Are We Too Fragile in Life? Podcast Episode

Prosperity allows you to ask different questions and those different questions give you different things to focus on, which is really exciting, but that also then opens up a whole world of things that you’ve never even thought about that there’s never even been space for. Welcome to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. 

It’s excellent to have you along. Brian and Ted are here in the studio with me. Welcome to both of you. Hey, thank you. I’m Matt. As we often do, we’ve got a bit of a balance to walk today. Yeah. Stray too far to the left, you’re in a ditch and stray too far to the right, you’re in another ditch. But I think it’s worth attempting. 

So let me set up the topic. There seems to be a lot of offense these days. A lot of offending. And people have acted badly forever, so it’s not actually more offense, but perhaps how we take offense, for example, trauma, bullying, emotional hurt, these types of phrases are used, and they are household terms. 

And my question is, how do we use these terms, and can we use them appropriately in an interrelation context? Do you see what I’m saying? Sure. Where we leverage these things. And so that’s what I want to recognize that we can go into two ditches here because these terms are so important. 

That’s correct. If trauma is something, then let’s get trauma right. Because we devalue the term if we don’t. That’s correct. Do you see the narrow path? Yeah, I think so. There sure is. And I think one of the things that we would say is that some words that are clinical terms like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and trauma, are words that weren’t in everybody’s vocabulary back when World War II happened. Okay. It is in vocabulary now. So, is that a good thing or a bad thing?  

Well, for people who have true post-traumatic stress disorder, somebody who has had their life threatened, somebody who has been assaulted and victimized, knowing that they had PTSD is a good thing. They can get treatment. But it’s interesting because we become familiar with the term and then start to spread it out. Okay. So, I was at the ice cream shop, and I bumped into somebody and dropped my ice cream cone. It was so traumatic. I’ve got PTSD every time I see that ice cream shop, well, that’s not PTSD, that’s not trauma. 

It might’ve been a frustrating circumstance. You might’ve been embarrassed, but it doesn’t qualify because we have terms for these really important matters and hurts in our life. It does make us think inward and be very thoughtful, which is really healthy. Right. You mentioned post-World War II, we wouldn’t have the words, and without the words you don’t have the thoughts. That’s right. Without the thoughts, you don’t have the inward inspection. Sure. And I quickly go to my grand folks, for example. They went through the Great Depression. Yeah. Isn’t that trauma for everybody? You know what I mean? But they didn’t have the words in use and sometimes as I compare my life to hers, am I kind of fragile? You know? Does that make sense? And sometimes I’m wondering, am I sturdy enough to do this life? Right? Yeah. You know, grandma, what can you tell me? And I think it speaks to reality that the context we live in, and our current reality has such a profound impact on us. 

What is normal to us is largely dictated by what is just commonplace. And you learn how to do that because that’s just the water that you’re swimming in. And we live in a different context than they had in that timeframe. Yeah, for sure. I think one of the things is when you go back generations, most of life was about how we make it through the day, how we eat, how we sleep, how we provide.  

And we’re in a different time, particularly in the US right now, we’re not in a third world place where every day you’re looking for your meal or something like that. But one of the things that happens as you move from needing to survive to being able to think about aspirations. Who do I want to be, where do I want to go? These kinds of things. One of the things that happens is we’ve shifted a big portion of it to having a goal. And it’s not necessarily wrong or bad, but it’s very different versus how we are going to make it this winter. 

I think that’s very astute. Bruce Shelley is an author who wrote Christian History in Plain Language. He makes the comment that all of human history found life is just suffering. But most of all, human history life was getting through it. Yeah. And then he talks more about their hopes and what religion played in that. But anyway, the point is, I was taken aback by that, and that’s not how I process my life at all, getting through it. It’s making the most of it is the way that I process my life. 

And that has an impact here with this. Yeah. Prosperity allows you just to ask different questions and those different questions give you different things to focus on, which is really exciting. But also, then opens up a whole world of things that you’ve never even thought about, that there’s never even been space for. Yeah. I think it’s a really good point because particularly in the last hundred years, here we are at this point in time because of prosperity. That isn’t in and of itself bad because of technology, healthcare, okay? And these kinds of things. It allows different expectations of life and the pursuit of happiness which is actually something that people can shoot for. That doesn’t mean that everything today is happy. 

And so, what happens? We’re still in a very broken world, and we see it in the news. We see it in life, and it’s around us. So, prosperity doesn’t equal happiness. Technology doesn’t equal happiness. Healthcare doesn’t equal happiness, but it does raise the expectation through culture and advertising that my life should be happy, and it should be easy. 

