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
30th, 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 27th, 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!
