I'm Sorry

I have never known emotional pain like this before.

I am about to give myself permission to totally and completely lose it because of how painful being separated from my husband and children is.

The separation hurts my skin. It hurts my eyelashes. It hurts each hair on my arm. It clutches my throat. It makes my neck spasm. It makes my eyes burn because there are tears that need to come out but too many were spilled yesterday. Are my tear ducts empty? How can I not be crying right now?

Four people who were a family are not a family today. There is my husband, always so angry, always so impossible to please, always so impossible to pacify, who is reeling so hard from the absence of family that he asked me to give him a list of things to change so that I’ll come back.

There’s 9 year old Daughter A who is a carbon copy of her father and doesn’t hesitate to scream at her parents. “I know you two are getting a divorce,” she yelled at her dad a few days ago, “just go ahead and say the word!”

There’s 5 year old Daughter M who is a carbon copy of me. She’s already observing, already scanning for danger and already people-pleasing. And if she still can’t avoid trouble despite her best efforts, she resorts to tears.

And then there’s me. The wife who felt completely demeaned when she was screamed or hissed at. The wife who felt like she could provoke yelling just because the look on her face was wrong. The mother who had horrible guilt for letting her daughters see her cower. The mother who lives in a different house now and knows she can’t come home without fear setting in.

I am a wreck, such a wreck that I can’t believe I don’t blow wide apart leaving a gaping hole where my heart was. And sprinkled in are the oddest pieces of comfort and oddest pieces of woe.

Pieces of Comfort
- 2 friends from long, long ago got in touch with me on the same day
- An older coworker abruptly came into my office, read me a passage about shedding or old skin to make room for the new and told me about her 2 painful divorces
- A younger coworker came into my office to ask me why I was on disability, and I decided to be honest with her. I told her that it was due to an eating disorder and anxiety. Then she confided in me that she was having very bad problems with an eating disorder and anxiety, and we both talked about how dysfunctional relationships seemed to be driving the problems in both of us. I felt a sisterly bond that has me crying tears for her but at the same time bowing my head in gratitude for the fact that she chose to come talk to me.
- A maternal coworker gave me a CD of beautiful hymns arranged on the piano, and when I started playing it in my office, the day’s tears finally did come.
- Yet one more coworker told me that there had been abuse in her first marriage and started to detail it. I’m the only one at work she’s ever told.

Pieces of Woe
- I continue to chase after those empty promises
- Codependent thoughts come at me like a serial killer with a butcher knife
- Everything I see reminds me of what life should have been, could have been or everything I see shows me what life is now.

One of the worst parts of today was when a man I work with just looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” In two little words he pared everything down to the sheer sadness of it all. Yes. I, too, am sorry.

And All His Empty Promises

At my therapy group last night, one of our members was talking about her relationship with a married man. You know the type. He claims he can’t stand his wife but then goes on a vacation with her, he says they aren’t intimate but then she ends up pregnant, he says over and over again that he’s going to leave but doesn’t. My fellow group member knows that she is nothing but the other woman and that her only future with him is as an unpaid paramour. She also feels terrible guilt about how her behavior is damaging the marriage of another woman. And yet she talked last night about how much of a hold the illicit relationship had on her and how negatively it was affecting her life.

“I cannot describe to you how totally unfulfilling that relationship is for me. I know he’s never going to leave his wife, I hate what I’m doing to his wife, but every day I want to get a text or an e-mail from him that makes me believe that he cares about me. So if I haven’t heard from him, I get really anxious and I text or e-mail him. And then there’s just this cycle of anxiety that I go through as I wait to hear from him the next time…”

I had never had the idea before to look at my life to see if anything was unfulfilling. I gave my life a quick glance and didn’t like what I saw: unfulfilling, unfulfilling, unfulfilling. I felt sick and pathetic. How could I not have seen how much time I spent in unfulfilling ways before? And looking at those parts of my life, why was I hesitant to change in some areas?

My favorite part of Catholic baptisms is when the priest asks the witnesses, “Do you reject Satan…and all his empty promises?” and we say that we reject him. When I was examining my life recently, that was all I could think of, that my unfulfilling behavior was driven by Satan’s empty promises.

Empty promises. I have trouble thinking of anything more terrible than reaching eternity, only to realize that I had led my life guided by the evil one, the master of lies. What if I could see the horrific, demonic driving force behind all of my bad decisions? Would I still make them? No. But I can’t see the full terror of the evil one. As much as I want to treat Jesus as my king, I chase after the empty promises.

I want to be saved by Jesus Christ. Part of me wishes that I were a Southern Baptist so that I would know that I was saved already, but the other part of me realizes that I would ruthlessly question whether I was truly saved or not. As a Catholic, I am supposed to become contrite for chasing the empty promises, confess my sins and repent. Right now I’m still struggling to attain true contrition, and I ask for Mary’s help with this nearly every day.

Empty promises. Has life really come down to this? Ever since I found my personal relationship with God in 1995, I thought I had been pursuing Christ’s promises. Mary’s promises. The promises of saints and popes. The promises of prominent Christians in my life. The promises of God my Father.

I can’t handle the thought of being a slave to the beautiful weaver of deception. I prayed a rosary yesterday, and as unworthy as I feel, I will pray another one today. The rosary is my lifeline, and I feel like I am a lost soul. Jesus, Mary, I’m reaching out to you. You can’t let the evil one have me. Give me contrition where I have no contrition. Help me to make a full confession. Help me to change. I cry out to you from the core of my being, where there is no peace of Christ, only turmoil.

M. Nole's Dream List

At the end of my therapy group this week, one member advised a member struggling with codependency to write a Dream List if she's tempted to e-mail or text the toxic man with whom she's involved.

