In 1992 I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease. In the last two years I have fully faced the reality that I was actually dying of malnutrition as a result of being an overachieving perfectionist mom, teacher and volunteer in my church. For me it wasn't about being thin because I'd been thin all of my life. It was all about meeting perceived expectations from others and being successful in their eyes. In the process I totally lost sight of my own self.
My daughter went into treatment for her own eating disorder in 2003. In the devastation of that experience, I was able to clearly acknowledge that I too had eating disordered tendencies. I knew that when stressed, I would cope by not eating, or simply be too busy to eat with my full schedule. After years of being an advocate for eating disorder recovery and promoting Health At Every Size and Intuitive Eating, it wasn't until I faced some unexpected weight gain that I really had a "come to Jesus" moment with the reality of my own illness.
In December of 2009 I had a complete hysterectomy that resulted in weight gain from the removal of my ovaries (I'm told estrogen is stored in the fat because our bodies still need it once they are removed). My eating habits didn't change but my metabolism clearly did and the pounds steadily came on. For the first time in my life I began to experience the reality of larger numbers on the tags of my clothes, shifting styles as one goes from misses to womens sizes. I've spent so much money trying to find clothes that I like and that fit well on this new me. To say the least, this struggle greatly embarrassed me after all the work I had done to promote a new mindset in our culture. EVERY decision to purchase the correct size was a conscious choosing and one where I simply had to trust the higher wisdom of those who had gone before me in this battle. I am beyond grateful for the tools they have given me and at present have committed myself to health at this size.
If you know me, you know that I am committed to fully facing my life and living with authenticity. That said it is certainly not a journey of the faint at heart. I am newly aware of the rewards in this culture for starving ourselves and being thin at all costs. From the latest styles flattering the thinnest among us to the attention paid to us by men when we are thin and considered more attractive (seriously, I've had a professional man tell me that certain teachers have more influence over students simply because they are thin and attractive-get's your dander up as a female doesn't it?), it is not an easy task to be comfortable in your own skin when you are larger. BUT do that I must!
My body continues to do amazing things for me and if it has to be a conscious habit to approve of it as it is, I will do it until I die. I love my life so very much and am SO thankful for God's gracious outpouring of resources for me (us- ALL of us!) to heal.
I'm fifty and life is JUST beginning!
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Monday, July 11, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Hard Day
For whatever reason I have been blessed with a daughter with mental illness. She was born three months early almost 25 years ago. Below the surface of her mostly "normal" childhood was a brain severely compromised by her stress-filled beginnings. As adolescence hit her, so did severe brain chemistry dysfunction. A girl we didn't even know emerged from the light and went down into the darkness of Major Depression. So major that the pscyhiatrists add /severe after depression when they write down her diagnosis. She'd been in a mental world we knew little about.
So much parenting took place with her older brother all throughout his last 6 years at home with us before he went off to college. Those same years with our daughter were spent spent hovering somewhere between life and death. At 14 she started outpatient therapy with a local psychologist. The young woman living in our home with us at that time barely reflected the one we'd watched grow up there. The sessions with the psychologist though helpful at times, were quite grueling with much of the rationale for her dysfunction seen as her family's dysfunction. So we did what good parents do, we tried to learn from it.
As what little light remained was leaving her eyes, we made the tough decision to put her in the an eating disorder program in Omaha. As we sat down after her initial evaluation we go the shock of our lives. We brought her in on the edge of life. The psychiatrist said, she is seriously depressed suicidal. We've come within hours of death with our daughter several times. Many times.
Last month after a couple of years of doing pretty well, we were called and told she had entered the emergency room at a local hospital and were asked to come see her. She gave the doctor permission to speak freely to us and there we were told once more of things under the surface we'd been oblivioius to. Some familiar things, some not so much. No parent ever wants to hear difficult things about their child's struggle no matter how old the child is. In the hearing you also want to hear how to heal the situation because you crave the solutions for her. Instead, what you are usually told is that she needs a more serious intervention and you agree to a plan you barely understand.Numbness begins to take over as she's taken by ambulance to a behavioral health unit in a city hospital.
The next day you get to visit. Your stuff is taken and the door locked behind you. Flashbacks of earlier inpatient times hit and numbness pervades your being so that all you really know how to do is exist while you are there. You try to be strong, to pay attention, to be present, but as you sit among other mentally ill adults and see that the world outside just goes by, it's very difficult. After a short chat, we left her there and went home. Something we've done since she was born, and oddly familiar feeling.
After a couple of days we were asked to participate in a family session. This time, I had to work and couldn't go - last couple of days at school. I'm told and I KNOW that it is essential that I live my own life since Hannah is and adult etc. but it never feels quite right not to participate in something like this. My husband went for both of us and hard things were discussed. As he reports back to me, I just feel this immense hopelessness at the reality that no one can follow the directives but her.
Days later my daughter let me look over the discharge papers. Diagnosis: Major Depression/Severe, ED NOS. At this point numbness returns and I realize the years have gone by and though others have gotten well, WE are still in the battle and this may be something we just have to LIVE WITH rather than conquer. No clue as to how to process that.
As the days go by, I feel the sting of life lived on the blade of a knife. I realize that she is kept there by wonderful advances in psychotropic medications because without them she would have died long ago. I know I should feel grateful and I am, but I also feel the realities of this delicate balance living life on this edge with my adult daughter. It's clear that I cannot control a thing. I can't determine what she does on any level. If I think I can and I try, I become codependent and develop my own mental health issues. Living my own life is somewhat frightening because at any moment everything could change.
She loses her phone, changes her plans, and I can't reach her. Everything slows down and if I'm not careful it stops until I hear from her again. Today was one of those days. I've pictured all sorts of things today. Being home and having unstructured time on my hands, I worried. Then I cried, really sobbed for awhile as if several levels of pain needed to get cried out. Then I slept. I worried some more and went through that cycle several times today. Clearly last month's hospital stay had something to do my inability to cope with not being able to reach her.
All is well now. Well, atleast it's gone back to normal. She sent me a text me at 4:15 telling me where she was and that she just found her phone. It does feel a bit ridiculous that I reacted so catastrophic like today. At the same time it feels like it was really just a way for me to get some bottled up tears out and wake me up to the present moment a bit more. Whatever...this is my life and onward I go.
So much parenting took place with her older brother all throughout his last 6 years at home with us before he went off to college. Those same years with our daughter were spent spent hovering somewhere between life and death. At 14 she started outpatient therapy with a local psychologist. The young woman living in our home with us at that time barely reflected the one we'd watched grow up there. The sessions with the psychologist though helpful at times, were quite grueling with much of the rationale for her dysfunction seen as her family's dysfunction. So we did what good parents do, we tried to learn from it.
