“It’s okay to not be okay.” We say this out loud during our Worship Gatherings almost every week.
All too often, churches earn their reputation for being sanitized communities where everyone pretends that life is going great, while everyone hides the struggles that are really going on beneath the surface.
And it’s not just churches.
Workplaces are often just as sanitized, with the specter of the next performance evaluation, the inner spur of career ambition, and the all-consuming demands for productivity leaving little or no room for authentic human needs. In the workplace, all too often, we have to pretend we are okay, that everything is going fine.
The end of May wraps up Mental Health Awareness Month, and one of the most telling symptoms of mental stress (that often flies under the radar) is a distorted perception of time. At the most extreme, those wrestling with self-harm very frequently describe time having slowed to a crawl and coming to a standstill, essentially making present circumstances feel like they will never change and giving rise to despair. Especially in the breakneck work culture of our day (perhaps especially where our church is based, in Silicon Valley), it is all too easy to feel like time moves too slowly for us, and changes or advancement we hope for are delayed, while others around us are jumping ahead. Many of us can relate to feeling stuck or sidelined, which creates immense emotional strain.
One of the hardest seasons of my vocational life came when I transitioned from a software industry role to a pastoral role. I was coming from a director-level position at a Fortune 500 company, managing a talented team of software engineers. A pastoral internship role became available at my church, and I accepted the role because I was serious about exploring ministry as a vocation, but in all honesty, the change in title and status was far more disorienting than I expected. Shortly after my job change, I remember having to fill out a form at a doctor’s visit, and when I was asked to enter my current job, I couldn’t bring myself to write, “Intern,” so I put my former job down instead. This was a season of my life when I felt profoundly stuck, and I wrestled with disillusionment about what I had gotten myself into.
Perhaps you can relate. “Stuckness” may come about as a result of an unexpected layoff or a job search that takes longer than expected. You may be in a job that seems like it offers no possibility for growth or advancement, or you may have a dysfunctional workplace culture or supervisory relationship. No matter what its cause,
Our feeling stuck often is accompanied by a distorted perception of time that tends to make us feel trapped and easily gives rise to feelings of hopelessness and despair.
I want to suggest that spirituality provides an unexpected resource to our perspective on time. In my tradition, as a Christian Pastor, the language I would use is that the Presence of God offers a different way of seeing our present reality, including our view of time. When the divine and the eternal collide with the temporal, space for hope is created.
This resource is more than merely reminding ourselves of the Scriptural aphorism, “With God, all things are possible.”
Inviting the Presence of God into our lives through prayer, meditation, service to others, worship, and other spiritual disciplines literally reanimates our view of time and viscerally reminds us that nothing is permanently stuck.
In this life, for better and for worse, change is not merely possible; it is inevitable. Negative change, like illness, grief, and physical decline, is intended to raise big existential questions and awaken our soul to our need for God. But just as importantly, the Presence of God awakens our senses to the grace of positive change. In fact, the Presence of God often provides direct personal resources of courage, conviction, or vision to choose for change in our lives.
I’m grateful to say that the feeling of disillusionment that I had for the first year when I transitioned to a vocational ministry role did, in fact, change. But it wasn’t because there was something inevitable about my alignment with a ministry role. I learned in that first year, as I’ve re-learned in many contexts since then, that inviting the Presence of God into my moments of despair or disillusionment changes the way I see the world and experience the passage of time and life’s seasons. I hope that may be true for you also.
If you are struggling with feeling stuck, consider praying for a greater awareness of God’s Presence in your life to allow you to see yourself and your circumstances differently in this season.
Our church, New Beginnings Community Church, is starting a series on trauma, mental health, and resilience. Join us for our upcoming message series, “Restored: From Trauma to Healing.”
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