Whatever I
share with you comes from my place in the body of Jesus Christ. It is not
better or worse than another believer’s offering of ministry, but it is
inevitably going to have differences that are intended by God. Of course, we
always want the differences in the gifting of believers to come together as
beautiful notes of harmony, and so I trust that what I share today will
harmonize with what God is already doing in your life.
For me, that
includes the necessity of doing my utmost to connect the heartaches of God’s
children to the comfort of God’s words. I have been shaken up by too many
stories of childhood abuse, struggles with eating disorders, bondage to
addictions like pornography, leaving me longing to know how to apply God’s
comfort in life-experience, not only in theological explanations.
This morning I
was considering the difference between the apostle John writing “behold” rather than “I saw”,[1]
and suddenly, there it was. Not a revelation of something spectacular; not some
amazing experience of being “in the
Spirit” in whatever way John was in the Spirit. No, it was nothing
fanciful, or special, or dramatic at all. It was a sudden feeling of deep,
inner pain, joined by the friendship of tears that sometimes seem all too quick
to make themselves known.
My immediate
thought was, “what’s the connection?” I do not presume to make the decision to
separate something I read in the word from something that is going on inside
me. I trust God to bring things together in ways that only he would think of
doing, resulting in help and healing the natural mind would never imagine.
The pain I
felt this morning was nothing new. I had felt it for a long time before someone
gave me a way to describe it. It is called, “attachment pain”. There does not
need to be a memory to go along with it; there does not need to be flashbacks
of abuse, or conscious experiences of trauma. It is pain associated with failed
attachments, or failed relationships.
I have often
wondered what it would have been like to grow up in the garden of Eden without
sin ruining everything. The very design of man as male and female speaks of
God’s creative masterpiece of relationship. A baby would have entered the world
into the arms of waiting parents. Long before he could ever understand such
things, he would experience the way God had designed his mother so that the
early months of feeding would require the most personal and intimate of
attachments.
If you have
ever seen the expression in the eyes of a mother and her baby looking at each
other during breastfeeding, you have seen the glory of God in designing us to
attach to relationships in the most warm and life-giving expressions of love.
Such things are to help us understand what it means that God so loved the world
that he would send his only Son in the likeness of sinful man, so that he could
be lifted up on beams of wood that would spread his arms open wide as a
Shepherd longing to gather his lost sheep into his love.
Even the pain
of failed attachments can point us to God because he tells us why attachments
fail, and why we are so self-centered and self-consumed that parents and babies
do not attach in the loving ways we were designed to experience. He can explain
why siblings are more likely to live in rivalry than honest and sincere
attachment. He tells us why relationships fail, why fear is more common than
faith, and lust is more common than love. It is all explained by one simple
fact: “All we like sheep
have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way”.[2] God’s way is the way of love; our way is the way of self; hence a
world full of attachment pain.
The reason
that someone like me has hope in the face of inexplicable heartache is because
of how this verse from the Bible finishes:
“and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of
us all.” Jesus, longing to attach with us as the
firstborn over many brothers,[3] bore the very iniquity of the man he had created, in order to
return his people to the relationships of utter and eternal attachment he had
designed for us. This is what we long for, and what we mourn for in its
absence.
Since first
finding that there was a name to identify the sabotaging pain that would rise
up from nowhere, I have heard too many stories of dear children of God carrying
this pain, and often wondering why it is there. Many people who have grown up
in churches, and have tried for long years to just be the good boy or girl
everyone expects them to be, find their masks crumbling with a relentless pain
that defies explanation. Pastors and wives express their confusion and
heartache over churches that dismissed them without any regard for the biblical
description of relationships among God’s children. Some people completely give
up on the church because judgment, condemnation, and rejection are far more
common than healthy, honest, heart-to-heart, attachment.
A conclusion I
have come to after a decade of working with children is that they instinctively
know how to attach to others, but would only develop a fear of attaching if it
is taught to them. They attach to their parents without any effort, but can be
taught to shut down by simply afflicting enough pain to discourage them from
trying. They attach to other relatives and caregivers as the most normal thing,
unless these relatives or caregivers communicate to them that they are not
wanted. They attach to their peers, even from a very young age, unless their
peers respond with cruelty, rejection, and hatred.
I say this
because I would like to encourage people to realize that attachment pain may be
very common, but it is not normal. Just as God did not design paradise to
experience death, or sin, he did not design paradise to include attachment
pain. We who have hope in Christ have the assurance that there is coming a day
when he will wipe away such pain, and lead us into the greatest and most
wonderful attachments we could ever imagine, in a world of joy that will never
end.
In the
meantime, join with me in holding on to such promises of God as this: “He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.”[4] It doesn’t matter whether your brokenheartedness is over your sin,
or the sin of others against you, God heals the wounds. He will also heal
relationships where both parties will let him.
When
God tells us, “Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted,”[5] he invites us to mourn our sin, and the sins of others, anything
that his caused attachments with God and others to fail, and feel the comfort
that he brings to all who will come to him in such honesty and humility.
Jesus
presented himself as the one who came “to
proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”[6] That is such a thorough description of healing that there is no
doubt this includes God’s remedy for anything we would associate with
attachment pain and its symptoms.
I do not need
to find the word “Alzheimer’s” in the Bible to know how to pray for someone,
help a family adjust, or help people direct their hearts into the eternal hope
of Christ in the midst of heartbreaking changes. I do not need to find the word
“Schizophrenia” in the Bible to know that we can walk with someone in the hope
and grace of Christ, and seek the peace of mind that God has promised.
In the same
way, it is not necessary to find “attachment pain” in the Bible to admit we
feel it. We do not need to find “anorexia” in the Bible, nor “marijuana”.
Scripture is clear in its message of hope to people caught in any addiction,
overwhelmed with any fear, feeling any pain, and we simply need to “teach
what accords with sound doctrine”[7]
as we respond to whatever we face in people’s lives.
In my case, it
was this verse that got me going this morning: “At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven,
with one seated on the throne.”[8] Considering
that John said, “and behold,” instead
of “and I saw”, touched something in my heart and I needed to immediately bring
it to God. Even as the tears of pain rose up from within, the comforts of God
poured down from above. I was not a mere bystander who was invited to come and
see something that John had experienced a long time ago in some isolated
experience of wonder. Every child of God who ever reads this verse, hears
resonating within their hearts the cry of “behold!” By faith, we can look at
the things John saw and behold them. What he saw, and wrote down into
Scripture, we can now receive by hearing these words, and feeling the same
faith rise up within our hearts as John felt as God wrapped the vision of
heaven around his awestruck soul.
I would not
tell you about my experience with attachment pain if I did not have a glorious
message of hope to share with you as well. At the same time, I could not keep
my experience to myself when I know that there are many brokenhearted believers
in Jesus Christ who need someone putting a name to the pain so they know they
are not alone. We can all feel some greater comfort in knowing that God will
keep healing this pain in this lifetime, and lead us into pain-free attachments
of godly love that will remain intact and secure forever.
From my heart,
Monte
©
2013 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless
otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy
Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
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