Weighing Up Hardships

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“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” So said the apostle Paul in Romans 8:18.

Paul, who suffered beatings, lashings, shipwrecks, snake bites, desertion by friends, persecution, imprisonment after false accusation, loss of loved ones, called all these things “light momentary affliction” compared to the “eternal weight of glory” that awaits us (2 Corinthians 4:17).

I find myself regularly pondering the purpose of suffering. I’ve written on it before. It still occupies my mind. I have a feeling it will be a lifelong project. Perhaps the pondering itself is one of God’s purposes!

But surely one of God’s purposes in the suffering of believers is right there in these verses. If sufferings are considered “light” and “momentary” in comparison to the glory to come, then one way we appreciate the glory of the future is in contrast against the afflictions we experience now. In other words, the more we suffer the more we appreciate the full glory of the future, because the greater the suffering the more glorious the future has to be to tip the scales. And the Bible assures us that however much we suffer, the scales are always toppled by the eternal weight of glory. The sufferings are “not worth comparing”.

What causes us to lose heart? Isn’t it when things come along which threaten our hopes and dreams? I may want to see my children grow into mature and successful adults, but serious illness (mine or theirs) may prevent that. I may want to have financial stability, a successful career and to feel like I’ve made a difference for good in my work, but time after time I get made redundant and then struggle to find work. I am tempted to lose heart because I can’t achieve what I want to.

We lose heart when the darkness of suffering looms larger than our view of the hope, when the threat is big enough to snuff out our view of the light at the end of the tunnel.

But we’re taught in the Bible that there is no affliction large enough to eclipse the hope that we have in Christ Jesus. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-38)

Hearing that is one thing. Believing it is another.

Believing it is one thing. Knowing it is another.

Knowing it requires experience; experience of affliction, proving for ourselves that what God assures us through the Bible is true, as we act according to our belief, our faith.

In order to not lose heart (2 Corinthians 4:16) we must set our hearts on things unshakable and certain, like Jesus who, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)

If my heart is set on a successful career, then I may lose heart when redundancy comes. If my heart is set on providing for and protecting my family, then I may lose heart when tragedy strikes or when I lose my strength to provide and protect. If my heart is set on sharing the gospel with those who do not know him, I may lose heart when blockages fall in my way and opportunities are few. If my heart is set on doing great things for God, then I may lose heart when my projects fail.

Instead we must have a vision of the glory of God, the glory that we will share in because of our adoption as His sons through the gracious work of the Lord Jesus Christ; a vision not dependent on my power to achieve it, or on my goodness or wisdom, or on any other finite being, but only on our great God and Saviour; a vision that is big enough to overcome any dark shadows of affliction or discouragement that would try to eclipse it.

The bigger the shadows, the bigger the vision needed.

And God is all about expanding our vision of Him, so that we treasure Him more, so that we love Him more as we appreciate His grace and His love more clearly and more gloriously. God’s love, grace and glory are infinite. Yet we are finite. So our capacity to take in His glory is limited. So our capacity can and must be stretched and expanded.

Personally speaking I know that my appreciation of God’s glory, His grace and mercy in Christ, His surpassing righteousness, His love for me, is so weak. I don’t feel as consumed by it as I know I should.

And I also know that the times my capacity to appreciate that has expanded have been the times I’ve run out of myself under pressure of things I can’t cope with: relationship difficulties, redundancies, career failures, illnesses, rejection. As those dark times have threatened to make me lose heart, I’ve been forced to cling more tightly to Jesus and to see just how brightly His glory shines and really does always obliterate the darkness. It really is impossible to be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus. He has secured it unshakably forever. There really is something infinitely more wonderful and eternal waiting for us.

Anything we might lose heart about in this life is so short term, so trifling, compared to the eternity waiting for us, enjoying our position as children of the only true God, the One who created all things and holds all things together.

