Then GOD

I’m supposed to be dead (or at least drooling).

In recovery 6/2003

Nearly ten years ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor that should have left me a drooling, limping parody of myself, assuming I lived. Instead, God healed me and when they opened me up they found only a desiccated and calcified mass where there had been a viable, entrenched tumor only the day before. That isn’t the story I want to tell today but it is important that you know I experienced a very real physical healing. 

I have been healed. I understand the power of a good and gracious God and of accepting whatever it is that God allows to come your way. I understand how to give thanks in bad circumstances. Then, as so many of us do, I forgot.

Sometimes, that’s what happens after the miracle.

I had a lot to live for.

The fourteen hour surgery in which they used a chisel to pick away at the now-dead tumor had some pretty severe consequences. I left the hospital with a new diagnosis: epilepsy. I had terrible seizures. They left me breathless, panting and paralyzed on the entire right side of my body for hours and hours at a time. I would only start to regain some tiny fraction of movement in my fingers and toes before the next seizure would hit. I was devastated. This new fear was more than I could handle – not knowing when or where the next one would strike was horrible. It was days before they found the right cocktail of drugs to control these attacks and, when they did, the medicines were awful in their own right and caused me to gain weight, lose my hair, and – eventually- fall into a deep depression.

Enough background. More story.

Trauma opens doors to things that Jesus came to free us from and Christians fall prey to things like depression and fear, too. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. While everyone who knew my story up to that point was still singing praises to God for the miracle, my life was absolutely ruled by fear. I never knew when the next seizure would strike and I lived for two years as a shut in- afraid to drive, afraid to boil water unless another adult was home for fear my toddler would try and ‘help’ if I had a seizure and burn himself or his brother. My nightmares were endless. Instead of being thankful for the miracle, I began to resent God for the seizures. I was okay with dying, but that wasn’t good enough for God! And, instead of becoming a drooling, limping parody of myself, I became an embittered and hateful perversion of myself.

Then God.

Then God  (and now you know the story gets good because now it is His) had mercy on me: this bitter, tangled and scribbled-on creation of His. He found me standing over a pile of dirty underwear, with a fist full of dryer lint and whispered, “This is not who I intended you to be.”  He told me to get over my fear and remember what I was called to: the hope, the courage, the joy, the sheer glory that was Him. When I worried my husband would leave me (because isn’t that the curse of women and the great lie of the enemy?) God told me that He would take care of my children and I because we belonged to Him and He didn’t need a husband to do it. Then, I can’t describe it in any other way, except that He breathed courage into me.

I began to obey. I started training my children as if every day were my last, I started praying again, I started studying the Word, remembering.  I started living thankfully again. Do you know what happened after I began to obey and give thanks? God healed me of the epilepsy, too. But that isn’t the biggest miracle. Let me show you something- When I was preparing this entry, I found an old journal and this excerpt from August of 2003, struck me as somewhat prophetic:

“Everybody looks into the mirror but nobody notices the mirror itself. They are naturally drawn to the image reflected in the surface. So through this [difficult season], my 'look-at-me' personality must be sure to say instead 'look-at-God'. All it takes is a little tilt. God is, perhaps, trying to shift my axis."                                                                 

I firmly believe that the biggest miracle I have seen in my life is this heart-change, this shift of my axis, this turn to thankfulness and obedience, this God-life that now thrives where my broken life used to flail its tiny, closed fists against the world. This God-Life is a restored and healthy marriage, it is children who love and are loved, it is a broken dream re-made, it is a renewed call to ministry, it is a second chance to reflect what is important instead of what is broken. It is the ability to find what God is doing in the middle of this messy world and get on board.

So, if we are mirrors- and we are!- what do we reflect? Do we reflect the troubles, strife, and ugly ingratitude of this world? Or do we reflect God and all that comes with Him? Justice and mercy, unbridled joy and soul-rending sorrow, humble obedience and fearless pursuit of the Father’s Will? Is it possible to change our axis? I believe so because I’ve lived it. It took years, but I was finally able digest the enormity of what happened to me and the lessons learned from that season are so far-reaching that they still show up in my own desert places, fresh manna for today. And I am so very thankful for it. 

Why is this so important to me? First and foremost, this idea of giving thanks was important to Jesus.

Eucharisteo – It is found throughout the New Testament 39 times. To offer a little perspective, the word euangelion which is most often translated with phrases like, “Good News” and “gospel” only appears 76 times in the New Testament and that's the theme of the New Testament!.  Jesus gave thanks often and publicly, as well as often and privately, to God. It’s enough to make someone wonder why.

I think it stems from the Garden where ingratitude and distrust became the foundation from which Satan launched his assault on this world. When we remember to thank God – for the small, specific things as well as the bigger, broader strokes – it loosens Satan’s hold on us. For that matter, if we give thanks we are no longer reflecting what is wrong in our lives but what is Good and what is God. We reflect God’s goodness into this dark world! We loosen Satan’s hold on the world and thankfulness becomes a vessel of the Kingdom of God – putting God’s rule and reign front and center in our lives for any who care to see.

When we can find something to be thankful for, it opens our eyes to another and another and another. It is in these seemingly barren landscapes that our souls are nourished. It is when this broken and messed up world tries to starve our spirits that God sends manna from Heaven and we can choose to eat it and be nourished or to close our hands and hearts to what He brings and waste away. It is in these difficult times we learn that God is good, all the time, no matter what is happening around us and even to us. 


