Category: Gratefully Sober

Gratefully sober since July 2008.

[I Asked God for More] than Motherhood

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I woke up on Sunday full of lament. The depression that had been crushing me was now a throttling choke. I woke up straining. Strangled and gasping for air, for truth, for relief; I woke up.

I woke up on Sunday already giving up. Begging for it, the answer to the question depression always asks:  Why am I here?

All night long, relentlessly; a jangling chorus, a litany of failures, a litany of fears, a litany of shame. Making a list, my brain ordered them into meaningful classifications, one by one, a citation of what’s gone wrong.

Then, I went from listing to knee-deep in real water that came in while we were sleeping.  While he slept and I tossed about listing endlessly my disappointments. They were a song, the cacophony of my failures, singing and dancing in a winged frenzy above the bed.  Those songs have always been there for me, silent to him.

The water is rising around us and soon I forget my question, my list while living the longest day that I can remember. We vacuumed 600+ gallons out of the basement, while it kept coming.

That day, on a Sunday, I woke up, realizing the only one who declares me a failure is me. I am my own worst enemy. Only I am disappointed and angry with me and

I am angry at God.  I thought God and I had big plans.

A missionary kid, I watched my parents traverse each Continent of the world, going where others feared, doing what others wouldn’t, changing things, making good happen, and always leaving us to DO THINGS.  I assumed – I thought I would be a part of this in the end, do something big, significant. Eventually I would do something special.

I thought I was special, when I was doing, making, performing, achieving.  God and I, I thought we had plans.

I woke up on Sunday and realized, failure isn’t at all what I thought – and when life took a detour for me, into shame, regrets, sin, my mistakes, it all taught me and turned me into a new person.

Redeemed, New and Different, I woke up.

And knew, again. And the question changed.

What is success in life if we cannot be there for our family, to be nurturing, teaching, holding, comforting? What I rarely felt growing up, this is my offering now. Even though it isn’t within my control what my children choose to do with their lives, who or what they become, I woke up on a Sunday and realized.

I’m no big shot, except in my kid’s lives and there I am.  And I’ll struggle for this to be

Enough. And I know it’s not forever

Except it will last forever, for them.

All is Grace, Part One: the Story of Sober Me

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Have I turned any other direction but to sit with my pain?

No saint here, bound and praying. I couldn’t quit

all the vices, they were many,

without God’s quiet stillness

ushered in.

A moment of need and prostrate

humbled, obviously being a fallen down drunk,

I opened.

In later years, when life wasn’t still, was in fact full of shit and heartache and disappointment

then, I found myself mostly still

hating Me. Still, considering fondly the

afternoon Gin & Tonic, sipped slow.  Then,

watching the languorous pouring of a glass of wine, everywhere.

I feel the accustomed

pang, insidious and stealthy pocketing my sober reassurance.

Still, open but with stone hard veins, I’m pulsing envy

hating them.

Then scribbled in the margins of a long forgotten book

I had asked –Do I have a death wish?

Of course I did.

The difference between the happy and the depressed is desire

to be alive,

or else every day wanting out.

Back up a year, no make that five years this summer to that fractured moment

when God spoke finally into my bleary drunken

Impasse.

Desire, to be Holy, ever holy or just a bit, less Me. That day becoming

an ex-drinker,

changed by my choice.

Grief and self-absorbed fear, growing like mold on bread left too long

I stank, rancid.

Longing for, but unable to will the power

within,

for peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, joy and light.

All was dark, even sober

unable to pray, not

believing the modulation of my own voice

to be heard by God—with much more important things to concern wtih—I clung

to misery,

hatred,

conflict,

doubt,

despair,

sadness

even as darkness was constant—

All the reasons I drank

stayed on in sobriety.

I thought I was dying to self but I was merely dying

stone sober, amidst my stench, self-loathing and judgment.

At that time sober wasn’t working

for me.

{Ten Thousand Tears}

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My tears are welcome.

I see them splattered, dried on my glasses as I peer out the window into the wintry, cold, gray, foggy morning;

tiny specks on the panes of my eyeglasses.

I wipe hard at these dried salty witnesses.

They are a record of my sodden heart.

Ten thousand tears come raining down.

The soil of my soul is softened.
Broken apart by tears, which took forever to reappear.  Though I fear

that I cannot stop them, deep down I know that they are what keeps my heart growing.