Hence often the purpose of our suffering is to expand our vision of God, to detach our hope from ourselves, to focus us more tightly on Jesus, to appreciate more fully the “eternal weight of glory”.

And with that appreciation comes great joy. “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing the suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:2-5)

A lesson from King Asa's bad feet

I was struck recently by a verse I read in my daily Bible reading. It challenged me personally, but struck me as pertinent to any believer who suffers illness, and, since we all go through trials, relevant to every believer. 

“In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe. Yet even in his disease he did not seek the LORD, but sought help from physicians.” (2 Chronicles 16:12) 

To some this analysis may seem a little harsh. Is the writer saying that it was wrong to seek help from doctors? Surely that’s what doctors and physicians are for? You have a disease. You naturally go and see a doctor. What’s wrong with that? 

I have certainly “sought help from physicians” quite a lot, to put it mildly, over the last few years! So I wanted to know what King Asa did wrong. As a Christian I want to seek the LORD, but does that mean that I should go to faith healers rather than my GP? Should I shun chemotherapy in favour of prayer alone? 

Asa was king of Judah, about 900 years before Christ. He was great-grandson of Solomon, the last king of the united house of Israel. He is described in the second book of Chronicles as a good king, doing “what was good and right in the eyes of the LORD his God” (2 Chronicles 14:2). He reigned for 41 years. But when you read the story of his reign it seems to start well and end badly.

What the writer of the account wants to contrast is the way that Asa’s initial success was based on his reliance on the LORD his God, and his ultimate demise was due to pride and hardness of heart. 

His early years were God-centred. His first recorded words to the people of Judah were an encouragement to build cities with walls and towers. “The land is still ours, because we have sought the LORD our God. We have sought him, and he has given us peace on every side.” (14:7) 

When the Ethiopians came against them with a large army, “Asa cried to the LORD his God, O LORD, there is none like you to help, between the mighty and the weak. Help us, O LORD our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this multitude. O LORD, you are our God; let not man prevail against you.” (14:11) 

God encouraged him through the prophet Azariah (15:1-7), “The LORD is with you while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you...” This gave Asa the courage to go through the land of Judah, ridding it of foreign gods. His zeal even extended to publicly deposing his own mother from her position as queen mother because of her idolatry (15:16). And for twenty years there was no more war (15:19). We’re told that “the heart of Asa was wholly true all his days.” (15:17) 

But six years before the end of his reign he messed up. Twenty years of prosperity and peace had made him complacent, and forgetful. We’re told that when the king of the northern kingdom of Israel mounted a blockade, Asa went straightaway to make an alliance with the king of Syria. And not only that, he bribed the Syrians, not with his own wealth but with treasures taken straight out of the LORD’s temple (16:2). A prophet came to take him to task, reminding him of his earlier faith and saying, “Because you relied on the king of Syria, and did not rely on the LORD your God, the army of the king of Syria has escaped you... You have done foolishly in this, for from now on you will have wars.” (16:7-9) Asa was “in a rage with him” and threw the poor prophet in prison. 

Three years later, when his feet became diseased, he went straight to the physicians, with no mention of asking for prayer. He was acting in the same way again. He arrogantly thought he knew what was required, surely nothing to bother the LORD with. He’d forgotten his earlier faith, and that the continued existence, let alone prosperity and peace, of the people was, “because we have sought the LORD our God.” (14:7) 

His early reign was characterised by a passion to take everything to the Lord in prayer. In his latter years he acted as if he thought he could do it all himself. 

The problem was not that he sought help from physicians, nor that he made an alliance with the king of Syria necessarily. It was that he did not pray and ask the LORD’s help first. When he had defeated the Ethiopians he had still led the people into battle, but he prayed to the LORD first and expressed his total dependence on Him. He should have done the same when faced with the Israelite blockade and the foot disease. 

The lesson for me is that I must never go to my doctors without seeking the Lord first. I must take everything to God in prayer, as the hymn says. The doctors are God’s instrument of healing and comfort, but God alone is the one who ultimately gives health, victory, peace, prosperity and everything else that we need. 

