The "F" word and the "P" word

"Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven." (Psalm 85:10-11)

I've noticed that the more God frees me up, the more direct, in-your-face, and no-holds-barred I become. But before I proceed, I'd like to offer a disclaimer. I don't want to poop on anybody's genuine attempt or desire to love or accept me. I simply want to express my opinion as truthfully as possible. I'm not an official teacher or pastor, and I'm not an ordained minister. Spiritually, I'm a shepherd, a big sister, a spiritual mom, a crazy artist who finds Jesus, points to Him, and says, "Hey, people, check Him out." Currently, my journey has involved some excruciating inner healing, mind-boggling soul detox, and a desperate quest to find relief from chronic emotional pain. So, while I'm finding my answers, I hope I can help other people find theirs, too, or at least lead somebody to Jesus' hand so that He can gently clasp onto my friend's hand and tell me, "Thanks, chickie, I'll take it from here."

Hmm. Maybe that didn't make any sense. Hopefully a story will help. When I was a teenager, my church split, and I remember hearing one of the "troublemakers" say something that some of the people around me didn't like. I don't remember her exact words, but I think she basically said, "You can't just accept what people teach you; you have to question it." Her idea and actions back then seemed somewhat scandalous, but now I honestly think I know what she meant. I'm not saying that we should be suspicious of everyone or everything. I'm saying -- from the perspective of someone who lived in spiritually abusive environments for most of her life -- that you don't have to blindly accept every nugget or platitude that everyone feeds you. It's OK to question it. If someone brings you food on a tray that you've never tried before, it's OK to sniff it before you eat it. What if it's spoiled? What if you're allergic to it? As I mentioned in a roundabout way in the previous paragraph, I'm a shepherd. I really think teaching is a black-and-white process: "This is right, this is wrong; this is true, this is false; you can count on abc, but you must avoid xyz." Shepherding is a gray process: "This is how you apply such-and-such teaching; this is how you can find God in your situation; if that didn't work for you, try thus-and-so."

So, that's why I'm blogging about the "F" word and the "P" word. In case you've been burned by abc like I have, perhaps you can try thus-and-so. Also, during the rest of this post, I'm going to be more direct, and I'm going to use a bit of profanity for the sake of description. (Not for the sake of being a bitch.)

Lately, whenever I ask God about any of the emotional-healing issues that He's steaming out of me, He usually tells me to just be honest. I grew up in a house where I was continuously instructed to lie and deceive. So, God has been telling me that honesty has been healing me.

A while back, I tweeted that "family" has become my new "F" word. I like the concept of family. I'm pro-family. I'm glad that God promises to put the lonely in families (Psalm 68:6). I'm exceedingly glad that God adopted me into His family (John 1:12). I'm enjoying my feline family that's drowsily snuggling up to my computer while I'm typing this.

But the word "family" doesn't always give me warm fuzzies (and I'm guessing I'm not the only person who feels this way). For most of my life, here's what "family" looked like for me: Mom is the true lord of the household; from the kitchen to the cleaning to our finances to our very emotions, she is in charge. Dad is the neediest child of the household, even though he's supposed to be in charge, which he compensates for by demanding respect as the official spiritual leader who is to be obeyed without question and who is also the professor who retains the right to lecture at anytime. None of the members of the household are allowed to form any opinions of their own without the approval of Mom and/or Dad. If Mom or Dad disagree, Mom is always right by default, or Dad will pout loudly, unless it is a spiritual matter, in which case Dad is right, unless the issue is honesty, in which case Mom's lies and attempts at deception are right. Loudness is of extreme importance, because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so this competitive atmosphere squelches most attempts at unconditional love. As a unit, this family is considered to be superior to all other families, because everybody else has problems such as drugs or illicit sexual activity. Our unit is shiny and perfect, and any attempts to legitimately escape from this environment, such as marriage or unapproved spiritual enlightenment, are guilt-tripped and/or punished.

So, I've had an extremely difficult time translating this phrase in the modern church: "We're a family." Is church "family" supposed to look like the paragraph that I described above? No way. Is church supposed to look like the ideal families that you see depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings? I don't know; church people don't usually follow me home or drowsily snuggle up to my computer while I type blog posts. Much of my experience with church people has been more of a laundromat -- a place where people show up once a week to get their dirty laundry clean, and it's often a completely different group of people every week.

