Having a ‘moment’

We’ve just started a course at our church called ‘Lifeshapes’ which I am helping out with. Last week we started with a dinner all together, and a brief intro to the course. One of the things talked about was ‘Kairos’ moments, kairos meaning time. The Greeks had 2 words for time: Chronos – from which we get chronological, as in timeline. Kairos refers more to ‘a time’, like ‘the time I went to…’. So, an event that happened once at a particular time, and used to refer to significant moments in our lives, turning points for example, and in this case, what God teaches us in those situations.  So, we were all asked to come next week prepared to share a ‘kairos’ moment from this week, whether large or small, the implication being that if we look, actually God is teaching us in so many situations, if not all….

But actually I could hardly concentrate on what was said last week and I will explain why in a moment, but it occured to me that what had happened was actually right there a kairos moment. So this is what I will be sharing on Thursday:

Last week, in the quitest possible moment of the evening, (seriously like pin-drop moment) my stomach chose to gurgle very loudly. Now I am not talking an average stomach gurgle, this was literally seismic, unnatural in its volume. really it was freakish. And in that moment I was overcome with embarrassment, I just did not know what to say. I am sure I turned bright red, and from then on I just sat thinking, please don’t do that again, please don’t do that again, oh what are people thinking…?  Which in hindsight is ridiculous, I should have said something witty and forgot about it, but I was too embarrassed! and instead I found myself stewing on it…

Anyway… God has been teaching me about ‘fear of man’ in the last few weeks. I am someone who is very confident, happy talking in public etc and yet since being ill I have found myself feeling very anxious in certain situations. On top of this, I have some stomach issues. I don’t ike talking about them, for the same reason, I get embarrassed.  I am lactose-intolerant which is fine if I avoid lactose but at the same time even when I don’t eat it my stomach can act in odd ways at times, including gurgling (although not freakishly loudly until now…!) I hate this. really, I hate it. It stops me doing stuff I really want to do. And what I have been realising over the last few weeks is that this is about the fear of man. About being embarrassed in front of people, not really about the condition itself. So as I sat last week, wallowing in my embarrassment, and not really listening to the teaching, I was giving in to that fear – what if it happens again? can I leave the room? what will I do next week? what are people thinking?  And this is exactly where I have been with the illness, making decisions about where I can go and when, on the basis that I might feel ill, or get sick. Rather than being honest and saying, ok I want to go to this event but there is a chance I might get ill, and if that’s the case I’ll come home…

I guess this all sounds a bit nuts so I don’t know if I am explaining it well… but the point is that God, through various things over the last few weeks and particularly the stomach gurgling incident, made me realise that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what people think. IT DOESNT MATTER WHAT PEOPLE THINK!

I know I have written on here quite a lot about being ill but not many people round here actually know. I am not good at accepting when I am weak and I hate that I can’t do stuff, so I just don’t talk about it, because I can’t accept it. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me, or, as I have said before, to be defined by being ill. So writing on here about it all has been very therapeutic…