Soil ready for love, open

to the community of believers,
to grace,
to healing, forgiveness and new life,
to hope.

My tears, such an old and forgotten notion

for me.

When I was a child I pinched my eyes closed to reject my weakness, my torment as I was hollered at by a daddy that

didn’t know

better.

I closed down my heart;

it hurt too much to feel bad all the time.  So I told them, you aren’t welcome here.

And my heart and soul slowly turned

hard as stone.

Today my tears rain down though I fear them, they make no sense

their intensity, they make me vulnerable,

they make me feel weak, even when I know this

is

wrong thinking. But it is true now, I cannot protect my soft heart, sodden and murky, saturated

still,

My tears, they are here to stay I hope, welcome.

MHH

I’ve lived with depression, at some points melancholy as a part of my “personality” for much of my life, but it only became clinical major depression about ten years ago.  A variety of things came into play and I fell into a dark, frightening place. (I tell a little of my story in Not Alone.  I tell parts and pieces here on the blog — under My Story.)

But I have worked hard to face my mistakes and demons,as I did I began to heal and then had the strength to do the personal care that one must do who lives with this sort of mental illness.  

Though I am in a similar place today, depressed I know that I am a different person. I am different  “Spiritual Soil.”  I thank God for that picture that came recently from a friend’s teaching in Luke 8. I know God as I never knew God then.  I sense the Holy Spirit’s whispered truth of healing and hope. I have enough hope to believe the truth that I will heal, I will heal again even as ten thousand tears rain down.  

Much of my blog has been about my depression, beginning in 2001 which worsened through a series of personal and family adversities over the next several years (including the death of my father from brain cancer, during which time my sister and I cared for him in our homes). In 2005, when I became even more severely depressed, I was nearly non-functional, attempted suicide, and I was hospitalized for a while.  

In later years, I became a quiet, desperate drunk attempting to self-medicate and forget..  My drinking addiction grew worse and worse over the period of my depression, becoming debilitating by 2006 or so. This was very difficult for my husband and the children at a quite impressionable age saw me frequently out of control. They are now to the age when these things do impact them, though I got sober in July, four and a half years ago.  

These are not easy things to admit.  They make me feel damaged, weak, and if ever there was a stigma related to being broken I feel it like never before.  But it came to me recently, that I have to write my story.  I have to tell it, and let it go.  So that’s where I will go, to that place of heartache, depression, my experience with being a hard-core fallen down drunken mother and my cavernous personal grief about that, and interlaced in-between is Hope that I have found.  

So as much as I fear my own tears, I fear more the depth of my sorrow and grief when it I shove it back inside.  That’s what makes one depressed.  That’s what made me drink.

I know this is the next step for me, to sort it out  and live hard days, weeks and months of therapy, sleeplessness, and depression ahead.  

I am thankful for the everyday, tangible and incredible voices of love and encouragement I find foremost from my husband, but also from friends and family.

Thanks for all those that read and live this story alongside.  I know there are fellow sufferers.  I know there are others who have family or friends who descend into this murky, sinkhole of a hell and you cannot imagine how to help.  I hope that whatever I find in my story that’s redemptive will one day help others understand, find help, and live through it as you walk beside a fellow sufferer.

This isn’t over for me, my story isn’t written.  

Grace & Peace,

Melody Harrison Hanson

January 29, 2013

What If All Your Life You Believed A Lie? You Are Too Broken.

The morning air is all awash with angels …  – Richard Wilbur

2290843205_d92e123b69_oYou cannot unbreak a broken stick.

This morning, I awoke to a sense of life’s forfeiture.  I am broken.
I’ve lived half my life, if my mother is to be believed I’m only in my middle years, as if I am a broken stick; a lost cause [in my mind.]
Separated from love, undeserving and
Lost to hope, real joy and vigor.

Trudging along beside humanity
Caught in my heartache.
Living in the grays, all color is gone.
Broken, bent, useless; a searing mark of shame,

On me.
I believed the lie – I am too broken.

Yesterday I heard my father talking to me about reconciliation. Oh the irony!

Yes, our family is stuck, stuck broken open in pain, wrecked by sorrow and a narrative we’ve been unable to overcome.  Addictions, the palliative that settles us for a moment; achievements, work, knowledge, studies, alcohol, even religion our swan song.

God is saying that I need to sort things out, that I am not
A lost cause.

