Discipline of Disturbance: Stop Waiting for Life to be Easy

By Hud McWilliams

Are you waiting for life to be comfortable, risk free, safe secure and certain? You are putting faith in your own effort, abilities, and determination. Life is messy, it's a challange at best. We must continue to change our thinking and beliefs in order to grow into integrity, character, and development towards wholeness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outreach, Inc (DBA Equip Press)
• Release date: May 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946453228

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

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Having counseled hundreds of people over four decades, I can’t escape the fact that people seldom genuinely want to grow. I can’t tell you how many clients have had the solution to their pain within reach, but instead chose to stymie the healing that was readily available.

When I began counseling people, I mistakenly assumed they would want to grow toward wholeness and maturity. I have walked with clients through their heartbreak and despair. I have pointed out the way of hope, the way through pain and loss to growth and theredemption of suffering. The way was open to them, but I have seen people repeatedly choose divorce over healing. I have seen them reject redemptive change in favor of a superficial alteration that will do nothing to deepen their growth into wholeness.

Most people just want to get by. They settle for a short-term, stop-gap solution that avoids healing and fails to address the deep hurt and losses of life. No matter what our natural response might be, I am convinced that we are created to grow even though much in our lives works against our growth. Why is this fundamental aspect of life so often thwarted? Why are so few of us willing to do the necessary work to push through the barriers that impede the way to maturity?

The process of growing into wholeness is messy and brings its own discomfort. Deep in the psyche of the first-world perspective, it seems that our built-in urge to grow is stalled by the more immediate desire to be comfortable, to be safe, to be sure and certain. In other words, we want to be in control no matter what it costs us. And as we will see, it costs us dearly.

When the pursuit of comfort determines how we live, a move to grow toward wholeness will merely be tolerated and endured (perhaps in the wake of crisis). But it will not be sought out. And even when we experience a moment of genuine growth toward maturity due to loss, grief, betrayal, or some other setback, we hope the process of growth will soon be over. We want more than ever to return to the seeming ease of being in control of our life. We want to complete the process of suffering so we can put it behind us and return to the patterns and routines that pass for safety and comfort.

We are driven to resolve issues, and usually, it’s a good thing to want closure. When you sign up to take a class, you want to complete it. When you enter a race, you want to cross the finish line. However, this mindset overlooks the fact that we are alive. As long as we are alive, things can’t be finished. There is no endpoint. There is no graduation ceremony that certifies we have arrived. Living things always are growing. If they are not growing, they are dead.

Growth is a reality, while quick resolution remains a tantalizing fiction. We create our own confusion when we overlay the idea of completion on organicgrowth. It will never work, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

I enjoy working with wood. On occasion, I design and construct a bed or a table. As I work on the contours and fit together the pieces, my goal is to shape the wood to my will. I make it fit the picture I have in mind for it; I conform it to my desired design.

However, I would abandon such an approach if the task involved training my dog. I can’t bring tools to bear on a dog. The process of cutting, sanding, carving, gluing, and planing serves the purpose of shaping the wood to conform to my desired outcome. But we know that none of that would work on a living being.

The reality of life is that you can’t force any outcome to conform to your will. My dog serves as a simple example. She will never stop barking at squirrels, no matter howmuch it annoys me. Working with a living being calls for an entirely different set of interactions, requiring relational give-and-take and large amounts of acceptance. Growth can take place and it should, but the tools involved are entirely different.

I would not think of using the word nurture in reference to a woodworking project. But I can’t imagine not using the word nurture when speaking of a living being. And that is just one aspect of the process of growth and development in life.

The Story of Your Life Is Much More than Just a Story

I grew up one block away from the church my family attended. It was the social center of my universe. Involvement in the work and ministries of the church was a fact of my world. My parents were deeply involved in the institution, so I gained entrance into the workings of the church through incidental means.

Understand that incidental does not mean accidental or unimportant. Much of what shapes us comes in the form of incidental—as opposed to formal—instruction. The big challenge comes in recognizing the powerful and pervasive impact that this has on our thinkingand our choices. It is important, however, to recognize the incidental learning that has influenced us because much of the incidental learning comes without labels. There are no headings assigned to many of the core components of our histories. The result is we fail to assign meaning to some of the most influential experiences that have shaped us. Or we might assign an erroneous meaning to such experiences, since we have no language to use in naming the importance of incidental influences.