I decided to write out my own list, and I thought it would be hard to come up with a neat and tidy list of even 10 dreams. I started writing, and within 3 minutes, I had gone past the number 30. I will be adding to this, but here is the beginning of M. Nole's offical Dream list.

1. Score well on the LSAT and be accepted into law school
2. Become a very good, ethical lawyer who helps people
3. Write a nonfiction Christian book
4. Get off of all pain medicine and be completely into AA again
5. Be active in Al-Anon again
6. Write a Christian novel
7. Have a popular spiritual blog
8. Devote myself to special Catholic prayers and especially to the Virgin Mary
9. Evolve into a saint
10. Make a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Rome
11. Be someone who does kind, spontaneous things for others
12. Make a charitable gift to honor someone special every month
13. Write a fiction novel
14. Create Catholic folk art
15. Learn to make rosaries
16. Join a good Protestant Bible study class
17. Go to Daily Mass
18. Have true contrition for all of my sins
19. Have my daughters when they become adults) feel like I was the best mother in the world
20. Be involved in a ministry (presently working for a ministry does not count)
21. Belong to a book club
22. Subscribe to an audio book service and listen to new books every month
23. Become a Facebook addict and play with my BFFs
24. Open a Christian art store in Midtown
25. Become a positive thinker
26. Become a humanitarian
27. Give generously to my church
28. Use my gift for spiritual writing to change lives, or even better, to save a life or a soul
29. Expand my for-profit resume business
30. Expand my resume ministry (free resumes to single parents and low-income clients)
31. Be on the board of a charity
32. Make enough money for my children to go to college wherever they can be accepted
33. Look like a million bucks well into my 40s and 50s
34. Lead others to the Catholic Church or to a belief in Jesus Christ
35. Infuse hope into other people with my ability to write fearlessly about my emotional and spiritual struggles
36. Resume my service work of intercessory prayer and pray for someone else's needs every single day
37. Realize when I'm 65 years old that I have lived a full, full life
38. Have every one of my friends to feel that I am the most faithful, supportive friend they have - because it's true
39. Make enough money to get manicures
40. Live in a small but adorable house
41. Take more creative writing classes
42. Write a screenplay for a movie about John Calipari

Things I'll Do If I Get My Old Body Back

1. Write a book. I won't be such a perfectionist, and I won't write it for anyone but me. But I'll finally write it - something I've been planning on doing for 25 years.

2. Throw away clutter with glee. 3 months ago this would have been a chore. Now it's something that aggravates my neck. I long to do it, but I either can't or know that I will have rebound pain. An odious task has become a privilege.

3. Journal even more than I had been doing. The pen in my hand was like an ignition that took me to God. I will journal every 30 minutes if I want to and won't feel guilty.

4. Put a sound system in my car and take joy rides.

5. Invite more of my children's friends over and not obsess so much about whether the house is clean enough. I can truly understand "good enough" now.

6. Use the public library more and read all of the time. There is so much good writing out there that I can't take advantage of now.

7. Go to 4-5 Twelve Step meetings a week. I already knew I loved them. The hole I've been feeling is painful.

8. Go to church. I love my relgion but have never really enjoyed hour-long services. Still, that's another piece of me that's gone right now.

9. Write freelance articles. It never hurts to try.

10. Buy healthier groceries. My dear husband is buying me groceries that cause me to gain weight. I never thought I would miss going to the grocery store.

11. Fold laundry lickety-split and get it out of my hair. Why did I procrastinate about this? Why did I let it pile up when I wasn't in pain? I don't understand this. I would love to tackle laundry right now if it didn't hurt.

12. Be grateful every day if I don't hurt.

13. Enjoy my children more. I loved them, but was I enjoying them? I didn't realize how many options a healthy body gave me. If I hear, "Mommy's hurting today," one more time I feel like I'll scream.

14. Be a better listener. Talking so much about myself has helped me to realize how much I was already talking about myself. The small stuff really isn't worth talking about. I know that now.

15. Care about my husband's day. Right now I have to pretend I care. There was a time when I really could have cared because I wasn't disabled by pain. I don't know how much I can work on overcoming my self-absorption as I face a life-changing set of physical problems. But when things are returned to a state of normalcy, I am going to take a huge interest in his day-in and day-out experiences. I can't wait.

16. Laugh at myself more.

I write this knowing full well that if I'm healed, I won't do all of this. But this experience has changed my life forever. As a thirtysomething, I had been taking "feeling decent" for granted. I've done a 180 degree turn. I also write this knowing that some of it (such as getting out of my self-centeredness) can be tackled now. Baby steps.

Take away my pain and stiffness, Jesus. As you like, when you like, if you like. I've learned a lot; I know you can see that.

Still Here

I am still here, but my computer time is very limited to due to my neck and upper back pain.

I don't know why God has let me be afflicted with an ailment that affects my spirituality and my attempts be a written expression of his glory. Maybe I'll know someday.

I am still here. I hurt, I stiffen to the point of worthlessness, and I wait. I had a nerve block with trigger point injections on Friday. Please pray that the procedure accomplishes the Father's will for me. Prayers for all of my loved ones and readers.

Leave Now

Yesterday as I was leaving the office I had a feeling that some sort of unspeakable violence was looming. I saw images of blood. In my stomach I felt that there was deep, dangerous anger threatening people I loved.

I wanted to call my husband to check on him and my daughters, but I had a very urgent need to put gas in the car. It was 20 degrees, and for several miles my car had gone past being empty. I put aside my hazy feeling of danger and pulled into the gas station around the corner from my job.

As I was backing my car into the right position for a fuel pump, a man came out of nowhere and sped right behind me, stealing my place. I could not back up anymore, and my car was too far away from the hose. There were plenty of other vacant fuel pumps. There was no reason for him to have sped up to the one I was getting ready to use and take it. But that's what he had done.

