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As a follow-up, Dan shares what is called from us when we are to forgive our partner.

Concatenation: the linking of things together, or the state of being interconnected

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. Luke 14:28-33.

Last week, myself, two Allender Center staff members and a director of an Ethiopian ministry met to discuss developing a curriculum to train indigenous care givers in trauma and abuse therapy. This Ethiopian ministry serves street kids and prostituted boys, girls and women. They are a remarkable group and the prospect of working with them is a true honor.  As we spoke, I looked at the faces of my two Allender Center colleagues and I knew they were exhausted. We have been in the start-up phase of our ministry and we are busy preparing for year two of operations  where we will be adding an additional training program for lay people who work with people who know trauma in the past and/or present.

However, both of my colleagues have long and deep connections to East Africa.  They radiated with anticipation and intensity.  I felt old and tired.  But I remembered the fusion of joy I felt the last night I  was in Ethiopia when I knelt with friends on a linoleum floor until the blood in my knees began to drain into my feet and I felt the black hands from 14 nations bless our heads and howl us in waves of dance and sound to the throne of God.

I am bound to the faces of Cherry and Wondi, the two directors of this Ethiopian ministry.  They are two of the most courageous, beautiful, hilarious, passionate followers of Jesus I have ever met.  My heart yearns to be back in their presence.  And I am exhausted and I know every question we ask and the discussion regarding the grave impediments to the project are moving us all closer to the inevitable tipping point where we decide yes or no.  The plot always thickens; the decision congeals.

I was struck with the untenable reality that every decision is a simple yes or no.  But within the decision is the vast concatenation of choice that no one can possibly surmise.  One day you will make a decision and run out the door to get a carton of milk and it will be your last trip on the earth due to the insolent violence of a drunk driver. You will say yes to a ministry opportunity and not be able to calculate the number of hours you will spend keeping the team patched together while addressing the envy, hurt, and misunderstandings amongst your volunteer team.

It is far worse than the future is uncertain.  It is far worse than mere pessimism.  It is utter certainty that the avalanche of new choices will in their own right spawn new decisions that demand a reckless entry into more complexity.  Decisions don’t simplify into an esthetic purity; they propagate into a promiscuous orgy of chaos.

I know the language is extreme.  I also know most people are not foolish enough to start graduate schools or attempt to translate Western trauma care into a context that does not need the patronization of another Western approach to African issues.  Everything about the task feels daunting. In most African languages there are not words to address trauma based suffering and shame.  There is a dearth of expressions to account for the suffering that comes as a result of being a victim of injustice, especially with regard to one’s inner world.  Is that a failure or part of the culture’s wisdom?  Even the answer to that question reveals bias and sets up a series of choices that in turn takes us to a different place.

It would be easier simply to not go; or go and teach what we offer here and let the Ethiopians and East Africans do the translation.  It is easier to plunge ahead and not think or be overwhelmed by the complexity and quit.

Each decision is made in the presence of a veil that is lifted only when one begins the journey–and by then it is usually too late to turn back or change engines mid-flight.  No wonder we are called to count the cost, but every effort to do so only exposes the weight is greater than we can comprehend.

In my soul I knew the moment would come.  Our team was asked if we wanted to participate in a research study to interview and learn from a dozen African leaders who were already involved in trauma care. We had taught this same group 3 years earlier and the study would allow us to see what concepts translated and were helpful and what did not.  The question came as quietly as a soft bird twill on a cool spring wind.  Alluring, easy, seductive.  Thankfully we have no money. Thankfully there is no time.  We are exhausted and there is so much that needs to be done just to keep our little boat afloat.

Faces, sounds, piercing, haunting prayer, hands on my head, the movement of the room and the tears in Wondi’s eyes, the thousands of women, boys, and girls lining the streets feet from our hotel, the injera.

The value in counting the concatenated costs, known and unknown, is that it invites us to move as close as we can to the rumbling and rumination of desire deposited in us by the Spirit.  I don’t know if I heard God.  I can’t at the moment say Jesus told me what to do.  I can say the exhaustion, fear, resourcelessness did not dissipate the desire; it only intensified it.

We said yes–but only yes for now, only for the research, only for this one trip.   We need to know our limits.  We need to be realistic. We need to count the cost.  We need to say yes.  Yes to giving up. Yes to giving over.  Yes.

