Hope for Healing

Yesterday, I began getting a headache in the evening. Assuming I must be dehydrated, I kept sucking down the water.

Earlier in the day, I had spent some time in the sun. It was 99 degrees outside, so I was pretty sweaty and gross. Since I was so gross, I decided the best follow-up activity would be sweating some more at the gym. Anyone who gets a lot of headaches has probably been told plenty of times that they just need to drink more water. Truth be told, this is the reason that I drink more water than anyone I know. I spend a large percentage of my day swallowing water or using the restroom. (We can safely assume that dehydration is rarely the actual cause of my headaches.) But, I’ve heard it enough that I still assumed my headache that began forming in the evening was due to a drinking failure.

As the night went on and my headache progressed, I realized how much water I had taken in, the frequency with which I needed to empty my bladder, and the reality of how great I felt when I got back from the gym and was in the kitchen, baking. If anything, I might have overdone the water intake for the day.

11:00/midnight rolled around and I started my prayer time, logging into to the blessed prayer room webstream… a lifeline for extended times away. Rose (a beloved part of the extended IHOP-KC family) had surgery coming up within a few hours and there was a lot of emphasis on prayer for healing. And there was A LOT of life on the prayers. I was definitely feeling it, from my little prayer room extension… my bedroom.

Around 1:20, Emily Russell prayed. And that was it. I don’t know what happened, but it was like she cracked something open. I sat weeping on my bed for the next 30 minutes.

Now, crying tends to make my bad headaches worse. (Probably no more than refusing to cry, though.) So it wasn’t looking too good for me and my headache. But I was really dialoguing with the Lord about His desire to heal, His promises to our community, and the promises of scripture. He IS a God who heals.

This might sound weird, but in all of my investigation and searching for my migraine triggers, there is one thing I have noticed that has been terribly consistent (well, kind of two, but I won’t go into the second). You won’t find this trigger listed anywhere that talks about migraine headaches. My “trigger”? Prayer.

The more I have broken my agreement with consistent headaches in my life, the more I have woken up from my place of resigning to it, the more I have asked God to heal me, and the more others have partnered with me in praying for healing… the worse and more frequent they have gotten. Every time I stand for healing prayer in the prayer room or sit in the back row for healing prayer, I am almost guaranteed noticeable backlash in the very near future.

So, as I sat there joining my heart with the prayers of my community and asking the Lord to do what He longs to do, I couldn’t help but laugh at the rapid worsening of my headache.

I don’t understand why it is like that. I definitely don’t fully understand warfare. I’m not OK with the fact that prayer, in essense, seems to make my headaches worse. But I am taking it as evidence that the Lord has finally awakened me to the real battle for my physical healing. He is able to heal me. And I believe that He will. And the “backlash” has given me hope that sickness is desperately fighting against me… grasping on as it ultimately looses its grip on me. I also take it as a sign of hope in my once apathetic and numbed heart. As Moltmann has said: as freedom gets closer, the chains begin to hurt.

By 3 AM, my headache had landed and settled in to its usual loction, right behind my eye. Definitely a migraine.

It was pretty miserable, but not bad enough yet that I couldn’t sleep. It was well after four before I managed to be unconscious, but I did, happily, get a little sleep. A little. Until I finally reached the point where that was impossible.

I spent most of that morning (when I should have been sleeping) pleading with the Lord, trying desperately not to move, and in far too much pain to have any hope of being unconscious. You wouldn’t believe how long I resisted my miserable trip to the bathroom before the desire to NOT wet myself won out. I probably should have let myself throw up at that time. It took a lot of restraint not to. And I might have felt a little better if I had. But I despise vomitting. (As helpful as it sometimes is.)

I returned to my bed, updated my status to ask for prayer, and continued to lay there, pleading with the Lord to do something about the pain.

After some time, sleep came. That in itself felt like a miracle.

I woke up a couple of times to find that I wasn’t in excruciating pain anymore. I would thank the Lord, roll over, and go back to sleep. Such joy!

I finally got out of bed at 2:30. And my head didn’t hurt at all. No, really… not at all. I know migraine headaches can be as short as a few hours, but I can’t say I’ve ever been that fortunate.

I’m usually pretty dizzy and nauseated, with a low-level headache for the day or two after a migraine. But…

I continued through the rest of the day feeling wonderful. As if I hadn’t just suffered through one of my most horrendous migraine headaches. In fact, it didn’t even feel like the day after a migraine. I think twice in the entire day, I felt a little sick/dizzy. But it passed almost immediately and may have been a food thing.

I have never had that happen before. I have never had a headache of that intensity so quickly and completely disappear.

So… my conclusion: prayer works. Thank You, Lord!

As far as I know, that’s the last one. And until I know otherwise, I will continue to live in the hope and possibility that it is.

