“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it build itself up in love.”
~Ephesians 4:15-16~

One of the things I can no longer tolerate is a disembodied spirituality. It’s not enough anymore for me to spend hours of my life reading through YouTube comments. If you’ve ever wondered if you’re the only one suffering, I suggest you stay away from places like Instagram and Facebook. Go to instead to YouTube and Reddit, where people are much more freely real. I promise you’ll find ones with all kinds of problems.

There’s such a thing as compassion fatigue. You can experience, know of, and be personally surrounded by so much suffering that your soul will gradually begin to shut down. The human being can only take so much, and that “so much” is actually quite a lot to be sure. I can tell you with certainty that there is also such a thing as compassion anemia, where there’s not enough blood in your body to hold the love in your heart. Believe me, I have tried to ignore it, to bind up my heart and make myself as small as humanly possible, hoping shrinking myself down would be the cure for what ails me.

In the earlier days of motherhood, I’d come home from walking the empty streets. I remember seeing the blogs and entrepreneurship of women. They were simultaneously managing marriages, young children, homes, and personal-hobbies-turned-businesses. I wondered where they got their freedom, not in regards to time, but in their personal consciences. It’s not like these were secular women. They called themselves Christians. Surely they weren’t doing it all. Something was suffering. Something always does.

I was taught to be on guard against the siren calls of Satan. I remember a conversation I once had with another young mom and pastor’s wife. She was telling me how she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for others, how she wished she could do more and not be so inwardly focused on just her own life. I remember the feeling and the ways that I dealt with it. Mostly I just told myself that there was nothing more important I could be doing than raising my children. They needed me there, every minute of every day.

Discontentment with marriage and motherhood was the primary sign and symptom to watch out for. This is where the devil would get his foot in the heart’s door, to steal your joy, to kill deep love, and to ultimately destroy the entirety of your calling and personhood. The way I saw it, while I understood there were such things as joy and Christian freedom and Law and Gospel and liberty, there were only two choices when it came to my life: Keep watch, or fail to be the wife and mother God had called you to be.

Call it pride, call it sin, that the world religion of grace and mercy became for me the total opposite. If something wasn’t right, then there was something wrong with you, with me. In the darkest of moments I only had God, whatever figments and words of Jesus that still remained in my mind. I thought I was called to be holy and suffer. Keep going. Keep working. Do not let yourself become the one who calls it quits. Keep shrinking. Keep dying. Keep telling yourself this is what God’s good and gracious will for you looks like.

In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan writes, “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.” Indeed, the mighty chains are heavy.

How many times in a life can a person wander far from God? The more I live, O bless the Lord, the more the scales just keep on falling. It’s embarrassing to me to see the obvious ways I got things wrong. I want to curl up into his lap and rest my head upon his chest and say to him, “Never will I leave you, Lord. Never, Jesus. Never ever. Never will I foolishly forsake you again.” There comes this proverbial breaking point, where no matter how worldly or impurely selfish it sounds to say it, you have to be real and fully true to who you are.

I have no idea who started this, but even when Josh and I worked here, the counselors referred to each other as “male staff” and “female staff”. Over the recent beach weekend, floating by from the middle of the lake, one of female staff members shouted my way,

“That’s what we could do for choice activity! Yoga on the dock!”

She wasn’t necessarily even talking to me, but in the afternoon sun, as I came up out of my soft forward fold, instantly I saw evening and shade. I could see us spreading out on the sand with our towels. Within seconds the idea bounced back their direction.

“Yes. Or on the beach!”

And that’s as far as it went, which was fine by me. I love spontaneous ideas like this. Entering into the worlds of possibility and ideas…it’s like the video game I could play for hours and never get tired. Though nine times out of ten the idea drifts away, it satisfies my inner child, keeping the creative spark inside of me from completely dying out.

So when one of the girls approached me during breakfast this morning, asking if there was a particular day this week that would be good for me to lead beach yoga, I froze. This isn’t how things typically go in a day. Coming up with ideas like doing yoga on the dock or beach is the easy part, the fun part. She didn’t know what she was asking of me.

Get me with one or two people, and yes, we’re doing yoga on the beach, rubbing sand all over our bodies as a natural exfoliant, and running into the warm brown-watered lake to wash it off. Yoga on the beach would be “that time” to be forever remembered, and into the years of being old and grey, whenever we were together, we’d bring it up.

