Remember to Breathe Part 1: You Are Stronger Than You Think

I was laying on the couch in the sunshine, listening to both the baby monitor and the distant sounds coming through the open window. It was a gorgeous day, but despite the warm breeze blowing in, my own fear was causing me to shiver. I knew it was coming, I felt it deep inside of me, and there was little I could do to prevent it.

Sure enough, a few seconds later I both felt and heard a shift inside of my body. My breathing became more labored before I had time to think about trying to control it. I began talking to myself, trying to remember to breathe in, breathe out, but it wasn't more than a few breaths later that the fear took over. I no longer had control of how quickly I was breathing, and I was pretty sure that the room was caving in around me. Everything started to go fuzzy, and tears began to stream down my face. Breathe in, Breathe out. I kept thinking about how sorry I was, and yet how I would have to suffer my consequences anyways, and that really wasn't helping. In the midst of the panic, I suddenly wondered if I would survive this one. Breathe in, Breathe out. I wasn't getting air. I leaned forward so I wouldn't fall off the couch when it all went dark.

It ran through my mind who I could call to calm me down, but by that point I couldn't see where the phone was. Breathe in, Breathe out. What if Benjamin wakes up? I can't take care of him right now. God, please let that baby keep sleeping. There has got to be a way out of this. God, please save me this time. Breathe in, Breathe out. I got dizzier, and the fuzz around the edges of the light came together in the middle. I stopped breathing. My heart felt like it might burst. I felt like it might not end this time. I fell forward. It went dark.

I don't know how long it lasted, and I don't know how long it was dark. When I opened my eyes and laid back down on my back, I was ok. My breathing had returned to normal, and I knew that I had survived another one. I don't know how many more there will be before it is finished. I'm just trying to hold on. One day at a time, one hour at a time, one moment at a time. I'm holding fast to the hope that I am stronger than it, and that I can beat it. I can do this. I can. Breathe in, Breathe out.

Ready to Jump, Even Ready to Fall

I woke up on Tuesday afternoon to a slightly disheartening message in my facebook inbox from a good friend who is on vacation in California. It began by telling me that there was a prayer need for a friend of my friend. "Ok, simple enough," I thought. I began to skim over the message and see who it was that needed prayer, and what had happened. When I got to the second paragraph, however, my eyes froze. Read along with me:

my pastor in Hawaii, Mark Rife and his wife Sarah went hiking on saturday and sarah fell face forward from a 75ft. waterfall. mark jumped in after her and only sustained a few injuries. sarah however was flown to oahu to be put in intensive care until they could determine her condition...

The message goes on to tell more about Sarah; the injuries she sustained, and her current condition. But for at least the next five minutes, my eyes kept wandering to that paragraph. Why? Because I was completely struck by the fact that the message told me that HE JUMPED IN AFTER HER. She fell off of a cliff, and he jumped in after her. I mean, who does that?

This picture of love, faith, and trust has not left my mind since Tuesday. I first thought of the love that we know as humans, the love that we have for each other, but it wasn't long before I related this to the Love of Jesus. The trust involved in making a jump like that. The ability to just jump, without thinking twice and without weighing the options first. This is pretty foreign to me, as I am pretty sure there isn't anyone (or anything) in my life that I would that quickly jump after. I don't have enough faith for that. I am not that devoted.

The more I think about it, and the more I have shared this story and where it has caused my thoughts to wander, the more I know that this is what I want to be striving after. I want to have the kind of faith that when Jesus tells me to jump in after Him, I don't ask questions and I don't heed caution. I want to love with the kind of love that causes me to be fully devoted to the point of jumping without first thinking about what it means for me. I want to trust enough that when I'm told to jump, I know that Jesus will be at the bottom to catch me and keep me from harm. I want to love that deeply, and I want to have faith that big.

This story has inspired me, and it has caused my heart to run after things I didn't know I was missing. I want to be brave. In fact, I want to be FEARLESS. I want to jump off without having time to worry about it, and I want to love SO MUCH that I know nothing else other than to just jump. Mark didn't stop to think about whether or not he would get hurt. He didn't consult anyone else about his decision, and he didn't stop to weigh his options. He just watched his beloved fall, and he just JUMPED. I want that. I want to be found at the bottom, knowing there was no other option. Let's go. I'm ready to fall.