As what little light remained was leaving her eyes, we made the tough decision to put her in the an eating disorder program in Omaha. As we sat down after her initial evaluation we go the shock of our lives. We brought her in on the edge of life. The psychiatrist said, she is seriously depressed suicidal. We've come within hours of death with our daughter several times. Many times.
Last month after a couple of years of doing pretty well, we were called and told she had entered the emergency room at a local hospital and were asked to come see her. She gave the doctor permission to speak freely to us and there we were told once more of things under the surface we'd been oblivioius to. Some familiar things, some not so much. No parent ever wants to hear difficult things about their child's struggle no matter how old the child is. In the hearing you also want to hear how to heal the situation because you crave the solutions for her. Instead, what you are usually told is that she needs a more serious intervention and you agree to a plan you barely understand.Numbness begins to take over as she's taken by ambulance to a behavioral health unit in a city hospital.
The next day you get to visit. Your stuff is taken and the door locked behind you. Flashbacks of earlier inpatient times hit and numbness pervades your being so that all you really know how to do is exist while you are there. You try to be strong, to pay attention, to be present, but as you sit among other mentally ill adults and see that the world outside just goes by, it's very difficult. After a short chat, we left her there and went home. Something we've done since she was born, and oddly familiar feeling.
After a couple of days we were asked to participate in a family session. This time, I had to work and couldn't go - last couple of days at school. I'm told and I KNOW that it is essential that I live my own life since Hannah is and adult etc. but it never feels quite right not to participate in something like this. My husband went for both of us and hard things were discussed. As he reports back to me, I just feel this immense hopelessness at the reality that no one can follow the directives but her.
Days later my daughter let me look over the discharge papers. Diagnosis: Major Depression/Severe, ED NOS. At this point numbness returns and I realize the years have gone by and though others have gotten well, WE are still in the battle and this may be something we just have to LIVE WITH rather than conquer. No clue as to how to process that.
As the days go by, I feel the sting of life lived on the blade of a knife. I realize that she is kept there by wonderful advances in psychotropic medications because without them she would have died long ago. I know I should feel grateful and I am, but I also feel the realities of this delicate balance living life on this edge with my adult daughter. It's clear that I cannot control a thing. I can't determine what she does on any level. If I think I can and I try, I become codependent and develop my own mental health issues. Living my own life is somewhat frightening because at any moment everything could change.
She loses her phone, changes her plans, and I can't reach her. Everything slows down and if I'm not careful it stops until I hear from her again. Today was one of those days. I've pictured all sorts of things today. Being home and having unstructured time on my hands, I worried. Then I cried, really sobbed for awhile as if several levels of pain needed to get cried out. Then I slept. I worried some more and went through that cycle several times today. Clearly last month's hospital stay had something to do my inability to cope with not being able to reach her.
All is well now. Well, atleast it's gone back to normal. She sent me a text me at 4:15 telling me where she was and that she just found her phone. It does feel a bit ridiculous that I reacted so catastrophic like today. At the same time it feels like it was really just a way for me to get some bottled up tears out and wake me up to the present moment a bit more. Whatever...this is my life and onward I go.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Spring of 2011
Today as I sit down to put some thoughts in print, I am once again in awe of the tenacious grace that envelops my life. Last night I was totally exhausted from a very intense week with several students struggling to make it through to the end of the school year. Turning the calendar over and seeing the word May brought great relief. On Thursday I left my classroom at 7:30 in the evening (school dismisses at 3:10) because it took that long to complete the necessary paper work from all of the behavior issues I dealt with that day. When one finishes a week like that, one expects to be fatigued, emotionally drained and ready to take a good break. One does not however, expect to find a well spring of life emerging from deep inside to bubble up and elicit nothing but thoughts of deep gratitude. Thus the state I found myself in as I was resting my head on my pillow at 8:00 o'clock last night while every inch of my physical body hurt like what I imagine hell might feel like. In the midst of it all I was never happier.
The theme of my blog is from a quote by Florida Scott Maxwell. It reflects the process of heart transformation that I have been through since 1992 when I was first diagnosed with an auto immune disease, forced to leave my beloved elementary teaching job and deal exclusively with my shadows. Shadows of which existed because though I knew God, I had very little knowledge of my own self.
David Benner in his book The Gift of Knowing Yourself says that, "Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality...We have focused on knowing God and tended to ignore knowing ourselves. The consequences have been grievous--marriages betrayed, families destroyed, ministries shipwrecked and endless numbers of people damaged...Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality..."
In the late 70's I encountered a version of the Christian gospel entitled, "The Four Spiritual Laws". It was a neatly packaged little gold booklet; a modern version of the ancient story of Jesus Christ's gospel message. Within its pages were four simple and "absolute"truths: 1- God loves you, 2- you are a sinner, 3-Jesus's death on the cross is the only provision for your sin, and 4 - If you want to go to heaven, you must individually receive Jesus by praying a short prayer written on the following page. So simple. At the time this little book offered me the perfect solution to my all encompassing sense of guilt, shame and general badness. I believed it immediately and prayed the prayer fully expecting to be relieved of the burden of being me. Those presenting me with this message assured me in myriad ways that this meant that I was instantaneously forgiven and set free because Jesus Christ now lived in my heart. I moved on in life after this experience with a passionate zeal to let everyone know how easy it was and how they too could discover this formula for peace, safety and relief from life's pain. I gave it my total devotion.
In the early 80's as I went off to college, my one and only goal was to get the easiest four year degree possible so I could go on staff with the ministry that created the little gold booklet. Prior to this experience I had always wanted to become a teacher. In fact, several times growing up I remember having a sense that teaching kids was what I was born to do. Therefore, I decided to go for a BS in Elementary Education thinking I would never really teach but it would be fun to learn how to. My focus was on evangelism and saving the world. Being a student leader for the ministry on my campus while going to school was a wonderful experience. In spite of my less than half-hearted devotion to my studies, I was able to graduate with a 3.0. I loved my education classes and teaching came naturally to me. Even so, I had no intention to ever do so.
Dean and I met our senior year in college. He too had found this version of the gospel message at 16 when he went to a Bible camp over the summer. He also found it liberating and personally freeing and gave his heart to it in earnest. His journey led him to the same campus ministry and it was there where we connected first as friends, then as soulmates eager to join forces and head off to the darkest part of the world armed with our little gold booklet in hand and heart. We married and fully planned to join the ministry together on a full time basis. But, as a proverb so rightly says, "Man plans his way but God directs his path," our plans fell to pieces and we ended up on a very different path.