As I blogged previously, I felt years ago like I was evangelism's bitch. Lately, honestly, I've felt like I've become prayer's bitch. The modern church, to me -- which I've been told is supposed to be "family" -- has been less of a "Hey, let me get to know you and invite you into my living room" environment and more of a "Pray for this, pray for that, pray for me, pray for us" environment. Yes, as a church, we're supposed to bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2). I completely understand that there are zillions of prayer needs out there that need to be presented to my heavenly Father. But for crying out loud, I feel used! I am not your prayer bitch. I do not want you to tie me to my prayer closet and force-feed me request after request without treating me like a person. Did Jesus say that He wanted a house of prayer or a prayer factory? Is His bride destined to live inside a house and enjoy each other's company around the fire, or to show up to a factory and keep placing items onto a conveyor belt?

I have feelings. I have giftings. I have a history. Would it kill you to try to get to know me, even a tiny bit? Do I have to be exactly like you to be worth getting to know? When I hear, "We're a family," but I get treated like, "You are my prayer bitch," it offends me.

Time for me to balance what I just said. I am happy in my church. I've chosen to unpack my bags, settle, plant myself, and let my roots grow as deeply as God wants them to grow. Sure, I'm in a season of major transition and will need to tweak some things here and there. (Perhaps one reason why I've been bleeding out is because my Father has been doing quite a bit of John-15-type pruning.)

And I wrestle with, "So, when they say 'family,' do they mean 'mom-and-dad' family or 'distant-uncles-who-only-show-up-at weddings-and-funerals' family"? Maybe to you, me being available to listen to your prayer requests means that I'm "family" to you. Or maybe you grew up in an enmeshed environment like I did (and are still getting healed from it like I am), and you would only consider me "family" if I were to let you call me twice a week and let you download your entire life to me during 90-minute phone calls. I've quite possibly overanalyzed this beyond belief, but this is the type of stuff I've been thinking through. "We're a family": Does that mean that you get to control me? "We're a family": Then why am I not in your will?

But here's the bottom line. During this particular leg of my tremendously gray journey where "family" is my new "F" word and "prayer" is my new "P" word, I've learned two things to be absolutely black-and-white true. 1) God adopted me into His family (Romans 8:15), I will always be able to count on Him, and He will never disappoint me. 2) I will always be able to count on God's people to hear my prayer requests, whether I text them, email them, or deliver them in person.

Maybe I'm 100% wrong. Maybe I'm overly whining. Maybe I really am just being a bitch. But I don't want to give up on this whole "We're a family" thing, and I don't want to stop praying. I want to figure this thing out, whether I get warm fuzzies or whether I'll just need more therapy later.

So, that's where I am right now in this leg of my journey, honest. Perhaps if I'm just stepping in a pile of bullcrap, hopefully I'll be able to tell the next sheep not to step here. We can figure this out together. Jesus believes in us. I don't think He would have left us in charge otherwise.

Suicide died

This post was written for #killingmonsters, a Freedom phenomenon where brothers and sisters in Christ share their monster-killing stories. For more information about #killingmonsters, please check out the end of this post.

This is a picture of my disco ball. I wanted to snap a photo of it with its rotating flashing lights, but it must have spent too many years in storage, because it doesn't work anymore. But no problem. My cat decided to illuminate my photo shoot with her lively presence. In my home, my disco ball died, but disco itself is NOT dead. As the Bee Gees would say, Ha, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive. Stayin' alive.

If you've known me for a while and/or have read any of my blog for the past several years, you probably know about my past struggle with depression and a suicide attempt. In this post, I would like to focus on suicide. I'll try to not repeat too much of what I've mentioned previously, and I'll try to include some fresh details. I may even refrain from quoting more Bee Gees songs. Hmm. Aw, what the heck. How deep is Your love? How deep is Your love? I really need to learn.

Mental health professionals get paid good money to analyze suicide, and I truly think they do an excellent job and have discovered some extremely helpful things. But I think each case of depression is different. Each person is different. Different people have different experiences, different hurts, different life-ingredients, and different needs.

So, for me, suicide is difficult to describe as a monster because it's taken different forms. I heard someone say once that it was like a monkey on your back. Perhaps a healthcare professional would call it the symptom of a disease. To comedians, it's a joke. Maybe to somebody who's never, ever been depressed, a suicide is a selfish, foolish, perplexing act or merely a cry for help. To anyone who's lived inside the prison of codependence, the hellhole of abuse, or the soul-starvation of unresolved pain, suicide is a false sense of hope that Satan breathes on and then wafts in your face like an addicting aroma that aches so horrifically but that seems like such a relieving escape. Or maybe it's all of the above.

