New Year's Revolutions

I’m sure that just about everyone I know has made New Year’s resolutions for themselves at some point in their lives. I certainly have. In the last few years, though I have gone away from that as a practice. I’ve come to think that, as a Believer in Christ, I have access to the power of change at any time. I do not have to use start of a new year as an arbitrary point in time to start allowing the omnipotence of God to do its thing in my life. However, I also realize that utilizing the cultural tradition we have of starting off the new year with plans to improve our lives is not necessarily a bad idea. It is useful to have the support and company of millions of other people who are likewise trying to improve their lives, but only if the other people you are connected with in your social web are actually going to hold you accountable and allow you to hold them accountable in return. I think sometimes that people set goals for themselves at the start of a new year because they know that they can cop out in a few weeks and join the masses who make setting New Year’s resolutions the societal joke that it has become in so many ways. So, in light of this, may I be so bold as to make some suggestions based on my faith and my professional and personal experience on ways to make your resolutions (whether they co-occur with the New Year or not) achievable and fruitful? (If your answer is no, please consider that you don’t have to finish reading this. :o)

1.) A very wise coach and dear friend of mine taught me this ever-so-important lesson: make sure the goals you set are ones that depend on things YOU control, not anyone else around you. If you set goals that are dependent on things you don’t control, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment when the people around you don’t do what you want them to. And we all know how often that happens!

2.) Remember that we are all human, and therefore imperfect. I know we would love to think otherwise, especially those of us who are slightly (or severely!) OCD or perfectionistic. (I include myself in this group, so you’re in good company if you do too!) When we set goals for ourselves and do not take into account the inevitable stumbles and sidetracks off our planned path, it becomes very easy to give up altogether and condemn ourselves for failure. Likewise, sometimes we become so paralyzed by fear of these little stumbles that we never start in the first place. It is imperative for success that we plan for the stumbles we will always encounter as imperfect people and show ourselves grace and mercy when they occur. Most importantly, GET BACK ON THE HORSE! I have seen so clearly this year in the life of someone very close to me how failing to get up, dust yourself off, and persevere in your efforts can end up paralyzing you. The fear of failure becomes a bigger and bigger beast that eventually is your enemy in and of itself, regardless of what you were originally fearing. If the creator of the universe can show us unlimited grace and mercy in our flawed stated, how can we do less than to show that grace and mercy to ourselves.

3.) You all know that I am a therapist for my day job, and one part of that is writing treatment plans. A lot of treatment plans. It’s a little crazy making at times, but it is important to set a plan for the change we are helping our clients achieve and then check back to see how we are doing. One of the tricks to writing a good treatment plan is to make the goals achievable and quantifiable. It’s pretty tricky to make things like reducing depression and managing schizophrenia quantifiable, but it is possible. The trick I’ve found is to realize that your target is not perfection, but rather improvement. If you aim to heal someone with schizophrenia, you are totally doomed to be both unsuccessful and disappointed. Rather, we aim for measurable, achievable goals. The same thing holds for setting goals in our every-day personal lives. So many people set goals to lose weight or quit smoking or whatever they are hoping for, but they just throw that out there as this big nebulous goal. That’s like saying you’re going to road trip from NYC to LA, but not lay out a plan for how to negotiate all the states in between. Pick your goal, but then set objectives that will be the steps between here and there. Also, try wording your goals in a way that gives you a measurable sense of what progress looks like. And then refer to # 2 again! :o)

All in all, my friends, I hope you will all know that you have a giant power source in the form of Jehovah M’Kaddesh- “The Lord who Sanctifies”- who wants to equip and empower you to maximize the life you have been given. You’ve only got one, so make the best of it. If you are reading this and are not sure how to claim the blessing of God’s change in your life, please consider that there is an enormous blessing waiting for you if you grab it. If you want any more ideas on goal setting or tapping into God’s power, let me know. I certainly do not have all the answers, but I can point you in the direction of some resources that have been super helpful for me. I hope and pray that this new year will be one in which we all see God’s power manifested in our lives and in our world in a new and amazing way.

Walking on the Water

I have struggled with clinical depression and anxiety for ten years. Well, really, in retrospect, I have figured out that I have had the anxiety for a lot longer than that, but it was never identified as such. How ironic, given that I have a clinical psychologist for a mother! Anyway, over the last few months, I have felt God nudging me and nudging me towards taking the step of faith of going off my medication. I have been on some kind of medication for almost all of the last 10 years, and during the brief interludes in between meds, my life has gotten really ugly (read: cutting, suicidal thoughts, major anxiety attacks, really scary stuff). One time, a couple years ago, it go so bad that my husband took my daughter away from me because he didn't want her to see me like I was. That was one of the worst moments of my life.

