Comfort and Security

After weeks of having most of my buttons pushed I decided to take the day off. The entire weekend actually. Rather than hole myself up in my house I planned to get out and just breathe. There comes a point when I just have to take a step back from my life and most of the things in it so that I can be still enough to actually hear God. I believe that God speaks to us every day… we’re just t0o busy to listen.

There was really only one thing on my agenda for Saturday. Ok…only one thing that I absolutely had to do. Being me, I did have a tentative “To Do” list for the entire weekend, but most everything on it fell into the “Suggestions” category. Life as I know it would not end if I didn’t get things on the list done. I like to make lists and I like to check things off because it helps control my stress. At the top of my Saturday list? Get my lithium levels checked.

With all the mounting stress of the past few months I had come to an unwanted conclusion: It might be time to up my medication. My goal for 2012 was to actually have my doctor ween me off of the lithium since my dosage is not even at a therapeutic level anyway. I’ve been on it for a long time and it’s been a LONG bumpy road. I’ve had mixed feelings about taking the lithium, but it was the first thing that ever gave me some semblance of normalcy so I hesitated to kick it to the curb. My doctor has advised me to just keep taking it. I stopped taking anti-depressants in 2006 and haven’t missed them. For a season I really needed them, but when that season ended God made it clear that they could not accomplish what only he could do. Now God seems to be reminding me that medication exists for a reason and it’s ok to take advantage of it.

Before I could up my dosage my doctor wanted me to have my levels checked. Oh, joy. Some women are blessed with a tiny waists. Others have tiny ankles. Me? I got tiny veins! I’ve been getting my levels checked roughly every 3 months since 1998 and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been told how tiny my veins are and how hard it is to find them. If you think I’ve got a million cane spider stories… I’ve got double that when I tell the stories of my misadventures with blood draws. As a result of said misadventures, I have issues with needles. Or should I say issues with medical personnel with needles??

I wasn’t exactly happy to go to the medical center first thing Saturday morning, but it needed to be done. Finding out that my doctor also ordered urine tests wasn’t fun either. Nothing like trying to pee into a cup to get your morning off to a weird start. When I sat down in the vampire chair I told the phlebotomist what I always tell the phlebotomist:

I am a difficult draw. They can never find the veins in my arms, so they take the blood out of my hand.

Yep. They take the blood out of my hand, but not until after they’ve all tried to get it out of my arms. And it’s never enough to try it in one arm and give up. They generally have to try it in both arms numerous times. It’s like I’ve presented them with a challenge and they don’t want to give up easily. I generally walk out with bandages on both arms and both hands. It is the rare phlebotomist who can get it on the first try.

True to form, she took up my challenge. She asked if I’d mind if she tried my arms first. She tried the left arm. No vein. She tried the right arm. No vein. She tried my hands. No vein. If I wasn’t absolutely positive that I was alive I’d start to wonder. She never got as far as poking me with any needles, though. I just sat there holding my breath wishing it was all over.

“God? Why does it always have to be like this?”
“When is it going to be over??”
“Can I be done now??

All of those things went through my mind and I wondered if God was listening.

Then she tried a spot halfway between my elbow and my wrist. I turned my  head away and clenched my eyes shut. I was certain that was going to hurt. Nobody had tried that spot that I could remember. I was just hoping she’d do it and get it over with without telling me that I’d just feel a “little pinch.” I wanted to give her a little pinch. Those “little pinches” are usually followed by my vein closing up and the person having to start all over again. This is generally when I start feeling lightheaded because I’ve been holding my breathe. On cue she asked me how I was doing. They always ask how I’m doing. I asked her if she was actually getting any blood. When she replied that she was, I told her that I was  doing ok.

She finished the draw and put a gauze over the spot. I could not look at her as she used another needle to transfer my blood into the small vials. I looked at a poster on the wall. I’ve seen it before, but I needed to see it again. It always reminds me of God. It reminds me that into our lives painful  things must come, but some are necessary to our health and growth. It is a poster for parents on how to hold their child when they are getting various shots. The title on the poster is in big letters:

Positions of Comfort and Security:

and it has pictures of parents holding their kids close while they get their shots. No kid likes to have blood drawn or to get immunizations. Most get scared or angry. They scream, cry, kick, and try to get away. It’s scary and painful… but necessary. The parents aren’t hurting their children, they are helping them. They are making sure they are as comfortable and secure as possible as they experience the pain. Sure, it might actually hurt, but only for a short while and the benefits of it far outweigh the momentary pain.

When I see that poster I think about how my Father, God, allows painful things into my life. Life has been rather painful of late, but I must never lose sight of the fact that my Father loves me. The pain he allows into my life has a purpose even if I do not understand it or like it.

My Father is not only aware of where I am… he’s with me.

My Father knows that I am afraid and he cares.

My Father is holding me close and is never going to let me go. And even if I get scared or angry… If I kick, scream, cry, or try to get away…  he wants only the best for me and knows what he’s doing. He is my Father and he loves me.