Dean and I discovered shortly after our engagement that our two school loans combined together would prevent us from being able to work with the ministry we were so passionate about. In order to be on staff with the ministry,, people are required to seek pledges for donations from others. We were not allowed to do that as a result of our debt. At first we were a bit lost but before too long determined that our best solution would be to find a church with the same belief system as our own and locate there. We did that a few months after our wedding and planned to be there for a couple of years, work and pay off our debt. Both of us were so young and naive that we thought Dean would find a job quickly, we could start our family and still be able to pay off our loans in that two year time frame. Of course, that didn't pan out and our delusional thinking quickly began to unravel.
We had our first child about 18 months after we were married. Shortly after the pregnancy, I began to experience a great deal of pain. I had surgery and endometriosis was discovered. We were encouraged to have our next baby sooner rather than later. We got pregnant again when our son was 15 months old. His sister was to be born right before his 2nd birthday. She came 3 months early after a long, stress-filled and costly pregnancy. She spent 2.5 months in the hospital before coming home only to spend the next 9 months in and out of the hospital for various issues associated with her prematurity. Needless to say, our dream of becoming missionaries in Africa was put on hold indefinitely. We found ourselves deeper in debt and unable to even consider the missionary option.
The church we attended had started a Christian school shortly before we arrived and I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I had been asked and accepted a position as a half-time Kindergarten teacher. I was SO looking forward to that but again...my plans vs. God's plans came into play and a week before school was to start the enrollment in the 3rd grade class had grown to the point that the school needed a new full-time teacher. A dream situation - 13, 3rd grade students. I was offered the job and though the salary was much lower than I would have made in a traditional school, the health insurance plan would take Hannah on without any riders AND it provided 100% coverage for all of us. It looked like a very proactive way to pursue paying off our debt and moving closer to our goal of missionary work in Africa.
That year was incredible and solidified my LOVE and passion for teaching. It was clearly where God had placed me, a very natural fit. The paradox was that though I loved it and felt most alive when I was teaching children, I hadn't come to the church to do that. I was there to be trained in ministry and become a leader in the church. Though the church valued my leadership in the classroom and my work with the students, it was not considered sufficient enough by the church leaders to allow me the freedom to forgo additional leadership requirements within the church's leadership training ministry. In fact, in order to be allowed to teach in the church's school at that time, many other leadership commitments were also required. In my case they were required, that is, until I started to become ill and unable to meet them.
As one by one my commitments diminished I kept teaching because it was after all, my job. As I look back now, I shudder to say this but the psychological grip on my mind that led me to believe I was truly in the center of God's will, was tightly fixed. Amid days, weeks and months of sheer physical agony, I continued to be counseled to obey without question and keep going. Then one day everything stopped when I was diagnosed with systemic lupus (a chronic auto-immune disease), Hashimoto's thyroiditis, pernicious anemia, and sjogren's syndrome. I was a very sick, underweight woman. I was in the six week of my sixth year of full-time teaching when my doctor told me I would never be able to teach again. I cried like a baby the day I left the students with their new teacher but I was honestly so ill, I was quite relieved to just stay in bed day after day. Obviously, I didn't fully buy into the "you will never teach again" determination.
The reason all of these memories come back to me today, is because last night was a rough night. I have overdone it the last two weeks and I am paying for it. This weekend it's an abrupt halt and lots of TLC, take care of Jane time without one shred of guilt. I know this current fatigue is temporary because it's May and in my work with kids with emotional or behavior disorders, perseverance to the end of the year is difficult and their problem behaviors increase because they just want to get out of school. Paperwork and meetings also increase. The reason I can endure it now, is because soon, school will be out. When it is out, I won't be leaving with 15 others on a ministry trip to Mexico but will instead come home and bask in the loveliness of my full life for some much needed refreshment before heading back in the fall. I will play in the gardens, take walks and drink in the beauty of the north woods in my Minnesota neighborhood and love every minute of it. So with that awareness, I know that it will be okay to suffer a little more right now.
I have learned so much since those dark days in October of 1992. I have come to accept that I cannot know God and dissolve my self. It has taken so many years, so many books, conversations and 3 years working with some amazing psychologists in an eating disorder treatment center to realize what the truth was. I got sick because my body knew what my mind couldn't comprehend, that illness was the only way out, the only way to break the mental grip of trying to be the perfect good girl, the perfect missionary and perfect leader in my church. It was the only way out of the grip of anorexia nervosa. In the years before I was diagnosed with everything, my diet consisted of right around 800 calories a day and not one doctor ever asked me about it. Not one. I was most assuredly slowly dying and dying of an eating disorder as much as any diagnosed illness. Anorexia nervosa is a disease rooted in the loss of one's self, one's core, one's will to decide for one's self.
Over the years since those darkest of days, I really have found my self. In the midst of that discovery, I have come to understand and realize that resistance to control is not always disobedience. It is a God-given means designed for humans to be able to protect themselves from evil by giving us the opportunity to stop and think about our choices, to count the cost so to speak before we move forward. The alternative is to acquiesce and allow others, all too often religious and insecure authorities, to control us with our blind and often unconscious devotion.
I am a passionate teacher. It is my calling and I know that because I'm most alive in the midst of it. And the gospel? Where does that fit into my life now? I continue to be fascinated by the life of Jesus Christ. That said, I believe that Jesus lived His own full life in alignment with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Now, I believe that it's our turn (Dallas Willard)to do the same. I believe that God wants me to live my own life too living it in alignment with God's intention for me. It has been and continues to be a profound journey.
The theme of my blog is from a quote by Florida Scott Maxwell. It reflects the process of heart transformation that I have been through since 1992 when I was first diagnosed with an auto immune disease, forced to leave my beloved elementary teaching job and deal exclusively with my shadows. Shadows of which existed because though I knew God, I had very little knowledge of my own self.
David Benner in his book The Gift of Knowing Yourself says that, "Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality...We have focused on knowing God and tended to ignore knowing ourselves. The consequences have been grievous--marriages betrayed, families destroyed, ministries shipwrecked and endless numbers of people damaged...Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality..."
In the late 70's I encountered a version of the Christian gospel entitled, "The Four Spiritual Laws". It was a neatly packaged little gold booklet; a modern version of the ancient story of Jesus Christ's gospel message. Within its pages were four simple and "absolute"truths: 1- God loves you, 2- you are a sinner, 3-Jesus's death on the cross is the only provision for your sin, and 4 - If you want to go to heaven, you must individually receive Jesus by praying a short prayer written on the following page. So simple. At the time this little book offered me the perfect solution to my all encompassing sense of guilt, shame and general badness. I believed it immediately and prayed the prayer fully expecting to be relieved of the burden of being me. Those presenting me with this message assured me in myriad ways that this meant that I was instantaneously forgiven and set free because Jesus Christ now lived in my heart. I moved on in life after this experience with a passionate zeal to let everyone know how easy it was and how they too could discover this formula for peace, safety and relief from life's pain. I gave it my total devotion.
