Can we all be human this Christmas?

Christmas is hard.

I absolutely adore the time off work, getting together with friends and family, the music, the food, the general festivities, and even the gifts, but none of those change the fact that I am human. None of my problems magically disappear when December 1^st rolls around and we enter this season of hope, peace, love, joy, and giving. Yet, I feel pressured to hide away all the stress, anxiety, depression, and angst that seem to run even more rampant than usual during this month, and paste on an over-the-top happy façade that says: “my life is perfect, and I’m having you over right now over eggnog and cookies at my perfectly decorated house full of love just to prove that to you—you should feel happy for me, or shitty about yourself so that I feel superior to you in some way because that validates my twisted psychological needs…”

No. Just, no.

I don’t often like getting preachy, because I feel like everything I say gets intensely scrutinized, or that I’m believing something “wrong” or misinterpreting something else, or that people just stop listening as soon as I drop the J-bomb thinking I’m some sort of weird, fundamentalist religious wacko without the balls to admit that I have my own human problems and doubts. But, I do believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human. He came to earth not to trumpet himself above us, but to be holy, yet approachable—to show the love and care of the father as a human in the flesh. Yes, there is the atonement for sins part as well, but when we herald that above the gentle, meek, humble, ready-to-get-his-hands-dirty human that Jesus was, we make him seem more distant from ourselves as humans, and less accessible.

If our lives were as perfect as we like to make them seem at this time of year, what need would we have for Jesus? If I had no mental health issues, a perfect family, and an infinite amount of money, and if I somehow magically felt adequate amounts of joy, peace, and love all the time, I guarantee that I never would have ever had any questions about Jesus, and sought answers. Christmas as a Hallmark, consumerist holiday has absolutely poisoned us. “Here, buy all of these material things on credit that you can’t afford so that you’ll be stuff rich and cash poor, but at least able to show your neighbours that you don’t have money to pay for stuff, so your life must be better than theirs, even though you’re both living paycheque to paycheque.”

No.

How about: “I’m human. I’m broken. I struggle with x, y, and z. I NEED a God who loves me enough to come down to my level and sit with me, cry with me, hurt with me, laugh with me, walk with me, and stay with me.”

Instead of trying to hide our brokenness under mountains of red and green, silver and gold, delicious food, and gifts, how about we get into community with one another as humans, be vulnerable about that brokenness with one another, lift up one voice to God, and celebrate that he cares and knows our struggles because he gave us his son to come live among us humbly, in full humanness.

Just a thought.

Sometimes I have bad days

Sometimes, I still have bad days. Days where my brain reminds me that it’s still sick, despite all the positive self-talk, getting off the drugs, and being discharged from specialists and therapists. What I heard from all of those people, myself included at the time, was only the same message that any mental patient dreams of hearing in their heart of hearts: “it’s gone, you don’t need this label anymore, you’re good.” A more accurate translation of those words and occurrences would be something like: “now we’ve reached a point where you’re relatively stable, and you’ve demonstrated the ability to not control, but manage the symptoms.” I still have bad days, where sometimes I feel like the best way to manage the nausea, lightheadedness, panic, and general depression is to just stop everything and stay out of the way, and try to think about what’s really going on.

And I feel like people judge me for it, but not as harshly as I judge myself. “No one else cries and hits themselves while they drive. No one else has to worry about having to make the last minute call over whether or not they’ll be okay to go to work, and worry about rescheduling clients if the day seems too big of a stretch. No one else talks about this as openly as you do. No one else worries about whether or not people are too concerned about them. You must only do this because you’re selfish and want attention. No one else wants to see you like this or try to figure it out, so just go be alone, don’t get anyone else involved.” It’s hard to sift out the lies from the not-lies.

If your mind is like a sieve, the lies are sand. They’re very, very present, but only for a brief moment. The truths are like rocks, they’re not going anywhere, but sometimes when a fresh load of sand joins the party, they’re harder to find. Sometimes the panning turns the rocks over, exposing a new side of the truth, which can be scary at first, but it gets thrown into the roster with all the other truths once its threat is debunked. Then, sometimes there are clumps of dirt that are hard to distinguish from rocks; the lies that look and sound so much like truth that you have to poke and chip away at them over and over again, from all sides before their fallibility becomes apparent.

It’s okay if there’s more than rocks in your sieve. There’s never going to be only rocks. Sometimes there are more dirt clumps than rocks, and the rocks are hard to identify, so you poke everything to see what stands and what disintegrates. God’s a rock, and I’ve spent some time poking at him recently, but he’s still in the sieve. I’m poking everything. I’m sorry if that makes me selfish, or doubtful, or stupid, or neurotic, or anything else I shouldn’t desire to be. God always has been here and will always continue to be here, but he isn’t a bandaid that I only break out when the bleeding gets bad. I absolutely don’t believe that he’s just a magical man in the sky, waiting for me to pray some magic words at the right moment before he feels like he can cure me of this disease. He gave me a brain, and although it sometimes doesn’t work the way it should, I think it’s really trying to believe that his purpose is greater than this affliction. It gets hard to believe on days like this, but these days also really make me realize that I have zero grounds to put any hope, investment, or downpayment on myself as a human individual—I am nothing, other humans are nothing, so my hope has to be in the Lord.

So, sometimes I have bad days, but God is sovereign every day. That’s cool.

Church: Are we living as the body of Christ?

This, I’m writing based on my own personal experience.  I’m sure religious scholars could have plenty to say on these topics, under “laboratory” or “ideal” conditions, of course.  There is certainly a time and place for those empirical observations from historical visions, but the battle is here, in the real world, right now, and things haven’t gone perfectly according to plan, as is incredibly evident.  It is my opinion that the North American church would not be struggling to retain the ground it still holds after several decades of dwindling membership, had things gone according to plan (that is to assume that the plan includes the growth of the local church).

So, a bit of background, for context’s sake: my family went to an Anglican church for the first 11 years of my life, and I was baptized there at the age of 2 months (or something like that).  After some political situation in the Anglican church at that time, we uprooted and attended a Presbyterian church for 7 years until we moved out of town.  During this time, as I became more independent and autonomous, I began questioning different aspects of faith, and didn’t think church was relevant—it was ritualistic, and I didn’t understand the appeal or importance of that religiosity.  I think I still believed in God, or some form of higher power, I just didn’t understand why that entity would need to be pleased, and why on earth it would find a bunch of old people who would be dead within the decade chanting half-hearted liturgies pleasing… Was this the way that these older people had done it for all their lives, and were we young people supposed to jump on this slow-moving bandwagon heading out into the middle of nowhere just for the sake of carrying on the religion? No thank you, said teenage Helen.  While I was in university, my parents moved and began attending another Presbyterian church that housed a considerably older and more religious congregation.  That drew me even farther away from the church, but I was in university and had more important things to do, like partying…

After a series of events, I found myself seeking Christian community on campus in 3^rd year, and became connected with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), where I met Jesus, dove into the Word and learned more about the Kingdom of God than I had every Sunday for 20 years.  It puzzled me so much: how could I have attended church for nearly my entire life, and known so little about God and his kingdom, and never committed myself to Christ?  How had I gone from “church is stupid” to “I’m answering God’s call to mission in Bangladesh” to preaching sermons in church in less than a year? HOW?!