In the essays that follow in this book, we will find that our real meaning is derived from language. If there are no names—no identifiers—to use, or if the labels just evolve randomly, then our lives essentially remain untethered, and we find ourselves adrift in a world of relativity. If the names are misdirected, vague, or otherwise off, then the response we link to them also will be off.

Because of the family I was born into, my early life was centered on church. I sang in the choir, played my trumpet during worship services, and volunteered at the town’s rescue mission. I was a leader in the youth program, which built my confidence and developed my social skills as I pulled in friends from the greater metropolitan area to get involved.

All of this helped expand my perspective beyond my small neighborhood. But the core perspective remained the same: the church was a world of us and them. There was us, which included everyone who saw things and believed things the same way we did. And there was them, everybody who failed to believe as we did. This was not harsh or judgmental, but it was very present as a factor shaping my view of what was true and right.

All of this was incidental, like water to a fish, or opposing the designated hitter rule if you live in a National League city. I didn’t analyze it or even register it; it just was. Later, working as a therapist, I began to understand the importance of needing to identify and name the incidental influences that have shaped us.

Think of someone you know who never has traveled outside the region of the United States where they were born. It might be expected that they will feel that all people should uphold Midwestern values (or Southern values, or Mid-Atlantic values, or whatever values reflect their home turf). We tend to assume something is so because we never have ventured beyond our inherited influences and beliefs. Does reality verify your assumptions or upend them?

Encountering the reality of life in ways that challenge or even shatter your assumptions and beliefs is unsettling, to say the least. Because the church community I was part of conformed to my parents’ beliefs and values, I had no reason to question my inherited belief system. I accepted that I should expect certain things from my belief system. For instance, I had learned by osmosis that being a follower of Jesus must be earned. I had to clean up my life so I could be a respectable follower of the Savior. But that long-held conviction stands in direct conflict with my present understanding of grace. When I was growing up, guilt and shame were prime motivators of my beliefs and behavior, along with fear and anger. No wonder I was confused by the deadly mixture in the implicit and explicit messages I was given.

In this book we will pursue growth toward maturity and wholeness. Not only does the process not avoid discomfort and pain, it leans into both in the name of genuine growth. What many of us never see coming is that the process also challenges deeply held values, convictions, beliefs, and commitments. This might come as we recognize lies that we have accepted as normal or necessary. In addition, fundamental assumptions that have provided a solid footing whenever life got challenging often turn out to have held back our growth. In other words, the things we have counted on since childhood might actually add to our problems.

As humans, we are designed for growth. In theessays that follow we will encounter and engage with the necessary ingredients of constant movement toward maturing. The object of living should be the desire to be a better man or woman, yet most of us have set out to be happy and comfortable at the expense of wholeness. Together, we will embark on a sustainable path of growth and development that leads to basing our lives on freedom, joy, and wholeness.

As You Begin Reading

Some of what we will explore will disturb you, since life never travels on a straight line. There always areinterruptions, and remember that the life of faith as the Bible describes it is disturbing. You cannot grow and develop, off-loading the outworn while adding new insights, without interfering with your comfort zone.

Most of us have kept busy forming patterns that feel safe and comfortable. The routines of life promise to insulate us from too much pressure, from outside interference, from unnecessary conflict. We work hard to maintain the patterns that have promised so much comfort.

But then we encounter reality. Life is disturbing. Even good things are disturbing: the birth of a baby, starting a new job, friendships, neighbors, moving to a different city. Meanwhile, we are growing older and losing things and people that we love. All of these developments invite us to grow, and the invitation comes wrapped in disturbance. Life is disruptive. Life is messy. Making a good meal, building a house—anything that is worth our effort produces some chaos and turmoil.

In order to get the most from this book, you must take it slowly and find a way to process your thinking with some other people. The best way to work through the growth process that is presented here is to do it with a small number of trusted friends. We are not designed to do this work alone. Too much time spent only with yourself—with your own ideas, questions, anxieties, doubts, and struggles—will not lead to the kind of growth that produces wholeness. For you to experience healthy growth, you need to do this with other people. That makes it harder to hide, to rely on excuses, to rationalize your evasive maneuvers, to avoid hard things that produce growth. Life calls for openness, vulnerability, and exposure. Interaction with other people makes those things possible, even highly likely.

