For our sake

I've noticed something in the past several years. People usually think that those of us who don't have a family (no kids, no spouse, no immediate family) get pretty lonely and depressed during Thanksgiving and Christmas, so they invite us to their homes and let us join them for their families' festivities.

I appreciate these invitations, and I love it when people share their families with me. (And I always like getting free food.) It can be true that Thanksgiving and Christmas can be hard when you spend those holidays alone. But honestly, those aren't the only two holidays that exist. The calendar is full of holidays -- not to mention 52 entire weekends -- that you can spend with your families, and it can be very easy to take all of these family times for granted. For me, frankly, Thanksgiving and Christmas are nothing compared to all the other holidays that I end up spending by myself. Ripping myself away suddenly from my family was a pretty big shock to my system, even though I had prepared myself for it, and I spent a lot of time grieving at first.

But I feel like I've adjusted since then. I can't always depend on my friends to fill in the family void in my life, so I've learned to enjoy myself with just me. For example, so far I've spent this Memorial Day weekend (since it's a grilling holiday) decorating hot dogs and enjoying a Star Wars DVD marathon. (I started with Episode III because I like to see Anakin Skywalker's intense emotional progression into Darth Vader.)

Am I lonely or depressed? Sometimes I feel little flashes of emotion here and there, but I think I'm OK. Honestly, it's hard to be lonely or depressed when you have a loudly purring cat trying to snuggle on your lap while you're trying to type on your laptop. I think I've learned to be happy with what I have.

And I'm even happier that my family isn't in my life anymore.

"So Jesus answered and said, 'Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel's, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time -- houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions -- and in the age to come, eternal life.' " (Mark 10:29-30)

Today while I was working in my kitchen, I was thinking about this bit in the Bible, and I asked God if I had left everything behind for Jesus' sake or for my own sake (because of the extreme unhealthiness and toxicity of my family). He reminded me of that part in Psalm 23 that says that He leads me through paths of righteousness for His name's sake... so it's both. I walked away permanently from my family for Jesus' sake AND for my sake.

What I'm about to say isn't in any way meant to insult anyone who believes a certain theology. I'm just telling my story, and if you feel like God is softening your heart to agree with me, awesome and thank you. If you feel the need to lecture me for believing the wrong thing, well... let's just say I don't have a problem walking away from people permanently.

In a nutshell, cessationism is the belief that the Holy Spirit moved powerfully and miraculously in the First Century A.D., soon after Jesus ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to believers in the book of Acts, and that the Holy Spirit ceased moving with signs and wonders as soon as the Bible was canonized. In other words, cessationists believe that we don't need the Holy Spirit anymore because we have the Bible. We have God the Father, we have Jesus, and we receive the Holy Spirit as a seal/guarantee on our hearts when we get saved, and that's it. Get saved, get baptized, read your Bible, go to church, try to not get caught doing anything naughty, and that's it.

Well, I don't believe that anymore. When the Holy Spirit met me, started talking to me, and helped me hear my Father talking to me, that cessationist theory kind of flew out the window.

In recent years, I heard someone say (or maybe I read it in a book) that believing cessationist theology is a type of atheism. In other words, if you believe that the Holy Spirit stopped existing as soon as the Bible was created, you may as well be an atheist; you basically only believe in two-thirds of the Trinity.

I think this makes sense. This certainly explains all those atheistic/agnostic thoughts that I was fighting off and on through the years. My birth father (one of the biggest spiritual abusers you'll probably ever meet) spent a few years forcing his cessationist doctrine down my throat. I had to spend several years puking it out.

This is why I believe that John MacArthur is the biggest [bleep]hole in the body of Christ, but I digress. ("Grace" my foot.)

In cessationist doctrine, the Holy Spirit is explained away in a similar way that atheists explain away the concept of God. I remember my birth father telling me once that there was a time when he was open to the idea of the Holy Spirit still moving in the same way that He did in the First Century. So, perhaps in an effort to experience the intensity that charismatics sometimes experience, he told the Holy Spirit something to the effect of, "Just flex my muscles." Of course He didn't. Why would He do something so intrusive, so intimate, with someone who was so hard and cynical towards Him?

