God Still Does Obvious Miracles

Today was just a good day, quite ordinary and unremarkable.  There was nothing fantastic or horrible about it.  I relished this day.  Driving down the road with the wind blowing in through the open window and the air conditioner on full blast while drinking iced coffee on my way to a therapy appointment for one of my little guys, found me smiling.  I am grateful for these days sprinkled in my life and at times poured in.  I have been in need of a day like this.

About a month ago something amazing happened to me.  It didn't make all my future days wonderful and normal, but it has changed my life in an area I had given up hope in ever getting any better. 

It's been a lot of years since I've read the Bible and felt safe doing so.  I didn't know what was wrong with me and it became one more guilt item on my list proving what a lousy Christian I was, if I even was one.  Because of course all Christians read the Bible, and I didn't, so what did that mean?  Once I learned about triggers and flashbacks I realized that hearing and reading the Bible was one of my many triggers.  That explained a lot; except it didn't fix it.

For the last two and a half years other things have been the main focus in counseling.  My inability to read the Bible, without being triggered or having intense fear associated with it, has been the elephant in the room that would stampede anytime it was poked at.  For a long time I could barely tolerate hearing the Bible read.  It wasn't much of an issue until the last few years because I was so disconnected(dissociated) that I didn't hear much of anything that happened at church between the opening and closing "Amens" anyway. 

I spent Monday and Tuesday of the first week of June 2015 spell checking an introductory book on post millennial eschatology, The Covenantal Kingdom, by Ralph Smith for my pastor.  I've pointedly avoided eschatology up until now, but for some reason I wanted to read this book, not just spell check it.  The ideas that came out loud and clear in the portion I read of the book was the love of God for me, and his greatness.

I also spent more than a week with at least 10 attempts of trying to listen all the way through the        sermon from Pentacost Sunday, but I kept falling asleep by or before the five or six minute mark.  Tuesday night I made it almost through the whole sermon and finally heard the part of the sermon that when I had heard it on Sunday made me want to think more about it, but at the time I couldn't hang on to it long enough.  I knew I would recognize it when I heard it again, but I didn't expect to be overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit at that point in the sermon, or at all. 

"When the fire of God descends on the people of God, there is no distance between God and his people.  There is no distance."

At that point everything was different.  I was crying, but I didn't know why.  I'm not sure which came first.  It was a flooding of feeling that finally connected me to what I've said I knew about God.  It was God's love, his greatness and his nearness suddenly becoming real all at once and it made me cry, but it didn't hurt or scare me.  It was like a switch got flipped and I felt it, and in that moment, fear and dread about reading the Bible or hearing it read was gone, and in its place was a desire and hunger to read it.  I wasn't afraid of it hurting me anymore.  I felt open and safe like I was in the country after being in the city for a long time.  A weight was gone and even though I was crying, I could breathe easier.

The things I've acknowledged about God to be true, but couldn't believe it in a deeper and more personal way are real now.  It wasn't anything I did to get some emotion going.  That's not me.  I believe that the Holy Spirit unlocked something in me, took away my fear of reading the Bible and gifted me with feeling God's love, greatness and nearness and a desire to read the Bible.  I've been reading in Acts for a while now.  I'm also looking forward with anticipation to reading actual scripture to my little guys and teaching them intentionally about God using a real Bible curriculum.  I was unable to do that with my older children. 

The timing was odd in how I needed to read a good chunk out of that book and hear the sermon at the same time before everything happened.  God didn't let me listen to that sermon again until he put in my head a bunch more about his greatness and love from Ralph Smith's book.  The idea of the nearness of God has always been a fearful thing to me, but not anymore.  For days afterward I was smiling and it was an at ease sort of smile, at peace.  It's been over a month now; concerns of life have wiped the constant smile off my face, but I can still read the Bible and want to, and that peace keeps coming back and the smile shows up too.

My story isn't finished, so I can't have that happily ever after ending just yet, but I know it will be there someday.

Pre-Written Prayers Are Reusable and Helpful Too

Growing up IFB(Independent Fundamental Baptist) I was taught that the only real prayers were those you prayed on the spot.  It was clearly said that any accidental recordings of prayers weren't able to be prayed again because they could only be prayed once.  Of course the Psalms were never seen as any type of prayer.  The "Lord's Prayer" wasn't a real prayer either; it was just a model of how we were to pray.  The older I grew the more restrictions and rules there were that applied to how to properly pray to God.  I didn't have to use thee's and thou's, but if I did evidently God required grammatical consistency in order to be pleased with my prayer, and I couldn't mix in a 'you' anywhere.