The answers still elude me.  My parents recently moved again, to another town, and this past Sunday (actually, like 6 weeks ago or something, I've been picking away at this piece for a while) the church that they have attended for the last 4 years requested all of our family members be present so they could give us a final farewell (the cutest!).  This summer the church has been going through the “Top 40 Hymns” as named by viewers of the BBC program, Songs of Praise, and each Sunday they sing 4 or 5 of them and one of them is chosen as the theme for the sermon.  I thought it was a pretty lame way to try and incorporate some pop-culture into the aging congregation, but actually, since many of the hymns are based on scripture, it has been fairly refreshing and back-to-basics, which I feel like all churches need, but particularly the high church.  Anyway, this Sunday the hymn that was preached on was “Just as I am”.  This hymn describes God’s willingness and delight to accept us as we are through all our doubts and imperfections—great message, no arguments there.  This hymn was described as the greatest altar-call hymn of all time.  The minister had to ask with a show of hands how many people in the congregation knew what an altar-call was: 3.  Three people knew, so the minister explained the nature of the altar-call: at the end of a worship service, people are invited to come forward and commit or recommit their lives to Christ and to receive prayer.  The minister was very clear in the sermon: “we don’t do altar-calls in the Presbyterian church”, which I understood, as "altar-calls are kind of a more charismatic/fundamentalist thing, and the high church is not exactly charismatic, or fundamentalist".   Then the minister went on to describe Canadian Presbyterian youth conference he had chaperoned in the 1990s, where the organizers had made an agreement with the guest speaker that he wouldn’t do any altar-calls because it would scare the children. I had problems with that:

1)      If something scares you, usually some of that element of fear stems from a lack of familiarity, and such fear promotes avoidance and a lack of understanding.  If we are going to live as the kingdom of God, we need to recognize that we have different traditions as Christians between denominations, and embrace and celebrate, or at least get to know these different traditions, recognizing them as of the same faith.  What better time to make this introduction than at a young age, when people are clean slates, not yet too jaded by sour experiences.

2)      FOLLOWING JESUS IS SCARY. Let’s just call that like it is.

3)      The questions of commitment: How, if at all, were these young people encouraged to commit their lives to Christ, and what do Presbyterians, and other traditions for that matter, believe to be the protocol for committing oneself to Christ?  Even deeper, if people are not committing themselves to Christ, how can there be any hope for raising up future generations of Christians, or creating new believers—how has this church been sustaining itself under these principles?  Does anyone believe that this method of non-committance is sustainable for the faith of individuals or the church as a whole? If so, why/how?  If not, are there any proposed changes, and what can we do about it?

The last question lingered in my head for an uncomfortably long time.  Earlier that week I had been sitting in my parents’ house, reading the Presbyterian Record that had been left on the coffee table.  It was littered with articles, editorials, letters, and reflections outlining the recently-passed general assembly, and how many parties left disgruntled that those at the conference were unable to discern whether or not Presbyterianism is still a relevant denomination in Canada, and how the conference-goers seemed to be more interested in talking amongst themselves to discern this, rather than praying and listening for the Lord.

The way I understand it (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that’s happened before, I won’t explode): In Catholic and Anglican (and Lutheran?) churches, your parents have you baptized as an infant through the sprinkling of water (although being baptized later in life is possible in lower traditions), you learn about the faith for a few years, and when you’re about 13 you have a confirmation ceremony, where you affirm your belief in God and the resurrection, publicly professing your faith.  I don’t believe confirmation is mandated for all people of that age bracket, but if you have peers in your church or go to Catholic school or are not yet autonomous from your family at that age, I can see how confirmation can become a pressure test rather than an act of genuine faith.

The Low Church (keep in mind, this is an enormous generalization, mainly based upon my own recollections and observations) largely abstains from baptizing individuals until they are cognizant enough to make a commitment to Christ (i.e. adult baptism, many by immersion as opposed to the sprinkling on the forehead used by much of the high church).   I understand the rationale behind this to be manifold: an individual is owning this big, life-changing decision rather than having their parents or guardians make it for them; the principles for adult immersion baptisms are derived rather directly from the Bible, whereas the argument for infant baptisms appears to be much more indirect, implied, or embedded in one’s own conviction; baptism is a public declaration of an individual choosing to follow Jesus, and due to the public nature of this declaration, accountability and support for the baptizee are facilitated.

Then, there’s the grey area of the Presbyterian and Reformed churches (among other denominations); they do infant baptisms with sprinkling, or adult baptisms by immersion, as well as professions of faith: the professing individual shares a snippet of their testimony and, for lack of a better term, professes their faith in front of the congregation. I’ve seen this happen primarily in the late teen years, but I have no reason to believe that it can’t happen at other times in one’s life or faith journey.

There seems to be this multi-standard thing going on of ways you come to belong to a church.  Divisions exist between whom is committing the individual to Christ and striving to provide a nurturing, Christ-centred environment (the parents or the individual) as well as how that commitment takes place, and at what age.

Commitment: can we talk about that for a sec? I’ve heard the language before of “daily surrendering” of certain aspects of one’s life: habits, vices, wellbeing, thought patterns, etc. to God. I’d argue that we need daily recommitment of ourselves to Christ, and daily reminders of why we began to follow Jesus so that we may fall in love all over again and continue to desire that pull deeper into pursuit of Shalom in his kingdom—“rebirth”, as it were. I do have an extremely short attention span, but I’d wager that a one-time commitment as a teenager isn’t grounds for a sustainable, active faith in Christ for people like me, as well as those with much larger attention spans. What does the church believe about this? It seems to be a different answer according to a number of different factors, including: denomination, governing body (assembly, convention, diocese, etc.), church leadership, and individual members. I feel like all would agree, however, on some level, that there has to be action accompanying the commitment to Christ—it isn’t just, “yay, commitment, home free, I’ve bought my salvation and now there’s nothing else on the earth left for me to do, see you in the next life, God”… Of course, some churches are better at mentoring, nurturing, inspiring, and motivating that action than others, but I think it’s something that all churches and individuals can and should strive to improve. (Here I am on my soap box, pointing out the speck in my neighbour’s eye…)

Another thing that we as the church need to be mindful of are the associations and judgments we make upon individuals attached to a particular group, denominational or otherwise. I mean, when I go to a Presbyterian church with my parents and people find out that I go to a nondenominational church where we sing praise songs with a worship band and our pastor has full sleeve tattoos, they seem disappointed (ick face!), and make me feel like I’ve picked the wrong church because it’s different than what their ideal church would be. “Oh, you go to one of those churches” is a phrase I hear all too often—what does that even mean?! By the same token, when people ask me about how I came to faith, or about what my church background is, I don’t like mentioning the Anglican church, just because I’ve seen my peers raise some red flags (and have raised some myself) about the theology of some Anglicans. Then as soon as I mention the word “Presbyterian” the eyebrows start going up because it sounds more like a nationality or new-age sexual orientation or classification than a religious sect. And then the “how did you end up here?”s start making their way out, so I mention that I met Jesus as a university fellowship student after 18 years of weekly church and 2 of running away from church, and that I’d never even heard that term, “meeting Jesus”, until university. My story confuses people; it’s not the black and white “I-was-born-and-bred-in-the-church-and-everything-was-perfect-so-I’ve-always-been-here-and-never-left”, or “I’d-never-been-to-church-and-was-a-total-sinner-but-one-day-I-met-some-Christian-friends-and-they-introduced-me-to-Jesus-and-he-helped-me-turn-my-life-around”, although those are both wonderful stories. It’s grey, and confusing, and I don’t even know what happened, or why, or where I belong—but I have been given this incredibly unique perspective that allows me to see so many nooks and crannies of the modern church; ways that it works, and ways that it doesn’t work; things it does well, and things it does not do well; areas where it is serving its members or clientele, and areas where it is serving the Lord. This gift of perspective is something that I believe God has used, and wishes to continue to use for the edification of the body of Christ that is the church. This is not to say that he has not gifted others in this way and that he will use them for the same purpose and other purposes, nor that my sole purpose in life, or the only way he has gifted me and will use me is buried within this idea.