But many things have become an immense wall of fear and excuses.
And if I say this out loud, it sounds like blame.

Brick by brick, I have built a wall like Fort Knox around my heart.
A broken stick cannot be fixed, but a branch
Still attached to the vine can be pruned.

Holding on to that image of hope which honors god’s love for us and his forgiveness of us and his promise to make all things
NEW.

Fear is the thing that corrodes my spirit and damages everything good in me.  It is not from God.  God seems to be working on in me,

In my sleep, asking: Do I trust him enough to help us work toward reconciliation? Can I let go of the belief that our family was broken such a long time ago, so broken that it would never heal.

I’m trying to trust that God can heal anything

Even a broken stick

That is me.

God Help Me {Part One}

I can’t figure out why I’m here. And not that evangelical crap about the Good News.  I’ve got a news flash.  It isn’t good, my news. I can’t figure out why I’m here and I can’t figure out how to help myself.  I’m sorry I’m sad and even sorrier that Jesus isn’t answering my prayers.

(Skip to Part Two, where God answers, if you simply cannot bear all this honesty.)

The other day I faced a sorry fact, that  my writing, all that I write about living with the mental-illness of depression and addiction, is stigmatizing.

People don’t mean to, but they can’t help themselves.  They cannot help feeling pity.  Tough break, they’re thinking.  Poor girl, she is a mess.  And they’d deny it to my face, but I am certain they must wonder about the depth of my faith;

I know I do,

Surely if it were deeper, then God help her, God,

would help her? Either way, I’m hurting.

I feel alone. And not because folks don’t care, so many do, care.  But because I have such a short memory.

I forget, when I sink here, mired down, coiled up into this misery, into this bleakness, then. I forget the Truth.

The Truth fades, and in my shadows, in the slum of my core I am filled with shame.   I’m ashamed for being a drunk even if I’m almost five years sober. Of course I am, no matter how often I speak of it. I simply speak of it to stay sober, group accountability of sorts.  I’m ashamed for walking away from an interesting ministry and career, even though I was at a spiritual standstill, I was unbelieving.  And here’s the vilest, most reprehensible, horrid part. I’m ashamed of my half-lived life.

And I’m most ashamed that I have written about all of it.

Glued to my bed, unable to move from the weight of it all, I imagine deleting my cyber self.  Just make disappear, all those places where I tell the hideous truth about myself. 

Keep it Good News. Keep it light. Keep it simple. Keep it clear that everyone is okay.  Everything is alright.  Shape and mold a self that is void of issue, trouble or pain.

Pretend.

I used to believe that I am the one Jesus loves but once I sank here

that no longer matters.  That is no longer real.

Where is Jesus?  How can he help?  And the Jesus community, the “Jesus followers” so busy being and doing, making and completing, they don’t see

Jesus isn’t answering my prayers.

Because here’s the Truth.  Here’s the Good News.  “Jesus” is the people.  And they are occupied.

Even as I write those words of anger and resentment I know I’m the one who’s broken.  I’m the one who’s lived an empty voided life vacated a long time ago.  Since then, not sure when it happened exactly, it was a slow trip down.

I’m a weak copy of the sorrow and heartache of my father and of my mum.   I never learned to make my own way.  The question remains, am I too broken?  Are the secrets ‘

now told, too damning?  Is the stigma tattooed on me forever – am I

good news, gone bad?

Part Two: I Asked God for Help (This is much more hopeful, I promise. He answered)

{We Are All Dying}

The crawl of fear,
of losing, is close.  It licks me,
as if I am a salty wound.  Everyone dies.

Of course.

But lately, I am aware
of Life all around me

healthy or otherwise.

Tiny birds are singing a sonnet, high up in the tree.
Cancer cells are growing inside a dear old friend.
Dementia and life-stealing pain overtake a sweet elderly neighbor.
Depression and anxiety crush the once glowing spirit of my child

Meanwhile I cling
to sanity, to sobriety
and to Faith, there is Peace.

We are all dying,

and yet without the thought of imminent loss,
of the Ultimate loss, death

we haven’t appreciated our life as a gift.

Everyone dies.
Everyone lives.

Won’t you choose to live?

Choose joy in the midst of sorrow and grief?
Choose peace when hope seems dim?
Yes, fear circles around me like a flame, curling and

enveloping me in those early morning hours when

fear wakes me with a vice grip on my heart, blood pulsing.
Aware, that I am alive.

