has been as much of my summer as popsicles, watermelon, and long drives. I have run down the same path to the Atlantic Ocean from our family’s house in South Carolina for years.

I grin as my feet remember the ocean floor, much like a reunion of best friends. The hard sand grows a little softer, the wetness and unknown creatures greet my feet like a handshake. One that lasts only as long as needed. It serves as a mere formality; a simple avenue to the real embrace: catching a wave. It’s simple: give in to the pull, enjoy the first wave, taste the salt, feel the sticky, cool ocean, and repeat. A relationship that never gets old.

Read the complete post here.

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