Peter and a donkey
By: Susan Schwartzetruber
Psalm 31:1-5; Matthew 16:13-20; Matthew 26:31-46
It is so good to be with you this Sunday morning. I want to thank Mark for extending the invitation and to share a the resources that will be guiding your current series called Reservoirs of Resilience in Uncertain Times.
Resilience is a topic that I love to talk about. Probably because in my work as therapist I have witnessed every day the incredible ability for people to be resilient as they live through painful, challenging, sad and tragic circumstances. These people tend to be normal but incredible human beings who may have deep inner scars but they are strong and flexible so that when the storms come they bend and bend but not break.
The COVID pandemic has tossed us into a tumultuous storm over the past 2 years. There is a quote circulating that we are all in the same storm but we are in different boats. I take that to mean that our ride in the storm or even our boat may look very different than that of our friends, family members, neighbours, siblings etc. This is a time where resiliency really matters.
As you heard the scripture passages this morning you heard a few stories about Peter the disciple. I see Peter as a resilient biblical character. Here is a quick bullet overview of who Peter was found in passages from New Testament.
- Peter a fisherman was One of the first disciples to be called by Jesus
- Jesus is walks on the water towards a boat where the disciples are. Peter goes out to meet him, and he too miraculously walks on the water but begins to sink when he became afraid
- Later on Peter accompanies Jesus when praying in the garden but falls asleep.
- When Jesus is arrested Peter cuts off a soldier’s ear
- In the story of footwashing, Peter wants Jesus to wash his whole body not just his feet
- Lastly, Peter states he would never deny Jesus and then ends up doing so 3 times before Jesus is crucified
Peter loved Jesus yet he made mistakes over and over again
Peter’s Messiah and friend dies and how does he carry on
Peter the sinker, sleeper, aggressor, impulsive one, denier, the average guy, becomes:
The rock on which the church will be built, and he evangelizes the gentiles and yet even at that point in his life he continues to run into trouble, he is arrested and miraculously freed. Peter somehow thrives.
So do negative things just keep happening to Peter or does he keep stumbling and falling down? He could have viewed himself as a failure, a disappointment and walked away from the close circle of friendship with the disciples. Peter is lavished with love from Jesus and is well liked by the other disciples even though in the face of tragedy he continues to mess up. When Jesus goes to pray the night before he is arrested, does Peter stay wide awake and protect Jesus? No, he sleeps. When the soldiers come does Peter non-violently stand in between? No, he is aggressive and impulsive and cuts off a soldier’s ear. Again, Peter is resilient in the face of these situations. How does he not simply give up after he realizes he betrayed his dear friend and Messiah at the moment of his death. Peter somehow shakes off this negativity, the harshness of his life reality including: the death of his friend and perhaps the loss of bigger dream and the expectation that Jesus was supposed to lead them all to freedom – not his own death. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Peter somehow carries on and becomes a significant founder of the early church. Even imprisonment does not stop him. Peter bends with his own mistakes or poor choices and his human vulnerable spirit. The life and world circumstances Peter lived in were tragic, disappointing, and sad. Somewhere he must have found hope to keep going.
Here is another character that also highlights resiliency.
Listen to this fable:
One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out a way to get him out. Finally he decided it was probably impossible and the animal was old and the well was dry anyway, so it just wasn’t worth it to try and retrieve the donkey. So the farmer asked his neighbors to come over and help him cover up the well. They all grabbed shovels and began to shovel dirt into the well.
At first, when the donkey realized what was happening he cried horribly. It must have been frightening to have dirt thrown on top of him. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he quieted down and let out some happy brays. A few shovel loads later, the farmer looked down the well and was amazed. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was shaking it off and taking a step up onto the dirt pile he packed down each time. (Shifting)
This continued, shovel of dirt, shake it off, step up. Pretty soon, to everyone’s amazement, the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!
Here is the moral of this fable: life is going to shovel dirt on you. The key to getting out of the well is to learn to shake it off and take a step up. Adversity can be turned into a stepping stone.
The dirt for the past 2 years has been the COVID 19 pandemic. This dirt is messy, overwhelming, annoying, frustrating, sad, constant, it has changed us, our relationships and the rhythm of our everyday life. We may call out to God to rescue us, to save us, and has God heard us? This pandemic dirt is like a big storm. Are the winds of this storm helping us to learn to bend or are we breaking in small ways or big ways.
