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.

The Christmas Miracle

Christmas hurts.  When I was a kid, even though my parents didn’t have much money, they always tried so hard to give us a nice Christmas.  Christmas was always a magical time full of family, food, and festivities, and it was a time of year that I always looked forward to.  I never understood why so many people associated such a joyful time of year with stress, anger, and loss.

Now, I dread it.  I began to notice when I left home that in my family, I seemed to be the only one keeping the magic of Christmas alive.  The house would not be decorated, and no tree would be cut until I came home after exams somewhere around the 20^th of December, and even then this would only happen after a few fights with my mother, with me doing all the work of cleaning, digging boxes out of the overcrowded basement, and decorating.  Whenever I came home for the holidays, the first words my dad would speak to me on my first morning back were “why don’t you make yourself useful and bake something today…”  I didn’t really mind this too much at first, because baking meant eating (which is something I enjoy), but after a while I began to notice that this was something I always did alone, which I didn’t enjoy.  No one else in my family cared to undertake either of these tasks, and had I not have been there to do them, I know they wouldn’t have been done.  After last year, both sides of the family decided to move on from Christmas get-togethers.  The message being sent was that both families have matured and need to move on from such childish frivolity.  Christmas didn’t matter.  As a born-again Christian, I was really hurt by that.  I know that neither family has a really strong faith background, especially in my generation, but to say that the birth of Christ, or even the season need not be celebrated by a gathering and meal-sharing of close relatives who seldom get to see each other really upset me.  Further to this, my mom called me up a few weeks before Christmas to say that there would be no decorations or tree at our house this year, and very minimal exchanging of gifts.  Celebration was frivolous.  Decorating was too much work (even though I would have been the one to do it).

My immediate reaction was to not go home for Christmas at all.  If I was going to be alone and miserable in my room over the holidays, I could do that just as well in London as in Markham—and more comfortably, seeing as I don’t have a bed in my parents’ house.  I didn’t see the point of making my own Christmas at their house when they had made it clear that they didn’t want to celebrate.

But after some spiritual consultation, and a lot of prayer, I realized that it was important to go home and be with family—God was going to show me something great if I did.  So I went home on December 21^st, after my last day of work, and only planned to stay until the 27^th, knowing that if this proved to be too long, I could always crash at a friend’s place. 

The first couple of days were kind of a “honeymoon phase”, where everything was great, and we were tolerant of each other’s quirks, seeing as we hadn’t all been together for that length of time since the summer.  Things started to go downhill on Christmas Eve, which is understandable with stress building as final Christmas preparations were being made—we were cooking everything but the turkey for a turkey dinner on Christmas day, which was to be transported to my Gramma’s house an hour away, and the kitchen in my parents’ house is not well-designed, and about the size of the head of a pin…

Then we went to church for the Christmas Eve service.  I’m not a big fan of my parents’ church.  It’s an old church in an affluent neighborhood with an old congregation, being kept alive by old money.  I haven’t really experienced God in that place before, but I was determined to get something out of that service in some way, so I went with an open heart and mind.  The service itself was nothing special, and there was nothing wrong with that.  What really irked me was during the sermon, the pastor was talking about “Christmas-and-Easter-Christians”, saying that there was absolutely nothing wrong with them.  Now, I’ll agree that it isn’t very diplomatic or loving to be condescending and give these types of Christians the idea that those who go to church more often are better than them, because it simply isn’t true.  There are plenty of people who go to church every week and don’t follow Jesus, and there are plenty of perfectly good, well-meaning people who haven’t ever darkened the door of a church.  The problem I had with this message, was that it seemed to give an “everything’s okay” impression.  It’s okay if you only come to church twice a year, which can be interpreted as:

a)      we’re happy as a church community with the people we have, and aren’t interested in getting to know you

b)      you don’t need to go to church/be in community to follow Jesus

c)      you should be spiritually satisfied with what comes out of attending church twice a year

It’s okay.

It’s not okay.  These things are just plain wrong.  If anything, I’ve got a problem with the church that isn’t bold enough to say “Jesus is in this place, we know we’re doing a good thing here, and we want you to come sit with us around God’s table as his family—all the time!” If there’s anything I’ve learned about Jesus in the last year and a bit that I didn’t know before, he was a bold dude, and he calls us to be bold as we share his truth—the gospel.  That’s something I know a lot of churches in the western world are missing.

So I left a bit disappointed, but looking forward to Christmas morning.  It came and went—nothing special, about 4 small gifts per person scattered around a 45cm tall cheap, fiber-optic, plastic tree.  The Christmas spirit wasn’t in our house, but we had to go bring it to the grandparents somehow.  I developed a bad headache in the car, but figured it was just because I was hungry, and would go away once I was able to eat.  We stopped at the nursing home where my dad’s parents lived, and I had been guilt tripped (with my brother) to play some German Christmas carols for them.  I got in the door and couldn’t move.  My head was killing me, I couldn’t see straight, I was nauseous, and every fiber of my being was holding me back.  I sat down and cried.  I had no idea what was going on.  I hadn’t had a panic attack in months, why was I having one now—on Christmas, of all days, when I was supposed to be bringing joy to people who had otherwise lost the will to live.  I was incredibly frustrated, and my family members seemed totally indifferent to my situation, wondering “what the hell [was] wrong with [me]” and why I couldn’t just go do what I had to do.  I couldn’t do it.  I have no idea why.  I became the jerk in that situation then, as a result of my inability to function.  That hurt.

We returned to my Gramma’s apartment.  I sat on the couch most of the time until someone made me “make [myself] useful and make the gravy”, which I did mainly just to keep the peace, not because I wanted to.  I ate about as much as a normal person would at a regular dinner (I’ve been told I eat about as much as a five-year-old), while the others stuffed their faces (as one should do at a turkey dinner).  My brother ate (and drank) so much that he started throwing up, which wasn’t super good for my headache + nausea + pathological fear of vomit.  I refused to sit in the back seat with him on the way home, but instead sat in the front and thought over what a horrible day it had been.  Then another panic attack hit, and I cried—like, bawled, with my whole family in the car—for about 45 minutes.  No one said anything, or did anything.  The thought just kept returning to my mind, that this was actually the worst Christmas ever.

The panic ebbed and flowed until we arrived home, and I stormed up to my room and shut the door, eager to cry myself to sleep and forget this day.  I started questioning God; why would he bring me here only to suffer—exactly what I wanted to avoid.  Then I remembered something that my mom had said when she was trying to persuade me to come home for the holiday: don’t shut out your family; they are the only ones who will love you at your worst and be there for you, regardless of your situation.  “She failed that test today”, I thought.  Then I remembered, I’m part of another family, before any human one, with a father who loves me so deeply that he would send his son down to earth to live among us, to know pain and suffering much greater than I have experienced, and to be killed by the same people he came to serve, so that anyone, regardless of past, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status… the list goes on… can be born again and live with God our Father in heaven forever.

I have a family of brothers and sisters in Christ as well, and God has placed each of them into my life at exactly the right time.  When we fellowship together in community with one another, I get a sense of belonging that I’ve never felt with any other group of people—it’s the most amazing, indescribable thing that I hope for everyone, especially my biological family.  Even if that day isn’t soon, it’s going to happen, because God wants his people to be reconciled.

God turned my “worst Christmas ever” into the best one yet, just by reminding me of who he is, who he has put in my life, and how his love and grace are limitless.  He has adopted me into the best family that anyone could ever ask to be a part of.  That’s worth celebrating.