Everyone lives.
Everyone dies.

They are bitter, these days and nights.  Acrid, this
awareness

of life. Pungent,

and in this Pain,
there is a Holy Awareness.

Life’s aroma is sweet.

A Crack in Your Life, That’s How the Light Gets In

I spent most of my life numb and afraid.

I spent the next while trying to fix myself.  Then, I began to let go of control.

Now life is a daily letting go.

“Maybe you have to have a crack in your disbelief, that’s how the light gets in.”

I am fighting, kicking and screaming inside where I am sadly still a (spiritual) child. I pray to be wise, resilient and strong, spiritually mature and faithful. I pray to live completely without doubt.

I pray, but I do not always live that way. And I am not any of those things today.

Today I am stewing in doubt.  I want proof of a benevolent God, I want it so much I could scream.  (And spiritual tantrum ensues.)

I am fighting, full knowing life has no guarantees.

I am who I am. I am a person who questions everything.  A cynic and pessimist who is perpetually asking why. Why? Why? Why? I never grew up out of why.

Why pain? Why suffering?
Why random illness, ill will, ignorance?  Why random kindness?  Why health, or wealth, or poverty?  Why high IQ’s or low?
Why an Old Boys Club?  Why gender differences and exclusion? Why are people born into privilege? Why are people living in garbage dumps?  

Why Anger?

Why joy?
Why is there depression or anxiety, in children?  In anyone?
Why are some parents cruel, angry even controlling.  Why is it easy to be kind when you have everything? Then I reckon that’s not even true, the kindest gentlest people I have heard of have been materially poor — Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus.
Why illness? Why alcoholism? Why cancer?
Why Facebook and Twitter?
Why hunger, why sexism, why homophobia, why racism? Why are they all in the Church? Why is “the Church” the most despicable place sometimes?
Why is the Word of God so mysterious?  So difficult to understand.  Why is it used as a club to hit people over the head?  Why is it used as a “Club” to exclude?

Why is prayer, this prayer, any prayer just a cry of the soul for help?

Hear me.
Meet me.
Answer me.

Life stripped down, naked.  Past all pretenses. Past and beyond to the heart.  Our belief or disbelief, the Truth; does it really come down to choosing?  What is the alternative?

Chaos and Randomness.

But when your child doubts, it throws back in your face all that you have held dear. Now that is a different kind of awakening.

Because I cannot defend intellectually the comfort I have found in knowing God.   I only know that I am a different person, down deep inside where I was once shattered and broken.  I have been rebuilt into a strong and empathetic person that believes in loving others, as the greatest and highest aspiration one can have.

God has helped me to love, to stay sober, to be a good and much less selfish person. I am in myself corrupt — bankrupt, broken, angry, jealous, bitter, self-centered and self-indulgent, an addict, sarcastic, judgmental and so sickenly insecure.

And then I recognize fully who I have become.  I realize with sterling clarity, suddenly that it is not that I doubted God exists but that I don’t understand why doesn’t God  act?

Change more people.  

Heal more sick.

Help more.  Restore us all.

Now.

In her new new book, Help. Thanks. Wow. Anne Lamott says:

“Sometimes pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in.  It’s most indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness.  Good luck figuring it out.

“It unfolds and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you almost give up…. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”

And so, the cycle of life unfurls and this time around it is full of heartache and anguish — for parenting is so hard, friends get sick and may die, people become self-destructive and addicted, kids suffer mental illness, people we love and pray for kill themselves.

And even though all these things are true,

we go on.

I prayed and asked God. Just “help.”

God answered my prayer, but not in the way I had in mind.  The answer was complex and forced me to face some hard things.  To take a deeper breath.  To hold on to God, hard and fast. To acknowledge that I’m not drowning tho I feel as if I am.  God is my life and buoys me in yet another storm.

My child coming to church perhaps isn’t the answer to my prayer.

I cried to God to show himself to my child and in doing so also to me.

And now I wait, …

MHH

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”  ― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Who’s listening? On writing and living a Story

The fog crept in steadily.

The morning was dreary, unusually dark; so much so that my son asked if the sun was coming today.

As I began my morning run I felt the drizzle soaking through the cloth on my arms, but it is unseasonably warm so my legs, bare to the elements, felt refreshed by the thick moist air.

