How playing Farmville changed my life!

I was thinking the other day about how much has actually taken place in my life from the inside out over the past 6 months...and even more epic over these past 64 months since my children were taken away from me and went to live with their dad's. I was trying to remember if there was a single event that marked the pivotal beginning of the changes that have led me through this metamorphosis. I mean, I know there are seasons and many events that have been instrumental in making all of this possible, but I was looking to see what exactly set all of this in motion.

As I thought back over these past 5 years, I found myself reflecting about what life was like through the days after my children were taken away from me. I'm pretty sure that I spent the first 3 months fighting against accepting that the reason my children were not with me was not anyone else's fault but my own. I was determined that I was going to prove that my children were taken away from me illegally. I was doing everything to make sure that I didn't leave any stone unturned because I wanted the court to see just how much I was doing. So I made sure that I had a long paper trail of all of the “proactive” appointments and classes that I was willing to take and diligently attend.

I wanted my children back and was willing to do anything it would take for the court to be able to see that I not only complied with the courts laundry list of demands, but I proactively enrolled in parenting classes and many other therapeutic activities that I was sure would show how intent I was on being healthy and equipped to help my children once the court let them come home. Looking back, I see now that what I was doing was nothing more than my “I'll show them” reactionary “choosing.” I was on a mission to convince the court that my children would be safe when they came back home.

I was dying without them and not having any control over anything was a moment by moment death unlike I ever imagined would be possible to endure. The bottom line is that everything I was facing at 36 years old was something that could have been healed and avoided if I had only cared enough about myself to make the time to get the help I desperately needed before I ever began having children.

I spent my entire life being careless, terrified of being alone, and desperate to be anything other than what I was. I made the “fake it til you make it” concept my entire life. The only thing is that I spent my life faking it and never really making it. Well, I made “it” and a lot of “it” but to be honest, “it” never turned out to be anything but chaos, dysfunction, misery drowned in the darkness of addiction and co-dependency.

I never planned to live my adult life as I have, and yet I see now that I never planned not to. I really believed that if I could just meet the “right” person who had a heart filled with love for me, somehow that would heal me, make me better, take away all of the endless pain and trauma and give me all of the things that nobody else was ever willing to give me. I never understood that remaining in the condition I was in mentally and emotionally would only bring others into my life who would be the fuel to the flames of dysfunction in an already unquenchable inferno raging within me.

By the time I was 18 I had spent the greater part of my life and nearly all of my adolescence in and out of therapists offices, and nothing ever reached my pain or helped me move beyond all of the tormenting memories. After the countless hours and visits week after week and year after year, there was not a single therapist who did anything to impact my life or show me the way to get beyond myself. I was talked out. 

I was sick and tired of rehashing my past and every single moment of inescapable memories that owned me. I was sick and tired of having to deal with the nightmare that I was living. I wanted to move on and live my life. I was certain that I knew what would be good for me. I knew what I was never going to do because of how it wrecked my life when other people who were supposed to love me and take care of me abused me, abandoned me, and left me as a little girl to fend for myself while they went on about their business as if I never even existed.

I was determined to not only become the greatest mother I could when I had children, but I knew that I was going to do everything different for my children than what people who were supposed to love and protect me did in my life. I never wanted my children to ever know the kind of pain and horror that I have, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that I could give them all of the things I never had. I was going to be the mommy whose life revolved around her children and I knew that I was never going to shelter my children or keep them from experiencing life to the fullest. All of my life growing up my mom worked and I spent my life missing her. I was going to do whatever it took for me to be able to spend as much time with my children as possible because I never wanted them to miss me or hurt because I was always working like my mom did in order to support the both of us.

I can see now that my hopes and intentions were not enough. Regardless of how much I wanted to create that kind of life for my children, I had no idea how to make that a reality. I thought that it was enough to know what you don't want and then do the things that are opposite of that and everything would just fall into place. I was wrong.

My entire life of pain, trauma, loss, and fear was housed within me within every thought, every choice, every response, and every plan. I was a terrified control freak who didn't trust anyone because everyone I had ever put my trust in not only hurt me, but always left my life no matter how much they promised they would never hurt me like they knew I had already been hurt throughout my life.

Eventually, my life became about doing everything to keep people from leaving my life. In that process when I couldn't make people stop hurting me and leaving my life, I became the one who did the leaving before someone else had a chance to leave me. As a result, I have spent my life playing games and sabotaging my own life which has caused only God knows how much damage in my life, the lives of my children and anyone else who happened to find themselves caught in the web of my existence.