*photo by dougmcneall

**title by elizabeth

Noticed

This is my friend Drake. He's fifteen months old, and probably one of cutest toddlers you've ever seen, right? Maybe I'm partial, but even if I wasn't I would still think he's cute. The problem with precious baby Drake, though, is that he KNOWS he's cute. And that makes it very hard to take him in public. Wherever we are, if we walk past anyone that doesn't acknowledge his presence, he will make noises at them until they tell him how cute he is (or until we walk away). He knows he's cute, and he wants to make sure everyone else agrees. Everyone. Now we all know that not everyone in the world (especially everyone in the public library) thinks that little kids are adorable. But poor baby Drake just wants to be affirmed. He wants to feel loved. He wants to be noticed. And oh, how much I learn about myself from this precious little boy and his seemingly pointless antics. For if the truth be told, I am exactly like Drake in this. I always have been. But I hope that I won't always be.

I have never exactly been the strong, silent type, though it may appear to be so sometimes. Silence is something that is rare for me, even when I'm sleeping. I'm just loud by nature. I'm pretty sure even my thoughts are often loud, judging by the noise in my head that I can't seem to control. On the rare occasions that I am more quiet than usual, for example when I am in big group settings, my facial expressions and body language usually still speak loudly, especially to the people that know me well. And as for the strong part, well, we'll just say that is also lacking. I'm weak and needy, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. We'll just leave it at that.

The bad part about my weak and noisy status is that it causes my happiness to depend mostly on the behavior of other people. I'm addicted to approval and affirmation (in both positive and negative forms), and I'll do whatever it takes to get them. That includes letting people use and abuse me, willingly discounting my own feelings, and worst of all, trying to manipulate the people I love into loving me the way I want them to. Let me be the first to tell you, that never works. It only causes me more frustration, and causes the people I care about to stop caring.

Yes, I want to be noticed. I'll admit to that one, too. Maybe no one paid enough attention to me when I little, or maybe negative attention has always been easier to obtain for me, so I play my strengths. Either way, the point is that the people who are supposed to notice me, the people who are supposed to pay attention to me and care about me, well, they just WILL. I don't have to make them. I don't have to obsess about what they think or what I did or didn't do. I'm tired of my demeanor, my mood, and my general contentment being found in other people. That's not how it is supposed to be. I'm selling myself short. Jesus loves me, this I know, and I want that alone to be where I rest. I want to care only about pleasing HIM and gaining HIS approval for all that I am and all that I do. I want to be able to say who cares if someone else doesn't appreciate me. He does. That's all that's really going to matter in the end anyways.

I hope that I can learn to become the strong, silent type. To me, it's those people who are a picture of security. A picture of rest. While I know that in some areas I will always remain weak, I pray that I can learn to be quiet more often. Just because I'm making noise (good or bad) doesn't mean I will turn a head or get a comment. I want to be loved for who I am, and I want to be appreciated only out of that kind of love. And as for baby Drake, well, he'll figure it out. Not everyone cares how cute he is. But the good news is, the people that really count tell him so every single day. May that be enough for him, and may it also become enough for me.


(sidenote: thank you, elizabeth (and/or ellie), for the advice about being noticed. it's truth. this is where it let me.)

"It's the Fear That Keeps Me Wide Awake"

I've spent the last few hours packing my life into boxes so that I can put it all into a U-Haul tomorrow and move to the next county. To be perfectly honest, there isn't an ounce of my being that wants to make this move anymore. You see, I have this problem with making decisions. Decisions, especially big ones (but usually small ones too!), scare the hell out of me. I'm terrified that I'm going to choose wrong. I'm terrified that either I or someone else is going to lose in the end. I'm scared of this not being the next right step in my life, and I'm scared of what I might lose by leaving this town. To sum it all up, as I laid in bed last night trying to sleep, I reached the disheartening conclusion that I have not only let fear take up residence in my heart, but I am letting it rule my life. And no one should be ruled by fear.

Fear is something that I have been familiar with my entire life. When I was growing up, security was something that was rare. It was important that I always stayed on my toes when it came to what I said and did, because if I chose wrongly there would be consequences. And the consequences usually hurt. This instilled in me my fear of choosing wrongly, and so it has made me hesitant of choosing at all. I think this is unfortunate, because being an adult is about making decisions on my own. And so I lose.

