Hardships And How To Deal With Them Series

Trauma and Transformation Level 1 - Class 3 - Spiritual Talk

This is the third talk in an 8-week class called "Trauma and Transformation, Level 1". The course takes a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual approach to healing. Both Christians and non-Christians are welcome. This is a reflection time of about 10 minutes that occurs in the class, before the remaining time which is spent in trauma education - helping people understand the impact of trauma on the mind and on all of life.

The one thing we all face is hardship. When we face hardships, and when we dwell on the past, when we are not being good to ourselves, we can feel weak.

And yet hardships are not possible to avoid. The past cannot be willed away or ignored.

We are not good to ourselves for a lot of complex reasons. In general being in our heads is often unhelpful. Sometimes I say that the worst coordinates or the worst place to be on the planet are in my head.

Spending too much time in our heads can lead to anxiety and fear. So we have to take care of, we have to guard our minds from excessive worry.

In Philippians, chapter 4 we find this: 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Feeling weak is a common human thing. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that we don’t have to feel alone. I grew up convinced that I was alone. Completely alone.

I grew up with zero idea that there was any option other than to struggle with being alone and to struggle with making sense out of a life which did not, at a core level, make sense; that at best I would only ever be forcing meaning on something that was unavoidably meaningless.

That was before something happened in my life. Something that completely changed everything in my life. At around 17 years of age, I first became aware of spirituality. I learned about spirituality through people I met and through the things that Jesus taught.

And I was shocked once I finally got around to reading those teachings, that they were not what I thought. I realized that in the total vacuum of knowledge that I had had of the Bible and the spiritual life, that I had in a sense “filled it” with my assumptions and prejudices and biases.

I learned of the possibility of healing, of giving and receiving forgiveness. I began to experience life in a different way, and I realized that before that, I was existing, but not thriving.

I realized that it's possible to create a good life despite hardship and trauma and suffering. I think the journey can be described as going from existing...to truly living. That might be a good way to talk about the spiritual journey we are all on.

And one of the things we need, in order to do more than just survive, in order to create a good life for ourselves, is to find strength. Strength is among other things the ability to cope with difficulties to find resilience in ourselves.

All of you who are here today have strength - likely much more strength than you give yourself credit for. After all, we are each here despite what we’ve been through.

To find strength is to place our trust where we won’t be disappointed, to place our trust in something or someone proven reliable and good. And this is where spirituality comes in.

Psalm 20:7 “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God”.

This ‘trust’ that King David is referring to is about what we place our confidence in. David himself was a military commander and he witnessed first hand how those entering into battle with chariots and horses would often perish with those chariots and horses.

Though those horses and chariots seemed like sources of protection, they would fail. The darts and arrows of life, which we never really see coming, require us to have much greater protection.

So David learned to place his trust in his higher power, in God. And placing his trust in his higher power, who David knew as One Who is loving, gracious, patient, full of goodness AND immensely powerful...

Placing trust there proved the key to David’s joy and success in life. It completely worked for him to place His trust in God.

That would be my testimony in a nutshell as well. It totally works. I’m 45 years in to living as a very imperfect follower of Jesus and it totally works.