The perfect church absolutely does not exist.  Many people when searching for a church home are looking for a community that supports and feeds their spiritual growth and wellbeing.  There’s nothing wrong with this, as ultimately, we all are seeking righteousness (righteousness = right-relatedness) and closeness with God, and it that relationship seems much more easily cultivated in a place where we feel his presence, whatever that looks like.  However, we must not forget that worship is not about us. Community is not about us. Church is not about us. All of the above are ways through which we love God and seek righteousness with him, and not with ourselves. Worship is speaking the truth about who God is.  Community is extending love to God’s children as he has loved each of us. Church is practicing being the body of Christ by combining these two things. Church is about the LORD. When people make these offhanded comments and funny faces as we talk about my upbringing or present whereabouts concerning church (“one of those churches” or the “ick!” face), I believe it comes from a place of wondering either “how does what they are doing in that place fit into my construction of ‘church’?” or “how can you meet the Lord in that place?!” The first question has already been nullified: the perfect or ideal church does not exist because it is not about us or what we want, but about the worship and kingdom of God. The second question is also void: how can one meet the Lord in any place? It isn’t up to the physical body of a particular church to provide satisfying interaction with the Lord to individuals because the church isn’t in place to serve us.  The church is the body of Christ, and we are there to worship and serve God; the church as an institution does not exist for our satisfaction, enjoyment, or validation.

All of this being said, there are points at which it is more than reasonable for individuals to make the decision to leave a church, especially when its actions or behaviours are not in line with the teachings of Christ. There are certain aspects of some churches my family or I have attended that I’ve absolutely loathed, but those churches are certainly not without their merits.  They were indeed places where I felt loved, at home, and learned the foundations of the faith. Likewise, any church or community I can choose to be a part of now or in the future is not and will not be without its downsides.

“As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for GOD HAS WELCOMED HIM. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” –Romans 14:1-4 ESV, emphasis mine

Paul was actually talking about food here, but the theme of not judging or condemning other Christians for their practices of worship or prayer is a common theme throughout the gospels and the epistles of the early church.  The early church members were much like us, in that they didn’t always take this message to heart. I was reading Jeremiah 31 the other day, and it was like déjà vu as an entire year of studying and leading scripture through the gospel of John flashed before my eyes as Jeremiah is prophesying that Israel shall be rebuilt (indeed it was—but not like they were expecting) and that they would plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria (maybe literally, but definitely metaphorically when you look at John 15)… Yes, God is for us as individuals, but he has not raised us one above the other; there is no “us and them”—just us. Jesus flattened the hills and raised the valleys so that there wouldn’t be an “us and them”, and that is something that we should make our worship about because it is absolutely revolutionary—it can’t always be about “Jesus you are so great because you saved me and died for my sins so that I may have eternal life with you and it’s so amazing that you would do this for me because I am so unworthy…” Don’t get me wrong—the fact that Jesus paid the ultimate price as atonement for our sins is absolutely greater than any verbal description that any human can assign to it. It is the gospel (good news) of atonement and foundational to the Christian faith.  We cannot, however, be Pharisees and use that atonement as an excuse to be elitist and create another “us, the saved” and “them, the unsaved” construction as a framework for how we associate with others. That is exactly what Jesus instructed the Jews NOT to do during his time of ministry! Yes, Jesus died, but he also lived, and we cannot continue to regularly polish his death up on a pedestal while his life and teachings sit on the floor, collecting dust. Ev’ry valley shall be exalted, and the rough places plain. (#HandelsMessiah #musicnerdmoment)

Churches are run by fallen, fragile, fallible humans, and by that virtue alone will never measure up to the perfection of Christ, the head of the church. We can strive though, and reach, and come closer all the time (but never touch—Jesus is like an asymptote that way). We are never going to be like Jesus in the way that we will never have to die as atonement for the sins of others (i.e., we are not the literal sons and daughters of God, as Jesus was), but we can put forth our utmost to love and serve one another in the name of Jesus.

If I was to hypothetically boil down all of the last 3000 words of convoluted statements into one final paragraph: What we get from church isn’t nearly as important as what we do there and outside, so we shouldn’t go shopping for a church with a checklist of objectives of things we are expecting to gain for ourselves in a particular community, without a larger checklist of ways we can love and serve the Lord and his people in that place. Worship is telling the truth about who God is, and is not for our benefit, so to speak. Commitment to Christ should be viewed as a commitment to living as he lived, and such a commitment should be lovingly encouraged among churchgoers. All churches have their strengths and weaknesses, and none is perfect, but with good, Christ-centred leadership and community, all should strive to become a bride worthy and reflective of Jesus. Instead of continuing to divide ourselves as the body of Christ through our own personal ideas and preferences of what church should be, while judging and condemning other groups for holding different views, we ought to put the petty differences aside, get back to basics, and allow our King to reign, with his gospel.

When there is nothing left...

When there is nothing left, God is left.  Truth.  In just a few days I get to cross the stage to receive my undergraduate degree.  Four years ago, this seemed absolutely unquestionable; I was smart, and my brains had gotten me good grades all throughout elementary and high school, why should university be any different?  I had bold plans to keep my average in at least the 90^th percentile to be assured a spot in physical therapy school upon graduation from an Honours degree in kinesiology.  That’s how things started…

I’ve talked about my struggles with anxiety exhaustively.  The gist is that it broke me down after I had all my ducks in a row and had myself set up for success.  No amount of “sometimes the best-laid plans never come to fruition” could ever console me, because I had lost everything that had ever made me successful, and made myself believe that I had value.  This illness had ripped me apart from the inside out, and it was totally invisible from the outside, so I was expected to just conceal it and carry on like normal.  That was all I wanted to do, actually, but it just wasn’t possible.  

By now, I feel like I’ve been given the label of “that girl who had anxiety and then found Jesus”… well, yes.  I’ve told that story a bunch of times, and it’s probably a good story, but that’s all it is.  It is but one story of a way that Jesus has touched me, because I have allowed God to say something different than the rest of the world, and speak truth into my life.  I’d wager that everybody has at least a story or two about overcoming adversity, and whenever I sit through a graduation ceremony, or walk through a cemetery, (well those were two very different examples), or a nursing home, I can’t help but wonder about the stories that each individual has to share: what brought them to this point?  What struggles did they overcome in life?  What is their family’s story?  I just really love stories: reading them, telling them, living them, and walking through them.  This story of me meeting Jesus while covered in the ashes of my dreams and having him show me that he wanted something way better for me?  That’s not the last thing he’s going to do.  It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to believe in a God who gets you through the tough times and just makes them okay, without any hope of pure joy and ecstasy in a future and a forever with him.  So Jesus got me through my undergrad—that’s just the beginning!  I’m not done with him, and he’s not done with me, and to know that as truth in my heart is a source of joy, every day.  I know there’s more, and it’s going to be so unbelievably beautiful, like a really good story.  That doesn’t mean that I’ll love absolutely every moment of it.  I know there will be heartache, tears, grieving, illness, and loss, just as there has been in the past, but when you’re on that road with God and not by yourself, he becomes the source that you draw from during those times, and …those who trust in the LORD will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. - Isaiah 40:31, NLT

I’m so excited to take time on Tuesday to celebrate everything God has done in the last four years of my life, particularly the last two as I’ve come to acknowledge and know him more.  When I stand for O Canada at that convocation ceremony, and hear my dad belting it out (probably in French, just to make fun) in his operatic baritone that cuts through everything, where I would’ve hung my head in shame a few years ago, I’ll smile (and probably also shed a tear or five), because I know no one was expecting me to make it there, and our Lord, in his abundant grace and mercy, gave me the strength to carry on, keep going, and finish this degree. Something about my dad’s voice always gets me, but beside that point, it’ll be like him saying “you did it!”, at the same time as God is going to smile and say “we did it!"...

Me and Dad at my high school graduation

Undergraduate convocation: celebrating reaching the summit of this mountain, but looking ahead to the other scalable peaks, and praising God for the beautiful panorama! Amen.

The plain and simple truth: I am a sinner.

