The first 40 years of my life and the awe of now!

I turned 41 this past May on the 19^th. The first 40 years of my life was a book until itself. From the beginning all the way through the end of the “me I used to be,” epic extremes have led me from one end of the spectrum all the way through to the other, and I have lived to tell my story. So here I am, pouring myself out in a new way. I myself have become an open book for I can honestly say that for the first time in my life I have nothing that I am hiding or trying to evade, run from and hope that nobody ever finds out. All of my secrets and skeletons have all been cleaned out and there are windows in the closets where the walls used to be. The light has exposed everything that once was covered in darkness and love has cleansed all that I once was.

I am free. I am whole. I am a miracle, and I am living proof of just how magnificent the Lord who made me is. For it is only because of His love and mercy that I am here. For this, I am eternally grateful! I am the proof of His passion and just how inexhaustible His vision and plan is for the most wretched kind of misfit. I am living proof that all that is said to be pathological and unchangeable in behavior and nature can be deconstructed, reshaped, and sculpted into someone that is transformed from an impossible mess into the Master’s Message, His one of a kind Masterpiece. I don’t say this because I am so great or I have learned so much. I say this because that is what I was, and because of all that His Love is, this is who I am. I am His and no matter what, I will never stop shouting from the rooftops that He is my everything!

I have done some of the most unimaginable things to myself physically and emotionally because of the inescapable agony that permeated every part of my life and body. All I ever hoped for was just a moment of relief so that I could know what it was to see just a glimpse of what life looks like through eyes that are not jaded and a heart that is not broken. I spent the greater part of my adult life self-medicating just to be able to try and live beyond the tormenting reminders of my past and all of the abuses that used to define my life.

I was an introverted rage-o-haulic. I was desperate to be loved and yet terrified to let anyone close because the second I did, they always ended up going away. I was clingy and smothered anyone who dared to want to be close to me. For the first 40 years of my life I was never able to have a single healthy relationship because I was not well. It is impossible to give anything that you are not.

I was dysfunctional and sick therefore all I knew how to continue creating was variant levels of dysfunction and sickness. Don’t get me wrong, I desired more than anything to be able to have a stable life filled with reason and rationale. I had never been willing to do anything to face myself and learn a new way of living. To be honest, I really didn’t believe I needed to. To do things that way would mean that I didn’t know how to manage my life or that I was incapable of making my life work without having someone else step in and try to micromanage and dictate to me what they deemed to be the “right” way. My ego had grown far too big to ever admit I needed help. I had spent my life growing up having everyone else telling me what I could and couldn’t do and there was no way in hell that as an adult I was going to let anyone tell me what to do.

Needless to say, advice was never something I heeded and if it got into one ear, it most certainly went right out the other. I was stubborn and totally unwilling to budge once I made up my mind. As an adult, I threw my temper tantrums until I got my way and then wondered why nobody really wanted to stay with me. I had become someone who was totally scary to be around because I was moody, I was unpredictable and if something didn’t go my way I was a force to be reckoned with. I was a power hungry ego maniac with a chip on both shoulders and a heart so ready and willing to give all that I was until someone did something I didn’t like or agree with. Then my open heart turned into a rock hard frozen mass that made it impossible for anything to get in or anything good to come out.

I was the girl who wanted everything now and had no patience whatsoever. Time, due diligence, and cultivation was nothing but a waste of time as far as I was concerned. If I wanted something and I couldn’t get it done, I would just go find someone who could and do my best to get it that way. I was a con artist and could come up with a story that would make nearly anything possible. Sadly, this is not what I grew up hoping to become. I don’t think anyone does. I’m pretty sure that there were things I learned along the way that incorporated survival and skills into what became my personality.

However, what I have learned is that none of what I have done or how I have lived was really me at all. Yes, I have done the things I have done but the person I was created to be was really buried underneath all of the behaviors and habits that I acquired along the way.

Instead of being the broken mess that I believed I had become, I found that as all of the things I learned along the way were peeled away layer by layer, I was underneath it all, but instead of being totally crushed and broken, I had really been protected from it all!

The real me has always been right here inside, protected as if I have been securely sealed in the amniotic sac of love. No matter how much I have been affected by everything, nothing was ever strong enough to get inside of the real me. I am the innocence that I thought was gone because of the things that have happened to me and all of the things that I have done wrong. It was never taken from me at all because there is no power in this world that is strong enough to overcome Love, and love is what we were all created by.

