Merry Christmas!

Christmas morning has come quietly in our house. I am the first one awake, and not a creature is stirring; not even our cats. Even though I could be sleeping in, my internal alarm clock pairs with the digital one on my dresser to bring me awake. How often do I get to experience the cozy silence of our sleeping house? I relish it.
Our Christmas celebrations have been spread out over the span of three days this year. Like a bar crawl is our journey from house to house as we drink deeply of family, food, gifts, and togetherness. I am mindful of the gifts of joy and peace as I revel in our holiday celebrations. Fresh in my memory are days when I could not enjoy anything because of the weight of the depression that lay over me. As I celebrate Christmas this year, fresh belief in God and his goodness fill me with more joy and gratitude for the gift of Jesus than I have ever felt in my life. With the gift of his son, God gave me a path to freedom from the fear and depression that threatened to end my life.
I have known about baby Jesus my whole life. Beneath the presents, Santa, vacation from school, parties, and food, he was there. Phrases like, "Jesus is the reason for the season," have been burned into my perception of the holiday since I was born. I don't believe it ever really hit home for me until this year, though. I don't know if anyone who has not been rescued from darkness can see baby Jesus with the same eyes I now have. His birth marks the beginning of my salvation. The life of the baby born on the first Christmas has become my guide for how I treat people, how I perceive the world, and how I view myself. God's love for humanity became flesh when he sent that baby to us. I reap the fruit of that gift on a daily basis, and it is sweet and life-giving. My Christmas is beautiful because of the Christ, and my gifts are lovely because of the great gift God gave to me when he sent his son to save my life. Life is good, and it is a very merry Christmas indeed.
I wish everyone could experience the joy I have found. There is so much pain in the world. There are so many people who cannot enjoy Christmas because it has become a big ball of stress, disappointment, and obligation. So many people still live beneath the weight of depression and fear. My heart aches for them, because I have been there, and it is terrible. How grateful am I that a path to freedom was born for us. I pray that others will find it as I have and experience the new life that is waiting there. God is good, Christmas is merry, and life is waiting. As I leave the peace and quiet of my bed to begin this day, my heart is already full. Merry Christmas!

1 Month, 6 Days: Face to Face

Sitting in my green, tufted armchair in a silent house is a rare treat for a Thursday early-afternoon. I am normally working at the dental lab this time of day, frantically trying to finish up the work for the Friday morning route. I'd much rather be here than there, and I am grateful for this rare moment when I can truly relax and bask in the peace of my home.

I took the day off work to spend some quality time with my mother-in-law, who has been visiting us from Mexico. Being around her is always enjoyable. She is a wonderful listener, filled with quiet wisdom, thought-provoking questions, and a deep love for God and people.

We spent the morning talking while we swung on the porch swing in my yard. Watching my daughter Zadie play, we talked about family and life, church and faith, Mexico and Ottawa. I learned more about Brandon and his family history. I listened to Teresa's heart for her church and community in Mexico. Beneath the shade of the mystery tree growing in the middle of my yard, conversation soaked into me like rain on parched earth.

When I work at the dental lab, I spend most of the day in my own company. I usually wear headphones and listen to music or audiobooks during the 8+ hours of my shift. Sometimes I can spend most of my waking hours in a day or week in relative solitude, since by the time I get done with work each day, I am usually too tired and drained to make much of a social effort.

Today reminded me that there is beauty in simple conversation. Two people, face to face, with genuine interest in each other's lives, feed and rejuvenate each other as they invest their time in conversation. When we break from our daily ruts of superficial encounters and electronic relationships, we find quiet peace in the simplicity of time spent face to face.

Today I am grateful for my mother-in-law and the beauty of this fall day. God is good, and so is life. :0)

One Month Old

Hello, friends. I have been receiving weekly e-mail devotionals from one of my dear friends who is walking her own path to freedom from depression and despair. This blog update is an almost word-for-word copy if the e-mail I sent her on the one month anniversary of my salvation.

It helps to be reminded of the truth of God, especially when I feel weak. It is easy for me to remember those things when everything is going well, but when I am falling apart and afraid, I need them the most. It has been a month today since I was born again, and I am happy that I made that decision. I have experienced joy and freedom in the past month that surpasses anything I have known in years. However, the past few days have been hard. My old fear, especially fear about being married, has resurfaced and tested my faith. Last night I felt crazy and trapped, and I struggled with suicidal thoughts again. This makes me so sad because I thought i was free of that fear and despair. I thought I would never want to die again when I have God to live for. But sometimes the fear and anxiety still feels so heavy that it makes me think that I am just fooling myself in believing that God can free me.

