January 2nd

Hello!


I know lately and for quite a long time now I have been writing here in an indirect kind of way as I share things already written, but this time I wanted to post directly, for a couple of reasons.


First, as I was thinking back to the last few sections of my journal that I shared here, I worried that I might have communicated something unintentionally, and that something would be the idea that emotional or psychological suffering, such as anxiety or depression, needs a spiritual cure requiring only faith, while physical suffering, such as a broken leg, requires only a doctor.


I have run into this kind of thinking myself on several occasions. It's not usually spoken out loud, it's more like an unspoken assumption.


For example, when I was eighteen years old, I returned from a summer in England where I had become quite deeply depressed. I was supposed to be enjoying myself over there while living with a cousin of mine and his family- he was a pilot in the air force and was stationed there- but I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into depression.


This was because considering my future was overwhelming and fear inducing. At the time, I did not have my driver's license and simply using the telephone was such an anxiety-laded ordeal that I had to write out a script on a piece of paper in order to prepare myself for the coming conversation.


In light of this, considering collage, even a state or technical college, seemed as far out of reach for me as the moon. I had been raised for seventeen years in a sheltered, exclusive, legalistic church with a focus on apocalyptic doctrines, and so I had prepared myself only for a future that included attending the Bible collage that was an institution of that particular church, and then getting married immediately upon graduation, and then raising children and being a godly mother and wife.


Anything other than that seemed so terrifying that I could hardly consider it, let alone pursue it. I was a failure in the eyes of all my friends and a great deal of my family and all my mentors, because most of them were in the church I had left. But I was also a failure in the eyes of the society in general, because everyone else my age was going to college with bright hopes and dreams, and I was floundering and could not even drive.


On top of this, of course I was carrying around the buried memories and wounds of abuse that had yet to be addressed. So I was deeply depressed that summer. At the time, our new church was a Charismatic/Pentecostal church.


The people at this church were loving and caring people with good intentions, just as had been the people in the church I had grown up in. But they were operating out of a certain set of beliefs, and this determined their behavior and approach- as they had for me, when I had been a member of that church. In fact, I had been very successful at behaving in all the right ways, and I had treated those that left in the same way that I was now experiencing in person, from the other side.


In the charismatic church we were attending, one of the beliefs they held was that depression was not the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain, produced as a result of trauma or grief, but instead was an evil spirit attacking a person.


So when I returned from England, the church gathered around me, put their hands on me, and began to rebuke the evil spirit of depression that they felt was opposing and attacking me. If this did not work, I knew it was my fault- I either lacked faith or was harboring a secret sin and should search my heart to find it, confess it and hopefully be healed. Otherwise, I believed this evil spirit would be following me around indefinitely.


I am certain that depression, like everything else in life, has a spiritual component, and I appreciated being cared for and prayed over. But the result of that experience was not healing. Depression has a spiritual component, but it is also like pain- it is a way that the body tells us we have been hurt, and need help.


For example, when we are hiking or jogging and fall and sprain an ankle, even the most devout generally do not rebuke the spirit of pain and then get up and try and continue to jog on the sprain, and then label themselves a spiritual failure because the injury and the pain remain.


Instead, we know we have an injury because of the pain, are forced by the pain to stop and exam the injury, and then go and find care. In this way, pain is a gift. If we didn't feel it, we wouldn't know anything was wrong, and would continue on and the injury would become compounded. When we finally got healing, it would be a longer and more complicated process, and if we never got care for the injury, we would probably end up with a permanent limp, and may not be able to jog again.


I say all this because if you, like me, have struggled or are struggling with depression or anxiety, I do not want to leave you with the erroneous impression that I am attempting to heal or address this solely through spiritual measures.


Of course I expect and have experienced Jesus' profound and spiritual healing work in my life, and that is precious to me. But I have also been to therapy and have been on depression medication, and am going to therapy still, about once a month, and to me, this is another and powerful way that Jesus is working to heal me.


There has been, and there still lingers, a burden of shame associated with emotional and psychological injuries and conditions. This exists in society in general, but also in a specific way within the Christian community. I do not want to add to this shame, even inadvertently. I want to do the opposite.