It hit me the other day: I am a sinner.  I’ve been searching for specific sins for months, after having brothers and sisters call me out on less-than-desirable aspects of my character, while the answer I was looking for was painted all over me with fluorescent colours, being shone on with big flashing lights.  My motives were so wrong; I was only looking for a way to justify my actions, making everything I had ever done seem okay, rather than acknowledging my faults.  Somehow, I’d always been the exception to the rule, and all that stuff about judgment of sinners couldnt’ve been for me, because my sins were justified, and therefore not as significant as the sins of others.  I was horrendously narcissistic, selfish, entitled, and childish—but all of these things could surely be justified from something in my past, right? NO.

This one Sunday…

In the morning, before church, I asked God to give me something to reflect on in scripture and felt led to Ezekiel 16.  Every time I’ve read Ezekiel I feel like I’ve misinterpreted it somehow, or it’s been super weird and hard to understand, so as I read I expected to be pretty overwhelmed and confused—but I read anyway.  This chapter is an allegory of the life of Judah, an Israelite nation.  Judah was born to Canaanites, who as a nation, were known for their wickedness.  When she was born, she was despised; her cord was left uncut and she wasn’t washed or purified before being left in a field for dead, writhing in her own blood.  God took compassion on her in this state, and spoke over her that she should “Live!” and she grew up and became very beautiful, and God gave her the best food and the finest clothing and jewelry and entered into covenant with her.  She exploited it.  She became a prostitute, and gave the fine things that God had given to her as gifts to the men that she slept with, and sacrificed her children to idols.  Then God goes into pretty specific details about his wrath against her.  He reminds her of her sisters, Sodom and Samaria.  Sodom was fated with fiery destruction from God, due to her sinfulness; Samaria was seen as unclean, and Jews just generally stayed out of there and did not associate with Samaritans.  God tells Judah that her sins are greater than both of these sisters; she not only followed their lead before her, but also made a name for herself with her own sins, becoming more depraved than Sodom and Samaria.  The chapter ends with God telling Judah that he will deal with her as she deserves, for she broke the covenant that he formed with her in her youth.  However, he still remembers that covenant, and promises to make an everlasting covenant with her, and makes a separate promise that Sodom and Samaria will be given to her as daughters, and on the day when he makes atonement for her, she will be rendered speechless due to her humiliation.

Yeah, maybe I had been a lying, manipulative, narcissistic idiot, belittling the gifts that God had given me—but if I repented from those sins and asked for forgiveness, God was going to give me something awesome, since that atonement thing with Jesus dying on the cross for my sins already happened, a couple thousand years ago… That’s how it works, right?

But I had to be the exception, somehow.

I’d been so afraid of God, since about January when all this stuff started being pointed out to me.  I felt dirty.  When I did go to God, I wanted it to be real.  I wanted some kind of sign that whatever I was saying to him was being acknowledged, and I only ever wanted to hear good things.  When I didn’t, I got anxious and caught in a spiral of self-hate.  God hates me—that was my way to be the exception—he loves everybody, but hates me.  Every time I talked to him I felt like he wasn’t there (side note: looking back, that was probably just me putting God in a box of how I wanted him to act, and not looking for him in other ways; I wanted God to be who I wanted him to be, not necessarily who he really was), but I heard miraculous stories of how God was acting from my friends; through dreams and visions, signs and wonders, prophecy and tongues—so God must’ve not loved me enough to show me himself.  I was jealous, and wanted what other people had, like a child.

Church happened.  It was rad.

I biked through a forest in the heat of the day and sat by the river, and asked God to speak to me.  Nothing happened.  I was getting kind of hungry.  I knew I didn’t need to eat, and that I’d been engaging in a lot of gluttony recently, but—God didn’t speak to me, so he didn’t care.  I pulled an apple out of my bag (real gluttonous) and ate.  I stared out over the river, marveling at how clear the water was.  I could see the bottom (1-2 feet down) with no trouble, it wasn’t very deep and there was nothing down there; no fish, no plants, just sand and a few rocks.  About 4 bites into this apple, I was staring into space when on the other side of the river produced a huge splash!  I was startled, and my eyes darted over to the location of the percolating water.  It had been way too loud to have just been a frog jumping in from the bank.  Then a HUGE fish, about 2 feet long and 6-8 inches across, leapt out of the water at least twice its height and splashed back down.  “WHOA!” was all I could muster.  I stared at the spot where the fish had surfaced as the ripples from the splash radiated to my side of the river.  I’d lost my appetite for the apple…but I finished it anyway.  I couldn’t stop thinking about this fish.  “That’s how obvious it is” I kept hearing in my head.  My first instinct was to label my sins as that obvious.  I knew that by now.  Everyone could see right through me.  Why didn’t I just stay hidden from human beings forever, sitting here in the dirt among the bugs and squirrels and crazy psycho fish?  It was beginning to hit me how childish and dramatic I’d been over the last 2 years—maybe like this fish: jumping out of the water saying “look at me, I have a problem”, and then keeping the undivided attention of whoever would give it focused on me just because I could have it and it made me feel important, even though I didn’t need it, and was diverting it from other people and things who did.  I feel like that’s actually something I’ve recognized for quite some time, but instead of admitting to it and dealing with it, I tried to justify and explain it away, like I could do no wrong.  That didn’t make sense to me, and I traced back to my childhood to figure out where that sense of entitlement came from.  Why?  Why couldn’t I just admit that I wasn’t perfect (or at least, better than most, given certain circumstances), and stop trying to make everyone I encountered believe that I was?  Why couldn’t I just accept that the way God made me was good enough, and his love was enough, even if neither of those things looked exactly how I was wanting or expecting them to appear?  Ultimately, was my desire for God in my life greater than my desire for the things that I wanted?

the casualtrees #punny

roots

Every time that last question has come up, I’ve walked away from it—it’s a scary question.  This time was no exception.  I got up and physically walked away, carrying my bike over some roots and fallen trees until the trail warranted that I could sit in the saddle and pedal.  I stopped again at another spot by the river.  A cluster of trees had been totally uprooted, and had fallen so that the tops reached the other bank of the river.  It was incredible to see.  This enormous ( huge: 12 feet long by 6 feet high, but only 2 feet deep) network of roots, packed with soil in every crack and crevice somehow wasn’t enough to hold these trees in the ground—it just wasn’t deep enough.  Not just one tree, either, but five or six had all come down together.  I gazed towards their tops and surmised that they must have fallen recently, because lush, green leaves had been produced by every tree.  These trees had all appeared healthy from above the surface, but below they were not anchored, and as a result, couldn’t be sustained (my knowledge of basic biology dictates that as long as the roots are above ground, they won’t be able to take up water and the plant can’t photosynthesize, so it dies).  The roots on these trees were too shallow and small to hold them in the ground; there wasn’t enough integrity in their structure to support the mass above them.  Each time I’d go back into my past to try and explain away my sins, there was some truth to each of those things: those were the small roots.  Small roots might be okay for a baby tree, but once it grows up the roots will have to grow too, or it’s going to have the same fate as these trees that had fallen in the middle of the forest (I wonder if they made a sound).  Those millions of small roots never get deep enough to uncover the real problem.  What was that?  I AM A SINNER. There’s the one big root, the one that goes down deep and builds branches and networks of more roots off of it.  Without that master root, I could have been finding little miniscule explanations forever, sending down little capillaries of roots, repenting for things followed with a “but this…”, amounting to about a 10 degree turn on an egg timer that would slowly creep back to its starting position with nothing to hold it in its new place.  I could have done all that work, and still suffered the same fate as that tree.  Those trees.  So I thought about that for a bit as I waded through the river to see what was on the other side, trying to get as far away from my house as possible so I could get some good exercise biking back home.

