Rev Gav

How can I have faith when my world is falling apart?

1 Corinthians 3:1-9

Ephesians 2:8-10

Between 2014 and 2016, I experienced a significant trauma when, bit by bit, my life fell apart. Over this two-year period, I remember sitting with my spiritual director, and each month telling her, “Well, at least things can’t get any worse!” but they did.

Parish ministry had become increasingly stressful and this led to my first break down. I was leading two churches part-time whilst holding down other jobs to keep beans on the table and support my family. At the time I was also being consistently and publicly bullied by members of one of my local congregations — being called a heretic for my stance on same-gender marriage and receiving weekly hate mails from members telling me what was wrong with me and my ministry and theology. On top of this I was dealing with two very serious safeguarding issues with no support from the church hierarchy. When I went to my local bishop to tell him I was not coping, he told me to ‘get over myself’, and lacking support and finding myself getting mentally ill, I had no recourse but to resign from my position. As I sought new church posts, I went to see the new diocesan bishop, only to be told that ‘there was clearly a problem with me’, and after all I had been through, I was devastated and crushed.

I decided to take a year out to renovate an old house and during this time, as well as dealing with a serious family matter, my wife became very ill and my marriage broke down. I then discovered I had made a mistake with my finances and realised I had not paid a contractor on the house and owed a large sum of money. I found myself in debt, unable to cope, and ill. Very ill. My mental health suffered and at the lowest point I was suicidal. It was only the love for my two daughters that carried me through those darkest of times.

During this traumatic period in my life, through the pain and anguish, many times I cried out to God, but eventually I gave up and I stopped ‘trying’ to follow God.

Recently, one of my daughters asked me how, during this period, I kept my faith, and my immediate answer was that I didn’t, that I let go of God. She looked at me quizzically and asserted that today, I still have a faith, which is true, and this led me to consider the nature of faith and its presence in my life.

If I am honest, I struggle to describe faith. I find it much easier to talk about things like belief — the things I know about God, or trust — a conscious, rational decision to rely on God. Faith is something different. It is like a fire that burns within. It is not static, nor continuous, nor ever-present.

During my trauma I suppose I continued to believe in God but thought little about it. I certainly stopped consciously trusting in God, and any faith had been extinguished. And so, my daughter’s question is a good one. How come I now have a faith? How come the fire again burns within me on which my trust in God now depends?

I previously liked to say, looking back, that even though I had stopped clinging on to God, that God had not stopped clinging on to me; that when I became a Christian I entered into a covenant relationship with God, and that, although I could not keep my promises or my end of the bargain, God, being perfect was faithful and kept her promise to never let me go.

Despite this being true, it does not convey how this took place and it doesn’t fully answer my daughter’s question, and so I come to the most important part of this reflection and a revelation that I write through tears of gratitude and wonder.

When I think of my life back then, the graphic image that immediately springs to mind is the battlefields from the first world war — those war-torn muddy landscapes with water-filled craters, splinters of wood, smashed bodies, and barbed wire; a literal scene of devastation; and a no-mans land. Yet, there, amidst the debris, a single poppy flowered — an inconceivable, fragile beauty emerged in the ripped-apart landscape of my broken life.

The truth? I didn’t plant the poppy.

* * *

Faith, I discovered, is a gift from God that flowers within us, and I have no idea if I created an environment for that faith to grow, but I think it probably began when I made a conscious decision to follow Jesus. However falteringly or faithless that decision was made, and however lacking I was in my knowledge and belief, I did once choose to trust in the Jesus I encountered in the Bible, and follow him. I think that was when God took over the reins of my life — a God who is more loving and more everything than I could ever possibly imagine.

Faith was planted in me again, and the fact that this was a gift, one I certainly did not deserve or earn, makes it all the more beautiful; that God would honour me in this way, by once again reigniting the flame that had been so brutally dowsed, leads me to fall at God’s feet, bow the knee, and say thank you, thank you, thank you.

I realise that some of you will be reading or listening to this, and you are in that darkest of places, where God seems silent or absent, where you continually face the brokenness and barrenness of your own landscapes, and I pray that this message brings you hope that once again the poppy can flower in your heart as it has done for me.

With all my love in Christ.

Amen.