The little cares that fretted me,

The foolish fears of what may happen,
I cast them all away
Among the clover-scented grass,
Among the new-mown hay;
Among the husking of the corn
Where drowsy poppies nod,
Where ill thoughts die and good are born
Out in the fields with God.

-Elisabeth Barrett Browning.

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“But there’s nothing more I could do, this is the end for me.”

“I’ve tried everything and nothing worked!”

“I can’t see how anything could still change.”

“I feel so exhausted, I’ve ran out of the will to live.”

With these words in mind, we can now see why life seems to be meaningless if combined with other factors such as exhaustion, hopelessness and seemingly insurmountable hedges.

It isn’t because life is over that one feels defeated, but that life could never change anymore into the kind of life one desires to have that causes one to consider all life as worthless.  But is it?  Are the blocks we’re surrendering to realistic obstructions that can no longer be overcome?

Let’s consider some of the hindrances that defeat our hope:

1. That we’ve ran out of strength

It is true that years of trials and suffering could so exhaust our strength that we may feel unable to carry on.  But exhaustion is not the same as death, and giving up is not the solution when all that we need to do is REST.

2. That nothing NEW is ever going to happen anymore

Boredom can easily sink in and render life tasteless.  It would seem that nothing new ever happens anymore.  But does it mean that nothing new will indeed happen in the future?  How could we know?  How could our words be so SURE?

We CAN’T predict everything that’s going to happen tomorrow.  We DON’T KNOW.  We don’t know the next person we’d meet that could make a difference in our lives.  We don’t know if we’ll get sick or if we’ll get well.  We don’t know the natural calamities that may strike any moment.  Maybe what we really mean is that we don’t want to hope anymore because we have been hurt so many times before.  Maybe we’re not merely expecting for a NEW thing.  Maybe what we want is a new development towards achieving our hearts desires.

3. That there’s NOTHING we could do anymore

Is it true that there is truly NOTHING more we could do?  Could it be that there is STILL SOMETHING we could do, but that we just DON’T KNOW it yet?  Or could it be that we’re just too tired or too hopeless to do it?  Could it be that we’re just too hurt to still try anything more?

How about being still?  How about waiting? Have we tried to wait to reap the results of our labor?  For just as there is time for a seed to grow, and for a flower to bloom, there must be some period of time between our efforts and the fruits we yearn to see.

How about asking for help? Have we already sought the help of others who could be in the position to help us?  Or have we sought only from those who already disappointed us in the past and therefore, we think everyone else will just be the same?  Have we sought God’s help?  Have we tried to trust Him and allow Him to show us a different way?

In order for new things to come, we have to try new things and embark on the uncertain, on paths we’ve never known before.

4. That we’ve already tried EVERYTHING

EVERYTHING is a very encompassing word.  Is it possible to have already done everything?  Maybe what we mean is that we have already done everything within our powers, within our limitations.  Still, could it be that we don’t know some part of us that has already become stronger through the years?  Could it be that doing everything IN THE PAST is not the same as doing everything NOW in our present capacity?

Doing everything could also mean to us as doing everything that had been expected of us.  It could mean doing everything we thought should be done, the way it has always been done, the way it worked for other people, or the way we thought things ought to work.

Could it be that we could still do something but doing that thing would be so new we’re afraid where it would eventually take us?  In other words, could there be ANOTHER WAY?

Which doors have been closed?  Which paths have been blocked?  Are all paths blocked or are there just some paths you DON’T WANT to take anymore thinking you already know where it would take you?

Life is Precious

Life is still precious, a gift that would never have been given if it isn’t worth anything.  Don’t give up yet.  Rest and renew your strength.  Then try something new, ask for help, ask even for hope that it may be found again.

You’re not the same person today.  Your hurts have made you wiser; your trials have made you stronger.  There is a different future now from the one you saw before. Try to see it with your new eyes, and with your new heart.

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How can one live with that
awful truth
and not die of sorrow,
of loneliness,
of unworthiness?

How can one ever hope
to be loved
when one knows how unlovable
one really is?