So, Dad spent the rest of his life looking down on charismatics and teaching against the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even from the pulpit -- even while looking right at me. (Thanks, Dad. I always enjoyed having a public lecture forced upon me. #sarcasm)

"Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife." (Proverbs 17:1 in the NIV)

The reason why I said all that wasn't to spark an online debate but to say how increasingly relieved I am that I left my family. In a nutshell, what it really boiled down to was the fact that I had to choose: them or God?

I chose God. And I haven't regretted doing so -- not for one second.

Has it been easy? No, of course not. Has it been worth it? Right down to the very last drop.

My life is peaceful now. My life is quiet now. I can't say that any of the holidays I spent with my ex-family were peaceful or quiet. They can keep their house full of feasting. They can keep their strife. I'll be happy with my dry crust, thank you very much.

 

Speaking of signs and wonders, here are some pictures of my clean kitchen. (It isn't spotless, but it's useable.) Seriously, the fact that I've been developing better housecleaning habits is pretty darn awesome.

That's just one example of something that I couldn't have done during my cessationist days. That's something that God -- the Father, the Son, AND the Holy Spirit -- has needed to help me with. He didn't flex my muscles. He gently led me in paths of righteousness, for His name's sake. For His sake. For my sake. For our sake.

Thank you, Mom

Dear reader, if you followed my blog a few years ago, you know that I've needed to spew some emo-flavored stuff out into the internet from time to time. I think today is one of those times. If this type of thing makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to either skip this post altogether or maybe just skip down toward the end where I talk about my cat. (Because she's harmless.)

I usually end up blogging around my birthday (because it's my way of processing getting old), but I didn't need to blog about my birthday this year. I had an awesome birthday. I had a very nice leisurely lunch with a friend, I watched some mariachi videos on YouTube, and I saw a movie at a theater. My heart was full.

But this year, I've noticed that Mother's Day has been hitting me kind of hard. In recent years, it's been just another Sunday, and I've had fun at church that weekend just being happy for the mothers who were celebrated. But lately, I've felt some stuff churning around inside me emotionally, and I think a lot of it stems from the issues I've had with my birth mother. (Long story short, I don't have a relationship with her anymore because God told me to leave the family. So I left.)

"As snow in summer and rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool." (Proverbs 26:1)

Yes, honoring your father and your mother is one of the Ten Commandments (as my pastor preached recently). But what if your father and your mother treated you so badly that God told you to cut ties with them permanently? What if it was because they were what the Bible would label as "fools"? What would it look like to honor them on Mother's Day and Father's Day? What sort of homage would you pay for their hand in raising you?

Well, I put together a note to my birth mother that I don't really intend for her to read (I don't really care whether or not she sees it), but I felt like I needed to express it cathartically. I needed to get it off my chest. Especially if your family situation is similar to mine and you'd like a break from all the regular "Happy Mother's Day" stuff, I welcome you to read my therapy note below. Just know that it's dark and very sarcastic. (Wow, it's snowing in July!)

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Dear Mom,

1. Thank you for being a stereotypically lazy Mexican. You inspired me to grow up to be just like you.

2. Thank you for encouraging me to be a medical secretary when you knew that I wanted to be a writer. Those two careers are so similar. It's like, you GET me.

3. Thank you for incorrectly remembering my 31st birthday and for telling my other family members to celebrate me on the wrong day. And thank you for shooing me off the phone several years after that when I called you to wish you a Happy Mother's Day. Few people on this Earth have made me feel as loved and wanted as you did.

4. Thank you for being so internally stoic and macho and for the major lack of affection that eventually blossomed into weird same-sex attractions at random times throughout my 20s and 30s. I especially appreciated getting to work through those tendencies. I'm sure they made me a real catch to all those eligible bachelors who never asked me out. And my soul especially thanks you for the huge, healthy doses of codependence and enmeshment that made all of the above nice and manageable.

5. Thank you for insisting on doing pretty much all the household chores yourself instead of sharing those responsibilities with me and my sister. Not knowing how to take care of myself as an adult didn't make me feel depressed at all.

6. Thank you for yelling at me when I was a little girl when I tried to tell you that I felt like you loved my sister more than you loved me. The Prodigal Son's older brother's behavior is so underrated in Scripture, and I'm glad I got to experience his feelings firsthand -- especially later in life when God would show favor to other people in certain situations instead of me. I've had so much fun working through these entitlement and jealousy issues.