I ran.  And I keep running not because I intend to win a race.  I ran, and I keep running not because there is anyone encouraging me along – though people are cheering, in my head and in my life.

I ran, and I keep running because I love myself.

Even as I have learned that I love myself and that I am quite beloved by God, I have my days.  Bad days when this doesn’t feel true.

The other day a reader said my writing “lacked heart.”  At first, it shook me.  The voice in my head murmuring and cloying, “You thought you had come so far.”

Sunday I heard the words again, the source Brennan Manning and a piece of a puzzle fell into place.  The first time I heard the words “I am the one Jesus loves” I physically recoiled away from the idea.  My heart, dry and rigid like clay left too long in the sun, broken into pieces already.  Those words didn’t offer solace, then.

Today I know they are true and I argue back.

I am loved!  I have a heart, soft and malleable.  I am full of passion and I can put my heart into words on the page and move people. 

But that cannot be why I write – for others to be moved, for others to approve, or for others to be impressed by my supposed ability.  And I cannot write what I am not living every day the passion and pain of motherhood, of being a Child of God, of being healed even as I am still broken, of God nursing me back to health over the last decade of depravity and addiction and a lifetime of sorrow.  I write my story not out of some psychological need, either.

I write what I am living even as I know I cannot write everything.  But write I do because I believe it will reach others in their inner dark spaces of which I know nothing specific, but I can imagine because the life I have lived; because I have walked the road of depression and a shaky unclear disbelieving heart.  I have lived the days, even years of not wanting to be alive.  I have been there and I am not there now and so I write.

I spoke it aloud to my husband, asking if he had read the piece.  What did he think?  Crushed, momentarily by my apparent “lack of heart” Wavering, slowly then I remembered the rest.  The fellow Redbud who said it was “brilliant” and all the rest who read and were moved and who wept. And I knew.  And I learned.

I cannot write for the reader.

I cannot write for my own personal health.

I cannot write for glory.

I must write because of the story inside, the story I have lived and still live daily.  The story is the gift and the sacrifice.  And if God is glorified in my weakness, this is why I write.

{Fly Away From Me: On Children}

I woke up this morning, the sun creeping in earlier than I wanted.  Coming out of my dreams, I felt grief wash over my body, sore from running daily; I felt the years wash over me physically.  And fear.

I am afraid for all the time—lost.  Gone.

My children are almost grownup into people, yet not ready to face the challenges of being adult.  But more and more they are absent from me and I feel their absence, the loss, physically — These babies I fed from my breast, nurtured if feebly the best I knew how.  Babies I brought in to the world through the tearing of my flesh and blood.  They are young adults and the time is gone.

I’m running out of time and as I woke I felt the years,

Weighty, heavy, lost.

Lost to the days of over working; long workaholic driven years of loving work more than I loved being at home.  I have forgotten those toddler years, unable to recall the first word, first steps, first book, I simply cannot remember.  Write everything down they said, but I thought I’d remember.

I was wrong.

Lost, because of so many days of a drunken cloud, a constant buzz from self-medicating.

I was trying to forget the sadness, the feelings of inadequacy. Feeling doubt in a world of devoted, sure people. Feeling the loss of losing the faith of my parents and not being courageous enough (yet) to find my own.

I lost many years of my children’s lives to being a drunk.

I woke this morning feeling the weight of it, a grief that is carved deeply within.  It is a heart ache, and with a cry  I wanted to start fresh.  A second chance; to rewind back fifteen years to hearing that I was pregnant for the first time.  I was surprised that my body, which I had loathed all my life, was capable of giving life.  And then I felt annoyed at the interruption to my career.  And then it came eventually; the felt joy and disbelief.

Now that baby girl, my little bird, is a young woman.  She is gone more than she is here and each interaction feels like our last.  I know we have just a few more years.  I think: hang on to love and do what you can to keep things open and safe.  I want to have a home, a heart that welcomes; A home of second chances, and third and fourth.  Arms open wide.

The days are slipping away, the chances are running out.

Even as I know this I know that I cannot clutch at her.  I must open my hands, joyfully and watch her fly. I will pray that she will want to return.

As I get up and face another day, it is to keep the nest warm and welcoming.    Yes, I woke up this morning already grieving. I knew.

My little bird is practicing her flight away from me.