At first I told her I didn’t think I could do it, but I really wanted to do it, with them, for them, or if I did, I would have to get over my issues first. Yoga is another one of those things that sounds useless and trendy, but besides lots of time, rest, and the generous grace of God, it is something that has truly helped my body these past few months.

I told her I could do it, not today, but any of the others. While I was eating my breakfast I also started thinking that we could even use this choice activity time with the girls to talk about being created in the image of God and Jesus’s overflowing unconditional love for each one of us. In one day I’ve bitten off every nail I’ve grown and not been biting since April.

She was asking me to commit. She asking me to plan. She was asking me to think and work and show up. Those aren’t even the things that bothered me most. She was asking me to get over my much weaker self-confidence, at least when it comes to doing something different that I’m not used to. She was asking me to face my fears.

I have a fear of doing things in front of other people. And I’m happy to do it. Please. Finally. My own inner child has been driving me nuts. There comes a point when the child isn’t happy be a child anymore. They have to grow up. They have to be able to be something else other than little. They have to, they have to, they have to give back.

This afternoon we went down to the camp lake to swim. I slid off the dock into water chest high, half-expecting the sudden outward change to unpleasantly trip the inside of me. It didn’t happen this time, or the other two times I’ve gotten into the water. The kids played with counselors out on the lily pads while the adults interacted, watched, and relaxed. There’s a weightlessness to the body when it’s surrounded by water.

I tiptoed around before leaning in for a few crawl strokes. I was mostly there just to not be in bed, to see if even though I didn’t feel good enough to walk down, maybe the sunlight would help me somehow. It was a good past week, but I think I may have slightly overdid it with the socializing. I pay for overdoing it in the following days. So I was there to get in, and swim a few crawl strokes. Mostly I just walked and breathed.

Little by little clearer thoughts come to mind. I told Josh that I’ve been thinking about this in terms of healed or not healed. Instead it’s almost more helpful to think of each day as presenting opportunities for healthy coping with life or unhealthy coping. God gives us something to get us through for each day, including little moments throughout our days for fun and sunshine.

Summer used to be a time when all the kids were home at once. The ones who weren’t in school were home with me, while the school aged kids were gone from 8-3:10. After the out-the-door rush came seven quieter hours with lesser activity. The school days breezed by fairly fast, but typically with enough time to catch a decent deep breath.

I don’t remember missing my kids, but I remember being so happy when school was out for the summer. When I was a kid at the beginning of summer, I can remember my mom wondering about what she was going to do with us kids. She signed us up for VBS. We spent several weeks at the free town park day camp. We took swimming lessons at Palatine Park in the mornings and spent afternoons and glistening evenings there.

The summer mom-dread was unknown until we moved here to camp. After two and a half months of homeschooling from March through mid-May, I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly handle having all my kids home again throughout the entire summer. Though we lived at a camp where our kids could go for free, I remember looking up the prices of the local Lutheran day camp, an option completely out of our price range.

I’ve been to the beach twice this year, but not to swim. Right now I can only walk down, but not up, as the way back is almost completely uphill. Even so, walking down is more than I could do even two months ago, which for that, I am thankful. It’s hard when I start to remember what isn’t.

I often hear comparison is the thief of joy. I recently connected this statement to my occasional tendency to compare my current weaker and limited self to my walking down and back to the beach easily and swimming almost daily in the summer with my kids self. The effect depends on who I’m comparing myself to. I can stand up straight. I’m not crawling to the bathroom or watching my mom set up a closer commode.

I think I’m getting better at acknowledging thoughts or feelings, and then letting them pass. Gone are the days of me trying to be a who I am not, of not allowing myself to exist as who I am. They say joy and pain will and can exist together. I’ve never liked that about life, but it’s also good to be alive.

I miss the kids when they’re gone. It takes me half the summer before feeling something other than like I’m aimlessly wandering around half-lost. This past week I walked down to the dining hall and back with a mom-friend. Before she left I mentioned not being back to normal. She said I was looking and seeming perfectly normal again. It’s weird how we have things about us others can’t see. I think at times it’s for the best.

I realize that most people never get the chance to take a year off of life to focus on themselves and their health and recovery. The year reference is a meaningless number I made up based on a rough estimate on where I might be in six months if I continued at the same rate I’m currently going. Nearly six months into this somewhat of a mystery illness/condition, I am wondering what the purpose of my life is right now.