I was startled and waited for a moment. There were a lot of vacant fuel pumps, but there were also a lot of customers around, emboldening me. Neither the man nor I got out of our cars. I thought about getting out of the car and trying to stretch the hose as far as it would go. I thought about getting out of the car and glaring at him. I was in a public place. I opened my door, craned my head to look at the man whom I was possibly going to confront, and I saw something in his eyes: he hated me.

Every now and then you encounter a stranger who hates you. You don't understand it, but deep inside of yourself, in your blood and in your bones, you know it. You make a choice whether to enter their insanity and have an altercation with them, or you leave the situation as quickly as you can.

When I saw the man's eyes, a voice inside said, "People can get hurt or get killed in seconds. Get away from him NOW."

I went to another fuel pump, not knowing whether I was scared he would shoot me or stab me or force me into his car. I didn't know if I thought he was on drugs or if he was acting on road rage for something I'd unintentionally done a half mile away. I simply went through the motions of pumping gas on a brutally cold day.

For a moment or so, my pride was in control. I held my credit card in my teeth and brushed my hair out of my eyes, trying to look nonchalant about the act of aggression I'd encountered and the fact that I had walked away from a confrontation. But the more I thought about the look in his eyes, the more disturbed I became. I was aware of the four or five other people pumping gas, but I was also aware that they weren't paying attention to me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the man looking at me as I waited on the fuel pump. The voice came back. "Do not fill your tank up. You already have enough gas to make it. Leave NOW."

As calmly as I could, I pulled out the hose, refastened the cap and got into my car. I didn't wait to be asked if I wanted a car wash or a receipt. I left, and the man left at the same time, driving in a different direction.

Once I was on the road, I called my husband to check on him and the children. Before I told him about my experience, he said he had something he wanted to say to me. An hour before, he had suddenly been struck by so much love for me that he felt he needed to thank God for me. So that's what he did.

Consciousness of God and his love consumed me. Suddenly I realized that I may have been the one who was in danger, and it may have been my husband's prayer of thanks for my existence that protected me. I won't know in this lifetime, but I am almost sure. Prayer is powerful, unselfish prayer for others is powerful and prayer of thanks is more powerful than we can begin to comprehend.

God, I don't really understand what happened yesterday or what it meant, but thank you for giving me people who pray for me, and thank you for this life.

Silenced

I am not still not able to write on paper without triggering or aggravating pain in my neck, and although I can easily type, I try to save my computer-posture strength for my job. I have only been to one 12 step meeting in the past several weeks because of how hard it is to sit in chairs in a group for an hour.

So the ways in which I expressed my spiritual thoughts - journaling, blogging, talking at meetings - are missing from my life most of the time now.

I talk to God, to the saints. I feel like my echo bounces back to me. It always did, but hearing my own voice at meetings and writing about God helped to make our relationship real to me.

This part of the journey seems to be a place where I depend on God more heavily than I ever have but without the spiritual helps I've relied on for years. I hate it even though I believe that I'll learn something that will be valuable to someone else eventually. Even writing that hurt. I vacillate between feeling shock, anger and self-pity over my condition and feeling embarrassment that I think about myself like I have a "serious" ailment.

My neck stiffened up like an iron plate as I typed, as if to back up everything I've been trying to express. I have no voice right now, not without pain.

Not without pain.

Exposure

Yesterday I had one episode of intense pain and took a painkiller, but otherwise I felt free of them. I had volunteered to read part of my 2006 spiritual journal at my charity's staff Christmas party, and I was nervous all day long. There were two problems: one was that I had written sincerely, so it seemed like I would be letting my coworkers see into my soul. The other problem was that part of me knew that it would touch some people and strike them, and I worried that I wanted to read at the podium for myself and not for God.

Despite my anxiety, I did it. As a preamble to our lighting of the Peace Candle on our Advent Wreath, I read two 2006 journal entries in front of everyone I work with. These will be posted as a separate blog entry right above this one. I told the staff that Christmas Day 2006 was a day filled with tranquility and gratitude, but that as late as December 23rd 2006, I was stuck in self-centeredness and shallow thinking and thought it was my worst Christmas ever. The journal entries showed how God was able to lift me out of my gloom and tell me what a gift my Christmas really was.

People came up to me afterward and told me that they had been moved by what I read. I felt exposed and felt that I had to brush their comments away lest I be making myself too huge. As a few moments passed I started to become able to look people in the eye and thank them when they told me my words had struck to them. One of my friends said, "What you read to me meant so much to me, more than you can ever know - really."

I wondered if my boss would say anything about what I read, and late that afternoon she came into the office to give me my organization Christmas present in it's uniform gift bag. Then she whispered to me, "I loved your story."

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"Will you do some writing for us...please?"

I nodded. "Yes." (Right now I'm a secretary).

"We need anyone who can write as beautifully as you do to be writing for us."

I nodded and said yes again. How peculiar it is to me that in this job that I never wanted to go out and get that God has given me a voice to talk about his glory. How peculiar and marvelous. I love it when I can see God working like that.

Damage

A couple of years ago, I found my spiritual niche. I experimented in concentrated intercessory prayer for other people, and I nearly always saw beautiful things happen. When the outcome was good, I knew the gift had come from God. In the handful of times that I didn't see healing, rescue or deliverance, I began to understand that sometimes life on earth is so difficult that only a higher power could see a plan for ultimate good.

I have been so wrapped up in my neck problems that I've frequently forgotten to pray for others. Intercessory prayer has been so important to me that I couldn't believe I had let it slip out of my life. But last week, I was startled to receive a prayer shawl that had been prayed over and given to me so that I could wrap myself in God's loving care and then a letter in the mail that told me I had been chosen as a person that a prayer group would pray for throughout Advent. That's when I realized that intercessory prayer was still active in my life; I was just on the other side.