Instead, when a woman, like Sandra Fluke, who exercised her right as a citizen, testified before Congress on an issue that she deeply cared about she was met with disagreement, most loudly from Rush Limbaugh, in the form of highly evolved and thoughtful engagement. Oh, wait. I’m thinking of what I wish would have happened, something different than what has far too often become the norm in public discourse, a return to the elementary school playground strategy to avoid true interaction with another by utilizing bullying and name-calling.

Though juvenile there is sophistication to Limbaugh’s tactics.  To physically violate her, to actually set up a video camera to watch her having sex, as he said she should do in exchange for birth control being covered by her insurance, is too obvious a use of violence and abuse.  Rather an urbane barbarism was utilized – violation and abuse came in the form of maligning her sexuality and woman-ness with words. Limbaugh exercised the same freedom of speech that applied to Ms. Fluke.  The tragedy is not that he spoke, but that his attack bears no originality or imagination and it is one as old as time.

Limbaugh joins an army of others as he speaks “slut” and “prostitute” to describe Ms. Fluke.  These slurs and their linguistic cousins (whore, cunt, etc…) and the spirit behind them, have been used for centuries to violate women.  They have been the go to red herrings to justify the raping, killing, abusing, and silencing of women. Should a man have been sitting in Ms. Fluke’s seat before Congress advocating for the very things she was speaking for, none of those words would have been attributed to him for his position on the issue, and his sexuality would not have been attacked for exercising his freedom of speech. These words are labels that specifically make dirty and degrade that which makes a woman most a woman, that which reflects the glory of God, her body and her sexuality.  For too long, these labels have been used as weapons of evil and justification of the evil committed against the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins and aunts in our families, the women in our local communities, nation and world.

Limbaugh’s comments reflect more than the offensive insensitivities of a misogynistic radio host, but there is an all too well utilized vocabulary created specifically to do violence toward and destroy that which makes us as women uniquely beautiful.  And unfortunate as it is that these words slide off the tongues of men like Rush Limbaugh so easily, it has been disheartening to hear and see women on various media outlets joining him.  We live in a land where we are free to speak and yet the language we choose is so vile and violent toward women.  It is not lack of freedom that limits our vocabulary but lack of honor.  There is a disingenuous refusal to acknowledge the assault against the beauty of women and our sexuality and the concerted efforts to bond a woman’s sexuality with sleaze.  Limbaugh with his own words confirms that the image of a “slutty” woman on a video having sex is much more acceptable an image of a woman for him than one who is advocating for her sexual health, and he is not alone in this.  There continues to be a violent and disparaging fixation on a woman’s sexuality without honor as well as a blatant refusal to look at her face to engage her.

Our eyes are up here Mr. Limbaugh.  Will you look up to contend with us?

Susan Kim is a member of The Allender Center Teaching Staff. 

But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:13-15)

I didn’t sleep well last night.  I was awakened as I yelled at my 8 year old daughter for some infraction that was so slight it was a jeremiad solely to give vent to my bile.  My daughter, her dark thick hair in two braids, went skipping away as if she had been deaf to my explosion.

An older man was sitting on a bench nearby.  He was reading a thin, wrinkly paper and he took off his reading glasses that were perched on an aquiline nose.  His sniffed and casually said, “Your anger is what keeps her from wanting to be with you now that she has two boys of her own.”  I woke up with a start.  Time had collapsed, the images vanished, but the accusation remained like a knife dangling from my chest.

I tried to fall back asleep but the acrid accusation wouldn’t let me find a comfortable position in the bed.  I reasoned against the judgment. I have failed; I still do.  I am not the best of fathers–not even in the high B realm, but there are many things I have done that are good and I have been mostly consistent in owning my failures and asking for forgiveness.  Perhaps I have done so too often and with too great a demand to ignore my harm so I could pretend all is well. Within seconds my effort to find justification and solace led to more incrimination and disquiet.  If I tried to reason my way out, I felt more insane; if I ignored the eruption, I felt obsessed with the thoughts.

I got up and reread the passages I quoted at the beginning.  I am redeemed from darkness, holy, without blemish, under no accusation, with the legal notice of my debt cancelled, God having nailed it to the cross in order to publicly humiliate and disarm the powers and principalities of darkness. This is a big deal – a really cosmic big deal.  And yet what remains is that I am either making a molehill into a mountain or God has gone to ridiculous links to win a petty, small minded man to participate in reconciliation.

