Crisis Envy

“[My dad was] boring. I’d look at the other kids at my school, and there was always drama. Someone’s father was an alcoholic, someone else’s gambled, someone’s parents were getting divorced. I mean, from the outside, it almost seemed glamorous. But my dad, he worked hard, he never played away, I don’t think I ever even heard him raise his voice. He was ordinary, boring. I don’t think I ever realised just how wonderful that was.”

Being Human S3 E6, ‘Daddy Ghoul’ (2011)

Ever heard of ‘pink lit’? It’s apparently the term used for chick lit aimed at teenagers, not that I knew that when I used to read it: I just called them ‘real-life’ books. I read a lot of them as a teenager, because they were funny and readable and at that stage in my life I’d read pretty much anything I could get my hands on that I had the emotional intelligence to comprehend the point of, but if I were honest, I’d have had to say that I usually found myself rather irritated by the teenaged heroines who guided me through these stories in whingey first-person narrative voices. They devoted so much time and trouble to pining after boys, feeling insecure about their appearances, trying to circumvent their parents’ supposedly unfair rules, and, most irksomely of all, complaining about how unacceptably weird their lives and families were. I couldn’t relate. I couldn’t see what there was to complain about, at least not to the extent that the heroine reliably did. For a start, her lamentatory¹ descriptions of her life and family rarely left me with the impression that they were particularly weird – I mean, no more than average. I firmly believed that everyone was weird, in his or her own way; that ‘normal’, the desperate aspiration of these pink-lit protagonists, was no more than a myth, which made it a very poor ambition indeed, for anyone. As a bit of a weird kid myself, I had learned to construe ‘weird’ as ‘interesting’ and ‘normal’ as ‘boring’; ‘weird’ as a badge of honour and ‘normal’ as an insult. The girls in my books, meanwhile, were depressingly normal already, and yet they sought to lower themselves to even duller levels of normality.

 

Because they’re pink. Like pink lit. Nope, you’re not getting anything cleverer than that.

And then there was the exception to the rule. My So-Called Life, subtitled The Tragically Normal Diary of Rachel Riley, is the first in a pink-lit series by Joanna Nadin, whose heroine’s chief preoccupation is – in contrast to the norm for the genre, but as betrayed by the subtitle – how tragically normal her life is.² Rachel lives in Saffron Walden with her mum, dad, and brother – which constitutes, let’s be real here, the most ‘normal’ family setup that exists – and tries to liven up her uneventful middle-class existence by introducing factors that might make her more interesting. I forget most of the details of the series, but I believe there was one occasion when she was disappointed to be forced to conclude that she definitely wasn’t a lesbian, another when she was mistaken for a single mother and was so taken with the possibility that she just went along with it, and another when she thought pretending to have a drug problem might make her more interesting in the eyes of her latest crush, who subsequently told her that since he’d had a drug problem himself in the past, he didn’t think it was a very good idea to get involved with her in case she tempted him to relapse. I’m not sure the actual quality of the writing was much better than the pink-lit average, but it was, at any rate, an amusing twist on the real-life genre. Rachel Riley’s life is normal, yes; boring, perhaps arguably; but also safe, privileged, and relatively easy. That she would wish to introduce factors that would make it less safe, privileged, or easy, merely for the sake of being Interesting, is surely laughably silly at best, and at worst, a gross insult to those whose troubles she would steal.

But the thing is, I sort of get it. More than I got all those other pink-lit heroines who wanted to be normal, I get Rachel Riley’s wanting to be interesting. I get the sentiments expressed by George from Being Human in my opening quotation.³ I get wanting to have some Issue going on, instead of just safe and privileged and easy. I’m not proud of the fact, but I get it. I call it Crisis Envy and I’ll try to explain it.