I made it home, had a nap, made some dinner, and then sat on my bed wondering what to do next to spend time with God.  When I started taking a weekly Sabbath on Sundays after MarkCentral, one of the rules I set for myself there was a technology fast: no computer, phone, or tv.  I recalled a book I had finished reading a few weeks ago, which suggested that when you didn’t know what to do, but wanted to be in the presence of God, it never hurt to say the “Jesus Prayer”: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner”.  I’m normally not one to gravitate towards pre-written prayers or liturgy, but I just felt like something was prompting me, and I should in this instance, especially given all the stuff around my own sin that I had been sitting in.  I prayed the words slowly, like I was trying to make sure I really meant every word.  I sat in silence for a moment afterwards, and really felt like God was saying “thank you, you are here”… “you are here”... What?  Like the little star on the map at the mall that tells you you’re next to Sears even though it’s been closed for several months?  So, for months, as I’ve been praying I’ve felt God saying “come to me”, but had no idea what that meant.  Wasn’t I coming to God by praying? What more did I have to do?  The answer was so simple: come as you are.  Who was I? A sinner.  I remember one of my friends telling me that “people are simple” 4 years ago when I was down and depressed in the grade 12 blues, and I fought that so hard… I was too good to be simple, like everybody else… Except that I’m not.  I AM simple like everybody else.  I AM a child of God.  I AM made in his image.  I AM beautiful.  I AM loved.  I AM a sinner.  I am all of those things, not just some of them depending on the day, or how I’m feeling, or the circumstance, or any other excuse I could possibly make.  I am all of those things, all the time.  That is the truth.

And that is what God loves.  Plain and simple.

Rivers and Overpasses

I’m an extrovert.  I hate being by myself, and over the last 2 weeks, living all alone for the first time has underlined that for me in many instances.  At the same time though, it’s been the best thing for me.  I’m absolutely free from any distractions, and have been spending a ton of time working on my relationship with God—something that I wrongly put in lower priority than my academics for quite a while.  Today I went for a walk with my journal and ended up by a river under an overpass close to my house.  I sat there for about an hour, praying and writing, and as the words came to me (loooong after the feelings #Fproblems), I started thinking (again, in a delayed reaction to feeling)—I’m sure this isn’t just for me.  I know I’m not the only person who speeds over overpasses, or spends hours in front of the computer on beautiful sunny days, or puts God in a box when I want him to do the work he’s going to do in me on my agenda and on my time, thinking that it’s somehow better than his.

So, this happened under the overpass:

God, I love you.  Thank you for being here with me.  I feel you in the warmth of the sunshine and hear you in the rushing water.  It seems to be moving so slowly where it pools, but as soon as it hits the rocks and thins out, it rushes.  I feel like that’s how you’ve been working in me, God.  Right now, when it seems like nothing’s happening, the work that you’re doing feels slow—sometimes like nothing is being done at all.  Then, when the pressure’s on, I get to see how worth it the wait was, as I joyfully tumble over the rapids to a peaceful other side for more refining and preparation for more obstacles.

Young rivers flow straight—fast and furious, and shallow.  Older ones cut deep and curve, taking more time to enjoy the view before arriving at the freedom of a larger body of water.

Life goes on above the overpass.  Cars speed by, stopping at nothing to be on time for appointments, school, and work.  I wonder how many pass over every day, not even knowing of the existence of this beautiful source as they clock in at 20 over the limit, speeding home to catch the start of the latest episode of some trashy TV show.

I know I’m that person—so self-absorbed that I fail to notice your beautiful creation all around me.  I know you want to change that, God, but I want it to be straight, to-the-point, and fast like the young river, and you want me to grow deeper, and show me more of who you are along the way.  Help me to put my own agenda aside, Lord, and like any river, go only where and as fast as you will lead me.

The time I preached a sermon

This happened a couple of weeks ago.  I haven't actually listened to it yet, so it may be totally awful, but I felt really good while I was speaking, and the message got a really positive response from the congregation.

The handing-over

MarkCentral was honestly something I wanted to go to last year, but wasn’t able to since it conflicted with our departure to Bangladesh.  This year I had a ton of reservations about going: not a lot of my friends were going, and those who were were doing different studies, I wasn’t too keen on being a lone fourth year in a Mark 1 study with a bunch of first years, and about 80% of the scriptures were ones that I had studied in manuscript format before.  Nevertheless, it was still something I had on my undergrad bucket list, and after the crazy academic year I had had, I was really looking forward to having some structured time with God, so I bit the bullet and signed up anyway. 

I had the last exam of my undergraduate career from 7-10pm on April 30^th, the day before leaving on a 5 hour drive up to camp at 10am.  I was also kind of coming from a spiritual high, after having an awesome experience preaching at my parents’ church on the 27^th, and had fears about MarkCentral quashing my vision of myself as a preacher—what if I had been wrong this whole time, and if all this had been fake, if that vision I had of me preaching wasn’t from God, and God wasn’t actually real, and I was a fraud, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing?  My internal tension was high for the entire drive up, but I hid it as best I could, singing my heart out to some Fleetwood Mac (much to the dismay of my passengers), complaining aloud about how stupid and unfair it was that in my fourth year I had had my hardest exam in the final timeslot on the final day of exams, and lamenting the fact that my spiritual life had absolutely sucked over the past 3 months because there just weren’t enough hours in the day to accommodate God.  I was actually just being annoying for the sake of being annoying, and didn’t care who saw through that because I was tired and cranky and just wanted to get to camp already so that God could start working his magic on me.

After arriving, registering, and saying hi to the collection of people whom I only see at such conferences, I finally had some time alone with my thoughts (which isn’t usually a good thing—in fact, in the past, it has actually been dangerous and detrimental).  I felt that panic attack that had been looming all day finally hit me, and now that I no longer had to stay alert and drive, I popped a Gravol.  I’d gotten rid of my sedatives and antidepressants back in January, since having them sit around was just a giant temptation for me, even though I hadn’t taken one in about 4 months before then.  When I started having panic attacks again in March, one time I was also really sick, took a Gravol, and found that it took care of the nausea and calmed me down, so I started medicating again—when I couldn’t sleep, when I was anxious, and when the anxiety made me sick to my stomach.  I knew it wasn’t good.  I was going to Gravol instead of to God, and there were people around me letting me know that—but they didn’t know me (even though they actually did, really well), and they didn’t know how hard this was (even though they actually did, really well).  This time, Gravol wasn’t working.  The anxiety lingered, and I went to get some more remedies from my car.  A friend came with me, and we prayed about it, and during that prayer, I really felt like God was telling me that he wanted healing for me this week, and although it wasn’t really specified what for, I was really hoping that it was anxiety.  Healing from anxiety after it being the thing that had typified the last 3 years of my undergrad, while meeting Jesus had occurred over the last two—how sweet would that be?  A couple of hours later, that anxiety exploded into a full-out panic attack, complete with muscle spasms, shaking, and crying, right in the middle of scripture study.  Awesome.  “God, were you not present in that conversation we just had?  I’m pretty sure you mentioned something about healing, and I’m also pretty sure that this isn’t it.  What the hell?!” During a break a few people approached me, saying that they were sorry that this was something I had to deal with, and that if I ever wanted to talk it out, or pray about it, their ears were open.  That was good, and I know that these Christians honestly just wanted to love me, but I was seriously so conceited by this point.  “This is embarrassing, I’m tired of always being the one who needs help, I feel like I can’t love others because they’re always so busy loving me…can you just back off and let me figure out my own shit so I can get back in the game and not drag anyone else into this mess?  Thanks, that would be lovely, and if God wants me to experience healing, he can do that on his own.  I’m tired of all of my relationships being based on people feeling sorry for me.”

So, I was pretentious, conceited, and just wanted to be isolated, even though I knew I wasn’t okay, and I needed people to come around me and help solve some of these problems.  Actually, maybe for the first time, was beginning to wonder how my life would look without anxiety.  Why was it something that I clung onto so tightly even though it had been the source of so much pain?  If it was something that God wanted me to let go of, why did I have absolutely no idea of what that might look and feel like?  How would other people see me?  Why was I so afraid?

