Higher Than Me

For several years now, God has been teaching me about trauma. As I have accompanied our adopted children on their healing journeys from a background of risk, and as I have experienced various painful situations myself that could be described as traumatic, I have often had the sense that God is preparing me in some way to guide others on this rocky, twisting road.

I have learnt that in God’s economy, none of our experiences are wasted. When God gives us the wisdom and insight to move mountains in our own lives, He very often calls on us afterwards to help others shift similar boulders in theirs.

I would like to take a few moments now to share three principles that God has taught me about developing the sort of faith that will carry us through traumatic times.

1) Learning how to enter into the Father’s embrace

When it comes to surviving trauma, legalistic faith and dead religious works won’t cut it. It’s intimacy and grace that we need.

When we read the psalms, we see that so many of them talk about God being a refuge and a safe place. In the Western world, where few people have experienced the terror of being surrounded by physical enemies (although this is changing as our world becomes more violent and unstable), it’s easy to skip over the many references to safety.

Actually, I believe that safety lies at the very heart of the Gospel message. Jesus came into the world to restore an intimate relationship between us and the Father that would bring us into an experience of safety in the most profound, redemptive and all-encompassing way. The salvation that God promises in His Word doesn’t just refer to our eternal destiny. It also has deep implications for our lives here and now.

It is only when we feel truly safe that we are fully free to live. It is only when we feel truly safe that sin loses its power in our lives. We are no longer driven to lesser gods in search of security, comfort or excitement. 

If we have a head-based faith that rests on knowing the correct doctrines and the scripture verses to back them up, or if we have a works-based faith that rests on performing religious duties, we will find it much harder to stand when the days become dark. If we have a close relationship with our Father God and experience His love for us as a daily reality, we will discover fountains of living water in the desert seasons of our lives.

This sort of relationship with God does not come easily for most of us. Like any relationship, it needs work and investment. It often requires a long process of trust-building.

When we come to faith, most of us feel deep-down that we are not good enough to be loved just the way we are. From our earliest childhood, we are taught to wear masks. We learn how to put on different masks for different occasions, how to say the right things, behave in the right way, and create the right physical appearance in order to be acceptable to others. Often, faith communities are no different. Children grow up with an appearance of faith, but really, they are just wearing another sort of mask.

For most people, both believers and unbelievers alike, the idea that we are truly acceptable just the way we are – with all of our oddities and eccentricities, with all of our dark and selfish thoughts, with all of our embarrassing mistakes and failures that we try to hide even from ourselves – is truly radical. And also rather terrifying. Most of us prefer the air-brushed version of ourselves. We feel more comfortable coming to God believing that we are doing something important for His Kingdom or that we are inherently virtuous than we do coming to God in all our human frailty.

It is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition that we all long to be loved and accepted just the way we are, but yet so many of us don’t really want anyone – including God – to get close enough to see who we really are because we feel so ashamed.

So, our time with God gets filled with religious rituals – getting up early enough in the morning, saying the right prayers, reading and memorizing the right verses. We always feel like we should be doing more, praying harder, fasting for longer. If only I was better at all this spiritual stuff, God would hear me and answer my prayers. 

The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8:26-27:

"Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God."

Here is Paul, the greatest evangelist in world history, saying that it’s perfectly OK to come before God in total weakness, not knowing how or what to pray. This could well be a description of someone experiencing trauma.

Trauma, by its very definition, is an experience that overwhelms our natural abilities to cope. It is something that is too big, too heavy, too fast, too painful, too confusing, too prolonged for us to stay in control. It is an event or series of events that fall outside our normal realm of experience. As such, we often have no words to make sense of it.

Science shows that memories formed during times of traumatic stress are stored in the brain as sensations rather than verbal memories. This is why, when we try to recall a traumatic memory, we often find ourselves remembering the sounds, smells, colours, the adrenalin rush we felt in our bodies, but we may struggle to put the whole thing together into a coherent narrative.

When we connect with God during times of trauma, we may have no words at all – just groanings, or perhaps even total silence. We have to be OK with this and not put pressure on ourselves to perform religious rituals or to know the right words to pray.

Contrary to what many believe, when we are under the fiercest attack, we do not always need to enter into intercessory battle.

"In returning and rest you shall be saved;
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." - Isaiah 30:15

In times of trauma, the most important thing we can do is to enter into the Father’s embrace and allow His deep comfort to saturate our souls. “You are not alone,” He whispers to His lost and frightened children, “The battle belongs to me and I will keep you safe.”

2) Developing deep and authentic friendships

A mistake that believers sometimes make is to think that they don’t need close, supportive relationships because God should be sufficient to meet all their needs. Believers sometimes adopt this position because they have been so badly hurt by human relationships that they feel safer shutting off intimacy with other people and pouring out their hearts to God alone.