Okay. Ted, expectation was the exact word that came to my mind as well. And so, if there is an expectation, for example, for bliss, then it’s easy to call out as offense, anything that is contrary, that is working against that goal of bliss. Does that make sense? For sure. Which makes me a connoisseur of my suffering. If the expectation is suffering, then when it comes, it’s not offensive in the same way. My point is, are we offended more today than perhaps they were in the past? We can’t answer that definitively, but this mental exercise. You see what I’m saying? Yeah. And, again, I don’t know if there’s more offense or not, like you’re saying, but certainly we’re much more aware of it because we’re not having to wrestle with some of the things that previous generations did. 

So, we’re going back to the context we live in. We live in a context that’s really quick to say, hey, are you being treated the way you ought to be treated? A really great question for sure, but if that’s the question you’re always asking, inevitably you’re going to run into multiple times through your day when no, you’re not being treated the way you ought to, which Jesus talked about treating people as they ought to be treated. But it was always, am I treating others exactly the way that they should be treated? Which is a very different question, a different focus. Yeah. And with that, I think one of the things that we run into is that we have to continually think about this balance that the Scripture provides for us. 

And one of the balances is that this earth, this life, and this place are not our home. The other thing is that suffering happens because there is something wrong with the world. Suffering is real because of the fall, because of sin, because of my own sin, because of somebody else’s. That’s real. 

But it also redeems these things. Christ’s redemption and new life says that there’s purpose and meaning and those are valuable to shoot for, as opposed to, hey, I’m supposed to be happy. Don’t bump me. Okay? Don’t disagree with me. If you disagree with me, then you’re a hater. 

Okay, well that’s a very different thing than, oh, we have a difference of opinion. Let me hear you. You hear me. And we have dialogue. We can even agree or disagree strongly, but the issue is now the fact that we disagree, what’s that mean for us? Is that, oh, we have to part ways. Well, when disagreement in my mind equals suffering, that’s where I get off on the wrong way. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. So, having a good definition of suffering, I think, is part of the human challenge. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Whereas, you know, I think maybe in history that would’ve been something like, oh, this is an opportunity where I can learn and interact with somebody who has a different thought or different idea is actually for my benefit and my good. 

Which, yeah, puts it in a very different stage. Yeah. So, you’ve just given the perspective that disagreement is an opportunity. Right. And setting that next to disagreement is suffering. Two completely different trajectories. That’s right. Another thing we have to take account for is we oftentimes hear, well, this person over here has a victim mentality. I want to separate out something about this that’s really important. When somebody experiences something like an assault, or somebody took advantage of them and took their money and things like they are a victim. That is an accurate description of what happened. Okay. What happens on the other hand? 

And yeah, there are people who will be on the other extreme of somebody who stays in a place where they never recover, but kind of milk it. Okay. I think that’s the fear that people have and I’m sure that it happens. What’s interesting is the person who is an actual victim. We’ll see some people sometimes that are like, I’m sorry, I’m complaining and we’re saying, you’re not complaining. You were really wounded. This is a real deal. And they’ve minimized it because they’re afraid that they’re going to be called out as somebody who has a victim mentality. 

And in our counseling work, we’re trying to help people to go from being a victim to a survivor, to somebody who’s thriving. Okay. That’s one of the models that we use. Victim, survivor to thriving or overcoming. So, we want to move them that way, but to say that this isn’t real is wrong. 

But also, we don’t want to say, okay, you’re suffering, you’ve suffered. So good luck. That’s you. You’re just going to have to sit there. So, the Christian message allows us to think about how we redeem hurts, how we grow, how we work with them, and some things about life that are really hard and not fair. 

I really appreciate you bringing up that idea and delineating between a true victim and a victim mentality. And I think the victim mentality is very pervasive. Sure. It’s very real. It wouldn’t be hard for me to comb through my own life to point out where I have a victim mentality. Sure. Where I can leverage hurts, for example. Maybe I would just not want to see resolve. Yeah. Because the leverage is too great. Right. You see that’s insidious like that?  

Yeah, I think so, and maybe an example of this would’ve been a couple years ago. I go through a secular training for counseling. And at the end, the question is whether or not do you think your beliefs, your ideas, your perspective, your worldview was respected throughout this training? Well. No, but that’s an impossible thing for them to be able to do. They’re not coming at it from the same worldview that I am. So, I can’t expect them to be able to honor every belief system within that room, but I know that, and therefore for me to say, well, no, I don’t think it was, but as a conservative Christian, I don’t come in here expecting that. 