Even in reading these glorious passages I couldn’t seem to rise above the foggy, middle of the night assault that left me feeling condemned. The failure to find comfort in God’s comfort only made me feel that much more hopeless.

How the night ended and how I entered into what felt to be a war for my heart is not the point of this reflection.  If I fell victim and joined the perpetration of violence against my heart when my children love me, my wife delights in me, and we were vacationing with dear friends in a gorgeous part of the country when the dream came–then how do those who suffer contempt from their families, daily fear and loss over the paucity of love, survive from one night to the next?  How do any of us live with the residue of contempt and accusation deeply hidden in our hearts that occasionally leaks to the surface like a skin rash that makes us scratch with unabated fury?

The thing is, most of the time we keep the accusations underground in stainless steel containers that cordon off the dank and foul incriminations that only seem to rise in unbidden moments like dreams or flash to the surface in the midst of an unsettling crisis.  Quiet or severe storms can provoke the same unruly accusations.

If the gospel is as good as God offers, then it must have the power to dismantle the atomic bombs we keep hidden in the silos of our unconscious.  But the first task is to let the accusations that seem to startle us awake or haunt the edges of our consciousness come to their full fury and darkest assault.

Seldom is it wise merely to ignore or brush an accusation aside even if it seems to work for the short run.  What would it look like if we could let all the core fears and accusations that sting us and shadow our face in shame stand in line to spew their venom?

If the accusations of the one who curses have been swallowed by Jesus and every debt I owe has been publicly named and canceled at the cross, then it is time not merely to give the accusation no power, but in fact to let my heart feel how much power and joy the accuser has already fouled.

To stand accused is the context in which I let Jesus stand before the accuser to take each judgment as his own, rather than for me to bear it alone. I will not find solace in escaping or trying to mitigate the accusations–the only relief I know that will last, is to know that God is not the accuser, and God takes the accusations against me personally, as a direct assault on his promise and goodness.

I never fully fell back to sleep.  It seemed like a good morning to get up early and run.  As I opened the door and stepped out into the cool morning air I heard the birdsong and the fluttering of wings.  It sounded like a flock of angels preparing a new day for the spectacle of the cross.

Dr. Steve Call is an Associate Professor of Counseling at The Seattle School and co-teacher for the upcoming Intimate Mystery Conference in Seattle, WA.

Upcoming Events: Intimate Mystery Workshop, March 22-24 in Dallas, TX and Intimate Mystery Conference, April 13-14 in Seattle, WA.

As a therapist, my work involves stepping into people’s lives in a search for the exiled and despised portions of their story, that they might discover and embrace blessing.  This work is often done in a one on one setting where we join together, but inevitably we must part.  The work sets up the leaving from the first moment.  To be of any help, I must know the look, feel, taste, odor and sound of exile. Daily, I am reacquainted with it as my clients exit my office and I return home with tales of both exile and return which ethics, law and good self-care mandate that I keep to myself.  In the context of supervision and consultation groups, I am able to share the glorious, desperate and confusing moments of therapy.  But it is always in the context of exiles joining together to be of support rather than an ever-present community.

This experience of exile has been ever-present as I have traveled with The Allender Center staff to St. Louis, for the Advanced Counseling Certificate.  My journey always begins with several of the teaching staff coming together to share a ride to the airport.  Then at the gate, we meet up with the rest of our team.  The coming together is wonderful and there is much to share.  A day of travel brings us to St. Louis where we make our way to the hotel.  I usually see a couple of the participants in my learning group and greet them—more exiles gathered together.  Finally, the first morning brings everyone together for the large group teaching and the small group interaction—a full communion of exiles.  Knowing that this is not a natural state on this earth, we soak this up.  As the teaching and experiences both fill up and exhaust us over four days, the time to part approaches, and the earlier process reverses:  I part with the participants, enjoy a last day of conversation, play and travel with the staff before bidding adieu near the baggage claim, and then a quick drive home.  It is so good to be home.  And yet I can only narrate to my wife but a fraction of what I’ve seen, known, spoken and received while I was away.  My vocation as a therapist has brought every sinew and synapse of my body into deeper contact with exile and brought a greater hunger for Heaven—a place where confidentiality will not be a factor as we rejoice, grieve and brag on each other with gusto.

Andy Ide is a member of The Allender Center Teaching Staff. You can read his bio HERE. You can learn more about the Certificate Programs offered through The Allender Center HERE.