Helpless

I am angry. So very angry. Ignoble, unhelpful, destructive emotion that it is. Stephen always tells me to start from where I am, and this is where I am. I am angry.

I am angry that tens and hundreds of thousands of people - millions - have been displaced from their homes and are forced to live in refugee camps near war zones or risk a dangerous journey across hundreds of miles of deadly seas or hostile lands only to be met by hegemony and nationalistic politics. No sympathy. No humanity. Just an overwhelming attitude of "you aren't my problem."

I am angry that an emotive picture of a dead toddler provokes a backlash of social media outrage and a (slight) change in UK government policy when the reality is that hundreds if not thousands have already drowned in the Med - but just because no one showed us a photograph of a child's dead body, our outrage was not stirred?

I am angry that I feel helpless, helpless to influence government policy in the UK or Europe, helpless to offer refuge or sanctuary to the vulnerable fleeing from a life destroyed, seeking only for a safe place to build a new life, helpless to counter the language of hate such as "swarms of migrants" or allegations that migrants are coming to Europe for "an easy life" or "benefits" or reasons of "greed." We call it greed when people seek a life that we are born to, when people who have lost everything seek only the basic rights we take for granted. Why do we merit them and these people don't? an accident of birth? It disgusts me.

But the reality is that this feeling of helplessness is to do with much more than the crisis of refugees that dominates the national and international news. The crisis has merely become the focus of my frustration and sense of impotence. It takes my attention away from the two tasks in front of me that I also feel helpless to do, but somehow I must do them. My life has become a dilemma, and irreconcilable difficulty, and impossible problem. I must rewrite my PhD thesis. I must continue as minister-in-training to a congregation that has already rejected me and my ministry. I must do both these painful and almost impossible things at the same time, what heavily pregnant and preparing to move my family in 10 months time, and I simply can't.

I have tried. God knows I have tried. I have kept my spirits up. I have sought to be positive. I have made start after start, attempt after attempt, but still I get nowhere, and all this time my spirit slowly dries up and dries out. How can I give to others what I do not have myself? How can I minister with no sense of calling? How can I lead a congregation that I know will not follow? How can I write what I do not believe in? How can I focus my mind on what only causes me to feel pain or frustration or rejection.

And both the church and the thesis are tied to one and the same thing - to each I gave my heart and soul in good earnest, seeking to do my best, to communicate clearly, to share with vulnerability, to contribute what is unique to me, and in each I was rejected, my natural bents called incorrect and in need of changing, my contribution insufficient, my communications and intentions misunderstood and rejected. In short I have been rejected in my vulnerability twice in less than a year, and I want nothing more than simply to walk away from it all. Damn responsibility and all my deeply held beliefs about keeping my commitments. Why should I give any more to those who have rejected the best I have to offer? Damn the rewrite and the cursed PhD, why should I sell my soul for a piece of paper and bend over backwards to please an establishment that steamrolled my ideas and my intellectual contribution without a thought to what I intended or how I might feel about the whole thing?

Why do I keep trying? Why do I put myself through this grinding torture of trying and failing every day? It is as if this is a set-up, a forgone conclusion, a trap from which I cannot escape.

I try to believe that I can find a fresh perspective, that the things I need to do are possible, even that I want to do them. I try a fresh approach tomorrow, thinking I'm simply looking at my problems in the wrong light. I desperately seek a way out of the trap, a way to transcend the inevitable ending that is coming, anything to change my sense of helplessness and redress the imbalance of power, but I cannot find it. The anger turns to tears, and I am left alone with my helplessness.

I can do nothing. Nothing I do succeeds.