I wish I didn't doubt, but...

My last blog post ended like this: “In summary: praise the Lord, healing is real…”

I feel like those phrases are among those that get tossed about easily in Christian culture, and, honestly, feel like the depth and magnitude of their meaning has been significantly deflated as a result. In the language of “Christianese”, these are among a series of mystic catch phrases that make many non-believers and Christians alike, cringe and scoff. Generally, I find myself in the cringing crowd, and try to use these phrases only sparingly, when I truly feel conviction of their reality. The truth is, when things aren’t going so well, I doubt the truth of these statements, the same way any other inquisitive human would. When I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, shaking, with my stomach churning, often after a day full of praise to the Lord for how far he has brought me along this healing journey, it’s very hard to believe that healing is real, and true, and has been happening. Similarly, I can barely imagine what it must be like to believe or even utter the words “God is good” after a couple loses their unborn baby, or a single-income family loses that source of income, or a person is evicted from their home and forced out onto the street. How could a God who is good allow these things to happen? If we don’t doubt the truth, even privately in our own minds, even momentarily, how can we ever discover and fully know it?

I’ve had pretty low self-esteem throughout most of the seasons of my life, particularly socially. I always felt somehow different from the other kids, and unable to fit in, and those suspicions of abnormality were, in one way, confirmed to me in grade 3. I was hand-picked to miss a period of math once a week to be part of a mentorship group with a guidance counselor with a bunch of other socially awkward kids, the purpose being to learn how to be less socially awkward and anxious and learn how to make friends—please, parents, don’t do this to your children. Nothing says “you’re weird and unlikeable and there’s something wrong with you” quite like “we’re pulling you out of math class today because we’ve noticed you don’t have any friends, so come let us teach you this basic life skill of acquiring human friendship that you just can’t seem to figure out”. People like me internalize blame, hate ourselves very deeply for it, and also internalize that hate, all while trying to project an image that is at least likeable. When that image fails, we put up walls, isolate ourselves, and stew in our own self-hate and hopelessness, wondering why we just can’t get it together and be normal. Grade 3 me, in all my wisdom (ha!), figured that I didn’t have any friends because I was too smart, so, naturally, to project an image of likeability and approachability, I pretended to be stupid, purposely spelling words incorrectly, and producing wrong answers to math problems. For the record, it didn’t result in any friendships.

About 2 years ago, when I started hanging out with Christians, I was exposed to a lot of new things, particularly relating to charismatic ministry, that I hadn’t experienced before. My first tangible experience of knowing in my heart, mind, body, and soul, the peace, presence, and truth that God is real and loves me—that moment was powerful. It left me knowing God in a way I didn’t know existed, and I wanted that reassurance of his presence all the time. That’s not the way it works, though. The Holy Spirit is not a dimmer switch that you can turn on and off as you please, although some Christians will have you believe that, and diminish all your problems to a lack of faith or spirituality, or ability to step up to the plate and do whatever it is they silently expect you to do. Enough exposure to (or, at least, perception of) that, coupled with my tendency to internalize guilt and blame, has often made me question God’s love for me, and my place in his kingdom. Apparently God outright speaks to some people with words or images or in dreams, but I’m not convinced that I’m one of those people. I don’t doubt that those are ways by which God communicates with humans, just the notion that I am a human he wants to communicate with in this way. Furthermore, when I do encounter inexplicable voices in my head, or dreams, they’re always rationalized somehow: “you only think God is telling you that because that’s what you want to hear”, or “boy, you have some effed up subconscious to come up with those crazy dreams”.