I wrote an article on loneliness and never heard back. As I’ve thought about it more, it was potentially one of those times where what I said was too much, too morbid and troublesome. A girl recently described her growth regarding her understanding of vulnerability. She said she had to learn to stop bleeding all over people who never stabbed her. Some people have described the act of writing as bleeding onto the page.

Whatever writing is, it is something I must do to be healthy, to keep living as the person I continue to be. I watched the camp kids play capture the flag tonight, completely amazed by their speed and abilities. It made me physically uncomfortable to watch them, my body somehow interpreting what it would be like to try to run. If I never run again, I think I could be okay with that. It’s a process of being slowly okay with things.

Monday we all made it to the baseball game. The boys and I came later once the game was started. They carried ponchos and umbrellas off to the bleachers while I stayed in the car and listened to the radio and watched the game. After about a half hour I went a little closer and sat in the grass for another half hour, feeling very much at home. I got up to leave just about the time the tornado sirens went off and they called the game.

God and I have been spending lots of quality time alone together. This is one of the ways I’ve reframed this situation to make it feel a little more comforting. “Wow, God, you must have really just wanted to spend so much extra time with me right now.” I’m so used to interpreting any type of pain I feel as God loving me, based on that verse about God disciplining the son he loves. And yet, that right there is one of those hidden heart places where I’ve been so wrong. There are pains that have nothing to do with love, and it is only by an act of God’s actual love that you can ever be free from them.

The thing is, me reframing my reality doesn’t make the truth any more or less true. God wants to be with us whether we realize it or not, whether we see him or not, whether we want to be anywhere near him or not. He wants to know us wants us to know him. Last week I finished watching season one of The Chosen. Recently I went back and watched where Jesus heals and hugs a leper. How lowly is the heart of God for sinners.

I’ve been reading about spiritual warfare lately. The book I started today is called Understanding the Wounded Heart by Marcus Warner, which I didn’t realize was about spiritual warfare when I ordered it. Two other books I’ve recently read and spent time rereading are The Adversary: The Christian Versus Demon Activity by Mark Bubeck and Warfare Praying, also by Mark Bubeck.

The term and concept of spiritual warfare is based on the passage in Ephesians where Paul states that, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

The sinful flesh, the world, and the devil and his demons are all elements in which the Christian will encounter warfare and are called to wrestle against. I’m still digesting, but several things have stood out to me so far.

1. The devil is a liar. Unless our minds are routinely bathed in the words of Jesus and the truth of his word our minds become saturated with lies that consciously and subconsciously control our behavior.
   
2. The truth is stronger than lies. Mark Bubeck uses the term “doctrinal prayers”, in which our prayers are not simply crying out to God for help or deliverance but declaring in faith who God is and what we know or have been told is true about Christ and his work.
   
3. Who we are in Christ is an actual thing. Our identity has changed (About that…that “identity” that you’ve somehow found yourself attached to, that bothers you so much, that causes you to fear or dislike yourself and keeps coming back over and over again? Has God ever said that about you? No? Then forget about it). Again in Ephesians, Paul tells his readers that no longer are they strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. We are part of God’s family. The death and resurrection of Jesus joined us to Christ and made us part of his body.
   
   The Christian life is one of daily remembering who we are, of joining in with the fellow saints and singing, “You are my Lord, I have no good apart from you” (Psalm 16:2).

I don’t think any Christian ever wakes up saying, “God, you’re great, but I’m all about living in my own strength today.”

Still not 100% here, still a ways from it from my perspective, but last time I wrote I said I’d given that up. I wish I felt better than I did. I am praying for healing, not just physically, but for all these different parts of myself. I’m having a few more tests done this week so I’m praying to get some more direction and that it’s nothing too scary. I’m also trying to take the words from my gentle yoga video into account where she says to treat yourself with compassion and not let yourself get into too much of a place of expectation or defeat.

To let it be as it is.

Sorry to be self-absorbed (okay, that’s an outside label I’m going to have to deal with at some point), but one thing that’s kept me busy these months is sitting with my progressive thoughts. This is going to sound obsessive but something I have taken interest in is how cycles repeat themselves. In this case I’m talking about the thought patterns linked to the day of whatever day I’m on in my menstrual cycle.

