Monthly Archives: August 2019

Summer Memories

29 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Relationships

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It’s the night before I usually post and I haven’t written anything yet. And I’m tired. So no deep thoughts, just highlights from summer vacations through the years.

As a girl I could count on going to North Carolina for about a week every summer. All our extended family was centered there, and it was usually the only time we got to see them. We packed in visiting as many of them as possible, ate lots of good food, created our own versions of a southern accent, and played with our cousins from dawn til dusk.

Far fewer were the actual family vacations we ever took.

Just like in my childhood, we have taken the occasional special trip for a long weekend, but grander plans are few and far between.

I have jumbled memories as a child of going on three big family vacations. In no particular order, the first of the big three that I always think of was a trip to Mackinac Island. I had no idea until many years later how far from home we traveled – half the distance of going to North Carolina!

If I’m connecting the right memories with this trip, we started driving north and stopped for the night at one of those drive up to the door motor inns. There was an old metal swing set, like in our backyard, and a sandbox in the courtyard surrounded by the u-shaped drive. We played outside until dark, and then we went down the road to a drive-in theater and watched movies late into the night for the first time.

The next day we must have driven over the famous bridge, though I don’t remember that part. We took a ferry to Mackinac. There were no cars allowed. They had horses and buggies and bikes.

We walked all over the place, and rented bikes for a while. I remember my older sister going ahead of me down a long hill that ended at the water of the great lakes, and I thought for sure she was going so fast she was going to sail right off the dock into the cold waves.

I’m sure we ate at least one meal on the island, and got taffy and fudge, but I don’t remember if we slept there or took the ferry back at night. There would have been at least one more night on the road, no reservations, just stopping when Dad got tired and there was a flashing vacancy sign.

I’ve held onto the free feeling of that trip my whole life. For once there weren’t meetings or church services to plan around. We could go where we liked. Dad could smoke openly. We could be filthy dirty and not worry about being clean before we climbed into bed, our head full of the adventures of the day.

Even now I love the days we can be aimless like that. Countless times we’ve set off just to be together, the kids demanding to know what we had planned, and my answer: we’re going wherever the wind blows us.

They don’t seem to like it, to crave it like I do.

A second vacation we took to Myrtle Beach. This one had to be planned a little farther in advance to secure a room in a hotel on the beach. We stayed high up in a suite that seemed bigger than the downstairs of our house.

We swam and dove into the waves of the Atlantic, not even conscious of any danger other than the undertow. This was before “Jaws”. I loved collecting shells and pretty rocks, and I could spend hours in the sand and water. I couldn’t get enough of the waves knocking me around.

One of my favorite parts was the outdoor shower at the top of the beach. I’d rinse off as much of the ocean and beach as I could, then go through a gate to the pool for more water time. I was always the first in and the last to get drug back up to the room.

I don’t remember how old I was, but I was young enough to not be embarrassed carrying my shell collection around the hotel in a personal hygiene bag from the bathroom.

There was some sort of carnival going on, maybe it was seasonal for the summer, and we walked around it at night when we couldn’t be on the beach, swooping up and over the ferris wheel, glimpsing the lights reflecting off the waves beyond the buildings.

We ate seafood and lazed around the room at night, everyone reading books or watching tv, feeling like millionaires at the top of the world.

That trip didn’t create my love for the sound of water, the feel of moving in it, salt or fresh, but it cemented it as one of my favorite things to do.

The third adventure was when I was a teenager, and the highlight was visiting Williamsburg, VA. There we really enjoyed the seafood! We toured some restored settlements, and since I loved history and stories, my imagination was filled with the sights and sounds.

Historic Williamsburg made me wonder where exactly my ancestors landed, and whether I had any native American blood in me as I always suspected. In the role playing that went on all around us, I could imagine myself as many of the characters, and I felt I would have loved living in those long ago days.

To this day I still want a fireplace I could stand in, with swinging arms to move huge cast iron pots over and off of the wood fire, cooking gallons of stew for whoever the wind blows in through the hand hewn door of the cabin.

It occurs to me that each of these vacations were to places people thought were worth visiting. But I can’t give you many facts about them.

I’d much rather remember the feelings of sharing the experience with the people I loved most.

Freedom to and from

22 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Childhood, faceliftbook journey, Recovery journey

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When I hear the same thing from several directions in my life my ears perk up, because it’s often God trying to get through to me.

Today it’s the concept of freedom.