I wish I didn’t doubt. I wish I could just believe that God is real and good, all the time. Last week, Western had a crazy worship night with like 500 people. The sheer number of people in the room when we entered was overwhelming and intimidating, but I was feeling pretty good about the Lord at that time, and he’s proven to me numerous times that removing anxieties is within the realm of his power. I didn’t know very many of the songs, the music was too loud, the lights were over-stimulating (I secretly felt like an old person at a rock concert), but I knew that God was present in that space. At one point during one of the songs, I closed my eyes and heard a gentle, but bold and serious voice: “Helen, I love you—I know you love me, please just let me love you…” And I got emotional for a sec as I tend to do, but I knew within a minute that this was an experience that I would scrutinize, and probably doubt. I allowed the thought trail to continue on: “ha, heard that one before ‘God’, I mean, voice in my head. Of course I want to hear in words that someone loves me because I spend most of my time alone or at work and seldom ever hear those words, of course that’s the first thing I’d think of that I’d like God to affirm to me”. 

But that last part though, that was different.

“I know you love me…” well, yeah, I’m a hopeless, awkward screw-up, and I’ve tried so hard to not be those things, and some days I feel like I only have hate and jealousy toward most other humans, and I’m a horrible, unlovable person because of it. I can’t put trust or hope in myself, or any other humans, or knowledge, power, or wealth for that matter (I don’t have enviable amounts of any of those to begin with), but God has proven his presence and provision through the fiercest trials, when I discovered the endpoint to what human knowledge, power, and wealth can accomplish. How can I have anything but love and gratitude to such a God? I do love him.

“…please just let me love you...” this part is challenging. I can’t even love myself. I have a knack for suffocating and snuffing out nearly every human relationship that I have ever entered for one reason or another. I feel dirty, unworthy, selfish, stuck-up, guarded, and angry all at the same time when I think about salvation. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d even consider myself “saved” because blackness in my mind absolutely rejects the idea of grace. It’s not for me. I’m not a miraculous conversion story. I’m a member of white, middle-class western society, happily blind and ignorant to most of my privilege. I look around at people singing songs of praise in church and think, “oh, how nice it must be for these people to truly accept and believe” borderline unaware of the blatant bitter sarcasm in my own thoughts. My life felt raw before I became a Christian. I didn’t feel fake or censored in front of my Christian and non-Christian friends. I felt like I could say and do what I wanted without having to face the scrutiny of “is this what Jesus would do?” or “have you asked Jesus about this?” or “what does Jesus say about that?” like Jesus is a ouija board. And then I perceive that my thoughts are misaligned with the thoughts of Jesus, so, fuelled by my own fraudulence, the cycle of self-hate continues. Isolation is a tough point in that cycle, where I feel like there’s no one who will understand this sitting-on-the-fence or on-one-side-feeling-like-this-side-wants-me-on-the-other mentality, and “nobody loves you” starts ringing through my brain but I say nothing about that to the Christians because they respond with “lies from Satan!” like he is an easily distinguishable separate ouija board (and having such an opinion is me obviously being not judgmental at all). I’m conceited, jaded, two-faced, fraudulent, sarcastic, angry, confused, depressed, doubtful, ugly, and feel like I don’t belong anywhere, yet someone is pleading with me, “…please just let me love you…”

I think I’d better figure out how to let the guard down and make that happen.

For Christmas, my mom gave me this CD, Welcome to the New by Mercy Me. At first I thought, ok mom, that’s cool that you got me a CD of Christian music because you think I’m super into that kind of thing because I go to church (I actually really dislike most Christian music—it’s just badly-written, poorly-performed, over-produced trash), but then she was like, yeah, I really like this one song on this album, and she starts singing it, and I’m thinking, what the heck? You listen to Christian music? Why? It’s crap, mom! But on one car trip to visit a friend a couple of hours away over the break, I popped it in the car just to see what it was all about. That CD has not exited my car CD player since it was first inserted. It’s a really remarkable album, exploring a bunch of different musical styles, but the best thing about it is the truth in the lyrics. They’re not bending over backwards to work scripture in there (not that there aren’t some excellent songs out there based on scripture), or repeating choruses a billion and a half times at the end waiting for  the last person to finish being prayed for at the altar call. No. They’re real, and raw, based on real human experience of encounter of God. The first track literally had me in tears while I was driving, listening to it for the first time. Check out these lyrics: (and check out the song here)

