Tag Archives: love

Burdened and Burnt Out?

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Recently, I very nearly burnt out. Some of this was my own doing, taking on too much all at once. Along side work I was writing a dissertation and a chapter for a book and trying to be a good husband and dad and various other bits and pieces. I was feeling pretty stressed, not sleeping well, having palpitations at times (something I’ve never experienced before) and feeling close to tears. Work is full on at times and can be emotionally exhausting, dealing with and loving people in the midst of the grit and difficulties of their lives.  I got out of a good rhythm of work and rest and reached the end of myself!

A fellow health professional came to see me feeling much the same way. He said, “Andy, where do we take all this stuff? Where do we take the pain that we carry for other people, the burdens we pick up, the mistakes we make, the emotional baggage that gets placed on us?”

Is it that we become less caring? Do we need to separate ourselves out from the pain of other peoples journeys? Well, maybe sometimes….sometimes we need to have good boundaries in place and make sure we take time to rest and be restored, so we can carry on loving and giving of ourselves. But sometimes, we do need to suck it up, bear with other people in love and suffer with those who suffer. Waking up in the night thinking about the teenager you’ve seen who’s not sure they want to carry on living and spending some time thinking about their family and praying for hope and peace is part of what it means to be human, even when it doesn’t feel great to be bearing that burden with them. Jesus said that the “human one” must suffer much. Suffering because of love. To enter fully into what it means to be human, we cannot avoid the pain of others or separate ourselves out from it. To love is to embrace the ‘other’ to allow ourselves to be moved by them and to see things differently. But if we carry it all in ourselves, we can be destroyed in the process and then we are not much use to anyone.

Where do we take this pain? Where do we lay these burdens? How do we forgive the systems which cause so much anxiety and dysfunction? What do we do with the abuse we suffer? Some people use alcohol or other substances to numb the pain. Some throw themselves into activities as a distraction. Some people disengage with it altogether. Some people talk it through and lay their burdens onto others.

On good friday, I am reminded that there is a remarkable place to lay all my burdens, pain, failings, stress and anxious thoughts: at the feet of Jesus. When I look at Jesus, laying down his life, having confronted the powers that disempower and abuse the multitude, I do not see him appeasing an angry God, rather I see God Himself; suffering in the most appalling way, utterly embracing our humanity and carrying away the pain of our mess with his arms stretched wide in love. I hear his cry of forgiveness for my ego-centric failings, find his grace for the shadow and unhealed parts of my life, see in his eyes a love that knows no bounds and discover a hope that this way of life laid down love brings peace for all humanity.

I love this passage from Matthew 11, found in The Message version:

Jesus says, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burnt out? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

I love that Jesus is with me in my work, doing it with me and he knows what it is to suffer. I choose again to receive his yoke, not those that others or the system try and place on me and in that, I find an incredible freedom.

A few years ago I wrote this song. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, maybe it won’t resonate with you at all. All I know is that as I engage with the pain of others, I am so glad to have found the One who can really carry my burdens and help me walk in freedom and love.

 

My Aunty Judy

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My aunty Judy is a heroine of mine (one of many incredible and strong women in my life). She is an example of a life poured out in love for those around her. She is a district nurse, working in rural north Yorkshire in the North East of England. I heard a story about her recently which inspired me and challenged me deeply.

I found out that Judy was visiting a certain patient of hers, who has a severe and chronic airways disease, unable to even leave the house due to her level of breathlessness. Judy went to this lady’s house and had never seen such squalour. The lady was too disabled to do any cleaning herself, and therefore none had been done for ten years! So, on the following day, when Judy could have been a having a well deserved rest, as she already works well over her allotted hours, she went and cleaned this lady’s house from top to bottom. The “system” had turned a blind eye to this lady’s needs, but Judy knew fine well that with the amount of dust and fungus in the house, this lady stood little chance of improving her breathing at all. No extra pay, no thanks from the lady, but rather a disciplinary hearing from the management powers, for going beyond her remit! But the lady now has a clean house, because Judy was willing to be a toilet, forgiving the system for its failings, cleaning up the mess and releasing more life in the process.

To embrace kenarchy is to embrace humility.