The other lesson is that we must persevere with this humble, God-centred, attitude throughout our whole lives. We cannot let age, complacency, pride, tiredness or anything else distract us or deflect us from looking to Him for everything, in Christ. 

“Let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:1-2)

Hickman Line (Cancer and Me - Part 24)

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Approx date: 14 February 2013

I may have explained already, but a Hickman line is a tube that is inserted into the chest for a few weeks, so that the nurses can deliver certain drugs more easily. The end of the tube goes into a big vein that sits very close to the heart, and the other end splits into two tubes – one for stuff going in, the other for blood coming out. I’ve included a picture, so you can see exactly what I mean.

I was quite nervous about having it put in, but looking back it wasn’t too bad. It was, however, another day off work, which I could have done without.

The reason it’s a day off work is that even after the procedure is complete and you can go home, the advice is to not drive because it can be sore with the seatbelt across the collarbone just where the line is sitting.

I had to go down to Southampton Hospital to have the line fitted. It’s done with the aid of an x-ray, and under a local anaesthetic. So you enter an operating theatre and lie on the slab, which is then adjusted into position with the x-ray machine above it. The doctor (normally an anaesthetist) makes two incisions, and pushes the tube into the vein through the one next to the collarbone. The other end of the tube is then pushed under the skin to come out of the lower incision. At a couple of points the x-ray machine is used to make sure that the tube is in the right place. Sound uncomfortable? It is a bit. It’s not something that I’d want to do for fun. But it’s over in a minute, and the whole thing is complete within about 20 minutes.

I had my line in for about 5 weeks altogether. Often patients will have them for much longer. Every week the line needed to be flushed clean by a nurse. If I wasn’t in hospital for any other reason in a particular week I had to make an arrangement for this to be done. Not a big thing (about half an hour or so), but more added hassle.

After a week or so the soreness has eased, and you hardly notice that the tubes are there. The times that they most got in the way for me were during the night in bed when they dangled annoyingly, and in the morning when I had a shower. Having a bath was not allowed, as the tubes should not be submerged in water. But in order to have a shower the tubes have to be wrapped in cling film to keep them dry.

I had to keep the line for about 3 weeks after the stem cell harvest was complete. That was because I was waiting to see the doctor in Southampton to talk about whether to go straight ahead with the transplant or whether to wait until my next relapse. If I’d decided to go ahead then obviously I would have kept the line until the transplant was complete, but in the end I decided to wait.

I believe that I have about 3 years until the disease comes back again. On the doctors’ advice I believe that when it does come back chemotherapy followed by the transplant will be my best chance of getting rid of it for good. And the doctors have also convinced me that there is no real disadvantage in waiting. A few people I spoke to (friends/colleagues) would have gone through with the transplant as soon as possible, rather than wait. Heidi, on the other hand, wanted to wait. We had holidays booked, which would have had to be cancelled (too familiar), and we were desperate for a return to normality. I felt fine, so I’d rather have a bit more time feeling fine and able to financially and mentally prepare for significant time out of action.

So the line came out on 22 March. It’s a bit more fiddly than just yanking the tubes and pulling it out! The Hickman line has a cuff just under the skin next to the hole where it pokes out of the chest. The skin binds to the cuff, by design, so that the line stays fixed in place. But that means that when it needs to come out there is a bit of digging to do to tear the skin away from the cuff. The process took about an hour for one of the haematology registrars to do in a side room, and then I had to go back a couple of weeks later to have the stitches taken out.

Well at least I know what’s involved now, so that next time there will be less new to think about.

PS. This blog entry is now part of a book describing my cancer journey/adventure/battle.

If you're a fellow lymphoma sufferer and want to compare notes, I hope this book will be an encouragement to you. You can find out how to get hold of it by clicking here.

What Keeps Me Going?

