Rehab

This is a picture of Macho wearing my knit cap. (I snapped the photo with my laptop.) Of course it doesn't fit him, but he had never let me put a cap on his little head before. It was such an adorable photo opp. Kitty in da hood!

"Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday." (Psalm 37:3-6)

Somewhat recently, I watched a very interesting episode of Mystery Diagnosis. The episode told the story of a woman who lived with an embarrassing condition for most of her life. Ever since she was a little girl, she would get a tremendous amount of pressure in her chest area that she could only relieve by belching. So, she would very frequently burp like the Dickens, and she would also have terrible bouts of diarrhea and constipation. Of course, designing her life around her condition was no easy feat. But as the years passed, she lived her life the best she could with a supportive family, and she had a career and a husband. Unfortunately, her condition didn't improve, and I think it made her depressed, and she ended up getting divorced, and I think all the doctors did for her was prescribe heartburn medication.

I'm not exactly sure what her turning point was, but after remarrying and getting a new career, she had a crisis that prompted her to seek a more specific answer from the medical community. Finally, she found a doctor that performed an hourslong test on her. He examined her intestines and discovered that some of them were situated in her chest cavity. So, for her entire life, her heart had been beating along with her strangled intestines, which had gotten stuck up there through a hernia in her diaphragm. This hernia was a birth defect. So, to fix it, the doctor performed surgery that repaired the hernia and repackaged her intestines into her gut where they were supposed to be. From what I understand, her burping/diarrhea/constipation symptoms disappeared immediately, but her heart had been permanently damaged from the years of sharing its space with her intestines.

That was a true story, and it fascinated me. In writing this, I certainly hope I wasn't insensitive to this woman or the fact that she was brave enough to tell her medical story on national television for all of us to learn from. She endured years of pain, suffering, and uncertainty. And I'm truly glad that she got the answers she needed and that she's much healthier now. It's just that the more I think about it, the more her physical story reminds me of my emotional story. Maybe other people can relate to this also.

Perhaps due to a metaphorical birth defect, aka iniquity, or perhaps due to conditioning, or perhaps due to trauma, some of us grow up with all kinds of crap passing through our system in a way that stifles or damages our hearts.

Speaking for myself, I know God is the Best Doctor in the entire universe, and He's spent lots of time sitting down with me and examining my metaphorical system with a metaphorical X-ray machine and saying, "Wow, you're not going to believe this. Do you have any idea how much crap has been passing near your heart? And how this crap-route isn't supposed to be there in the first place? Do you see the open door that I'm going to need to perform surgery in order to close forever?" And I look at the X-ray machine and say, "OH, MY GOSH! I NEVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED THAT THAT'S WHAT'S BEEN CAUSING ALL THIS!"

And then you think about all those times when your soul would belch and cramp and emit all kinds of unpleasant things that would scare people away, and you weren't exactly sure where these unpleasant things were coming from. There were times when you'd feel pressure in certain situations, and sometimes you had trouble expressing yourself and become depressed, and other times you couldn't control your expressions, so you'd have angry outbursts or yelling contests or just competition contests, and you'd end up in places that you certainly didn't want to be, and you wondered if life would ever be liveable. And you'd remember all the people who would stay away from you, and then you'd remember all the people who wanted to stick around you -- the ones who saw your troubling symptoms but accepted you anyway, and they wanted to walk you through them, and they knew that you weren't just a pile of unpleasant symptoms. They knew you were a loveable person with a troubled heart.

And then God does the surgery, and He's like, "OK, let's get all this crap routed away from your heart. There ya go. How does that feel?"

And you're like, "Wow. The symptoms are gone."

And then He tests you with certain situations. You feel the symptoms again, but less severely this time, and you feel a little strange to feel angry without having to check in to a psych hospital to deal with it. Or you feel a little weird with your heart palpitating with excitement or stress or nervousness. And you have a bad day, and you apologize to the Doctor, and you talk to Him about your bad day.

And He's like, "It's OK. You did it right. You talked to Me about it. That's the way your stuff is supposed to flow out of your system. Pour it out to Me."

And then your heart, which has been weakened by years of strangulation, beats painfully at first, but then with exercise, your circulation is restored to what it was supposed to be in the first place. And your heart gets a little bit bigger and stronger as you learn how to feel more and more emotion and as you learn how to express it more healthily.

And, of course, when I say "you," I mean "me."

For the past several months, I've been praying, "Thank You for healing my heart, my mind, and my gut. Please keep healing my heart, my mind, and my gut." My heart, of course, is the way I feel things, cherish things, and treasure things. My mind is the way I think about things and remember things. My gut is the way I process things and the way I "take" things.

Because life can punch you in the gut sometimes. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna punch back, or are you gonna double over in pain and crawl back to your Doctor? (I think the latter is the healthier option.) What are you gonna do? Are you gonna pretend it doesn't bother you, or are you gonna anticipate the punch and build up your gut muscles beforehand? (I think the latter is the healthier option, and it probably requires planning and anticipating.) I think the more time I spend with the Doctor and learn His ways and let Him condition my gut, the better shape it'll be in to take the punches and roll with them.

And I think the less crap I carry around in my gut, the better shape it'll be in so that my entire body can take care of whatever it needs to. I'm a very deep person who is capable of hurting very deeply. So, usually when I process pain or clean out a wound, I'll spend a very long time emptying it out, examining it, and doing my part to ensure that it's all gone.

As I shared with my lifegroup a long time ago, I consider forgiveness to be a lot like tithing. If you get a paycheck, you really shouldn't hang on to your tithe for very long. As soon as you know how much you owe, get it the heck out of your bank account, get it to your church's storehouse, pay it completely, and enjoy the rest of your check. If somebody offends me, I really shouldn't keep it in my gut for very long. As soon as I know what the offense is, I need to get it the heck out of my soul, metaphorically poop it out of my metaphorical gut, make sure it's all gone, and enjoy the rest of my life.

I think sometimes that can take a while, because I think some offenses have lots of layers to them. It'll be like, "Lord, I forgive so-and-so for doing such-and-such. They made me feel like thus-and-so when they did that." Then it'll be gone, but it'll come back, and I'll have to talk to God about it more and make sure I didn't leave anything out, because maybe there's a tiny little sliver of something stuck somewhere. I mean, I don't want to get a metaphorical polyp, right? "Lord, I forgive so-and-so for doing such-and-such. They made me feel... oh, my gosh. They made me feel LIKE BLEEP WHEN THEY DID THUS-AND-SO!!" Then I'll probably cry, and God will probably scrape out the wound for a while until it's better. Then that process might repeat a few times until I'm like, "Oh, yeah, so-and-so hurt me. Huh. I forgot all about that." And I'm on my merry way.

And, of course, I've been thinking about this sort of thing because my church recently had a sermon about forgiveness. I'm still learning about it.

I think if I've had all kinds of mis-routed crap flowing near my heart, it might take a while for my heart to finish its rehab. Maybe it needs to learn how to beat the right way. And maybe my guts need to learn how to flow the right way, too. But I think God is in the business of rehab. He lovingly pushes us to our limits, and then He repeats until we learn how to walk, talk, and think the right way. And our hearts will remember forever the correct way to beat, and our guts will remember forever the correct way to flow.

Then it's only a matter of time before He puts a knit cap on your head and says, "Check it out! She didn't let Me do that with her before! See how adorable she is?"

Tirzah in da hood!