Take the time to process the experience of growth. Make space in your life for this to happen. Genuine growth and the goal of wholeness are worth your commitment. And do all of this with a small group of likeminded people.

With that as a preamble, let’s begin.

CHAPTER 1

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The Solution to Your Suffering Is Not What You Think It Is

Most of us are committed to avoiding pain, and that commitment accounts for much of the pain we experience. This book is written for people who desire wholeness. It can be an overwhelming subject, yet it is needed if we are to embrace life as it was intended by our Maker and to experience a whole life that is essentially life-giving and joyful.

This subject often is buried under layers of experience and occupation without much reflection. Embracing wholeness, or even acknowledging that there may be more than we are aware of, requires us to make intentional decisions.

The process of growing toward a whole life is marked by a few components that establish its boundaries. For any of us to embrace life from this perspective, we will need at least some measure of these elements:

Maturing into an ever-increasing state of being that is undamaged or is healed and increasingin responsibility for our own lives.

Integrating into our being the restoration of places where we have been wounded. (We recognize that we all are wounded.)

Becoming a contributing part of a community.

These three tasks are to be faced concomitantly. In order to move toward wholeness over the arc of a lifetime, you will need to be equipped in specific ways to do this work, which is not often modeled. And since there is no formula, we don’t have the fallback position of comparison and copying. That means the hard work of growth rests squarely with each of us.

I’ll incorporate some word pictures throughout this book to help you follow the threads through the conversation and begin to embrace the complexity that is a human life. A life well lived will be marked by joy and freedom attached to wholeness. This transcends your circumstances, which often is the most difficult part to comprehend.

First, Life Is Hard for a Reason

As we experience life, we must embrace the hardships that inevitably are part of the rhythm of living. Life is hard for a reason. Nothing has a natural tendency to go right, so we must shape our perspective accordingly. This takes some doing.

I like to think we are a bit like a house where the need for maintenance is a constant, from cleaning to repairs. We living beings need upkeep and maintenance as well, along with the added element of being nurtured. Like a house, we pick up dust and wear along the way. We know that dusting, for instance, is a never-ending process. The same is true for humans. We have to remove the clutter we have picked up on our way through life. The problem is that we become attached to these things, making the removal process a demanding one. The harshness of this process usually is misread as something that should be avoided, yet it is just this undertaking that is necessary for us to grow in a whole manner.

An image that accurately illustrates the process is the crucible. A crucible is used along with intense heat to purify various types of metal. The process yields an unencumbered product, which helps define how we achieve joy. Struggle and what we often think of as drudgery assist us in the journey toward life-giving wholeness.

This process is designed to produce two outcomes.

The first aspect is that no growth can take place without struggle.

Whether you are growing a business or a marriage, building a house and making it a home, or developing your life, all of these efforts demand a struggle to become what you hope them to be. For me, a crucible represents the struggle that is involved if growth toward wholeness is going to take place.

The second aspect is the necessity of deconstructing lies.

We grow accustomed to, and even attached to, certain lies. Whether the lies come from direct deception or from much more insidious sources, their effect is similar. The lie stops growth by diverting us from accessing the joy we are designed to live out of. Any time we embrace a lie as the truth, we are likely to promise ourselves we will do or not do something based on the lie. One of the most commonly shared lies is that relational rejection hurts, and often we first run into this when we are in the midst of puberty and then make and attach an internal pledge never to risk or be that open to relationship again. The rolling impact is that later in life we are lonely because we are honoring this hidden lie, and since we are not really conscious of where the lie came from, we simply perpetrate the lie’s effect and thin out our relationships by not being vulnerable. The core of intimacy is to be known and a lie like this essentially prevents us from that kind of openness, resulting in less likelihood of intimacy being available. Exposure is the only way through this and what breaks the lie’s hold.

Today I wrote this note to a client who had asked about lies:

With all trauma or wounds comes a message, which most often is twisted by the very wounding experience, whether or not we are aware. And, in fact, more often than not we are not conscious of this reality, so this message is the killer.