{How I Wish I Were Different: After Four Years of Sobriety}

I go to the garden. My reasons are messy and fluid, resembling the task.

The 95 degree temperature hits me in the face as I sluggishly climb out of my car. Searching the field, I identify three backs bent. I see them from afar. Why am I here? There is no turning back as the heat punches then catches in my throat.

There are things growing.  I am amazed my first night by the thought of food coming from somewhere.  I pull up dirt covered onions, cutting of roots and tops.  I learn quickly and try to be efficient.  Drop them in the bin, but not too rough.  Not enough to bruise.  My hands reek of onion and I wipe the moist liquid from the onions on my perspiring arms.  I’m hoping this keeps the mosquitoes at bay as twilight approaches.  I did not spray myself before coming, though in a type A moment I had come prepared.  I didn’t want to come off as a novice stinking of bug spray.  That night was my first in the garden.

I am nervous, as I am doing anything new.  Intensely shy, I do not like meeting people.  I can carry a conversation fine but more often than I like to admit, I’m just too lazy.  Self-centered even, I suppose.  Showing an interest in someone, even when I care about them, even when they interest me, even when I know someone already takes so much out of me.  There is a price.

This is a quality I hate about myself.  How I wish I were different.

I wonder, after getting gussied up for a wedding yesterday, why being with people so hard for me?  I was drained and tired afterward.  Some people relish parties! Though happy for the bride and groom, all I could think about was being exhausted.

Partly this was for the fact that there was an open bar.  That brought up all sorts of unexpected feelings. Damn it, I think to myself, I still resent  that I cannot drink. Being a drunk (former drunk, of course) this is more than a little ironic to me.

It’s just not fair kept echoing through me, whiny and complaining.  Deep and pulsing, a humming in my soul.  Not fair, not fair, not fair!!!  I was feeling deeply sorry for myself. And this is how I know, how I knew, even then that I cannot drink ever again.  I know even now that I am a drunk that doesn’t drink.

I wish I were different.

Four years ago this week I quit drinking – it was for good this time.

I should go to an AA meeting and get a four year chip.  But I don’t do AA.  Not absolutely sure why.

I guess, I like to act like I’m not really an alcoholic.  I just “don’t drink” and when I’m not around it I’m “fine.”  But I don’t think I’m happy not drinking and this scares me more than you could know.

I am finding joy and peace, learning to feel the abundance of my life.  But I need to find out why other sober people are happy even at an open bar. But not me.   

I realized last night, sitting across from a young gal from my church who was kind of sloppy from drinking three giant glasses of wine, that I am not a happy sober person.  I watched her enviously as she made at least three trips to the bar and brought each one back to our table.  And I knew. There are some things that I need to sort out.

I wish I were different but maybe that’s the thing.  I am me.  I was a crazy falling down drunk, once upon a time.  It was no fairy tale. And I am no princess. I am a drunk, I may be sober, straight and clean, but I couldn’t have a good time last night mostly because I forgot who I was.  And I felt deprived.

I wish I were different.  But I am me. 

Trudging through the cauliflower and tomatoes and watermelon plants today, lugging loads of weeds, carrying hefty loads of hay I worked hard.  I worked to help.  I worked for penance. I worked to forget.  Who knows? Perhaps all that and more.

I know this – I am grateful to sweat, for my health, to be here, to be alive.  Yes, even to be sober.

I may wish I were different but I can only be me.

I can only live this one life.  Oh I have regrets.  Watching others last night brought up plenty of regrets, touched a well of sorrow, a deep recess carved in my soul, but in the end as I embraced the truth of Christ’s grace this morning at church, singing gratefully, I was more thirsty for more of Jesus,

You see, I know I’m a sinner.

I know I’m forgiven.

I need to forgive myself.  And perhaps, even give something back.  Four years sober I don’t know much.  I have no great wisdom about how and why.  There is more I don’t know than what I do.  But this is me.  This is who I am.

I have to stop wishing otherwise.

{Forgiving is a Miracle: Courageous and Holy. “When Daddy’s Rage”}

We are not too old to take courage.

We are not too late to sacrifice.

We are not too lost to reach out to each other and linger on the rim of time.

– Ann Voskamp

As I read those words this morning I was thinking instantly of my relationship with my Dad — gone since May, 2003. He was a tortured soul in many ways or perhaps I just didn’t understand him.