It didn't help, though, that my daughter had a very bad start to life when she was born possibly because I had been on antidepressants throughout my pregnancy. Talk about guilt-inducing!! After her being in the NICU for 10 days, the attending doctor we'd been trying so hard to get through to for days came up to me and said, "So, I see you were on Effexor for a while." (Mind you, we'd told him, one of his residents, a nurse, or some other bipedal hospital staff person this about once a day for ten days.) Through a veil of furious tears, I said, "I'm still on Effexor, and I've been telling you that for days!" His response: "Well, that might be a problem." (Editorial note: this was one of the closest moments I've had to hitting someone out of fury in my life, but I refrained. Go me.) From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I had asked just about anyone who had a heartbeat... therapist, psychiatrist, PCP, OB/GYN, midwife, you name it... if I should go off my meds to protect my baby, and every one said it was a cost benefits analysis that pretty much came down to the reality that I dissolved into a major mental health disaster case when I was off my meds and a mentally healthy mom was really important for a healthy baby. Somehow, between the beginning of my pregnancy and the end, the "common knowledge" about Effexor changed and no one told me. To this day, no one can say for certain if my being on meds messed Evie's health up when she was born or not. Believe you me, I suffered HUGELY from guilt and honest-to-goodness PTSD about my daughter's stay in the hospital for the better part of the first two years of her life, and I'm not sure I'm still completely done with it. So I've been caught in this trap between wanting to stay on my meds to stay sane and wanting to get off my meds because I want to have another baby (preferably one I don't poison) and don't want to continue this pattern of feeling like a crack junky (only legal!).

Several sisters in Christ within the last month have shared that it's been on their heart to encourage me about taking a step of faith that God would fully deliver me from the need to be on medication. I have struggled with the idea of healing at God's hands forever, it seems... I certainly believe God CAN do anything He wants and He is Lord of all things, including my mind and body. At the same time, though, I also know that I don't understand how and when He chooses to do that healing. As a good friend and counselor so wisely put it, "You can't prescribe God." It's not as easy as saying, "Go home, take two advils and some God and call me in the morning." I know how hard it has been to deal with my mental illness over the years, but I also believe adamantly that He has used my suffering to know how to comfort others with the comfort wherewith I was comforted. As a social worker, I have been very blessed by being able to look people (especially women) straight in the eye when they pour their hearts out to me about the miseries of depression and anxiety and tell them the straight truth: I know how you feel. I don't usually go into the gorey details, but I know they can sense that I get it for real.

After a TON of prayer and thought and lots of seeking counsel, it became very clear to me that God was telling me now was the time. I took a step out of the boat and went off my meds. I never intended to go off cold turkey, but I ran out on a Saturday, forgot to pick up my refill on Sunday, and then had to go to work before the pharmacy opened on Monday, thereby getting through 48 hours without any meds and feeling okay. It seemed very clear that God was trumping my rational, cognitive brain and saying we were going to go whole hog on this one, so I continued to refrain from any medication, instead of tapering off it as I planned. That last pill was one week ago today. I know that doesn't sound like much, but if you have any idea how hard going off antidepressants can be, you'll understand why those seven days are a major miracle. I have been so blessed with the gifts God has given me that seem to be exact reenactments in my life of stories straight out of the Bible... I am the man on the mat whose friends carried him to Jesus, even though it meant cutting a hole in the roof of a house. I am the woman Elijah told to go to her house and make a small meal for him when she and her son were starving, after which she would be blessed with more than enough to keep them from starvation. I am Peter, stepping out on choppy seas, sinking every time I do anything but keep my eyes directly focused on my Lord. I know in the grand scheme of the miracles God can do and has done, mine is fairly small, but in my life, it is huge and I have been so transformed by keeping my eyes focused on Him, the Author and Finisher of my faith. I pray that maybe just one person will read this and find that it meets them where they are at in their lives. If that happens, let me tell you my brother or sister, that when God sends you on a journey, He will absolutely not give you more than you can handle. He WILL stretch your thinking on what that max point looks like, but through His power YOU WILL NOT BREAK!

Am I really going native?

So, the question should be addressed right off: how can one go native if one started out that way? If I grew up living in the country on a farm, doesn't that mean I should have the simplicity thing down by now? Well, one would think the answer to that question would be yes, but in my case, that is not true. I did, in fact, grow up with a deep and seemingly genetically-based love of nature and agriculture. But ours was not a working farm per se, in the classic model of being a hub of fruitfulness that would provide for most of our felt needs. I also was also part of the "recovering" generation of a family long tied to the difficulties and anxieties of farming in an age where small farms were (and are!) increasingly becoming an endangered species. As such, many of the inherent pleasures and joys of farming and "living close to the land" were overshadowed by the harsh realities of eking it out trying to make a living as a dairy farmer and the marks those realities left on my dad and his siblings. I never minded helping out around the farm and often had an itch to explore some kind of agriculture my family no longer worked, but it almost seemed that my dad felt, "If I don't have to do that anymore to survive, then I'm not going to." If he could buy eggs instead of going through the hassle of raising chickens to provide them, great! If he could buy hamburger instead of eating every last bit of food they could get out of a slaughtered milking cow because they couldn't afford to waste the food, that would be just fine, too. I was, at the same time, saved from the pain and responsibility of being made to live close to my food source and denied from the joys of being a more dynamic part of that process.

