For the Love of Self

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” Carl Jung

If you could live in my head and listen to my thoughts, you would hear a lot of negativity directed at me. You would hear a lot of phrases berating me for stupid actions and needless words. If I mess up, you can be assured that I will be the first one to scold myself. I never thought this was a problem; it's just me and how I feel about me doesn’t hurt anyone else. Does it? It seems that my feelings for myself do affect others. I see some of my own attitudes and feelings being reflected in my daughter and it isn’t pretty. In an effort to be humble, I have become very self-obsessed. I tend to be too serious, and I am constantly afraid I may seem vain or self-promoting. This also causes me to do and say things that seem offensive to myself even more. I’m in a cycle of self-defeat.


I spent my whole life trying to encourage others and be all things to all people, but the years of constant castigation of myself have left me drained with nothing left to give. I saw someone post a tweet a week or so ago saying we must love ourselves because God instructed us to "love our neighbor as ourselves." (Matt 19:19) At first I brushed it off, but then I realized that I would never say the things to my neighbor that I say to myself. Not loving myself hasn’t made me a better person, it’s kept me from growing. It’s caused me to be infinitely insecure. So the question I have now is how to fix this. Should I buy some cheesy self-help book, stand in front of the mirror and repeat affirming things to myself, or give myself five compliments for every negative comment. The first thing I have done is admitted the problem. Yes, I do not love Tammie and it is a problem. Next, I am giving the problem to God and asking for His direction in the repair work.

How Much Longer?

Every time we go on a long trip,  my daughter asks the question "How much longer?" or "Are we almost there?" at least a hundred times. On Saturdays, we go to town to run errands and I often hear the question, "Where are we going next?" Usually, after hearing these questions multiple times, I begin to say, "You’ll know when we get there." Our humanity longs to know exactly where we are going and how long it will take. We hate not knowing the plan.

In my spiritual journey, I am the same way. I am always impatient to know exactly how and when point A will lead to point B. I always want a map or GPS that gives me a clear list of instructions of where to go and which turns to make. God just does not work that way though. He is the Father and I am the child, and I must depend on him. To believe in the divine providence of God, Liz Curtis Higgs says, is to believe that "God is there, God cares, God rules, and God provides." It doesn’t mean that God will explain His ways or let you in on the plans beforehand. It doesn’t mean that God will consult you and make sure this is what you want. We must trust in His love for us and His amazing knowledge of what is and what is to come. So many things in life do not make sense, but we must lean on His understanding and not our own.

 

This year it seems that I've been in a valley or desert that doesn't seem to end.  I find myself asking God "How much longer?" Today I think I hear Him saying "You'll know when we get there."  So God, I guess I will try to quit asking questions and just enjoy the ride. Sometimes the scenery is not so beautiful, but I know that just around the bend, you have something amazing planned. Don’t let me take control; please take me where you want me to go.

A Long Drink of Silence

Psalm 62:5 For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from Him. 

I’ve always been a thinker and always enjoyed time alone. I am the oldest child in my family and was the only child for almost 5 years. I have two brothers and although we did play together frequently as young children, the older I got, the more I separated myself to read and think. I can remember my oldest brother, who is nearly 5 years younger than me, was always a chatter box. One day I was driving us somewhere and I finally said in exasperation, "Can you please be quiet so I can think!" The silence lasted all of about two seconds when he piped up and asked, "Whatcha thinking about?" Thomas Carlyle said, "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge." Ruminating and thinking are the creative platform for almost anything that gets accomplished in this life.

My adult life started with a bang. I started working at age 17, I moved out at 19.  At age 21, I married a widower with two sons. I was attending college full-time and I was working nearly full-time in his office. I had a daughter six years into our marriage and I continued to work in our family practice and brought her to work with me. I’ve had my times of being closer to God and times I’ve drifted away over the years.  It just seems that in the past three years with the trials we’ve experienced and the accumulation of years of things I’ve not dealt with, there were times I felt God had vanished. I could see Him working, but it seemed in my own life He was not speaking; He was silent.