I went for some tests – an endoscopy in fact – in hospital the other day. As the nurse was doing the booking in form with me, she was remarking that everything was normal – blood pressure, textbook 120/80; temperature, normal; oxygen level, 97%; no asthma, no diabetes; and so on. She was waiting to hear something abnormal that might indicate why I needed to be there. It was only the question about medical history that gave her the answer, and as she asked she noticed the size of my file on the desk in front of her!

I told her briefly about the non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the treatment in 2010 and the recent relapse and retreatment. She remarked that it was good that I still remained cheerful, I was still smiling, because she reckoned that was unusual.

It’s not the only time someone has remarked on my positive attitude. A few times when I have had to break the news about my illness to friends or acquaintances that I haven’t been in touch with for a while they’ve said even my emails convey a positive outlook. They think it’s remarkable that I am not full of self-pity or despondency.

It just made me wonder, is it really that unusual? It’s not something I was conscious of. I was just getting on with things, having the treatment, doing what needs to be done to get through. I wasn’t consciously trying to be anything. I just don’t see the point in worrying about stuff. I accept the way things are. I’m not bitter. It’s just stuff to get through that is not as easy as normal life. And really, to be honest, for me cancer has been just a bit unpleasant, but nothing grotesquely painful (so far); although I accept that the NHS will have spent thousands and thousands of pounds making it just unpleasant rather than deadly!

I know I’ve published similar thoughts on this blog before, but sometimes I don’t appreciate how unusual it is to feel that way. I still don’t really believe it is unusual. I haven’t personally met many fellow sufferers that have been openly despondent or depressed. So maybe people are just buttering me up to be encouraging!

Whether or not it is, in fact, unusual, I cannot deny that there is a significant spiritual element for me.

I have an eternal hope through the Lord Jesus Christ – hope of life as it should be. There will come a time when imperfection will be swept away – all evil, illness, pain, suffering, death, sadness, grief – all gone. I will one day be free from cancer, and from all illness, for ever, and free from the sin that plagues me. Death will be a distant memory, and not a lurking fear. And life will be full of joy, full of the God of joy, the Creator of everything good.

I know that God is in control over all things, so that nothing frustrates Him or thwarts Him. And I know that He loves me as a precious son (and I know how much I love my children, and His love must be infinitely greater). So I know that whatever I go through now must be for my good, even if I cannot see it directly.

And if my Saviour, Jesus, can submit himself to suffering the pain of betrayal, torture, an agonising death and the wrath of God upon sin, all for the sake of people like me, then how can I refuse to submit to less if that is God’s will? I am a follower of Christ. And He didn’t just happen to suffer. He came to suffer.

In facing all that, Jesus raised his eyes to the “joy that was set before him” (Hebrews 12:2). And I am determined to do the same. I am also determined that I must encourage others to seek out and discover that joy, which is the joy of adoption as a son and heir by our Creator. It’s a joy that is only available through faith in Jesus Christ, whose death removes the barrier between the believer and God, the barrier of sin; and whose resurrection gives us the hope of eternal life.

I don’t hold these things consciously in mind 24 hours a day, but the knowledge of them helps to give me a positive outlook. If we know that no matter what obstacles we meet along the way, however difficult or frustrating, we are sure to attain our biggest and final objective, then those obstacles will not seem so big. Short term pain is still pain, frustration is still frustration, hardship is still hard. But none of my pains, frustrations and hardships can prevent me from reaching the eternal joy that I mentioned earlier. “… in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present not things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-39)

There is an infinitely deep reservoir of hope for the Christian, rooted in Jesus Christ, and promised in the Word of God. I know that I have the rest of my life ahead of me, and that there may be even harder times, times when I may not look or sound so cheerful or positive, times when my heart aches, times when physical pain clouds almost every other thought. I pray that the Lord will enable me to persevere, and strengthen me to fight to keep drinking from that reservoir, to always fix my eyes upon Jesus and the joy set before me.