I have been working through the things my therapist and I have brought to light, because I have to analyze things in several ways to really get it.

I’ve always been a very tactile person, and visual. And aural. And vocal. I suppose if I could smell and taste an idea that would be perfect

Ideally I would be able to fully see and hear, while at the same time restating out loud and writing down complete thoughts as they come to me. And drawing beautiful pictures to illustrate. (That part is in my dreams.) The result would be both a complete restating of what I got out of the experience, as well as an impression of what it all meant that I am willing to alter as I gain more understanding of the facts.

Free thinking.

I guess that would be one way to define the way my mind works. I let my thoughts go in different directions, and try to glean from them the best ideas, leaving the inferior ones behind. Free to pick and choose the ones that best support whatever I am coming to think about any topic.

So the topic of freedom keeps coming up.

The first condition I’ve uncovered in my therapy is that I have lived in a state of persistent paralysis. One way to describe this is that it’s like the common dream where you are in a situation and helpless to do whatever it is you need to do: scream, fight, run, whatever would get you out of the conflict you are in to safety.

Years ago when Switchfoot released “Dare You to Move” it resonated with me, though at the time I didn’t connect how paralyzed I really felt. In many many areas of my life there were so many things I longed to do that I could imagine in intricate detail, but when it came time to step out and do, well, I was stuck.

I’m still in the process of working through this, and true to who I am, I am examining this revelation in lots of ways. One of them is to search out what the Bible has to say about being paralyzed. One passage that came up doesn’t use the word, but encompasses the idea:

For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Galatians 5:14 (The Message)

Self-interest vs. free spirit.

If there are any two words I would have used to describe myself for most of my life, it would be those: free spirit.

By which I would mean not tied down to any one activity or course of action, versatile and able to go with the flow of life, willing to change things up to suit the current circumstances.

In my mind I am this free spirit. But the reason I think of myself this way is because by allowing myself an out, I am able to protect myself from situations that are threatening or uncomfortable.

In other words, I’m free to walk away whenever I feel like it. Which is another way of saying, I’ve really been about keeping myself safe for most of my life.

And that doesn’t feel like freedom to me, because for many years I’ve been on guard, waiting for the times I’ll need to walk away to keep from getting hurt.

Galatians says my self-interest is in direct opposition to the free spirit. So what does that mean?

So another source I look to for help in figuring things out is The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I regularly read through this, taking about a year, as I often have to reread one sentence a dozen times to let it sink in.

And today I read a passage about how the enemy can’t always use bad circumstances to draw us away from God, because God often does his most important work in us while we are going through trials. In this paragraph is this:

” One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”

(That was two sentences. See what I mean?)

If I’m reading this correctly, Lewis is saying that service to God is perfect freedom, because the person’s will freely conforms to God’s will for them.

In this sense, freedom means a giving up of my own self-determination to let God decide what is best for me. And by giving up my rights to myself, God gives me life full and overflowing with his love and goodness.

So back to Galatians. A free spirit (and I still love that phrase, love that it’s in the Bible!) really means a person who is so sure that God is able to do beyond what they can ask or imagine, that they live giving up their own plans daily to let God work out his plan through them.

What I’m starting to see, with the persistent paralysis of my life, is a woman who has been anything but free. And as my impotence is falling away from me, I’m finding I don’t have to stay stuck in old patterns of thinking.

There is a truly free spirit inside of me that has been biding her time, waiting to be allowed the luxury of resting in the knowledge that God has a good plan for me, and I need to let him bring it about.

I don’t have to do this on my own.

The Direction of Upright

15 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in faceliftbook journey, Recovery journey

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I’ve started seeing a therapist.

I’ve wanted to for a long time, and a couple months ago I finally decided it was the right time.

And to give a little more background, I have also been meeting for the past year with a mentor, a Christian woman, through a unique local ministry that provides this service for free.

I feel like a totally different person than the woman I was when I first walked in to Journey of the Heart last July, looking for perspective. Over this past year I’ve learned to step back and look at day to day situations in light of the truth instead of through my emotions.

I’ve learned a lot about boundaries. How I didn’t grow up with many firm ones, and why I never learned how to set them in many areas of my life. I started setting them and experienced great peace in being able to say no.

I learned to respond instead of reacting. I began to make decisions based on what I was really willing and able to do instead of what others wanted me to do. I learned to not make excuses for taking care of myself.

Which felt really weird after so many years of putting everyone else first.