When I am in the middle of it, it seems nearly impossible to go on. I feel like I am hanging on by my fingernails. I think the scariest part is feeling like I have lost control of my own mind, and I cannot trust myself not to do something stupid and dangerous. Can I trust God to keep me from going to a place I cannot come back from? Will he save me every time, or will one time be too much, and I will not be strong enough to do what must be done? This terrifies me. Is he strong enough to reach into my life and preserve it when my mind is that weak? Is he bigger than my fears? Is he stronger than my panic? Is his love great enough to cover my deficiency and pour love through me when I have none to give? Will he really save me every time?

I know that I am not strong enough to save myself. All I have left in life is to trust that God will indeed do what he has promised. No matter how hard I try, I am me, and I cannot lift myself out of this mire with my own hands. So I will trust. I will pray, and praise, and cry out. I will choose to stand firm when I want to run. When I cannot stand anymore, I will be on my knees, praying for help. When I cannot kneel, I will fall on my face and cry out. If he does not deliver me, then I will just lay there until he decides to, even if it means that is where I die. What else is there for me to do but trust? I cannot save myself.

I would greatly appreciate your prayers. I know that you fight your own battles with depression and anxiety, so you understand how hard it is to keep fighting sometimes. Please walk with me through this. I believe God has given you to me for my friends because you understand, and I can be completely honest, knowing you will not judge me. I want to live, and I want to be free. I choose to trust God and believe that he is strong enough to save me, even in my darkest hour.

Thank you for loving me and investing in my life. I value your friendship more than I can express. <3>

It is difficult to share the depth of my struggle in such a public medium. However, I believe that God is leading me on a journey of healing and transformation. I believe that he is using my brokenness to create beauty. I want to share what he is doing in me, even though some of it is messy, ugly, and embarrassing. My words and my life are his to use, and even though it is hard for me to let you see me so broken and vulnerable, I know God is using my journey for his glory. I want to be real with you. I want you to see what he is making me. I am one month old and growing.

Day 21: Starving

Did you ever get so busy that you forgot to eat? Before you know it, you're cranky and exhausted, snapping at everyone around you. Your productivity begins to take a dive. It is hard to focus and easy to make mistakes. Things can become pretty ugly when we forget to eat.

I think the soul starves when we do not take time to ingest the daily bread of God's presence. I am finding that skipping a day or two of quiet time with God leaves me weak and snappish. I become lazy and lethargic. I lose my sense of purpose. Little things irritate me, and it is more difficult to find beauty in the world around me. Only when I notice the ugly symptoms do I realize that I am starving. I am ravenous. I need God to fill me. To function, I need to remember to eat.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Day 18: Bigger Hands

Sometimes facing a normal day can be as scary as facing something new. In fact I am more intimidated by inaction than challenge. Waking up to a dark-house morning, I put myself through the paces of getting ready for work. Even though it is Friday, I do not feel any particular sense of excitement. A long day of work is ahead of me, and my supervisor has begun leaning on me to increase my production. That adds stress to my work day, because I like to set my own pace and take my time to do a thorough job. Having to rush things makes it easier to make mistakes, and I hate receiving my work back with adjustments to be made after I already thought it was complete. I want to be able to live up to my manager's expectations, but sometimes it feels impossible. It is difficult for me to walk into a situation where my failure is not only possible, but probable.

I have been praying about my job and asking God to help me to do good work every day. I feel like I am already doing the best I can on my own. It may take some sort of aha-moment or unseen hand to shift me from this rut I am in. Until that happens I choose to trust that God has placed me in a job where I cannot succeed to either teach me something or to help someone else in an unseen way. I can accept that. It is good to know that the situation lies in bigger and more capable hands than my own. My day begins. Here I go.

Day 16: In the Stillness

Sometimes it is frustrating being a woman. As stereotypical as it sounds, I really do find myself subject to hormonal mood swings depending on the time of the month. On a day where nothing bad has happened, I feel grumpy seemingly without reason. The fact that I have no good reason for my bad mood makes me frustrated, and the fact that I can't shake it makes me even more grumpy. It's a vicious cycle. The only things I can do are to eat chocolate, to hold my tongue lest I say things I don't mean, and to pray. Out of the three, I am finding the last to be most successful today.

When I woke into a bad mood today, I decided to skip my morning run. Pushing myself to exercise when I did not even want to be awake turned out to be beyond my willpower today. I compromised by rolling out of bed when all I really wanted to do was reset my alarm and go back to sleep. After dressing, eating breakfast, and making a cup of coffee, I headed out to my yard to sit on the swing and pray.