I planned this retreat not really knowing what to expect. I’ve never spent this much time alone in my life. I rarely get silence and I’ve also realized that I tend to make sure there isn’t any. I have music or something to occupy my mind available at all times. There is solitude and a heavy silence surrounding the Hesychia House of Prayer. The only sounds are cows, birds, crunching of grass or gravel as you walk. The silence is somewhat deafening because my mind is far from quiescent. The thoughts have come in droves the longer I sit in silence. There is a calendar in my room that says "Deep Silence Blossoms". I’ve realized that silence increases the volume (both the number and sound) of your thoughts. I’ve tried to limit my music and I haven’t really had anyone to speak to. I have walked, sat, laid and just let my mind wander. In the silence, I feel God as sure as I feel my own skin. The thought that has prevailed is that I want to conquer my selfish, human desires and find contentment in only Him. I’m tired of wallowing in self-pity. It’s time to lay it all down and leave it there. In Isaiah 41:1 it says, "Listen to me in silence, ...let the people renew their strength; let them approach, then let them speak..." As I sit and listen to God in silence, I am renewing my strength that was so very depleted. As my strength starts returning, I feel the need to speak.

Happy, happy, happy

Our society is consumed with being happy, happy, happy. I am probably the biggest proponent of laughter that you will find, but as it says in Ecclesiastes 3:4, there is a time to laugh and a time to cry. Despite the fact that we all have bad times in life, we do our best to cover it up and make sure nobody knows that we are sad, hurting, or broken. We all have to face sickness, death, financial disasters, stress on the job, chaotic schedules, and on top of all that, many of us have children who are involved in too many activities. The stress of our lives is way over the limit of what we should be handling on a daily basis. The past few months have been difficult for me. It seems that the stressors of my life, which are probably about par for the course, have started bothering me more than normal. I heard my husband tell someone the other day that I had been the most mature twenty-one year old in the world. My daddy says that I have "always been a grown-up". I guess all that maturity has finally gotten to me. The past few months, I have had a hard time dragging myself out of this pit that I’ve fallen into and getting myself focused to do the things I need to do. I, like many other moms, have a very active schedule, and the holidays and summer vacation just escalate the madness causing us to endure new heights of stress and chaos in our lives. The past three years, I’ve had several extra stressors come into my life which intensified the normal stress.

 I guess it’s no wonder that sometime at the end of last year, I realized that I was at my limit. I decided I needed to laugh more to get rid of some stress. The more the year has progressed, I started noticing things that I hadn’t noticed before. I began to have more anxiety, wanting to cry all the time, being unable to focus on movies or books like before. I go through spells when I can’t decide what I want to eat or what I want to listen to; I have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep–it is just a general malaise. I have covered well, and when I have tried to talk to people about it, they either don’t understand or don’t think anything is wrong with me. Apparently, I don’t act depressed, but it seems that I have to make myself do everything that is required of me, and I tend to do everything much slower than before. I would just prefer to sit on the couch or lie in bed all day. I can’t actually let myself cry and release any negative emotions because then people will ask what is wrong with me and I really haven’t been too sure about that myself. I apparently am very good at bottling things up and putting on my happy face. I laugh and I smile, and I show frustration over minor things, but I’ve developed quite a skill at tapping down my emotions over the rest of life’s problems. I don’t have time to deal with emotions, if I cry, people will want to discuss it. We really do discourage tears in our society, and we shouldn't. Jesus wept, and he did it in front of his friends.

I’ve been craving time alone. I don’t ever seem to be alone, and if I’m away from my family, it’s to go to a meeting with another group of people. I think that everyone needs time to sit and think and spend time with God. A time to get away from the pressure of a schedule. Even though I’ve had vacations and church camp, they all require something of me while I am there. I am not sure I’ve ever had three days in a row without anywhere to be or anything to do or anyone to be around in my life. Jesus went away for 40 days to be alone and pray, and when we fail to have sufficient alone time with God, the stress of our lives will become too heavy for us.