I think the timing of all this has been good for me and my family. My youngest is now sixteen, so as young adults I think they all benefited from my not doing as much for them. They now take care of more of their own things, which will help them as they transition to school or apartments.

Not to mention that after more than thirty years as a mom, I have my own things I’ve been looking forward to doing.

Probably the most significant change is that I have a mentor who faithfully turns my face back to God. Pretty much every time we meet she reminds me to ask for God’s input before I make any decision, and to search the Bible for direction.

I welcome the reminders to do the first thing first.

You would think that after having a relationship with Jesus for most of my life, that would be the most natural thing to do. Yet it isn’t.

So after almost a year of being mentored, there were things we had talked about that I felt a need to go into more deeply with someone trained to help a person know how to deal with their thoughts and feelings.

It was time to look for a therapist.

As with finding my mentor, God brought forward the right information at the right time. Even though the people giving me advice didn’t have all the facts clear, I ended up finding a Christian therapist that is helping me find freedom from things that have held me captive since childhood.

I’ll tell you a little about the therapy, but it really is different in the experience than in the description. And you can look up the description if you are interested in knowing more about it. I feel people like me, who are ready to dive in and tackle whatever issues come up benefit a lot from this therapy.

Splankna Therapy, according to the website at Splankna Therapy Institute ‘is the first Christian protocol for mind-body psychology.’ What happens in the practice of the Splankna Protocol is that I (mind, body, heart, spirit) tell my therapist where my body is holding on to the emotions that resulted from traumatic situations in my life. In isolating them she figures out what emotions or situations are keeping me stuck in reliving old hurts instead of healing and moving on.

The most satisfying part for me is that I pray and release the hold these things have had on me, and my therapist also prays healing over me.

It sounded like hooey to me. Bunk. Rubbish. Nonsense.

Then I tried it. And after only three visits I’m noticing real changes in the way I do life.

I have been able to name things that have held me back, put me on the wrong track, distracted me from my goals for most of my life. I have experienced NOT falling back into the same patterns of self-defense and control that have become second nature to me.

I have had revelations of lies I have believed, and been floored that I ever would have listened to them in the first place. And I have been able to call them lies and let the father of lies know that he doesn’t have a hold on me any more in that area.

I don’t know how long I will continue, but I am excited to be freed from more of my self-inflicted chains. I have tried to control my life, my environment, my safety and well-being since I was six years old, and I am so ready to hand it back to God, who is the only one who knows what my next steps should be.

Both of these ventures, being mentored and going to a therapist, flow out of the last four years of Celebrate Recovery. I now deal, one day at a time, with my hurts, hang-ups and habits; I identify my character flaws, my faults and shortcomings and ask God to remove them from me; I learn to recognize when I’m doing something hurtful and make amends more quickly; as I am hurt again I make the choice to forgive before letting the wrong fester into a much bigger wound than it needs to be. And most surprising, I have become willing to ask for help.

A neat thing has been happening with my therapist. She prays over me before we start, and she prays again when we are finished. And in her prayers, God puts thoughts in her mind, words to say, that are uniquely meaningful to me.

At our last session she prayed that I would be in line with the plumb line.

My whole life I have loved plumb lines. You pull them out and they are covered with purple chalk, and a weight hangs at the end and when you hold it up it hangs down and gives you a true straight up and down direction. If it’s against a wall, someone is holding the top and someone secures the weight when it’s hanging straight, and plucks the string to leave a straight line to orient to.

And in my life, I am seeking to find the plumb line that shows me I am oriented to God’s plan for me.

My therapy is showing me how I have not let the weight determine the direction of the line, how I have pulled it out in the directions I wanted it to go, snapped it and left a crooked, skewed chalk line that I have followed blindly.

I so much need there to be a strong hand holding my life line, and I need to see where God means for it to go, unaffected by the circumstances of my past and present. I need to see the direction of upright.

Inspiration

08 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Asthma

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Feeling inspiration is always great, but I want to share a little about the other meaning of the word: the drawing in of breath.

Most people take it for granted. There’s no thought required, unless you want to hold your breath or blow out birthday candles. Before I was diagnosed with asthma I never thought much about it.

As a kid I could run – and place with the fastest – in any kind of sprint or short race. But in the Presidential Fitness Challenge the 600-yard dash was my undoing. We ran five sides around a large square of grass, and I usually walked the last two or three with stitches in my sides, panting.