By the time I reached my early 20's I stopped praying.  I was too afraid I'd do it wrong and incur God's wrath for my presumption in prayer.  I would pray for specific requests for people in great need or pain.  Eventually pastors caught on that people prayed for things and weren't praying all the other proper sorts of prayers that were divided correctly into whatever the right way to pray was.  So for a while in my 20's and early 30's I heard more about how wrong it is to use God as only someone to ask things from, but not talk to him in any other way in prayer.  Big push on prayer, not prayer requests.  Once again I altered the way I prayed and only prayed for life or death issues. 

Imagine my surprise when we began going to a different church and I observed men going up to pray from the pulpit with their prayer already written out.  Now I knew that sort of thing happened at Bob Jones University in chapel, but I counted that as a speech requirement for the 'preacher boys' and never considered they were praying for real.  But here this was a real church and they had written prayers?  Baptist love to talk about the slippery slope, but seeing prayers written out and prayed in a meaningful way in public for the first time was a first step in a long theological journey away from fundamentalism.

I still don't pray my own original prayers, except on rare occasions, but I'm learning to pray the prayers that others have written.  Here is one that fits me pretty well right now.

Sustain Me in the Coming Then

O God, empty me of angry judgments,
   and aching disappointments,
         and anxious trying,
and breathe into me
   something like quietness
         and confidence,
that the lion and the lamb in me
   may lie down together
         and be led by a trust
as straightforward as a little child.

Catch my pride and doubt off guard
that, at least for the moment,
I may sense your presence
   and your caring,
and be surprised
   by a sudden joy
        rising in me now
to sustain me in the sudden then.

from Guerrillas of Grace by Ted Loder

How God is Becoming More Real to Me

How is God real to me?  It sounds like an odd question to ask, maybe *gasp* like something a seeker friendly church would have a little pamphlet on.  I can't help any similarities there may be.  I must remind myself that God cares and look for those ways He shows himself to be real, not just a far off God who doesn't hear.  I can't reconcile my pleading prayers when I was being abused and His apparent deafness, to the teaching that God is present and hears our prayers and loves us.  When I try to think through both things I get trapped in a loop of flashbacks.  It's not a good place to be.

What I can do is to look for God's hands in my life today and then in the more recent past.  If I go back too much farther; I run into problems, big ones like: does God love me, did he love me back then, what about protection, is God really good, how sovereign is he anyway, and God was present but did nothing.  The way I can skip over those type of questions is for me to look at all the evil in the world being done to people of all ages and then remind myself that I'm nothing special to rate some divine protection.  There are Christians being murdered and abused for their faith.  I had it pretty easy in comparison. Somehow I'm not sure this is the way to handle it.  It ends up with me viewing God as a distant and uncaring God who is big into consequences.  So then I'm back to completely ignoring my own past, beyond the last few years, and disregarding today's present persecution of Christians unless I put it into a "suffering for Christ" category.

Today I look for God's caring in my life.  I see it in the meals brought to us by families in our church; in the freshly mowed grass because all of our mowers are broken and my husband now works out of town; in the concern being shown to us as one of our children is suffering from head trauma; texts, phone calls, getting together to just talk; in so many kindnesses big and small; and the fact that I can't disappear from church or blend into the background because I have become a part of this body. All this and so much more are evidences to me that God cares.  I see it through the tangible touch and actions of Christians who are God's arms around me in difficult times, in times of change and in the mundane of everyday life.

Another aspect of God that I see is that of Him working in me to change in a myriad of ways. Something is said repeatedly over a long period of time in many different ways and places until one day I hear it again but now it is accompanied by that uneasy feeling of guilt.  It's a different sort of guilt than the one that goes along with being abused.  It's one that causes you to realize this is talking about me and this is my sin.  To avoid dealing with this sin guilt is not a good thing.  Slowly my eyes and ears are being opened.  I'm sure this is God at work showing me what needs to be confessed and repented of.  Easier said than done, though.

God is becoming more real to me through His church, specifically and mainly the church I'm a member of.  I'm thankful for mp3 players, blogs, facebook posts, email, texting, and twitter.  All this tech provides more ways for me to hear again what God is trying to tell me.  It doesn't sink in the first time around I hear it in a worship service or in counseling.  God is patient with me and I've seen His gentleness towards me in the last two years.  I can be in church now and rarely dissociate anymore, and the triggers are seldom a problem.  A lot has changed in the last six months from what my church experiences were two years ago or one year ago.  May God continue His work.

