I once had a job which came with a house which came with a garden, a big garden.
I hate gardening with a passion, so I didn't bother with it. To give you an idea of the scale of neglect I perpetuated, the grass would grow to several feet in height and once a year - literally once a year - I would beg, steal, borrow or hire an industrial strimmer to attack my suburban Bristol jungle. One of the artier members of my youth group threatened to make a papier-mache giraffe head, to give the impression of the grass being even deeper. I wish she had got around to it, it would have looked fantastic.
Since then I've managed to avoid having a garden, which I'm sure is a matter of great rejoicing for my neighbours. The house I am in the process of buying does have a garden, but there are two significant differences: first of all, it's much smaller; and secondly, this time I'm going to have a wife. She will either take care of the garden or nag (sorry, that should read 'organise') me into doing so. No prizes for guessing which one I'm hoping it will be.
Spiritual permafrost
The point of all this is that there are very few occasions in my life where my deeply held loathing of all things horticultural has in any way bothered me. But just once, someone was trying to explain something to me with a gardening metaphor, and it almost stopped me from understanding something really important.
'I can see what the problem is, Steve, you're suffering from spiritual permafrost,' Bob's words reverberated around my head. I had been struggling with a difficult job at a difficult church, and my own relationship with God was a long way from what it should have been. Bob was a wise old friend, with a knack of putting his finger on things. Was I about to miss out on a pearl of wisdom because I had no idea what permafrost actually was. Fortunately Bob noticed the blank look on my face and explained.
Permafrost is what happens where some land gets so cold that it freezes up, and then because the conditions are so unremittingly cold, it never gets the chance to thaw out before freezing over again. That's what had happened to me. One way or another I had allowed myself to freeze over spiritually, and now the difficult environment I was in meant that it was hard to thaw out. Bob reassured me that this was not an uncommon situation, and on reflection I'm sure that he's right.
Into the ground
It's easy in youth work for us to run ourselves into the ground. We can be so involved with everything that is going on, with the demands on our time from the young people, their parents, the church, and from whatever else is going on in our own lives, that we can let our relationship with God suffer. A missed quiet time here and there starts to form a pattern and before we know it God is a stranger, weariness becomes the norm and spiritual permafrost has got us in its grip.
What is the solution? On a basic level, make some changes. It may be that we need to get out of the chilling environment to thaw out from spiritual permafrost. For me it meant that when I left that job (which I was due to do soon after my meeting with Bob anyway), I spent some time out of youth work. For volunteer leaders, maybe a sabbatical away from the group might work wonders. Even if you don't step back altogether, it might mean reorganising what you do, to allow others to take more of the burden from you. The important thing is that the conditions creating the freeze are changed.
Muck spreadin'
That's a good start, but it's not enough. Putting goodness back into land involves fertiliser. Spiritual permafrost is usually in part a result of our stopping to take in the spiritual food that we need. Somehow we need to get back into the habit of eating regularly. Why not start with a favourite part of the Bible, something that has provided nourishment for us in the past? A jaded appetite is more likely to be tempted by favourite foods, and this can get us used to actually eating again. Once you've got started like this, you can move on and try other things, but the vital point here is that we do get going again.
My garden is actually a good metaphor for spiritual permafrost. I may have spent a day every summer hacking it all back, but ultimately that made no difference, because I never changed the pattern of neglect that allowed it to become overgrown in the first place. One year later, everything had got overgrown again, and I was back where I had started. We need to make sure that when we start sorting out our relationship with God, we also think about what we are going to do to stop ourselves from getting frozen over again. More about this next month.