In the early 80's as I went off to college, my one and only goal was to get the easiest four year degree possible so I could go on staff with the ministry that created the little gold booklet. Prior to this experience I had always wanted to become a teacher. In fact, several times growing up I remember having a sense that teaching kids was what I was born to do. Therefore, I decided to go for a BS in Elementary Education thinking I would never really teach but it would be fun to learn how to. My focus was on evangelism and saving the world. Being a student leader for the ministry on my campus while going to school was a wonderful experience. In spite of my less than half-hearted devotion to my studies, I was able to graduate with a 3.0. I loved my education classes and teaching came naturally to me. Even so, I had no intention to ever do so.
Dean and I met our senior year in college. He too had found this version of the gospel message at 16 when he went to a Bible camp over the summer. He also found it liberating and personally freeing and gave his heart to it in earnest. His journey led him to the same campus ministry and it was there where we connected first as friends, then as soulmates eager to join forces and head off to the darkest part of the world armed with our little gold booklet in hand and heart. We married and fully planned to join the ministry together on a full time basis. But, as a proverb so rightly says, "Man plans his way but God directs his path," our plans fell to pieces and we ended up on a very different path.
Dean and I discovered shortly after our engagement that our two school loans combined together would prevent us from being able to work with the ministry we were so passionate about. In order to be on staff with the ministry,, people are required to seek pledges for donations from others. We were not allowed to do that as a result of our debt. At first we were a bit lost but before too long determined that our best solution would be to find a church with the same belief system as our own and locate there. We did that a few months after our wedding and planned to be there for a couple of years, work and pay off our debt. Both of us were so young and naive that we thought Dean would find a job quickly, we could start our family and still be able to pay off our loans in that two year time frame. Of course, that didn't pan out and our delusional thinking quickly began to unravel.
We had our first child about 18 months after we were married. Shortly after the pregnancy, I began to experience a great deal of pain. I had surgery and endometriosis was discovered. We were encouraged to have our next baby sooner rather than later. We got pregnant again when our son was 15 months old. His sister was to be born right before his 2nd birthday. She came 3 months early after a long, stress-filled and costly pregnancy. She spent 2.5 months in the hospital before coming home only to spend the next 9 months in and out of the hospital for various issues associated with her prematurity. Needless to say, our dream of becoming missionaries in Africa was put on hold indefinitely. We found ourselves deeper in debt and unable to even consider the missionary option.
The church we attended had started a Christian school shortly before we arrived and I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I had been asked and accepted a position as a half-time Kindergarten teacher. I was SO looking forward to that but again...my plans vs. God's plans came into play and a week before school was to start the enrollment in the 3rd grade class had grown to the point that the school needed a new full-time teacher. A dream situation - 13, 3rd grade students. I was offered the job and though the salary was much lower than I would have made in a traditional school, the health insurance plan would take Hannah on without any riders AND it provided 100% coverage for all of us. It looked like a very proactive way to pursue paying off our debt and moving closer to our goal of missionary work in Africa.
That year was incredible and solidified my LOVE and passion for teaching. It was clearly where God had placed me, a very natural fit. The paradox was that though I loved it and felt most alive when I was teaching children, I hadn't come to the church to do that. I was there to be trained in ministry and become a leader in the church. Though the church valued my leadership in the classroom and my work with the students, it was not considered sufficient enough by the church leaders to allow me the freedom to forgo additional leadership requirements within the church's leadership training ministry. In fact, in order to be allowed to teach in the church's school at that time, many other leadership commitments were also required. In my case they were required, that is, until I started to become ill and unable to meet them.
As one by one my commitments diminished I kept teaching because it was after all, my job. As I look back now, I shudder to say this but the psychological grip on my mind that led me to believe I was truly in the center of God's will, was tightly fixed. Amid days, weeks and months of sheer physical agony, I continued to be counseled to obey without question and keep going. Then one day everything stopped when I was diagnosed with systemic lupus (a chronic auto-immune disease), Hashimoto's thyroiditis, pernicious anemia, and sjogren's syndrome. I was a very sick, underweight woman. I was in the six week of my sixth year of full-time teaching when my doctor told me I would never be able to teach again. I cried like a baby the day I left the students with their new teacher but I was honestly so ill, I was quite relieved to just stay in bed day after day. Obviously, I didn't fully buy into the "you will never teach again" determination.
The reason all of these memories come back to me today, is because last night was a rough night. I have overdone it the last two weeks and I am paying for it. This weekend it's an abrupt halt and lots of TLC, take care of Jane time without one shred of guilt. I know this current fatigue is temporary because it's May and in my work with kids with emotional or behavior disorders, perseverance to the end of the year is difficult and their problem behaviors increase because they just want to get out of school. Paperwork and meetings also increase. The reason I can endure it now, is because soon, school will be out. When it is out, I won't be leaving with 15 others on a ministry trip to Mexico but will instead come home and bask in the loveliness of my full life for some much needed refreshment before heading back in the fall. I will play in the gardens, take walks and drink in the beauty of the north woods in my Minnesota neighborhood and love every minute of it. So with that awareness, I know that it will be okay to suffer a little more right now.
I have learned so much since those dark days in October of 1992. I have come to accept that I cannot know God and dissolve my self. It has taken so many years, so many books, conversations and 3 years working with some amazing psychologists in an eating disorder treatment center to realize what the truth was. I got sick because my body knew what my mind couldn't comprehend, that illness was the only way out, the only way to break the mental grip of trying to be the perfect good girl, the perfect missionary and perfect leader in my church. It was the only way out of the grip of anorexia nervosa. In the years before I was diagnosed with everything, my diet consisted of right around 800 calories a day and not one doctor ever asked me about it. Not one. I was most assuredly slowly dying and dying of an eating disorder as much as any diagnosed illness. Anorexia nervosa is a disease rooted in the loss of one's self, one's core, one's will to decide for one's self.
Over the years since those darkest of days, I really have found my self. In the midst of that discovery, I have come to understand and realize that resistance to control is not always disobedience. It is a God-given means designed for humans to be able to protect themselves from evil by giving us the opportunity to stop and think about our choices, to count the cost so to speak before we move forward. The alternative is to acquiesce and allow others, all too often religious and insecure authorities, to control us with our blind and often unconscious devotion.
