Broken by Fear, Anchored in Hope

Faithfulness in an age of anxiety

Rob Merchant, ROB MERCHANT

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780281083152
• eBook ISBN: 9780281083169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Has the power to plant seeds of hope in your heart that when the storms come, it's possible not to be afraid.' - Rachel Gardner

One in four of us will experience mental health problems. Shame, fear, anger and despair are our unwelcome fellow travellers, as Rob Merchant knows to his cost. We can resort to self-medicating through consuming, working, or other distractions, to hide who we are. Rob has tried them and discovered they don't deliver.

Healing starts when we accept our vulnerability. True mental health - and true resilience - develop as we surrender wholly to Christ. Rob explores how we can move away from terror and self-loathing. As we acknowledge our vulnerability, and our place before God, we can discover forgiveness of others and of self, and find hope.

It is never easy, but it works, because it's true.

'Disarmingly honest, powerfully disruptive and reassuringly scriptural. A rare and precious gift.' - Krish Kandiah

5
Surrender

A year after becoming a Christian I was attending a local church and had been invited on a church weekend away. It was a wonderful time of laughter, prayer, friendship and family. Experience of the different church families I encountered was teaching me how to relate and how to trust. Of course, being a church weekend away, there was the usual schedule of worship, teaching, prayer and ministry.

Everything had been going fine until the final morning session before we all returned home. As part of the session there was a time of prayer, and a friend’s mother came up to me and asked if she could pray for me. I agreed. She placed her hand on my shoulder, began to pray and then suddenly stopped. There was a moment of silence, then she began to pray for me again, only to stop once more a few moments later. As a new Christian I wasn’t sure if this was normal and quite what I was meant to do. I was also wondering what on earth this woman was going to pray for, if she kept stopping every time she tried to pray for me. Was God revealing some hideous sin in me? Was she so utterly shocked that she had no idea what to pray, or how to exit the space without anyone noticing? My good old paranoia had kicked in on full power, and in the silence I was now wondering how on earth I could move away from this woman, who still had her hand on my shoulder, and pretend to anyone looking that I had no idea what this nutcase was doing; she clearly needed retraining in how to pray for people.

It was at the moment of preparing to break away that she spoke to me.

‘I’m sorry, Rob, but it’s very strange. Every time I pray for you . . .’

Silence again.

‘Yes,’ I replied desperately, trying to avoid my ‘yes’ sounding like a question inviting more detail.

‘I’m sorry, but every time I pray for you . . .’

Yet more silence . . . hand still on shoulder.

‘Yes!’ Perhaps an affirmation of her desire to pray for me would somehow end this.

‘Every time I pray for you, it is strange, you see, but every time I pray for you I see an old man.’

Okay, an ‘old man’; that was a first, that had my interest, ‘Yes?’

‘Every time I pray for you I see an old man who is bent over from the weight of all he is carrying.’

‘Ah.’ The image wasn’t a surprise.

‘The old man is bent over because he is carrying great rocks and they weigh him down.’

‘Hmmm . . .’ I was playing for time and an opportunity to end the conversation.

‘It is strange, because when I close my eyes I see an old man, but when I open my eyes I see a young man. It simply doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re a young man! You’re 18! How can you be old and burdened! I’m sorry, my prayer isn’t helpful.’

And there was the opening to end this. ‘It is very strange. Doesn’t sound like me at all. Thank you so much for being willing to pray for me. I guess sometimes our prayer wires get a bit crossed!’

I took my opportunity, left the room and found a quiet space outside away from everyone. I was angry, fearful, ashamed and despairing that God not only knew my innermost being but that he would make what was hidden known to someone else. This action on God’s part was outrageous to me. How could he betray what was hidden?

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

I’m not sure David intended me to declare his words in Psalm 139 as a statement of frustration rather than a declaration of hope, but why is God so ‘God’? I mean, why can’t God be a bit less ‘God in your face’. Why must he be so darn relentlessly compassionate? You see, when you’ve survived abuse or trauma, the compassion of another can be painful; an expression of love can be physically impossible to receive because it might not be compassion or love, it might simply be a means to an end. Worse than that, to be offered compassion or love is to be offered that which tears open an old festering wound and allows someone to poke about in deeply painful places. For children who are trauma survivors, it is not unusual for a ‘Well done for . . .’ or ‘I’m really proud of you for . . .’ to lead to an act of violence as the child rejects the pain of feeling loved or cared for. I know this feeling as an adult, when you want to put out of sight that for which you have received love or compassion because it is never enough to fill the void of love and compassion that exists deep within.

For years I’ve received thank-you cards from people, either after speaking at an event, taking a funeral or a wedding, from students who I’ve taught and nurtured through training for ministry. Each card is a beautiful expression of another person’s affection, love and appreciation. But for many years each card has been both painful and beautiful in equal measure. Early in ministry I couldn’t read the cards, but at the same time I couldn’t throw them away because I valued the fact that this was another person’s gift to me, and that gift held the value of their time and thankfulness. I would simply put them away in a box, stored safely behind a set of drawers where no one could find them and where I could never see them.