I am in awe at how life looks and feels to me now. I think often about how in the Bible Jesus speaks about having to be like little children in order to see the Kingdom of Heaven. I started thinking about what life was like for me when I was a little girl. Life was all about trust, and dreaming and believing. I could hear the most outrageous story and believe it was true. I didn’t need proof. I didn’t need someone to show me how. I trusted that what I was being told was real, and that was good enough for me. Why? Because of my connection to being able to visualize and feel what I was being told. 

Children perceive and they feel. They have strong intuition and communicate nonverbally because they sense, feel and then take action. They do. They play, they invent, they imagine, they explore, they are daring and willing to try things knowing there is no guarantee. Even when they get hurt, they are eager to get back up and do it again.

They believe in themselves and have physical experiences to validate why. Children desire to fix and heal and comfort. Children live to express themselves bigger and better than they did the time before and the time before that. Children love to love and have access to an unceasing flow of boundless enthusiasm. Children believe they can only until they are told over and over again that they can’t. Children love to take the boxes they crawl into and make grand forts out of them, but they always find new ways to invent and reinvent ways to design and arrange the boxes to make their imagined adventure different and more exciting each and every time. 

Children push the envelope, they ask questions and are interested in why things work the way they do. Children love to use every sense they have been given to immerse themselves in each moment and once they taste, touch, feel, smell and experience something, they are unlikely to forget it.

Children love to be around others and know that they feel better when they are playing with other children. To isolate a child is to take away the very spark within their spirit that gives them life. Children by nature are collaborative. Competition is the exception and not the rule because competition is a form of separation, isolating them from the community under the label called “better than” or not good enough.

If a child sees another child has fallen down or is hurting, they will go to them and try to figure out a way to help. It is only when children are pushed away and caused emotional suffering that they begin to put their walls up and distance themselves from the one who is hurting or rejecting them.

Yet as adults, we believe that we know everything and that the children need to learn from us. We are so busy trying to be “grown ups” that we have lost our ability to play, create, and connect to others. Children are the purest examples of what true life looks like. In the lives of children there is joy and kindness, and there are so many things that as adults we have lost sight of that are essential to character and quality of life. The kingdom is not found in how many scriptures we can recite, how many times a week we go to a church service or in how many rules we have been able to follow. The Kingdom is expressed in every moment of awe, in laughter, in reaching out your arms to help someone who has fallen so low that they don’t know how they can make it another moment. We are the Kingdom. We are so busy looking for a place that we are trying to get to that we end up missing all of the incredible moments right here and right now of all that Heaven is here on this earth.

I had something happen in my life that rocked my world and shattered everything I had spent my life believing life was supposed to be. I found myself caught up and entangled in the webs of my own lies, deceptions, and perversions that I was desperate for Jesus to come back and take me to this place I was taught is called Heaven because in Heaven there is no suffering and there are streets of Gold, there is abundance of everything good that you can imagine and people who have died that I love will be there waiting for me as long as they loved Jesus and were “saved.”

In Heaven I get to have a huge mansion and this incredible life where every day for forever is wrapped in the blanket of God’s love and His goodness made in His perfection and beauty so why in the world wouldn’t I want to hurry up and be able to get there?  Here’s the thing though; as long as I was looking for Heaven somewhere else I was missing everything right now. Everything for me was almost like just to pass the time to try and be good enough to please God enough so that I could be allowed into the big white pearly gates.

I went through life going the motions doing things and performing according to what I was taught is pleasing to God and constantly fell on my face because no matter how good I tried to be I always tripped along the way.

I realized that I was living my life trying to please God because I wanted all of the stuff He could provide and give me. I wanted the enormous mansion and everything that I could imagine forever and ever. I didn’t want to hurt anymore and I certainly didn’t want to burn in an everlasting hell where I would be tormented day and night forever separated from Heaven and God! I spent my entire life terrified to live and terrified to die. The fear of the unknown has always done me in. I have never in my life been so sick and tired of all of the rules of what you can do and can’t do in order to please God or be accepted into His Kingdom. 

Then the fear of being kicked out of the Kingdom if I go and screw up as I usually did, and the constant terror of rejection that hadn’t even happened yet was enough to keep me running like I was on a hamster wheel. All I wanted was to be loved and the God I had been taught about who made me and loved me was inconceivable to me, yet I knew I wanted Him more than anything.

It was really impossible for me to see God any different than what I experienced growing up. Our parents are so important because they are the first experience we ever have. They are our gateway to God. How can we ever imagine a God who will be unconditional and love us and forgive us when our own family refuses us, judges us, and punishes us over and over again sometimes unmercifully as we are reminded for ages of what we did wrong or how our choices have impacted them? Why would we ever believe deep inside of our hearts that we could be accepted unconditionally when most of us have never even seen what that looks like?