I am a passionate teacher. It is my calling and I know that because I'm most alive in the midst of it. And the gospel? Where does that fit into my life now? I continue to be fascinated by the life of Jesus Christ. That said, I believe that Jesus lived His own full life in alignment with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Now, I believe that it's our turn (Dallas Willard)to do the same. I believe that God wants me to live my own life too living it in alignment with God's intention for me. It has been and continues to be a profound journey.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Naked Spirituality - My Journey
Have you ever read a book and felt like the author very literally looked into your own life and wrote it? Naked Spirituality by Brian McClaren is that book for me right now. I'm only on page 44 out of 240.
Consider this:
"If people resolve the tension on the side of immanence or nearness, G-d becomes too much the chum or mascot or even guard dog, a genie who comes obediently when summoned by the magic words. When this happens, prayer is like rubbing a magic lamp or commanding guard dogs to attack an intruder. One's religion starts looking a lot like superstition or witchcraft. And magical religions in this mode too easily turn homicidal and genocidal because, quite conveniently, "God" hates the same people its adherents hate and is happy to share their malice.
Naked sprituality differs from magical religion as love differs from lust. Where magical religion tries to harness cosmic powers so that "my will may be done," naked spirituality seeks to be yielded to God that "God's will may be done." Where magical religion tries to possess God for one's own benefit, naked spirituality seeks to be yielded to God for God's will, the common good." page 44
As I have left the mainstream of Evangelical Christianity the above two paragraphs pretty much describe why. As I grew in surrendering to God in the here an now - the present moment, I began to realize that my faith in Christ is so much more than wielding the Bible as though IT were Christ. As I pondered Jesus describing himself as "The Word made flesh", I thought about a Sunday School teacher who once told me that if I dropped my BIBLE, I was dropping Jesus. I never did really believe that. As time went on and life's events felt crushing to my soul, I finally let myself entertain the possibility that the authors of the Bible were human beings like me. I realized that their inspiration was given to draw me toward Jesus, The Word of God.
As that paradigm of thought solidified in my mind, I realized many things and one of those things is that proving moral right from wrong based on one's particular interpretation of the Bible is a rather precarious business. I've seen many, many moral positions come from Bible verses neatly put together by each student to determine the one right position on an issue. I've also seen very sound minds be put on pause, if not completely on hold, when the person was considering a moral dilemma because their particular Christian bent had determined that the verses meant one thing or another. And I have also felt the shear terror of those trying to defend a position to the death because if what they believed weren't absolutely the right thing, they would actually have to think and that terrified them more than anything else. It is often been so difficult for many in my circles to accept that much of life truly is a mystery and therefore, at our very best, one's interpretation of the ancient texts is at best a speculation no matter how confident one appears to have it down. I discovered that this resistence to mystery in my own heart was very much intertwined with my egoic need to perceive that it could, really could, be perfectly right if one just understood the Bible - rightly.
But no more, my God is no longer within the pages of an ancient book, though that book is as precious to me as ever. God is not within a specific church, but IS in any place where seekers are coming...but guess what? God IS also where no one is even looking for God. God IS. And IN Jesus, I personally find God IS very much among us.This I KNOW with every breath I take.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
My Healing
And when He had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him, entreating Him, and saying, "Sir, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering great pain. And He said to him, "I will come and heal him." But the centurion answered and said, "Lord, I am not qualified to for you to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, 'Go!' and he goes, and to another, 'Come!' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this!' and he does it." Now when Jesus heard this, He marveled, and said to those who were following, "Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel…And Jesus said to the centurion, "Go your way; let it be done to you as you have believed," And the servant was healed that very hour. Matthew 8:5-13
Jesus didn't say these things to encourage people to mindlessly follow authority as evidence of our great faith. He was simply saying, this guy gets the fact that I am the Christ and have been given authority over the powers of darkness. As I read this portion of the Bible last week, it hit me with a profound impact because I had been taught that this man's great faith came as a result of his being "under" authority. It's taken several years of being removed from the modern day evangelical world to recognize the mistaken interpretation of these verses. Reading them at face value, it's pretty clear that the centurion simply got who Jesus was because of his own life experiences as a soldier. His faith is great because he recognized that kind of absolute authority in the spiritual realm as he witnessed Jesus performing miracles of healing.
Unfortunately, rather than trusting my own wise-mind's interpretation of the Bible and reading these verses to be drawn closer to the Messiah, I bought into the idea that others who deemed themselves more spiritual than I was by their positional authority in the church, had the right to control my life. This is what I now believe Jesus calls the "leaven of the Pharisees" in another passage.
As a result of this misinformation, I surrendered my will to a great many others in almost every area of my life, being admonished that if I were "under" authority, my faith would be great and I would see miracles like this centurion saw. What I saw instead was the complete destruction of my authentic self. The self that God created and wanted to live through. Instead of living water, the daily dose of this teaching was similar to drinking a continual dose of poison that slowly kills you. Iin fact, it very literally did almost do just that.
In 1992 I was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus, an autoimmune disease that is basically the body's declaration of war on itself. I was in more physical pain than I ever knew possible when my doctor told me to stop everything, take heavy doses of steroids and go to bed. Weeks turned into months and I knew I had almost died. Everything began to change from this point on. Some of those who had, by my permission, assumed control over my life, seemed scared out of their wits at what was happening to me and as they finally let me decide for myself what I was "supposed" to do, I gained new strength and further clarity. I made many changes and slowly began to find my way back to a healthy life.
When I look back at the time when I first came to a personal faith in Christ, I sincerely believe it was almost exactly like the centurion of old. I heard about Jesus as the way to God and as I witnessed His work in the lives of others, it became true in my own heart. I chose to believe that he was the Christ, the promised Messiah, the one with the authority over the spiritual forces in the Universe. As a result of that faith, I witnessed God's intervention in my own ordinary life. Unfortunately, all too soon, that faith in Jesus, turned into faith in the Bible, faith in the church I attended, and finally faith in compliance to perceived authorities. By the time I nearly died from this "faith" paradigm, I had almost forgotten the fresh faith I once knew. By the time my daughter nearly died twice from an eating disorder, I was so distraught at my own and my family's dysfunction that I was truly ready to leave the faith altogether. Had it not been a real genuine faith born in my heart years earlier, I would have done just that. In truth, I didn't even once seriously consider it.
What kept me from completely throwing in the Christian towel was this. When I originally chose to follow Jesus in 1977, it was because I had experienced a deeply personal relationship with God through my encounter with Jesus, I believed He was Emmanuel, God with us. I believed that as he ascended into heaven, the Holy Spirit had come and now lived in me. It was this recognition of Jesus as the Christ that rekindled my real faith in God and guided me through the darkest days of my life.
The journey to personal health has been long and arduous. It has been painful beyond what I ever knew I could successfully live through. It has made me raw in every way possible, emotionally, socially, physically, mentally and spiritually. But oh, the miracles I have seen as I've enjoyed the genuine faith that has come in the recognition of Jesus as The Christ. It is well with my soul.