Got to live right just stay in line
You’ve heard it all at least a million times
And like me you believed it
They said it wasn't works
But trying harder wouldn't hurt
It sounds so crazy now
But back then you couldn't see it

But now here you are
Eyes open wide
It’s like you’re seeing grace
In a brand new light
For the first time

Let us be the first to welcome you
Welcome to the 
Life you thought was too good to be true
Welcome to the new

You broke your back kept all the rules
Jumped through the hoops
To make God approve of you
Oh tell me was it worth it
The whole time you were spinning plates
Did you stop to think that 
Maybe He is ok with just you
There’s no need to join the circus

And now here you are
A new point of view
And now it all makes sense
Why it's called the Good News
And oh

Look at you
Shiny and new
Look at you
You got the proof of purchase
You were purchased
‘Cause you're worth it
Look at you
Finding your groove
Don’t you dare think
That you're not worth it.
‘Cause you're worth it
Yeah you're worth it

I wish grace was simple. I wish I didn’t doubt. I wish I could love myself and allow others to love me. I’d like to have hope that all these things will happen. In my human shortsightedness, I’m blind, but that also gives me the opportunity to trust God, who somehow finds ways to love me even when I don’t want to let him.

Happy New Year, it's Time to DO Something

I’ve felt better over the last 5 days than I have in about 8 years. 

Last Saturday night, I came to the decision that I wasn’t going to go to church the next day. I was really tired and unlikely to wake up on time, for one, and I had attended a church the previous week that I had been to once before, and although I enjoyed the service, I didn’t really feel comfortable there. I felt like an outsider, and no one spoke to me other than the greeter who gave me a bulletin, and I’m not the type of person to jump into conversation as a stranger among a group of friends, so I left promptly after the service was over. I didn’t have any desire to play the same game of roulette with a different congregation, but I knew that I was going to end up disappointed and sorry if I didn’t go to church, and that if I did go, I’d get something out of it, God would use something to speak to me.

But I didn’t go.

I spent hour after hour watching marathons of renovation shows and British dramas, obsessively checking my social media accounts during every commercial break the way that some people check their refrigerators, afraid to miss out on anything new that might appear. I was angry at myself for not going to church, or going out of the house, or even getting dressed. After about 14 hours (yeah, disgusting, right?) of binge-watching, the questions bouncing around in my mind became more prominent than the removal of asbestos tiles and tone of hardwood that was going into that downtown semi, or the intricate terms of various alliances that were being formed by historical, fictional characters.

When, how, and why did this become my life?

The instinctive answer to the “when” was when anxiety became a part of my life as something that I consciously and constantly had to deal with on a daily basis, but different occurrences from even before that yielded similar results. In high school, I tore a ligament in my knee, which ended my athletic career for the time being, since it was a year between the injury and the surgery, and a year of recovery following that. After that ordeal, I babied that leg for years until I developed severe symptoms of overcompensation in the other leg, which required further medical treatment. I was so afraid of getting hurt again that my efforts ended up being harmful.

Almost 3.5 years ago, after living as normal of a life as I could for the previous 4 years dominated by knee injuries, life took another blind turn. All of a sudden, I was having 3 violent panic attacks a day and had to wait until I was feeling well to do anything that involved leaving the house, and even then it was a gamble. Mental illness is SO different than physical illness. It’s easy to Velcro on a futuristic-looking brace and be excused from potentially harmful components of a game or workout session. It’s so much harder to explain to your TA that you haven’t been to your tutorial in a month because you literally are unable to get out of bed without hyperventilating, gagging, and crying, and so aren’t able to get to the doctor to get a doctor’s note.

So the posture quickly becomes one of self-preservation when one’s safety or well-being seems threatened. That’s something I acknowledge that I tend to gravitate towards, and I’ve been working on it. To other people, it sometimes comes across as selfishness, or attention-seeking… There’s been a lot of healing that’s had to happen over the last year or so as a result of me believing those lies about myself.