We all have our own ideas of what Love looks like or how we will know if someone really loves us, but I can honestly say that I never in a million years would have ever believed that what love really is was possible even though I always hoped that it was. I had no idea that Love really has nothing to do with how you feel or what someone else give you. Love is an action word. It is a constant that is ever moving, and ever present. It is always accessible and is the only true cure for all that we label depression, anxiety and mental illness. Love is the only thing I know that when you give it, it fills you inside with equal force that you gave to another. It is the only case where I know for a fact that the more you give the more that you get immediately within. Living love has become my drug of choice!

I spent most of my adult years as a mom and as a woman totally addicted to anything that would give me even a second of pleasure or escape from all of the misery locked for a lifetime deep inside of my heart. I spent nearly 2 decades going in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals creating conditions and inducing episodes of pain that would almost always guarantee I would get at least 30 Vicodin at a time. I suppose I should have become an actress because I was so good at faking illnesses and playing the part when it came to needing medicine. I don’t say this with any kind of pride or to pat myself on the back for being able to con dr’s into supplying me the weapons that singlehandedly controlled and altered my life for many years.

Then something happened to me in 2010/2011. I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and I had ongoing back pain that was horribly excruciating because of a bulging disc in my sacral area of my low back. At one point I was going to the dr. every 10 days and they would refill my Percocet. I did that until I was sent to a pain clinic in November 2010. At the pain clinic they rationed me out 185 of the 7.5/325 strength Percocet a month. I remained on that amount of pain medicine all the way through the beginning of June 2012 when I came to a place where I decided that I had enough and so I stopped taking the medicine altogether. The medicine never totally took the pain away but it masked it enough mentally where I could push past the threshold of what was physically doable for me and keep going in my life without being incapacitated because of the pain.

I never realized just how much of an addict I was throughout my life until I didn’t take narcotics any more. I spent my life in denial about so many things resisting the acceptance that I really was a huge mess that would never be any different unless something drastically changed without the change being traumatically drastic. I truly believe that it was the mind numbing properties that gave me the edge I needed to feel hopeful while I was going through the greatest hell I had ever known. The way I was able to feel close to the Lord in the midst of the pain taught me how to reach for Him in a way I never did before. In that process I began developing new ways of thinking and living, of being and doing that began to dramatically affect the way I was navigating life. 

Do I love God? Absolutely with all that I am. Did I get here today just because I fell head over heels in love with Him on my own. Yes and no…I chose to obey and do the things that I have never done at any other time in my life because I knew that the way I had always done things in my life was not working and if I continued to do anything the same as before I would surely lose and so would my children. I knew I couldn’t live with that. 

The difference was that even when the pain and emotion was so intense for me, somehow the medication I was taking gave me the ability to reason enough with myself and choose to do the thing that was so hard to do. The fact that I had a constant supply of narcotics that I had always had to fight to get before actually diffused my fear of what life would look and feel like for me if I didn’t have them. After spending years and time in and out of medical facilities going through hours and hours of tests and observation just hoping that a doctor would write me a prescription was exhausting, but in order to get the meds I didn’t know of any other way.

So when I developed a real medical issue and had a green light which gave me access to whatever I needed to manage the pain for the first time in my life I felt relief. Not relief from the pain so much, relief from everything I have had to do and put myself and other people through in order to get pain meds through the years. Now all I had to do was go to my pain clinic once a month and they would write the prescriptions and off I’d go. I think it must be a psychological thing about fearing the lack of something that makes you need it and crave it almost obsessively because once I knew I could get more medicine month after month, I noticed that I wasn’t taking them the same. It was almost like knowing I had as much as I needed was changing my addiction to them. I was gaining the control over it and it was losing its hold on me. I have become convinced through this journey that emotional pain causes a plethora of physical pain that is very real and at the same time un-diagnosable.

Addressing the center of all of the emotional and mental realms and trauma’s of my life has made it possible for me to go from being nearly physically incapacitated from the pain to now actually having some days where I forget I have pain at all!  Of course it hasn’t happened overnight, but I have been able to see myself and all of my patterns and habits along the way change, transform, heal and become consistent. This has altered my quality of life in every way, but it has taken my full commitment and cooperation in order for me to get here. I finally realize that I am worth it and that if I ever hoped to know what it is like to live life limitlessly, that I needed to start with a single step. And here I am!

This month it has been 2 full years since I have been on any pain medicine. I don't have any desire for it, I don't think about it and in fact, even when I am in the most excruciating pain, I would rather bear the intense pain and actually feel and experience life as I am, than to put anything into my body that will cloud or desensitize me from being able to feel the fullness of the joy and the pain and I am living life doing ALL things through Jesus who gives me strength!