But when she’s not nursing, she is caring for children with severe mental and physical illnesses in her own home, to give their parents some respite. And when she is not doing this, she is often trekking halfway across Europe to help her eldest son who is setting up an eco-backpackers place in Bulgaria! And amongst all of that she cares deeply for her 4 other children and their families and her own mum, my Nanna, who’s health is seriously declining. Talk about going the extra mile!

Yet she has learnt the secret of rest and refilling in the midst of it all so that she doesn’t burn out. She has found the secret that God is really with her as she serves others. This is where God is found – with those who are in need! She has learnt about unforced rhythms of grace.

No job is too small for us, no person too unclean to be embraced and no task is beneath us. This is the kind of love that transforms the world.

An Open Letter to Theresa May, Home Secretary

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Dear Theresa

I hope you don’t mind the informal greeting, as I’ve never had the opportunity to meet you, but I believe in a level playing field when it comes to communication and I find that titles can get in the way of that. I also wanted to use your first name, because it is somehow more human and I want to appeal to you as a fellow human being, before addressing you as our current home secretary. There is a very high probability that you will never read this, so I thought I would write it as an open letter to engage others in a vital conversation.

The reason for my letter is to appeal to you on behalf of the hundreds of people you are currently detaining in any one of the 11 Detention (Immigration Removal) Centres located throughout the UK. There have been several reports of the dreadful treatment of fellow human beings, people we call our brothers and sisters, in this wide and varied family of humanity. Even your chief inspector of prisons calls the conditions ‘appalling’. Many of these people have been victims of torture and abuse from which they have fled only to be treated in a simply disgusting way in this nation. You are even detaining pregnant women and children (141 children that are known of in the last 5 years). These beautiful human beings are treated in an altogether sub-human way.

Georgio Agamben writes of the ‘State of Exception’. I’m sure you are aware of his writings, but if not, this ‘state of exception’ describes how a human being can be both simultaneously bound and abandoned to law. It reveals what really undergirds a nation; that which we are willing to put aside to maintain the status quo. The detention of people in this way reveals a vile underbelly and a rotten foundation to this nation state. These detention centres are our very own example of Guantanamo Bay, where people are held without hope of a fair trial, justice or human kindness. Essentially, by keeping people who are deemed to have failed in seeking asylum in these detention centres, you “erase any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.” (Agamben, State of Exception p7). To treat any person who does in fact have a name and a face in such a manner, is altogether inhumane and utterly wrong.

In our house, we try to live with the following kind of philosophy:

In this house

As home/house secretary, I wonder if you think the home/house we are creating in this land is reflected in these removal centres? I know you will argue that this land isn’t their home, which is why we are sending them back to their country of origin (which I doubt they could really call home or they would not have fled it). But there is something so very wrong about how you are allowing them to be treated. You know fine well from serious case reviews that terrible errors have been made in sending people back to their country of origin, leading for example to the death of a lesbian woman in Uganda. You know there have been and continue to be atrocious abuses of basic human rights in these detention centres. You know that people are being denied access to vital medical treatment (www.medicaljustice.org.uk). You know that at least one person has been unlawfully killed at the hands of your profit making making friends, G4S, who run these centres for you. Yet you are allowing it to continue. Theresa, how is this loving? How is it kind? How is it human?

I am sure your job is filled with complications and difficult decisions, and I am sure that there are some who may well need deporting to another land, but do not let the office you hold become separate from your humanity. I appeal to you as a fellow human and I appeal to you as the home secretary to do an urgent review of these centres.

I would like to suggest the following:

1) Please would you spend a day in each of detention centres and simply hear the stories of those you are detaining there. Then please look them in the eye and justify your decision to allow them to be treated as sub-human.

2) Please remove G4S from the management of the detention centres, as they have demonstrated a recurrent lack of love or concern for human welfare.

3) Please consider that detention centres could be managed instead by asylum charities, who have a far better understanding of the needs of those they would be caring for and can ensure that they are given appropriate access to legal help and medical intervention. This can be backed up with security if needed, but by changing the environment and approach of how we ‘detain’ people, I imagine we will have less security issues.

Thank you for taking the issues of human love and justice seriously,

Yours most sincerely

Andy Knox