Looking after it - Yourself
Recently I have been challenged not only to finish well – always an ambition of mine – but to run the race well. I can only finish well if I run well: as any student of athletics knows.
This challenge has changed my thinking about how I should live my life. I made my first formal commitment to follow Jesus when aged 9 at school in the Himalayas. I did so because I wanted to ensure that when I died I would go to heaven. Yes, I have learned that there is much more to following Jesus than securing a good exit route but to me as a 9 year old in a missionary boarding school that seemed quite important at the time.
As a result I have treated lightly (in some ways rightly) the occasion of my eventual death. I now realise that sub-consciously I was living my life at a pace dictated not by living out a full life-time but by trying to get as much done as possible before the glad time came to meet my maker.
I have now been reminded that the likelihood is that I will live my three score and ten, my God-ordained span of life. To finish before then is to finish early and that is not usually God’s plan – he does not need me in heaven until the right time.
So if I live my life in such a way as to cut short what he has given me to do … well that is disobedient and sinful. It is poor stewardship of what I have been given. If I want to finish well, I need to run well, not full pelt all the way. It is a marathon not a sprint.
The bible provides us with a context for running a good race, for looking after ourselves.
2 Corinthians 4: 1-18
particularly verse 7, “but we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” and verse 16, “though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
Stress
One of the major challenges we have to face in our culture and in our time is that of stress. When Paul wrote these verses the experience of stress was different from what it is today. Stress would have occurred from time to time at points of crisis: such as being shipwrecked!
Paul’s body would have responded physically and psychologically to the stress and when the occasion of the stress was over his body would have responded again in a way to aid recovery.
The main difference between the stress that Paul experienced and the stress that we experience (apart from the obvious actual circumstance of being whipped and beaten up) is that his stress would have been short-lived and then followed by time to recover.
We live in a culture (and many of us buy into this hook, line and sinker whilst others fight against it) where stress is non-stop and there is little recovery time.
For example:
- You wake up in the morning to the deeply unpleasant sound of an alarm (why do all alarm clocks make a terrible sound?).
- You put on the radio or TV and get worried by a news report about child abduction or rising mortgage rates.
- The household goes through 60 minutes of anguish as sleepers are chased out of bed, clothes are dragged out of the washing and ironed, keys are lost and buses missed.
- No time for preparing for the day with a leisurely breakfast and time to pray together. On the contrary, inject some caffeine into the system and get running.
- Sit in a traffic jam building annoyance with every red light and idiot driver.
- Drive or ride and text and phone and listen to the ipod all at the same time – but forget to process your thoughts from the issues of the day before.
- Rush into work without time to compose yourself and go straight into a confrontation with a class of 30 kids or a difficult patient or a client with a complaint.
- Turn on the computer and spend 10 minutes deleting spam then get faced with a million email messages tyrannizing your timetable and prioritizing your day for you.
- The www speeds everything up so everyone expects an answer seconds after they have hit “send”.
- Keep up the caffeine fixes and grab a sandwich whilst on your feet.
- The computer blinks and beeps at you all day with messages and pop ups and sounds which mean - you’re not sure what.
- The mobile shouts and squeals with messages and calls (and that is just other peoples’ phones).
- You get home to more calls and people wanting meals or help with homework or just needing to make your own dinner, prepare for a meeting, balance your finances.
- Even without a meeting you decide to watch the football and end up screaming at the TV. Or watch Big Brother or East Enders or the News and work yourself into a lather about man’s unpleasantness to man.
- Check your email, msn, skype, myspace, facebook, twitter … oh and open the post.
- Is there a bill to pay or on overdue one to worry about?
- Have a row with someone on the phone, or a child, and try to get to sleep with a dozen worries circling around your brain.
I feel stressed out just thinking about it. Hopefully your life isn’t like that but I think you will you get the drift.
Even assuming you get a really good night’s sleep – when are you not stressed? When does your body recover?
The various reactions in your body that help you cope with stress are good for a few minutes but are simply not designed to keep up with 24/7 pressure.
The result is stress; which leads to
- Increase in pain
- Increase in anxiety
- Increase risk of illness
- Increased fatigue
- Increased depression
So if you are feeling like that, you may be glad to realise that it is not just you!
The pace of life has increased - which brings about stress and
the pace of life allows for less restoration time – which means no time to recover.
I don’t just feel stressed a lot. The point is my body is giving up trying to help me deal with stress and is working against me. It is telling me to slow down, rest, look after myself, do less. It will put me in hospital if it needs to.
