I Can Feel It Coming

I can feel it coming, like the way you can sense it in the air when summer is rolling in with the humidity.

I can feel it coming, like the way the smoke from a fire can catch on the wind and float for miles until it reaches your senses and you think to yourself distractedly – “ah, smoke...”

I can feel it coming, like the way a grain of sand has no power against the steady crashing of the waves on the shore…up and out…up and out.

I can feel it coming, like the way the sun sets every night, no matter how beautiful the pinks and gold and reds would be just to stay that way forever..it sets anyways.

I can feel it coming, like the way you know tomorrow will be here even if you don’t want it to…

Inevitable. Bigger than me. Bigger than all of us.

It bears down on us like the car-crusher in a junkyard crushing old rusty cars together to the music of grinding metal. Only for us, it holds us just in its grip, immovable, without totally crushing us. We can’t move, we can barely breathe. But it won’t have mercy and just take us out….no, it keeps us just right there. We wait for the relief of the final push, but it doesn’t come. It just holds us, and we lay there powerless under the weight of 10,000 bricks.

It presses down on one person and I can feel it spread.

I can feel it spread, like the way the bees fly from one flower to the next.

I can feel it spread, like the way oil and water don’t mix, can’t mix.

I can feel it spread, like the way fog rolls over a field.

I can feel it spread, like the way the first snow falls in big fat flakes and covers everything.

I can feel it spread, like the way dominos will keep knocking each other over endlessly once the first one goes down.

When someone around me has a great grief, it reaches over and crawls inside of me to stay for a little while. It wreaks havoc inside, it goes deep down and pulls all of my old griefs to the surface and I re-live all of them. It is like when you are in love, and the sky is bluer, the grass is greener, the flowers are sweeter. When you are under grief, it seems to lurk around every corner, dulling the senses, it seems to be upon person after person after person that you come into contact with, it seems as though the devil himself is on attack against your particular field of people and relationships. It is like walking through the thick air of a greenhouse, but instead of green life all around you, everything is dead and the heat is suffocating.

I can feel it winding its way through me, like vines growing up the side of a brick house.

I can feel it winding its way through me, like hands tightening around my neck.

I can feel it winding its way through me, and it leaves me with a disoriented kind of depression.

It will have its way and I will be exhausted until it is through. I would like to squeeze out some wise words of hope and cheer while it is here, but instead I just freeze. I freeze and I wait. I hold on, but even the holding on isn’t really anything because I just float and wait for it to be over. No drastic moves, no quick actions, avoid making any big decisions, don’t talk too much, don’t talk too little, don’t let yourself feel anything too far in any direction, just fly under the radar and wait. Make like a robot and operate out of memory, depend on your programming to get you through until you can handle it again.

It’s quiet and no one really knows. Someone close might suspect I am not right, but I will say very little. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know and it’s not that I’m hiding. There is no answer, because to notice is to make me crawl out of my skin, and not to notice is to make me crawl out of my skin too. I’m just so, so tired, and to even talk about it seems stupid and more exhausting. Even now, writing about it seems pointless. It will pass soon, no need to hold it under a magnifying glass.

Even in the grief/depression funk, I have the hope though, the hope that it will pass because it always does. I don’t have much else, but to trust the pattern of my history, and more importantly to trust the God who is carrying me along. He is okay with the fact that I am dead weight right now, that I must be carried and can only barely, weakly, consent. He has taken into account my inability to hold an entire thought in my head long enough to pray in a respectable way. He has taken all of this into account and yet I know Him enough to know He will still see me through. I’m glad for that, it helps me rest in Him this time when I really need to the most.

So tonight I am resting. It is okay that:

Emails are left unanswered

Phone calls are left unreturned

Tasks are uncompleted

Things have been forgotten

Pizza has been eaten instead of salad and exercise has been skipped

God is handling all things that need to be handled, and He is okay doing it without me tonight.

Come back and look for the follow-up to this post with the next one I will write, which will be titled “I can feel it lifting”, and will celebrate the passing of the grief/depression funk.

 If you are also in the funk, you might appreciate my sister's writings on depression and grief.

Flashback

I spent most of last Tuesday visiting a dear friend in the hospital. She went there through emergency and was waiting on several procedures that morning. She was in an incredible amount of pain, and she was terrified. She is also a drug addict and alcoholic who has been clean and sober for almost four years.