It was over and I hadn’t really felt any pain. That had to be a record. She got it on the first try, the vein didn’t close up, and I didn’t have a bunch of gauze taped to my limbs. If you knew my history with needles you’d understand how monumental this was. I needed to thank her. She wasn’t wearing a visible name tag, so I asked her name. Her reply made my heart jump.

Charity.

Her name was Charity.

Immediately a verse popped up in my mind:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13 New International Version).

In the King James Version, the word “love” is rendered as “Charity.” You can doubt this all you want, but I believe without doubt that God sent a phlebotomist named “Love” to remind me that despite the struggles I’ve been having he loves me. He is holding me in a position of comfort and security whether I realize it or not. I fairly floated out of the clinic certain that God was going to eventually lead me through all of this and I would make it to the other side with my mental health intact. These momentary trials that I am dealing with are for my overall health and growth. God wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true.

Oddly enough, later when I removed the gauze and threw it away I looked down to where Charity had drawn my blood. I bruise. When they draw blood I generally have green and purple bruises for days. There wasn’t a mark on me. I couldn’t even tell where the needle had gone in. It was amazing. My Father had held me in a position of comfort and security while Love had done what needed to be done.

As Jumpy as a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

That would pretty much describe my first reaction when I walked into my kitchen this morning.I looked up at the light and saw this silhouette against the glass dome of the lighting fixture:

 

Yep. The return of the cane spider.

[Cue creepy music]

For those new to my blog over the past six years I’ve chronicled my experience with these eight-legged spawn of Satan many times. I still remember the day I saw my first cane spider. I darn near jumped on top of the table… at least until I realized that it could climb up there too. That day was the start of a raging arachnophobia that defies brief explanation. I would blog about every encounter… sometimes still trembling in fear and other times having regained my sense of humor enough to laugh at my own trauma. There was that time one trapped me in the bathroom at two in the morning. Or the time that one crawled out of the vent in my car WHILE I WAS DRIVING. Or that time I set off all those bug bombs in my classroom only to come back to a scene of carnage that rivaled a B-grade horror flick. There were spider corpses everywhere, even hanging from the ceiling! I literally froze in place and had to call for help on my cellphone.

So when I moved into my new place a year and a half ago, I was unpleasantly surprised to realize that having a sugar cane field as a backyard meant that every spider in a 50 mile radius thought my place was a timeshare. In all the other places I lived, there was always the convenient roommate to kill the critter and dispose of the carcass. I was so eager to live by myself that I totally overlooked the fact that if my home was infested with cane spider or centipedes or any other creature (it was)… that I would be the person responsible for doing any of the killing. My first month in this place was filled with terror and tears. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to piss God off that he would relegate me to critter hell. Let’s not forget the 8 inch centipede that I sprayed to death with RAID and then left under a bucket for 10 days until I was sure that it was dead. There has not been a day that has gone by that I have not been afraid living here. But in my fear something happened…

I learned that there are several ways to kill a centipede and that cane spiders aren’t as fearsome as they look. Gone were the tears and the trembling. Why just last week I happened to notice that there was a cane spider on the ceiling in my hallway. If I didn’t kill it, my Canadian bacon was going to burn. Since NOTHING stands between me and my bacon, I sussed up the situation and determined the best way to kill it. Before I could really even worry about it dropping down on me I’d knocked it down with the broom and gave it a swift smash into whatever afterlife cane spiders enjoy. In all these months God has had me confront my fears. I am, however, still very much afraid of the cane spiders and the centipedes, but I don’t let the fear stop me. I’d have to move out of my place if that were the case, and I’m not moving…. just short of hearing the audible voice of God.

Mark Twain once wrote that “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.  Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave. ” I have the first part of that quote in a frame on my shelf. I used to be a woman of many fears. God has been freeing me of many of them, but it has driven me crazy that I am still afraid of those blasted spiders. The one in the lamp this morning was directly over my laptop. The laptop that I turn on every morning before work and blog. How could I possibly sit in my chair knowing that, at any moment, that creepy critter could squeeze out of the light  and drop on me??? Such a horror doesn’t even bear considering because I’d have a heart attack on the spot and my last post would be submitted posthumously by a friend.

God?? Are you serious?? Is this REALLY how you want me to start my day??

I grabbed a broom thinking I could tap the glass and startle it back into the hole in the ceiling. Evidently, the glass gave it courage. I tried tapping the glass with the broom handle. No such luck. I had to continue getting ready for work, but I kept an eye on the glass just in case it made it’s move. I was planning to kill it and then tap dance on the corps out of spite. At some point, I stopped looking. I had things to do and it was time to sit in the “hot seat” under the light fixture and go about my cyber business. I kept craning my neck ever so often to make sure it hadn’t moved. I kept wondering WHY God wouldn’t just smite it or something. There was NO object lesson to be had. I could clearly see my fear and my fear was not budging.

At least not until the last time I happened to glance up and notice that the bold silhouette that had been spread eagle inside the light fixture had now taken on the pose of the Wicked Witch from the “Wizard of Oz.” Cane spiders shrivel up when they die. And that’s how I found Spot (I’ve decided to name him now). I looked up and Spot was dead. The heat of my light bulb  had cooked him like a McPaddy under  a heat lamp. He shriveled up into a tight little ball, hence “Spot.”

