“Give the Man a Chance”

FYI- this is part of a series on how to live out our faith in a positive way. Click here.

I, like many people, am a huge fan of the movie Die Hard. I probably watch it twice a year. Once in December- because it’s the all time greatest Christmas movie, and then once in July because I just can’t wait to watch it again.

Die Hard was directed by John McTiernan- a guy with a very odd career (a story for another day). For a brief time, McTiernan knew how to make action thrillers better than anyone else. Another example is The Hunt for Red October, a movie about a disgruntled (yet highly decorated) Russian submarine commander (played by Sean Connery- with his native non-Russian accent) who tries to defect to the US with a brand-new, untraceable submarine filled with nuclear warheads.

The plot is complicated. But the simplified version is something like this: Connery can’t tell anyone on the American side that he’s trying to defect because word would eventually get back to his Russian higher-ups that the new sub is now in American hands- which would ignite a war. So, he has to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the CIA to follow so that they can discover that he is defecting, rather than traveling to launch nuclear warheads at New York or wherever.

Only one man in the CIA gets it: Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin). He then spends a good portion of the movie convincing his higher-ups that Connery is defecting and not starting a war.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you the plot of a forgotten sub movie. Well, here we go. John McTiernan liked to have a theme in mind when making movies. His theme for The Hunter for Red October is this: Give the man a chance.

Jack Ryan’s job is to convince every higher up above him to give Connery (Captain Ramius) a chance- rather than to assume he’s the threat he appears to be and to simply blow him out of the water. He begs person after person, give the man a chance.

This, to me, speaks to a very key skillset to have when it comes to trying to live our faith in a positive way. If and where you can, give people the benefit of the doubt. When our survival instincts kick in in life, they warn us of danger- even when danger isn’t there.

It’s easy to assume someone is out to get us, or trying to harm us. It’s less easy to give the man (or person) a chance.But our faith calls us to speak back into our survival instincts, to look for the good in others, and to offer the benefit of the doubt not only as an act of mercy but also as an act of imitation of Christ himself when he says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I believe this is Christ’s way of saying: Give the people a chance.

What helps you offer the benefit of the doubt?

Freezing for Survival

Yesterday I talked about wanting to run, punch, yell, kick and bite as survival strategies. But there is a second strategy - FREEZE. Freeze is its own unique little bundle of joy. This is the response our body makes when it decides we are too slow to run or too small to fight. It's the "play dead" survival strategy. This is the end of the line for survival strategies.

I have heard the stories over and over. Men and women using their little girl and boy voices to mourn their inaction in the face of abuse as children. They ask: "Why didn't we tell someone? Why didn't I protect my little sister? Why didn't I DO something?" It is unsatisfying and unhelpful so I do not say it, but this I know: if you froze, it was your body making the best choice it knew to make at that time.

If this ever happened to you, I pray you know this. Freezing is our last resort attempt to survive..and if you did this, it worked because you are reading this blog. But...you may still suffer the ill-effects because you know what happened...your stress cycle was not completed.

Afterwards, our bodies still have all those amazing chemicals that we could have used for fighting and fleeing if we had been capable. If our freeze move works, then our body begins to shake and shudder. We do not have a good way to describe this sensation, but it is our body doing what it does. It's the physiological way the body ends the stress cycle. Crying is a good example of this, even if it feels like there is no good reason to cry! There is! Listen to your body!!

Safety From Stressors

Stressors, whether external or internal, are the things in our life that activate a stress response in our body because our body interprets them as threats. After two hurricanes collectively wiped out over 30 trees in our yard, causing a lot of expensive damage both times, Pete and I view trees as stressors when the wind blows or storms arise. We don't choose this. We read The Giving Tree to our children! We understand that trees are lovely things that provide shade, love one another, and help oxygenate our environment. We KNOW this but our bodies KNOW other things - like how scary it is to hear them crashing around us in the middle of a dark night with no light source to help us see what's happening.

Stress is what happens in our bodies when we encounter one of these threats. It's part of our survival system. Epinephrine takes charge and sends blood rushing to our muscles in case we have to fight or flee. Glucocorticoids provide us energy to persevere. Our muscles tense, our sensitivity to pain diminishes, our body becomes fully alert; we focus on the threat and forego all distractions. We forget that we are mammals but fortunately our body remembers. We have a body that helps us fight for survival.

The only way to complete this stress cycle is to fall victim to the stressor or survive. But this cycle is only completed if the conclusion makes sense. Here is an important key piece of information: we must do something that informs our body that the threat has been removed. We need a signal that indicates we are safe.

Do you have any chronic stressors that you cope with but have not found a way to find safety from?

You are NOT the Problem

Remember my friend from yesterday's post who felt her problems were too unique for anyone else to possibly understand? I feel her. I understand, maybe not perfectly, but I do have some experience with a problem or two that has been statistically unique and complex. I do not happen to have that kind of problem today, maybe tomorrow a problem like that will pop up. But today, my brain is not on high alert trying to make something complicated simple. My brain is relaxed and more able to fire on all its cylinders, not just the survival instinct part of my brain.

When I can have a "whole brain" experience, I can ponder and remember and learn and consider new ways of seeing an issue. One hypothesis I have about my friend, because I've history with the same issue, is fear. I don't know about her, but when I have one of those big hairy problems that feels like it might swallow me, my last nerve resists MORE problems. And, I am deathly afraid someone will tell me that a problem this big is all my fault. I am bad. I am wrong. I am to blame. Who wants to add THAT to an already over-heated brain trying to survive?

Let me just say one more personal thing, to give you, dear reader, a bit of context. I have survived big problems in the past. Not the biggest, not the most unique, not BIG T trauma (well, maybe a couple of BIG T traumas), but I have survived problems. But my brain, for reasons I have some clarity on at this point in my life, has always believed that if I were good enough (not bad), smart enough (not dumb), worked hard enough (not lazy), then I WOULD HAVE NO PROBLEMS. So every problem, no matter how big or small, was in some way MY FAULT. See the reasoning? This kind of belief, will, eventually, say after your mother dies, a pandemic strikes, you live through a politically tumultuous time... cause your brain to short-circuit and explode.

And when that happened to me, I carried on, because isn't that what you're supposed to do? And...I got help. Lots of help. Lots of different kinds of help. And to my utter amazement, whether I was learning how to dead lift more weight than I believed I could lift, or zooming with my therapist, or talking with my physician, or taking a tennis lesson... I learned that mistakes are not big deal. Problems are inevitable and that you can have a multitude of problems without ever having to point a finger and assign blame or declare a winner of who is at fault. If my mind were not already blown, this would have surely resulted in the same outcome.

I did not know this. I could explain to you why I think I did not know this, but the whys no longer interest me. What has captivated my attention, energized my mind and body and spirit, is this idea that having a problem is inevitable and normal. Our work is NOT to avoid problems; our work is to take responsibility for our problems.

Mind blown. How about you?