The monster of suicide is sort of like an agent in The Matrix because it can assume a multitude of forms, can show up anywhere at anytime, is very eager to terminate you, and must be confronted and destroyed before it destroys you. The monster of suicide is sort of like the corrupting "my precious" ring in The Lord of the Rings because it's so shiny and seems so empowering, and it must be destroyed in the fires from whence it came, or else your entire world as you know it will end. The monster of suicide is sort of like the mystery illness that gets diagnosed, treated, and then can come back unless it is properly identified once and for all by a Doctor who knows exactly which gene in your DNA has been causing your misery and knows how to genetically alter every cell in your body.

In 1998, I was hit with a suicidal thought for the first time, and I got rid of it. But after a while, I began to struggle deeply with depression, and the suicidal thoughts returned. It was as if something deep inside me clicked on, as if somebody had installed software without my permission, and now the software was running, and I didn't know how to stop the program. Sometimes, somebody would hit CTRL+ALT+Delete and start the Task Manager and end the program, and I would have peace for a while. But then the software would start running again. I don't exactly remember what the triggers were back then (although I suspect rejection), but I do remember it was as if I had accidentally stumbled upon a darkly magical wardrobe inside me that forced me to live inside an evil, dystopian Narnia that I couldn't return from.

That was my struggle for approximately 2 years. I would get better, and then I would get worse. Better, then worse. Better, then much worse. Better, then horrifyingly worse. I had an elaborate support system of people who had never known clinical depression at the level that I'd been experiencing. I didn't have health insurance, but I had an extremely obedient personality, so I was doing and trying everything that people told me to do and try. I got a ton of prayer. I confessed. I got counseling. I signed a contract. I had accountability. But every time I would try to escape the pit, something would pull me back in. I had changed from a happy, go-lucky, shiny extrovert with a smile to a dangerously introspective, soul-chafed, clouded, diluted creature who wallowed in her own soul-filth and longed to get her life back.

One Saturday afternoon in November 2000, I gave in to the living hell inside my head and told God that I was going to take my life and that only He could stop me. I may as well have waved my middle finger at Him. So, I bought a couple of bottles of aspirin, chugged down their contents, and waited for them to take effect. I wrote out a note, and I had this romantic idea of dying with my kitten next to me while Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" played on a tape in the background. But the tape broke, my kitten didn't want anything to do with me, and an hour later, I was still alive. I was like, "Wow, God wants me!" As I naively tried to put that incident behind me and move forward, I began to feel the effects of the overdose. Apparently, 48 aspirins will give you temporary hearing loss. Who knew? (A counselor telling me later that I stank at attempting suicide because aspirin wouldn't have killed me didn't exactly help my self-esteem, even though her heart was in the right place. "Great. I can't do anything right.")

So, I got checked into a psych hospital, I got professional help, and my life was never the same again, in a good way. If you know me, that is probably the part of my story that you're familiar with. In the years that followed, I intensely avoided anything suicide-related, especially music that sang about it or casual "If we don't finish this project, we should just throw ourselves out the window" suicide jokes. Now I realize that perhaps the monster wasn't completely dead, and I was still afraid of it.

In October 2010, right after I finished something my church calls Kairos, I went to a church service and suddenly got hit with suicidal thoughts all over again. After a couple of hours, I snuck away to my car and got alone with God to ask Him what the heck was going on. He told me He was healing me from the issues that drove me to suicide. Then in the spring of 2011, I was hit with another suicidal thought out of the blue, and I know now that it was Jezebel-related. (I may blog about Jezebel sometime in the future, because she's another monster that I killed and have needed to fiercely guard against.)

Then there were a couple of extended seasons in the summer of 2012 and even this past January -- and I've blogged about them -- in which I had to battle suicidal thoughts all over again. One of these seasons was a time in my life when I was inspired by friends who had just gotten married. I made vows to God as a way of expressing my love to Him, solidifying some extremely important things in my heart, and just declaring before heaven, hell, and anyone listening what my promises were to my Father. I'm 100% serious about keeping these promises, and I'm counting on the Holy Spirit to remind me of them and to help me keep them. So, one of these Psalm-56-type of vows I made to God was that I would never seriously consider suicide as an option again. Then I endured open hell after open hell, and I came through them alive, and I thought I was good to go.