For you created my inmost being;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and

wonderfully made;

your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.

(Psalm 139.13–14)

Studying theology has been a saving act for me. It has saved me from the reliance on my otherwise unreliable emotions. My innermost being may feel utterly shame-filled, I may resent my very existence, I may despair at how I have been made and broken, I may reject the beauty of all that surrounds me, but I know full well that nothing I can say, do, scream, reject or deny can change the unalterable action of God’s extravagantly loving activity in creation. God can’t be any less God, regardless of my frustration, because God is God and that God is God is utterly sufficient.

But here is the heart of the matter: God surrendered all. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. The Word that spoke all that is seen and unseen into being, humbled himself, became a man and lived among us. He was not less than God, for he was God,

who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God

something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself by becoming obedient to

death –

even death on a cross!

(Philippians 2.6–8)

These words from Paul in Philippians are with me every day. Every day I marvel at Christ’s obedience, his love, his willingness to surrender all to save all.

Obedience has been the one consistent aspect of my faith in Jesus from the very first moment I met him. He said ‘Follow’, and I followed; simple really. However, surrender has taken a rather longer time to develop in my life. You see, I liked my rocks. I knew what life was like, feeling old before my time, feeling burdened by memory and pain. The weight of pain in my life was a familiar old friend. I knew fear, shame, anger, despair. I knew them well, and the thought of putting them down, of leaving them behind, was painful, almost too awful to imagine. Surrendering to what is familiar is a darn sight easier than surrendering to what is unfamiliar, and as an 18-year-old, I had no intention of surrendering what I knew.

What I hadn’t realized at that point in my life was that I had already surrendered. I had surrendered hope, love, joy; I had surrendered my horizon because I was bent double looking at the floor carrying my familiar friends. Furthermore, and perhaps what has shocked me most as I have grown older, there was the realization that I had surrendered to pride and not to humility. I thought that carrying my own burden and not placing it on others was the greatest expression of Christian humility – turns out it was just plain ignorant pride. I was proud of my ability to carry my rocks. I’d done it, no one else, no one had helped me, this was all my own work of bloody-minded survival, and the fear-fuelled, shame-surviving, anger-agitated, despair- driven, sheer hard work of simply living had kept me alive! Only it hadn’t. It hadn’t kept me alive; it had kept me existing and in doing so had consumed my childhood and was slowly consuming my adulthood until there would be nothing left and no reason to continue.

The journey of surrender would begin a year later. I’d left school aged 18 having successfully failed to achieve my A-level grades (and in one case any A-level at all) and in God’s good grace found myself working for an organization called Mencap Homes Foundation, supporting people with learning disabilities to live within a community-based home. It was a time of hard lessons and great satisfaction; it was also a time when my inability to react well when triggered by a person or event found full exposure. My PTSD had been triggered by the actions of another, and my Shield Against Shame response had been anger, which I’d written down in a staff handover book. The book was meant to enable one staff shift to note down key events and needs for the next staff shift; it was an important communication tool. However, I’d decided to use it to express the full flight of my anger about the attitude of others. This in turn triggered responses by other members of staff, angered by my public airing of my anger, and escalated the whole situation.

At the next staff meeting the use of the handover book was discussed, and in the meeting a deputy manager was very clear about what she thought about my attitude and behaviour towards others. As I heard her words my shame took flight as my humiliation deepened. Feelings of fear, anger and despair started to overwhelm me, the room began to close in, it grew difficult to breathe, I felt light-headed, I felt as though I was being trapped, that the people sitting around me were about to harm me. There was no escape: I had to run. The deputy manager finished speaking, I made my excuses and left the room. I went to the toilet furthest away from the staff meeting, locked the door and cried. Ashamed, terrified, a small boy who had no idea what to do next.

Over the next few weeks my emotions became increasingly unreliable, tears welled up at the thought of going into work, I had difficulty sleeping, I felt permanently exhausted, my concentration was shot and my paranoia was firing on all cylinders. I don’t know what made me go to my doctor, but I did. I remember sitting in the consulting room with him, he explained what a breakdown was, asked me about my mental health, and offered me a choice: tablets or talking therapy. I chose talking therapy, and a month or so later I was sitting in a room with a man who was explaining what a therapist was and asked me about my life, the incident at work and what it reminded me of. Without realizing,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Miss, What Does ‘Incomprehensible’ Mean
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The storm
• 1Fear
• 2Shame
• 3Anger
• 4Despair
• 5Surrender
• 6Forgiveness
• 7Faith
• 8Hope
• 9Love
• Conclusion: Setting sail
• Notes
• Miss, What Does 'Incomprehensible' Mean