I am not proud of any of this, and even writing about it dangles the baiting reminders of guilt, shame, and the embarrassment that has always been the glue that holds and weaves them all together. However, I also know the truth which continues to set me free. The truth is that my life has been the furthest extreme of an inconceivable nightmare and there is nobody who is worse than what I was. I am certain that nothing was ever going to reach me and be able to break me without breaking my spirit. I was a broken mess with an ego and a chip on both shoulders which made me a force to be reckoned with. I never wanted to be like that, but I didn't know how to stop. Nor was I willing to listen to anyone try to tell me how to live my life or what I had to or couldn't do.

Somehow through every hopeless circumstance that has happened in my life, hope has always burned within me. Not because I am so hopeful or have the strength to keep my head up, be positive, or believe that things can change to become everything and more than I have spent my life dreaming about. When I had no idea what love was, hope still found a way to rise up within me and pull me from underneath the wreckage and smoldering rubble each and every time my life has come crashing down. I wish that I could say it is because I am so strong and resilient, but that wouldn't be true.

True strength I have learned has very little to do with getting back up again. Ego is very good at pushing you to get up and do it again. Ego propels response and action when there is fear of how you will look if you don't get up again. Ego even has a way of convincing you of just how strong you are... how taking the bull by the horns will only make you stronger and cheers you on to use every ounce of strength to show just what you can do so that you never have to go through whatever it is again. True strength most oftentimes looks more like weakness than being strong. I continue to discover that strength is found within the heart we have been given because this is where I've learned love lives and calls home. However, I have discovered that love has many companions and where love is, hope is always close by.

It has been my many rendezvous with hope that actually prepared me for love, and it is only because of Love that I am here today. Love shows me how to pour out everything I am without holding back or trying to sugar coat things to minimize the things that I have done. A moment with Love changed my entire world and everything in it. Love has always been right here, waiting for me, waiting for you. I was never willing to follow Love because it was all about me and I didn't know how to trust people I could see, much-less someone and something that I couldn't see.

So I sat on the sidelines of my life waiting for love to find me, and when it didn't, I took my ideas of what I wanted love to be and set out to find it and make it happen for myself. This was the story of my life. Compromise, deceit, settling, impulsiveness, and everything to try to make everything happen “right now.” I refused to understand that without the process and the order that creates a solid foundation to build upon, it is only a matter of time before whatever goes up will come crashing down. 3 marriages, divorces and 23 years later, here I am. I finally see that “quick fixes” are nothing more than band-aids. They cover things for a bit, but never stick for too long. I spent my life doing everything possible to band-aid everything and instead of getting better or being able to heal, the years of band-aids that covered me had turned me into a mummy.

Every part of my life was not just broken, it was shattered! Sometimes when a broken bone doesn't heal properly the only way to fix it is to re-break it. It's going to be painful and there is no guarantee that everything will be as good as new, but you will never know unless you trust that the doctor is able and knows what to do. I have had to be deconstructed to remove all of the pieces and shards of the toxic me, reconstructed and put back together again piece by piece. This has taken so much longer than I ever would have imagined, and I know that this is something that never would have been able to happen in this way if my children would have still been living with me. And though I have died everyday that they have not physically been with me, I know that the mommy they have now and who I am for the rest of forever is someone who is well equipped to handle anything that comes with skill, heart, love, fortitude, courage, surrender, wisdom and understanding from navigating the uncharted waters and unmapped terrain of life!

Who I am today is who I was always created to be, and for the very first time in all of my life I love the person I am and am in awe at all that I continue emerging at the hands and heart of the Master Creator, the Lord Almighty! The road has been long, but He has walked every step of the way and carried me when I was too weak or terrified to take another step. Every tear I have cried he has wiped away, and He has cried with me because He has shown me that what hurts me makes Him sad too.

He is faithfully working all of this out as He continues taking what was meant to destroy me and using the intense fire to transform the carbon like darkness of who I was into a diamond vessel that His love and light brilliantly shines through...not because I am great for I am nothing without all that He is within me. It is only because He is most awesome and as long as I am willing, He is faithful and will complete this work in me that He started when He thought me into being.

The clearing in my life has been unfathomable and for many seasons over these past 5 years it looked like nothing good would ever be able to emerge because everything was continuously being ripped out of my life. I would just barely get beyond one loss and another came in like a flood with even greater force than the one before! I didn't know why He wasn't rescuing me from the insanity that took everything except my physical life and left me totally and completely destitute.