Never the Same Again (Cancer and Me - Part 15)

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Approx date: 6 February 2011

One of the things that seems true about a brush with cancer is that afterwards, even with a good outcome, you see things differently. Your whole attitude changes.

It is true in my case that my faith was strengthened. It’s also true, although I know that perhaps I can’t generalize for everyone, that there were lots of positives to come out of it. For one thing I found my love of writing, and blogging has been something that I have continued with and hopefully helped others in the process. For another, I got to spend so much time with my kids, and that is priceless. I have no doubt that Jake would not be the fantastic footballer he is today if it hadn’t been for the little training sessions I put on for him in the back garden whenever I felt up to it (and sometimes when I didn’t). He really did improve in that time, and I know he realizes through that that sometimes bad things happen for a good reason. Of course, he sees it now in purely worldly terms – there is always a silver lining to every cloud – and that has certainly been something we’ve been able to see. But the real silver lining may not be after we die.

I also got to help with maths homework, watch school productions and go to parents evenings (after chemo finished), and we got to go on lots of ad hoc evenings/days out simply because I was around.

But I also started to realize that I had become somewhat slave to work. Our overheads were high, primarily because of our lovely big house with our lovely big garden. Ok the mortgage had been partly repaid, but there was still some left. And the house was now 40 years old, and would soon need new windows and major work to the kitchen and bathrooms. The only way I could see to adequately maintain it was to go back into a full time senior position, of the sort that I’d had trouble finding for the previous 2 years since the recession started.

I also had other things that I enjoyed doing more. Being ill made me realize that having time to do those things – the writing, the music, the football coaching with the kids – was important to me, and I simply had to make time for them. So I wanted to have a more flexible lifestyle where I didn’t have to earn so much money and work in such a stressful environment.

Cutting a long story short, that led to a search to downsize. We wanted to sell the house, have no mortgage, but not compromise too much in terms of living space. We looked at moving away from Basingstoke, even had a house-viewing weekend in Derby, because we thought it might be relatively cheaper to move up north. But that came to nothing.

Eventually, we had almost given up when I phoned an estate agent about a fairly new house in Basingstoke. It was big enough and turned out to be within negotiation reach of our budget. However, after putting in the biggest offer we could afford, we were beaten to it. Heidi was despondent, but around the corner I had seen a sales office for some new homes. I looked on the website and there was a special offer on a 4-bedroom house at a price just above our budget. I encouraged Heidi to at least come and look at it with me. Nothing to lose by going to look, even though she was pessimistic, to say the least.

Well, it just shows how things can work out. We went and looked at the house, and it was lovely. The only drawback was that the kitchen was inadequate. It wouldn’t have worked for 6 of us. So we went back to the sales office and explained that to the lady. After a few minutes of chatting she paused and said, “perhaps you should go and see the house next door to that one”. She explained it had a much bigger kitchen, and had been finished for nearly a year. When she told us that the asking price was another £30,000 – so about £40,000 more than we could afford – Heidi asked what would be the point. The sales lady just winked and said, “trust me!”

We looked at the house, loved it, and again put in the highest offer we could - £40k below the asking price. And a few hours later, the lady phoned me back to say that the builder had accepted the offer. Amazing! It turns out that we went in at literally exactly the right time.

We moved in February 2011. The house itself has worked well, and we are now mortgage-free. We even managed to pay for a holiday abroad with some of the equity we got out of an endowment policy that we didn’t need any more. But we have missed the 0.2-acre garden – especially the kids, and especially Jake and Joe, the footballers. I don’t care that maintaining the garden here is a 10-minute-a-week job, rather than a 2-hour-a-week job. I would do anything to see them enjoying the space and being able to play freely. It’s so much more built up around here – probably why it’s so much cheaper – so there are also fewer alternatives to the garden. We do feel a little sadness, maybe occasionally regret. But on the whole we can see that it was the right thing to do at the time, and we do have a lovely house.