Then about 3 weeks ago while I was fighting my loneliness monster and feeling intense pain, I got hit with suicidal thoughts all over again. I fought them, overcame them, and then had a heart-to-heart with God the following morning. After calmly driving around for a bit that rainy Saturday morning and processing my battle from the previous night, I stopped for some breakfast at a safe place. (For me, any public place where I can sit down and eat a meal is a safe place.) It was a conversation something along the lines of "Lord, with all due respect, WHERE THE EFFING CRAP IS THIS COMING FROM???" I hadn't fought warfare that had been coming at me externally. I had fought a monster that seemed to be picking fights with me internally while slowly shrinking and dwindling away and gasping its last dying breaths. Thanks to God, it appeared that each one of my battles with suicide had become less intense with each brawl. The battles had become quieter and quieter, and I had gotten stronger.

So, when God answered my question at the safe-place restaurant, He delivered the final blows to my suicide monster Himself. "The only way your soul knows how to deal with extreme pain is with suicide," He told me in the parking lot. After I was still in awe at this major revelation, He continued after I sat at a table and waited for my food. His words were probably the most random piece of advice that anyone could have given me, but they made perfect sense to my soul: "You don't have to commit suicide. You can dance to disco music."

I know that disco isn't overtly mentioned in the Bible, I don't know exactly what theological phenomenon supports the concept of cured-from-suicide disco, and I'm certainly not going to start a worshiping-the-healing-power-of-disco cult. But I do know that my God told me exactly what I needed to hear. He fed me exactly what I needed to eat. He smushed His strong foot into whatever embers had still been smoldering from what had once been a bonfire, and He snuffed out the embers forever. After I ate my breakfast, I whipped out the Bee Gees and other music I had in my car, and I boogied on the highway. Life was mine, and I was enjoying it.

"I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death." (Psalm 118:17-18)

"They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support. He also brought me out into a broad place; He delivered me because He delighted in me." (Psalm 18:18-19)

Rewinding back to 2000, my roommate at the time visited me at the psych hospital and said that me attempting suicide was like me rejecting her, as if I were saying that she couldn't help me through it. I explained to her that I had attempted suicide because I was the one who was feeling rejected. I wasn't waving my middle finger at her with my actions. I was in a pit, I was at rock bottom, and I was a humongous mess that only God could fix. If I truly believed that people wanted me around, I probably wouldn't even have considered suicide at all. I'm sorry if she felt rejected or slighted or ignored by my actions, but I'm thankful that she doesn't understand firsthand how I was feeling.

During that season, I needed a support system, and I got one. But a support system wasn't my ultimate hope for success. I needed professional healthcare, and I got it. But medical support wasn't my ultimate answer for healing.

Fast-forwarding to 3 weeks ago, I fought the final battles with suicide alone, and I needed to face this monster square in the face myself. No crutches. No contracts. No people. Just the monster and me, with "me" being covered under the ultra-protective wings of my heavenly Father. Just Neo and Agent Smith about to brawl in a subway station with his friends watching helplessly aboard the Nebuchadnezzar. Why isn't she running? She's beginning to believe.

I don't know exactly what happened, but something clicked inside me during my disco revelation. I'm not afraid of suicide anymore. I can listen to music that sings about suicide. I can endure suicide jokes. I'm not saying that I don't revise the lyrics to something more positive in my head. I'm not saying that I'm best buddies with people who think suicide is a laughing matter. I'm saying that I know now that a monkey isn't going to leap out of nowhere and latch onto my shoulder just because somebody said the "s" word. It's dead. I'm alive.

Suicides are strewn all over news headlines now. Hurting people left many loved ones behind who are trying to pick up the pieces and make sense of them. I definitely don't know all the answers, because I can only tell you my story, but I have noticed some interesting patterns. Throughout the years, people such as Kurt Cobain and Ernest Hemingway were artistic people in the public eye who were claimed by the suicide monster. I know from experience that being artistic means being excruciatingly sensitive and feeling an excruciating depth of emotion. So, when I hurt, sometimes the wound can be very deep and can take a very long time to surface so that it can get properly treated.

For me, perhaps my wound was a rejection that occurred before I was even born. Perhaps my birth father reacted so strongly to the news of my existence that it prompted my birth mother's doctor to suggest that they abort me. Perhaps my birth parents considered that option for a few seconds too long. Perhaps my developing ears should have heard them fight for my life, even while I was in my birth mother's womb. Perhaps if I had been fought for ferociously back then, I wouldn't have had to fight so ferociously for my existence myself as an adult.

But I fought, and I won. Jesus went ahead of me, like the infinitely perfect Big Brother Firstborn that He is, and conquered death for me first. Now I'm more than a conqueror in Him. Now He can wave me in front of the devil like a giant middle finger that says, "See? Tirzah's still here. According to you, she wasn't supposed to make it, but I want her here, so she gets to stay. I win. She wins. You lose."

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive!

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