If you don’t have the problem, you may not understand the terror of pain for the addict who has found freedom from the addiction. As we walk through a new drug-free life, we come to know with certainty that as long as we do not put any drugs or alcohol into our system, we will not start the deadly reaction of craving, known simply to us as MORE, NOW.

If we want to stay clean, which most of us desperately do, then we must cling to this reality. We must know in the deepest, darkest, sickest, most hidden and malicious parts of our hearts that to try the drinking and drugging again would equal consequences too great to bear, would entail the end of our lives as we know them, and would be the first step on the road death of every kind, the first of which would be spiritual.  

At some point many of us come to accept this completely, and though we still have fleeting thoughts, we are freed from obsessing and toying with the idea. It is no longer a possible solution to ourselves or our lives. We live out our lives grateful for the way this certainty has planted itself in our hearts, and we are able to live, making mistakes, seeking, questioning, facing failures and successes alike, but knowing all the while that drugs and alcohol are simply not on the table.

Sometimes we get sick. We need surgery. We have medical emergencies. We break bones. We throw out our backs. We need major dental work. We are in PAIN. We can be martyrs to it for a long time, we will try to tolerate and manage ridiculous amounts of pain, and we usually do this well, but eventually a point comes where the pain wins out, something must be done. And so our feeling of total powerlessness against our addiction returns, as if lightning really can come right out of the clear blue sky and strike us drunk and high, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

My friend was a noble soldier, but that morning she needed some pain relief. They offered her a “small” dose of a powerful opiate which she resigned to with trembling fear.

I held her hand and watched as the injection shocked her – it absolutely shocked her. She covered her face and began to cry. As a fellow addict, I saw the guilt and shame and terror which she had been free of for so many years return in mere seconds. She looked around with red eyes and tiny dilated pupils. “Oh my God I’m high, I’m high, I’m high,” she cried and cried. I reminded her that she was sick and in pain, and getting relief that her body desperately needed.

Eventually she came back down to earth and recovered. They would be taking her to surgery soon. She was loopy and we just chatted. She went home that night after surgery. She is on the mend and has not found it necessary to drug-seek after this experience. The flashback was more than enough for her.

It was more than enough for me, too. Our stories are different, but it has never been more clear to me than in that moment that my friend and I have shared the same pain. Different states, different drugs, different people and circumstances, but the same pain. The same isolating, powerless, desperate pain which comes with addiction and alcoholism. The same miserable self-hatred and restlessness.

It reminds me of just how amazing God really is. Because not only do we start from a basis of common pain and common problem, but we also share lives that have been pulled from that deep pit, we share freedom from the tyranny of drugs and alcohol. And self!

Everyone has their own personal snares set by the devil, those things in life which could totally take them down and out, drag them into the pits of hell, make them a slave, and worst of all separate them from God. Mine happen to be drugs and alcohol, but I know there are many others.

What I have found in my struggles is a great and powerful God who turns things upside down and brings great good out of the darkest bad. I was captured by the vortex of sin like an unsuspecting prey swallowed up in one bite by a lightening-fast cheetah on the run in the middle of the night. Snatched up, and suddenly it was so very dark. But once I reached the end of myself, God was there, ready to start something new.

It’s so like the devil to promise good things which only last for a little while and ultimately lead to hell – mentally, emotionally, literally. And it’s so like God to be right there ready to lift us up in our weakness once we’ve hit the bottom.

What’s that, child? You’re laying in the desert, burning in the hot sun, with no food or water, you can’t take another step, and the vultures are circling overhead? I know. I’ve watched the entire time, I’ve been calling out to you, and I’ve protected you from all kinds of predators and storms along the way. I’m glad you finally want to talk to me, and you’re willing to do things My Way. Now just rest, stay close to me, and you’ll be fine, because I will take care of you in every way.

And in my life, I lay there in amazement while the desert became a rich forest of soft greens, pools of fresh water appeared around me, and the vultures were replaced by doves that were singing praise to Jesus who came to earth for us to undo the work of the evil one. Just like the old Gaither Song -

All I had to offer him

Was brokenness and strife

But He made something beautiful of my life…

Remember this week– EVERY person you know in your life who is recovering from drug addiction or alcoholism is a MIRACLE from God!!