I have missed a lot of my normal life since these physical problems started after Halloween. I've missed being able to fold laundry, wash dishes or pick up toys as I saw the need. I've missed being able to read spiritual books and write in my spiritual notebooks by hand. I've missed being able to sort through papers without stopping after a few minutes due to neck pain. I've missed driving my car without pain. I've missed doing my own grocery shopping so that I can buy food that doesn't pack weight on me. I've missed sitting in church pews and the metal chairs in AA meetings without feeling my neck stiffen after a few minutes.

What I miss most about my normal life is knowing that I was on a spiritual journey and feeling like I was constantly growing. On an intellectual level I know that I'm still on my spiritual journey right now as I accept my powerlessness over my pain and my limitations. But do I feel it? No. Not really. I certainly didn't feel it all the time before my neck problems started, but I must have felt it a lot, because I miss it so much.

In October I felt like I was about to start working on something important. I was going to go to graduate school or start seriously writing a novel or begin some other challenging undertaking. Now I am flailing around just to make sure my children are clean and fed and that I show up to work no more than 20 minutes late.

I want my life back, I want my hopes back, I want my spirituality back. In several weeks, with a minor but debilitating physical problem, I've started to think of myself as an ailing person instead of a spiritual person. It embarrasses me to admit how much my neck condition has damaged me, but it's true.

I pray and wait for the day that I include these weeks in my spiritual history but that I have left the self-pity, the self-centeredness and sense of loss far behind me.

A Tribute

18 months ago I realized that my dream of being a stay-at-home mom was apparently not what God intended me to do. I had been trying for years to find a way to make it work financially, and our financial situation only worsened year after year. Finally I started to say, "God, it looks like you want me to get a full-time job. Please let me know forcefully if I'm misunderstanding you." And there would be silence.

So in the summer of 2006, I took my first tiny step toward aligning my will with God's. I updated my resume. I set a 15 minute timer and told myself that all I needed to do was work 15 minutes on it and that I could work on it for another 15 minutes the next day. The technical side of updating it was no problem at all since I write resumes for other people. I just couldn't believe the candidate described on the computer screen was me. It was so official.

I didn't start applying to jobs at that point, though. I was afraid that I would be hired too soon, and that I would miss out on my last free summer with my kids. I decided to start actually applying in August '06. And the whole time I waited for my deadline, and when my deadline came, I was terrified.

I overuse the word terrified a lot. But when I describe the way I felt about working full-time again, I truly do mean there was terror. Sometimes my body shook and my extremities quivered from the fear. I believed that I was incompetent and inept. I believed that in any job I started that I would learn so slowly and make such stupid mistakes that they would regret hiring me. These were not little worries being whispered in my ear. These were things that I believed at my core. I was scared about how hard it would be to find a job, but I was even more worried that once I found one, my coworkers and supervisor would be disgusted with me, and I would be miserable.

I asked God to please help me find a niche in an office where I could do the work well and everyone would be glad that I had come to work there. Later I started adding that since I didn't want to work full-time, it would be great if God could find me a job where I was actually helping people. Three months later I was interviewing to be the assistant to the director of a local charity, and I closed my eyes and jumped into the unknown.

Last night I had my performance review. I post this not to compliment myself, but as a tribute to how unbelievably wise, powerful and loving God is. Here are the remarks made about someone who, 18 months ago, was physically ill due to her fear of failure:

- Excellent work ethic...
- Accomplishes what is set before her every day...
- Quick study and good listener to learn how to do her job...
- ...Excellent thinker in deciding on how to proceed when faced with new issues
- Always willing to help no matter what the task and takes on new assignments with enthusiasm...
- ...I believe her capacity is much greater than we are currently utilizing
- I am very dependent on her eyes and ears and expect to become more so the longer we work together.

And these were snippets. My review was so outstanding that I can hardly digest it. I was so scared of working full-time, and God put me in a job where I could soar. So that is why I have written about my job review on my spiritual blog. It's another sign that God knows exactly what he's doing, and that he loves me.

Jesus, I love you and the Father. I love it when I know that the Holy Spirit fills me. I love the saints, Mary, St. Benedict...too many to name. Thank you all for loving me and taking care of me. I don't think there's anything I more I can add.

When He Was Enough For Me

It is hard to believe that a few weeks ago I felt like I had a spiritual core. Right after Halloween, I developed reactive arthritis from a virus, and I have been on prescription pain medicine off and on since then. I have had chemically induced moments of such peace and optimism that I could not help but rely on painkillers to give me relief from fear and darkness. I do not remember what it was like when God was my Higher Power and when he was enough for me. It does not seem like a relationship with God can ever be enough again.

I know what to do: pray, go to meetings, talk to people and let go. I also know that the feelings I want to escape from – fear, loneliness, sadness and shame - will trouble me until I let them surface. There is one more thing that I know, and it is probably the hardest part to accept. I know that I cannot control when I will feel better. I can pray, I can live in the solution, I can surrender and I can even truly want God’s will. However, I will feel better when I am supposed to, and I have no idea how long it will take for that feeling to get here.

And at a time when I need to feel a spiritual connection the most, reading and journaling cause more neck strain than I can tolerate. So as I wait to become assured of God’s care again, I cannot use the tools that I have relied on so heavily in the past. I can’t read my Emmet Fox books. I can’t read a few paragraphs of my Norman Vincent Peale books. I can’t read the story of a miraculous healing in The Miracles of John Paul II. I can’t read the daily meditations in my Al-Anon books. I can’t write in my journal about the day’s struggles or anything that gave me hope.