Resilience is the ability to steer through
serious life challenges and find ways to
bounce back and to thrive. (tie back to donkey story)
Do you relate to Peter the disciple or do you relate to the donkey?
Peter was an average person, he was well liked, he had good friends, he had an important relationship with Jesus, but wow he kept stepping into trouble, at times he sunk when he doubted himself and became afraid, sometimes he became angry and other times he was sad, discouraged, and full of despair. Yet Peter was resilient in the difficulty, and he eventually accomplished great things.
Or do you relate to the donkey: Instinctually, the donkey figured out how to survive. He could have laid down and let the dirt cover and suffocate him. But no, his natural resiliency skills kicked in and he became creative and perhaps even energized and walked right out of the terrible situation he found himself in.
We are born with innate resiliency. Resilience is not something we have or don’t have. We work on it and we can build it throughout our lives.
The major point here is that resilience is not a genetic trait that only a few” super people” possess.
Resilience is an amazing innate quality and function of our brain to help us survive. Resilience is the capacity of any system to adapt to threats and danger. Our brains are naturally wired and prepared to develop resilience but yet to build our resiliency we must have life experiences where we face adversity. Adversity helps us to build protective factors and the opportunity to learn and grow. Sometimes the adversity is something we find ourselves in due to the choices we make and other times its adversity that is part of our reality and day to day living.
The global uniqueness for us in this COVID reality is that this threat, this danger is invisible. It makes the threat and our reality seem surreal. This potential danger cannot be seen. We don’t see the virus floating in the air heading our direction. But we can’t see COVID coming and run the other way.
There is an article from the Harvard Business Review from Feb.7 2022 entitled “Rehabilitate from the trauma of the pandemic.” It describes the pandemic in 3 phases : shock; pain; and rehabilitation.
In the pain phase 3 needs were often not met :
- The need for certainty – the was an absence of reliable patterns
- The need for control and autonomy – rules expectations, patterns of behaviour kept changing as we learned more about the virus
- The need for connectedness – we may have been cutoff from physical touch, conversations over coffee or sitting in the same church pew with one another
The writer describes that we are now in the rehabilitation phase which may be the hardest and the recommendations are wise :
- Don’t move too fast – take time – be careful with expectations
- Value progress however small
- Remember that we are all walking wounded – and we will emerge with different experiences, as need to continue to extend self-compassion, and compassion for others and patience.
It is important to name the losses that have happened. You may have lost face to face connections, involvement in activities such as sports, choir, acting, any kind of music making, worshipping together, watching movies together, having dinner together, hosting people in your home, holding your new grandbaby, simply being without a mask.
In preparation for this talk, I watched a TED talk by Dr. Lucy Hone who is a director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resiliency. Her talk is powerful and moving and yet building resiliency isn’t a complex deeply psychological process. Her suggestions and recommendations are informed from resiliency research and her own story of loss and grief.
Dr. Hone had been a resiliency researcher for many years and then tragedy struck her own life. Her 12-year-old daughter was riding in a car with her best friend. The car was driven by Dr. Hone’s good friend. While they were driving, a car drove straight through a stop sign crashing into their car and killing all three instantly. All of a sudden, the expert in resiliency was in the grip of gut-wrenching loss and pain. She was a Mother who lost her little girl. Here are her 3 strategies for resiliency that helped her cope, bend, and survive:
- Resilient people know that “bad things happen.” IE dirt is thrown on us. This is truly a part of life. Suffering is a part of human existence. Perhaps pre-COVID, that message in our society may have been lost. There was a mindset that life wasn’t supposed to include suffering and if we did everything right and if we were successful in our choices we would not suffer. And yet suffering is a part of human existence.
- Resilient people “are good at choosing where they select their attention.” To be resilient you need to focus on things you can change and accept what you can’t. We often notice negative things much more quickly and the negative sticks like Velcro. This is also part of our wiring for survival. If we didn’t notice threats, we wouldn’t fight or run away and survive. And right now, we are bombarded with the negative during COVID. The skill that can be learned and strengthened is your “skill of attention.” Can you look for the benefit? Can you accept the good? Can you hunt for the opportunities? Building your skill of attention needs to be practiced, deliberate and intentional. Article : Resilient Christians choose to focus on where God is at work for good and lean in that direction.