That’s the tension of waiting for healing. True hope causes you to live every day in the possibility that maybe that’s your day. (Thank you, Leah Morgan, for reminding me of that and helping give me the courage to continue hoping as the circumstances overwhelmed me.) Hope is dangerous. It opens you up to pain (and joy). Because hope deferred truly does make the heart sick. Disappointed hopes are painful because hope is the stubborn resistance to the temptation to be unfeeling and indifferent. Hope like that is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are too weary, without His strength, to continue in the vibrant life that hope awakens.

So, I am still choosing the life of hope. I am leaning on the Holy Spirit, daily being renewed by His life within me. And the God of Hope is filling me with all joy and peace in believing, causing me to abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13).

And I am grateful for His healing power, manifesting itself in the world, in my life.

Suppression Unto Deprivation

My first week in Texas was… rough. I was tired and overwhelmed. I felt my confidence completely deteriorating. And I found it unusually difficult to engage in a real way with the people I was giving time to be with.

Every time I opened my mouth and said something real that came from a place of any depth, I felt that I could, at any moment, completely fall apart. It didn’t matter where I was. It didn’t matter who I was with. If I dipped anywhere below the surface, I was sure to break down and begin bawling.

This was a problem. I did not want to burden my friends with my emotions. There was a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t feel like crying in public. I didn’t have time to go there. I didn’t really want to be that vulnerable.

So, quite naturally and with little thought, I suppressed my emotions. It took a lot of energy and an almost sub-conscious intentionality. But my once-perfected skill of shutting down my emotions kicked in and I was able to numb myself with very little conscious thought.

I stuck to the surface. If I felt myself about to crack, I would alter my course and steer away from the touchy things. I said relatively little. I felt very little.

There were two major consequences to responding to my emotions in this way. First, it became virtually impossible to relate to anyone in a real way, as I was setting apart significant time to meet with people. It’s hard to connect with a person with any depth when you are determined to stay at the surface. Simple contradiction. Second, I COULD NOT sleep.

Yes. I suppressed my emotions so thoroughly that it was keeping me up at night. It was exhausting.

After about a week of sleep deprivation, I finally realized what I was doing. So, Thursday morning, as I was failing again to fall asleep, the floodgates broke and I just started to cry.

From that point, I resolved not to shut down emotionally, for the rest of my time in Texas. Since then (the last three or four days)… I’ve cried A LOT.

One week to go. A lot of pain remains that I haven’t even touched. But the Holy Spirit, my Comforter, is with me. So I’m feeling pretty hopeful about the next seven days.

Mom’s Cookbook

Unless there is a high probability of complete disaster, I don’t think you can call it real baking. What I just did: REAL.

Without my mom around to fill in the gaps, her cookbook can feel like more of a riddle book. “Here are the things you’ll need. Good luck turning them into something that resembles the above title.”

Fortunately, my mom had a great love for post-its. If we are lucky, we might find a post-it floating around in the loosely bound heap of stained pages, a post-it that contains clues for the journey.

Tonight’s recipe listed the ingredients and told us (in vague and general terms) what to do with the dough.

At first, I was a little bothered by the lack of information to get me to the dough stage. Fortunately, I knew enough about baking to start by mixing the dry ingredients, continue by cutting in the shortening, and conclude with the addition of the wet ingredients.

After I was pretty committed to my determined process, I found a magical post-it that told me to do exactly what I was already doing. The find was actually rather fortunate, though. It mentioned two ingredients that I had COMPLETELY OVERLOOKED. (Grease-spots all over the pages cause the ink from the reverse side to blend in with the ink on the facing side. I wasn’t being careless. The ingredients were hiding… in their clever camouflage. Not to mention, the rapidly-decaying cookbook necessitates delicate handling, making careful inspection rather tricky. OK… maybe I was being a little careless. Can I blame it on the fact that I was fairly emotional?)

The recipe called for 4.5 cups of flour. It’s probably a good idea to have at least 7 cups on hand if being able to actually work with the stuff is at all desirable. What kind of recipe requires rolling THE STICKIEST DOUGH IN THE WORLD? Oy.

The whole venture was perpetually on the brink of a total catastrophe. My “cat noises” were at an all-time high. And I ended the evening covered in flour. (I really need to invest in an apron. Or at least choose not to wear black.)

And I missed my mom like crazy the entire time. I wish she could have come in and laughed at me as I wrestled with the obstinate ingredients. (Or… ummm… to teach me how to persuade them to adopt a more cooperative posture.) I wish she was here to partake of the resulting super-yum when the timer went off. I wish she was here to congratulate me on my success.

I just wish she was here.

iPhone Fun

My dad bought me an iPhone. (Thanks, Dad!) and I absolutely love the thing.