Jesus didn't say these things to encourage people to mindlessly follow authority as evidence of our great faith. He was simply saying, this guy gets the fact that I am the Christ and have been given authority over the powers of darkness. As I read this portion of the Bible last week, it hit me with a profound impact because I had been taught that this man's great faith came as a result of his being "under" authority. It's taken several years of being removed from the modern day evangelical world to recognize the mistaken interpretation of these verses. Reading them at face value, it's pretty clear that the centurion simply got who Jesus was because of his own life experiences as a soldier. His faith is great because he recognized that kind of absolute authority in the spiritual realm as he witnessed Jesus performing miracles of healing.
Unfortunately, rather than trusting my own wise-mind's interpretation of the Bible and reading these verses to be drawn closer to the Messiah, I bought into the idea that others who deemed themselves more spiritual than I was by their positional authority in the church, had the right to control my life. This is what I now believe Jesus calls the "leaven of the Pharisees" in another passage.
As a result of this misinformation, I surrendered my will to a great many others in almost every area of my life, being admonished that if I were "under" authority, my faith would be great and I would see miracles like this centurion saw. What I saw instead was the complete destruction of my authentic self. The self that God created and wanted to live through. Instead of living water, the daily dose of this teaching was similar to drinking a continual dose of poison that slowly kills you. Iin fact, it very literally did almost do just that.
In 1992 I was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus, an autoimmune disease that is basically the body's declaration of war on itself. I was in more physical pain than I ever knew possible when my doctor told me to stop everything, take heavy doses of steroids and go to bed. Weeks turned into months and I knew I had almost died. Everything began to change from this point on. Some of those who had, by my permission, assumed control over my life, seemed scared out of their wits at what was happening to me and as they finally let me decide for myself what I was "supposed" to do, I gained new strength and further clarity. I made many changes and slowly began to find my way back to a healthy life.
When I look back at the time when I first came to a personal faith in Christ, I sincerely believe it was almost exactly like the centurion of old. I heard about Jesus as the way to God and as I witnessed His work in the lives of others, it became true in my own heart. I chose to believe that he was the Christ, the promised Messiah, the one with the authority over the spiritual forces in the Universe. As a result of that faith, I witnessed God's intervention in my own ordinary life. Unfortunately, all too soon, that faith in Jesus, turned into faith in the Bible, faith in the church I attended, and finally faith in compliance to perceived authorities. By the time I nearly died from this "faith" paradigm, I had almost forgotten the fresh faith I once knew. By the time my daughter nearly died twice from an eating disorder, I was so distraught at my own and my family's dysfunction that I was truly ready to leave the faith altogether. Had it not been a real genuine faith born in my heart years earlier, I would have done just that. In truth, I didn't even once seriously consider it.
What kept me from completely throwing in the Christian towel was this. When I originally chose to follow Jesus in 1977, it was because I had experienced a deeply personal relationship with God through my encounter with Jesus, I believed He was Emmanuel, God with us. I believed that as he ascended into heaven, the Holy Spirit had come and now lived in me. It was this recognition of Jesus as the Christ that rekindled my real faith in God and guided me through the darkest days of my life.
The journey to personal health has been long and arduous. It has been painful beyond what I ever knew I could successfully live through. It has made me raw in every way possible, emotionally, socially, physically, mentally and spiritually. But oh, the miracles I have seen as I've enjoyed the genuine faith that has come in the recognition of Jesus as The Christ. It is well with my soul.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Utah
As I sit here in the hotel waiting for Dean to arrive at the Salt Lake City Airport, I cannot help but reflect on what has taken place in my life from the day we came here with Hannah in 2004 until now. Back then I came with a very strange sense of adventure mixed with intense, raw fear. Hannah had nearly died twice that year, just before admission and again while IN a hospital in an inpatient program. In debt beyond belief, having just mortgaged our home to get her into the first month of residential treatment we landed at this airport. Today's departure binds the back cover to this book of experience we know as Utah.
Years ago, Brigham Young arrived here in this valley where I now sit. At the end of his journey, after coming through the Wasatch Mountains, he looked out over the vast space in front of him and said, "This is the place." For him it was THE place he'd been searching for. The place where his people, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, could safely settle and become the people they wanted to be. What they wanted was simply their "own" place, a place where they could continue to live and practice their religious beliefs. They clearly wanted this so badly that they were eager to endure the harsh realities of the journey, only to come to a place that would test them even further.
As I gather my own thoughts today, I realize how much my own experience in making this journey to Utah, mirrors that Mormon journey so long ago. This has also been “the place” for me to settle and establish myself. My husband and daughter would also concur that their experience here has accomplished similar things in their lives. It may sound trite but in every way, we have each found a new sense of self out here in what began as Brigham Young’s Utah.
In bringing Hannah to Avalon Hills, a residential eating disorders program for adolescents in the Cache Valley of northern Utah, we had no concept that our journey would lead to eventual employment and relocation to that beautiful place. The first 5 months of our experiences there were spent with Hannah living at the treatment center and Dean and I coming and going for visits with her and family therapy. It was a healing time for her and a revealing time for all of us. We learned a great deal about her illness and our family’s dysfunction as well as the dysfunction of life in our home community. We spent much of that time in a paradoxical state of numbness and awe. The realities of what we were dealing with were very difficult, but the immense sense of authentic healing that was taking place in our lives was profound. It was clear that God had led us to the perfect program and therapist to lead us out of the darkness we’d been in for far too long. We not only invested all of our material wealth in the process, but heart and soul as well. Our hope was always that we would learn what we needed to, that Hannah would learn what she needed to and we would return to our home in Nebraska and move on. As with most families in our situation, the road to recovery is full of the unexpected and unpredictable.
As fall approached that year we made plans to take a road trip out to Utah to bring Hannah home and stop in Colorado on the way back for a short family vacation. We were so looking forward to a fun family experience together after all we’d been through. You can imagine our dismay when that hope was shattered when we got to our hotel and the reality of our severely anxious and symptomatic daughter began to set in. Instead of the pleasant and enjoyable time we’d envisioned, we were all a mess and in the end just got through it and headed home. Shortly after Hannah’s re-entry back into our home community, her relapse became severe enough that she was put on a plane and headed back to Utah to be readmitted. It was a devastating time for all of us.
The following months were spent continuing our utmost devotion to figuring out what would work in Hannah’s life so that she could successfully recover. The treatment center developed what they would later call the “Hannah” plan. A plan where she would transition slowly from the controlled treatment setting there and come home for short visits that would be extended as time went on. By November she was progressing fairly well but by that time it was clear that more drastic family changes were in store for us. I resigned from my job as an elementary school teacher because I just couldn’t keep up with my responsibilities at school and the intensity of a daughter in early recovery. Her outpatient follow up care had to be done in Omaha about 2 hours away from us and would often include as many as 2 and sometimes 3 trips a week. It was truly an exhausting time.