I feel that my testimony of the way Jesus moves in my life puts me in a unique position to help remove some of the shame. Because look! Look at how He is with me, and yet see how I struggle also with these things that in some circles or in an unspoken way, are considered failures or shameful or a bad testimony.


If you are struggling with these things, please do not be ashamed. You are not a failure, or less than, or falling short. Your body, and most certainly your mind, is a marvel and depression and anxiety is telling you something helpful for you to know. Lean into Jesus, pray as He directs you to pray and lean into your community, but do not feel ashamed of needing therapy, attending therapy, or of taking medication. No one is ashamed of taking an aspirin when they get a fever.


Fortunately for me, my parents had the courage to attend therapy and to begin healing, and this gave me the support needed for me to begin at a fairly early age- when I was twenty six. It was much harder for my parents, because they had several decades of pain to work through.


But at the right time, Jesus led me to the perfect therapist and through her training and compassion, I began to be free of the horrible beliefs that I had formed about myself and the world as a result of the abuse. It took three years, the first time.


I had to go back to therapy the same year that I was diagnosed with infertility, as the shame around infertility compounded the shame of abuse, and I couldn't work through all that on my own. At that time also, I found a wonderful, experienced and compassionate therapist who helped me untangle the damaging beliefs.


Going to therapy the first time was absolutely the hardest thing that I have ever done, and many times during those three years I thought I had reached the limit of what I could take, but Jesus was most certainly present and helping and guiding me along.


In fact, it was in one of those sessions, as I was trying to face a certain memory of abuse, that I suddenly saw that Jesus had always been with me and that I had never been alone in the terrible, shameful and painful dark. Never once had I been abandoned. In fact, Jesus had taken on my suffering as His own. I cannot express how deeply this makes me love Him- Jesus did not have to do that, He could have remained aloof. He did not. This is love beyond description.


No one knows the courage it takes to begin therapy of that kind unless they have been through it- to face the thing which is so terrible and so unthinkable that for years massive amounts of energy have been dedicated to denying it ever happened.


There is a certain idea that healing should take only this amount of time and then be done with, but anyone who has suffered abuse or trauma can tell you that this belief is not true and not helpful. Healing is a life long process, but one that is not without hope or success or sudden moments of wonderful freedom and clarity. 


God does sometimes demonstrate His glory by a sudden transformation in people's lives and those testimonies are powerful and beautiful. But many other times, He demonstrates His glory by leading us to healing one slow step at a time, teaching us patience, courage, mercy and compassion along the way.


This is the way Jesus has healed me, so it is what I can talk about, even if in an anecdotal way, and what I have learned by this slow process of healing is so beautiful and precious and personal, and has revealed the heart of Jesus to me in such intimate ways that to be honest, I would not want Him to work in any other way with me. To know Jesus in His suffering is a gift.


This does not mean that I try to prolong the suffering or that I want to glorify the suffering, or that I do not get help, or that I feel ashamed of needing help. It just means that I get to know His heart as I walk along beside Him, growing up into Him through the healing process, which has been a long road for me, and continues still.


That's one thing I wanted to say. The other thing I want to say is that the next few sections of my journal that I will be sharing are going to be more intense than the previous ones. They are what is sometimes called "strong meat."


I just wanted to give my readers a bit of a head's up. I'm in the process of preparing them before posting them, and I don't know how long the process will take. The last few blogs that I have posted have been like stepping stones, though they are valuable in their own way.


I am committed, by the grace of God, to being as transparent and honest in sharing these experiences as I possibly can, so that I do not attempt to make them more or less than what they were, but to simply let my words frame them as best I can, as a witness to something beautiful and holy, something that illustrates, in a limited way of course, the love, grace and glory of God.


I cannot do this on my own, but I am trusting Jesus to guide me in this process. In the end, I must hand myself and my words over to Him with an open and transparent heart. He has never failed to guide me by inner and outer confirmations, in the most generous, specific and comforting way and if He were not doing that, I simply would not be able to share these things- even the things that I have already shared.


So I am trusting Him with this also. What I will be sharing is as much a mystery to me as they will be to others, so I am simply offering them freely, with faith, hope and love, first to Jesus, who gave them to me, and then to anyone else who comes along and reads them.