As the Psalmist reminds us, “Be still and know that I am God”.
Instead of, “Don’t just sit there, do something,” we sometimes need, “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
If I don’t respond to what my body is telling me then I am not going to get to my three score and ten – and I will not have run well and I will not finish well. This is because although a certain amount of stress is good and healthy, the amount of stress that many of us experience is not. In fact it accelerates the rate at which our body goes wrong and eventually dies.
However, when we manage stress we are managing our lifetime strategically.
How do we do that? Well the picture that Paul uses is that of jars of clay. Fragile, breakable things which are not that attractive to look at. But what is inside them is a treasure, very special.
He has been talking about it in the verses before. The light of the knowledge of Jesus shining in our lives and through us to others. Through 2 Corinthians Paul explores the theme of power in weakness; God’s comfort in our discomfort; life and light against death and darkness. The opposites that coincide in God’s plan.
Paul brings two more opposites together here – life and light held in a dying physical body. Something precious held in a clay jar.
2 Corinthians 4:7
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us.
When we look at how we are living the life God gives us, how we are following Jesus and being lights in the darkness, it becomes clear that it is very much his doing and not ours.
Arch Hart (the Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena) takes this a bit further and says that stress is living outside the jar. In other words, God has given us a certain amount of time, energy and physical resource and when we live in a way which is beyond that, we experience stress.
That should be stress which helps us, directs us back to working within the boundaries, back within the clay jar. But our tendency is to ignore the warning signs and carry on outside his plan for us. At that point stress becomes a negative thing and begins to damage us.
It is just like money – if we spend more than we have in the bank we go into debt. Short term debt, quickly repaid, need not do us any harm. Long term debt will cause all sorts of problems.
So we probably all recognize what I am talking about.
What do we do about it?
We need to look after our bodies and our souls. We need to address the issue of a healthy work-life balance. For now I want to comment briefly on some other steps we can each take personally to address this issue and also discuss how we try and re-enforce that with what we do as a community of faith here at the Vineyard.
PERSONAL ACTION
I am told by the medics that stress is an increasingly common problem. So much so that some define it as an epidemic leading to widespread depression. In fact so much so that many, many of us in this room are suffering – some without realising it.
Depression
As the medics’ understanding of depression is improving they are diagnosing an increasing number of people with stress related depression who were previously not identified. Apparently around 1 in 6 of us could be diagnosed as clinically depressed. That is a big deal and means that it affects all of us here – either directly or through someone who is a family member, friend or work colleague.
These days depression is much less a matter of inherited illness. Sometimes it occurs as a result of loss but increasingly it is as a result of stressful lives.
As a broad generalisation (different people will react in different ways of course); in women depression frequently manifests itself in some form of anxiety and is felt whereas in men it frequently manifests itself in substance abuse and is acted out.
The cause of stress related depression and illness is most often a result of choices and decisions we have made.
- We take on too many commitments.
- We work too hard and for too long.
- We over-commit in finances and lifestyle expectations so we have to pursue bigger more demanding jobs.
- Thus we put ourselves under financial pressure.
- We associate business and hard work with success and affirmation – wrongly.
But the hard fact is that if we are living within God’s boundaries for our lives, if we are within our jars of clay, then we will have sufficient money and time and energy and space and probably health to be who we are meant to be.
If we run out of money then often it is because we have spent too much.
If we run out of energy we have worked too hard.
If we run out of health we have put ourselves under too much pressure.
If we are too busy, we are too busy.
And the result of living our God-given lives is not peace and fun but anxiety, illness, fatigue and sorrow.
SLEEP
You may not realise but many of you wish you were a giraffe. Why?
Because a giraffe needs less than 2 hours sleep a day.
Compare a python which needs 18 hours.
Arch Hart, again, describes sleep as God’s antidote for stress.
So I have been doing some research on sleep. There is a lot of conflicting information out there but some things do seem to be agreed upon:
- We don’t sleep enough.
- Lack of sleep is the main cause of road traffic accidents and workplace accidents apparently.
- Lack of sleep is a cause of illness.
- It is possible to sleep too much (over 9 hours).
- The amount of sleep we require is, “What we need not to be sleepy in the daytime”. Jim Horne. Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre.
- Sleep works in 90 minute cycles for adults. You need either 5 or 6 cycles (most say 6), on average, over the course of 7 days. I.e. 7½ or 9 hours.
