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Monday, May 27, 2013

Pastoral Ponderings ~ Attachment Pain and the Comfort of God

          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.)


[1] Revelation 4:2
[2] Isaiah 53:6
[3] Romans 8:29
[4] Psalm 147:3
[5] Matthew 5:4
[6] Luke 4:18-19
[7] Titus 2:1
[8]  Revelation 4:2

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