*

Now to Him Who, by (in consequence of) the [action of His] power that is at work within us, is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams]—

To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen (so be it).

Ephesians 3:20-21, Amplified

September 23rd

The window is open. They've been open all day, to let in the cool air that has finally arrived with autumn. I sit on the carpet, leaning my arms on the windowsill. Outside, there is a restless energy. I hear the revving of an engine on the darkened roads, a snatch of radio caught as another car passes.


"Is it Friday night?" I ask Jesus, idly wondering.


All around me, people are getting ready to leave their houses and head out in the pursuit of something- some bright, dazzling adventure, some wordless hunger.


I remember the glittering bulk of an airport at night, pools of yellowed light and moving sound roaring over head and lanes of light and streams of people. I think of myself waiting there, in line for Japanese Air ticket counter, or already in Japan and ready to go out, uncomfortable in my too-tight clothing, confused by the foreign chatter of the radio- always rushing away, being lost and found in airport terminals and pushing my life away until tomorrow so I wouldn't have to come to terms with it.


"It is Friday night and the world is restless," I tell Jesus, my eyes as much on my memories as they are on the back yard.


But not you, He replies, His voice gentle.


Reminded, I become aware of the solidity of the house around me, the peace of the lamp lit bedroom with the sleigh bed and battered, comfortable pillows and the dried palm branch tucked into the mirror.


"No, not me," I agree. "Because I have You." Our joy in this is mutual and full of delight.


Earlier in the evening, there had been a cloud tumbling higher and higher into the eastern sky, scalloped curves golden with the sun setting behind me. White and gold, cut crisp against the saturated blue, it towered over the trees and the stop light.


For you, Jesus had said, with almost playful generosity, as if He had whipped that cloud up to such sweet heights simply for the pleasure of giving it away like a meringue.


"Thank you, I love it," I reply promptly, happy to join in this particular game. "I love my cloud gift. It's a beautiful cloud."


Now the evening has mellowed and the light has left the sky. I wash the rest of the dishes and wander upstairs, thinking I might read, but I can't read. I can only rest there, the book beside me, the room filled with the presence of Jesus. Our conversations come and go with no regularity.


I am thinking of the book, The Little Notebook, by Nicole Gausseron, a French woman who had a relationship with Jesus much like mine. I have ordered the books, three of them. Her description of Jesus has filled me with joy and delight in Him all over again.


Do you see how the love I give one person causes others to be drawn to Me, so they come to Me anew and with deeper longing? Jesus asks. I also do that through you.


"Yes, I can see that," I acknowledge, because Jesus has been telling me this a long time, ever since I first started writing about Him.


Do I light a lamp just to put it under a basket? He has asked me, reasonably.


I am sitting on the bed and my hand is itching. Ever since I fell by the pool two years ago, the skin there sometimes bothers me. I wish that I could remove something from it, as if it were a splinter, but it's not a splinter and it never seems completely to heal and it's frustrating.


It's not your hand that really bothers you, Jesus points out in the quietness between us. It is as though He is turning my face gently toward something I don't want to see. What you really long to do is to draw out of you all the brokenness and pain from your childhood.


I sit there, motionless. Of course He is right. The rightness of what He is saying is opening up layers of my heart, and I can see right down through. This fills me a resigned, childlike grief, heavy and simple, because there is nothing I can do. I cannot pull those memories out once and for all. I cannot make it so it didn't happen.


"Yes," I admit, sadly. "But I can't."


Jesus is filled with grief with me, so much that my grief is not only my own, but also His. I have been speaking to Him with no particular sense of where He is in the room, but now I see Him enter the room and come to me swiftly and bend down over me and gather me up in His arms. He presses His cheek tenderly to mine as He holds me in His arms.


But I bear them with you, He whispers, and the love and the grief in His voice are strong and mingled.


Jesus is so present that it seems almost inevitable that at any moment, He will actually come around the corner of the open door and walk toward me. I find that I'm holding my breath, waiting in the stillness for the physical sound of His footsteps on the carpet.


I am not the only one waiting on the edge of that moment. Do you need even that? Jesus asks, quietly into my heart.


