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Rubbish We Believe When the Poop Hits the Fan

IT’S ALL MY FAULT, GOD’S ANGRY, AND NOW HE’S VANISHED

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Vladimir Lenin

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

John 10:10

If God had told me all I needed to do to be healed and cancer-free was stand on one leg in a bowl of oatmeal while singing “God Save the Queen,” I’d have jumped right in without taking my socks off. I was desperate for healing. Who wouldn’t be? So when a book about how to receive God’s healing anonymously landed on my doorstep, I put the kettle on and dived in. I couldn’t wait to hear what this book had to say, as I was confident God could zap my tumor from its dark orifice with the snap of his heavenly fingers. Unfortunately, I never made it past the first few pages and my tea lay forgotten.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. The words stung and burned as if I’d sat butt naked on a fire ant nest. This book that promised so much encouraged me to just lay hold of my healing, to just have enough faith, to just believe, and even to just lay claim to my God-given, abundant (which implied “fully healed”) life. I’m paraphrasing somewhat, but you get the gist of what it said. I couldn’t read on.

Rather than feeling encouraged and hopeful—expectant even—that God can and does heal, guilt, fear, and hopelessness welled up alongside frustration and sadness. It was that small four-letter word that did it. By using the word just at every turn, the author had a gun loaded with insinuations pointed right at me, holding me hostage.

Each sentence implied it was my fault God hadn’t healed me. I obviously didn’t have enough faith, I wasn’t good enough, or I hadn’t figured out what God was teaching me. If my faith was stronger, or if I prayed certain prayers and just believed in my stone-cold, stubborn heart, God’s blessings would pour forth from heaven and I could claim my healing and skip through life’s meadows fully restored (the italics are my passive-aggressive frustration seeping out). It placed my healing firmly on my own shoulders. If I wasn’t healed, it would be my fault.

It was hurtful and damaging, not to mention theological bunkum that reminded me of bogus faith healers in white suits proclaiming the prosperity gospel at the expense of the hurting and hopeless. But annoyingly, it sunk in. Despite knowing it was nonsense, I was left feeling inadequate and somehow to blame for my suffering.

I’ve never met another woman who doesn’t believe some sort of rubbish about herself or who truly believes how wonderful she is, have you? Believing lies about ourselves seems to come free with our extra X chromosome, along with hormonal mood swings and the eternal search for a life-completing shade of lipstick. But when life falls apart and stinks worse than a week-old tuna sandwich, our perspective of what is true about God, our circumstances, and ourselves is rocked. It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not, and lies love to grow and take root in this fertile soil.

Friends, it’s time to call the lies what they are because this rubbish steals our abundant life right out from under our noses and keeps us locked in ever-shifting, life-sucking quicksand where it’s impossible to catch our breath. This is why it’s so important to deal with the lies before we do anything else. Then and only then can we find solid ground to build on.

Over the years I’ve believed more than my fair share of these lies, and never more so than during my grief and pain. The more I believed them, the more I watched myself untethering from God as I lost touch with his truth. As she carried her unborn son, who she knew wouldn’t survive more than a day after his birth, my friend Maria said that she had to kill her fear before it killed her.1 In the same way, we must kill the lies we believe before they kill our ability to live life to the full—but we can’t do this if we don’t know what they are. So the first thing we’ve got to do is identify them and bring them out of the shadows into the light.

The Lies We Believe

Self-Trash

Lies prefer to stay hidden and undetected, so let me ask you this: Have you ever walked numbly out of a doctor’s office and imagined the shock waves of your diagnosis spreading out to affect everything and everyone you love? Or perhaps you’ve blamed yourself for not getting pregnant or failing to find Mr. Right despite the ticktock of your biological clock. Maybe you’ve been up night after night believing the fallout from your broken marriage will never end and happiness will always elude you.

These are the kind of things lies whisper into our pain, and I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and been to therapy to prove it. Apparently we’re not alone.

When psychologist Martin Seligman researched thousands of people who’ve experienced suffering and how they dealt with it, he discovered three often-held core beliefs that stunt our recovery and therefore magnify our suffering:

Personalization: the belief we are to blame—it’s all my fault.

Pervasiveness: the belief all areas of our life will be affected.

Permanence: the belief the aftershocks will last forever—life will always be like this.2

As I read these everything in me shouted, “Yes, yes, YES! Me too! I believe them all!”

They’ve taken hold in the dark of night. I’ve cried myself to sleep churning my own personal versions over and over. These lies are so plausible, so real and tangible, I can reach out and touch their cold exterior. I call them my “self-trash.”

IT’S ALL MY FAULT

Despite being told I’d done nothing to cause my cancer, I still managed to blame myself. I’ve always eaten the entire apple—core, pips, stalk, the whole nine yards. Maybe it was that? Perhaps it was because I’m lazy and have never washed my fruit and veg properly, or maybe I ignored the symptoms. Then, to cap it all, I managed to heap on more blame for all the disruption, pain, and worry my illness and treatment rained down on everyone, from my family and friends to the lady who booked my appointments.

I constantly apologized for anything and everything. I still do. When the family’s waiting in the car outside yet another ladies’ loo at the third petrol station we’ve had to make an emergency stop at in the last half hour, I apologize repeatedly no matter how many times they tell me it’s fine. As another whopping medical bill lands with a thud on our doormat, I hand it to Al apologetically, with a million “I’m so sorry’s.”

Even though my cancer wasn’t my fault—not even the fault of the genes I was born with—I still believed somehow it was my fault. If it wasn’t the apple pips or the unwashed fruit, then God must be angry with me. Maybe I’d done something to deserve this, or he was testing me. Perhaps my faith wasn’t strong enough for him to heal me. Whatever the reason, however illogical, I believed somehow my cancer was my fault.