Things got worse.  I let the anxiety take over—that was my auto-pilot response.  I couldn’t shake it, and I didn’t want to.  Other people encouraged me to go to prayer ministry, and I did, looking for answers.  This anxiety had been suffocating me for almost three years, and I knew that that wasn’t good, but there was something I was getting out of it that was filling a void, otherwise I’d be able to just forget about it like any other person.

I got the answer: attention.  My first mental reaction was a series of expletives.  It was that obvious to other people, and it took someone else (actually a few someone elses) pointing it out to me before I accepted it as truth.  Anxiety got me attention, love, and care.  Being “normal” or “fine” wasn’t okay because it meant that nothing was wrong and then there was no reason for anyone to give me those things: that was the big giant lie straight from the pit of hell that I had believed since I was a kid.  Even though I’d been on both sides of the track, after being brought up going to church, falling away as a teenager, and coming into Christian community in university, I still (subconsciously) refused to believe that God loved me for who I was, and not who I was not.  I didn’t need to be any better or any worse than I actually was in order to be loved, cared for, appreciated, and noticed by God, and by other people, but that truth, even though it had been on a billboard with flashing lights right in front of me, and was screamed in my face by people who did actually love me, was too impossible for me to believe.  It was too good to be true. 

Panic attacks suck.  A lot of people end up in the ER when they have them, thinking they’re heart attacks, and I’ve ended up there a couple of times for that reason.  Anxiety was absolutely poisoning me.  Between all the drugs and the self-harm and the negative thoughts that came with it, I found it actually really bizarre to process the fact that the thing that made this okay to me for nearly three years was the fact that it got me attention.  Was I that starved, and was my life that bad, or was I just too self-centred to realize how awful this was for me and everyone around me?  My natural reaction was towards the latter.  I tend to immediately react (irrationally or not) on the aspects of life that I can control.  Yeah, there were a lot of times when I used my anxiety to manipulate other people, and those were totally dick-moves on my part, but I also needed to acknowledge that that was only one side of the story.  Growing up in a culturally-homogeneous hockey town as a nerdy kid from a family of ultra-conservative musicians, having two emotionally unaware parents, one of them physically absent for a couple of years—these things and more encompass my own brokenness and my family’s brokenness and have shaped how I view the world, myself, other people, and relationships.  I’m pretty confident in the validity of extrapolation here: we are all broken, and we all make bad decisions sometimes, but we need to not rely on our own strength to forgive ourselves and those who have hurt us, and be agents of change; that is where we need God and his grace.

So after receiving that revelation, I returned to scripture study, and we were studying the story of the demoniac man in Mark 5.  I’ve studied this story probably about 3 times in manuscript style since starting to become serious about Jesus almost 2 years ago.  Each time, the story is the same—I’m the demoniac man: he can’t control his body, I’ve experienced that; no one has the strength to subdue him, I’ve been physically restrained to be hit by sedatives in a syringe; he lives among the tombs, some days I feel like that when the anxiety gets so bad I can’t leave the house; he bruises himself, I bruise myself; blah blah blah, it sucks to be this guy, I get it.  And then Jesus heals him, and it’s awesome, until you realize that this is the third time you’ve read this story in a year and a half and Jesus hasn’t healed you yet.  This time was actually different though: we started talking about how much Jesus actually loves this man, even though he doesn’t know him and has absolutely no reason to care about him.  Jesus, a Jew, goes across the sea overnight through a storm to this Gentile region among the tombs to find this demon-possessed man who he has absolutely no obligation towards (by religious laws and culture of the day, they’re kind of supposed to be enemies), and Jesus lets these demons destroy a herd of 2000 swine so that they will stop tormenting this man, absolutely crushing the industry of this region.  This man’s physical life, and quality of life were more valuable than the countless other healings that Jesus and the disciples could have performed had they stayed in the Jewish region, and more valuable than the livelihoods of the local farmers, and more valuable than the lives of 2000 swine.  The logic of the love of Jesus is absolutely irrational, and that’s what makes it so incredible.  He didn’t love this man any more than he loves me.  He does have the power to heal.  There was something that I wasn’t connecting or understanding yet that was standing in the way of my holistic healing.  Then, someone in the group brought up something in this text that I hadn’t noticed before: this man was the first person whom Jesus instructs to go out and tell other people about how he has been healed—this man is the first evangelist in the gospel!  Jesus called him into preaching, and he has called me into preaching!  The parallels weren’t all bad…

The next couple of days were just emotional.  I knew I wanted to hand my anxiety over to Jesus, but was so absolutely afraid of doing so—and I felt like I had had that conversation in my head so many times, and just not felt genuine about it, like I wasn’t ready, and that made me so frustrated, and even more emotional, and even more not ready to let go.  It finally occurred to me on the last full day, as the passage we were studying mentioned something about honouring your father and mother, which I know I’ve been doing a really bad job of, that I finally grasped that anxiety was getting in the way of me living my life for God, and that wasn’t okay.  I needed to hand it over, pronto.  It had taken so long for me to realize this—did God even care anymore, or had I dug myself a grave so deep that I couldn’t be found?

And then we studied about the Syrophoenician woman.  To a lot of people, this story says a lot about women’s rights, and how this woman doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants from Jesus, even after he refers to her people as “dogs”, and seems like he is about to turn her away without healing her daughter.  This woman actually embraces her identity as a woman, and as a gentile, and tells Jesus straight up that even though the Jews are God’s chosen people, the gentiles deserve some of his love as well.  That was what I needed to hear.  Even though I was lost in all this brokenness, and guilty of all this sin, it was still who I was.  I needed to go to Jesus as that person, not as someone trying to be better than I was, or someone trying to be worse than I was so that he would receive me faster or better or with more grace, and not in a fake emotional wreck to make anyone think I was more serious about needing to make a change.  God made me, in his own perfect image, and for the first time in my life I actually believed that that was a good thing, and I wanted that person to be who I was!  No more hiding.  No more mask.  Just me, God’s beautiful daughter, exactly as he intended!

That night after worship, I said the prayer—no tears, no drama, just me being real with God (and my staff worker, whom I wanted to be witness to that, as I knew that she was one of the people who I had manipulated, and whose love I had exploited for my own selfishness—and honestly I thought that she never wanted to speak to me again because of that).  It didn’t feel as “real” or “extravagant” as I expected it to feel, but it felt so right, and I knew in my heart that this time I had finally been genuine and successful.  I had finally handed my anxiety over to Jesus after 3 years of torment, and asked him to fill that empty space with himself, and to hold me, and walk with me, and love me with his own perfect, unchanging love.  I’m always going to be broken, and I’m always going to sin, but PRAISE THE LORD THAT JESUS IS ALWAYS GOING TO LOVE ME!!!!!!

To all the people whose resources, love, time, and energy I have used unwisely: I am truly sorry, and I ask for your grace and forgiveness.  Thank you for loving me graciously, in the best ways that you knew how, when I was in need.  To the select few (you know who you are) who loved me enough to argue with me, and call me out on my bullshit while I screamed and cried at you and told you that you were wrong and didn’t understand me: THANK YOU!  Thank you for loving me in a way that is bold and difficult, and thank you for sticking by me through your obvious frustration and resentment of my bad choices.  Thank you for trusting God to give you the grace to love me, because I know it was not on your own strength.

Anxiety is still an emotion that I experience as a human being—I’m experiencing it right now as I just ate some questionable food and am feeling kind of sick.  However, it does not bind me anymore; I’ve handed that piece of my identity over to Jesus.  I acknowledge that I still need love and affection as a human being, but not through manipulation of others with anxiety and panic attacks.  Full healing will take time.  I’m going to need a lot of prayer over the coming weeks and months as I grow into this new identity in Christ, and I’m going to need people to come around me and remind me that I am loved by humans, and by Christ, through the good, the bad, and the mundane—without using anxiety.