The first thought through my mind after I thanked God???

“What’s better than a cat on a hot tin roof??”
A dead cane spider under glass!!!

And that’s when the object lesson hit me. So often I work out strategies to confront with my fears. I feel good about myself for having overcome them. God’s put a verse in my head today: Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord who determines his step. All my plans to kill the spider came to naught. God wasn’t asking me to kill it (quite unlike the untold hordes he’s had me kill up to now). He wanted me to see my fear, confront it, acknowledge that I could do nothing about it, and then surrender it to him. Am I saying that God fried a cane spider on my light bulb to teach me a lesson? Yep. One that stayed with me all day. It had me asking myself what am I really afraid of at work or about church or any other thing that scares me?? What’s the worst possible thing that could happen. In the case of the spider, God took care of my fear. I didn’t have to do a thing. Couldn’t it be like that with other things?? If so, that could mean a whole lot less drama and striving on my part. Of course, I had to look up “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” since I’d never read or seen the play. That brought to mind a whole ‘nother line of thought… that’ll have to wait until next time because I’ve reached my word count limit. If I can’t get to my point in under 1300 words… I’ve said too much. *Whew! Only 1298!”*

On the Road Again

I woke up worrying this morning. Not the “I’m not trusting God and everything is overwhelming” worrying. It was more of the, “There’s so much to do. How do I make plans?” type of worry which I tend to think is not as bad as the first kind. As soon as I realized that I was worrying I prayed to God and he told me to get out of bed and start taking care of business.

There’s a saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” I got sick of hearing that when I was actively struggling with my Bipolar Disorder. People mean well… but people who say that to people who can’t help themselves are ignorant.  I don’t buy into that type of thinking because if you were… say… mentally disabled or completely physically disabled… according to this little nugget o’ wisdom you’d be screwed. Such people should not expect any help whatsoever from God because he only helps those who can do already do it themselves. There’s enough evidence in the gospels to disprove this. Jesus was all about helping people who couldn’t help themselves. Yet there’s plenty of evidence to also support that Jesus expected people to buy into their own healing. Some times he did  just heal people. Other times he’d tell people to do stuff first and then they would see the healing.

For me, worry used to be the equivalent to a near fatal disease. Bipolar Girl could literally make herself sick with worrying and had all the health problems to verify that claim. IBS, GERD… I had a bunch of initials testifying to the fact that worry was trying to eat me alive from the inside out. That’s why God told me to get out of bed and stop marinating in my worries. There is nothing about my situation that a little advanced planning will not take care of and then, once I’ve done my part, God will take care of his. My part involved stepping out in faith (and getting out of my bed) to send some much needed emails to my boss and our HR department. Ignorance is not bliss. It feeds worry. Finding out  how my company handles TDI and what I need to do to prepare for my month long sick leave was the major order of business for today and God was not  going to type the emails.

My point? God wouldn’t have abandoned me had I stayed in bed and worried some more. He is a big enough God to have contingency plans for my worry. But he’s also grown me so much in the last year, that I actually was able to help myself in out of this pit o’ worry. Last year this all would have been overwhelming and depressing. I distinctly remember having a total meltdown on the phone and crying when I had to talk to somebody about my insurance needs prior to my hysterectomy. God helped me last year when I couldn’t help myself. And he’s helping  me this year when I can.

The best part of the day came when I dealt with another practical worry: driving. I woke up worried about how I was going to get to my post-op appointment tomorrow. Nobody has complained, but I feel like I’m asking for too much help. I don’t want to burn anybody out and since all of my friends work, I don’t want to impose trying to get to a 2:00 appointment. Since my jaunt to church proved to be my undoing yesterday, I wasn’t at all sure that I’d be able to drive myself into town tomorrow without ending up sore and miserable. Well. God gave me my driving orders after I sent those emails. I got enough of a confirmation that I was supposed to at least try to drive, that I got in my car and drove. And then, once I got to my destination (a nearby park), I got out and walked. Ok. Hobbled is more like it… but I did it. The emotional equivalent of walking on water minus all the water. I have no reason to be afraid and no reason to worry about tomorrow. God has not left me to deal with all the details by myself. He’s just chosen a different way for me to walk this particular stretch of road: when I see potential pot holes, I need to look to him first, and then trust that he will walk me over, around, or straight through if necessary.

 

One Wedding and Two Funerals part I

The first thing I did upon waking up this morning was to kill this:

Seven months ago those things (cane spiders) used to have me quaking in my boots — or they would if I actually wore boots, but this is Hawaii — who wears boots in the house?  I used to quake in my slippahs and both me an my slippahs weren’t happy about 8 legged critters in the house. My arachnophobia was so severe that I would literally have the shakes and, on more than one occasion, break down into a fit of tears. I used to say that one of these days I wanted to be tough enough to kill the spiders with my hand and then lick my palm. I was that desperate to get over my fear that I wanted to overcompensate for it. Well, I’m not there yet (not sure I really want to be — licking spider guts off my hand sounds kinda gross to me now), but I did quickly grab a broom and sent that critter into whatever afterlife critters go to. And then promptly got on with the rest of my day. Change? Yes, I’ve changed. A spider funeral before I even took my morning meds.