- Each cycle contains 3 or 4 stages each of which you need and each of which restore different parts of your system.
- You should be able to wake up without an alarm – if not you are not getting enough sleep.
- If you wake before you have slept 7½ hours you need more exercise.
- Your body sleeps better when it thinks it knows what is going on through habit (so try to go to bed and wake up at the same time each night – including weekends).
- A nap in the afternoon (less than 20 minutes or over 1½ hours) is brilliant.
- Organise your bedroom as an environment for sleep. Remove distractions (TV, mobile phones etc), dark, comfortable.
- With babies establish a routine and don’t let the baby fall asleep in your arms because of the pattern it will establish and which will cause you grief for years.
- More than one drink of alcohol will mean that your body wakes from the light stages of sleep easily and will lead to interrupted sleep.
- Caffeine stays in the system for a long time and is active for about an hour. It makes it more difficult to go to sleep or will wake you in the stages of light sleep.
- Exercise will help you sleep but it is better at the beginning of the day than the end.
- Avoid sleeping pills.
- Keep your conscience clear (Jesus said, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger”).
Sleep and rest is difficult for me because there is so much I have to do and so much I want to do – even if it is just reading books. But I am learning how my body must have sleep and rest if it is to function better the rest of the time.
An analogy: our immersion tank
Like our immersion tank. It is like a big kettle with enough water to fill a bath or run several showers. When the central heating is off in the summer we heat water through the immersion.
When the water is cold it takes about 45 minute to heat up. If, once hot, we run a bath the cold water comes in at the bottom of the tank whilst the hot water is going out to the bath. As cold water comes in it is heated up to replace the hot water going out.
If we immediately run another bath or someone has a shower and then does some washing up, for example, the tank will empty out the hot water and get cooler and cooler. Until we stop drawing off the water and allow it to heat up again we won’t get hot water.
So we turn off the hot taps for a while. You could say that when we are not running a hot tap nothing useful is going on. Everyone is getting dirty and we are not doing anything about it! But actually, something is going on. The heating element is working quietly away inside the tank heating up the water. When enough time has passed there will be plenty of hot water again.
Similarly, when we lie down to sleep or just sit in a chair and watch the sun go down. We may not think we are doing anything but our body is recovering. We are being restored physically whilst we rest. That is why sportsmen sleep a lot – because their body needs loads of recovery time. Also whilst asleep our brain is going back over the recent hours and sorting it out – what do we need to remember, what can we forget (a bit like a defrag if you are a computer person)?
2 Corinthians 4:16
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
This is a call to look after yourself. Although they are “wasting away” we need to care for our physical body. One day we will be given new bodies but until then we should look after them as much as possible. And a most imnportant way of doing so is to sleep.
Do you remember what I said about the strong theme in 2 Corinthians about power in weakness, life in death? Paul is urging us to allow God to renew us although we are in a body that is “wasting away”.
Note two things about this phrase:
Firstly: to renew is not just like replacing a worn out tire. It is about an ever-increasing renewal. He is pointing us forward (you can see it in the next verse where he talks about the future eternal glory) to the time when we will stand complete and whole before our creator and Lord. Our inner person is growing and is full of life and is being renewed. This is something that happens daily.
Secondly: there is a routine and rhythm to growing a spiritual life which starts at the daily level and works upward to weekly and annually and so on. Sleep is actually part of this but so is our devotional life, what Spurgeon called the “culture of the inner person”. Although what we do as a community of faith helps, at the end of the day you are responsible for your life. God gives you what you need and you should feed and care for this part of your person every day.
CORPORATE ACTION
When Alison and I first planted this Vineyard we wanted to try and avoid being a church of meetings as much as possible. Some years later we now find that we have a full diary and a full programme of things going on. On the one hand very exciting, on the other hand exhausting and perhaps distracting from our purpose and vision.
So I would like to re-state some of principles which are important for us and which may help ensure that being part of this Vineyard does not add to your stress levels and take you out of your God given boundaries.
You can read these in another paper called “Reinforcing rest”.
What I am saying is that although, as we grow, there will be lots going on and often several things going on at once, you don’t have to do them all. You don’t have to come to weekly worship each week – unless you think that is right for you.
You are responsible for both: for your jar of clay and for attending to the “inner person”, the life of Christ within. You are responsible for being renewed day by day. You are responsible for looking after yourself. God loves you and doesn’t need you to drive yourself hard to impress him or to join him any earlier than necessary. So relax and get some sleep!
David Flowers, 25/06/2007