Grounding

• When you feel the flood of anxiety rising, nauseating your stomach, tightening your chest, the floodwaters approaching your neck.
• When you wake in the middle of the night and you can't get back to sleep because your head is spinning with a thousand dizzying disturbing thoughts.

Lead me to the Rock

When you are travel sick or sea sick, they tell you to look at the horizon. Look at something fixed and stable. When you are having a panic attack or you are feeling faint they tell you to get down on the ground or hold onto something solid or look into the eyes of someone you trust and keep eye contact with them. It's called grounding.
There is a Christian version of grounding. And it's particularly valuable in these days of rapid, disorientating transition.

Single verse grounding

Sometimes it is a simple as one precious verse repeated until it gets from our mouth into our heart:

I have set the LORD always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. (Psalm 16:8)

I remember repeating that over and over on a particularly awful plane flight.

I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63:8)

Mark Oden explains how precious this verse is in the midst of the Italian coronavirus outbreak: "His eternal arms are underneath us as we cling to him." As a scared baby clings to their parent's neck but it is the parent's strong arms that hold the baby up, close and safe, so we cling to the Lord but it is he who is under us and wrapped around us and holding us to his heart.

The Lord is my shepherd. (Psalm 23:1a)

Try saying this with emphasis on each of the five words. He is not any Lord but The Lord. He is not weak but the Lord. He not only was, he right now Is. He is not distant, he is My. He is not a hired hand, he is the Shepherd. As with the old story, you could try holding a different finger for each word.

A more developed and ancient grounding exercise is to rehearse to ourselves the Apostles’ Creed, the 10 Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. This is the ancient pattern of Christian catechisms. Evidence from the early church (50-250 AD) suggests that catechesis involved teaching the 10 commandments and the Lord’s Prayer (Weinrich). The bulk of Cyril’s Catechetical Sermons delivered in Jerusalem in 348 AD are expositions of successive lines of the Apostles’ Creed. Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) unpacks the 10 commandments then the Apostles’ Creed then the Lord’s Prayer. The much longer Heidelberg (1563) goes through the creed (Q23-58), the commandments (Q92-113) and the prayer (Q118-129) while the later Westminster basically follows the same pattern. [For more on the development and value of catechesis see ‘Considering catechism for suspicious Protestants’ by Daniel Williams.]
Catechesis was obviously developed for children and enquirers to get them ready for baptism or a public profession of faith. But in the Christian life the way in is the way on. There is a tremendous stabilising effect in going over the foundations and essentials of our faith again. This is presumably why Cranmer designed the regular order of Morning Prayer (1552) to include the public declaration of the Apostles’ Creed and the corporate praying of the Lord’s Prayer while the Communion Order includes the 10 Commandments, the Nicaean Creed and the corporate Lord’s Prayer.

So try these as grounding exercises:

The Apostles’ Creed

Whatever is happening right now - these things are true:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

Notice first this is about faith not works. There is nothing of me here. Nothing about my emotional or mental or spiritual or moral state, only that I believe; I look outside myself and openhanded grasp what is True. I take my eyes off myself and look to God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I shift my weight from the unstable confused little mess that is me and onto the great Rock and the rock solid unchangeable truths about Him. Though my head (and everything around me) might seem to be spinning out of control there is an almighty Creator God. He has everything in his hand.
Then there are the historical facts of the gospel – Christ came, suffered, died, was buried, rose, ascended. That happened. Long before I was born. Historical fact. It doesn’t depend on me. And yet he went through hell instead of me.
Then there is the presence of God with me right now in this moment. I believe in the Holy Spirit. There is the communion of the saints. Even if I do not get to see and touch them physically in these days of lock down I believe by faith in the communion of saints. And there is the forgiveness of sins.

Oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin – not in part but the whole, Is nailed to His cross and I bear it no more; Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my soul.

And wonderfully I can know the future. How the next few weeks and months will turn out is very unclear to us but the ultimate future is crystal clear and absolutely certain: Christ will come to judge the living and the dead, we will all be raised bodily, we will truly live eternally with him who is Life. Let's fix our eyes on that horizon which is completely steady and utterly beautiful.

The 10 Commandments

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
4. Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
5. Honour your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbour’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

First and foremost these are commands to convict us, to cut us down, to show us that we are helpless stinking sinners in desperate need of saving by and from a holy God. And that will probably be a key part of our grounding. We need to be like Job on the ground in the dust and ashes to truly see things rightly. This is where the gospel hits me afresh as the greatest news in the world.
And then, as Luther said, the gospel takes the Law from being a stick to beat us and gives it to us as a staff to lean on. We get up from the ground and the Law becomes the royal law of Christ, our guide to grateful living along the way.
I think it was the late Elizabeth Elliot who used to say, “Trust in God, obey him, and do the next thing.” Her point was that when you are in the midst of confusion and/or busyness and/or heartbreak and/or competing demands, the thing you need to do is simply to obey what God has set before you: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God; to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbour as yourself.
Matt Perman says a similar thing in What’s Best Next: if you lose all your complex productivity tools and calendars and lists and planners then all is not lost; you can move forward just asking What is the best thing to do next? And the key to answering that question is God’s commands.
So amid the confusion of an endless email inbox or multiple to-do lists there are actually only 10 things to do today (Trust, Listen, Hallow, Rest, Honour, Love, Cherish, Give, Witness, Rejoice) that all hang on 2 (love the Lord and your neighbour) which are really one. We can get up and put one foot in front of the other.

The Lord’s Prayer

Long before the Archbishops of York and Canterbury suggested this as a good way to use your 20 seconds of hand washing time, believers have steadied their hearts with what has become know as the Lord's prayer.

Our Father, who is in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
now and forever. Amen.

Drink this in: you have a Father who is in heaven. A Father who has sent his Son to die for you and the Spirit of sonship that you can call him Abba. A Father who is high and holy and yet dwells with the contrite and lowly (Isa. 57:15). A Father who controls the universe and yet is intimately concerned with every detail of your life. A Father far more keen to give than we are to ask. A Father so keen to bless us and commune with us that he has given us this prayer template so we would know what he would love us to ask him for and that we might have confidence to approach him.
As we pray the Lord’s Prayer we’re re-centred on the things that are most important – your kingdom come, your will be done – and we ask for what we will need as pilgrims on our way to the celestial city – manna, armour, leading.
We come as sinners to a holy Father and find forgiveness while simultaneously acknowledging there is a horizontal outworking of grace – as we forgive those who sin against us – a turn of the heart to peace and reconciliation (that may be a key part of our grounding).
And finally we acknowledge that the power, the kingdom and the glory belong to Him (cf. Rev. 4:11; 12:10). The power is not ultimately with us, with politicians or persecutors. There is only One who says, ‘I make known the end from the beginning… my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please’ (Isa. 46:10). He can and will work out all things for the glory of the Father and Son.
Amen