Archive for the The Journey Category

“And my heart is yours. And what a broken place it’s in. But you’re what I’m running for. And I want to feel the wind at my back again.” Switchfoot – Back to the Beginning Again

How does it feel to live in a land where the worst enemy you face is yourself? The enemy knows every weakness and can cut you down at the knees with a thought. Outwitting this enemy takes grit, but not the kind that comes from within. For there is no weapon known to man that can defeat this sickness of soul. Not will power, not self-control, not determination or even fortitude. The grit of which I speak is grace and it’s a gift, one I all too often refuse.

I find myself in desperate need of grit via grace lately. Waves of depression and anxiety have scrambled my brain. I find my perspective and thinking aren’t clear or even accurate at times. I am paranoid, distrustful, resentful and bitter. I try to control my impulses only to find myself slipping and stumbling down another binge-eating hill. My journey to learn discipline seems to stop entirely while I nurse my wounds and try to gather enough courage to take another step. I won’t sidestep the truth, it’s daunting.

Today I feel like I’m suffocating beneath the weight of these burdens. The crushing weight of despair is a black veil twined round my face. In these moments I am ugly to those around me—thinking and sometimes speaking the darkness to life. I am guilty of trying to distract away the darkness, but no amount of television or food or wishful dreaming removes the veil. So I’ve been thoughtfully sorting through books that might shed light on my affliction, but the only book that seems to offer any comfort at all is the Bible, and even that is faint.

I feel like I’m back at the beginning again. I’m clinging to an old and tattered piece of cloth and praying that God will make it new. I’m praying for peace—that the pain will relent—and for hope for a future free of depression. And I’m cognizant it may never come in my lifetime. I’m standing at the bottom of the well with only a pinprick of light and praying for someone to throw me a rope and pull me out. Grace is all I’ve got left….

but He is more than enough.

On the days when I find myself back at the beginning, I consider that the beginning is a good place to start. At the beginning I realize just how desperately I need God’s grace and that He is capable to abundantly provide it. At the beginning I realize I have no strength in myself to take a single step forward, but He loves me anyway. Love isn’t a sentiment of affection from afar, but an actionable event He is holding me and telling me I am precious and dearly loved. My darkness doesn’t scare Him. He doesn’t flinch at my tears or push me away to wipe the snot from his shoulder. He loves me in all my messiness.

Today if you are struggling with something, whether it is the crippling pangs of food-addiction or alcoholism, or drug addiction, or anxiety, or depression or wayward child syndrome, or fill-in-the-blank, you are not alone. The God of the universe is closer than you imagine. Before you gasp the words, “Help me!” he is there.

I can’t see the light yet, but I know that light exists. I can’t feel the hope yet, but I know his arms are wrapped around my chest. I feel like the waters are closing over my nostrils but I know He is breathing through me. He is for me. He loves me. And so I hope in the God of grit and grace and I rejoice. Let these dead bones dance. I am His and He is mine. Hallelujah! Hosanna!

The television series, “This is Us” has sucked me in. I love it for the same reason many people do; the writers facilitate a discussion about issues that resonate with our culture. Race and sibling/parent relationships are at the forefront of the conversation and–interestingly enough–the show takes a very candid look at what it feels like to be overweight in a thin-obsessed society.

One of the main characters, Kate, is an obese woman who attends OA meetings and discusses her insecurity about her size. Chrissy Metz, the actress that portrays her, has been open with multiple publications about her struggles with weight in real life. I find her candor refreshing. She doesn’t minimize the impact obesity has on identity, and I believe she is charting new territory by not selling the fat-acceptance message in deference to the importance of living a healthy lifestyle. Our culture too often takes sides in this matter and rarely arrives at a meaningful resolution.

I live in this tension. I know what it feels like to be helplessly fat and I know what it feels like to find success in losing weight and keeping it off. I know what it feels like to feel the pinch of “too tight pants” and to experience gut-wrenching hunger as I deny myself the foods I desperately crave. I fight on the side that accepts people for who they are(pounds and all), and I fight on the side of living as healthy a lifestyle as possible. In my reality I find these sides are not opposing at all, it’s just that we consumers have become so hopelessly conditioned to the lure of good marketing.

Don’t believe everything you read.