I went away to college, stayed in my college town to live, proceeded to work for a couple years, started back to grad school, got married, finished grad school, had a kid, and then moved back to my small hometown area with my husband and my toddler daughter. Okay, so that was about 10 years in one sentence. Let me expound a little... my college town was in many ways the polar opposite of my little country hometown. Collegetown was sophisticated, fast-paced, subtle, and metropolitan. That never changed in the whole time I lived there and I always have and always will appreciate those things about it. Then there's Hometown. Hometown didn't change much, really. It was me that changed. What I used to think of as boring became calming and what I used to think of as provincial became connected. A major transformation took place over those ten years.

A lot of things contributed to that change in me. My parents prepared the way for that change to take place by teaching me to be open-minded, curious in all things, and passionate about loving God and His creation- human and otherwise, in all shapes and forms. My undergraduate studies opened my eyes to an ever expanding array of knowledge about different people, places, and topics and gave me a chance to explore those new ideas first hand through traveling and internships. My job experience introduced me individually to the idea of a professional drive motivated not by a desire for monetary gain but by a pursuit of my career as something that would leave a positive lasting legacy for the kindom of Jesus. My graduate studies ironically acted to cement my long-standing passion for holistic health and wellness grounded in a Christian ideal while simultaneously training me most rigorously in one facet of that whole.

My husband taught me to slow down and begin the process of seeing lack of excessive intensity in others not as a character flaw but as a goal to strive for. He shared with me a love of physical activity in different forms, including that which many people would call "work." Such a foreign concept to so many young people our age or younger, we both thought going out to work on a car or chop wood was a great physical project that could be seen as interesting, educational, and maybe even fun, whereas so many other young people had developed an antipathy to physical labor as something that was foreign and distasteful. Through these shared interests and a relationship built around our mutual love of many things natural and simple, we began a family. Our family has been and remains based on these concepts and how they stem directly from, or at least are connected to, our faith.

Then along came our little girl. She's the reason I use the name Petra's Mama. She's so interested in rocks that I call her Petra for a nickname. In case you don't already know this from your own life, having a child changes your life like nothing else I've ever experienced or anticipate experiencing. Suddenly your legacy in the world goes from a hypothetical topic you discuss over drinks with friends to a little person with arms and legs who is wholly dependent on you and who will be shaped more by you than by any other person for the next 18 years or so. As I think about it, though, it isn't really all that sudden, is it, especially when your a mom? You go through roughly nine months of slowly coming to grips with this transition. You think you're ready until you actually have the baby, and then your level of readiness becomes a moot point as you are thrust into the realities of parenthood ready or not. One of those realities for me was the that a medical decision I made- to the very best of my ability and with the best information I could gather at the time, I should add- may have contributed to my daughter's health problems during the first few weeks of life. Suddenly a lot of things that I had only studied from books or learned about in the professional world became intimately and frighteningly personal. I went quickly from being able to say honestly and compassionately to those I worked with, "I can sympathize," to being able to say even more honestly and more compassionately, "I can empathize."

Thus began my long journey of motherhood, one of the ongoing threads of which has become my husband's and my very real commitment to "investing" the healthiest and most wholesome elements of life into our little girl. We have become more and more aware of the dangers and harsh realities that lie behind the gilded exterior of many parts of our modern day culture and we reject the premise that they must be part of our life. Now, don't get me wrong... we're not becoming Amish or anything (I am, after all, blogging, am I not?). I'm just saying we are learning to be real with our society and take the good with the bad; to assess honestly what is beneficial and what is detrimental and speak more truthfully about what falls into what category.

One of the ways in which our family's life now reflects this belief was our move last fall back to Hometown. We both now live and work within 10 miles of my childhood home and I must say, I'm loving it. I have come to realize over the last six months that so many things I took for granted as a child are things that are precious treasures that make up for the things I found annoying. Let's be honest- it's not that all those things have ceased to exist (believe me, they haven't!), it's just that I now see them in a different light and they are far less important than the positive elements. I now see being in this area is setting the stage for a lot of the goals and ambitions my husband and I have shared throughout our relationship, including spending time in nature as an integral part of life, being as close as possible to our food supply, and living as low as possible on the ecological impact ladder- in general, having a simpler life.

I dawned on me the other day that this transition back to my old stomping grounds geographically and into a new chapter of defining our priorities and activities might be interesting to other people as well. If no one else, I'm pretty sure there are a few poor sods back in the Collegetown area who care enough about us to read this just to find out what we're up to. Maybe, if I'm lucky and write well enough, I might attract a few other internet junkies like me to reflect on what one family's journey to simplicity looks like in hopes that such reflection might trigger a similar transformation in their own.