EVERY PART OF MY LIFE IS AFFECTED

When my bum got cancer it felt like my whole life got cancer. I hated the way it seeped into every nook and cranny, the small everyday things as well as the big whoppers. I didn’t have the energy to even cook for my kids, and I watched as kind friends ferried them to their activities. It was a gift, but it was a visible sign the cancer was seeping out from where it started, weaving its way through my body and life, and I believed it robbed me of my role as mum.

Then there was the impact I saw on the big important parts of life: I assumed that one argument meant our marriage was falling apart and on the fast track to divorce, or that every teenage outburst meant the kids were so worried and messed up they were doing drugs to numb their pain. Even as I began to get better, I couldn’t do things like run the trails the same way I used to. Just walking the dogs became a game of connect the dots between the public bathrooms in the park and porta-loos on neighborhood construction sites, all the while praying for the presence of loo paper. My cancer traveled with me. Where I went, it went, and I couldn’t see a part of my life where its tendrils weren’t wrapped around, choking me.

LIFE WILL ALWAYS BE LIKE THIS

As the fog of cancer descended, I couldn’t see how life could ever return to how it was BC—before cancer. The life I saw stretching ahead seemed permanently stained by my current cancer-colored reality. Surely I’d always feel this way. How could I ever feel normal again? The surgeries had completely replumbed me, and I couldn’t trust my digestion for longer than it took to make a cup of tea, so I imagined a life of bathroom-seeking anxiety panning out ahead of me. Not to mention the ever-present reality that the cancer might return. I wanted my life back—all of it—but I couldn’t see that ever happening.

And what if I didn’t make it? If the kids had to hold my hand as I breathed my last, would they ever recover, or would they be scarred for life? I just couldn’t see how life could change.

It was as if a second cancer of lies ate away at me along with the tumor. See for yourself in this list of even more lies I claimed for myself.

I believed no one really understood what I was going through.

I believed people saw me as pitiful, a charity case.

I believed I had to cope with a smile and be strong.

I believed I was different from everyone else.

I believed my ostomy bag and scars made me ugly and unwanted.

I believed I was a burden.

I believed I was broken and unmendable.

I believed I was weak—only weak people get sick. (I didn’t believe this about Mum and Jo, but I sure did when it came to me.)

Then there were the lies I believed about God, which is kind of tricky and awkward given I’m a pastor’s wife.

God-Trash

To make myself feel like a normal human being during treatment, I would hide the bulging ostomy bag on my belly under floaty sweaters (or as my kids called them, my “baggy” clothes) and camouflage the bags under my eyes with industrial-strength concealer. And since I never lost my hair during chemo, each Sunday I would sit in church looking just like BC Niki. Except I wasn’t.

I love our church, so I never felt the need to fake a smile or hide my cancer, and from the front we were as real and honest as we could be. But since I didn’t look sick on the outside, I appeared to have it all together on the inside. No one knew what was really going through my head as I went through the motions on my darkest days. I call these lies my “God-trash.”

God’s left me.

God’s fed up with my moaning, angry outbursts, and neediness.

God doesn’t care anymore.

God’s busy with more important things (like the Ebola outbreak in Africa) and more spiritual people (like Julie at church, who’s annotated her whole Bible—in color!).

God doesn’t see me, and if he does he ignores me.

God doesn’t love me like everyone else.

God’s not as good and merciful as I thought.

I’ve done something to make God angry.

God’s trying to teach me something I’m just too dense and tired to figure out.

I’m the exception when it comes to God’s love and grace.

God’s mad at me for some mysterious reason.

Maybe you resonate with a few of these immediately and can pinpoint your own daily battles. Or perhaps you’re feeling a little smug, grateful your beliefs are so strong you don’t struggle with this nonsense. But twenty years in ministry have taught me we all believe this trash at some level—however buried or camouflaged—and never more so than when tragedy strikes and our defenses are down. This is why, if we are to find solid ground and begin to breathe again, we must deal with them.

Dad, Dandelions, and Digging Deep

When I was a kid, my dad showed me how to pull dandelions out of our lawn. He told me there’s no point in just snapping off the stalk and spiky leaves; it was important to dig out the entire root if I didn’t want them to grow back and stab my bare feet next summer.

Trying to find God’s full life in the midst of our less-than life without dealing with Seligman’s three P’s or our God-trash and self-trash is like dancing through the sprinkler in the heat of summer on a lawn full of spiky dandelions. We can do it, but it’s not nearly as much fun, and we’ll finally give up and head inside.

When I wrestled my first dandelion from the lawn, I was amazed at how big and strong its single taproot was and how deep it had grown into the soil. Seligman is right: the three P’s, along with other lies we believe about God and ourselves, magnify and prolong our suffering. If we want to do more than just build resilience and heal from the painful things in life—if we want to live life fully in the midst of the pain and beyond—we must pull up those lies by their roots. God is calling us to grab hold of his abundance right where we are, but the call of God always requires us to leave something behind. To live abundantly, even in the midst of pain and suffering, we must leave behind the false beliefs holding us back.

So, if you’re serious about grabbing the most out of the life you’ve been dealt, get a pen, a pad of paper or one of those fancy journals you got last Christmas, and your Bible, and find somewhere quiet, because this is where we start to learn to breathe again. If you’ve got small children, hide in the bathroom, get a neighbor to watch them, or take a long bath. Anything to love yourself enough to dive in.

The questions at the end of each chapter are where the magic happens. They are super important and I’d hate for you to skip them. Because while the practices are the map, it’s not until you start walking the roads themselves (by doing the work in the questions) that you make progress to where you want to be.

Jesus came to give you abundant life—now go grab it.

I am a Thriver.

I believe life doesn’t have to be pain-free to be full.

I reject the lies of the world about who and whose I am.