Tag: broken

Categories
fearful trauma

But What About Me!

Between Traeth Lligwy and Moelfre at 3pm Sunday 23rd April 2023. Photographed by myself

I’ve been pondering how to pull the last four posts together and this came to me this morning.

When we live in a state of high alert, high anxiety, of fear, of high meerkat mode, even though it doesn’t appear that way to our logical minds we are too often thinking of ourselves and how things will affect us. We overlay it with looking as if we care for others but too often, not every time, it is that “but what about me!” fear. This leads us to being greedy and selfish, to taking the job that makes us miserable because we want others to see us as in a respectable position, putting our own egos and own self image before what our heart really says. The system is broken but we only really want to fix it if it helps us not if it helps a wider world, a world that will exist after we are gone.

Many people bemoan the state of the UK’s National Health Service and say more money needs to be put into it, but if something went wrong with the treatment they are having many would sue. I learned the other day that there is a department in each NHS health board that deals with people who wish to bring litigation against some part of the Health Service. Often because they think they have been short changed. This does not help with putting more money and resources into sorting out this system. Interestingly too I knew of someone who had to fight with lawyers who wanted her to take the NHS to caught because twice her babies had died a month before they were due to be born. She felt that the NHS was not to blame but also that no amount of money would ever replace her babies. Yes she wanted something to change but did not see how suing for a large sum of money would change anything.

Yesterday in the UK we had a nationwide security alert go off on our mobile phones. This was a practice to see if it was possible to warn people of an impending disaster. [The above photo is where myself, husband and dog were at that time] Now much as I do not like the idea of any government department being able to get into my phone and send me something I also think it isn’t such a bad idea to know if one was likely to be flooded, earthquake, fire, bombed, whatever, in time to take evasive action. But what tickled me was that many people were saying how it frightened them and that they would be really upset if something like that happened unannounced. So now we want to be warned about warnings of impending disaster. Nice idea. But again it was “all about me”.

So why are so many people on such high alert? For good reason. There have been so many traumas, many of them passed down through the generations, that too often they are seen as just what is rather than a trauma. A friend once commented at a map I had on my wall to help with home schooling about how many it was all just about commemorating battles, and of how many there were. Our land is littered with fighting, much of it internal battles of who should be king, who should rule, how people should worship God, etc. Then in more recent times those who came back from both the 1st and 2nd world wars who were traumatised, those who had lived without a man in the house, etc. And for myself I campaigned with CND and learned about what would happen in a nuclear war. All very scary. All things that make one on high alert. All things that make one put oneself, and often those closest, first. It does not encourage thinking of something bigger like a national health service, a national education system, a national anything. It all comes back to “what’s in it for me?”

Again though we revolve back to getting rid of those traumas. I know I’ve been pushing QEC but I do also think there are many others ways too. QEC worked for me but things like Sozo, and other inner healings works for other people. I would say anything that helps deal with trauma, deals with pulling down those walls that separate us from each other and the world, from God and the Universe, are all valid. But I do believe, as I say so often, that until we can release ourselves from being on high alert – which is often so ingrained that we don’t know it’s there – we will not be able to really put others before ourselves.

Love your neighbour as yourself

Mark 12:31

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life

John 3:16

God loved because God isn’t traumatised. Jesus was able to do what Jesus did because he put others first. We can only love others if we truly love ourselves and are willing to stopping having to protect ourselves by being on high alert and so having to protect ourselves first.

When someone is on high alert it is not about the other but about them. Let go and let God in and then I think we can truly heal our broken systems and our broken world and let of of logical thinking and replace it with heart thinking.

Advertisement
Categories
broken strikes vision

Is Everything Broken?

From a walk above our house over the Christmas holidays taken by myself – Dec 2022

This post comes about because my friend’s funeral is going to be 32 days after she died. It is a 25 min slot in the local crematorium and there were only 2 spaces left on that day. Yes I know we’ve had covid – more the restrictions than the extra deaths. But surely having to wait over a month to bury someone is wrong. Someone I know said she was told that a month wait is normal. That’s not normal at all. What had gone wrong?

It led to me doing some more pondering about these strikes we’re having in the UK and what is going on there. As I mentioned in Strikes Take Planning a couple of weeks ago it is more than money. It is about conditions, about not feeling respected and more.

Then today I heard from two people who feel they are not valued where they are. One even gets paid a substantial amount of money but felt like no one really cares about people. Again that whole thing about respect.

I do understand that much has changed since covid and the UK has also had Brexit to deal with but I felt with both these things that there was more to it. Many people I know in both education and the health service say that the problems lie in the area of having to have outcomes and statistics, that is about profit and money. The management are looking at statistics, result charts, comparing with others, rather than caring for others.

My big bug bear always comes from schools because I suppose that is my thing. I work there. I went to one when I was a child, Actually to several. I chose to home school my children. What I see now is a lot of stress, a lot of not knowing what to do with some of these kids. School has lost its vision.

Schools were originally started when the Factories Acts said that children under a certain age could no longer work in factories, in mines, as chimney sweeps, etc, etc. This meant there were a lot of children on the streets with nothing to do. So they were corralled into schools. It was then realised that this was a good place to mold a workforce for the work place. So subjects were then added, made to fit the outcome of what was needed, and so forth. But now I think that vision has gone. Now it seems to be good grades, good behaviour, improving, but what is real need in the workforce now? I think it is more complicated that it was 150+ years ago because we no longer have the factories, the heavy industry, etc.