As Christians, my husband and I have always sought guidance from God in our lives and this situation was no exception. As we sought that direction in this state of fatigue and desperation, we both began to sense that our family needed a new place to start over. Since we had both really loved our time in Utah, Dean decided to pursue employment there. It was just weeks later and things fell into place for us to relocate. On New Year’s Eve of 2004 we pulled into the city of Logan to begin our new life there. Before long we both had employment and Hannah was settled into a local charter high school. It was such a surreal time for us. The following 5 years brought us more of the most difficult and faith-stretching experiences we could ever have imagined living through.
Hannah continued to pursue recovery and as she did time began to reveal that she was dealing with much more than the initial struggle with bulimia that started us down this amazing pathway. At some point along the way her psychiatrist added bipolar 2 and borderline personality disorder to her complex mental state. As parents we learned that recovery for any one of these illnesses can take a long time and that the answers were as individual as a person’s fingerprints. In order for us to understand her and understand how we could be part of the solution, beyond merely paying for treatment, we knew we would have to continually grow ourselves. We read books, we met with other parents in the midst of, or having gone through, similar experiences through a NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) Friends and Family Class as well as through the network of parents we knew from Avalon Hills. We have met people from everywhere, several different religious persuasions, socioeconomic classes, and a variety of cultures all with similar threads of pain and growth weaving their way through each family’s own tapestry.
We are now on our new home in Cambridge, Minnesota, (writing this on a notebook computer in the moving truck). Our 23 year old daughter is waiting for us in our new home there. I’ve spent the last 5 weeks finishing up the semester of classes at Utah State University. I’m in the process of acquiring an endorsement in mild/moderate Special Education. It’s clear that the experiences of the last 7 years have carved out a place for this new professional direction in my life. My husband has returned to his vocation of selling grain handling equipment and Hannah’s working and continually moving forward.
People with my faith background often tell me that “God is good”. After all we’ve been through, I would have to concur. That said, what God has made clear to me in a myriad of ways, is that humanity is, in all its forms, God’s perfect creation. God's love and grace toward ALL of mankind is intense and personal. Both are readily available to meet anyone, anywhere. Dean and I have very literally met God in places where our strict fundamentalist persuasion would never have allowed us to look before. Had we not been given such a remarkable daughter (and I must add, her deep thinking inquisitive brother) we’d never ever have come to understand these truths.
In conclusion, it is very clear that Utah will live in our hearts forever as “the place”. It was where God took us, as very weary and broken people and gave us room to grow and re-establish our lives. We have been profoundly changed forever. I will thank God every day for the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains, the richness and grace given to us from our special friends there and especially for Avalon Hills…the magical place that started it all.
Years ago, Brigham Young arrived here in this valley where I now sit. At the end of his journey, after coming through the Wasatch Mountains, he looked out over the vast space in front of him and said, "This is the place." For him it was THE place he'd been searching for. The place where his people, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, could safely settle and become the people they wanted to be. What they wanted was simply their "own" place, a place where they could continue to live and practice their religious beliefs. They clearly wanted this so badly that they were eager to endure the harsh realities of the journey, only to come to a place that would test them even further.
As I gather my own thoughts today, I realize how much my own experience in making this journey to Utah, mirrors that Mormon journey so long ago. This has also been “the place” for me to settle and establish myself. My husband and daughter would also concur that their experience here has accomplished similar things in their lives. It may sound trite but in every way, we have each found a new sense of self out here in what began as Brigham Young’s Utah.
In bringing Hannah to Avalon Hills, a residential eating disorders program for adolescents in the Cache Valley of northern Utah, we had no concept that our journey would lead to eventual employment and relocation to that beautiful place. The first 5 months of our experiences there were spent with Hannah living at the treatment center and Dean and I coming and going for visits with her and family therapy. It was a healing time for her and a revealing time for all of us. We learned a great deal about her illness and our family’s dysfunction as well as the dysfunction of life in our home community. We spent much of that time in a paradoxical state of numbness and awe. The realities of what we were dealing with were very difficult, but the immense sense of authentic healing that was taking place in our lives was profound. It was clear that God had led us to the perfect program and therapist to lead us out of the darkness we’d been in for far too long. We not only invested all of our material wealth in the process, but heart and soul as well. Our hope was always that we would learn what we needed to, that Hannah would learn what she needed to and we would return to our home in Nebraska and move on. As with most families in our situation, the road to recovery is full of the unexpected and unpredictable.
As fall approached that year we made plans to take a road trip out to Utah to bring Hannah home and stop in Colorado on the way back for a short family vacation. We were so looking forward to a fun family experience together after all we’d been through. You can imagine our dismay when that hope was shattered when we got to our hotel and the reality of our severely anxious and symptomatic daughter began to set in. Instead of the pleasant and enjoyable time we’d envisioned, we were all a mess and in the end just got through it and headed home. Shortly after Hannah’s re-entry back into our home community, her relapse became severe enough that she was put on a plane and headed back to Utah to be readmitted. It was a devastating time for all of us.
The following months were spent continuing our utmost devotion to figuring out what would work in Hannah’s life so that she could successfully recover. The treatment center developed what they would later call the “Hannah” plan. A plan where she would transition slowly from the controlled treatment setting there and come home for short visits that would be extended as time went on. By November she was progressing fairly well but by that time it was clear that more drastic family changes were in store for us. I resigned from my job as an elementary school teacher because I just couldn’t keep up with my responsibilities at school and the intensity of a daughter in early recovery. Her outpatient follow up care had to be done in Omaha about 2 hours away from us and would often include as many as 2 and sometimes 3 trips a week. It was truly an exhausting time.
As Christians, my husband and I have always sought guidance from God in our lives and this situation was no exception. As we sought that direction in this state of fatigue and desperation, we both began to sense that our family needed a new place to start over. Since we had both really loved our time in Utah, Dean decided to pursue employment there. It was just weeks later and things fell into place for us to relocate. On New Year’s Eve of 2004 we pulled into the city of Logan to begin our new life there. Before long we both had employment and Hannah was settled into a local charter high school. It was such a surreal time for us. The following 5 years brought us more of the most difficult and faith-stretching experiences we could ever have imagined living through.