Sometimes, not often, the message is spot on and tells the truth in context, and then the event does not become toxic going forward. In other words, it is faced in the light, and in the moment [it is] embraced and owned, but in a matter-of-fact manner.

However, and this is the big however, most often when some aberration/wound/trauma happens to us or something is left out or omitted, the message that is attached is twisted and the product is a lie we begin to believe. Then we promise ourselves not to [fill in the blank], which functions as a pledge or vow, we begin dragging the past with us, not as part of our story but as a maker of our personality.

That may be way too complex, but I do not think you have to dig in the past. I believe it shows itself when you face what is occurring in the moment you are in.

That is why I want you to know that practicing healthy/life-giving skills in the present matters if you truly want to get loose from the network of lies foisted on you from childhood. If you want to break that bond and refute the vow you made, you need to access the joy that your heart and life were made for.

The real practice is to disarm the corrosive attachments, which I suppose involves facing forward and embracing the moment you are in. At the same time, recognize the intrusive thoughts that are lies. Spit on them and return to the joy God gives.

Second, Joy Is the Core Relationship

Joy is the sense of hope that comes directly from someone else delighting in your existence. Being wanted, known, accepted, and loved are no small items. The product of such joy is a wholeness that is larger than context and it is attached to maturing growth. I think of four contexts we all have found ourselves in at some time in life. One is a life-giving context where joy reigns and surprise is central. Humor and good jokes surprise us and thus are good parts of this joyful, life-giving space. Games should be fun, yet often they are robbed of joy by the demand to win instead of learning to play to your fullest, which is its own reward.

The second context is life-neutral. Nothing of significance is going on, and life is comprised mostly of this experience. Nothing bad happened, but then nothing really good happened either.

The third context consists of life-sucking experiences. These take place where you are given a context that is impossible to live by. Somehow the elements that are involved use you instead of delight in you. We are not objects to be used but rather responsible beings to be responded to.

The last context is life-destroying, in which the setting does not stop at using you; it somehow consumes you. The world of human trafficking is just such a context.

Instead of accepting that these four contexts are just the way things are, we are to push against the emptiness that is present in all that is not life-giving.

Third, Live Out of Being a Whole Person

What does it mean to be a solid person or to know your true self? These are, of course, ideas of being that do not require the validation of others to be okay. This may appear to conflict with our central need to belong, but the kind of relationship we have with ourselves is defining of the limits of wholeness. Many persons experience very little sense of self and thus either appear hollow on the inside or at least not really there when you press to connect. A complete person has an aura about them that is calming in any context. A complete person impacts a setting in a life-giving manner even if the environment is conflicted.

Studies of emotional intelligence have shed light on the true self verses the false self. No matter how it is stated, it remains a central focus of this writing about wholeness.

Fourth, Deadly Mixtures Are Found Everywhere

Throughout this book I will refer to a story that has wildly impacted me on my journey toward increasing maturity. (Complete maturity is an unattainable goal, but it is the goal nevertheless.)

A story is told about prisoners of war in a camp in Indochina. The POWs were dying at an unusually high rate. The rules of war under the geneva Convention called for feeding prisoners enough food to sustain life and giving them enough medical attention to keep the wounded from deteriorating.

The Red Cross visited this prison camp to try to find the cause of the high mortality rate. Their first visit produced no answers, but a return visit yielded the discovery that the captors were mixing good grain, which was enough to sustain life, with castor oil, which is a cathartic. The effect was to prevent the body from leeching nutritional value from the grain. It simply passed through the body too quickly.

I call this a deadly mixture. All through life we mix truth with lies that come in a myriad of packages. The lies include false ideas as well as things that were said to you or done to you or withheld from you. The end result is that your access to truth, and thus joy, is blunted if not eliminated.

As was the experience of the prisoners of war, after good grain was mixed with castor oil, it’s no easy task to figure out how to separate nourishing grain (truth) from the added ingredient (lies). In this book, we will learn how to separate the two.

The core challenge is to remove the debris that we pick up. We gather some of the lies before we even have language to put to them. Some of the lies are foisted on us through context, which may be something as mild as an offhand comment that sticks for a lifetime.