Where there is no vision, the people perish

proverbs 29:18 {a}

And I do think it is that lack of vision and the need for tangible outcomes, and making money, that have become the issues in too many places – whether education and health service or the company my friend was moaning about, or even the funeral service. People are no longer the centre. That is not to say that there are not loads of people out there who don’t care. These professions and work places are filled with people who care, but it is harder and harder to care if what you do does not make a profit for shareholders, show something good on the league tables, show some outcome.

And again I will say this leads to lack of respect for the majority of the workforce, but also because those in higher management are being pressurised by something/someone higher than them.

A thought to finish with – I came across a post on a friend’s Facebook page. I think it is true that said that so much of what we do is controlled by other people, by money and by our past. And we need to refind the vision as to the what and why of the country we are blessed to live in.

Categories
end times Humanity

Is The World Broken?

Is the world broken? Are we in the end times? Has humanity run its course?

These are all questions that seem to arise from fellow dog walkers whilst walking round the park in the morning. Most have just seen the news and so need to ponder out loud, need a sounding board for their thoughts whilst they are alone.

Now the Ukraine/Russia war is coming up to a year old and Europe and US has stop standing on the sidelines that makes on think of the “wars and rumours of wars”. And we too often forget the wars raging through much of Africa; the drug wars in South America and the mass migration that has caused. Then there is the huge earthquake in Turkey and Syria, with at last count over 15,000 people dead. Plus flooding in New Zealand, floods in this country, fires in other places. And let us not also forget the covid pandemic.

Is this the end times? Has humanity ran its course?

I found it hard to say whilst standing in the park, which is a man made phenomena, listening to the birds coming to the end of their morning chorus, see people who have got to know each other over the last three years of pandemic, who have become friends, become supporters and confidants of each other, who care and look out for each other.

There is so much good in the world, I believe, that too often we take it for granted. We see the big things – which are horrendous; the wars, the deaths, the natural disasters, the man made disasters, the hatred – that too often we don’t see the small things. Not just those random acts of kindnesses but the day to day “Good morning”s, holding doors open. In fact I need to quote the poem that was on Beth’s post this morning, Small Kindnesses because this proves to me that humanity has not run its course, is not done yet. Things happen but there are too many kindnesses going on for it to be the end!

I’ve been thinking about the way,

when you walk down a crowded aisle,

people pull in their legs to let you by.

Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes,

a leftover from the Bubonic plague.

“Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes,

when you spill lemons from your grocery bag,

someone else will help you pick them up.

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it.

To smile at them and for them to smile back.

For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now.

So far from tribe and fire.

Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy,

these fleeting temples we make together when we say,

“Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

by Danusha Lameris, Small Kindnesses

I’m planning a follow to ask “What does God think?”

Categories
fixing healing

Wounded or Broken?

Walk by river at St Asaph taken by myself August 2022

I am blaming The Naked Pastor for bringing my attention to the difference between saying you are broken to that of saying you are wounded from a trauma. He says, and I think I agree, that if I am broken then I need fixing but if I am wounded then I am ok but have parts of me that need to be healed.

Here’s a quote from David’s last newsletter and a link to the cartoon relating to it:

When you set out to ‘fix’ yourself, you end up changing the person you are and causing extra hurt and extra trauma. 

But when you change your mindset to one of healing, you begin to realize that you were never broken and that you never needed fixing at all. 

David Hayward The Best Healing Cartoon

I’ve just done a Biblegateway search of the words “broken” and “healed”. Broken only applies with something physical, like bread or bones, or branches of unbelief. But Jesus does loads of healing and if fact Peter says of Jesus:

“He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”

1 Peter 2:24

And Isaiah says, when foretelling of Jesus

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5

Not broken but wounds. And for transgression read “all the things we’ve done wrong, had done wrong to us, our traumas, hurts, fears, physical, emotional and spiritual.”

Yet last night I was at a meeting where the host, who was the pastor of the church where the meeting was happening, said that the church was for broken people and that he was the most broken of them all. See now I don’t think that’s a great boast. Why would I want to be part of something that seems to be proud that people are attending and being led by someone who is more of a mess than they are. What I love about QEC is that not only does it help me to be healed of my hurts, fears and traumas, but also gives me tools that I can then do this for myself. I don’t need to keep seeing my therapist to go over stuff. I have been healed, set free. Oh yes it does sneak up and bite me often but I know how to recognise it and deal with it.

I am slowly growing towards being the person I am meant to be. As Naked Pastor says we aren’t broken and needing put back together as if there is something wrong with us but we are hurting and wounded and need healing. And this is what the Bible tells me Jesus died for and yet why is this church, and others, saying that it is ok to be broken and to want to stay that way?

I am so grateful that when I met with God I was in a total mess and got filled with a great reassurance that I was loved unconditionally just as I was. Yes I have gone on to be fixed but have learned that it is about being healed not fixed. I am not broken and don’t need fixing. I am awesome as I am but need to be healed so the real me can get out into the world. And I am learning to do this with a mix of Jesus, Holy Spirit, God, some great friends who like me as I am, and also [and I know I keep publicising it but it is awesome] with the help and support of QEC and the tools that come with it.