This really happens.

I’ve never considered myself much of a control freak. I don’t want to control anybody else anymore than I want to be controlled. But I also don’t like when I can’t control things, or rather, when things don’t go the way I want.

In reality it’s never that direct.

I don’t like when I put effort towards something, and it fails to produce the results I am after. I feel like our society is based on a system that works, produces, and then succeeds. I honestly don’t know how to not think like this.

But aiming for success sets a person up for failure. And if you’re trying to succeed, the absolute last thing you want, the thing that will drive you crazy and lead you straight into despair faster than probably anything else, is failure.

I don’t understand this part of myself. I’m not a control freak. I’m not a type A.

I’m a type B living with so many different variables that even I struggle at times to be laid back.

(To all the control freaks out there, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t like to be called that, which is probably why I keep denying that I am one. I’d rather be known as something else.)

But I am a perfectionist. Which means I’ve have had to spend my life trying to figure out how to deal with the fact this world isn’t perfect, including me.

(Right. Right. Right. But I tried!)

Oh no. I’m not going there this time. This isn’t about me having to now go back to the drawing board, back to the journal to figure out what I need to change about myself, what part of myself needs to be ignored, denied, stuffed down, locked away, tweaked, worked on, adjusted, “surrendered”, joked about, and examined in order to survive.

Because while even in my Christian life Jesus was not enough for me (again, it’s never ever that direct), he’s enough for me now, even though I’m still doing it. I’m still noticing and still talking about where things aren’t right and trying to say where I want them now. In the meantime God shows me how they already are. God has always been enough for me. His is the perfection I want, that I have because he freely shared it.

The kids made cookies this afternoon. Between the chilly temps and the falling snow, it seemed to them a cooking making kind of day. This morning they watched another snow documentary, which they ended up telling me later they had already seen. I had to leave this morning to go to a chiropractor appointment. The documentary was shown in honor of the snow, but also to fill the half hour space between when I had to leave and when dad would be home. I’m thankful for the presence his job has allowed.

This present “season” has put a little more space between me and the kids. It’s not something I sought or even necessarily felt like I needed, but rather has become a practical necessity in dealing with my various appointments and needs. I have to say, it was rather abrupt, and something I didn’t have the energy to process, fight, or even worry too much about. If it weren’t for the still small voice saying, “Trust me”, I might have been or might still be a little more upset about it, the way it happened so fast.

I’ve moved out of the phase of waiting for 100% to return tomorrow. 100% may look different from now on, meaning there might in fact be a new normal for me. It’s not just a physical difference I notice in terms of limitation, it’s an emotional one. It’s like an entire layer in my range of emotion has been shaved off. With frustration. With sadness. Physically I can’t get too excited. From my bed, I was FaceTiming with my mom and sisters. Personality wise the energy, elation, and laughter is there, but it’s almost like my body cannot contain it. My legs were shaking the entire time we talked.

That being said I’m still feeling and seeing improvement. It’s just been slow. Last month at this time it’d been a little bit over a week without Xanax, something that a month before would’ve seemed possible only in the presence of God and miracles. The journal entries gradually morphed from “7:30AM-Yuck” and “2:00PM-Crazy awfulness” to “made it till 11AM without a pill” to “4PM-still doing alright”. This month I attended the Easter vigil service and watched my son get confirmed from the cry room. I went to my son’s first baseball game last Monday and watched from the car. I haven’t been back.

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
~Romans 8:37~

I am not normally a TV or even much of a movie person. I get bored and (or because I???) have a hard time following along with the plots. But when I was at my parents’ house in January my mom introduced me to a show called The Chosen. I wasn’t much able to tolerate being out of my bed so she set up the TV upstairs for me. We watched the first episode of Season 1 together which is about the story of Mary Magdalene.

You need to watch this show. The storylines are all about real people and the lives Jesus is calling them out of to follow him. The way Jesus is portrayed in these shows is now my favorite screen portrayal of Jesus. He is the most human Jesus I have seen. He is kind. He is gentle. He knows everything about the people around him and is not afraid of them or their problems. He is not put off by human beings. He loves them.

I haven’t finished watching Season 1 yet but I have now watched episodes 1, 2, and 3 of Season 2 which were extremely moving and well done. May God’s love be shared and may many be blessed.