7. Thank you for allowing dirty old men to commit adultery with me (at least in their hearts) at church. I cherish the fact that I get to work through a truckload of trust issues with every Christian man that I will possibly meet for the rest of my life. What happened to me isn't a modern-day version of child sacrifice. Not at all.

8. Thank you for only reading the Bible any time you had to prepare to teach a Sunday School lesson. I've enjoyed riding the rollercoaster of learning how to have a quiet time all by myself. Being raised by a religious hypocrite was especially fun.

9. Thank you for not asking me probing questions after I responded to an altar call when I was 8 years old and everybody thought I got saved, but I really didn't. Thank you for teaching me that I could get baptized and take the Lord's Supper now like a good little Baptist. Thank you for pressuring me to get baptized later. I had so much fun working through those doubts about my salvation, even decades after the fact.

10. Thank you for operating in a Jezebel spirit and for training me on how to follow in your footsteps. What a fabulous journey it has been to escape from Jezebel's nurturing, insistent grasp. She kept coming back for more, too; I loved that about her. Thanks so much for carefully painting that target on my back.

11. Thank you for teaching me how to lie and deceive. It was so awesome getting to cover for you all the time -- like whenever you didn't feel like going to church on a Wednesday and you would tell us to tell people you weren't feeling well, when you were actually just enjoying episodes of Matlock or whatever TV show was so much more important than being in God's house. What an excellent example you set for me.

12. Thank you for always sending Dad to do your dirty work for you anytime you felt the need to talk to me about serious things like sex, my new spiritual beliefs, or finishing college early. Way to take responsibility. Good for you for being so passive and emotionally disconnected from me. You always had a knack for making me feel really loved instead of trapped in a lifelong prison.

13. Last but not least, thank you for all the emotional and spiritual abuse. I've had so much fun over the past 23 years working through all the issues that resulted from all that stuff -- especially when I finally found out several years ago that that's what was making me feel so loved in your house: abuse.

I could keep going, but I think 13 is a good number to stop at. Especially since you were the ultimate Proverbs 31 woman.

Love,

Tirzah

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Seriously, though, Romans 8:28 basically says that God will redeem all that stuff that happened to me. He'll take the manure and turn it into fertilizer. He's been doing that for years, and I think He's continually in the process of doing so.

For instance, I know now that He designed me to be a worship pastor. I don't know exactly what that will look like in the future (why should I know every detail ahead of time? that would take all the fun out of it), but I suspect that I'll need to be prepared for anything. I think I'll need to be pretty strong on the inside. After all the stuff I've lived through, I think my soul is probably buff enough to bench-press a Buick. On top of a Cadillac. On top of a Hummer.

If so, that would definitely be God's handiwork.

 

Speaking of handiwork, mine ain't always so great. One good thing that my birth mother really did teach me was that cats like to play with straws. So, I keep some handy. I thought maybe Choochie was getting tired of the straws, so I got this idea in my head that I should tie some of the straws together and make them into a ball. Pffffft. The above photo is the resulting monstrosity. I tried getting Choochie to play with it, but I ended up accidentally bonking her in the face with it. I mean, look at it. It ain't exactly conducive to safety. (And it definitely isn't a ball.)

So, I bought a little dumbbell (two balls, each one with a bell inside it, both connected together with plastic) the other day. Choochie doesn't really know what to do with it. She and I both just kind of stare at it when I roll it across the floor. But she's almost 17 years old now, and she isn't as playful as she used to be. She seems to be very content napping and snuggling. She seems to have everything she needs.

After Macho died, God showed me that Choochie's needs are different than Macho's were. Macho was a little drama king who loved my attention, and he loved for me to sing to him. Choochie doesn't need music. She just needs me.

Choochie knows me as "Mama" (because that's what I call myself), and I guess you could say that I'm a cat mom, but I certainly don't celebrate Mother's Day for myself. I personally feel that that's a holiday meant for humans to celebrate with one another -- not crazy pet owners. But that's just my opinion.

In terms of humans, I'm not anyone's mother, and I really don't want children anymore. Why would I? I'm 41 years old, and no eligible bachelors currently want to go out with me (otherwise they would be asking me out), much less marry me and have kids with me.

And in terms of having parents, God has definitely been parenting me, filling in the gaps, and healing me. And the healing process is still continuing.

But hopefully I'm not a fool. Hopefully I'm a better "Mama" to my cat than my birth mother was to me. That's kind of sad. But hopefully it's true.