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. That is my reality for the moment. I can’t; this will never work. I said once in an AA meeting that if I miss meetings, not only does my disease lie to me about how harmless drinking is, but it also lies to me about how good God is.

And that is the only faith I have right now. Life seems empty and bleak, I feel like I am in the world all alone, and I cannot imagine ever feeling joy again because I know that God loves me. But a tiny part of me says that this is just my disease lying to me again, kicking me while I’m down.

I hope so.

So Many Of My Tears

God is amazing. Sometimes you can look back at a course of events and see how he was working in your life and protecting you from something ahead of time. I am in the middle of this phenomenon right now.

Yesterday I woke up feeling mournful, but the fact that it was All Saints Day seemed very significant to me. I talked to the saints that are special to me and offered up prayers of thanks for them. I fell into a state of abundant willingness, which is a soothing albeit mysterious state for me to be in. There was no fear that God has a protective circle and that I was outside of it. If such a circle exists, I knew I was in the fold.

Within hours, I was in a family crisis, and my husband and I again talked about divorce and separation. My earlier contemplation of the saints and my awareness of God's love allowed me to become calm and rational. I was able to wear an impenetrable shield without hardening my heart.

I don't know what today holds, but I know I am loved and protected. And I especially want to say that I love Mary. I have turned to her again and again, and she has always helped me. I gave her so many of my tears yesterday, and I know that she listened to me, loved me and made sure I knew I wasn't alone.

Different Angles

I was in the grocery store last night and had to ask if my feelings were real. In the morning I had met a meek and pleasant man with Lou Gehrig’s disease who wants to start volunteering frequently for the charity I work for. I was saddened to know that he is terminally ill, and I admired him so much for wanting to use the time he has left to help others. That night, I saw him at a closed AA meeting and found out that he had recognized me as a member of the program when he had spoken with me at my job earlier in the day.

So now I have nice new friend, I am going to be seeing him a lot at work, we have a bond since we are both in AA and he has a progressive, fatal disease. As I left the meeting and felt more sadness come upon me, it was so strong that it felt like an assault.

I stopped by my church and prayed for him at Adoration. I prayed in front of the statues of Jesus and Mary in the sanctuary and asked them to please take care of him. I lit a candle for him and said more prayers. And in the grocery store, as I kept thinking of his tragedy while I was trying to shop, I wanted to cry out in pain.

Since I know so much about my chronic self-centeredness and my histrionics, I felt I had to examine myself. Was I making someone else’s sad story about myself? Was I using his situation to act dramatic? Was the attack of pain I was feeling real?

The answer was simple and silent. Yes, it was real. Earlier that day I had talked about people behind their backs. I had told a lie. I had been harsh with my 7 year old and out of anger had tried to hurt her with my words. For a lot of the day, I had been expressing my worst character defects. But the pain I felt for my new friend was real. My compassion was pure, without ulterior motives. I hurt for him.

I walked to my car in a strong wind, seeing lightning flash around me in the night sky. I felt anchored in the now, and I felt whole. In one day I had seen some of the worst I bring to God and to the world and also experienced the best I bring to God and to the world. Selfishness interspersed with concern outside of myself, meanness interspersed with love for my neighbor, ego interspersed with reliance on God. The wind seemed to come at me from multiple angles just as my emotions hit me at different angles. “This is who you are,” I thought, “This is who you really are.”

For where your treasure is...

Matthew 6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.


Over the past several years, I have cringed when I read this Bible verse. I have always come away from it condemning myself for loving money more than God and feeling guilty.

Today I was having a very hectic morning full of kid-induced drama (infected mosquito bites, lost book bags, lost saddle oxfords, lost ballet shoes, undone homework, etc.), and I started to run so late that my own pre-work routine fell apart. I was angry, and after an hour of muttering and stomping, I knew that my day was getting worse and worse.

I finished up gathering my things in the silent house (only silent because I was running so late that the rest of the family was gone), and I quieted myself inside and out. I decided that I was powerless over all of the trouble I had already had but that I could choose not to let it ruin my entire day. Then Matthew 6:21 came softly into my head. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This time, I didn’t judge myself harshly with it. It came into my mind and showed me a positive truth about myself.

Do I want more money? Yes. Do I get jealous of people’s appearances and material possessions? Yes. But I was surprised this morning when I saw that my treasure is really my peace of mind and my reliance on God. That is what I seek, value and safeguard above all else. And that is where my heart is and where I direct my energy. When I pray today for God’s will to be done concerning my family’s finances, his will is truly what I want, no matter what that looks like.

God’s will is my treasure, my relationship with him is my treasure and there my heart is also. I am amazed to be typing this after how strongly I felt for years that God had abandoned me. I think that’s what Jesus wants for all of us…for us to be amazed by him.

If There Is Any Way

I got a phone call last night from someone who was in agony. His spouse's depression, isolation and sideways rage are almost more than he can handle. He feels unqualified to monitor her depression and is scared for her sake, while he himself is having to deal with the loss of the happy marriage they had just months ago. I listened to him for an hour, told him to look at all of his options, invited him to an Al-Anon meeting and let him know I was praying for him and wished both of them the best. My response was inadequate given the gravity of the situation, but I knew there was nothing more I could do at that moment.

I took a shower before bed and cried through it. I was in a daze watching television. I woke up this morning, and my stomach felt clutched by the sadness of what they're going through. One of the reasons I hurt so much for them is that they do not have faith in God, and I don't think they have any form of spirituality at all. I don't know how God is going to help them when the idea of God is something that they reject. And I don't know how people without faith make it through the hard parts of living since that is the only reason I feel like I've made it this far.

