So, it seems that I am in a mood to write at the moment…..so write I will.
REST.
This is what is on my heart to talk about, because it is what I’m learning, and writing is made all the more powerful when the writer is writing about his current experience. This will need a number of separate posts, as I want to try to explore this theme….
At the moment I am only scratching the surface of this revelation, and maybe as I write more will be revealed. I feel I must dwell here on this subject for a while, maybe weeks or months, who knows! There is something so powerful about this, I actually believe that this is the KEY revelation of this season for many of us, and a doorway to entering into all God has for us.
So, first of all I want to give some raw and honest testimony of why this revelation is so important to me and how I went on a bit of a detour for a while in my own life.
As I neared the end of my twenties, I one day began to realise I was becoming very performance oriented. This seemed to be the opposite of how I had been in my teens and early twenties. I couldn’t quite work out how I got this way. I have great parents who didn’t base their acceptance of me on how well I performed, but showed me unconditional love. I have always been a natural perfectionist, but this didn’t seem to account for why I now seemed to feel a weight of responsibility on my shoulders and like I was trying to prove myself all the time. What had happened to the laid back me of a few years before? Its only very recently that I have realised the answer to this question.
I began a job when I was in my mid-twenties, managing a housing estate in central London. I had a couple of successive promotions until I was managing a team of 7 people and overseeing the management of about 2000 properties and the residents. Those of you not from the UK, you need to understand that some of our inner-city housing estates are not full of Hugh Grant or Keira Knightley types sitting round sipping champagne and hosting dinner parties, but rough, real and ready places where there are many people with myriads of problems, be it drugs, mental health, physical health, young teenagers stealing cars, arsonists setting fire to everything, prostitution, despair. Obviously there are good things as well, community spirit, people looking out for their neighbours etc. But my role was not just managing a portfolio of properties but managing the chaos that often results from thousands of very broken lives being concentrated in one area. I had been given a lot of responsibility at a fairly young age.
Although I enjoyed the responsibility initially, I soon realised that the buck always seemed to stop with me, as I was known as the person with overall responsibility for the whole estate. Therefore, if someones heating went wrong, and it wasn’t fixed in time, I was the one the person would come to if things weren’t resolved, the same if someone had had their car vandalised, or their window smashed. People often need someone to hold responsible, a named person who can be held to account. Now, obviously there was a team of very able people in my team who often got things resolved before my involvement was needed. But when there was need for money-saving cuts, I ended up having to manage the same housing estate with 4 instead of 7 people. We were already at full stretch with 7 in the team, and now i had to manage the same problems, the same size estate with far less. Soon things were beginning to fall apart at the seams, and I was in a place where I had to try to hold together something which was failing, and to everyone on the outside it looked like it was my lack of competence. Then people above me also decided that things were going wrong due to my lack of experience. It was like one of those movies where someone is innocent but nobody believes them, and then they set out to clear their name. I felt I was doing everything I could to the best of my ability but people still thought I was to blame if things went wrong.
Gradually I began to work harder and harder, longer and longer in an attempt to get everything done that I didn’t have time to do in normal office hours. I didn’t get paid for this extra time, it was just the drive not to feel like a failure. But still I began to realise I wasn’t superman and no amount of hard work could keep everything from going wrong.
Now time to be even more honest: There were days when the pressure of trying to please my bosses, trying to look after my team and trying to please a demanding client and residents groups caused me to break down in tears, a grown man, in an office, sobbing. Not from self-pity, just the tears that come from the stress of trying to hold together something which is actually outside of your control. I remember several occasions of breaking down in my office, then taking a deep breath, going to the bathroom, washing my face, gritting my teeth and then walking out to chair a meeting or meet an angry resident. Maybe my youth, inexperience and perfectionism did play a part in the way I handled these times of my life. Maybe now I would handle things much differently. Somehow I got through these times and eventually I left the company, realising i needed to leave for my own sanity.
So, why have I shared all of this?
I believe during that period of work I picked up habits and thought patterns that I let influence my view of God and life in general. I changed from a sometimes too relaxed guy into a stressed out shadow of my former self. And I let the mentality of a stressful workplace take root in my mind so I carried this into other areas of life, especially my relationship with God.
Quite often we assume most of our emotional problems must stem from childhood but they can often be from work or other situations where we have had negative authority figures or expectations, we subconsciously learn a mindset and then carry that mindset into other areas.
For me, I have realised I had developed a mindset where I thought I had probably not done enough to gain God’s blessing and favour, maybe I had not covered all my bases, maybe if I prayed a bit more, read the Bible a bit more, been a bit more bold, more loving, more motivated, then I would see breakthrough. Because of the mindset learned from trying to meet unrealistic expectations at work, I began to try to achieve to earn both the favour of God and of man.
I also felt a responsibility for everything and everyone, and that if something didn’t happen it was my fault. Therefore I started to carry unnecessary burdens, and this resulted in a lot of stress. After a while I realised I hardly spent any time with God, resting or relaxing but was always trying to work, achieve and carry the burdens of everyone around me.
I am now here in Iceland after a long journey of learning to let go, realising the world is much better in God’s hands than mine. I left job, family, friends, financial security and career prospects to come here. I was tired of trying to build my own great life for myself and just desired to learn what it really means to follow Jesus, and run empty handed into his presence. The first reason I believe God put it on my heart to come here was to rest and learn to be me without all the excess baggage. I also feel like this is just the beginning of a much more exciting journey of just trusting in God and not myself.
So, just a few thoughts to finish which may provoke you to think:
1) What unhelpful ways of thinking and acting have you picked up from childhood, school, relationships, work, or even church? Are you striving to prove yourself or prove something to others? Do you feel like you are never quite good enough and always have to do something extra to make the grade? Maybe you have been rejected and feel like you have to work extra hard to gain peoples’ acceptance? It’s good to identify these things and just bring it before God
2) Are you simply doing too much? I know you may have children, job, a house to look after and its easy for me to say that. But creating space in your life to rest and also to be with the Lord, in fact making it your priority, could be the key to the rest of your life. Sometimes we cannot receive all that God has for us because we are too busy holding onto things which we picked up in the race to achieve or prove ourselves. Creating space is the only way to begin to discover what’s really on your heart and drown out the constant active voices urging you to do and achieve.
3) Is your identity based upon what you achieve, what you do, or is it in knowing you are God’s child? You’d be surprised how many of us are trying to become someone, when we already are a vastly superior ‘someone’ than the one we are trying to become.
4) When Jesus called his disciples they had to leave what they were doing and follow him. They left their jobs, financial security, possessions, homes, sometimes friends and family… Is there anything you are doing which is rooted in your own need for identity that you need to leave behind in order to discover your identity as a child of God? An advert in the airport reads ‘Life flows better when you can travel light’…do you need to travel more lightly?
5) Patience. We often are impatient to let God lead us into his destiny for us and so we start making decisions to try to create our own destiny for ourselves, and sometimes let the good get in the way of the best. Some of our worst decisions can come from just being impatient, and in my experience sometimes a 2nd best solution always presents itself just before the best. Obviously there are times we have to do things we don’t really want to do for a season but be very careful of making big decisions about career, big commitments, relationships etc before asking if this is really on your heart and is this God’s absolute best for me?
So, a lot of heavy stuff in this post….but please think about it, I am really convicted that many of us have incredible journeys and destinies to enter into when we take the risk of following Jesus out of everything which we have built for our own security and learn to let go and rely only on Him.
I have so much more to say, I plan to post once a week over the summer just on this subject! So please keep reading 