It was when he was dying that he admitted to me that he often felt righteous in his anger and raging at us.  All this reminded me of something I wrote several years ago. I share it now.

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Forgiveness of grave acts of injustice can feel like an abstract concept to those who have not experienced those acts. (PRISM magazine)

My pastor said yesterday … that anger and the need to retaliate when someone has hurt you is “normal” even as normal as the reflexes a doctor checks when she taps on our knees during a check-up.  Normal.

I hate that word – “Normal”.  I don’t understand the use of it.  It is a bit reckless to say anything is normal these days when people have such diverse experiences and upbringings. But think I understand what he was trying to say, that a wish for vindication when you have been hurt is a healthy response.  But even that doesn’t sound quite right.  It is a human response?

But what response should one have to being hurt or abused or rebuked or shamed or yelled at — retaliation?  No, I think he means a human response to lighter stuff.  If you are being gossiped against it is “human” to want to strike back.

When I think about my childhood, I think the healthy response is to shrink and cower.

One learns to hide, to disappear, and to not be the object of Dad’s attention.  Perhaps this response is not “normal” but it sure was reflexive for me. That’s why it is hard to hear that wanting revenge is a normal, human response.  If that is indeed what my pastor meant.

Then, as I look back, I see that THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES when I wanted a sort of revenge with my father and mother.  I have carried fear of my father for as long as I can remember and an anger at my mom for not protecting us.  And a kind of fury.  I used to have rage dreams all the time. On the really rare occasion I will have them still, but they are thankfully now years in-between.

The powerlessness that comes from having a father who never admitted he was wrong creates that anger and sense of worthlessness.

It is not worth trying to explain yourself.

It is not worth having your own opinion.

It is not worth expending energy because nothing really matters, nothing really matters at all.

I am so glad I am past that.

It’s just too bad my father had to die for me to come to this place.

I carry a huge feeling of loss that I never knew sweetness in my relationship with my dad.  I loved him out of fear and a wish to please him.  I know he loved me.  But he just – couldn’t – help himself? If it is true he couldn’t help himself, I wish he could have let God help him.

I miss him now, as I ponder what could have been.  He really was a dear man, loved by so many around the world who were his friends and never knew the secret rage he carried inside him.  I’m glad that many people didn’t know – in a way – because Dad accomplished many good things, helped many people, was loved by many.  God why did you take him so young?  Sixty-two?

I hope it wasn’t simply so that I could live. No, I don’t really think God works like that.  It was a convergence of events coming together to give him cancer and take him.  And my ability to heal, to forgive — I have to believe that I might have come to it even if my dad was still here.  Perhaps it would have taken longer, but it would have come.  Eventually.

I have forgiven my father and then I think of my mother who still has a story to tell.  I don’t know if anyone would believe her, but she has so much in her life story that could be helpful to others.  Surely we can’t be the only ones in this situation, caught between a person who does good things and has their secrets.  A Christian leader who means well but whose home life isn’t right, isn’t right at all?  That’s our story

IN THE END what needs to be said is this: Forgiveness is what each Christ follower is asked to do in response to the forgiveness Jesus extends to us.  It is not easy.  It can take a long time.  It often depends on the emotional health of the person doing the forgiving.  It always depends on all the factors surrounding the situation and each person has to sort that out, often with the help of a pastor or a counselor.

I have been in therapy of one sort or another, off and on, for twenty-five years!  Wow, that’s crazy sounding but it’s true.

Pulling back the layers of pain,

the years of stagnation and lack of healthy growth as a human being,

the crazy mixed up ideas,

the strange perspectives and opinions picked up over the years.

The times of resisting God.  Or not being willing to obey God.

And finally, I came to a point of decision, for myself – without the guilt, or fear or coercion of others, but in complete obedience to God.

Forgiveness, it’s messy.  It’s damn difficult. But it is so sweet, when finally healing, forgiveness and the mercy of Jesus come down.

And you begin anew. And your story continues…

I am still left with where rage comes from? What makes a daddy hurt us so bad?

I have pondered my father’s strange rage for many years.  I cannot pretend to have answers and obviously I cannot ask him.  But I have a friend who works with incest survivors.  She has a very special ministry. My father always said that he was sexually abused as a child, by a minister in his church.  I never believed him.  But I asked my friend about this and she said:  “When a person admits to this as an adult, they are telling the truth.  They have no reason to lie.”