But the main way that things are never the same is that cancer is constantly in the background, lurking in every thought. Mainly the thought is, ‘will it come back?’ Every check up is slightly anxious, even though, when you think about it, you don’t go there to get news. You go to check ups to update the doctors and let them know how you are feeling! But every little illness, every twinge of the gut, every migraine, every back ache, whatever it is, the first thought is not to grab the paracetamol or the Rennies; it’s to wonder whether this is the start of a relapse.

And it would take a long time to be free of that. I’m not sure it would ever go away. So even when you’re not living with cancer, you are living with the fear of cancer.

PS. This blog entry is now part of a book describing my cancer journey/adventure/battle.

If you're a fellow lymphoma sufferer and want to compare notes, I hope this book will be an encouragement to you. You can find out how to get hold of it by clicking here.

Derren Brown's trick too far

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Celebrity psychologist Derren Brown is an extremely clever man. Having watched a few of his TV shows, I have to admit to being as amazed as anyone else at the things he manages to do. He uses hypnotism, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and psychology to perform some marvelous magic and spectacular stunts. And I am not just saying that. Some of his tricks have literally made my jaw drop! But he is also arrogant, and his arrogance has led him to a direct assault on religion.

He recently produced a two-part TV show called Fear and Faith. The second part of the show focused on what he called “the biggest placebo of them all – god”. His aim was to show that, whilst religion claims to give experiences that have positive effects in people’s lives, spiritual experiences can be explained away. His claim was that if he could manufacture a religious experience then he could prove that religion is wrong to claim that the divine element is necessary.

So using techniques such as NLP, suggestion and association (subconscious linking of a physical trigger with an emotional response), he went ahead and (inside 15 minutes) caused an atheist to have a spontaneous emotional experience that made her reconsider whether the supernatural was real. She said, “In that moment I felt that all the love in the world had been thrown at me. It had always been available. But I’d somehow mistreated it by pushing it away and not letting it into my life. My spectrum of experience was broadened. It felt supernatural.”

He also showed that the mere suggestion that there is someone watching us, or that there are patterns and meaning in events, will cause us to change our behaviour. It doesn’t have to be real to make us act differently. Hence he asserts that the idea of god was invented in order to help keep moral order in society, and through the association of emotional experiences it has become ‘hard-wired’ through evolution into the human psyche.

His final summary was, “I think the most honest answer to the question 'why do you believe in god' is 'because it makes me happy'. There is no reason to argue with that. We all find ways of making ourselves happy. And understanding religious experience as a human process is to me a far more resonant and a more beautiful approach because it's real and it shows how astonishing we are, and what emotional riches we are capable of. We each live an extraordinary and improbable life.”

Very very clever. There is no need to doubt his integrity, or claim that he did anything underhand. Sure, it was all trickery. But that was the point. He explained almost every step of his trickery and manipulation. His lies and psychology brought about an experience that was real. But are his conclusions right?

There are several reasons why I don’t think Christians in particular should find this a credible challenge to their faith.

First, just because something can be mimicked does not mean that the original is fake. Just because I might be able to make a perfect copy of a Picasso does not make the original Picasso any less a Picasso! So just because Derren Brown can make a copy of a religious experience does not mean that real spiritual experience is not possible. His logic seems to be that psychology is everything, so psychology explains everything. It’s a bit like Pharoah’s magicians and Moses in Exodus 7:8-13. Moses performed miracles, and Pharoah’s magicians managed to reproduce them. Did that make Moses’ miracles less miraculous? No!

He also proves too much, in one sense at least. I’m pretty sure that a psychologist and hypnotist of Derren Brown’s caliber could make a man fall head over heels in love with any woman - a bit like the film Shallow Hal I guess (but it doesn’t really matter whether he sees her as she really looks or not). He could do effectively the same procedure as he did with the atheist to give the man loving emotions when presented with an associated trigger and the presence of a particular woman. Does that mean that all love would be proved to be unreal? If not, that would leave questions about what defines love, if someone can feel love under manufactured psychological conditions? We’d then start talking about free will, and whether actually love is just something that emerges when certain triggers and associations are present, whether manufactured or accidental.