No nightmares this morning. My dreams were actually rather good. But with all the good stuff that happened to me this weekend there really wasn’t any fuel for bad dreams. Earl didn’t have anything to work with, so I guess he didn’t even bother. After I killed the giant eight legged invader, I looked out my window at the yard. Good soil.

For a long time now I’ve been asking God to put me on the “good soil.” There’s a parable in the book of Matthew that talks about spiritual growth. Jesus makes his point by telling a parable about these different types of soil where a farmer throws his seed: the path (which really shouldn’t count as “soil”); the rocky soil, the thorny soil, and the “good” soil. Each soil represents different types of people. Me? I’ve always been the thorny soil type. Bipolar Girl has let many worries and cares of the world choke her faith. Struggling with a mental illness that predisposed me to worry, anxiety, and stress in general pretty much ensured that my soil was going to have tons of thorns in it. Thorns, weeds, whatever it is you want to call it… I had lots of it and it choked my faith for years.

When I moved into my new place it was a modern day parable waiting to happen. Not only did I have all the critters coming out in force to help me confront my fears, but I had to watch daily as the weeds seemed to take over the yard. After my hysterectomy I thought I could get out in the yard and do some light gardening. Bad idea. I ended up in a lot of pain and things pretty much still hurt. Unfortunately, I am not able to work in the yard and as the weeds crested over the doors of my car I sadly thought how the weeds in the yard mirrored my spiritual condition. I have long since believed that there was something wrong with my faith. I still think that. Bipolar aside, I just do not seem to have the passion and faith that I see so many people displaying. I could fake it so that I’d look good to other people, but that kind of faith doesn’t keep you warm at night. Fake faith isn’t worth the time it takes to put on the mask. Besides, I want something real. I want a faith that is living and vibrant… and as much as I am committed to my God and love him… “passion” is not a word that I’d use to describe my faith or my relationship with him.

Weeds. The weeds seemed to describe my faith and that was not enough for me. I’ve been praying for a very long time for God to “fix” my faith, but like the weeds in my yard, the weeds/thorns in my life weren’t just going to magically disappear.  Yet, I didn’t know what to do about my yard or my life. For me, my life is my faith and the two cannot be seperated. I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve been in counseling for most of my adult life. If counseling was going to fix me… it should have done it by now. I’ve been on meds since 1997. If the meds were going to fix what’s wrong with my faith, they would have kicked in by now. If going to church and praying was going to fix it, I think that 17 years of going to church and praying would have done something…

And it has. God used the counseling and the meds and church and prayer to get me where I am now. And then he said, “Change.” I had to do and think and be different than I ever have been if I wanted the weeds in my life and in my yard to go away. One awesome thing about my job is that it actually pays me enough money to do more than just buy the bare necessities. In the past, spending money to pay somebody to do my yard would have been totally unthinkable. This Saturday I paid two of the students from work to come and do landscaping in my yard. They were overjoyed to come do it and I was overjoyed with the work that they did. The transformation in my yard is amazing and pictures just don’t do it justice.

Paying people to do that which I cannot do myself. Hmm. Why have I always tried to do everything by myself?? They pulled weeds and killed off critters that were hiding in the brush. They knew what they were doing and I didn’t. The hours they spent at my house flew by and if I didn’t have a wedding to go to, I would have stayed and let them finish killing off all the weeds in my yard. Death to weeds! Down with thorns! Yep. I am SO down with that cause. As I surveyed the work that they’d done I found myself talking to God. My mentor had suggested that I do this really intense Christian counseling that is supposed to get to the root of whatever ails ya’. I was skeptical. After my last round of counseling I pretty much figured I was all counseled out. I didn’t even want to do more counseling. I’ve been relatively happy since my surgery. Why botch up what ain’t broken? Counseling has always seemed like pulling off so many layers of skin or picking scabs that should best be left alone. But what if… God wants me to do counseling  in answer to a prayer? I kept asking God to fix me and all roads seem to be leading me to this counseling.

A few months back I did that eight part series on getting ready to be married. At the time I thought I really wanted to be married but it was mostly so I could have all that God-ordained sex that Christians are supposed to be able to have. I even said that once I got hired full time at my job and could afford it, I was going to join eHarmony and find a spouse. Then the reality hit me — I am not quite ready to be married. I’m not waiting until I’m perfect or something ridculous like that, because I know that nobody is perfect… but there is still something wrong with my faith and if I don’t have a deeply passionate love relationship with God, why do I think I can have that with a human? Clearly, there is a major need for thorn and weed removal in my life. What if God wants me to do this intense counseling so as to get to the roots of whatever it is that is stopping me from getting closer to him? I have to admit that I couldn’t even have considered doing this counseling a year ago. A friend did it… and it was like having several layers of skin peeled off. When she suggested it to me I gave her an emphatic, “NO!” But last weekend I promised to be open to whatever my mentor said. I wasn’t expecting her to mention this counseling to me. If I hadn’t promised God I’d be open to what she said I would have shot it down like a kamikaze pilot. I’ve had time to think and pray about it this week.