Since jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, my blog has kind of died off. I post occasionally. But not with the same frequency as before.

One reason for the Twitter-induced coma that my blog has fallen into is the simple fact that I could tweet from ANYWHERE, updating my status from my phone. It was far easier to tweet than to blog. (Not to mention, the 140-character limitation made the constant updates fit quite easily into my busy schedule.)

Well… Now that I have my iPhone, I can also blog from anywhere. I can’t make any promises… But it seems likely that I might begin blogging more frequently.

If this does happen, my posts will probably be shorter than usual. (Probably to the betterment of my blog.) And… They will probably be riddled with typing errors. My grammar may even suffer due to the change of pace and weird changes that I might make without really paying attention to what I have done. (Probably to the betterment of my condition as a grammar snob and recovering perfectionist.)

We shall see…

Not Forgotten

I haven’t forgotten that my blog exists. Well… maybe I kind of did.

In any case, I still think of myself as “one who blogs”. And I will eventually do the blogging to back that up. I think.

FIRST, though, in writing ventures… the overdue newsletter. Oh-so-overdue.

Seized by the Spirit

Have you ever been unquestionably aware of something that you had no way of articulating? You know that it is true, whatever it is; you just don’t know how to express it.

This has been true of the state of my heart… my livingness of life.

A lot of people have observed the change… or at least some of the outward manifestations of the change. And I KNOW things are different. But I have had no explanation for those who have inquired about the transformation. I have only been able to agree with them, very conscious of a reality that I could not express but that was so beyond argument that it was confirmed by the testimony of many witnesses.

Each person has observed it and articulated it in very different ways, but I know that they are talking about the same thing. I have become more expressive. My smile is brighter. I have come out of some sort of shell. I have a new boldness. My voice is different. And on and on and on. All of these statements are true, but none of them are particularly meaningful, independent of the greater reality from which they are flowing.

I am freer… more alive. And I don’t know how to explain it.

Fortunately, Jurgen Moltmann did.

I found this paragraph in The Source of Life, a phenomenal book about the Holy Spirit. Despite the fact that it is translated from another language, it is beautifully articulated. And it felt like a perfect explanation of the new life and freedom that I am continuously encountering.

So… here it is. Here is my Jurgen’s explanation for what has been happening:

If we are seized by the Spirit of the resurrection, we get up out of our sadness and apathy. We begin to flower and become fruitful again, like the plants and trees in the spring of the year. An undreamed-of love for life awakens in us; we drive out the sweet poison of resignation, and our painful remembrances of death are healed. We encounter life again like children, in eager expectancy.

Defining Hope

Before I write my next post on John 13-17, I thought it would be helpful to give you an overview of my working definition of hope. This will just help us be on the same page as I try to explain how Jesus’ words in these chapters are a message of hope.

Most simply, I define hope as a confident and joyful expectation for the future. Hope is desire. Here are some definitions that Webster gives us… my concept of hope is expressed in each of these:

1. to cherish a desire with anticipation
2. trust
3. to desire with expectation of obtainment
4. to expect with confidence

Biblical hope is birthed in the promises of God. Trusting His faithfulness and ability, we confidently expect and await the joyful fulfillment of those promises.

Psalm 37 is a beautiful hope Psalm. Again and again, David gives the exhortation to hope, articulating it from a slightly different angle each time. (Something we frequently find in the Psalms.) Rather than presenting a lengthy list of things that David thinks are a generally good idea, it further develops this uniting theme of hope or trust.

I see each of these phrases from Psalm 37 as an exhortation to hope:

• Do not fret
• Trust in the Lord
• Abide… and feed on His faithfulness
• Delight yourself in the Lord (… and He will give you the desires of your heart)
• Commit your way to the Lord
• Trust in Him
• Rest in the Lord
• Wait patiently (or longingly) for Him
• Cease from anger and forsake wrath
• Depart from evil and do good

I will not give a lengthy explanation of each of these and how they exhort us to hope, but I will happily clarify any of them if you ask.

My definition of hope actually came to life as my heart was resting in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews, as a whole, is all about hope. It, like Psalm 37, is a constant exhortation to hope, packed with beautiful articulations of the nature God. My time in Hebrews has resulted in the following conclusions (among other things):

• the concepts of COURAGE and encouragement/exhortation are closely linked with hope
• hope is manifest in OBEDIENCE
• hope sustains ENDURANCE
• hope is about PROMISE
• hope is BELIEVING
• hope requires FAITH in who God declares Himself to be
• … and a lot more than that, but we’re trying to keep this simple.

And, most significantly, I pulled this really simplified definition of hope out of Hebrews 3:6 – Hope is essentially CONFIDENCE AND REJOICING.