Writing In Order To Do Battle

I can't find the answer to this, but I've been wondering about it for the last several days.  Wondering to the point of almost panicly worrying.  Does PTSD come and go?  For me that has been my experience, but I can't find anyone else saying the same thing.  I've wondered about this for years now, ever since a doctor gave me a word for what was happening to me.  I'm a bit funny with the way I describe things not realizing its something "real" and enough other people have had the same thing going on that they gave it a name.  Just this past year I discovered the word dissociate and what it was, and lo and behold it's what I've been calling "zoning", "being gone somewhere" or "losing time".  I have a great fear of re-entering the battle and once again ending up in those dark places where I lose my way.  I stopped writing when I got to a comfortable place.  God is held at arms length, but I can catch glimpses of Him in church on Sunday and through the overwhelming kindness of my church family.  It's a safe place in my journey, but I'm being nudged along to go farther.

I haven't been writing, anywhere, and that concerns me a bit, in the sense that it should concern me, but it doesn't--not really.  I write when I'm actively dealing with things and I haven't written in months.  I've been asked to make a list of fears and concerns to work through in counselling.
I would say "challenged", but that just sounds too baptist to me.  Of course to me it's not just a list, it's the contents of the boxes I've been dragging around all these years.  In some ways its the monsters in my closets that have come so close to destroying me in the past.  I use the word past in a way that includes not only my personal ancient past, but my recent past too.  Just yesterday I read two bloggers who posted on the topic of writing either directly or indirectly.  One of them sounds like he is fairly close to where I am in my own journey while the other one is in a place that often seems unattainable to me.  Both of them are writers that speak to me in the deep places of my soul.  http://redemptionpictures.com/2014/09/12/when-writing-is-an-act-of-hope/
http://messytheology.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/when-there-are-no-words/

Writing for me has always been cathartic.  I started my first little diary in third grade.  I still had it, up until almost four years ago when our house burned down.  As an adult, reading that first diary I ever kept, brought back memories, good and bad.  Almost all the good things in there involved going to my grandma's house, the food she made, the stories she told and helping her hang out laundry, pick apples and watch her work in her garden.  When I was old enough to not pull plants instead of weeds, I was actually allowed to go in the garden.  Other events I wrote about I remember writing carefully in case my diary was ever stolen and read.  My careful writing at age 9 wasn't careful enough and I got in trouble for what I wrote.  I didn't keep a diary again until 5th grade.  I learned my lesson and wrote carefully and left out the most ugly parts.  Yet years later reading my diary from elementary I again saw those events I so carefully edited in my writing, and the memories invoked were not edited.
The power of the written word is incredible.  And those were just my own childish writings, yet they held the key to my memory, to my own story.

By 7th grade I was writing furiously and unedited, except for the terrible secret I carried that I couldn't write about even in my own journal.  The raw anger flowed from my pen and filled spiral notebooks.  Anger, hurt, and betrayal, along with the pettiness of junior high drama, were my themes. I wrote for me and only me.  I wrote to keep my sanity and a place to siphon off the anger and rage that threatened to tear me apart.  My anger grew as my understanding of what had happened to me grew.  I never gave it a word until 2003.  I couldn't name it.  I was too afraid.  The anger was too powerful and I barely kept it in check through my writing.  By 9th grade I was learning to control the anger through other means and harness it.  I made good use of it and the abuse at home finally stopped, for me.  Still I wrote.  My survival depended upon it.

I wrote all through high school and into college at Bob Jones University, where I again looked for help and thought I found it.  I would have been better off to have kept writing and skipped the counselling.  The times I stopped writing were the times I was being successful at locking down all my boxes and shutting off emotions.  But of course anger was a main component of all the boxes and anger can only be contained for so long.  Thus the cycle of writing while depressed, angry and trying to close back the boxes that another counseling attempt had opened began.  I haven't written anywhere for a few months.  It's been different this time though.  At least one of my monsters has been destroyed and not all emotion has been cut off.  I think I've been experiencing life the way that other people do, to a point.  Real emotions have still been in play.  I've cried and didn't shut it off with anger.  I can't remember doing that before.  It's been incredible to smile and cry and not have to do my usual routine in order to "be normal".  I like it.  The problem is that this is only a plateau and there is a long journey still ahead.  I've been content here for long enough.  It was a nice break from the battle, but it's time to re-engage.  Once again, I write.

