Tuesday, April 30th | Children and Trauma (Part 2) (ft. Nicole Shah)

Howdy folks, it's me, Tom Sawyer, coming straight from Clearview Church in the heart of our beloved Henderson, North Carolina.

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Absolutely nothing less than five stars for any reason imaginable under the sun. We're going to leave some links in the description so you can do just that. And today is April 30th, which means our date the word is coming to you from Ephesians 4-30. It says, And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. We forget sometimes that when we talk about asking Jesus into our heart and having Christ in our heart, we have the presence of God as believers. We have the presence of God with us in the Holy Spirit. That's right. So when you are doing all of those things that you know are disobedient to God's word, that you know are sinful, you are grieving the Holy Spirit. And over time, that sin can sort of deaden your spiritual nerve endings so that the more you engage in that sin, the less guilty and the less convicted you will feel over it.

And that's not a good place to be. That's right. And it also helps me to remember that we have a purpose. You know, we don't just not grieve the Holy Spirit because it's wrong, but it's that we were sealed for the day of redemption. There's a purpose to your existence and there's an end game. You know, there's an end goal.

There's a place, a destination we're trying to get to. It's that day, that great and dreadful day of the Lord of redemption. And so I think for me, it's one of those things where you live on purpose and the Holy Spirit helps you to do that. And speaking of which, I'm going to try not to grieve the Holy Spirit today, but I am going to gripe a little bit.

Well, hold on before you get into that gripe. We want to remind you guys that all these verses are coming to you from the Date the Word app, a partial sponsor of today's episode. It's available for free on iPhone and Android and every day connects today's date with God's word and the hope of making it more memorable for you. That's right.

Thank you to Date the Word for sponsoring this show. It's Tuesday. My friend, I know that the gripe is ready for harvest. It's right, man. It's succulent. It's right there on the vine. Let me just go ahead and grab that.

Welcome to the gripe vine, everybody. Oh, that was a big one. Alright, so I used to eat a lot of frozen food, right?

I'm a young man, bachelor, kind of freshly married, we're figuring out. You want to nuke a hot pocket. Nuke some hot pockets, nuke some pizza rolls.

All that stuff. I don't like, I'm doing it now more. I got away from that for a little while because I started eating healthy, going to the gym, get my life in order. Uh oh, then I had some kids. Yeah, kids tend to take that off the rails. Well, so babies, they don't eat hot pocket. They don't eat pizza rolls. They don't eat frozen burritos. They eat milk and a little baby food and mush. Well, now I've got a toddler.

So he's eating, you know, he's eating peanut butters and jellies, he's eating some Kraft macaroni, he's eating all that stuff and he's expanding more and more and more. So here's my problem with frozen food. And this is a problem that I used to have, but I forgot about because I could just deal with it. There are two outcomes.

You have frozen in the middle or you have boiling lava hot. That's the one. Why is that?

It's 2024. We put a man on the moon in the sixties and we can't figure out, we can't figure it out how to get pizza rolls to not be blocks of ice in the middle. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's that rotation that just doesn't hit right. I don't know if it's like just kind of like a, if there needs to be settings for different shaped foods or there needs to be some sort of like spit in the middle that rotates your hot pocket.

I don't know what it is, but figure it out. Like it's 2024. We should be able to microwave our food better than we are. In my hands right now I've got a telephone, a camera, a calculator, a compass.

I've got banking statements. I've got a two way instant communication. You can watch full out movies and TV shows on the thing in the palm of your hand. I can, I can revolutionize the whole earth with this thing. I can't figure out how to make my food just a little bit warmer because the problem isn't just that it's frozen in the middle. The problem is also it's like, Oh, it's frozen in the middle. I'll put it in there for like 30 more seconds. Now it's the temperature of the sun and I can't figure out what's like, what, like what am I doing wrong?

Then people always going to come along. Just put it in the oven. I don't want to. No, if I wanted to put it in the oven, I would have put it in the oven. I want to microwave it. I don't want to.

Yeah, I'm with you. Get it together microwave companies. I'm about to honestly, I hate to even say this, but I'm about to stop giving my son frozen food. Can I, can I, I will tell you one thing that works a little bit better than microwave is an air fryer if you have it. We do have an air fryer. I'm scared by it. It's, it's much better than a microwave and the food is a little bit more even.

Yeah. Ellie uses the air fryer sometimes. The thing is I don't know what to do. Like I, it is a little bit of a learning curve to microwave. It is a little bit of a learning curve, but you, you kind of find those rhythms of like, this is for a hot pocket. This is for pizza rolls. This is like you just kind of, yeah. One of the things, another gripe, this is kind of a secondary gripe, but I do have a gripe with the air fryer in that it's not just Ellie. Although Ellie is the main culprit.