I've prayed for this couple many times over the past year, and I don't know how many times I've prayed for them in the last 18 hours. Many, many times. They don't seem like wasted prayers, but they seem futile. I feel like I'm reaching deep into a bathroom cabinet and am only pulling out expired medicine. I pray, but Jesus knows that I don't really have any hope.

Last week at a work retreat I did a guided meditation where we tried to discover what we think God sees when he looks at us. In my meditation I saw God looking at me and seeing how much love I have for other people and how much I ache and grieve for them. When I got the image of God reading my heart and seeing the concern I have for people who are hurting, not only did I feel loved by him, but I felt like I was seeing the real me. I feel so selfish, bad and mean most of the time that I cried tears of joy thinking that God might treasure the kind of love that I bring to the world.

And now I have this October day where I am called to give this couple to Jesus. It almost seems like an insult to them to try to help them by praying for them when they don't believe in him. But besides being on standby with empathy and a willingness to listen, there is nothing else I can do. So I pray to Jesus, Mary, St. Monica (patron saint of troubled marriages), and I think I'll be talking to St. Dymphna and their guardian angels, too. I am not quietly comforted by this; my inner refrain is still "This is so messed up."

Dear Jesus, today please take special care of people who are in pain but don't know you. If there is any way that you can help, please do it. Amen.

Bottom of the Boat

A friend of mine calls it the "gerbil wheel." I have compared it to a fish wildly flopping on the floor of a boat. Another person I knows refers to the phenomenon as "attack thoughts."

What we're all describing is when we feel assaulted by fear, and thinking about the problem causes other negative emotions (e.g., self-loathing, guilt, shame, new fear) to start coming at us at lightning speed from other angles. It doesn't seem fair. We think about the problem in our life because we want relief, we want to be sure that it's as bad as we think it is, and several minutes later we have had so many new horrible thoughts that we feel worse. If you ever see me with my head bowed and my fingers in my hair clutching the top of my head, you can assume that I'm overwhelmed by fear.

For years I tried positive thinking to overcome both my painful emotions and hard situations themselves. I would do my best to ignore my fear and think about God's love for me instead. For several years in a row I had incredible results with this approach. I remember talking to my husband in our kitchen and sounding jubilant. "I get it now. I mean I really, really get it." I believed that I knew the spiritual laws of the universe and that I'd rounded a corner and would not have to suffer again.

I don't believe in jinxes, but oddly, after I said that, I seemingly started to fail at positive thinking for several years. God did many incredible things for me during this period, but two grave problems got increasingly worse, and I believed they had the power to destroy my family and ruin my life. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, I took the approach I usually do: "I will work harder." I prayed more. I read every spiritual book I could to make sure that I was not overlooking the tool that would turn my life around. I obsessed about my prayers, trying to make sure that I was using the verbs and phrases that would allow me to access God's compassion and gain his help. I always thought that I was very close to the solution but that God was waiting on me to do something right, and that I had just not figured it out yet. I asked God to guide me. Silence. I spent a lot of time in my pose (head bowed, hands in hair).

At the end of these years where life got harder and harder, I ended up on my front porch. I went out there every night to cry. Not only had I collapsed emotionally from the stress of my husband's illness, his inability to work and the financial stress associated with that, but lately I was unable to sleep, I was hyperventilating during the day, I was having esophageal and throat spasms that I thought signaled cancer, my extremities would spontaneously twitch and tremble and I was losing weight rapidly although I had stopped dieting. I knew I had broken down emotionally, and now my body was breaking down. I never knew how I would get through each day during that period, and by nightfall, once I had struggled through the day and completed it, I cried on the porch.

"You've given me a $hitty life, God," I said one night with tears streaming down my face, "and I hate you for it." That was the first uncalculated prayer I had said in a long time. I wasn't trying to utter the words that would compel God to help me. I was convinced that he was content to see me suffer, so I felt free to be completely truthful. The physical problems I was having felt like God had slapped me in the face. He had seen how hard I had tried to overcome the hard parts of my life, he had heard me begging him to make things better and now he was allowing me to have such a severe physical reaction to stress that simple things like microwaving oatmeal and making 10 minute grocery store trips seemed mountainous. I didn't know how much longer I could survive, especially since he had decided not to help me. So I hated him.

And the help came pouring in. It came in the form of kind, compassionate people sprinkled throughout my life and in a series of events that gave me more and more hope. I was helped by a loving, concerned physician. I returned to AA. I returned to the Catholic church. I wandered into a Catholic bookstore and found two books that changed my life. I told God that I was letting go and meant it. He was not silent anymore. He gave me continual affirmations that I was on the right path and that I was being carried by him. The multiple holes in my faith were filled by the pure love of family, old friends and new friends who linked me to God. Life was too much, it was too painful to bear, but I was not alone anymore. The reality of my life became the love that was present all around me.

Last night some recent financial happenings triggered the gerbil wheel, the flopping fish, the attack thoughts. Our financial future seemed bleak, and as I turned it over in my head, it went from looking worrisome to looking extremely bad. I started hating myself for certain decisions I've made, and I felt shame that told me that I'll always be such a bad person that I'll be beyond God's help. As I type this, I'm still flopping frantically on the boat, wanting to grab hold of the spiritual idea that will deliver me from my fear.

Enough with the struggling. Enough with straining toward grace and trying to get away from fear. Today I submit to fear. As soon as I feel myself panicking and trying to push the feeling away, I will relax back into the fear and let myself live in it in the moment that it surfaces. I will not be alone. The times I have felt God the most powerfully have been the slow minutes that I have entered into my pain and realized, "O God, even here, you are with me."

I welcome your prayers and will post an update later on my submission to fear. Please leave a comment and tell me about anything you're grappling with right now.