When you have a mental illness, your self-worth is in the toilet. It is no source of pride or confidence to wake up in the morning and only be able to cry because the challenges embedded in the tasks of daily living are insurmountable in your present state, and there’s nothing anyone can do to take it all away. Adding insult to injury is when:

1)      society tells you that you need to make your own happiness (kind of impossible when you can’t even make yourself dinner because you can’t get out to do shopping)

2)      individuals with no experience or knowledge of the disease treat it like it’s nothing, and you’re being way overdramatic

3)      the church and its people say things like “you don’t need to have everything together to go help and serve this other person/group of people” (meaning: “you don’t have to be a perfect person” and not “you don’t have to be able to do anything”), or dismiss mental illness as spiritual inadequacy, or demon possession

It’s been a rough few years, and I’ve been hurt in all of these ways and more, and it’s chipped away at my self-worth piece-by-piece until there’s been nearly nothing left and I’ve just gotten up in the morning and cried because I was still alive and nothing had changed—for weeks on end! I knew that God loved me, that that was truth, but when your self-worth is swirling down the pipe after that flush and you believe that you are nothing, anyone else’s words and thoughts become more credible than your own, and you can start believing some really hurtful things about yourself if the people around you are not supportive, or have a different idea than the gospel of love and healing.

Permanent change doesn’t happen quickly, or easily, or painlessly, but the alternative is extremely unappealing. I want to change. I want to be uninhibited by physical and mental afflictions. I want to be confident in the truth that God loves me, and to rest in that. I want to take risks and live the full life that he intended me to live, without guarding myself from irrational circumstances. God has proven to me time and time again, that although things are not always comfortable, he is with me, protecting me, and I will be okay. I want to be convicted of that on a much deeper level this year, and beyond. I’m making a conscious effort to step into that conviction this year, going out of my way to go places and do things where I would’ve preferred to stay home and do nothing before, just to prove to myself that it’s okay, and that I can do it because I’m relying on the unwavering strength of the Almighty. I’m bound and determined to get my old life back—my old, uninhibited, confident life—the only difference this time around is that the Lord is in the picture, and has convicted me time and time again that things are so much better when he is there, and that I need him there.

This has been an incredibly slow, and, at times, painful process of healing that has been full of setbacks, but for the first time ever, I firmly believe that healing is happening. Healing is real, and it is something that God wants for his children. It doesn’t happen when or how you tell it to, and not as a result of you or others doing anything other than asking for it, but it is absolutely real!

¹⁶ So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸ as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. – 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18

Truth. I can’t even say it any better than Paul does here. I put this passage on a sticky note on my desktop almost a year ago, with little conviction that it was truth, but reasonable conviction that it was something I needed to let sink in, and it has sat there, and sat there, and I see it multiple times a day. I’ve scoffed at it, sworn at it, read multiple commentaries on the passage, called myself the exception to the rule because “there is no way this is true and I am being renewed because I feel like shit every day and this is only getting worse and I feel like there’s no one to talk to about it and God isn’t listening to me…” and then the thing that you’ve been praying for for years starts actually happening, and you finally gain the wisdom and perspective to sort of begin to grasp what’s really been going on.

One last resolution: I want to help people affected by mental illness. This is the loneliest life ever, and even if you have people who support you, that doesn’t mean that they understand what you’re going through. You’re always afraid of people dismissing you when you tell them how you really feel, or that they’ll overreact, or that the people who knew you as the person you were are going to see you differently and that it will ruin those relationships. It sucks. I’ve been through it and I have no idea what it looks like to effectively minister to these people, other than coming alongside, sitting, listening, and being patient. It’s not very glamourous, and probably really messy, and likely won’t produce observable change in a relatively short period of time like some other forms of ministry, but I really believe that it is very important, and often overlooked because it’s literally invisible most of the time. It doesn’t have the appeal of building a school in Central America or holding orphan babies in Africa, or even helping students meet Jesus, and honestly, that makes me kind of ticked, because it’s just as needed as all of those things.

In summary: praise the Lord, healing is real, and unresolved angst that I hope leads to something larger and more important.