I think it's everybody. We can't get fries right in the air fryer. They're always mush or they're always bricks. It's, I haven't found, now we did do crinkle cut fries and we ended up doing pretty good with those.

Crinkle cut are usually the best. Yeah. Crinkle cut fries in the air fryer was pretty good, but when you do straight like Julie and regular fries, they always end up really, really, really crispy and hard. Um, so I'm still, I'm still learning the air fryer, but maybe I should just give my son healthy snacks. Maybe.

We love to eat yum healthy snacks. Sure. Like a yogurt and a carrot. Yeah. And then he can be fine with that. Yeah. But instead I'm giving him hot pockets and then complaining when it doesn't work out. Yeah. And I feel like even if, even if we get the temperature right, he's gonna, he's gonna be unhealthy cause he's eating hot pockets. Sure.

He's eating burritos. Right. This whole thing kind of frames me as a bad parent. We gotta go figure some stuff out. We need to, we need to, I need to figure this out. Maybe, maybe you shouldn't air this. If you've unlocked the secret of the microwave, write in and let us know two five two five eight two five zero two eight.

Or you can visit us online at cleerviewtodayshow.com. And you're, if you work for a microwave company, we need you to do some work. Yeah, seriously.

Get it figured out. Okay. Stay tuned. We'll be back after this. Hello, Clearview family.

I'm Nicole and I'm David. And we want to talk to you today about the Clearview app. You know, there are so many churches out there that put their sermons on YouTube and their announcements on Facebook and their prayer list on Periscope.

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Or if you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, send us a text to 252-582-5028. That's right. And we're here once again in the Clearview today's studio with Dr. Abbadon Shah, who is a PhD in New Testament textual criticism alongside permagest Nicole Shah is back again.

Permagest Nicole Shah, welcome back. Let me ask you this. Have you ever eaten a frozen chicken, egg and cheese hot pocket that's still like rock hard in the middle and then you got so sick that you had to cry, cry, cry, cry.

It's an oddly specific example. Not that that's ever happened to me or anything like that. If I came across, now it could have been cold in the middle, but the moment Biden's in his cold, I'm going to put it back in the middle. No, no, I'm talking about like you shove it down like it's a block of ice.

Absolutely not. And then you stay up, you stay up late at night just praying, why did this happen to me? Did you do that?

I may have done that. Oh gosh. No, we were talking about how like with frozen food, like I don't eat much frozen food anymore, but when I did, it was like, you can never get that balance between completely frozen in the middle or like boiling lava. Hot pockets are the worst for that too. We talked about this earlier, but there's, it's always like either still frozen in the middle or liquid magma hot.

Yeah. And Ellie will always do it to where it's like boiling. It's like she'll take it out. She's like, ah, and then super hot food, like hot temperature or you put it in the microwave. Is there steam rolling off of it when you bring it out?

Yes, but I'll probably wait for a little bit. I'm not going to burn my tongue. It's not worth it. I remember, I remember like eating all that unhealthy frozen food and just never finding the balance. It was, it was, it's hard. It's hard to find a balance in life. Well, and then, you know, balance is where we ought to aim for most things. Balance is the middle. You should shoot for the middle ground. Thanos taught us that, man.

Make you rest in peace. Perfectly balanced as all things should be. You gotta do it. You gotta do it a little deeper. Perfectly balanced as all things should be. Well done. There it is.

Good job. I'm working on it. We are talking about balance today, but as it relates to, you know, we began the conversation yesterday talking about trauma, talking about how we navigate through the difficult things in our lives. And we want to talk about that balanced approach today.

So Dr. Charl, what is the daily encouragement you want to leave with our listeners today? Balance. Balance.

There you go. Find balance. Take a planet hostage and then make it all okay about balancing a little, balancing that little knife on your hand, giving it to the little alien. No, no, no, not that one.

I'm with you though. Balance. You gotta have balance in life.

Yeah. I learned that a long time ago with regards to church and ministry. And this was a Ronnie Floyd who wrote this book on secrets to growing a church. And in that book he talks about go for the middle. And, and he's in a people go to one of the other extremes and that's fine.

It's sometimes worked for certain people. They'll go all contemporary hardcore hanging off the chandeliers type. And this is going back 20 years ago, right? Or they'll go all traditional over here. He said, go for the middle. It attracts the masses. And so I said, okay, okay, let me try this. And it sure works. But then also in other areas of life, bringing in some balance is very important. Don't over, don't go all in. Like even exercising. It's great to exercise, but if you just go hardcore exercise, exercise, exercise, constantly nonstop, just on and on, you can get tired of it. And then you're going to go the other extreme, which is I'm just bored with it.