Bottom line, if spiritual experience can be explained away by psychology, then so can love… and any other emotion or human experience.

Second, Derren Brown’s analysis of human motivation can lead to the devaluation or denial of the reality of altruism and humanitarianism. He thinks that we believe in god ‘because it makes me happy’, and says, ‘we all find ways of making ourselves happy’. But you see, if our own happiness were our highest goal – and that would apply to all humans in this worldview – then all acts of self-sacrifice, giving to the poor, putting others first, etc, would have to be construed as selfish. In other words, seeing people in danger or in need makes us unhappy, so helping them makes us happy. So we help people in order ultimately to make ourselves happy, whatever our stated motivation is (religious, altruistic or otherwise). If ‘making ourselves happy’ were the sum total of everyone’s motivation, our reasons for doing everything we do, then we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that self-giving and sacrifice was truly possible.

And that isn’t necessarily a problem directly, I admit, in an atheist worldview.  As long as poor and needy people are being helped, who cares whether the motives are selfish or not? I just see it as another example of where atheism will take its adherents where they don’t necessarily want to go. Consider, for example, that coupled with the atheist focus on the individual, selfish motives can be used to justify anything that makes me happy, even things that make other people unhappy.

But my final counter to Derren Brown’s attack is that true Christianity is not about raw experience. He acts as if debunking an experience is debunking religion entirely. People have emotional experiences for any number of different reasons, and with lots of different causes. One of those causes is spiritual, if there is in fact a spiritual realm as Christians believe. And it cannot be otherwise in a Christian worldview, because God created us with emotions.

But God also created us with mind and intellect. He created logic and order, so that we could understand the world around us, and seek Him. Christians don’t believe in God simply because He makes them happy. Most thinking Christians are aware that even emotions experienced in church may not be caused by God, or even a genuine response to God. The real reason we believe in God is because God is real, and there is no making sense of reality, knowledge or morality without Him. Arguing about the existence of God is like arguing about the existence of air (while we are breathing it), or arguing about the use of logic (while using logical arguments).

All Derren Brown is doing is using his own perspective on Christianity and generalizing it. I read somewhere that he was a Christian in his late teens, but lost his faith because he (incorrectly in my view) came to see it as intellectually flawed and based on circular reasoning. He came to believe that, in the absence of rational support, Christian faith (and any other religious faith) must be based on strong experiences which draw people in. Following those experiences, Christians continue to believe despite any evidence presented that they are wrong.

However, to conclude, what he has ended up doing is displaying the same circular reasoning that he was desperately trying to escape. He now believes that everything evolved, including human beings, and believes that behaviour and emotion is all explained by psychology. Hence in looking at emotional experiences that Christians claim to be of spiritual origin he immediately dismisses the possibility that they can be of spiritual origin. Instead he only looks for evidence that psychology can explain emotional experiences. Once he has found that he stops looking any further.

In my opinion, Derren Brown should stick to his tricks, his feats of memory and perception. I will continue to enjoy those. But, more importantly, I’ll also continue to enjoy the hope of glory, through the real Jesus, the Son of the real God, who really died and really rose again from the dead, and was really witnessed as risen by hundreds of people and testified as risen in the Bible. I’ll continue to be emotionally moved by the glory and majesty of my Creator, the grace of my Saviour and the witness of the Spirit who dwells in me. Sometimes I will laugh with elation, sometimes I will cry with joy or amazement, sometimes I will sit dumbstruck with awe, sometimes I will hide or weep with shame and guilt. I am not embarrassed about the emotional experiences we have as Christians. But I will also continue to make clear that none of that would be genuine, or even possible, if Christianity were not true, and truth is a rational category requiring rational belief. So I will continue to ground my faith deeper and deeper in truth, with a mind open to facing every challenge.