Calm Under Pressure
Beholding the glory of our Lord — in his striking Gospels calmness and his present imperturbable equanimity — we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We cannot study the real Christ too much. We cannot look to him too often. We cannot meditate on him too much. In coming as near to him as we can, and abiding in him as much as we are able, we will in time learn more of that holy stillness of soul, that godly composure, that glorious equanimity, and a thousand other graces besides.
I love the old word equanimity. It’s almost fallen out of use today. Perhaps that’s because, in part, the reality has become increasingly rare. Equanimity is a term for composure, for emotional calmness and presence of mind, particularly in trying circumstances.
We’re living in times that condition us to overreact and explode, in a society that rewards outrage and outbursts. It’s never been easy for sinners to keep even tempers in trial, but present distresses summon us afresh to learn composure under pressure, how to “hold our peace” when the moment requires it, and give release to emotion in its proper time and place. Our families and churches and communities need leaders who have learned to keep their heads when others are losing theirs, to not lose control in anger or self-pity but keep a sober mind, and be, like our God, “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6).
We need to bring equanimity back.
Non-Anxious Presence
The road-tested wisdom of Proverbs 16:32 whispers to those with ears to hear,
Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty,
and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.
Count “he who rules his spirit” as a biblical phrase for equanimity and holy composure. Note well, the wise man neither smites his spirit nor takes orders from it. He neither stuffs his emotions nor lets them play king. Rather, he rules his spirit. He learns how to keep his spirit cool, his temper even, in moments when fools get hot, weak kneed, and their passions carry the day.
This is not stoicism. Christians have long called this “self-control.” We aim not to be men without spirits but those who keep “a cool spirit” under duress, when the immature lose control. We do not discard our emotions (as if we could) or suppress them, but by God’s grace we seek to bring our spirit increasingly under the control of his Spirit.
Holy Calm
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) commends the “holy calm” of godly strength and praises the Spirit-empowered composure to which God calls his people and provides — and all the more in times volatile and easy agitated.
The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil an unreasonable world. (Religious Affections, 278)
Foreign as “holy calm” and equanimity might seem in our frenetic and furious age, we are well aware of the present challenges to our composure — which Edwards names in language we could hardly update more than two hundred years later: “storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world.”
Superlative Meekness
Yet Edwards not only commends “holy calm” in Christ’s soldiers. He presses deeper. He celebrates it in our captain and Lord himself. “In the person of Christ do meet together infinite majesty and transcendent meekness,” he writes, which are “two qualifications that meet together in no other person but Christ.”
Only God has infinite majesty; only in becoming man does Christ have meekness, “a virtue proper only to the creature.” In this meekness, Edwards says, “seems to be signified, a calmness and quietness of spirit, arising from humility in mutable beings that are naturally liable to be put into a ruffle by the assaults of a tempestuous and injurious world. But Christ, being both God and man, hath both infinite majesty and superlative meekness” (“Excellency of Christ”).
Who among us has not felt the temptation “to be put into a ruffle by the assaults” of our lives and age?
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Give Others Their Moment
Your friend shares about their special needs child? You are listening to a story of your friend who is a caregiver and the surgery the person they care for just had? Your friend just took their family to a special camp and had a great experience? Phil. 2:3-5, “do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for our own personal interests, but also for the interest of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.” Let’s do this and care about others, their story, and give them “their moment!”
Impressed recently about this idea, I have realized that we don’t often give others a chance to share their “moment” without others (or myself) wanting to share a similar experience or story. Something that happened to us recently has us really reflecting and being much more observant of letting others share what is important to them without topping their story or telling our own unless they ask.
Upon being asked how we were, Joe shared that I (Cindi) had just gotten out of the hospital and shared in 2 sentences how critical I was in the ICU -going in for one reason and other things popping up. Without missing a beat, nor asking a question or showing any interest, they shared about a friend who went into the hospital for something and died of something unrelated. It helped us to realize some things we should be aware of when others share something with us:Others (outside our closer circles) probably don’t really care and thus their own story will come to mind and trumps ours (we didn’t know this persons’ friend, so how was this story pertinent in the moment?)
Their story was obviously more important or they would have asked about ours (not a question asked nor a concern shown except, “get better soon”.)
Their “death” story of their friend didn’t encourage our journey!
The “can you top this” attitude can leave one feeling unheard and invisible. (It did us.)So how did we handle it? We said not another word, listened to the story and commented on it, sharing our condolences on the loss, and went on our way.
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Efficiency in Churches
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, August 21, 2023
Discipleship is inefficient. It’s slow, it’s messy, it can involve going the wrong way for large periods of time, it’s painful, and it always involves suffering. Berry argues that we have come to understand nature to engage in production rather than work in cycles. Churches don’t ‘produce’ anything, but I think if we think of trees as conveyor belts for the making of fruit then we can end up thinking the same way about Christian ministry: we do these things to get that fruit. Instead, trees die and rise again each year bursting with fruit and then dying and then bursting with fruit.Neil Postman argued that our metaphors demonstrate our thought patterns. I’ve argued that our metaphors fence our thought patterns such that we can’t think outside of them.
I suspect the relationship here flows in both directions rather than simply downstream, but metaphor and thought connect in important ways. When we use machine language to describe ourselves, we both reveal that we think we’re machines and we persuade ourselves that we are machines.
Reality, as it always does, pushes back. We should be concerned by thinking that humans can recharge, because it undermines the Biblical reality of rest in the gathered people of God. We should be concerned by the idea that we need to process things rather than think or feel them.
Wendell Berry, in his essay ‘Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,’ argues that after the industrial revolution the machinery metaphor has changed how we think. He highlights three examples, each of which I think is worth reflecting from the perspective of church ministry.
Efficiency
Berry argues that we now see efficiency as an end. We assume that the best thing for each thing we do is for it be run efficiently, because that’s what a good machine looks like.
We would commonly criticize public services for being inefficient, but why should a particular service that the government offers be efficient? I want to react against the question—after all, they’re spending my money as a taxpayer—but I think seeing efficiency as an inherently good thing is a product of these shifts, and an arguably less humane one. This is not saying that efficiency is bad as a means to good ends, but it becomes bad when it is pursued as an end in itself.
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And You Shall Never Displease Me
Whether it’s your child or parents, your husband or wife, your pastor or congregation, let them know, and then relate to them in such a way that they believe it: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”
So many people live with a deep sense of failure. So many people go through their lives convinced they are a constant disappointment to the ones they so naturally long to please.
Children consider their parents and feel a sense of shame, certain that in some way their parents regard them as a disappointment. Meanwhile, parents consider their children and feel that same sense of shame, sure that their children regard them with disapproval.
Husbands consider their wives and wives their husbands and, while they may not know exactly what they’ve done wrong or what standard they have failed to uphold, they are convinced their spouse looks toward them with a displeased eye.
Church members are often convinced their pastor is disappointed in them for their level of involvement in the church or for the minimal strides they have made in sanctification. Pastors, meanwhile, often feel a deep sense of disapproval from church members, perhaps because they are ordinary preachers rather than extraordinary ones or because they simply do not have enough hours in the week to accept every meeting and fulfill every request.
There are so many Christians who live under a cloud of disappointment and disapproval. And we cannot allow ourselves off the hook here. Our husbands and our wives, our parents and our children, our pastors and our congregations—all can feel that withering sense of censure from the likes of you and me.
And, if we’re honest, such censure is often real rather than imagined. It is real because we are all susceptible to expecting people to live up to our standards rather than to God’s.
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