Americans are fat. The studies tell us so. These studies prepared by reputable organizations tell us everything we never wanted to know. We know the fattest and healthiest cities to live in. We have studies on studies, proving or disproving every theory known to mankind. (Bacon vs. no bacon, butter vs. butter-free) Today I read this headline. In the article Mike Stobbe states, “The researchers estimated more than 107 million children and 603 million adults are obese. I guess fat children scare people. Why is that? Are fat children somehow more worrisome than hungry children? I pulled up information on world hunger and read, “The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016.

I’ll be honest, every single time I read about people who are hungry or “wasting”, I feel like an idiot for talking about food addiction. Because, really, how can we possibly compare the two? But I digress.

There was a scene in an early episode of “This is Us” where Kate berates a thin woman for discussing her body issues(the woman was anorexic). It was vastly unfair. Kate was exasperated with her own inability to lose weight and the show justified her shaming the thin woman. I have learned that the very same emotional issues that cause obesity also cause anorexia (when in doubt read Portia De Rossi’s account in “Unbearable Lightness”). And while we’re being honest, we should at least acknowledge that we all have a disease. But rather than treat only the symptoms(obesity, anorexia, alcoholism, greed), why aren’t we working harder to fix the major malfunction inside our bodies, and—could I be so bold as to suggest—our hearts?

You Hypocrite!

I met a young guy named Zack at Sam’s Club the other day while spending more money on dog food than it would cost to feed three children for a month. We were discussing music when he introduced me to an artist who sings under the name, Father John Misty(Josh Tillman). Zack explained to me that he really likes Josh’s music because he points out the hypocrisy of Christians. When I asked him why the music resonated with him, he told me that the people who claimed to be Christians in his life had rejected and wounded him. I was curious and I went home and listened to a few his songs.

“Oh, their religions are the best
They worship themselves yet they’re totally obsessed
With risen zombies, celestial virgins, magic tricks, these unbelievable outfits
And they get terribly upset
When you question their sacred texts
Written by woman-hating epileptics” – Father John Misty

The thing is, Josh Tillman is right. Christians have done great damage in the name of Jesus. They have not loved rightly, or served humbly, or self-sacrificed properly. We have Jim Baker and Clyde Fant and Darrin Patrick and many more. But Tillman’s aptitude for pointing out the hypocrisy of Christians is really no different than Kate’s in pointing out the lunacy of anorexia. The truth is that we are all broken. When we stand around pointing out the brokenness of others, we do ourselves a great disservice by ignoring the real disease that plagues all of us. I feel like we’re trading in band-aids while standing around bleeding to death via our gaping wounds.

I need a Cure!

My problem is I’m hungry. I’m hungry even when I’m not hungry. I hunger for love; acceptance, companionship, and the gift of selfless admiration. I hunger for hope; depression-free days and anxiety-less nights. I hunger for faith; to know that my life has a purpose, that there is meaning for my existence, that I won’t evaporate into nothingness when I die. I hunger for forgiveness; to undo the harms I have inflicted on the innocent, to be absolved of the debts I didn’t mean to incur, to recapture the wonder of the first date, the first glance, the first kiss—all of the before’s that have been tainted by my harsh words and unforgiving nature.

The only place I find the cure to all of those things is in the person of Jesus. Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. I would like to echo C.S. Lewis when I say that Jesus was either a lunatic or he was who he said he was.

I am a hypocrite because I am a sinner, but Jesus was neither hypocrite nor sinner. His whole life was love. He taught people to love their neighbors more than they loved themselves. He asked those who followed him to forgive their enemies and bless those who persecuted them. He modeled that love by going to the cross and in his final breaths uttered these words, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” He offered the only real cure to our tumultuous existence: peace with God. Peace where there was enmity. Peace where there was a broken relationship. Peace when we rejected the good He offered because we thought we were gods and knew better.

But I object!

When I was younger I felt persecuted by Christians who expected me to be good. I had failed to live up to their expectations and so a pastor and a panel of elders suggested I did not know Jesus because I had “sinned”. They heaped despair onto my already guilty and grieving heart. I walked away disgusted and sickened by their hypocrisy, but years later I can see that they were only men. Humans. Fallible and weak, just like me. I bear the scars of their words but in Jesus I find forgiveness and peace. I don’t trust men, but I do trust Jesus.

Us and Them

Statistics paint a poor picture of the real landscape of the human heart. We fail when we try to generalize the human body and the human spirit. We stand on battlegrounds with fists and swords and fail to recognize we are fighting the wrong war.

