Soulfood

Notes from the opening session of the CCEF 2023 National Conference

Alasdair Groves

We were not made to experience trauma. We were not created for suffering. Life-shattering experiences are a result of the Fall and sin.

Ed Welch

Much suffering and pain is temporary – it fades over time. Wounds heal. We forget and move on. But some suffering endures past the present moment and doesn’t heal.

Love means moving gently and persistently into the suffering of our neighbors, seeking to understand the hurts they are suffering that don’t seem to be fading away.

Remember! There is no dark corner of human experience where Christ has not gone, both in his journey to the cross and on his way to find each one of us!

Psalm 130, Psalm 22, Psalm 46 – these psalms and many others give us words to express the depths of our anguish resulting from trauma.

God speaks to suffering in all its forms in Scripture. And it assures us, Christ dethrones the darkness that accompanies all traumatic experiences, and he seeks out the weakest and those who are hurting the most.

What is trauma? First, death has come close to us. Death in some form has impacted a life. With it comes wickedness – death travels with sins such as neglect, rape, unpredictable anger. And second, when it comes close, it feels as though it never leaves. It changes us and it intrudes into today. It makes us feel as if we do not belong to ourselves, but to death.

Death in scripture is a kind of power. It is a co-conspirator with wickedness and the devil. And therefore, we must remember that death’s native language is deceit, lies, and falsehood. It inspires us to shame, silence, isolation, and loneliness.

Jesus Christ is utterly necessary and the only way to conquer death! So we are not those who despair without hope. We can be brought gently back to life by the one who has power over death, proven by his resurrection from the dead!

So how do we become trauma-informed to help those who are enduring seemingly unending death?

“A pastor must study two books, not just one. Certainly he must know the book of Scripture…He must also be a master in reading the book of the human heart. He must know men no less well than he knows his Bible.” J.I. Packer

We come with humility. Humility knows that it doesn’t know, so it asks questions. Humility knows it has come to the end of itself.

We come with compassion. Compassion seeks to move closer. It wants to know details. It is honored to hear and understand what is on a person’s heart.

To be trauma-informed is to learn from a traumatized person with humility and compassion something of what is intruding into their present from past trauma.

God promises us that we will be comforted by the Father in Jesus Christ by the Spirit so that these traumas that feel so heavy are reframed as light, momentary afflictions compared to the eternal weight of glory to which we are heirs. (2 Corinthians 1, 4)

So we persist in prayer. We keep crying out (psalms, the parables of the impudent neighbor and the persistent widow). We believe that God desires good for us and so talk and ask and talk more and plead with God to do for us what He has promised to us.

We gather others into our quest to plead with God. We don’t do this alone! We ask others to pray with and for us.

We trust in God alone to bring healing into our trauma. We cannot put our hope in any other help. We must find this pearl of great price and hold on to Him!