- Resilient people ask, “is what I’m doing helping me or harming me.” Ask yourself: What are the things that I do that help me and then you need to keep doing them. Stop doing the things that you know make you feel worse. But I know this is not easy to do.
In the article that Mark shared with me it also affirms this idea that resilience work requires that we constantly reflect on what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Again these 3 strategies are not in-depth psychological interventions. But they do work, and they are resiliency skills.
Here is another resiliency image for you to consider.
Have you ever seen the tall redwood or sequoia trees in California? These are incredibly majestic and massively tall trees.
You would think that a 350-foot-tall tree would need deep roots, but that’s not the case at all. Redwood tree roots are very shallow, often only five or six feet deep. But they make up for it in width, sometimes extending up to 100 feet from the trunk. They thrive in thick groves, where the roots can intertwine and even fuse together. This gives them tremendous strength against the forces of nature. This way they can withstand high winds and raging floods.” They bend but do not break or topple over because of their intertwined roots.
Redwoods do not survive alone…ever. They form “tribes” or communities. The entire system relies on their rooted connections.
At the beginning I focussed solely on how you as an individual can build up your resilience. I have not yet emphasized how important and integral relationships, support, involvement, and community are to building resiliency. Charles Darwin also talked about resilience, and he stated that the greatest predictor for resilience equalled collaboration and cohesiveness.
To be resilient we need what the Redwood trees have – a root system that is intertwined, a broad system of connections, embraced with one another to withstand storms and dependent on each other for nurture. When the winds blow, they are rooted because they hold each other up – although that may not be visible to the eye above ground. We can’t survive alone in the midst of this pandemic
We all have the capacity for resilience and a nurturing environment and positive supports influence the outcome of resilience but there are a number of other factors that can also influence this.
I’m sure you’ve heard stories of folks who have experienced the same tragedy, and some walked away unscathed – physically or mentally, while others are troubled and distressed for years. And on the other end some individuals come through a tragedy stronger, with new skills and energized.
Some congregations and leaders will have the spiritual capacity to deepen and grow and thrive while others will remain stable while others may have to reassess their ability to keep going currently and post-pandemic.
All of these results along the continuum of thriving, no impact and stable, or distressed are completely normal and typical responses to tragedy. We are all different, we are wired differently, we experience support differently and we interpret situations and their meaning differently. All these factors influence how we get through things.
Let me take you back to the donkey. Maybe if this donkey had a history of abuse would he respond the same? If this donkey had lost all of its family members, would it shake the dirt off. If this donkey was injured, would he be able to step up? If this donkey had been penned up for years, how would he respond? I think you see where I’m going. Not all of us respond in the same way to the same experience depending on who we are, who supports us, and what we may have already lived through.
Could you also name some unexpected gifts and surprises that have emerged over the last 2 years? For some students on-line learning was a relief and allowed more flexibility over time. I have heard other stories that families are spending more time together – eating around the table, playing games, taking walks, talking together. Others of you may have thrived in this differentness….you are taking more risks to do things differently. We’ve had to worship in new ways and try to stay connected. There are often unexpected gifts that emerge in the midst of tragedy and adversity.
One of the protective factors that I have noticed which is not typically named in resiliency research is faith. Where does a belief in God, a higher power, and the support of a faith community fit into all of this. Perhaps throughout this year we may have become a bit disillusioned with the faith concept that God is in control and God loves us. Even as we work on building our resilience, we still feel pain, loneliness, fear, sadness, anger and disappointment and like David in Psalm 31 we need to call out to God during our difficult times.
Can we trust that God is there to comfort and support us? A belief in something beyond us can give us hope. This is a time where we might struggle with our faith, which often happens during times of adversity. Our faith communities are part of the tree root system that keeps us grounded and secure. Again, church might look different than normal, but I hope you do feel supported and cared for in the midst of this.
Resilience – are you learning to bend and bounce back
When discouraged can you be encouraged by Peter the disciple or the donkey
You can build resilience when you pay attention to the positives and balance out the negative. Sometimes adversity can result in gifts and unexpected opportunities.
We need to be a forest of trees with broad and intertwined roots to weather this storm.
Even as we work on building our resilience, we still feel pain, loneliness, fear, sadness, anger and disappointment yet we believe God is present to hear our voices.