In the stillness of the early morning, I began to lay my burdens at the feet of Father. Sunrise streaked a blue patch of sky as the swing gently rocked me. My coffee cup was an oasis of warmth in the chilly September dawn. In the quiet, in the stillness, I knew that He was God. I asked Him to walk with me through my day. I told Him about my job and asked for His help in doing my best work today. By the time I returned to the house, my heart was lighter. I still have to deal with the burdens of life, great and small, but God meets me in the stillness. I am not alone.

Day 15: Through My Ears and Over My Heart

As I journeyed through the wilderness my life used to be, I always sought out music that spoke to where I was at that place and time When I was a child and teenager, a steady influx of Christian music fed me. However, college brought new life circumstances, and I expanded my musical palate to include a wide variety of very good secular music that was more in tune with my questioning, wandering heart. No longer believing in God simply because it was how I was raised, I began to feel like Christian music deserved a harder scrutiny than I had ever before given it. Did I believe what I was listening to? Was it a cliche? Were those artists simply regurgitating scripture and theology to cookie-cutter chord progressions and instrumentation? Did the music mean anything to me?

I completely stopped listening to Christian radio because my heart was not in the same place as the songwriters' lyrics of faith and praise. I was angry with God and unsure of what I believed. The songs I listened to were by artists like David Bazan, who sang about his own struggle with Christianity, and Nickel Creek, whose song Doubting Thomas seemed to speak my own heart's concerns. I was wandering in a wilderness of pain, doubt, and confusion, and I needed a soundtrack that matched my life.

After being born again two weeks ago, I started listening to Christian radio again. I figured I would give it a fair chance since I actually believed in God and His plan for my life again. Feeling a little bit foolish, I turned on the radio in my car on the way to work, trying to have an open mind. I was and still am biased against the Christian music industry, but I figured there had to be at least a little bit of good music mixed in with all of the ho-hum canned stuff. As I listened to the words of those songs, I began to feel my heart resonating with them in a new way. Words celebrating salvation and hope echoed my own newfound freedom from depression. For the first time in years, I believed in the God around whom those songs swirled, and the music was more than concepts and words.

Though my animosity toward Christian radio had dissipated, my bias against it was still in force. I began to think about searching for songs of hope that also were not afraid to portray the messier side of life and the true depth of God's grace. Our local Christian radio station has branded itself as family friendly, which is fine. However, we live in a messy, broken, hurting world. I need more than just squeaky-clean songs. I need a soundtrack that sings the songs of my life, and my life is not a happy bubble. There must be songs for anger, songs for disappointment, songs for confusion, songs for doubt. Songs for coming back home, songs for dark nights, songs for loved ones who died young, songs for enemies, songs for broken relationships. But for my life soundtrack, God must also be in those songs.

I woke up this morning groggy and unrested. After a night of fitful dreaming, the last thing I wanted to do was crawl from my bed and face the day. In a gray humor I drove to work. I began to pray, which is my new habit whenever I find myself in a bad mood. I believe that God uses my emotions to point out problems in my life and to keep me from getting too distracted by the little things, thus ignoring the big picture. As I prayed, I turned on the radio to the Christian station. Amy Grant began to sing about how crying about our problems to God is better than a hallelujah sometimes. "We pour out our miseries. God just hears a melody. Beautiful, the mess we are. The honest cries of breaking hearts are better than a hallelujah." Wow. That was not a song of feel-good theological regurgitation. I mean, yes, it contained spiritual principles, but the truth within the song felt real, gritty, and raw. I wanted more.

When I got to work I created an Internet radio station on Pandora.com based on the Amy Grant song I had liked. The songs that came up were okay, but they were not quite my style of music. I typed in Derek Webb instead, remembering how much his song "Wedding Dress" had affected my perception of God's love for our broken humanity. The music that resulted from my search absolutely blew me away. Song after song carried powerful lyrics about life both messy and beautiful. Songs of faith and praise mingled with grief for a sister who had died young. The instrumentation of the various artists and bands was similar yet diverse. Each carried a singer/songwriter vibe, but while some were a simple guitar and vocal combo, others were intricate in their percussion, strings, and other unexpected instruments, like the banjo or bells. As I listened, I realized that I had found a treasure trove. Each song went through my ears and over my heart, bathing me in beauty and truth.  I had found the soundtrack to my life.

It feels good to enjoy Christian music again.  There are still many songs that I really, really love that have nothing to do with God, but since my life has changed, so has my perspective.  I no longer see the world in the same way I did before I was made new.  Everything seems so much more purposeful.  I look for the beauty hidden in ugliness.  I find myself looking for ways to bring healing to the lives of people I meet every day.  I see God everywhere, and I believe in His goodness.  Now, I have music that sings with my heart, and my heart sings with the heart of God, which beats with compassion and love for the world.  That is something worth singing about.