Paying somebody to do that which I cannot do myself? If it works on the weeds in my yard, could it possibly work on the weeds and thorns in my life? Saturday afternoon I was willing to consider it and it was on my mind heavily  as I stood in a beautiful garden at a resort hotel watching a friend get married. She’s older, so it wasn’t one of those froo froo wedding where the young bride makes me feel like a shriveled up old spinster. My friend looked lovely and she and her groom didn’t have that giddiness that comes with young couples in love. They were quiet and solemn (nervous maybe?)… but it felt like they knew exactly what they were getting into and they were ready. That’s what I want. I want to be ready and God’s telling me that I need to let him pull the weeds. Bipolar Girl figured she’d always be too broken to ever get married. Now the possibility is actually there but I can’t take a bunch of weeds into a marriage.  As I watched my friend getting married I decided that I’d do the counseling if God really wanted me to do it. Let the counselor pull the weeds. I would not resist.

In order for me to change… old ways of doing things, old mindsets are going to have to die. The weeds in my life are going to have to be pulled from the roots as assuredly as the weeds in my yard met an untimely end. The dead weeds represent things in my life (worries and cares for the world) that have to go. The dead spider represented my release of my unreasonable fears. I think my fear of drowning is reasonable since I don’t know how to swim. My fear of sharks, however,  is not reasonable since there aren’t any sharks on land. Let go of that which is not reasonable. And the wedding? It represented hope and possibilities. With all that warm fuzzy goodness going on this weekend… no wonder Earl decided not to come out and play. As is, that wasn’t even all the good stuff that happened this weekend. There is more. A lot more… but it’ll just have to wait ’til the next post.

Puff, the NOT So Magic Dragon

One Christmas when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley I found myself walking around the town by myself. It was cold and dusk was falling. I’m not sure where I was going or how long I walked… not much stands out in the memory other than the way that I felt. I looked into the windows of the houses that I passed…at all the different happy families with their Christmas trees and decorations and I felt alone. Useless. Loveless. As if I would never find a place where I fit or where anybody would actually miss me if I never came back.

I went back to the dorm terribly depressed and even more suicidal.

It’s impossible for me to pinpoint from the vantage point of now exactly what stopped that particular downward spirals. To this day, I don’t really know why I never went beyond a few half hearted attempts to take my life. I’d love to say that becoming a Christian made it all go away, but the fact that it didn’t is the reason why this blog and my manuscript exist in the first place. I share that snippet of a memory because that is how I have felt for most of my Christian life: alone… useless… loveless. Afraid that if I ever did actually take my life that nobody would care, not even God.

I used to be afraid of God. And not in that healthy, “fear of the Lord” way either. I was terrified of him. To be more precise I used to be afraid of just about everything. If you go back to the very beginning of this blog you’ll find a post somewhere called “Dragons” or something very similar. It was a fairy tale rendering of my life with Fear being the villainous dragon that chased me everywhere, dogging my heels just waiting to the most opportune moment to kill me. It was Fear that kept me thinking that God couldn’t, or worse, wouldn’t do anything to heal all my broken parts. It was Fear that kept me from trusting God; that had me thinking that he was faithless because he wouldn’t magically make my Bipolar Disorder go away. Fear kept my deepest sins and shames locked in my own mind convincing me that people would despise me if they found out what I was really like. Fear kept me away from people and it kept me away from God, isolated in my own little bubble that I had come to call “Bipolar World.”

“God, what’s wrong with my relationship with you? How come I can never seem to get really close to you? There’s a disconnect and no matter how hard I try… I still never seem to really know you. I feel empty.” I used to say variations of that all the time over the years. I kept asking God to show me the root cause of what was wrong with me. At first, I used to think it was my incest issues and my dysfunctional family, but I didn’t get much closer to God after years of trying to deal with those things. Then I thought it was my sexual addiction, but after working through a lot of those issues I’m still not much closer to God. I used to think it was my Bipolar, but when years of therapy and psychotropic medication did not transform my life into the model picture of the Christian life I had to go back and ask God once more what was wrong with my walk? Where was the intimacy that I longed for, but never really seemed to achieve for any sustainable period of time?

Since my recent hysterectomy I have not experienced any symptoms of my disorder. I’ve had my share of health problems, employment problems, financial problems… a veritable mixed bag o’ stressors, but none of it has caused me to slide into depression. Trade in depression for a uterus. Who knew? So how come I haven’t morphed into Susie Q. Christian Girl? Why is the intimate relationship with God still lacking? I feel like God revealed the root cause to me recently and I’m still processing it, but he’s given me some help to make the processing more bearable.