My Son Learns to Pray

Theo turned two this weekend. For those of you who are not familiar with the average two year-old, this means many things. His opinions are becoming more established. His communication skills are blossoming and it seems like he is saying new words every day. His brain is a sponge soaking up the world around him, constantly learning. He is trying to dress himself, he is sleeping in a big-boy bed instead of a crib, he can even help pick up his toys. Some days he loves baths, other days he screams the entire time.

He mimics his mom and dad. He wants to brush his teeth when we brush our teeth.  He “helps” me do the dishes. He loves to watch his dad work in the garage. Oh yeah, and when we yell – he yells too. (We are working on this). 

So he is also learning to pray.

We pray before dinner, and he knows to bow his head (with or without a big smirk on his face). We pray before bed as part of the bedtime routine. He usually crawls into his bed with his blanket, lays on his tummy with his sheep pillow, looks up at us, and says “pray?” in his little voice. And so I, or his dad, kneel next to his bed. And we thank Jesus for that day, for trips to the park and riding in the stroller, for ducks, for popsicles, for mommy and daddy and elephants, for Grandma and Miss Jane and Nana and Bump and little brother Remi. And please watch over us while we sleep tonight, Amen.

There is nothing like watching children receive what is given to them. The simplicity is something my frantic adult mind really cannot comprehend. He takes what is given, in faith, just because we are his mom and dad, and he trusts us. He personifies the song that goes “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it”.

 My kids, from one moment to the next, can bring out the best and worst in me. And they stare at me with their big eyes while it is all right at the surface for them to see. They are little precious pieces of my conscience and of God’s grace, running around my ankles, tugging at my pant legs and pleading for my attention.

They soften my rough edges, they melt my heart, they make me hope.  These little free spirits teach me more lessons than I have ever taken from any book.

 Parenting is terrifying. It is teaching me that same old lesson, over and again – the one that says there is indeed a God, and I most definitely am not Him. Right now I am their almighty mom, the meeter of all needs, the provider of juice and snacks and snuggles and coats and time-outs. Right now it is really all very simple, and we can play in the grass together, look at the clouds, pick dandelions, chase ducks.

The world is also terrifying. It is terrifying just as itself, but it is even more terrifying as it relates to my babies being in it. Will they be sucked into some of the awful things that got ahold of me? When I read the news or even browse through my own small little facebook world, it seems like the odds are stacked fiercely against children in Christian homes.  Corruption and devastation seem inevitable.

And they would be – if it was all up to me. But since my role in their lives is limited to their mother and does not include also being their Holy Savior, I still like to think that there is hope.  As limited and imperfect parents who are also always receiving Grace, we are doing our best to pass on our love and understanding of God to our children, and that is really all we can do. It is indeed a relief to be reminded that the God who pursued me, called me, saved me, keeps me, blesses me, and guides me is the same God who is already there for my children, and He knows exactly what they are to face in this life. And he will not leave them or forsake them, just as he hasn’t left or forsaken me.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11).  

I remind myself that this doesn’t read how my selfish nature would like it to, something like, “For your mother knows all things, she will fulfill every need you ever meet in your life, she will direct your path in every way and ensure by her sacrifices that you make it to heaven to be with her forever.” No, I am only to fill the role and responsibility God gives me in their lives. And I am so blessed to even have that role!

So we will keep teaching them, knowing that the time may come when they are not as eager to receive. But God calls us to be faithful and to plant seeds and to tell the truth to everyone, especially our children.  My children aren’t mine to keep locked up, clean and spotless, for only my enjoyment. They belong to Him, just like every other person I know belongs to Him. It’s a hard lesson on a mommy heart, but also for anyone who wants to hold on tight while loving the people around them. But God is trustworthy, of that I am convinced. I can entrust all things – even my most precious babies – to Him.

 

Lord, help me to take to heart the command to entrust everything to you, to cast all my anxiety on you. I know you are trustworthy to care for all persons and things which I cannot uphold in my merely human strength and abilities. Rip from me the delusional, pretending notion that I am more than I am. Help me to love freely and the way you intended with all the people I love, especially my children. Amen.