When I was young, I feared adults and the pain they could inflict upon me physically. Not feeling safe with the people who were supposed to protect me the most from everything scary and unknown did more damage that I have ever chosen to realize. Now, a few years into adulthood, I find it hard to think of anyone as safe. Which gives me nowhere to escape to from the fear. It has caused me to be the most afraid of the people that I am closest to and should trust the most. This makes life very scary. It leaves me searching for security, and causes me to stay frozen when it comes to walking through life, for fear I may take the wrong steps forward.

All this being said, I think I'm tired of letting fear take the upper hand. It is robbing me of my life, and it is taking from me the ability to risk. I'm so afraid to let go that I cling with all my might. This isn't fair to me, and it isn't fair to the people who love me. I have to learn to jump, even when I can't see the ground. I have to learn to TRUST, which is completely foreign to me. I think I'm finally realizing that the entire world isn't out to get me. Maybe there are people out there who are safe, even though they may fail me from time to time. Maybe it is ok to take steps in a forward motion, and hope that Jesus will work out the details if I just follow His lead. Life wasn't meant to be lived in the same state of mind all the time. We're supposed to take adventures that are offered to us, even if it is simply for what we might learn along the way.

So even though I'm still questioning this move I'm making tomorrow, I hold tight to some advice I got from a dear friend just last night: even if this is the wrong decision, I will learn from it. Which in the end makes it the right decision. I believe that Jesus wouldn't let me make huge decisions that are the wrong ones. I believe that He's holding me in His hand, and guiding me along the way that leads to life. I believe He can deliver me from the paralyzing fear that rules my heart and my life. Fear is not of God. For "God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline". So may I learn to risk. May I learn to trust. And most importantly, may I learn to LIVE, confidently and free of the fear and lies that have plagued me for way too long.

Emotions Trapped Between the Threads

I am moving in a few days, and being the procrastinator that I am I just decided to start packing today. You see, packing for me was going to require going through everything that moved home with me last August that has been abandoned in my empty dining room ever since. No one but me knows why I have left these things abandoned for the last eleven months. No one but me knows the emotion contained in the full boxes that I haven't brought myself to yet touch. For the same reason, there is a five foot by ten foot storage unit just down the road that I pay rent on every month, full of things I haven't touched in two years. This may sound silly, but I truly haven't had the ability to go through this stuff. My things were dumped in these two places in seasons of confusion and pain that I couldn't face. They were placed there to be held until I was ready to deal. They contained emotion and memories that I refused to deal with and instead kept buried. Until today.

This morning at church the message was about healing from the pain we kept buried deep inside. The pain that no one knows about. Oh, the irony. Jamie, my pastor, used the illustration of trying to hold a beach ball under the water. You can hold it down and lay on top of it, but eventually it's gonna pop up and smack you in the face. Yep. And until healing comes, we live in fear and we live trying to control the pain we hide. Yep, again. I consider myself an expert in pain control. But how much easier would it be just to embrace healing instead? How much easier would it be to finally walk through my grief and my pain, and find the Light that heals? The Love that heals? The Truth that heals?

My mother died four years ago. And while it would be so much easier to say that I was over it a long time ago, I would be lying. I have run from grieving for so long. I have held onto the pain, I have held onto that stage of life, and even more inconveniently I have held onto everything that reminds me of her. I have boxes full of everything that causes me to remember, just in case I forget. Today, I think it might be time to let go. Today I realize that people are not contained in stuff, and neither are memories. My memories of when my mom was alive, my memories of happy times (and happy shopping trips) will not be lost if I let go of my material things.

So as I stood in my dining room this afternoon, going through the clothes my friends have been trying to throw out behind my back for years, I realize I am finally ready to let go. And I realize it's ok to let the tears come as I discover the clothes I was wearing the day my mom died, the dress I wore to the funeral, the sweater she bought me that Christmas, or the shoes that she wore before I did. It's ok to be sad, and it's even more ok to throw them in the goodwill pile. Because it's time to grieve, it's time to deal, and most importantly it's time to let go.