The first helper came in the form of a friend. I emailed her and asked if we could meet for prayer. Busy person that she is, she dropped everything to make time for me. Then she patiently sat as I revealed to her what God had revealed to me — and she didn’t even blink. She didn’t judge me, or worse, try to downplay what I had shared. She didn’t even pretend to try to have a point of reference, but from other things that she said it was clear that she understood more than she even knew. I told her that I wasn’t afraid of what God had shown me and I wasn’t feeling condemned. I just didn’t know what to do with what he’d shown me. So as a good, non-blinking friend, she just prayed for me. I felt as if a giant weight had been lifted off of me. She had prayed specifically about something I’d never revealed to another person in my life because up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even known what the real problem was. I am still not at a point where I feel like I can go into detail here, but I’m not lugging that weight around in my subconscious anymore. It is enough that I am not carrying this burden alone and that I am not ashamed.

The second helper came in the form of the guest speaker at church today: A dynamic man with a clear and evident passion for worshiping God. He asked a question that I’d asked myself as I drove to church this morning: Why do I do this?? Why am I going to church??? Why do I do this Christian thing?? Ok. Three questions, but he hit the nucleus of what I was thinking this morning– if I’m not having this deeply intimate love relationship with God… then why bother? His answer? We do this thing called Christianity so that we might have eternal life and that eternal life does not entail naked people sitting around on clouds singing “Kumbaya” (I added that). It starts now. Eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Eternal life is knowing God’s real character and nature. So all those years I spent dancing a slow dance with depression and suicidal thought, I was struggling with things that kept me from knowing God. I wasn’t experiencing eternal life. I was struggling against eternal death. I kept feeling like something was drastically wrong because it was. Anytime anything blocks me from having an intimate relationship with God, everything is drastically wrong.

As all good little guest speakers do, he had some thoughts on what things might stop people from having an intimate relationship with God. Of course, his list wouldn’t include mental illness and the need for therapy and medication, but I figured that was a given for me. Once I’d addressed those things I needed to get down to the real issues. He said that fear, condemnation, apathy, sin, and ignorance kept people from having an intimate relationship with God. Listening to his list I had to agree with him, but I also listened in awe. As he went through his list of five things I found myself doing a mental checklist of my own and coming to an astounding conclusion:

• Fear - I am no longer afraid.

That stopped me cold. I used to be afraid of just about everything and have many blog posts to back that up. And my list of fears was real. I actually wrote them all down to catalog them and the list was extensive. It contained valid fears as well as a whole bunch of really irrational ones. I got a friend to pray about my fears last  year around the time of the Hawaii Writers Conference and I was amazed at the fears I was able to overcome even back then. This entire last year has been about confronting the dragon Fear and realizing that fear can only control me if I let it. I’m not completely “fearless.” I still have realistic fears that I think are healthy and there’s still the whole issue of critters to contend with, but I would no longer describe myself as a fearful person controlled by fear.

I no longer fear God and what he’s going to allow to happen to me. I no longer fear his will for my life, because I know him better now, even if I’m not as close to him as I’d like to be. I don’t even fear my Bipolar Disorder or suicidal episodes anymore. I can’t explain it. I’m just happy that the fear is gone. Fear, the not so magic dragon, is NOT what is keeping me from having an intimate relationship with God. It did for years, but not any more.

And sitting there in church today realizing that I am finally not afraid was a moment that I wanted to capture in a post so that it won’t be lost. I haven’t been able to find the words to talk about what has been blocking me from having an intimate relationship with God… but I can talk about what used to block that relationship but isn’t blocking it anymore. Fear was a biggy for me, now it’s not. Condemnation? That was a dragon that was always in a close second to fear. That would also be the speaker’s next point and my next post, but until then… I’d like to leave you with two images. One is a picture that an artist friend did for me. She illustrated my piece about dragons. She saw me, with sword in hand, standing up to my dragons, unafraid. I have always like that illustration because it made me look more fearless (and thinner) than I’ve ever been:

 

 

And the other… a childhood memory to reflect just what the “dread dragon fear” looks like to me now:

 

HR PufnStuff - Harmless dragon from Saturday morning cartoons...

 

 

Mind Games

Night before last I had a really twisty nightmare. The kind that holds on to a part of your mind even after you wake up.

At first, I couldn’t remember it when I woke up. I just had that vague feeling of having been emotionally stepped on. Back in my early days of blogging I used to say that it felt like a giant lady with steel tipped sh-t kickers had been stomping on me all night. That was before I started to feel like I should clean up the language in my blog (hence the “-”). When will it finally sink in that I need to just clean up my language period?? Some Christian publishers won’t even touch literary works that contain curse words for fear of offending some of their readership. And while I can see the point of that… I’d be a big old flamin’ hypocrite if I said that I didn’t curse every now and then or that the occasional curse word didn’t make its way into my writing. Steel tipped “butt kickers” just doesn’t seem to carry the full weight of what I felt yesterday.

Ok. End of tangent almost in sight.Way back in one of my earliest posts, I did say that I have a tendency to “digress and wander,” but that the very nature of an adventure lies in the fact that it is not linear. Today is one of those non-linear kind of mornings. The more I babble the better I feel.

Anyway —

The giant lady came to visit night before last and I woke up a mass of emotional bruises. And all because I had a dream (and not the cool MLK kind). Somewhere between a true nightmare and a really bad dream… I had this dream and it still disturbs me, a day later. One dream can have that much power. Of course, I’m just happy that I don’t have chronic nightmares anymore. I don’t wake up every morning feeling so fragile that a long stare would break me. I wasn’t afraid to go to work yesterday for fear that the phantasms in my dream would follow me there and wreak havoc with my day. The dream was evil. There’s no mistaking that. But the first thing I had to remind myself when I remembered it was that it wasn’t real.