100% true. I remember. And in fact, I'm living testimony of that because I went, I went a little, I went a little too hard right before Thanksgiving. And then when Thanksgiving happened, guess what? From, from November till about maybe mid December, almost early January, I didn't work out at all. But Nicholas just leaned over from the side and, and he shook his head like, no, you can go hardcore.

He was very disappointed. But, but, but here's the thing. He, he does have balance because he's not working out all the time. He's here working right now. Right. Right.

Right. He goes to college. He is, he has other hobbies, so he is not working out nonstop. When he does work out, he goes intense, which is fine. I'm talking about nonstop working out. Yeah. Like when you've got like a wife, kids, all that stuff, but you're still just in the gym eight, nine hours a day.

Eight, nine hours a day. That's what we're talking about, which is extreme. So don't do that. Balance. Go for balance. You taught me that years ago with, like you said, not just, not just growing in church, but in every area, if there's a spectrum to be found, aim for the middle. Yes. Usually most of the time you'll end up where you want to be. That's right. And I think it also applies to even what we were talking about yesterday with the sufferings that we have in life.

You have people that flock to the extremes and unfortunately they're the loudest ones. So you've always, so you always, you know, they're the ones that you see all the time. So it's either I don't have any problems. I'm good. Sort of a squeaky wheel situation.

Right. Or what we see nowadays is I've got the most problems in the world. I'm the most traumatized person that's ever lived. Every single thing in life has been against me. I've been oppressed. I've been hurt. And those are the people you typically hear from. Yeah. I mean, that's what we want to talk about today is that suffering is real.

Don't minimize it. Neither should you maximize suffering and make it look like everybody has a trauma and everybody needs therapy. Not everybody is traumatized.

There's a difference. Wait, tiktok told me that everyone was traumatized. Yeah. Trauma is not only part of life. I think at this point it is life. Yeah.

There's a, there's a difference there. You can be stressed or you can have trauma and they are not, they are, they doesn't mean that just because I'm stressed, I'm traumatized. Stress is a normal part of life. It's a body's response to pressure. And what are the things that make up for stress?

Oh my God. Loss of job, finances. It can be, it can just be school deadlines. It can be a lot of things that, and it's not necessarily bad stress. Some of the stress you have can be good stress. And that's not something that is one of those things that we want to hear about, that there's good stress.

You see that blurred distinction a lot with, uh, with Gen Z and down. Um, a lot of like, I'm stressed about this, so this is trauma for me. This is traumatic going through this. This is, this is shaping me mentally and, and determining my future as a person. Well, what's happened I believe, um, with especially Gen Z and probably a little bit with millennials is that, um, healthcare has really taken the forefront, you know, our mental health, which is all great.

It is good that we want to take care of ourselves, that we want to have good mental health. I understand that. But when you take it from, to an extreme, then that's when everybody says, well, I'm traumatized. Right. You know, and that's not really the case. Yeah. Yeah. Trauma can cause stress in our lives, but stress will not always lead to trauma.

That's right. Stress is part of life. And I like, I like the distinction you guys are making with, cause, cause it's easy to jump on the boomer humor train and be like, oh, all the self care, all the mental health. It's just, it's just a hooey, but it's not, it's, it's a good thing that is being misused. And a lot of times I feel like that's where our culture goes is we take good things and either take them to such an extreme that we misuse them or just twist them entirely.

Yeah. I think the stumbling can come from, you know, both on the part of the parents and on the part of the young people. In the, in the advent of smartphones, our culture has become increasingly self focused. So where I would before go and ask my parents for advice on things, I now turn to my phone. I now turn to my friends on social media.

I now turn to Google, YouTube to try to figure out things. And that could be something as simple as how to change a tire. Or it can be something as profound as how to deal with a stressful situation you're facing. And you're not going to get what we've been talking about, you know, biblically based, right? You know, information, advice, any of that. You're not going to get any biblically based things from Google from so far.

It doesn't matter where you look. Most things on the internet, on your phone, on TikTok, they're not going to be biblically based. You know, you mentioned Gen Z and millennials and I'm thinking about some of the things that they've, some of the crises that they've gone through, like 9-11, ISIS, like mass shootings, pandemics, stuff like that. And so it has created this sort of weird generational trauma almost.

And I know that's not what that phrase actually means, but that's kind of how I'm using it. But then I think the things that like our grandparents went through, like the Vietnam War and the draft and all, and like the civil rights movement, all these things that, I mean, they, people who lived through the 60s say that it was as chaotic, if not more so. And I wonder if there wasn't any trauma there or if they just dealt with it in a different way. You know what I'm saying?