Soul Gripping

I work at a charity in a poor urban community. I'd whittled my to-do list down so much yesterday that I decided to work on a mail campaign alongside our volunteers. I like being around our volunteers because most of them are elderly, and they help me to daydream about the person I want to become. I want to believe that even if I were wealthy I would think about people who don't have enough, or that even if I were a widow, I would want to spend some of my time helping others. The volunteers help me to imagine being a financially secure and loving person, and it's hard for me to imagine myself as anything better.

Yesterday morning I was working with one of my favorite volunteers named Betsy, who's smart-alecky and has a story about everyone in the city. Elaine was also with us. I had never actually spoken with her before; she has a soft voice and looked polished but was casually dressed. I was having a pleasant time stuffing envelopes with Betsy and Elaine and listening to them talk about "nickel Cokes" and dating during World War II.

Within an hour, I was trying to keep the two of them from seeing that I was crying. I found out through their conversation that Elaine had had a son with Down's syndrome, and he had been a sweet, happy adult who had proudly volunteered at our charity. Elaine talked about how much he enjoyed his volunteer work and then smiled a little and quietly said, "I prayed and prayed that I would outlive him, and God answered my prayers."

I cannot comprehend loving one of my children so much that I wanted to go through her death so that I could always make sure she was taken care of. But at the same time, I do understand it, and that's why I started to cry. I didn't cry because I pitied Elaine; she didn't seem unhappy. I cried because the love that emanated from her made something resonate in me, and it hurt.

In the spiritual place I have been brought to, love, pain and death exist together. Loving deeply makes me so vulnerable that pain is unavoidable, and death is the only way through the pain. The death of dreams, the death of insistence, the death of self. And somehow the death of Jesus on the cross completes everything. I could barely type the last sentence because I have absolutely no understanding of it. It's something that I believe, but it's not something I can speak about. I've had only the faintest glimpses of what Jesus has really given me, and they've been fleeting. There have been a few moments where I was aware of my life and it's circumstances, but I became more aware of the love of God.

So I cried at the mail table at work yesterday. The part of me that has seen glimpses of God does not emerge very often. But it will burst forth in certain situations, such as after talking to someone and realizing that God wants my prayers for them, or listening to someone and realizing that she knows the same God that I have known. Then that part of me that is buried deeply, that exists in the innermost layer, becomes for a moment my entire existence. If I'm alone I can cry and gasp and thank God for showing himself to me again. If I'm around other people, I blink back tears and try to act like I don't feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Betsy and Elaine were looking at their stamps and envelopes the entire time they talked; I don't think they noticed.

Do you have people in your life or have you met anyone whose words grip your soul? Have you ever felt like you couldn't talk about God as he really is in your life and then met someone that you thought would understand? I would love to read your comments.

Pet Peeves

Jesus wants a relationship with me, right? The relationship frustrates me. It doesn’t feel like the way a relationship with a living, perfect being should feel. Sometimes after our interactions I find myself angered, bitter, frightened or in pain.

Is there anything about God that frustrates you? I decided to come up with a list of what bothers me and share it with you.

God’s timetable
Help has always come. I’ll repeat that statement. Help has always come. But there have been a lot of times that help seemed like it didn’t come in time. Those periods of my life have been very hard. After the last time in my life where it seemed God was never going to come to my rescue, I ended up with weight loss and arrhythmia from the stress. He saved the day, but I truly felt like I almost didn’t make it. I don’t understand why sometimes his help is instantaneous and at other times it’s on the other side of drawn-out agony.

God’s silence
Just recently I prayed about whether or not I should apply for a different position at my organization, and God seemed to drive home the idea that he wanted me to keep working in my current capacity. Every day I became more and more convinced that I was in a niche that allowed me to do fulfilling work while developing new skills, and I finally had such an overwhelming feeling that God had answered me that I never started on the paperwork to apply for the other job.

There have been other times, though, that I have asked God questions and heard nothing. During one hard situation, I went years without knowing what God wanted me to do. Although I could sense him in my life helping me in other areas, with that one problem it seemed like I never got any guidance from him.

God’s idea of best
I don’t see much of a point in believing in God and trying to have a connection with him if he’s not the ultimate source of love and he doesn’t always do what’s best for us. The problem that I have, though, is that what God thinks is best has sometimes been immensely painful for me. I have never attempted suicide or wanted to commit suicide, but I can think of three times that life seemed so unbearable I wanted to die. There were two times I wanted to be struck dead in a traffic accident (with the other driver coming away unharmed, of course), and there was one time that I fantasized about returning to severe dieting and having a heart attack. To want death is to find life so hard that you give up hope, but somehow while this was going on, I was receiving what was best for me. It’s something I can’t understand.

God’s kindness to my enemies
This is the most embarrassing one to list. I love the idea of God forgiving me for everything I do and loving me in spite of it, but when I see people living well who seem mean or oppressive, it horrifies me. I become outraged that I love God and try to be loving to other people, but God allows people who are hostile or nasty to have more comfortable lives than I do. Some people say that everyone gets their own dose of heartbreak and sadness in life. I don’t believe that. I believe that some people who are not as loving as I am have much easier lives. I get angry with God because I don’t think they deserve it, and I think he should have blessed the "good guys" more. I know how flawed my thinking is here, hence my embarrassment.

So there you have it. You have seen my list of problems I have with God, and I probably could have come up with more. I don’t think any of those feelings should be in my head, but on the other hand, maybe the fact that I have some complaints about the way God works means I have a real relationship with him. What I got out of reading the Nicole Gausseron diary series (my favorite three books ever) was that Jesus wants a relationship with us more than anything else. I hope her diary was right.

What frustrates you about the way God works in your life? Do you talk to him about it? Have you always had the same issues or have things changed over time? I’d love to hear from you.