For what can one offer
her beloved
if not the thorns
that surround her very heart?

What can one expect to receive
if not fear, and if not rejection
for all the darkness
that one really has?

O, that my darkness
could turn into light,
and that my emptiness,
be filled with good!

O, that a kind hand
may lead me somewhere safe,
safe even from the horror
of who I really am.

Maybe then though I cry,
I might find some comfort;
though I hurt and cause others pain,
I might find healing and forgiveness.

Though I fail,
I might hope to keep on trying,
Though I die, I might believe,
and I might live again!

"I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact." - C.S. Lewis

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Love your neighbours as you love yourself.  God spoke with the presumption that you already know how to love yourself.  But how about for people who do not even know how to love themselves? Did God ever tell them not to learn to love themselves?  What happens when you don’t love yourself enough?

When you don’t love yourself enough:

• you allow people to mistreat you and to continue to mistreat you
• you try to please other people feeling it’s your obligation, not because you want to
• you feel guilty when good things come your way
• you feel that God doesn’t want you to be happy and He cannot forgive your imperfections
• you feel suspicious when people treat you well or become extra-generous
• you feel that it’s your fault when things go wrong
• you pity yourself easily when someone criticizes you
• you don’t feel comfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror

At first glance, it might seem that this lack of love for isn’t so harmful in our relationship with others.  But how could we even have a basis for loving other people when we can’t even love ourselves? By which standards are we going to treat them when we can’t even treat ourselves well?  When we don’t love ourselves enough, we also lose the capacity to love other people.

Following are some more of the consequences of not loving ourselves enough:

• we allow others to think that it is tolerable to abuse other people
• we find it hard to receive love
• we become prone to depression and hopelessness
• we sabotage our own success because we believe we don’t deserve it.
• subconsciously, we even reject God’s blessings thinking God could never really be concerned with our happiness.

It isn’t a sin to love yourself.  God loves you, and if it’s an evil thing to love someone such as you are, why is it that God continues to love you still?

What’s wrong is when we love ourselves above our neighbours, not caring if we hurt others just so we could get what we want.  We also go wrong when we love ourselves or our neighbours above God, for only God could make us fully happy, and it is from Him where all love comes from.  God is Love Himself.

Do you love yourself enough?

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Love Is Not The Same As Kindness

“There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.”

Lewis explained that kindness is merely interested in taking away the suffering of another.  Love on the other hand, is interested in the good of his beloved, even if that good should mean that the beloved suffer temporary pain.

How many times have we questioned God’s love for us because He did not appear to be kind?  In times of trial and darkness, when His kindness seems so far away, we all too easily doubt He ever loved us.  For how could He allow us to suffer so much if He really cares?

But God cares.  And more than being kind, He is Love itself, a Love that wills us to be just like Him, a Love that wants us to be strong, steadfast, sensitive to the needs of others, able to empathize with and help those who are in pain.

It’s Easy To Be Kind Without Sacrifice

Lewis further explained how man can so easily boast of kindness as though it is something that is difficult to do:

“The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart's in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn't hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature.”

“Perhaps my harping on the word "kindness" has already aroused a protest in some readers' minds. Are we not really an increasingly cruel age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plato rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbour's welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self approval, or ease.”

In the event of conflict between our neighbor’s welfare and our own interests, are we willing to make the necessary sacrifice for the good of the other?  If we truly love them, we will be able to do so, for love is not a disinterested act of philanthropy or random kindness towards those you don’t care deeply about.  Love is a consuming fire!

Intimacy Reveals True Love and Kindness

Why is it that there are people who seem to be so kind to others and yet so strict with those whom they love?  Aside from the possibility of hypocrisy, these people find it easier to be kind with others because they don’t care so much at all for them as much as they care for their own family and friends.  Lewis wrote:

“It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most memorable sense.”

It is not that we should be unkind to our loved ones.  We just find it more difficult to do so because we feel a greater urge deep within us to seek for their good, not just to gain their pleasure or to see them happy at the moment.