Like, I wonder how that balances. There was trauma, but they didn't understand what it was at the time. If you, if you look back at any history books or any medical books, things that were going on World War One and even further back, there was trauma.

These soldiers were coming back even in the civil war. If you read people's journals or diaries and they talk about their fathers or their husband coming back from war and they were never the same, or they had nightmares or they had, you know, all of these things, that was trauma, but they didn't have any idea what it was. It was just a part, it was a part of life. It was a part of what they went through. So trauma comes from the Greek word wound, right? And as a noun, it appears in the New Testament story of the Good Samaritan. So the Good Samaritan poured the oil and the wine into the Samaritan's trauma. His wound. We hear language like that still, like he experienced head trauma or blunt force trauma. Oh, hey, that's a good point.

Yeah. But there's a difference between trauma and the traumatic event, correct? Yes, yes, there is a difference, a big difference between a traumatic event is something that you are powerless against. And this is like natural disasters.

This is like violence, whether it's war or mass shootings, this can be so many of those types of things that you don't have. Yeah, abuse, abuse can fall under that, whether it's verbal or emotional or physical or sexual abuse, that falls under the traumatic event, right? Trauma is a wound that results from an experience, witnessing an event and hearing about a traumatic event. Yeah, the trauma is what you get from it.

It's what it does to you. And now what you're seeing a lot of, because everybody can pick up their phone and they can Google whatever the event is, and you can see raw, unedited footage of traumatic events. And you are a teenager or young, watching this.

Or little kids, little kids are watching it. And even us, we could be traumatized by something that's unedited. I mean, it's horrible. There are times I've been watching things, and these are just news reels or a video shot by somebody in a traumatic situation, whether it was a shooting or it was a killing or was abuse, or it was just somebody being violent.

And I'm like, oh, okay, let me see what happens. I'm like, no, I don't need to put this in my head, because that is a traumatic event. And if I continue watching this, it may cause trauma to me.

Do I really want to do this to myself? And I quickly get out of that feed or scroll past it or do whatever I can to end that, because, yes, I was not traumatized up to that point, but it could very well happen in the next few minutes. Children and teenagers don't have that mind capacity to be able to handle some of these things.

And so that's why, as parents, that's why we're here as that layer of protection so that they don't get traumatized by things that they're seeing. Right. Well, I think that's kind of the, not confusing part of it, but the part to contend with is that it's an emotional response to a stressful event. Right.

And so if it's emotional, that means it's personal, which means it's sort of perspective based, which I guess is kind of why we could witness the same event and I might walk away traumatized from it and you may not. You know what I mean? That's right.

Yeah. And that is true. So a lot of people don't understand, but it has, I believe it has to do with your personality. I believe it has to do with your, just your makeup. Your upbringing. Your upbringing. It has to do with a lot of things, not just the fact that, oh, you and I are witnesses, so both of us are.

No, not necessarily. Now, the whole idea of trauma comes on the scene in the 1860s, correct? When Dr. John Erickson, a surgeon, university professor at the university college in London, he wrote a book on the injuries that were sustained by the railway workers.

Now I can assure you, I know what that is referring to. You grew up in a railway junction. I grew up in a railway junction, railway town, and yes, people would lose their arms. They'd be crossing lines to get from one station to the other and they would get run over by the train. When I say run over, it means you've been chopped in pieces.

Yeah, you're eviscerated. Yes. Oh yeah, it was, it was it. And then there were people who would try to commit suicide on railway tracks. So these things were not uncommon, which means they were common. People negative, but they were common. We heard them growing up.

It was like, yeah, did you hear that? And what would happen is at that time when that would happen, a siren would go off. Because we live in the railway junction where the railway quarters were, where the railway bungalows for the drivers and the GMs and the CEOs, and then the railway quarters for people who worked in the local shed or they worked on the train station. And so the siren would go off. If the siren goes off at 12 o'clock or five o'clock or eight o'clock or whatever, then you know it's just, or 12 o'clock at night, that's just a regular time siren.

But if it goes off like, means something happened, either train got derailed or somebody got hurt. What was the response when that happened? Like, did it become, if it were, if it was common, did it become less, not less traumatic, but less. Less jarring, less shocking. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, because. Did the response get easier, I guess? Yeah, because we didn't pay attention to it because it wasn't happening to us or the people we knew were right here.