Spiritual Envy

I have an emptiness that tugs at me, even when I’m not worried about money or a family member or if one of my daughters is getting her feelings hurt at school. It’s spiritually based, and yet the feeling isn’t spiritual at all. The uncomfortable emptiness is envy. I’m very familiar with envy and frequently find myself envying random people for their larger houses or toned upper arms or lives as stay-at-home mothers. Frequently when I’m in this state of my mind I can catch myself, realize that jealousy has no payoff and think about something else.

But the spiritual envy is hard to shake off. It’s easy for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having 1000 more square feet of house, but it’s almost impossible for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having a stronger spiritual center. Of course I’d be more content and more useful if my relationship with God were stronger. Of course I’d help more people find faith if I had more faith. It makes sense for me to have what I want spiritually…but I don’t have it.

I want to be like my friend Kristen, who is the most positive person I’ve ever known. She thinks about love, talks about love and wears clothes and jewelry that remind her of love. If I had seen her huge pink faux gemstone ring in a store I would have flinched, but on her it’s just part of the entire “love package” she sends out to the world each day. I want to be like Alexis who loves her church, has her deepest friendships through her church and doesn’t talk about Christianity unless you bring it up. But then she speaks about it quietly and steadily, and you know that it’s the foundation of her peaceful, mother-of-three-boys existence. I want to be like Courtney, who is a born again Christian and always talks about Christ and always brings up her beliefs. I want to be like Mary, who is either muttering or smiling and cracking jokes – until you start to talk about God. Then she becomes sober and intense and tells you the hard truths: that for her there is no life without dependence on God, that her beliefs about herself and her place in life create her future and that she struggles every day to find gratitude and claim it as her reality.

The people I have just written about have real faith that directs their lives. As I go about my life, God is the most important thing in it, and yet I feel like I’m just pretending to have a relationship with him. That is where my spiritual envy comes from. I look at the spirituality of others, and it seems authentic. I look at mine, and it seems forced.

At the same time, I have had spiritual experiences so amazing that when I put them into words, they read like fantasy. But they were real, and each one was so overwhelming it seemed to suffocate me at the time. When I’m feeling jealous of other people and the way their love for God is expressed, it helps to remember that he has chosen me to witness some spectacular works. It helps, but the emptiness doesn’t go away.

I have started this blog for a very simple reason: I want to talk about God. My hope is that this blog will become service work just as my prayers for others are service work. My hope is that becoming even more engrossed in my spiritual life will take away the feeling that my relationship with him is not enough, and the feeling that if I really loved him and lived for him that my life would look like something else. My hope is that I attract readers and that he reveals ways for me to express my faith in ways I had never thought of.

For everyone reading this, thank you for coming, and I pray that you will come back often, with all of us stronger in our faith.

Living in the Present...Maybe

I don’t think anyone would say that staying in the present is a bad thing as far as our emotional health goes. Jesus said to, twelve step groups say to, self-help authors say to. But when dark thoughts come, is it always helpful to try to stay in the present? For me the answer is no. There are situations where trying to stay in the present is very useful to me. If I’m feeling regretful about the past, if I’m angry with people for things I think they’re going to do in the future or if I’m feeling bitter because I long for more material things and don’t think I’ll end up getting them, then realizing that I’m dealing only with this single moment can quickly ease a lot of that discomfort.

There are other times, though, when I’m emotionally troubled and trying to stay in the present seems to aggravate the situation. I am filled with panic or dread about something that could happen in the future, and I try to make myself understand that I can only experience today. For example, I can be at peace because the medical claim isn’t being denied today… I can be at peace because my daughter has not been diagnosed with a disease today… I can be at peace because I can pay my bills today...It’s true and it makes sense, but the fear may be so awful that it keeps popping back into my mind. I’ll frantically keep trying to correct my thoughts. I’ll try to use will power to keep my mind focused on the present so that I will feel okay, but it doesn’t work.

And that’s where the problem lies. If I’m extremely worried about something of a grave nature, I am not okay. In that situation, I am a person filled with fear, and it’s not okay for me to feel like that. Bringing myself back to the present helps when I know better than to feed the thoughts I’m having, but what if I don’t know better? What if I knew I would die tomorrow? Could I be okay with it by focusing on this moment, feeling the keys clicking underneath my fingers, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and smelling roasted potatoes in the kitchen? I don’t think so. I think I would be filled with worry about the emotional and financial impact on my children, and I don’t think I could chase the feeling off by recognizing that it had not occurred yet.

I’m an intelligent person. If I can think my way out of distress, I probably will. If I can’t think my way out of it, it doesn’t mean that I need to try harder. It means that I’m having a harsh encounter with my makeup, my humanness. The only thing that can help me is to realize that I cannot help myself, no matter how much I want to be able to. Trying to play mind games with myself to escape from fear delays my taking the problems that overwhelm me to God. God empowers me to deal with things that bother me, but the things that terrify me are his domain, not mine. I am not supposed to handle those matters myself any more than my seven year old is supposed to sew stitches in her forehead.

What about asking for God’s help to live in the present? Wouldn’t that be following the advice given in books and taking the problem to God? Yes, but what may be more important is that I am trying to beat the system and think of the angle that will make things okay. God is not going to make me earn his help through my own cleverness. He’s going to help me through my fear because I ask him and he loves me. I can ask God for anything I want, but if I put pressure on myself to appeal to him in the right way, then I’m trying to solve the problem myself. In AA we sometimes talk of the most powerful prayer that we ever prayed, the one we prayed before we ended up in our first meetings, the one that changed our lives. Although the settings and circumstances were different for us all when we prayed that prayer, we’re in complete agreement on what the words were. “Help me.”