Skip to main content

Seminary Never Prepared me for This

We live in a brave new world.  My seminary education never envisioned some of the issues which pastors now face on a regular basis.  Thankfully there are godly Christian people out there who have been thinking through these issues.

I had never heard of cutting till five years ago.  It is hard for me to even comprehend what depth of despair would drive a person to actually self-inflict such pain.  This article addresses the issue from a godly perspective.

The First Cut Is The Deepest: Self-Harmers In The Church

“People say it’s for attention but I dinnae think so. They just feel worthless.” (anonymous Scottish female)
What is the first thought that comes to mind when we say the words,“Self-Harm or Self-Injury?” For many it will be the image of a young person with prominent scars or burns on their arms. But to define the act of deliberately causing oneself harm takes in so much more than cutting and can include choking, biting, head banging, hitting, picking, scratching, self neglect, breaking bones, eating disorders, pulling out hair, scalding, removing limbs, genital mutilation, self-poisoning and so on. The list is almost endless.
A survey of Scottish young people stated that nearly 20% of females and 7% of males revealed that self-harming had been a lifetime occurrence. The UK has the highest rate of self-harm in Europe and the highest proportion of people who self-harm are statistically between 11 – 25 years of age.  Sadly, self-harm is not confined solely to youth. It is something that we are very familiar with in women across all age ranges.
One of the best visual aids I’ve seen to help us understand self-harm is the simple party balloon. The balloon is a visual image of our lives when stress come calling. Trials appear and the pressure increases inside (and our balloon is blown up). Now, there are lots of ways of dealing with that pressure. Some just let it explode in anger (your balloon explodes, making a massive noise. However, the immediate pressure has gone. The downside is that the balloon is destroyed, made a mess and given those closest to you a bit of a fright).  Others respond to stress by going AWOL (illustrated by letting go of the balloon and watching it float away, blown around in the wind until it comes back to earth fully deflated).  Then there are those that self harm (illustrated by taking the neck of the pressurised balloon, pulling it tight and cutting a little bit of the rubber with scissors. The pressure is then slowly released, like a safety valve, from the balloon as it deflates bit by bit.
read the rest of the article HERE

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Death For a Believer

We picture death as coming to destroy; let us rather picture Christ as coming to save. We think of death as ending; let us rather think of life as beginning, and that more abundantly. We think of losing; let us think of gaining. We think of parting; let us think of meeting. We think of going away; let us think of arriving. And as the voice of death whispers,  "You must go from earth," Let us hear the voice of Christ saying, "You are but coming to me."   Norman Macleod

Families' Fridays

From Focus on the Family 10 helpful tips for single parents Imagine this: you’re the sole parent for your children. You get them up, get them fed and send them to school. You do the housework, maybe you go to work yourself, you get home and you’re still the only adult there. There’s no one to relieve you. No one to pass the baton to while you take a shower or take a few minutes for yourself. You make dinner and gather the family around the table to eat. You play with them, read to them, give them baths, get them to bed and there’s no one there to sit with and process your day. There’s no one there to laugh with you or pray with you. Instead you keep working. You clean up the house again. You pack lunches for the next day. And you eventually crash into bed, knowing you’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. For many, this is not an imagined scenario. When you parent alone – whether due to divorce, the loss of your spouse or having a spouse who works away from home for long periods of...

Quotation of the Week

“And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”” (Matt. 26:39) The object of Christ’s attention here is this cup. What is the cup? What’s in it? In Scripture the cup refers to God’s wrath or judgment (Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15). Here in this foreboding vessel before Jesus is the fully fermented, undiluted, cup of divine wrath. It is God’s impending judgment that has him sweating drops of blood and in deep agony. Christ is looking down the barrel of heaven’s infinite wrath, and his heart is shredded in agony. As barbaric as the human suffering was, it was not the chief agony of the cross. This was reserved for his assignment to drink the cup. It wasn’t the prospect of martyrdom—wrath at the hands of men—that weighed so heavily upon Jesus, it was wrath of God. Erik Redmond in the article The Dreadful Cup and Our Faithful Savior .