Though I never went to a doctor about it as a child, as an adult I developed a wheeze. Like a squeaky toy under a rocking chair. It actually took me months to finally get checked. I wanted to try all the home remedies I could before going to the doctor, but the diagnosis was exercise-induced asthma. Surprise.

The only effect on my life was occasionally using a rescue inhaler. Maybe five or ten times a year. Not hardly worth the expense of the medicine, and I’d often use it way past the expiration date since I used so little.

My personal experience with asthma attacks was one year on a women’s retreat when an older lady got to laughing too hard and had one. I was helpless. Between a few of us someone thought to run back to her room and get her inhaler, but the woman herself couldn’t speak to give us instructions. She had to concentrate so hard on moving air in and out that she couldn’t waste it on talking.

Inspiration – the drawing in of breath.

Not easy for her to do. In fact we were about to call 911 when she was finally able to pull in enough air to send it over her vocal cords and say she was feeling better.

I cannot tell you how many times over the years I’ve thought about that night. Her distress, my ignorance of what was happening to her, our panic as a group, the way that several voices at once can drown out the silence of the one who can’t speak.

We tend to listen to the voices we can hear. When they go silent, our own thoughts and sounds take over. But not always in a good way.

A couple years ago I suspected my symptoms were getting more complicated, causing muscle spasms between my ribs, and after trying several medications I decided to try an inhaled daily steroid to see if it helped.

I want to be clear about this. I decided this. I went to health care providers begging for help at figuring this out, but got no farther than, “What do you think you should do?” So I did a little googling and came up with a medicine to try, ran it by my very helpful and knowledgeable pharmacist, and picked the cheapest choice.

It seemed to work for about a year. But last fall things ramped up again, and I started into about eight months of frustration with all people medical, combined with constant sinus problems, no sense of smell or taste, increased wheezing and coughing, and the topper – asthma attacks.

My first one came on a Friday evening, and I didn’t know what was happening. I guess I expected it would be instant shortness of breath, but the reality was I started coughing up great quantities of mucus and it didn’t slow down.

I tried sipping water, used my rescue inhaler, and decided it would probably calm down by the time I got to Celebrate Recovery. But when I got there I sat in the car and texted people inside that I was having trouble breathing and was heading home. Two and a half hours later, I was finally able to breath normally.

When the second one happened I knew enough to not push myself. I sat still, I took the medicines I had, I forced myself to breath deliberately.

There is a kind of breathing that is so labored that your chest rises up from the middle from the effort of the drawing in of breath. The expiration is much easier, an afterthought of the extreme work of trying to force air into passages that are closing and filling with mucus.

I could feel this happening, I could point to it, but I couldn’t explain it verbally. So this second time my family was around and would say things like, “It sounds like you have a bad cold,” or “Do you need a drink to help clear your throat?”

Not helpful. I just have to say this. To be visibly struggling to draw in air, and have it dismissed as a sudden onset, already at maximum mucus production cold when I had NO SYMPTOMS five minutes earlier is frustrating beyond belief. I couldn’t even think of the reply I wanted to make, much less send the sounds out of my mouth. I was reduced to violently shaking my head no. And crying. Which only made it worse.

So several more have followed. I should have gone to the emergency room or an urgent care with a couple of them. I finally went to the ER the day after my worst one and was admitted. That’s a story for another day.

My point is that I understand being the person who is clueless as to what is happening to someone having an asthma attack. And now I understand being that person. Sitting in distress, whispering, “inhaler” with nobody hearing, feeling unable to stand and walk down the hall to get it myself.

And I’d like to say that what I need, what my friend all those years ago needed, was for someone to understand that I have no control over this, and that there are only a few things that will help if I can somehow tell you.

So ask: is your inhaler…? and ask all the logical places. Because I may only be able to move my head. Ask if I am able to get any air in. If I’m not, try every drug or device I have. If they don’t work, get me to someone who can help me. Don’t listen to my protests, because I’m basing it on what I see possible for me to do on my own, not on what I need.

If my lungs are closing, I’m not getting much oxygen to my brain. And it is showing in my stubbornness. And I’d much rather yell at you later, lungs full of air, for overreacting, then not be able to draw in one more breath.

Ask me why

01 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Recovery journey

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I had the great privilege of attending Celebrate Recovery Summit East in Hendersonville, Tennessee in July, 2019. I want to tell you all so many things about it, but it’s going to take some time while I digest and process all the great stuff I learned.