On the last day of my first summer working at Tyndale House in Cambridge,⁴ I, like everyone else on the programme I’d participated in, was called in for a pastoral chat with the person in charge of that programme. He said, I feel as if I haven’t got to know you very well this summer, Anne, because you’ve just sort of been fine. And it was true; I’d just sort of been fine. He gave me some good advice in that pastoral chat, but most of it was, of a necessity, rather generic. It felt like a kind of distillation of something that was happening to me all the time: I’m just sort of fine, I’m always just sort of fine, and you don’t get any special attention or support when you’re just sort of fine, because you don’t need it. More than that, you don’t deserve it. I saw no possibility of satisfaction in merely seeking attention, but I coveted the gaining of warranted attention. And in order to warrant attention, one needs to have some sort of Issue or Crisis going on. Hence springs up Crisis Envy. Like Rachel Riley, I didn’t want the unspecified Crisis merely for the Crisis’ sake; I wanted it because of how I thought it would prompt other people to behave towards me.

Mind you, I didn’t want it as much as Rachel Riley; I did know that, in reality, having a Crisis wouldn’t actually be half as much fun as being just sort of fine, and I certainly never tried to engineer one for myself the way she did. But still, the resentment sat there. Why should everybody else get a chance to play the victim, and not I? Indeed, without wanting to ruffle too many feathers, I think our current culture of elevating victimhood really plays into Crisis Envy. We divide the world into victim and oppressor, hero and villain; we create hierarchies as to who is the most marginalised; we mistake victimhood for virtue, and small wonder that people scramble to claim as many of these oppressed identities as they feasibly can, and so prove that they warrant attention.

But small wonder or not, Crisis Envy is, straightforwardly enough, sin, as it likewise was for me: it was a desire to be served rather than to serve, which, if you hadn’t realised, is the exact opposite of the model Jesus left us to follow. It was self-centredness and a love of the glory – the attention, the praise and admiration for coping so well under such difficult circumstances – that comes from human beings, instead of the glory given by God who throws down the proud and lifts up the humble. I have his attention and support – his unchangeable love, his constant willingness to hear my prayers, his presence ever with me and strength for every task and temptation, blimey how he’s blessed us in Christ – and I didn’t gain that because I and my circumstances warranted it, but because he is generous and merciful to self-centred sinners like me.

But here we run into another element of my Crisis Envy. See, the Bible tells us as Christians to expect suffering; beyond that, it calls suffering blessed and downright commands us to undergo it. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, said Jesus. If [we are] children, then [we are] heirs – heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him, wrote Paul to the Romans. And in his second letter to his mentee Timothy, not one but two imperatives, share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus, and endure suffering, and sandwiched somewhere between them, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. And then in the letter to the Hebrews, if you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.⁵

I am supposed to be suffering, I thought. I am not supposed to be enjoying a safe and privileged and easy life; I am not supposed to be just sort of fine. If I don’t suffer with Christ, can I hope to be glorified with him? If I am not persecuted, can I suppose that I am truly desiring to live a godly life? If I don’t feel the pain of being disciplined by my heavenly Father, can I suppose that I am really his son and heir?

This bothered me. I told people that it bothered me, basically whenever the issue came up in Bible study. “Jesus says if we follow him we’ll suffer, and I just haven’t ever suffered at all,” I said. “But you must have done, somehow or other,” they said. Or alternatively, “Don’t worry, you will.” And so I held my breath and waited for a Crisis; I waited for the storm to hit, so that I’d know for sure I was a real Christian – but the storm never did hit. I was just sort of fine.

 

Ah yes, a storm, the classic Christian metaphor for a Crisis of some sort. Apparently this is an 1846 painting by someone called Anton Melbye.

This was a different kind of Crisis Envy. This wasn’t wanting a Crisis so that I’d have a legitimate claim on other people’s attention; it was worrying that never having had a Crisis meant I had no legitimate claim on adoption as a son of God. It was a terrifying possibility.