However, the Bible is clear that God designed us to be in fellowship with one another. “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Trauma research shows that people who feel isolated and cut-off from others while they’re going through a traumatic event are far more likely to experience PTSD than those who feel connected. When we have healthy and supportive relationships around us, our resilience to stress is considerably higher.

What is important is the quality of the relationships. Superficial friendships that rely upon us hiding who we really are will not help us when the storm clouds gather. In the same way that we need to be able to come before God just as we are, we also need human relationships in which we feel loved and accepted without pretence. We need to provide for one another a safe place where we are not ashamed to be vulnerable.

When Jesus lived on this Earth, he performed many of His healing miracles through touch:

"When the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them" - Luke 4:40.

Later, Jesus commissioned His disciples to lay hands on the sick in order to minister healing (Mark 16:18).

I sometimes try to imagine what Jesus’ touch would have felt like, and the message that it would have conveyed. It seems to me that His touch would have said, “You do not need to be afraid. You are not alone. I see you and hear you. I am fully here and present with you. In this moment, I am focussing all of my attention on you because you are precious and valuable to me. However broken you may be, and whatever you may have done wrong, you do not need to be ashamed. You are not unclean and I am comfortable drawing close to you and touching you. I care deeply about your wellbeing. With everything in me, I want you to be well.”

It is my personal belief that the intense experience of love, belonging and acceptance that Jesus communicated through His touch restored healing to the minds and bodies of those who He ministered to. I believe that His followers, who had witnessed and experienced the life-changing love of God for themselves, continued touching others in the same way. I believe that this explains why the Gospel spread so powerfully in the first century. As lost and fearful people entered into an experience of safety in the Father’s arms, they began loving others in the same way and drawing multitudes into a living relationship with God.

I believe that we can still touch each other in the same way today, and the results can be just as powerful. If we are able to come together during times of traumatic stress – which are often accompanied by physical symptoms – and if, instead of trying to fix one another or preach at one another, we can just accept, listen to and love one another, I believe that we will discover a deep well of healing and strength.

3) Understanding that we are not powerless

Many people don’t realize the deep connection between trauma and powerlessness. The essence of trauma is the sense that we are not in control. Events are happening to us or around us that we have no power  – or perceive that we have no power – over.

The complicated thing about powerlessness is how quickly the feeling can escalate. It doesn’t matter how emotionally strong and resilient we are, when we encounter a traumatic situation that we have no control over – be it a serious illness, a redundancy, a violent crime, a failed relationship, or anything else – we can easily lose confidence in ourselves and in our own abilities to cope.

PTSD is often marked by an escalating sense of powerlessness that progressively consumes more and more areas of our lives. As our self confidence falters, we begin to doubt ourselves, our own abilities and judgments in domains of life unconnected to the original trauma. For example, someone may experience trauma in a personal relationship, but gradually lose confidence in their performance at work, their parenting skills, their ability to drive a car or even just to leave the house.

The key to stopping this runaway train is to understand what’s going on.

In the throes of trauma, it’s not always possible to stand back and reflect on how we can exercise some sort of power within the situation. But if at all possible, it’s a good thing to do. The quicker we can regain some sort of control – however small – over some aspect of the situation, the less long-term damage it will cause to our sense of self confidence.

What it looks like to take control is very different depending on the situation. In a physical disaster, it may involve using our practical or medical skills, or reaching out a hand to comfort someone else. In the case of a sudden illness that takes us out of action for a while, it may mean using the opportunity to invest in relationships that we may have neglected due to the busyness of life, or reading books that we would never normally have the time to read.

For me, it’s writing. If I feel like the difficult experiences I’m going through are equipping me with insights that I can write down to help others, it gives me a sense of meaning and purpose within a wider situation that I may have no control over.

The steps towards regaining power may be very small if our self confidence has taken a heavy knock. It could be venturing out to the shops instead of ordering in. Or choosing to meet up with a friend. Or valuing ourselves enough to start taking care of our physical health.

When we are supporting other people who have experienced trauma, it is important to be mindful of their need to regain power. With the best intentions, it’s easy to end up reinforcing their sense of helplessness by doing for them things that they are capable of doing themselves, but have lost the confidence to do. Supporting someone through trauma is about coming alongside them with grace and compassion, and walking patiently by their side as they slowly gain the confidence to climb back into the driving seat of their own lives.

I believe that the days we are stepping into across the world are going to be marked by increasing instability and trauma. It is easy to look at the future and feel afraid. However, God says in His Word that “perfect love cases out fear” (1 John 4:18). As a worldwide body of believers, we have an opportunity to break off our terrible fear of vulnerability, and to allow ourselves to be loved by God and to love one another as He intended us to do. As we move beyond shame and judgment, and more fully into grace and authenticity, I believe that we will experience in a tangible way the deep sense of inner safety that God promises to His children.