For a moment, I'm torn between several layers of motives, longings and doubts, until I am released into the simplicity of the best answer. I remember the kind of faith that delights Him.


"No, because I already know You are right here with me," I confess, giving myself completely over to this knowledge by faith.


This does delight Jesus. Joy flares up through Him and kindles my spirit; we are luminous with joy and love.


You are My heart, He says.


I think about this, what that might mean. I think about how His love for us makes Him vulnerable to pain and suffering through us. It shocks me, when I grasp it.


"How much You must suffer!" I tell Jesus, in amazement.


You also will suffer this, He says quietly.


And I think of Merissa, how right now she is small and safe in the house. But she will grow and go out into the rest of the world, the whole time as though she is my unprotected heart, freely walking around, bumping up against the world and getting sometimes bruised, disappointed, rejected and growing up through it all and I will suffer it all with her, because no matter where she goes or what she does, my love is a living connection to her.


But for Jesus, this is multiplied to such a degree that I can't grasp it. I am moved to pity, to compassion. I throw my arms around Jesus and it is as though our hearts are beating in time to this pain of loving- His love vast, incomprehensible, full of grief and hope and sure and certain faith like a bedrock beneath, and mine small but still beating in time with His.


"We will suffer together," I whisper to Jesus, because my love for Him is fierce, even if it is only human, and because I can't manage it without Him.


I could see His face close to mine in the hush of the room. I could see the scars from the thorns. Those scars always draw me in. The story of love they tell me is personal, because I never knew they existed until I began to see His face.


The scars seem to open and I'm not seeing them, but I'm seeing Jesus bound and bloodied under a hot sun, in a crowd of hate and noise. This has happened before, so I am not taken unaware. Sometimes I see slivers of His Passion and whenever I do, Jesus hides His agony from me. Often, I do not know what He is feeling; He won't let me share it with Him.


This time He does, I see the crown of thorns violently shoved over His head, scraping the skin clean open and I hear Him cry out and then I am shut away from that scene, the inner and the outer pain and I see again the closed scars at His forehead. His face is gentle and kind, full of peace, His eyes are warm with love.


That crown was meant to mock Him; a crown of pain, of dead and dried vines twisted into an instrument of cruelty, but Jesus humbly accepted it and wore it out of incomprehensible love, love so vast we can hardly understand it, and just like any of His scars, the scars left by those long thorns only serve to make Him that much more beautiful.


*


Look at me. Look at my face. I know that the road is rocky. Do not look down at your feet. I am a companion. I walk ahead of you, but I slow down in order to walk with you. Follow me. I am the road.


-Believe That I Am Here: The Notebooks of Nicole Gausseron, Book One, January 30

August 25th

I chew my lips so badly that I must put chap stick on at least four or five times a day to prevent the skin from chapping and breaking. When I go to bed at night, my jaws ache.

I never leave the house unless it's to go grocery shopping or with Keith. I don't even know where the local library is.

I wear the same two linen shirts and two cotton skirts all week long.

I tell myself this is fine, so long as I keep writing, jogging and the house clean. Which I do.

Most of the time, I think I'm happy. It's hard to tell sometimes.

My days are defined by these obscure internal crises that no one else ever knows about, unless I happen to blog about them. Things having to do with self perception: my perception of everything from my general way of living to a specific comment I left on facebook.

It doesn't matter what I say or do, at some point, it will feel like a terrible mistake and will follow me around, my constant companion for the rest of the day. I've almost stopped commenting at all, because of this, to try and avoid it.

Most of the time I'm happy to see Keith pull up in the driveway and go striding down to the mailbox. Sometimes he's arrived in the midst of an intense internal weather system that doesn't want to give way for him; I want to continue absorbed and wrestling.

I am like the crazy, eccentric and creative writer person that scare other, more normal people. I wonder if I could have turned out differently if I had tried. Would I trully want to be different? Different in what way?

I wonder if this version of me is truly the result of my choosing, over and over again, personal authenticity over society's expectations. Or is this just the result of my anxiety wearing away at me, like wind scouring the rocks?