No reason to lie.  She also said very often anger like that comes from abuse in the past.

I don’t know if it is true but I cannot ignore this about forgiveness, about following Jesus into radical loving.

Paula Huston says: “Regarding the tender souls of children, Jesus says in a passage that can be read as referring either to young human beings or to “baby” Christians: ‘Things that cause people to sin will inevitably occur.  It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.’ (Luke 17:1-3)  The roots of our adult sin patterns are often to be found in the still-gaping wounds of childhood.”

So perhaps my father was hurt as a child.  And I was a child, crushed by his pain and hurt, as he took it out on his family in his rage and anger.

At some point we are each responsible to work through our experiences and get to a point of healing.

Again, from Huston:

“Then, and only then (after the process to be sure) we can see the other person as “a human being, no matter how degraded, a fellow soul made in the image and likeness of the God we adore.”

“God causes his sun to fall on both the good and the evil, and his rain to fall on both the righteous and unrighteous.” (Phooey, I can’t remember the reference.)

The longer we shut up our heart against the one that has hurt us the closer we come

to losing our own heart,

our humanity,

even our life.

And for some even our minds.

These things happened to me in the form of depression, alcoholism, and self-loathing and disgust; a misery of life, abject poverty of soul. I was a dead man walking.

There is hope, found in Jesus at the cross.  Laying those things down, the heavy burden of pain, of picturing yourself putting your pain at Jesus’ feet.  If you truly give it to God, release it when you can and

be ready for miracles!

MELODY

** Some people have a hard time picturing things in their mind’s eye.  If that is true for you I would urge you to watch the movie THE MISSION.  That movie changed my life.  I believe it will give you a picture of your pain and lack of forgiveness as those heavy pieces of armor that the priest dragged up a water fall as penance.  Whenever I begin to forget what my bitterness and anger, lack of forgiveness are doing to me, I can see in my mind’s eye that sack of armor.  No one can live that way.  No one should live that way.  No one needs to live that way.  I did for so long.

{a midstream update on “ch-ch-ch-changing”} part 2 of “I Hate Being Fat”

Sometime in May I admitted to myself and “the world”  in a post that I hated being fat.

It’s now late June and I want you to know that I’ve been busy.  More importantly, I faced something about myself that I don’t like, I can even admit that I hate about myself, my weight.  I wrote about it, which was cathartic just in itself, and it was a kick in the pants for Tom and for me to do something! 

There’s something about our culture that has your average person (I am including myself here) convinced that we can’t do anything about our appearance.  And if you’re not already thin, or already beautiful, or already in shape, stay out of the fitness clubs.

I had myself so talked into a pathetic corner of apathy, that I thought I shouldn’t even be seen on the streets exercising because I was such a joke.

I had my head so full of excuses that I felt hopeless, and worthless, and hated the sight of myself.

I’m here to tell you that I started exercising!  I read a book and stopped eating wheat.  I no longer have acid reflux.  I have lost (since March) thirteen pounds. More importantly I decided that I want to be around when my grandchildren get here. (No, this is not an announcement.)

I get out there and walk or walk/jog with my Couch Potato to 5K phone app cheering me along.  I do it five or six times a week, and have now going into my third week.  More than anything I decided that it was possible to change.

Do you believe you can change things about yourself?  There comes a point in “middle age” when we must either give in and give up OR do something.  I don’t think very many people believe they can change.  The stories of successful exercise or weigh loss or even giving up something like alchohol are too dramatic, too flashy, too much turn-your-life-upside-down unbelievable.

But this is a story mid stream — to tell you that if you want to you can change anything!

In March of this year I was the heaviest I have ever been — I was 179 pounds fat.  I felt horrible.  In May I decided perhaps I could do something about it.  I’m 166 pounds now and I won’t tell you my goal because I don’t want to jinx myself.  I am changing habits.  Changing lifestyle.  Changing the way I look at myself.  I am changing my future — likely extending my life, certainly I have more energy and optimism and hope for the future.  There is a power that comes from doing.

But I just want you to know that if you decide to, you can do anything.  What I have learned (at least about myself) is that it is a lot like being an alcoholic, in this way…

All I need to think about is today.  

All I know that I can change is today.  

Will I choose to go and walk/jog in 90 degree heat today, because this is what I decided to do? Yes, I will.  Yes I did.

What will you choose?  What will you decide to change today?