What an ending to my undergraduate career—finally understanding that God and his people love me for the person that he made me, and not for anything I could make on my own.  Praise Jesus, I have been saved by his grace!

Anxiety: struggle-->teaching-->hope

Someone asked me a question last week that I had a little bit of trouble answering: Do you wish you never struggled with anxiety?  Panic disorder absolutely sucks.  I wouldn’t wish my episodes of sheer terror, breathlessness, screaming, and self-harm on anyone.  Their unpredictable nature has caused me to avoid countless classes, social functions, and other events that I would have rather attended, and snowballed into fears of things I used to enjoy: driving, being alone, physical exercise, and just sitting in silence.  Panic attacks made me afraid of my own mind, because I knew that whenever I got stuck alone with my mind, it would take the wheel, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it from spiraling into a cycle of negativity and paralyzing fear, where the only way to make sure I was still alive was to over stimulate my senses through my own screaming, or self-inflicted physical pain.  Isn’t that what toddlers do when they’re frustrated and starved for attention?  Why was I experiencing these things for the first time as an adult?

Struggling with a sick mind after living for 19 years in a family that judged everyone based on appearance and composure taught me that mental illness is not a choice.  I didn’t want to have panic attacks.  If I could, I would have stopped them before they started.  I felt so alone, and like no one understood that.  That was when I learned what empathy was.  Whenever I saw someone who was obviously struggling with something, my initial reaction, instead of “why can’t you pull yourself together, because you’re upsetting me”, became “I’m sorry you’re struggling right now, and it hurts to see another person go through this, because I know how painful it is.  I wish I could help you.”  Little by little, I’m learning to reach out to these people.  Initially, there was a lot of fear of saying the wrong thing, but through trying to navigate my own brain with multiple doctors, therapists, counselors, and mentors, I’ve learned that the best teacher is experience—the people who have been the most helpful in terms of helping me understand and cope with what is going on have been those who have actually been there and know the beast, not necessarily those who have acquired multiple degrees and pieces of paper after studying it in theory for decades.  So, if you’ve been there, your voice is inherently valuable, and it becomes your responsibility to use it wisely, for the purposes of building up others. 

This led into me looking to understand how family brokenness and generational sin manifest themselves in so many different ways in individuals, and how difficult it can be to break those cycles.  I noticed patterns in my own family of pride and judgment, and realized that they had worked their way into my own mannerisms without me even realizing, or worse, under my full realization, but without any comprehension of how bad it was.  By no means was the brokenness in my own family the worst that I had heard of, but it still often left me craving a time of grief for what was lost in my childhood and would never be, and made me scared of the life that I was going to live and the bad choices I was going to make if I didn’t break free.  It wasn’t easy to dig back to the roots of these problems, seeing exactly how they had embedded themselves into my daily life.  I often realized that they had hurt others, and needed to apologize for this thing that I previously didn’t even know was a problem I was supposed to keep in-check.  Sometimes I felt hopeless, like I was just destined to make the same mistakes as my parents and grandparents, and nothing would ever be different because I was bound to their sin—and then I would remember that that is an insult to God.  He builds us the way we are for a reason, and if there are sin patterns that survive into our own lives from our parents, he has something for us to learn from that, even though it is his hope that we will eventually come close enough to him to truly understand that we are not bound to the sin of our earthly families, because God has adopted us into his family (read Ephesians 1, it’s really good!).

It’s probably also prudent to mention that if it wasn’t for anxiety, I never would’ve met Jesus.  If that demon hadn’t broken me down to the point of needing to ask for help and seek out a supportive community, and literally, divine intervention, I would’ve continued down the path of self-serving ambition, worshiping my own uniqueness, and finding pride in my own accomplishments (which, by the way, only were possible through the gifts God had given me, and the privilege of being born into a family that could afford to put me in sports and music lessons).  As soon as I realized that my entire life had been a shrine to my own gifts and uniqueness, I lost passion for a lot of those things—sports, violin, kinesiology, geek culture…I wanted people to look and my life and see what God was capable of—what he had done and was doing, and not the walls that I had built up and worshiped as divisions to separate me from the rest of the flock.  No one was good at or passionate about the same combination of things that I was, and that was an excuse for me to be indifferent, and not get to know and love other people.  My own selfishness told me that I was beyond comprehension of other human beings, above them, and that I would never be understood by anyone else, so I’d better know myself inside and out, become about things, make them my everything, and show that externally so that people would know I was about something that they didn’t know about, and would leave me alone because they couldn’t relate.  It was my way of differentiating and making an idol out of myself, and it wasn’t okay.  After encountering God, realizing that this lifestyle was bad, and seeing it show up in other people, I realized how damaging it was, both to the person who lives it, and those around them.  I absolutely don’t believe that change for these people can come from the outside.  For sure, other people can point it out, but narcissists generally don’t react well to other people identifying their flaws.  It has to come from a deep realization and acknowledgement that something is wrong, and a desire to change.  My struggle with anxiety brought my identity issues to the forefront, and other people in community pointed them out to me (which I didn’t enjoy, but realized was necessary).  I eventually realized that I had a sin pattern of grabbing onto things, becoming all about them, and refusing to let them go because they were such a huge part of my identity.  That’s not God’s hope for his children either—it sounds something more like this: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. – Romans 12:2, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. – 2 Corinthians 5:17

Someone else asked me yesterday what I thought my greatest moments were of this school year.  It didn’t even take long for me to come up with the answer: the times that I absolutely struggled inconsolably with anxiety.  Morbid, right?  Hear me out.  During each one of these times, God was able to show me a different aspect of who he is, and how he loves me in a really tangible way.  That makes me turn to him, accept his comfort, peace, and love, and reminds me that he does in fact have purpose for all of this, and has already made me aware of positive changes that have been made as a result of the different exposures that anxiety has necessitated.  As I already mentioned, I totally and utterly loathe these attacks while they are happening, and wouldn’t wish anxiety the way I experience it on anyone, but I know that God is absolutely in control of the intensity of every panic attack, never lets me bear more than I can handle, and uses each one as a teaching moment later on when my mind is clear.  Stories are how I understand and best explain things, so here’s a really strong example of that from this year:

Over Christmas break I went to a conference run by IVCF called Kingdom Calling, the theme of which was to discern with God what it looks like to continue following him after graduation and work for the furtherance of the kingdom, vocationally and otherwise.  One of the days was entitled “The Day of Discernment”, during which there were no formal structured activities, and we were expected to spend some significant time alone with God in prayer.  I did this on three separate occasions that day, taking my journal to the empty ballroom of the Royal York, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and listening for the Lord.  You can see the decline in my attitude in the journal entries as the day went on; in the morning I was very gung-ho and excited for the day, by the afternoon I was getting a little tired, and in the evening I was just angry and frustrated at some of the things that had come up (or not come up) as I had been praying.  At about 11:00 at night, I went by myself with my backpack to the mezzanine of the hotel.  I didn’t really want to be alone, but figured that everyone was as tired and frustrated as I was after such a long day, and didn’t want to hang out and listen to me externally process how upset I was.  The emotions associated with that anger and aggravation escalated into a panic attack.  I was crying and shaking really badly.  There was no consoling me, and no one was around.  I couldn’t bear the focus on my lack of emotional control anymore, and though I thought my self-harming days had ended months before, I broke and couldn’t handle it anymore: I started violently scratching and bruising my wrists until they were purple and started to bleed.  I knew that hurting myself hurt God, and I was glad—he had hurt me that day by bringing up painful stuff from my past and not giving me the kind of plan for the future with which I was hoping to exit the day.  I wanted him to know that I was hurting, and I wanted other people to know that I was hurting, too. I was hopeless, unloved, and unwanted, and physical pain was quicker and easier to deal with than that emotional pain—but bruising wasn’t enough.  I reached into my bag and found what I was looking for: a pocket knife.  I opened the blade, and as I stared down at it, my vision disappeared—I could see shapes and colours, but not make out objects or faces.  I froze.  I couldn’t move.  I was paralyzed, still holding the open knife.  There wasn’t any other explanation; I knew that this was God protecting me from myself, and in that I was able to find calmness.  I was so calm as I sat there, basking in my own shame of how I had hurt God as he spoke to me, so gently, words that he spoke to me so often:

“you are mine, and I love you.