“You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.” – C.S. Lewis

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There are times in your life
when all that you could do is rest.

You cannot love,
you cannot dream,
you don’t know where to start,
and you don’t know where to go.

You want to change your life,
but you’re too weak to move,
you’re too tired to think,
too hurt to heal,
too numb to make amends,
too lost to even hope,
too tired to even pray.

Rest then O heart,
and rest then O soul,
for the journey has been too much for you,
and the world has left you wounded
and alone.

Sleep then for a while,
let go of all your woes.
Lie down in trust,
and let your tears flow down
as they should.

Somebody’s watching,
Somebody’s catching your every tear.
Fear not, for in the quiet of the night
you’re in the arms of Him
who loves you most.

Think not of your worries,
think not of your wounds,
for they shall be healed.
In time shall you find comfort,
and you shall find peace.

O blessed peace,
claim your portion and your strength.
May your soul know what stillness means,
and may the very marrow of your bones
find ease.

Time has come to stop your restless wonderings,
and for all the useless work to cease.
Let God work while you are sleeping,
and in the morning
may you find all things new and sweet.

"In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength..." -Isaiah 30:15

"Remain still before Him, and stop your own restless working until He begins to work.  Do nothing that He Himself has not commanded you to do.  Allow God time to work and He surely will.  Then the very trials that threatened to overcome you with discouragement and disaster will become God's opportunity to reveal His grace and glory in your life in ways you have never known before." - Streams in the Desert

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When one is hurt, only his hurt is real. Other people’s hurts doesn’t matter.  They are just an added burden which one couldn’t carry anymore.

When one is hurt, one needs attention. One is like a vacuum that needs to draw all the good things towards it.  All he sees is his deep emptiness that must be filled, and it isn’t filled.  It’s like a cistern with many holes that could never be filled.

When one is hurt, one feels alone and cast away. One yearns to reach out but is unable to.  No one wants to share his hurt, and he is thus left more alone.

When one is hurt, one hurts other people. One may not want to, but one does.  Others are hurt because he has no capacity to absorb more hurt or think about others.  At other times, others are hurt because deep within him, he wants them to understand.  He wants others to feel his hurt, too, that he may not feel so alone.

When one is hurt, one finds it difficult to trust, to receive and to be loved. Everyone is a suspect for causing him more hurt.  Everyone is a suspect for further rejections and betrayals.

When one is hurt, only those who are strong in love can reach him. Only those who are willing to reach out to his darkness can bring him light.

When one is hurt, one needs healing. One has to recognize his wounds and one must see his problems as they are.

When one is hurt so much, sometimes the only light that could reach him is God’s light, and the only love that could heal him is God’s love. No other person is trustworthy enough or strong enough.  Only God’s love is stubborn enough to persist, even to the point of death and of offering of one’s own life just so that the lost may be found and the blind may be made to see again.

When one is hurt, one dies slowly.  But he who finally trusts in the God who pursues him shall have new life!

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We know, too, how it all ended, right?  He was met halfway by his father with open arms, taken back, celebrated and loved.    But did we forget something? Was it really the end?  Whoever remembers the other prodigal son?

People may not recognize him because he didn’t look the part.  He wasn’t the one who left home and shamed his father.  He wasn’t the one who lived a useless life.  In fact, he lived quite the opposite.  He was the responsible one, the dependable one, the one who has always done what he thought was his father’s will.

You may now be starting to recall something.  Yup, he’s the one.  The brother who’s bitter for the party given by his father to the son who just returned.

Not many people could relate to this other prodigal son.  Not many care anyway.  He just didn’t seem bad enough to create a dramatic story like his brother.  His life seemed boring, and he’s got everything anyhow.  He was never lost, never poor, never as miserable as his brother.  Yet isn’t he?

The truth is I really think he is just as miserable and as lost as his brother.  He may not appear to be so, but his bitter words revealed his true feelings in the end:

‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.  But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ – Luke 15, NIV

Are these the words of someone who is happy with his life and with his relationship with his father?  Not really.  His brother atleast knew that he was doing something wrong, but this one believed he did everything right but despite all he did, he wasn’t rewarded at all, he wasn’t getting what he thought he deserves.