I have to figure out what to take that I think is wise and beneficial and what to set aside. Which again, is just a very different mindset or even to think about my son when he’s at school and, and somebody makes fun of his haircut. Well, sure, you could call that bullying. You could say that he’s a victim. Or you can say, okay, hey bud, that’s unfortunate. That shouldn’t happen. We want to acknowledge that, and we want to figure out how to walk through that and not to see that as the same as the kid who gets beat up in the parking lot or recess or those sorts of things. 

One of the things that’s come to me as you give those examples, Brian, is this belief that the world should orient itself according to me. Yeah. And so that was really the question, did we orient this according to you? Did we orient according to you? Well, at the end of the day, no. And you couldn’t. 

Right. But in all of our interactions when we have a mentality that life needs to orient itself to me, we’re off on the wrong foot. Yeah, I think the concept also occurs around the term persecution. Persecution is real and believers feel it in a wide variety of reasons, ways, and spaces. 

But it’s interesting because when you take what I’ve experienced. As a Christian in a secular society, in a field that isn’t Christian, I’ve experienced some bumps, some slights, some unkind things at times. My point is we have to be careful not to go into a mindset that I’m bearing the worst cross ever. 

It was frustrating. It was hard. I had to work through it and navigate, and I did my own story, but let’s be careful. Because I haven’t resisted to blood as it says in Scripture. Well, Ted, and what I heard from what you said there, which I think is a very poignant observation and easy for all of us, and that is to have respect for human experience. 

The broad human experience. To have that perspective, as you mentioned. persecution and be divided in this continuum. Maybe this, but it’s certainly not what required you to have an understanding of the broader Christian human experience. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I think that is really helpful to this conversation because when we get myopic, we lose sight of the broader human experience and that gets us into some trouble. Yeah. And I think with that, one of the things that comes to mind is that even for Ted’s example, it’s important that you can register that it was hurtful. That was hard. And if we can do that in relationships then that can help us say, okay, where am I at and help us process. Whereas a lot of times, even for that we deal with in the counseling offices, we isolate and we kind of try to sort through that all on our own. And then a lot of times that either leads to, this shouldn’t bother me at all, or it lends to making it much bigger than what it was. 

And those are the sorts of things that we get into those ditches that aren’t helpful. Yeah. I think one of the things that happens with that isolation piece is if we don’t have somebody to bounce it off of or don’t have a frame of reference, things get really either/or. 

Either I was persecuted this bad, which is at a hundred, or it wasn’t at all, it was a zero or it was a one. There’s an entire continuum here, and you have to remember too, whatever we’re in at the time, that’s big for us. You ask a sixth grader what do you want to pray about. They’ll say, I’ve got a big math test tomorrow. 

You know? Yeah. And it’ll be the easiest thing, but it’s big for them. I think that’s the other piece here that we just have to be able to meet people where they’re at, to understand. And the other thing is people have different tolerances.  My wife and I were in the airport going through TSA and different things. That’s traumatic.  

Ted, go ahead and share about that. Let me tell you what I think I did at lunch yesterday, I did use the word traumatic, but I used it in that broad sense. The thing about it was I was just anxious, and the guy said, do this, whatever, this, and I was just discombobulated, and I felt really stressed, and then Donna says, come on, that’s what happens when you come through TSA, and you have to calm down.  

She had an expectation that you didn’t have. She did. She is like, yeah, everybody’s grumpy in TSA, so just don’t worry about it. Just walk through and go on. I started by saying we’ve got a narrow path to walk, and we’ve got ditches on either side. A ditch that we can fall into is to minimize. And what I hear you saying Ted, is don’t minimize the hurt. Acknowledge the hurt for what it is. So, it’s a tricky landscape. Yes, it is a tricky landscape. But I think that’s the thing where if we can find that place of being able to acknowledge hard, and particularly when somebody has been victimized and they’ve been in a place where there’s been authority or significant harm, or the potential for harm. 

Those are huge things, and we want to honor that. And even the smaller things to recognize are still hard and it’s painful. We can be invited to come alongside that. And it’s not really our job to necessarily figure out exactly where they fall on that spectrum or ourselves as much as, okay, what is it? What am I walking through and how do I walk through this wisely? And that’s more difficult than what it seems like it should be sometimes in a progressive, healthy manner.  

I think it is part of when, going back to Ted, you’re talking about victims and the victim mentality. A victim mentality probably doesn’t want to see improvement as much as maybe holding onto that. 