On September 18, I will turn 40. Most people want to do something radical to mark this event like tattoos, body piercings, skydiving, bungee jumping, or a big trip. I started early this year thinking about what I wanted to do for my birthday. Like everything else, I had no focus and just couldn’t decide. Then last week a friend called and said she wanted to take me away for my birthday. I seriously thought about it and realized that I didn’t want spa treatments, or anything enjoyable per se, or even to be around people. I just wanted to be alone to pray, cry, scream, sleep, sit, read, walk–just be. So on September 15, I will be going to the Hesychia House of Prayer, and yes, it’s a monastery. I know that normal people don’t want to wake up in a Monastery on their birthday, but I am far from normal at this point. I’m tired of being and feeling the way I have this year. So I am going away and me and God are going to wrestle it out. I am not sure how I will react to being alone, but one thing is for certain, Tammie will never be the same again.

God Cannot Love Me Less

When my daughter does something that she knows she should not have done, she always cries and asks me if I still love her.  It is human nature for us to feel unlovable when we sin.  Because of my upbringing, I have always had to fight the mind-set of equating God’s love with my actions. In the back of my mind, I always feel that if I am "good", then God will love me more. On the other hand, when I am bad, which seems to happen with great regularity, then I feel unlovable. I grew up in a very legalistic denomination and there were so many rules that I couldn’t begin to name them. I knew what was acceptable and unacceptable, but it was an unwritten list. I will always be shaped by my earlier experiences, but there are some habits I have had to break. I do not believe that I am saved based on my actions, but for some reason I still fight the feeling that God will somehow love me less if I mess up.

This week in class we studied 1 Samuel 12. The children of Israel wanted to be like all the other nations and have a King, and despite the many warnings that Samuel gave them against this, they kept demanding a King; therefore, God delivered to them their desire. In 1 Samuel 12, Samuel is telling the children of Israel how God has always taken care of them and it is made abundantly clear to them that they have turned away from their God, they have sinned, and they began to be fearful and to feel unloved. In verse 20 Samuel says "Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil, Yet do not turn aside from following the LORD, but serve the LORD with all your heart. For the LORD will not forsake his people.. . ." To me the word forsake means to leave, and the dictionary defines it as "to quit, leave entirely, or abandon." The Hebrew word in this passage actually has a slightly different definition. It means to beat a mass until it is flat or to devalue something. For some reason this clicked with me.  I realized God does not love me less because of my sin. I do not lose value in His sight because of my screw-ups. I have always said that I disappoint God, but He still loves me. I now am beginning to wonder, "Can God be disappointed when He knew I was going to mess up anyway?" God loves me. There is nothing else I can add to that. It makes no sense in my finite human mind. I can’t understand it or fathom how massive His love is. I just know that God loves me with all of His being, and He cannot love me any less!

The Most Important Question

Yesterday, I made a comment to a client which triggered him to share his testimony with me. It resonated with me, because I felt God calling me to witness--to actually speak up and ask someone "Do you know Jesus?" This client said that he was living a very rough life and one day he and the guys he worked with went to a restaurant. He noticed there were some beautiful girls working in this restaurant and he was able to obtain the number of one of them. He was very excited and he called her the next day and the very first question she asked him was, "Are you saved?" He, having no religious experience, totally misunderstood and thought she was worried about him being a safe person to be with.  He quickly assured her that he was safe and assured her of his good intentions. She said, "No, no! You misunderstood.  Are you saved? If you aren't saved then you are lost." He again glossed over the question assuring her that he was a really good guy. She hung up on him. Although, he said from that point he was tormented over her question and what she really meant. It was the beginning of his search for spiritual meaning and his search for God.  He never heard from this girl again, and she doesn't know that she asked him the most important question he ever heard.  