You are Mine, and I Love You.

YOU are MINE.” 

It was true.  I was his.  He was in control.  He did love me.  He loved me enough to stop that cycle of self-inflicted pain, and let me sit in that shame, paralyzed, and unable to be distracted for long enough for the message to sink in.  This time, I was the sheep who had wandered off from the flock, and wouldn’t come back unless Jesus, the good shepherd, came and found me, broke my legs, and carried me back.  My legs were broken, and sore, and served as a reminder of what happens when I take matters into my own hands, thinking I can handle life without God.  I sat paralyzed, unable to see properly for about half an hour, until a friend who was at the conference randomly called me and asked to hang out.  I broke down on the phone with him, and the two of us and another friend got together and prayed.  The next day, after another carefully-crafted series of events, I was able to acknowledge that anxiety, as I saw it, played an unhealthy role in my identity, and handed that piece of myself over to God, asking him to fill those empty spaces with himself.  That was a turning point.  I’ve had struggles with anxiety since then, but with each one, the turnaround time becomes less, and God is able to show me a new piece of who he is, and how he still loves me criminal amounts even though I have disobeyed, insulted, and hurt him immensely.  He shows me areas of my character that I need to work on, and ways that I can love other people well, particularly those who have hurt me. He is the ultimate vinegrower, pruning off the branches that were barren, or bearing bad fruit—the pruning hurts, and sometimes the vine doesn’t bear full fruit for a few seasons afterwards as it recovers and regroups, but the vinegrower’s ultimate hope, plan, and dream for the vine is that it bears good, plentiful, quality fruit, and he will not do anything to put that plan off-track.  The enormity of goodness in that message is impossible to comprehend.  Seriously.  It is GOOD.  Amen.

The call is that we love our neighbour, bless those who curse us, turn the other cheek, humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, and find the plank in our own eye before we point out the speck in our neighbour’s, among other things.  God has used anxiety, and other painful situations in my life that were intended for evil, to teach me about these things, and allow me to grow into an individual who is more in line with his character.  That is a gift that I am thankful for every day.

From life's first cry to final breath...

When I first told my Oma (German for Grandmother) that I had decided to follow Jesus about a year ago, she responded with “yes! He is the way, the truth, and the life!”  I was kind of amazed to hear those words come out of her mouth—she had been in decline over the last few years and her dementia had progressed to a point where she didn’t often remember my name when I would come visit.  It was so remarkable to see how even though she seemed perpetually confused in the whirlwind blur of the world around her, God had maintained himself as the firm foundation, the ROCK of her life, and she was still able to know him and turn to him.

God called her home to be with him last week.  The 5 days in between her death and the funeral were really difficult in a lot of ways.  With a death like hers, in a way it is a relief, because she had been suffering and hadn’t been herself for quite some time, but it is still very saddening, and a time for grieving.

Recently, God and others had been bringing up a lot about my issues with pride, selfishness, and narcissism.  I beat myself up a bit over the last visit I had with my Oma.  It was Christmas day, and I was having a panic attack and didn’t want to go visit her.  I ended up going in the room for about 30 seconds, giving her a hug and saying “Merry Christmas”, promptly followed by “can we go now?!”, which wasn’t met with any verbal response, so I just left on my own.  Really, I couldn’t have stuck it out for five minutes to spend time with my ailing grandmother?  Everything was about me.  I had no clue how to love people—especially those who had loved me.

At her funeral service, my dad read some scripture: John 14:1-6.  He made it through verses 1-5 no problem, and then, as soon as “I am the way, the truth, and the life” crossed his lips, I could see him beginning to break down.  If that was one of Oma’s favourite passages of scripture, or at least significant enough for her to remember in her final years, he no doubt had a myriad of memories with her associated with this particular scripture.  He paused to collect himself, and I could see him fighting back tears.  I hadn’t ever seen him cry before.  I wanted to jump out of my seat, give him the biggest hug, and make him cry, and comfort him, and love him.  I can’t remember ever feeling that way about my father.  God had been moving in me, and I knew it was good.  Dad rolled “no one comes to the father, except through me” off his tongue and returned to his seat as fast as he could.  Oma knew Jesus.  She was with him and the father in heaven.  I wanted to make that known to my dad, somehow.

At the reception following the service, I paid particular attention to my Opa.  He had loved his wife more deeply than any other man I had ever seen, and it was so weird and sad to see him without her, by himself.  At one point I looked over to where he was sitting and saw him smiling, holding my cousin’s 5-week-old baby boy as someone was snapping photos.  There was the full circle.  I was then reminded of the words: “from life’s first cry, to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny… No power of hell, nor scheme of man could ever pluck me from his hand…” Something clicked in me, that I knew God had been trying to express for a long while: I belong to God (I am HIS), and even though I have been fighting so hard against him in a lot of instances, trying to do things my own way, he hasn’t ever left, and won’t ever leave, and has known my every thought and move since the beginning of time—known that I would sin and betray and choose against him, in full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and still, he stands by me, jealous for me to choose him!  He does this with every single one of us, knowing that many will never choose him, but still showing them a profound, unconditional love and acceptance that the world can try to imitate at best.  I’m so happy that God gave us Oma as an example of what he does and how he provides when we do choose him.  She lived through circumstances of war, poverty, immigration, and being the mother of 7 boys, which I can scarcely imagine.  Her faith got her through, and God provided for and loved her until the very end and beyond.  He loved and provided for her so abundantly that she was able to pay it forward, and love and provide for us, her family, and also neighbours, friends, and strangers, taking nothing extra for herself.

After the guests had gone, and only immediate family was left, Opa and I had a conversation.  We talked about Jesus, and how awesome he is.  Opa was describing to me how Oma lived every day by faith in what she had not seen, and now, after 89 years of living in that faith, she was finally able to see what she had been believing in!  I had expected him to be sad at the loss of his wife of 62+ years, but instead he was the most joyful and relieved I’d ever seen him.  “She finished the race!” he told me, “It was long and hard, but she did it, and she is no longer suffering. I am so happy for her!” Wow.  Just, wow.  A living example of the faith God wants us to have, right in my own family.  I was awestruck and overjoyed.  Yes, she is home with her father in heaven, and we will all be there together again someday.  God is so freaking good!

*   *   *   *   *

I’m in my final semester of my undergraduate degree, and the burning question on everyone’s lips right now seems to be “what next?” Hearing the story of my grandparents’ faith only underlined for me what I had already known to be true: the greatest thing I could possibly do with my life is to follow Jesus, and obediently go where he leads.  Over the last few months, God has grown my heart immensely for church ministry, and has made it clear to me that this is an area where he would like to use me, and a direction he wants me to take.  I feel so blessed to have heard this from him so clearly, and to have had my peers, mentors, and parents, people who I respect and look up to, bless me into this decision.  So, after some time off after graduation to get to know and love the people of the world (I’ve had intentional mission in the workplace suggested to me, and I kind of really like the idea), it’s off to seminary!

God has done some amazing work in me over these four years at Western, when I arrived with my only intentions being to “get drunk and have fun”.  Never in a million years would I have imagined that I would choose this path for myself, but our God transforms hearts and minds so radically when we choose him, that now I can’t imagine my life any other way than with him.  You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to choose anything else.

Till he returns, or calls me home, here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.