Dear Fellow Christians:

God’s grace was never meant to be kept to ourselves. Why are our love muscles so weak?

Dear Unbelieving Friends:

Forgive us! We have failed to love as we ought. We are broken, just like you. But Jesus is still worth knowing.

Hope

We are more than our bodies. We are more than our (Obese! Sinner!) labels. We are more than statistics. We are in fact sacred souls seeking a path through a polluted wasteland. We are hungry and not satisfied, grieving and not comforted, bound with chains of addiction and longing for liberation.

If I were writing for the show, This is Us, I would write Kate finding hope in Jesus rather than food. I would give her the realization that true satisfaction comes not from losing weight, but rather from finding peace with God and with her body. I would give her hope in having an identity that rejects stereotypes and discovers joy in pure and beautiful love that extends grace through the living person of a God so lovely He left the throne room of heaven to live among stinking Pharisees and helpless tax collectors in order to make a way for her to know true and lasting peace. Peace that is so rich that she would know she is wholly loved even if she never lost a single pound.

Our failures and weaknesses do not define us. Our broken hearts are not the end of the story. If we are willing to endure, our shattered dreams are the birth pains on the pathway to hope. Enduring, however, takes strength. And many times I just don’t have any.

For some odd reason, I am slow to process events and emotions. Where others react and retort, I simmer and internalize. Where some articulate and cuss, I try to measure my words. The reason for this is that my brain is slowly processing—like an old DOS computer grinding away at zeros and ones. Therefore I have somewhat of a slow build. After a conversation that upsets me, I find myself chewing over the words for hours and days. I measure the body language of the person I spoke with; considering what they said, and then I match the words, trying to determine what they really meant. Then I make mental notes that will help me speak to that person the next time without losing control of my tongue (as I did this past weekend).

I write all of this because my depression causes these analyses to breakdown, as they did yesterday, when I went bottom down and belly up emotionally. I lost all sense of rational thought and in my fear, anger and worry, I ran straight to the drive through for Chick-Fil-A ice cream. And it helped. Emotionally, in the moment, it really helped. The problem is, sugar is a physical trigger and once I start using it as a crutch it can cripple me pretty quickly.

I struggled to get out of bed this morning and not simply because I was tired. I am facing real life challenges at the moment and how I respond to them is important. There are no easy fixes and no quick resolutions. And though I want them to, my raw and powerful emotions refuse to be quieted. All I can do is suffer through each blip and bleep as my thoughts ebb and flow, and then try to anchor my hope in truth.

A good friend contacted me out of the blue yesterday and said I was on her mind. She reminded me that we must prepare for battle and then fight. I’ve been so busy drowning in my quicksand thoughts that I forgot that part. But this morning I dragged my sorry, sugar-saturated body out of bed and went running with my sword in hand (or to be more accurate, streaming through my earbuds).

I was listening to the truth when I remembered that my identity is not grounded in people or circumstances. My identity is grounded in my God. I re-learned that I am not powerless, though guilt-wracked from failure and ashamed of words I used in wrong ways. I am a child of the King, sincerely loved and abundantly victorious.

For all practical purposes I am facing some very real hills that must be climbed. And if you are reading this, maybe you are too. Sometimes I get to looking at the path before me and feel overwhelmed. But if I pry my gaze from the precipices to my right, and toward the heavens from whence my help always comes, I find that the hill isn’t so rocky or treacherous after all. What’s the worst thing that can happen? So I gain 10 pounds, I’m still a child of the King. So my enemies slander and lob mud-balls of hateful words at me, I’m still loved and atoned for. So depression digs in and refuses to abate, the biggest love in the universe has covered me with his feathers so I can find refuge under His wings. What does it mean to be loved by God? It means that I am safe—always and forever, even when I feel like utter garbage.

Today if you find no hope in these words because your body is wracked with anxiety, depression or real-world-job problems, remember that if you are God’s child, you are not abandoned. You may go bottom down and belly up, but as long as you live, you are cherished by Him. And while we certainly can’t understand in our groaning all the circumstances and pains He allows, we can rest in the knowledge that He has a purpose for them. I can also guarantee they are for your good because He is good.

The funeral is not the end of the story. The divorce is not the end of the story. The loss of your child is not the end of the story. He is faithful who promised. We simply have to trust.

Deuteronomy 31:6 “Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the LORD your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.”