Setbacks and the fullness of life

Relax. You're still you

Photo credit: No idea

What’s not to trust about life? What’s not to trust about setbacks in life?

Setbacks are inevitable. But what is the real need to be allergic to them?

There will be a time, let’s remember, when we’ll all be gone. Not many years from now, people we’ve not met will own our houses, have our money, and drive on our roads. People in only a couple of decades, possibly, will know nothing of our stories, and will only encounter our names in epitaphs and family trees.

Our best response to setbacks now is therefore the same as our basic response to life itself. For me, it begins with the assurance that whether I live or die I am the Lord’s. And that is robust, even when I myself am not robust.

Nothing can fall out of God, after all. Every quark and every neutrino is ordained, and maintained, and promised.

We’re not lost, to say it plainer, and God isn’t lost.

To say it practically, we might as well trust God in everything this side of death, even our setbacks, since we’re going to have to trust him on the far side too.

There is life before death, in other words, and we are intrinsically part of that. This connectivity, this continuity, will continue.

So here’s the thing, about setbacks in life. If you regard each of them as a gateway into life, whatever that is, the fear of setbacks and their apparent consequences ends.

We can sure try to have the right Everything, and set all our affairs up to please us, and we can imagine that in this way we’ll finally be without fear. But good luck. Or we can allow the reality of every feeling we get when our okayness system inevitably fails. And then shrug.

The burden of carrying our ego self and mistaking it for our real self then vanishes.

The clarity, the freedom, after that – what Christians like to call trusting – is a surprise intimacy with another world, THE world, actually, the real world, hidden in this one, right here, partly disguised as our troubles.

What part of you is angry about your latest setback in the world you see? What part is terrified? (And let’s be clear, the right name for anger is actually Terror.) You have a chance to know that if you walk away. You get to see what part of you survives. That part of you, you’ll recognise, was always there. And it’s indestructible.

To say it another way, living life in the heart with integrity, and not in the idolatry of setback-avoidance, proves no interruption with your true identity. To do anything other than this is disorienting, and frightening. To live outside of the stockade of your own construction is to live in the continuum of life before time. And that’s right where you’re built to be.

Still grieving about a setback? Still frightened and hurt by something you bought into emotionally that didn’t go right? Here’s what happens when you lose your fear of being hurt in this way. The grief doesn’t disappear; but you do become able to assimilate it. The grief doesn’t get smaller; but what happens is, you realise you’re bigger.