I have felt God tugging at my heart these last months about witnessing. I have lost the vision and the burden for the lost that I once had. Where I once had a burden to help needy and hurting people, it has now become a burden to help needy and hurting people. My husband is a Gideon--one of those men that hands out Bibles. I am in the Auxiliary and I carry a KJV New Testament and a Spanish language New Testament in my purse at all times. I have given out a handful of Bibles in my membership, but not near enough. I pass untold numbers of people everyday who need Jesus. They sit in the very place I work and I never think to ask them "Are you saved?" Last week at church camp I felt God renew my strength and renew my burden. My heart was softened, and it seemed like I couldn't quit crying. Today I prayed, "God send someone to me to witness to today", and tonight I sat thinking "God didn't send me anyone." Then like a lightening bolt he reminded me of the boy that was in my office with his father.  This young man is headed down the wrong road right now, and all I did was take care of the administrative work that needed completing. I forgot to witness. 

I am always waiting for someone else to start the conversation, and so many times I realize that they are waiting for me to tell them why I have hope. They want me to tell them why I am so happy with the life I live. It may be that they don't even know they are lost. I am praying that God will quicken my spirit when that person I need to witness to comes into my presence.  A preacher, that I have a lot of respect for said, "We can't change the world, but Jesus can."  The world has drifted farther and farther from God, and we worry about the political and social ills of our society.  I have heard people bemoan how Christians just want to tell you about Jesus and not take care of their earthly needs of food and shelter. I believe that until we do take care of their earthly needs they won't hear the message, but be careful that we don't spend our time feeding the poor and never telling them they need Jesus more. They may need clean drinking water, but more than that they need the water Jesus gives that they will never thirst again.  The only way our society will change is if we start introducing them to Jesus and then ".......do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you. (1 Samuel 10:7 ESV)

Laughter Toxicity

I love to laugh; it is better than chocolate in my opinion. In college, I wrote a research paper on laughter and discovered that laughter has been proven to actually work like a medicine.  At the time I wrote my paper, there were laughter clubs in India.  They got together in the park, much like exercise groups would, and they laughed.  They tried to tell jokes in the beginning, but they ran out and discovered that you can make yourself laugh and it works just as well.  I am currently in the process of updating my research, and I see that there is now laughter yoga. The goal of http://www.laughteryoga.org is to bring "good health, joy, and WORLD PEACE through laughter".  Laughter knows no language barriers. 

The last three years have been stressful years, and I started this year with the goal of laughing more. I tried to incorporate things in my life that would make me laugh because I know that laughter releases the bad stress from your body. It just seems like life continued to distract me from laughing. Apparently the average four year old laughs about 300 times a day and the average 40 year old laughs only four according to Psychology Today. These statistics differ depending on what authority you are reading, but they all agree that children laugh vastly more than adults. I do believe I am above average in the laughing department, but I do allow the stress of my life to dictate how much I laugh. 

This past week I went to church camp. When you go to church camp, you always expect to get spiritually pumped up, and I did. I didn't expect to develop "laughter toxicity!" I was sitting around talking with some friends and one of my friends was telling the story of how a poor little girl was stuck in the bathroom stall with no TP. She kept hollering and begging for some TP and nobody would pay attention. I had walked in about this time and finally my friend was handing her a roll of TP over the stall and I noticed it was the wet roll. The thought then went through my mind "Oh no, that is the wet roll.  Why did I not throw that away? I have picked it up and put it back down about ten times. Did I think it was gonna dry out?" Then the little girl cries out plaintively "This TP is wet!"  For some reason this story struck me as hilarious. I was trying to tell my side of the story and I got so tickled that I laughed harder than I have laughed in ages. I lost my breath, I cried, and just could not stop. Everyone was amazed. They hadn't seen me laugh like that and teasingly wondered if I was drunk.  I did eat a Rainbow Pop right before, and it may have gotten blamed for it. In fact, the Rainbow Pop sales shot up after that. It felt so good to laugh, and I still felt the effects of it the next day. I am actively trying to make myself laugh, even if there is nothing funny. Who says you need funny stuff to make you laugh. Just smile and fake a good belly laugh, and you will probably start laughing for real.  I promise you, that if you ever laugh so hard you cry, you will feel better than drunk and the hangover will be glorious. 

Here's the link to my research paper on Laughter
Laughter: Is it Healthy?
http://home.hiwaay.net/~garson/laughter.htm