So I’ll start slowly, with one of the first things I heard that resonated deeply inside me.

It was a simple question. Why?

Yes, the one my two-year old granddaughter LOVES to ask, though I’m not sure she understands what she’s saying.

The answer to that question is not, “Because I said so” or “Just because”. It’s a question that, if properly answered, needs to be thoughtfully approached.

It demands involvement, commitment even.

There are many other questions that are easier to answer. Logistical things, like when is something happening or where, how long will it last, how much does it cost, who will be in charge, who will decide which person does which job.

These are the kinds of questions I’ve been fielding as I’ve approached my church leadership about starting a Celebrate Recovery group at our church. But they aren’t the questions I think really matter.

You guessed it. That question would be “Why?”

Why, when there is a Celebrate Recovery that meets within a few miles of our building, should we let you start a whole new ministry out of our church?

Thank you so much for asking! Because, as I learned at Summit, the answers to the why questions get to the heart of the matter, cut through the busy work and touch the places people need to hear possibilities.

Why, when there are plenty of other recovery type programs out there, should we choose CR as the one we endorse?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Why do you even think there is a need for Celebrate Recovery in our church?

Interesting question. Let me tell you what I’ve learned in the last four years as a part of Celebrate Recovery.

Those why questions, they get my heart pumping because I can see hope and healing and freedom spreading through the people I’ve come to love and think of as family with the answers.

The other questions, not so much. I can make guesses of who will lead what and when we might start this study or that promotional push, but those are all just supposes. The people I think of could easily be replaced, will be replaced as the years go by. The day and time I come up with may change to better suit the needs of the people (because there’s a better why that might need to be addressed!) In the end, those other questions matter to some extent, but they aren’t the crucial ones.

Here’s one of mine: Why did it take me almost 50 years to face my childhood abuse?

There’s a question for you! I’ve been working on this for a little over four years, and I’m finding that I will probably be facing different aspects of how my abuse has affected my life for years to come.

The answer is pretty simple, once I was willing to face it: fear. Irrational, yes. But there it is. I was afraid to say anything to my mom the one time she ever asked when I was 6, and ever after that I created my own ways of dealing with the aftermath. And it took me almost 50 years to name the fear.

From the outside, it might look like that should be that. I got it out in the open. Now I’m all better, right?

If only life were really that simple.

And I’m a strong person. I’ve always been independent and willful. I don’t cower in the face of opposition. I learned to stand up, to be seen and heard. If anyone could face fear it should be me.

But I couldn’t. So again, why?

That’s the question that took me a couple of years to truly embrace, to answer honestly.

Because I am not in control.

In fact, my life is out of control. I admit it. I cannot make anything happen that I think should happen. I can’t control the weather, the economy, politics, my kids. And I can’t control my own tendency to do the wrong thing in any given situation. It’s often the easier choice, the lazy choice, that gets me into trouble.

In facing the answer to that last why, I found freedom like I have never known before. I am not in control! And thank God, He is!

And it’s because I’ve been digging deep to answer my own why’s that I’m eager to answer those kinds of questions, because the answers are so satisfying when you see them come to life.

So let me give you some answers to the why’s. Yes, there are several CR groups that meet within a few miles of my church building. But I don’t see the people in my church attending them. There is something to be said about familiarity, and many people won’t step out of their comfort zone, even when they are in extreme pain.

Why CR as opposed to anything else? Secular programs have very similar steps, similar meetings, success at helping people get and stay sober from chemical dependencies, at least for a time. The simple, yet overwhelmingly complex answer to this is: Jesus. He makes all the difference.

Celebrate Recovery is centered around Jesus, and when I realized that I had no power to handle the things I was facing about my past, that’s when I learned that I have his power flowing through me. He is willing to take on whatever I have to face, if I ask. And that is the thing that makes CR the success that it is. Feeling the strength of Jesus in me helps me know I can face anything life throws me.

So why is there a need for Celebrate Recovery in my church? My simple answer is that I needed it. And I had to look for years before I found it. And I don’t want anyone else to waste all that time when they could be finding hope right where they are.

My church family needs CR. There are people struggling with hurts they can’t get past, hang-ups that keep them stuck where they don’t want to be, and habits that they think are going to take care of their pain, but only prolong their misery and bring sorrow to their loved ones. I know they are there. And I want them to find the healing and freedom I have found and am still finding.

So I dare you. Don’t worry about all those other details.

Ask me why.