Forgiveness Without Coercion: What does it look like?

If anyone would have told me 6 months ago that I would be in contact with a former counselor and forgiveness would be brought up, and the end result would be a good one; I never would have believed it.  For the first time in my life someone asked for my forgiveness and didn't try to avoid responsibility or turn it back on me and make it out to be my fault in any way.  I am still in shock.  I've never experienced anything like this in my life. (There has been one other person, but that happened outside of the IFB/BJU world and the whole process was much simpler.)

Forgive  It's one of those major trigger words that can easily lead to full blown flashbacks.  Except this time it didn't.  I'm not say it wasn't triggering and that I didn't have flashbacks, but because of the other persons response to me the flashbacks didn't become debilitating.  I did lose some time( the name I've used to describe dissociation for 20 years, before I knew there was a name for it) but overall it was just a beautiful demonstration of what the process of forgiveness and reconciliation can look like.  This may not sound like a positive experience, but it was and is.   It was hard work and took the better part of three days.  At the beginning of this renewed contact  I had no inkling where it would go.  At first I received a somewhat generic request for my forgiveness without the other person really comprehending what it was they were asking my forgiveness for.  Back and forth we went until I was concise and specific enough that the only option left would be to dodge it, turn it back on me, or accept responsibility.  Amazingly, the responsibility was accepted and forgiveness still asked for and then granted.  By the end, I actually wanted to forgive and I wasn't guilted into it.

Wow!  If this were to happen for everyone; what a different world we would be in.  Granted, this is only one person and not even my original abuser, but the effect this persons counsel had on me was far reaching and life threatening.  For this person to acknowledge the harm, is such a huge deal for me.  I never thought it possible.  Maybe, just maybe, others will follow suit for me and for others.  And maybe the hurt, and the fear, and the never ending guilt can begin to be assuaged, for all of us.  As to the teacher that abused me in elementary school, I doubt he would know genuine repentance if it ran over him, but that is a topic for another post.

Maybe someday I will be at a point where I can read the Bible without being severely triggered and spiraling into either dissociation or flashbacks.  For now I'm ok with enjoying the good things in life and being thankful to God for the beauty I see.  The GRACE investigation set off a chain of events in my life that is truly life changing.  I have to face the past or be crushed by it. It's a slow road to healing and agonizing at times, but I think I have hope that it is possible.

Vulcan Mind Meld During the Sermon

Do you ever listen to a pastor when they start off a sermon and the topic is going to cover suffering and wonder if this time things will make sense? I do. I listen and I watch him preach as though I could do a Vulcan mind meld from my seat and suck the understanding about all kinds of suffering straight through his eyes and into my heart. Sometimes the topic does cover what I'm wondering about and it is a huge help knowing that the pastor "gets it" and yet I'm still left with questions.

• How does God use sin sinlessly?
• Did God plan sin? Is he sovereign over all?
• Did God allow sin? He didn't plan on it, but he can make it work.
• Does God listen to the prayers of those who will be saved or does he not listen until they actually are saved?
• I can understand suffering for Christ, that's in the Bible.
• I can't understand suffering without a point to it. The point can't be--You suffer so you can help others who suffer. That's just circular reasoning.

I know God is sovereign. If I didn't believe that; then I couldn't trust God for anything, not even salvation. I just don't know how to understand the sovereignty of God in relation to my own suffering. I didn't suffer because of persecution and standing for Christ. I suffered because of someone elses sin. How can God use that? There has to be more than II Corinthians 1:3-4. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
What about verses five through seven which continue the thought of suffering for Christ? For as we share abundantly in Christ's suffering, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

These verses are talking about suffering for Christ and yet are used to "help" people with all kinds of suffering that have nothing to do with persecution. I don't get it. This is where I just can't wrap my mind around God's sovereignty and my suffering. I have to separate it and know that somehow I'm just not understanding something. But I want to understand, hence the Vulcan mind meld stare during sermons.
Another question I have concerns the timing of when God listens. Did he not "listen" to me all those times I was begging and crying out to God in my mind? Was I not one he listened to yet because I wasn't his child? Does he listen to those who will be his child? How was I viewed by God? Was it as his child even though my salvation was years in the future or not as his child because my salvation was years in the future?
These are not just intellectual arguements and hypothetical questions. These are questions that drive me to understand who God is. These questions also tear at me. There has to be answers, doesn't there?