I wonder what kind of story I would write, if I wrote about this me- the thirty three year old, infertile, anxious shut in who is also the warm and passionate wife who is also the woman with the spectacular, adversarial and fertile internal life.

Yesterday I wept. My brother and his wife were given a little girl. Their life was added to, was enlarged in every way.

In the light of this, my own life seemed so futile, like a grown up playing in the sandbox. Who cares if I can write? What does it matter? It won't change the world. I'm not a genius; I just have a natural ability.

My body seemed so broken, so worthless. Already having been the sexual plaything of pedophile, already spent, spoiled, plundered. And now broken, yielding me nothing. Just an empty vessel.

I just let myself grieve. Then I wrote. I forced myself to continue writing. After all, what am I going to do? I have this life. I have this day stretching out in front of me, full of emptiness. I might as well write.

July 12th

I woke up to an unusually foggy morning here. It is suffocatingly damp and hot out there, and the cement is covered by the broken pieces of branches and bunches of leaves that got flung down in the last storm. They've all shriveled and turned rusty brown now. I scoop them out of the pool each time I swim.

As I was fixing my coffee, I had a unexpected moment of nostalgia for Kentucky, no less. So, that can get filed in Merriam Webster, listed under "irony."

Colorado now feels so far away that it's no more than a dream, a dream of clear, dry air and fresh sunlight. It is now the stuff of legend, and the reverence that a legend commands is often in our voice when Keith and I speak of it. "Colorado," we sigh, with low, hushed voices, "oh, Colorado!"

I'm bogged down, temporarily, in Torii. I hate writing through the awful parts. It seems so terribly complicated and I hate thinking through them. I still haven't figured out who exactly it is that is abusing her, what his relationship to her is, how old he is, what his position in life is, where he lives, etc, etc.

Basically, I know nothing about him because I wish to give him as little thought as possible. That's ok, for now. It's ok not to know a lot of things about your own story, even while you're writing it. At some point, I'll sit down and map this person out.

There's so much mercy in my story that I'm even tempted to extend mercy to him. For example, I was going to have Tenshio castrate him, once Tenshio learned who he was. And then, when I got to that part, I thought, doesn't justice lie with God?

Though, of course, Tenshio can act as the agent of God's justice. It wouldn't be wrong of Tenshio to do that; it would be gratifying. And I may still have that happen. It's just, I got to that part and somehow, I held back.

In the meantime, Gilly has been forced to realize that the dead girl lives inside of her. The next step is to realize that the dead girl is a part of her, and not evil, and not dead, and not bestial. Tenshio will have to explain this to her, over and over again.

It's a hard thing to believe. Actually, writing about the early stages of Gilly's emerging memories was quite difficult. I know now that the part of myself that held the abuse memories was incredible good, to point of self sacrifice, and incredible strong.

But I remember distinctly when I thought of that little girl as evil. Going back to that place felt almost like a betrayal of that part of me that had sacrificed so much for me, that part that waited in the filthy dark for years and years, waiting for me to become strong enough to rescue her.

However, Torii just wouldn't be as powerful if I didn't write it fully through every stage of the process. Besides, self hatred can be so pervasive, and for so many different reasons. I want to write one story of such self hatred and reveal how transforming it is when we choose to look at ourselves in a different way, when our eyes are opened to who we truly are.

I didn't expect these issues to be coming while on board the ship. I planned on having that happen on the Indian subcontinent. I thought of the ship voyage as largely trouble free; I had some vague idea that the water itself would be like a sponge and absorb the spiritual qualities of the Kagamihara, or some such nonsense.

I am letting the story spin out as it will, though it's not going according to my schedule. I'm worried that if I try too much to direct it against my own, mostly subconscious instincts, the story itself will dry up. Maybe by the time they reach Tenjiku, Gilly will have made some kind of peace with herself and be ready to see the actual memories themselves.

By the way, Tenjiku is the ancient Japanese name for India and guess what it means? The heavenly middle of the earth, or the sacred center- something along those lines. I'm not making this crap up, it's true. How cool is that?

Since I am getting closer and closer to the massive "hinge" of the story, or the Torii gate itself, I'm beginning to see more and more clearly how it's going to be written, which is exciting. I'm eager to be on the other side of this curve.