There were many times in my life when I could relate to this brother more than I could with the first.  I could relate to his exhaustion, to his efforts all through the years.  And I could relate with his pain, the way he never seems to get his father’s love.

By any chance, could you recall a time when you felt the same way?  Have you ever felt like you’ve already done everything you could and yet you still feel as though you’re not any closer to what you wanted to achieve?  Have you ever felt like you’ve already done everything for a certain person and yet that person still fails you and hurts you in the end?

We just wanted to do good.  We wanted to do what’s right.  But all we get in return is pain, suffering and disappointment.  Where is our father in heaven then who says he loves us?  What have we done wrong to deserve all these?  We have done our obligation, we obeyed all his laws, and yet the person that he rewards is that person who disobeyed him and never lifted a finger to serve him!  We were the ones who were doing everything.  We were ‘slaving’ for the father, but the father never even gave us a goat to celebrate with our friends when he gave that other son a big party all for wasting his father’s wealth and living a sinful life.  Isn’t it all unfair?

The sad thing is that the parable never said what has become of the other prodigal son.  It never mentioned a happy ending for him, never a word on whether he got his party or whether he ever came out from his bitterness and felt the love of his father.

The only thing that ended the parable were the following words of the father:

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.  But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” – Luke 15:31-32

That was it.  No hugs, no parties, no gifts to make the other son feel better.  All that the father said was, “My son... you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”

If you were in his place, how would you have reacted? What would you have thought?  Could such words ever be sufficient enough to heal your pain?  What would you have wanted your father to say?

Personally, and at first glance, I wasn’t happy with what the father said.  For one thing, it was a very short response.  Couldn’t there be a longer explanation?  Secondly, he mentioned my brother again.  Is this all about him again?

Thinking about it though, I couldn’t think of any other answer that the father should have given me.  “My son... you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”

The father only reiterated what I should have known all along, that I was his child, and that everything He has is also mine.

It is the truth, but it isn’t easy for the truth to sink in.  I haven’t realized it all these years, have I?  How could I so easily understand them now?

But I have to.  If the truth needs to be repeated to me ten more times, or even a hundred times more, I should hear it out and let it open my heart to what I have failed to see all this time.

My brother at least knew that he has his father’s wealth to claim and spend in whatever way he liked.  He just forgot that the most important thing is his father’s love.

But I have forgotten both. I have failed to claim my gifts.  And I have failed to see my father’s love.  I wish I could say I have already gotten both, but I am still in the process of learning to recognize and to receive all that the father has given me.  Someday, I pray that I might finally be able to receive all of his love and all of his blessings for me.

How about you? To which prodigal son could you relate to?

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For example, one reason why we find it so hard to forget a previous relationship is that we can’t accept the fact that it could all just end that way and all our efforts, all our time, all our tears and suffering had just gone to waste.

God wastes nothing however, especially our tears. We don’t know the end yet, especially within the broad perspective of eternity.

The other person may not appreciate everything you have done for him now, but it is certain that you have made an impact in his life. That impact will play a part in the grander scheme of things.

You’ll never know how he shall one day remember everything that has been done for him, how he was loved. At present, he may really feel such a deep craving to be loved but fears so much to be abandoned such that he consequently pushes away those who desire to love him.

But if you were able to show that person that you have been there for him at one point in his life, one day, God may let him see all the blessings sent his way, including the people who loved him even though his heart was still closed and unable to receive the love being offered him.

It’s never a waste to love.

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The steady hand can never find the deep things of the Lord;
The undimmed eyes can never see the comfort in His Word;
The joyous heart can never know the healing of His love;
The learned mind can never grasp the wisdom from above.

But, oh, the trembling hand clasps His and loses all its fear;
The weeping eyes can search His Word and read His promise clear;
The broken heart rests in His love until its faith prevails;
The childlike mind can reach the source where wisdom never fails.

By Annie Johnson Flint

He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.- Psalm 147:3

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