what do we do when life is out of control?

 

We have asked our vicar, Mark Prentice, to write this one for us as we were struggling to make the words in the page make sense. I think he's done a good job of it though. If you want to hear more of his wisdom you can drop in on the 'Mie vicars blog' just search that bit in speech marks to find it. If you're local to us visit at Andrews church on Britannia road or st John's church, Caldwell hall road, both have services at 10:30 on a Sunday, or join the live stream on YouTube or the church website. Or you can catch up on the live stream in the week, I often do this when I've not been well enough or awake enough to get to church or watch live.

What do we do when life is out of control? 

Not just when it seems out of control…  there are days like that, when the problem lies in us.  The chaos is within, and it prevents us from meeting the circumstances of our lives in an ordered way.  But what about when the chaos is outside of us?  When life is genuinely beyond our control?

A moment’s reflection confronts us with the difficult truth that chaos is often lurking just beneath the surface.  We are painfully aware that is lays siege to our ‘normal’: finance; employment; health; an accident that is someone else’s fault, an error of judgement…  so much of life is simply beyond our control, and very few of us will make it through life without that chaos breaching our defences.  We will feel a victim in our own lives, to our own lives.  And the question remains:  what do we do when life is out of control?

There are remarkably few options.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, avoidance can often be our instinctive and reflex reaction.  Maybe if we ignore it, very occasionally it might just go away.  But many of us have learnt through bitter experience it doesn’t.  Usually it just gets worse.  Mind you – that doesn’t stop us trying it as a first response!?  When sustained avoidance becomes our settled strategy, we call it escapism… and escapism can quickly become increasingly destructive – to ourselves and to those around us.

When we can’t avoid any longer, we try to bring order out of chaos.  We can get advice, support, re-prioritise, make changes.  And often we can restore the veneer of order, drive the chaos back below the surface.  Sometimes the best we can hope for is ‘feeling’ that we’re in control.  But it’s better than nothing, and a quick Youtube search will return a range of techniques…  Some of them work.  Slowly the storm – or at least the sense of it - recedes… till the next time. 

There is another option.  In some ways it is the most difficult.  It starts with recognising that we aren’t in control.  This isn’t resigning to fatalism, still less is it abdication of responsibility.  Quite the opposite.  It’s simply coming to terms with a deeper reality.  For all our systems and techniques, for all our efforts and determination to impose order and structure, it turns out we are fundamentally part of the chaos of life, rather than its solution.  We can easily contribute to the chaos of our own lives, and be part of the chaos in other people’s lives.  On occasion, the storm rages so fiercely, that this simple truth is unavoidable.  Our lives are so out of control, so shaped by factors outside of our choosing, that we cannot with any sense of integrity cling to the myth that we are masters of our own destiny, or indeed captains of our own soul. 

And then what?  We can’t surrender to meaningless.  Well, in theory we could, but a deep spiritual instinct prevents us taking this option.  At a profound level we know we matter, that even our suffering, even our chaos has meaning and significance.  So what do we surrender to… or rather ‘who’ do we surrender to? 

For Mark and Ruth, that question has an answer as profound as it is simple.  You know them well enough to know their faith in Christ.  As the storm of their lives has raged higher, as the efforts to bring order out of chaos have slowly been stripped away, their trust in Christ has deepened to meet the challenges they are facing.  This is not something new to them.  They have trusted Christ for many years, looking to Him as Captain of their souls and as Master of their destiny.   Some of those years have been calm, others tumultuous, foreshadowing the storm they are living through now.  In all of them they have learned to trust Christ.  That heritage means they have the strength and courage to trust Him now. 

This isn’t a naïve trust, a Disney-trust that hopes against all the evidence that everyone will live ‘happily ever after’.  Christianity, properly understood, has never been so naïve.  Those of you close to them know too that this isn’t escapism by another name.  It is a reconciling to reality.  Not just the reality of Ruth’s illness, but a deeper and more ancient reality.  A reality that is found in Christ, the very definition and foundation of Reality.  Christ who Himself has entered the chaos and the storm of this life, and this death, and who in the midst of the tempest, ‘entrusted Himself’ to His Father. 

As Christ Himself entered death, it was to forge a way through it.  To chart a course through this undiscovered country.  He navigated safely even through this greatest of all storms.  And He offers to walk with us as we seek to do the same.  If you have ever been genuinely lost, you know the relief of suddenly seeing the familiar face of someone who knows where you should be, and how to get you there.

For those of us who share the Brailsford’s faith, we know that here is the only solid ground on which we can stand, and from which we can navigate the storms of life and death.  You have already seen for yourself the difference this has made for them.  Many of you have found yourselves unable to make sense of their dignity, their calm and ability to accept and deal with all that is happening to them.  As the storm has worsened, they seem to have become more still.  This is the outworking of their faith in Christ.  It is born of their willingness to accept their own limitations, but also to accept a God who has none. 

We were designed to bring order out of chaos.  But we were not designed to do so alone. 

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