But I can imagine if the families have their loved ones who were on a call or they were on the train or they're working today, of course, there is a fear or trepidation like, oh, wait, I hope the next few moments are okay because, or we're going to get a phone call. So yeah, so that's where the whole study began in the 1860s when railways were first coming out. And then of course, 70s, 1870s would be the Civil War.

Yes. And you know, that's what I was talking about earlier was that these soldiers were coming home and they were having all of these issues, but we didn't have anything to call it. We didn't know what it was called.

But in, but once it was probably around World War One in the early 1900s, where it was turned shell shock. Now, the word trauma is not mentioned in the Bible. We see trauma happen within the first four chapters of Genesis. Of course, we know trauma is in the wound of the Samaritan or the man whom the Samaritan helped.

But the idea of the trauma came in first four chapters. Think about how traumatic it must have been for Adam and Eve to have their eyes open just like this. Of course, they disobeyed God, ate the fruit, listened to the serpent, and now they're ashamed of each other. All of a sudden, they can tell something is not right with the world.

God comes, but now they are running to hide themselves from God. So that's again a traumatic event. Whether it is the trauma or it is now a response to the trauma, you know, we can debate that.

Followed by the judgment that God pronounced on the man, the woman, and the serpent. I mean, it's like, it really is the worst thing that can happen. It's like the very state of reality is cursed and broken now, and it's because I did it.

It's because of me. I can't imagine. I mean, they are living in this perfect world and then all of a sudden, sin has come in. How traumatic is that? It could go from absolute perfection.

I have more or less ruined existence. I just imagine, even on the personal scale for them, I imagine the guilt we feel when we sin, but imagine feeling that for the first time. Imagine that hitting you for the first time, that icy dagger in your stomach, and you feel just like this chill and this separation. They wanted the knowledge of good and evil.

Be careful what you ask for. It's insane that the way that, you know, we've kind of come to this, like we've spent almost all of human history numbing over or trying to numb over what was never meant to be. Yeah. And then, of course, there is Cain killing Abel, Jacob and Esau fighting with each other, but so much that Jacob had to run for his life. I mean, that would be, I would put that in the traumatic category.

And then, of course, who can forget Joseph being sold into slavery by his own brothers. I'd say that was traumatic. I don't know. That's not traumatic.

I don't know what it is. That falls firmly in the category. If we can truly say that getting our order wrong at Starbucks is traumatic, then I think we should not have that. Joseph has experienced traumatic events, for sure.

Oh yeah, 100%. I would say what we need to remember, and Diana Langberg, you like her book a lot, Nicole, is called Suffering in the Heart of God. She writes three things about the enemy. What she's saying is the enemy is behind this trauma. He is behind suffering. Again, keep in mind, not all suffering is trauma, but the enemy is behind all of that. He's behind sin. He's behind suffering.

And then if some of these things do lead to trauma, he's behind trauma. He is the author and father of sin. He is the father of lies. So he lies to us while we're in trauma, lies to about ourselves, lies to us about other people, like, hey, you can't trust them, and even lies to us about God. And so we are now bombarded with all these lies, and it's terrible. Satan is the deceiver. Like it says in Revelation 12, 9, so the great dragon, again, referring to the serpent of old, was cast out, the serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, he was cast to the earth and his angels were cast out with him. So Satan is the one.

And his power, I mean, his power is terrible. And this should cause us to approach this whole idea with fear and with trembling and then with humility and also with repentance. We've got to have a repentant heart. But also another thing that Diane Langberg points out, evil is not just something that we do. It is something that we are. That's a hard pill to swallow. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's so important. In fact, sin is poison. It contaminates.

It spreads. It seems to change shape and easily delude us so that we pick up that which is evil and call it good. That's a good point. This is all part of what causes sin and suffering to multiply and sometimes lead to trauma.

Yeah. And I know there are some people who are listening who are thinking about the situation that they're currently facing. You're thinking about what you're currently going through, what you're dealing with. You know, we advertise this number a lot for you to write into the show with your questions, maybe for lightning round questions. But if you have something that you're dealing with and you'd like help on how to get through that, how to find those next steps, write in. We would love to be there for you as part of our Clear Read Today Show family.

You can write in 252-58-25028. Don't forget that you can also visit us online at cleartodayshow.com. And if you believe in what the Clear Read Today Show represents engaging hearts and minds for the gospel of Jesus Christ, just go to the bottom, click that donate button and let us know what's coming from our Clear Read Today Show family. John, what's coming up tomorrow? We've been talking about trauma, suffering in the world, but you know, it has a very real impact on us. We're going to talk about that a little bit tomorrow. Not only its impact on us, but our correct response to it. Make sure you guys are here. We love you guys. See you tomorrow on Clear Read Today.