I’ve still never had a Crisis. I’m still just sort of fine. But I don’t worry so much about not being a real Christian any more. Crucially, even though the Bible is clear that following Jesus does entail suffering, hanging our fundamental confidence in our salvation on anything other than what Jesus actually achieved on our behalf through his death and resurrection, is trying for salvation by works. Anyone can suffer; only someone who’s been cleansed of sin and adopted into God’s family can trust in the cross of Christ for salvation. The latter action, not the former, is the vital proof of the status.

The fact remains that scripture predicts and prescribes suffering as an unavoidable part of the Christian experience. But I have a bit of a different idea now as to what that suffering might actually look like. After all, anyone can have a Crisis. Having a Crisis might constitute suffering, perhaps extremely severe suffering, but it isn’t necessarily suffering for righteousness’ sake. Mere victimhood isn’t virtue. Whereas – well, when, for instance, I get really, really upset (like, many tissues’ worth of upset) about the fact that certain people don’t know the Lord Jesus and the salvation found in him, and I sit there as a sobbing wreck begging God to gather his sheep, does that maybe count as suffering for righteousness’ sake? When I drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night because my semiconscious brain has stumbled into sin and dragged me with it yet again, and I need to repent and receive God’s mercy and realign myself and pray against temptation, and to that end I forgo the better part of an hour of sleep, does that maybe count as suffering for righteousness’ sake? When I tell a friend what I really think about God and his standards for human behaviour even though I’m afraid she might not take it well; when I choose to stop spending time on something I enjoy because I’ve concluded there are more edifying ways I could be spending that time; when I fast to teach myself self-denial and God-dependence; when I refuse an impulse I know comes from a place of sin, and then refuse it again, and again, and again, as it continues to rear its head; when I work to tear down my idols, to pull out from under myself the things on which I have been accustomed to base my identity and security and satisfaction, and expel them from my affections – do these things maybe, just maybe, in however small a way, count as suffering for righteousness’ sake? It’s not what you’d call severe, I’ll admit that happily, but the point is, it’s there. It’s not true that I just haven’t ever suffered for the gospel at all.

Crisis Envy is sin, and like all sin, it’s ultimately completely stupid, because having a Crisis wouldn’t gain me anything at all that would be of benefit to me. I don’t need to gain the special attention of other humans, or to convince myself that I deserve it; I already have God’s special attention, even though I didn’t deserve it – and I can be sure that I have it, that I have the status of being his rescued and redeemed and regenerate child, not because he’s chucked a Crisis or two my way so that I might tick the box of having suffered, but because I know how Jesus suffered for my sake on the cross. And I am to imitate Jesus in the life God has given me to lead, not go chasing a less ‘normal’ one like Rachel Riley. I am to imitate him in suffering, yes, and suffering is an unavoidable part of the Christian life, yes, but that suffering doesn’t necessarily come in the form I’d learned to expect, as storm and tragedy and Crisis. On the contrary, to wake up every day and choose to die to oneself in hundreds of tiny ways is to suffer. You don’t get any special attention for it. It looks little different to being just sort of fine. But it makes you more like Jesus; and if we suffer with him, as his fellow heirs, then rest assured, we shall one day be glorified with him.

Footnotes

¹ Not a real word, apparently, but there doesn’t appear to be a word that serves the function I wanted, so I was forced to coin one. Alternative suggestions welcome.

² Not that you necessarily want to buy it, but I feel I should provide the link: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Joanna-Nadin/The-Rachel-Riley-Diaries-My-So-Called-Life/14707641. This is a new cover that lacks the exact same subtitle as the original.

³ Thanks, as usual, to Springfield! Springfield!: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=being-human-uk&episode=s03e06.

⁴ They’ve got themselves a shiny new website since I last looked at it: https://tyndalehouse.com/.

⁵ You’re looking at Matthew 5, Romans 8, 2 Timothy 2-4, and Hebrews 12. Why not start in 2 Timothy: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+tim+2&version=ESVUK.