Hannah continued to pursue recovery and as she did time began to reveal that she was dealing with much more than the initial struggle with bulimia that started us down this amazing pathway. At some point along the way her psychiatrist added bipolar 2 and borderline personality disorder to her complex mental state. As parents we learned that recovery for any one of these illnesses can take a long time and that the answers were as individual as a person’s fingerprints. In order for us to understand her and understand how we could be part of the solution, beyond merely paying for treatment, we knew we would have to continually grow ourselves. We read books, we met with other parents in the midst of, or having gone through, similar experiences through a NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) Friends and Family Class as well as through the network of parents we knew from Avalon Hills. We have met people from everywhere, several different religious persuasions, socioeconomic classes, and a variety of cultures all with similar threads of pain and growth weaving their way through each family’s own tapestry.
We are now on our new home in Cambridge, Minnesota, (writing this on a notebook computer in the moving truck). Our 23 year old daughter is waiting for us in our new home there. I’ve spent the last 5 weeks finishing up the semester of classes at Utah State University. I’m in the process of acquiring an endorsement in mild/moderate Special Education. It’s clear that the experiences of the last 7 years have carved out a place for this new professional direction in my life. My husband has returned to his vocation of selling grain handling equipment and Hannah’s working and continually moving forward.
People with my faith background often tell me that “God is good”. After all we’ve been through, I would have to concur. That said, what God has made clear to me in a myriad of ways, is that humanity is, in all its forms, God’s perfect creation. God's love and grace toward ALL of mankind is intense and personal. Both are readily available to meet anyone, anywhere. Dean and I have very literally met God in places where our strict fundamentalist persuasion would never have allowed us to look before. Had we not been given such a remarkable daughter (and I must add, her deep thinking inquisitive brother) we’d never ever have come to understand these truths.
In conclusion, it is very clear that Utah will live in our hearts forever as “the place”. It was where God took us, as very weary and broken people and gave us room to grow and re-establish our lives. We have been profoundly changed forever. I will thank God every day for the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains, the richness and grace given to us from our special friends there and especially for Avalon Hills…the magical place that started it all.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Faith in the Life of Jane...
When I was 16 I listened to a friend read through a neat little booklet called The 4 Spiritual Laws. When he got to the prayer to ask Christ into my heart it made sense so I prayed with him and according to the booklet Christ came into my life. I grew up Lutheran and according to this "new" version of the gospel I was not a Christian until I prayed that prayer. This was in the late 70's when the Jesus movement was in full swing and people were leaving mainline churches in droves as a result of this "new" take on the gospel. It was really not "new" to Baptists and other evangelicals because that's how they approached the Bible and its teachings since they first came into being. I was eager to shed my "wild" ways so when I heard this formula, I bought into it with all of my being.
My life made a radical change. I left the Lutheran church and headed to the Southern Baptist one in my town. It was very casual and not a status presentation like I often felt the Lutheran church was. You could wear jeans and be comfortable there, very little ceremony or liturgy, it was real to me. Later when I went to college I got involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, the ministry whose founder had designed the Four Spiritual Laws booklet I'd been converted by. One of the main reasons I joined the ministry was because of the emphasis on training people to live as disciples of Christ. That said, part of that involved sharing this lovely little booklet with complete strangers. I was NOT good at that. In fact I hated that - evangelism - just hated it. The people I met in Campus Crusade were wonderful spiritual people and I learned a great deal from them. I met my husband there and thought my life was going to follow this wonderful spiritual path that another booklet from the ministry explained to me.
It was called The Spirit Filled Life. In that little booklet there is a diagram that shows two circles with a throne in the middle of each of them. There is a capital S in the circles. In one the S is on the throne of the circle with a cross in the circle but off to the side. Dots are spread out within the inner circle to represent the circumstances of your life. The drawing is designed to illustrate that when the S is on the throne of the life all, of those dots are in disarray, not in sync and chaotic. The second circle has a cross on the throne of the life representing Jesus with the S representing the self, in submission to it. The dots are all moved to the outter edge of the inner circle and in order - all circumstances in the life are in sync with each other, perfectly distanced apart. The serious seeker is challenged to buy into the idea of a life that represents this circle is a full and "abundant" life. I bought into it with all of my being. As it turned out life was very different than I expected it to be in the years to come.
As I married and sought to follow Christ in this way, I discovered that living life in submission to Christ often made it look like the other circle - where the dots were all over the place. My life was anything but neatly ordered and in sync. I did sincerely love the person of Jesus Christ that I had discovered in the Bible but my life was full of relationship problems, money problems, and I was sick a lot! Life was just not at all in order like this drawing indicated it would be, like I thought it could or should be. In spite of the reality that surrounded me, I continued to teach this perception of the spirit-filled life. It took nearly dying from an anxious quest toward perfection before I started to find my way out and into the real abundant life I now know.
Time to go but more later...
My life made a radical change. I left the Lutheran church and headed to the Southern Baptist one in my town. It was very casual and not a status presentation like I often felt the Lutheran church was. You could wear jeans and be comfortable there, very little ceremony or liturgy, it was real to me. Later when I went to college I got involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, the ministry whose founder had designed the Four Spiritual Laws booklet I'd been converted by. One of the main reasons I joined the ministry was because of the emphasis on training people to live as disciples of Christ. That said, part of that involved sharing this lovely little booklet with complete strangers. I was NOT good at that. In fact I hated that - evangelism - just hated it. The people I met in Campus Crusade were wonderful spiritual people and I learned a great deal from them. I met my husband there and thought my life was going to follow this wonderful spiritual path that another booklet from the ministry explained to me.
It was called The Spirit Filled Life. In that little booklet there is a diagram that shows two circles with a throne in the middle of each of them. There is a capital S in the circles. In one the S is on the throne of the circle with a cross in the circle but off to the side. Dots are spread out within the inner circle to represent the circumstances of your life. The drawing is designed to illustrate that when the S is on the throne of the life all, of those dots are in disarray, not in sync and chaotic. The second circle has a cross on the throne of the life representing Jesus with the S representing the self, in submission to it. The dots are all moved to the outter edge of the inner circle and in order - all circumstances in the life are in sync with each other, perfectly distanced apart. The serious seeker is challenged to buy into the idea of a life that represents this circle is a full and "abundant" life. I bought into it with all of my being. As it turned out life was very different than I expected it to be in the years to come.
As I married and sought to follow Christ in this way, I discovered that living life in submission to Christ often made it look like the other circle - where the dots were all over the place. My life was anything but neatly ordered and in sync. I did sincerely love the person of Jesus Christ that I had discovered in the Bible but my life was full of relationship problems, money problems, and I was sick a lot! Life was just not at all in order like this drawing indicated it would be, like I thought it could or should be. In spite of the reality that surrounded me, I continued to teach this perception of the spirit-filled life. It took nearly dying from an anxious quest toward perfection before I started to find my way out and into the real abundant life I now know.
Time to go but more later...
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