There are other more intentional violations of our beings that wound us. If we fail to attend to them they will continue to thwart our access to joy. And beyond events and words spoken, the things that are left out of our experience can have as much or even more affect on us. To experience freedom and joy, we must attend to both the messages and experiences we are aware of and the things that failed to materialize in life.

There are no shortcuts to remedying the deadly mixture of lies with truth. If we are not willing to accept that life is hard, in part, because of the outworn, toxic perceptions of our false selves, then we will take the easy route of saying, This is just the way I am. Doing so might be one’s default setting, but it stops the development of our souls.

Joy is a slippery construct to get our minds around. And joy is inextricably linked to wholeness. These two go together and cannot be limited to external behavior only. Joy is not pleasure and it is not happiness, though those can be part of joy at times. A fuller understanding of joy is that it is learning our place in the order of things and the resultant freedom we find natural when it does occur. Hubris cannot occupy the same space as joy. A major aspect of joy and thus wholeness is the relational substance we experience. Those who do not mature have a thinned-out framework for thinking about connecting with others because something blocks access to the joy we are made for. We withhold ourselves when we get a toxic message that we are not worth being known.

CHAPTER 2

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Find Out Who You Are

In the creation account, we read that God charged Adam with naming the animals. In the era of the ancient hebrews, names meant a lot. When God changed Jacob’s name from Jacob to Israel, it was akin to a tilt in the axis of the chosen people. Naming matters.

It still matters today, and it matters in your life. If you mischaracterize yourself by accepting the wrong name it will have negative consequences.

Who or What Named You?

Because we are relational creatures, we’re shaped and named by past interactions with other people. A young child is preverbal, so when he or she is affected by an event, the child has no language to describe the event or language to use in processing the feelings it evoked. The event had an impact, but in terms of the child’s categorizing it, the event didn’t have verbal meaning. It floats around in the person’s system, remaining always an unnamed influence.

My wife is sensitively wired. She senses things that I don’t sense. She is aware of people. She’s aware of events that I haven’t noticed. This is the way we’re wired and it’s not good or bad. We’re different.

That’s why two people who grew up in the same family, in the same neighborhood and attending the same schools, and raised by the same parents, often end up with radically different perceptions of the past, the present, and who they are. There was an event that had a significant impact on each child in the family. And the event marked each child for the duration.

But, and here is what we often miss, the child has to pick it up. He or she may sense a portion of what happened. There may be a vague sense that something happened, but the memory is indistinct. Or they might focus on a part of the experience and try to process it.

In our first five years of life, hardly anybody remembers anything. Your brain is not designed to master memory that early in life. It’s true that adults tell us stories about what we did and said when we were very young, and often we assume we remember the event. But what we remember is having been told about the event.

Here’s a diagram.

Here’s your reality. It’s what you experience. It’s actual, it’s factual, it’s true in the sense that it fits inside the bigger box of life. What exists inside the smaller box is what you recall, what you have pieced together, and what you accept as your history and—by extension—as your identity. However, the bigger box is what’s true.

And while the bigger box is what is true about you according to the Bible, it doesn’t always work in the way you would like it to. We would like the Bible to work in our favor according to our definition of what we want and need. But the Bible is not a set of instructions for assembling and maintaining a well-tuned life. It’s a story whose claims are entirely true.

Reality, the way it is indicated in the diagram, is part of truth but it’s not identical to truth. Reality is less than the truth. What you experience has to be interpreted by you, and as you process it and draw conclusions, you necessarily assign meaning to it from inside your system.

Your system can be understood in terms similar to shared views within a regional culture. In Kansas City, for instance, barbecue involves smoking meat (pretty much any type of meat) and then adding additional flavor in the form of tomato-based sauces seasoned with brown sugar, molasses, and other ingredients.

A Kansas City barbecue connoisseur visiting the Carolinas might well be caught off guard when he finds that pork is considered the correct meat for barbecue and that the seasoning is vinegar-based. We process our own history according to our culture, and we tend to overlook or reject what is foreign to our experience. In this way, our experience shapes our definition of reality and narrows and distorts our understanding of life.

The Process of Discovering How You Were Named

When you reach adulthood and want to examine the ways you have been named, you need to reinterpret your history. You have to go back and look at the most influential events, people, experiences, and words, and give it all a proper name. The reason for this is that you are not your history, unless of course you