Living a Life of Welcome
Have you ever noticed that we grow the most when we are struggling through a challenging season?
Have you ever noticed that we grow the most when we are struggling through a challenging season? I have noticed this throughout the different seasons of my life, and although I’m always grateful for what I’ve learned, I confess that I don’t always appreciate the journey suffering brings.
How about you?
Why is that?
When the reality of life strikes and shows us that life is not always full of good and happy times or relationships but is a mishmash of all that is good combined with all that is difficult, challenging, heart breaking, and filled with loss and suffering – it can be very hard to cope well. Yet it is those exact times when we are being offered an opportunity to welcome our experience and growth through it.
Welcoming? Why and what do we need to be welcoming?
Welcoming helps keep our hearts soft and open to growth.
In challenging seasons, when we face the unexpected – those unwanted times we all have, we can welcome many things. Things that help and things that don’t. Helpful welcoming things might include curiosity. Or stillness and silence. Or mystery. Or hope. Or remembering. It doesn’t mean we ignore the difficult season we are in, or our emotions, nor our resistance to the suffering – we mustn’t dismiss or minimize the difficulty of it all. Welcoming, to me, means to be open to new ways of seeing our life’s journey. In a way that is filled with curiosity, stillness and silence, mystery, an enduring hope, and the gift of remembering.
In my case to do this I’ve learned that we must find new ways to cultivate some daily practices that can help us carve out ways to welcome our messy experience.
So, let’s define a few of these words first and then in my next blog post we can talk about what daily practices might be helpful.
Curiosity. When we can welcome curiosity, we are more able to wonder and ask questions. We can ask God questions or ask ourselves and others about anything. Using open-ended questions that encompass who, what, why, where, and when, and how can help spur on the curiosity to explore. Curiosity helps us come at an issue from different directions or perspectives and is not set on a specific outcome.
Curiosity doesn’t embrace expectations. If we want something a certain way with no element of curiosity that is an “expectation” – it is not cultivating curiosity.
Being indifferent to the outcome is more in line with what fosters this curiosity. It seems that when we welcome curiosity, we’re inviting new insights into our mindset that can help us change, grow, and deepen our existing knowledge while still being true to our faith traditions. It can even deepen our understanding of our circumstances that can help us accept them in new and deeper ways that move us forward, out of the “stuck” kind of places we may find ourselves. It is so easy for us to hang on to a certain way of thinking about how life should go. Curiosity also cultivates wisdom – a wisdom that can help us make decisions that are wise and safe for us given our circumstances.
Curiosity uproots our expectations, massaging them, changing them and allowing us to release them and embrace life in new ways – stronger ways – more resilient ways. Ways that are not bound to preconceived notions or set expectations.
Curiosity is cultivated within a heart that wants to learn. Learn through the pain of what exists, difficult as it may be, and the reality of what we are facing today and may face well into the future. It has a neutral stance – not an agenda whereas expectations have agendas.
Stillness and Silence. When we face stresses and crises, many of us tend to get busy, agitated, anxious, preoccupied, controlling, or busier to avoid facing what we are experiencing. Welcoming silence, while a challenging exercise, creates the space our hearts and minds need to process, to feel our emotions, to explore for meaning and purpose, to unpack, release, lament, and grieve our situation, losses, and future, and receive new insight, peace, and hope. Sometimes it is overwhelming for us to do it alone, so we might need to be with another safe person for added support – be it a friend, religious leader, or professional. Sometimes just knowing that another person is present with us can be comforting and healing.
Mystery. When we welcome mystery, we are releasing control of not needing to know all the answers – the reality is that some things are just plain unknown. Living with the ambiguity of not knowing why something happened can be challenging but it can also instill a deeper dependency, faith, and trust in God. Mystery fuels curiosity and reminds us that we are only human and don’t know everything. It reminds us that God is much more than our human understanding that is finitely human.
Hope. When we can welcome hope, we are welcoming and receiving promises of a better future, promises that some good will eventually surface again in our lives, and that there is some meaning and purpose in our time of suffering.
We tend to reach for hope through several avenues. It might be a more straight-forward kind of hope like wishing things were different. It might be a deeper level of hope that we express, when we want the future to look a certain way, based on our expectations of what we believe will make us happy. When we are remaining in control, I call these “false hopes” because we can’t undo the past circumstances – we can just respond differently as we move forward. When we wish for the past to be undone, we are denying the reality of what we are facing. So, we need a different kind of hope that strengthens us to persevere.
This kind of hope can be found in safe, healthy communities through the loving, encouragement, and care of others who support and encourage us, and love us unconditionally. These times with others that bring hope is a foretaste of the kind of enduring hope that God can bring us. God’s hope is the kind of hope that allows us to embrace the mystery of today and the certainty of an abundant life in the future despite the circumstances we face – it is a belief that our future will be different from today.
Hope brings inner healing and wholeness and helps us look forward with expectant, confident anticipation of what God will do. It is also a hope-filled anticipation filled with faith and trust in the promise of eternal life when we die. Enduring hope – is based in God’s character – His person, His Word, and His promises.
Knowing and embracing this kind of enduring hope deeply empowers us to take the difficult steps of processing our circumstances, releasing our emotions, expectations, and lamenting the circumstances while grieving our losses and changes and bravely accepting the reality of what is. Then we may be able to step forward to embrace life today – with all its challenges. As we persevere with each step in this healing journey our hope deepens.
When we bring our times of suffering before the Lord, we can gain a greater confidence and assurance that He is compassionate and with us, in and through our suffering, and that there are promises for a new future. This brings us the ability to persevere through the suffering with and enduring kind of hope because it is based in God’s promises and character.
The suffering doesn’t magically disappear, neither does the pain, nor the triggers – it is a process of trusting, believing, releasing, and reaching out for help repeatedly over time while remaining open to the idea that the journey of suffering will transform us to be more of the person God created us to be through it.
Remember. If you are anything like me, I tend to forget some of the promises that speak to my heart and help me to persevere through the challenging days. The act of remembering helps us make choices about the kind of hope we’ll embrace.
The things I like to remember are:
1) God is a good god.
2) He has a plan and a purpose and a future for us.
3) We must find a way to praise God for His goodness despite the circumstances we are facing.
4) We get to choose the kind of hope we’ll embrace that is based on God’s character and promises for a hope-filled future.
Suffering is often described as a lonesome experience. Yet with God, when we can remember that He is always with we are never really alone. Why? Because He doesn’t leave us alone in or through our suffering – we just need to remember to turn toward Him.
When we remember these truths, we are more likely to care well for ourselves as we learn to embrace our reality today while looking forward to the hope of tomorrow. And slowly we’ll begin to see and experience peace and joy even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Daily Practices of Welcome: (Part 2 – stay tuned)
My next blog post will have some of my favorite practices that help me. If you have any of your favorite practices that you’d like to share, feel free to post them and maybe we can incorporate some of them into the next blog list.
We are all learning together, and this is a great way to share.
Until next time... I remain yours truly,
Wonderful insights and recommendations- These are all important when facing challenging times!
I absolutely loved this perspective and am trying to live it in my life.