Yeah. Would that be a good way to understand that? Yeah, and I think one of the things is that labels get put on a lot of different things. And sometimes the labels are helpful and sometimes unhelpful. And so, that’s why having people to help us walk through life and help us to find the right things is so beneficial. 

And parents help kids and spouses and people in church, we help each other. And so, let’s say somebody who is wounded by an authority figure, the tendency emotionally is to say, an authority figure wounded me here. It can be really easy to then go to the next authority figure and say, this person’s a wounder also, or they’re suspect or a person in this role, a policeman is this way, a TSA agent is this way. Again, I’m going to tell you that the TSA agents were grumpy in O’Hare airport last week. Okay. And also, in Denver. And that TSA agent is going to say, you know what, there was a real knucklehead. That’s right. What is the common denominator between Denver Airport and O’Hare? 

This is, and I know Donna is one, but that’s not what I’m talking to. Yeah, okay. So, the common denominator was me. But you guys have thrown me under the bus. I’m not even sure of my point at this point, but I do think that I have to defend myself. 

But I don’t know if this follows, but one of the things I was thinking about earlier in reference to the victim mentality is that very rarely does anybody even realize they’re doing that. Yeah. And so, it’s not necessarily a conscious thing, but there are a lot of people who fear being that, oh yeah. 

And then they double down on the other side of just like, nope, nothing’s going to affect me. And it’s more about being fearful that’s what they’ll become rather than you acknowledge this. Now I think that’s really helpful. Here we’ve got two clinicians, and you spend a fair amount of your time helping people see that their hurt matters. And they have under reported, undermined it themselves. Is that what I’m hearing? Some people do that. That’s for sure. There’s a group of people who come in, why am I depressed? I just don’t know why I’m depressed, and you know what’s wrong with me. 

Then you learn their story. I’m like, you’re telling me five things and any one of those things could have put somebody in that category. So, we do that. There are other people who will be more expansive about things and feel things really acutely and those kinds of things. 

And we have to help them see things in context and things like that. And again, both sides of this need to be listened to, be encouraged, helped, and walked with. Maybe one comment from each of you as we think about living in this world full of offenses about what is required to live in this world where offenses abound. 

Well, I think there are many things that are required. That’s the tricky part. There are so many. I think certainly one that comes to mind would be wisdom. Wisdom to know when there’s been an offense. What kind of an offense that’s been? Where do you take that offense? How do you process that internally? 

I think wisdom would be one thing. I think another thing would just be grace and forgiveness. What does that look like as we’ve experienced offense? Wherever they fall on the spectrum, to see that as we follow Christ, that’s part of what he calls us into. And sometimes that’s going to be very challenging to be able to extend forgiveness or grace. 

And I think what motivates me to think about is being quick to try to think about what that looks like in the small offenses, because that’s hard enough. And if I’m not practicing and learning and being able to build that out on those small things, then to think I’m going to be able to do that when that trauma does hit or that big offense hits. 

And Brian, if I were to get my word picture for what you just said is flexibility as opposed to rigidity. Yeah. And I can really try that on. I can see that where I break pretty easy, I need to be more flexible and absorb some of that and I think grace and forgiveness and wisdom go into that. 

 Ted, one or two things. I think one of the things is in our expectations of life, we really have to work on separating out the difference between finding our sense of joy and happiness in circumstances versus in God and his promises and the direction we’re going. And I think it’s easy to say, and as a preacher, I’ve said it and I know that sometimes it’s hard for me to follow in it. 

But we have to remember that this world has many joys, but it isn’t heaven. It isn’t heaven. It isn’t going to be heaven. Relationships are wonderful and messy. You know, the world we live in is beautiful and broken, and we have to be able to see that. It’s both of those things. And to not live into the dimness that happens if you say it’s all broken, there’s no good anywhere or believe that everything’s supposed to be a Pollyanna world. Yeah, those two, living in either of those places either leads you to constant frustration about the brokenness of life or despair over the brokenness of life. And God doesn’t need either of those. 

That’s great. Brian, you helped us, you gave us a lens for viewing our hurt. And Ted, you gave us a lens for looking up and out of our hurt. And I think both of those are probably great takeaways. Thanks to each of you for tackling this. Thank you everyone for listening. God bless you. And we have a tremendous amount of respect for the hurt and the offense that everybody has incurred. As small as it might be, as great as it might be. And we just want to live healthily with the hurt that we all have. 

We’re not going to get out of this life without it, I don’t think. Goodbye.