My favorite apostolic prayer is Romans 15:13. It reinforces this basic definition (in a chapter that similarly addresses themes of believing, courage, and promise):

Now may the God of HOPE fill you with all JOY and PEACE in BELIVING, so that you will abound in HOPE by the power of the Holy Spirit.

(The Holy Spirit aspect of all of this is pretty exciting, too, but I’ll wait for that, until I actually start talking about John 13-17.)

Each of the terms I have mentioned throughout this post always evoke the idea of hope when I hear them. And my definition of hope is a glorious swirly pool of all of those terms and concepts.

Hope. I love it.

The Complexities of Simplification

Today has been a miserable day. I know I’ve said this before, but the grieving process really doesn’t make ANY sense to me.

I’ve been occupied with some intense decluttering, simplifying, and letting go in the last few weeks. I guess I should have known how difficult it would be. I probably should have realized that I would be confronted with a million Mom things that were going to be really painful to contemplate releasing.

It’s amazing how difficult it can be to get rid of something that I have in any way associated with my mother.

Today was a big day. And I didn’t even realize it until I was curled up in the fetal position and bawling on the sound booth floor, leaving no one at my screens post.

On one of her last visits to Kansas City, my mom had spent a considerable amount of time hanging these little shelve things in my room. She had sketched out an entire layout for these shelves that were intended to house my Willow Tree figurines. A bunch of my friends (and my boyfriend, who was cooking for us that night) were over so that my mom and friends from Texas could get to know them a bit. We had great difficulty coaxing her to come and join us because she would not walk away from her project. She loved to express her love through giving and serving.

When I moved out of that room into the little basement apartment, I never took those shelves down. I couldn’t do it. So my incomplete wall of stuff decorated a chunk of Des and Jen’s room for the entire time that they lived in the house.

Well, we have a new roommate, now. And I realized that it was a bit ridiculous that pieces of my life are still residing in two bedrooms that I no longer physically occupy in our house. So, I took the shelves down today.

As I was boxing all of the little figurines, I found one that was still in its box. At the top of the box, stuck to the styrofoam, was a note from my mom.

Needless to say, my project for the day experienced a long delay. I couldn’t see a thing anymore, so I just stood there crying.

Fact: I have too much stuff. I value simplicity and the fasted lifestyle. There is a contradiction between my values and my circumstances. I need to let go of some things.

Fact: So many of my things have my mom attached to them. I want to hold on to every little bit of her that I still can.  The most important woman of my life is gone. How can I give up the tiny remnants of her life that surround me? It’s all that I have.

I’m still doing it. I’m not letting go of everything that I perhaps should, but I am letting go of little things here and there. And it is shredding my heart to pieces.

I just want her back in my life. It has been far too long.

Selfishness Consumed in Unquenchable Love

John of the Cross. Brilliant. I’m not sure if there’s much else to say than that.

I am presently three days into “a 40-day journey in the company of John of the Cross”. The book, “You Set My Spirit Free”, is arranged and paraphrased by David Hazard. I do not yet know what days 4-40 hold, but if they are anything like days 1-3, I think this one is worth searching out.

The words of today’s reading are still drifting along the surface of my thoughts. Here are a couple of sentences that nicely convey the general message of this chapter:

“The more we allow love to enter, the more we grow to love others with our whole will–even when they treat us miserably.”

“I tell you, acting in love when others are not acting in love toward you–this is of the highest value to your soul.”

And I am utterly convinced.

This is where the Holy Spirit has been leading me… into love. He is teaching me to desire the most excellent way. He is exposing my selfishness, my coldness, my impatience, my bitterness, and the ways “I barricade and protect myself against others… and mostly against [Him].” (Borrowing that quote from an ouchy little prayer at the end of the chapter.) He is tenderizing my icy heart with the flame of His love. Opening my heart to Him, exposing it to that fire, is the wisest thing I can do. I am so grateful for His leadership.

That is why I am being so deeply moved by today’s reading. It simply and beautifully articulates the lessons that my Teacher has been so persistently unfolding in these last months. The Spirit of Truth has not relented in drawing my stubborn, calloused, and weak heart into wisdom. And amidst the tears and the immense pain of the journey, He has continually manifested Himself as my Comforter and the source of life, the One who sustains and enables me.

Holy Spirit, teach me! You are able to present me faultless. You know how to lead me. Do not relent until You bring it to completion. I commit my way to You. You who are able and faithful. Your words are faithful and true. Bring them to pass.

John 13-17

My heart is still moving like crazy in John 14-16. My enjoyment of that passage has pushed me out a bit, to the surrounding chapters. John 13 offers some essential context and of course I want to spend some time in the concluding prayer of John 17.

So… I just wanted to write a quick post to let you know that my love for the passage has not faded and I still have every intention of following through with my former commitment to blog about it.

In a little while…