So much of the life of the mentally ill is lived in their heads. So much of my life as one with a mental illness has been lived in my head. I’ve had angry conversations with people in my mind that never see the light of day. I experienced countless tragedies as I grappled with “what if” and “if only.” Worry, fear, resentment, bitterness… depression, mania, outright insanity… they all exist solely in the mind. Lives can be lived and lost in dreams and in our thoughts. And all too often, my thoughts and dreams that should have stayed in my mind would ooze out during the day and affect my real time actions.

Yesterday was not such a day. I have stopped playing the mind games. It was not real. It seemed real. It even had some basis in reality because there were people in it who I know. But they were doing and saying things that they would never do. This makes me think of when my friend and I went to Disney World. We went to their off site gaming park to play in their arcade. Something like five floors of video and arcade games including some virtual reality. You put on the headset and they give you a controller of some sort and then you are transported in your mind to a world that doesn’t exist… but seems incredibly real. They put us on one of the Pirates of the Caribbean ships and I swear that I felt like I was actually there battling ghosts ships that were coming at me. I felt like I could touch them. It was amazing how real it seemed.  It was great fun… we stood in line to do it several times.  But it wasn’t real.

Being able to distinguish between fact and fake is important for everybody, but even more so for those suffer from mental illnesses because the fake thoughts, if left unchecked, can kill you. My thoughts yesterday? I still have to shake them. I know that when I see those folks from my dream in real life it’s going to take some effort on my part to remember that nothing happened. They didn’t abuse me. They didn’t touch me. In fact, they never even saw me. So I can’t go acting all weird around them. Yesterday, I couldn’t write about this because to dwell on it would have messed me up and I would have been a bit frayed around the edges by the time I got to work. This morning? I needed to air these thoughts and get them out of my head. I feel like the giant lady might have made another visit last night… but I don’t remember the details. When that used to happen in the past, I’d be in the middle of class teaching a lesson when the memory of the dream would come rushing back to me, shocking me and stopping me in my tracks.

Whatever I dreamed last night wasn’t real and it cannot hurt me. Whether I remember it today or next week. It’s not real. And even  if it was real, I have no doubt that God would help me deal with it. I’m running from a lot fewer conflicts these days because he’s giving me the strength to deal with them. I have my thoughts on what might be behind the dream last night and the night before, but that’s better saved for another posts. For now, it’s enough for me to remember that I don’t have to play the game. I don’t have to give into fears of things that never were. I can edit this post, press “publish,” and then get on with the rest of my day. I’m going to be late for work… because I rambled so much in this blog… but that a small drama. The dream isn’t going to hijack my day. Game over.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, Part II?

The more I seek change in my life the more change I am actually seeing. Of course, what amounts to change to me might not register on the Richter Scale of public opinion… but it matters to me. In chapter three of my manuscript I go on at great length about how fear is a controlling force in my life. I portrayed Fear as a dragon that continually chased me no matter where I went. Honestly? I think fear stunts your growth (emotional, mental, relational, professional… not physical). I was raised in fear. I packed it off to college with me.  When I got on the airplane to move to Maui, Fear was out on the wing of the plane like that creature from that Twilight Zone episode that made Will Shatner go crazy.

Last year I sent a list of all of my fears that I could think of to a friend. She fasted and prayed for me because I got an idea out of reading the Bible. This kid was being plagued by a demon and the dad asked how come the disciples couldn’t roust it. Jesus said that it was the kind that could only come out by prayer and fasting. Not that I think everything that goes “bump in the night” or drools out from under the bed is a demon (no, cane spiders and centipedes are not demons) but I do believe in the demonic and I do believe that fear has its roots in it. My friend faithfully prayed through my list and for a while I was seeing some real growth and then nothing. No forward movement, but no backward retreat either. And then my fears just started looming all over again and I wondered what I was doing wrong.

Running from fears is sometimes necessary, but not ideal. Mark Twain has a great quote about fear. Look it up some time. Mastery of fear — it’s a maturity thing.

So as I sat with my centipede in a bucket I felt like I was on the cusp between maturity and immaturity. Knowing that I had to deal with it, but too afraid to actually do anything. Focusing on the good things… the things God has done is a good way to face fears. It gives you enough happy juice to make you think that you can stand up in the face of anything. I did not have enough happy juice to move the bucket… so I decided to go to sleep and deal with it later. Of course, I hadn’t counted on seeing a big fat cane spider splayed out on the wall while I was putting on my blue and white teddy bear pajamas. I was singing and all happy until my eyes noticed the telltale movement on my dark blue wall.