You are invited to the table. Come and eat. The meals here in the Kingdom are never the served the same way twice.

Monsters Under the Bed, Part 2

I decided long ago to live open, stay kinetic, and be brave. Yesterday’s post was hard, though. It was too fresh, too new of a revelation, and too raw of a hurt. The funny thing was that I didn’t know that fear existed in me before yesterday! It took a bad case of Writer’s Block and some Divine Drain-O to figure it out. Then it was even harder posting it because blogging, for me, isn’t an anonymous endeavor. I am a volunteer pastor at a local church and many of them read this blog.  I also write the small group curriculum and often use concepts that initially hammered out here. So last night, at small group, I had the dubious privilege of sharing one of my deepest, darkest fears with 15 other people (and which ever of the 45 other small groups in our church used this week’s curriculum).  I wanted to go home and hide under my covers and never come out again. It was horrifying and awful but, at the risk of sounding cliché, I knew that God wanted me to do it.

Now, I don’t know if God used that story to help anyone else significantly. Topics like fighting fear with love usually take seed slowly and grow even slower (obviously!)- I suspect that I won’t know if my words had an impact on anyone for years. I hope they did, though, because I know God used them to help me. Articulating my fears forced me to admit that they existed, turn them around, examine them and understand them.

Then God pulled one of his “God Things” out and taught me a lesson or two.

Mere hours after I posted about Monsters Under the Bed, gifts started showing up. Gifts that took time and energy to make. Gifts that said, “I know who you are!” from people whom I’d never shared this fear with before.  Last night a boxed gift set and a gift card to a restaurant and a kindly worded note, a rare smile from a sad-eyed woman I’ve often prayed for, a chance to hold a long-anticipated baby boy, a card in the mailbox with another gift, and this morning a box of handcrafted soaps and lotions. I know when a so-called coincidence is not a coincidence. These weren’t just gifts that were purchased in haste because of a perceived pity party.

And you were there, and you were there, and..

God KNEW!  I’m so humbled and amazed by a God who has given me my heart’s desire and then took the time to help me see it: a community that has embraced me and my quirky family completely. I still struggle with that fear but it is diminished now. The day He asked me to confront it was the day he crushed its head with, of all things, humble pie as I realized that what I longed for was mine all along. And humble pie never tasted so good. It was very Wizard Of Oz.

It made me think of God in a whole new light. Well, perhaps not. Perhaps it is better to say it helped me understand Him in a whole new way because my head often “knows” what my heart cannot yet comprehend. Today as I looked at our Christmas tree with all of its shining ornaments, I envisioned God much like a parent at Christmas time. Grinning in anticipation as He wraps a gift while listening to an angelic chorus caroling in the background (but it has to be a live chorus because he’s God and probably doesn’t need an iPod). Maybe there’s even a glass of wine. Either way, the gifts He has prepared for me are for me alone. I just have to wait til he gives them. Or, in this case, until he shows me how to play with them.

Thank you, God, for community. Thank you for friends. Thank you for a place to belong. I see them now. And Merry Christmas to you, too.

Monsters Under the Bed

I am afraid of needles. In fact, I passed out when I got my ears pierced! I don’t think that makes me a coward, though, because I have killed poisonous snakes, climbed mountains, been in an airplane that was on fire, and stood face to face with a gun wielding gang member without panicking. I just don’t like needles.  Or motorcycles (to be fair, I think that’s more logic than fear). It’s easy to laugh at our idiosyncrasies and pretend they are the sum of our fears but we all know there are scarier things than spiders. Individual fears are the proverbial Monster Under the Bed. They lurk until we are alone, lying in the dark, recounting our day for God, weighing each thing carefully.  Fear is the Joy Stealer, Heart Crusher, and the Dream Destroyer. It bites our heels and hisses in our ears. It binds our hearts and breaks our lines. Fear is a thief.

What do you fear?

I fear not fitting in. I fear that everyone around me has such good friendships that have grown over a life time of living in one place that I, as a relative newcomer and ARMY brat, will never be able to understand on a level that allows me to truly ‘belong’.  My fear robs me of the comfort of life-long friends. Every time someone says something nice, my fear whispers to me about how truly kind they are to include the new person. It makes me want to be like them but it doesn’t allow me to accept that they might actually consider me a deep and true friend. A very few wise people have caught on to this fear of mine and are slowly helping me overcome it, with the power of love and insight provided by God, but it lingers. Fighting fear can be a long road. I only become a coward when I stop fighting.

What does your fear rob you of?

And what about when a nation is gripped by fear? What happens when an entire people group is afraid of the same thing? Economic decline, violence in the schools, the zombie apocalypse… take your pick. There’s plenty to choose from and a quick glance at a history book will tell us that nations in fear have the potential to do ugly things.  What does our nation’s fear rob us of? I am not wise enough to say but history will teach our grandchildren about our fears and what came of them, of that I am certain!

Whether it is a ridiculous aversion to needles or a world-wide epidemic, if we are to be the light of the world then we must stay on our guard against fear. We must not become reactionary, fear-driven people but rather a people that run to God with our needles, spiders, clowns,  fear-driven desperation and even rage. He is big enough to handle them. In fact, He is the only one big enough to navigate through the tsunami of emotions we feel and plot the true course. We only need to follow his lead despite the fear that claws at our hearts. Keep following, Brave Hearts. Keep fighting because though fear bites our heels for a little while, we will crush its head in the end.