Fear coursed through my entire body jostling a few teddy bears on the way down. No RAID! and no broom — both were in the kitchen. I’d have to get past the spider in order to get them. If I hit it with one of the fly swatters that I have hanging in every room and missed it might advance on me. But as the only breathing adult in my studio, it was left to me to kill it… and thirty minutes later I did. The battle was not Moby Dick epic, but again… important to me. Oddly enough, it looked different once I killed it. A different color than when I’d first seen it. Even more odd, I noticed a total absence of fear once it was dead. Last year this time I had a spider in my old room. I was gave in to hysterics. I morphed into Bipolar Girl right before my housemates’ eyes.  They could not find it so they couldn’t kill it,  so it was in my room with me when they shut the door. I would not turn out the lights and I could not go to sleep. I kept imagining it crawling into my nose or my mouth. The resulting meltdown was not pretty.

Last night, I was able to take care of it. Then I scooped it up and sent it on a one-way sea voyage and then went to sleep. When I woke up I was surprised to see another dead spider in the exact same place where I’d seen the first one. There HAD been two spiders! Good thing I didn’t know that last night. Just last week the presence of multiple spiders had me so scared I nearly wet my pants. Last night I was able to convince myself that I hadn’t seen two spiders and that I’d killed it. It might just seem like I’m rambling on about something silly… but my arachnophobia is legendary and these spiders can be huge. Fully matured and splayed out on the wall they can have a leg span as big as my hand and though they lack bulk, they aren’t spindly little things either. They are creepy and have scared the everloving Gobstoppers out of me ever since I returned to Maui in 2005. I even used to  be afraid to deal with the corpse –which shrivels up into itself once you kill it or the legs pop off like they’re on springs. That I could deal with them last night without having a total meltdown or with only minimal shaking is a HUGE honkin’ deal as far as I’m concerned. I’m changing. I’m mastering my fear.

Of course, I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the  centipede. I head out to church in 45 minutes. Maybe I’ll talk to my old housemate’s daughter and see what she’s doing after the service .

Pajamas and Tennis, Part II

I’ll start off by saying that the centipede is still under the bucket in my kitchen. I’m waiting until it’s well and truly “corpsified” before I even think about lifting that bucket. And when the bucket gets lifted, ten chances to one it won’t be by me. The most likely contender is my old housemate’s 13 year old daughter. She has always come to my rescue to kill spiders and their ilk. Now I just need help with corps removal. I figure I’ll give it a day or two unless the ants start to swarm over the centipede buffet.

Oddly enough, I was in really good spirits when I drove to work yesterday. The centipede did not mess up my groove. I ignored the idiot light in my car and just prayed that my car wouldn’t stall on the way to work. I was pleased to see that more of my “Bloom where you are” flowers were out. Not many, but I could see them tucked away in the foliage. I even continued to ponder how I was going to write the last post in the “8 Points to Marriageability” series that I’ve started but have yet to finish. And it didn’t even bother me that my paycheck had not yet been electronically deposited into my bank account. Comfort comes in weird shapes and sizes… and in this case, with a bunch of legs. God really does have a warped sense of humour.

It was in the middle of my first period that the Admin. Secretary came into my class and handed me my paycheck. Evidently, there was some internal problem and we had to get “live” checks. Mine was a live one alright! I opened it up and had to promptly sit down. I’m so mathematically challenged I had no idea how much money I was going to get on that check. I saw myself scraping by for the month of August worrying every day about how I was going to provide for myself. The day before I’d already gone to my friend to get an advance on my upcoming house sitting gig. An advance is so much easier for me to stomach than a loan. It turned out to be a much needed advance since my paycheck didn’t get deposited overnight like it should have. These past few weeks I kept trying to figure out how I was going to make things happen. I was stressing myself out for no good reason. When will I learn??

I looked at the check with wide eyes — my gross was nearly double what I thought it would be so that meant my take home was enough to put a large goofy smile on my face that you couldn’t have scraped off. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. All that worrying and all the while God was using the job that he’d already given me to meet my current needs. Abundantly so. I’m looking at the check right now… and there’s that stupid grin again. Do I care that there’s a bucket behind me with a really large dead centipede under it?? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep turning around to make sure it hadn’t moved… but the irony is not lost on me. God used a fear to take my mind off of a worry. Then he answered my prayers about the worry to take my mind off the fear.

Yes, I still have to wait to find out about the job but for now I’m comforted by the fact that I have a job that I like. I’m doing really well and people are noticing. I have the finances to take care of the most pressing stuff this month and I’m socking away half of next month’s rent just because I can. It also crossed my mind this morning that I didn’t scream when I saw the centipede yesterday. Not once. That would have been my normal MO. I also didn’t turn and run from the room. I didn’t do any number of the immature things that I’ve been known to do. Oh, and PRAISE GOD, I didn’t start crying. I hate when insects reduce me to tears. I feel that I was very mature in my handling of the situation. That it’s still under the bucket with the hammer on top is not a sign of immaturity. It’s a sign of fear. I’m still afraid of it. What if it’s not dead?? What if all the insecticide caused it to mutate and it’s triple the size?? Am I joking? You decided.

I think admitting my fears while trying to overcome them also another sign of maturity. It’s enough for me that I was able to deal with the centipede without falling apart. I kinda fell apart after killing the last one. So I see growth. Go figure. Only two posts and I’m already more mature than when I started this series.