Everything that I had attachment to in material form, everything that held my identity was stripped away. It was like the band-aids I had spent my life covering every owie became a part of me and as it was peeled away, it felt like pieces of me were being torn apart. They had been on me for so long that to me it looked and felt like me. I resisted and sobbed, I prayed and cried, I begged and pleaded for God to make it stop and to take away the pain and make the people responsible for all I was going through, to stop destroying my life.

Then just as I felt myself able to breathe for a moment and the rays of hope just began to peek through and shine into the dust and debris of the most recent whirlwind, I was nailed with something more devastating than the last. I didn’t realize it then, but I was praying for God to save me from the very process that He was using to shape me, cleanse me and save me from all of the idols and gods that I was certain I could never live without!

If He would have rescued me as I begged Him to do, none of what has happened and who I am today would be possible! I would still be totally consumed by my past, all of the guilt and shame that comes with being abused and being an abuser. I would never know what it is to be free from all that was impossible to overcome and I would never have reached for Him as I did, do, and learned that no matter what I am going through I really am never alone for He is always right here with me. He knows the best way because He created the way. Together the things that we are doing are monumental in my life, family and our legacy is eternally reaching. This is forever!

Today I am thankful for every second of pain both physical and emotional. I am thankful for every abrupt loss and unanswered question because it is that pain that keeps my heart connected to thankfulness.

I am thankful for all of the moments that I have witnessed miracles of epic proportion even when I am the only one who sees things the way I do. As insane as the pain and loss have been, the inexhaustible joy on the other side of it has shown me how to see. I have learned to gauge that as deep as the darkness swallows me, I know that if I hold on and not try to avert the pain but instead let myself move through it, the heights that I am being prepared to soar into are equally as high as the depths were deep!

I've learned about something called radical acceptance which is fully accepting any given situation. Knowing that “it is what it is” doesn't mean that I have to like whatever it is I am going through or in the middle of. It just frees me to be able to adjust myself and gain the power over how I choose to respond in the midst of an undesirable or “unfair” situation. I have learned that no matter how awful something is, that it won't always be that way. The  unimaginable event becomes an opportunity for me to remember all that I have learned along the way, and to use those skills to help me as I face myself and the circumstance. 

I think that I was so focused on getting to a certain place in life or beyond that I never bothered to stop and see that all I have is right now. In this moment of now, I can either cultivate something within myself, reach to see what else is buried like treasure within me, push the envelope and experience life in the magical moment by moment unfolding. Or I can be so consumed with “getting somewhere” that I end up missing the only moment I have (now) and never uncover anything more than I already have.

It has taken me my entire lifetime to really begin to believe that what I do and choose and think in this moment is the energy creating the next moment and all that follows. I am still learning just how powerful we have been created to be, but the truth is that we are powerful beyond measure because we are created in the image and likeness of God Almighty, creator of all! How can we say we love Him and are waiting on Him to fill our lives with everything we hope for, pray for and dream of, and then sit back doing the same things we have always done and wonder why nothing is turning out quite the way we hoped it would?

Something happened to me a few years ago and it ended up being instrumental in changing my life. I was kind of addicted to playing Farmville on Face Book. I had spent my time creating an amazing farm and designing it just the way I would if it were a real farm. I even went through the different crops you could plant and harvest to find what would cost me the least amount of money to plant the most of and also would grow at the fastest rate and yield the highest return. I found that grapes grew the quickest, cost me the least amount of money and yielded the highest profit.

So I spent oodles of Farmville money buying more land, planting more grapes, and expanding like crazy. It was kind of ridiculous because I actually scheduled my life around the time I knew that my grapes were going to be ready to harvest. I bought bigger equipment to ensure it took me less time to collect all of the grapes and I had an amazing time because it felt like I was really farming and making a lot of money even though it was just play money.

Then my life took a turn in a direction that I wasn't planning to go. I decided that I was going to go back to school. I was accepted to a design school and since they didn't have a campus here my only option was to take my classes online. I decided to get my Bachelor's degree in Video Game Production and Design and I had absolutely no idea just how intensive the courses were going to be. It felt like right out of the gate from the moment I started school all I had time for was school, sleep and homework. I suppose I never factored my Farmville addiction into the equation when I went back to school. Sadly, back then, I may never have started school at all if I would have thought it could interfere in harvesting my virtual crops!

Needless to say, the first few days of class I totally forgot to check my crops and harvest time came and went, my crops were totally dead. I was actually pretty upset because not only was I going to have to pay to harvest dead crops and making zero profit, but I was going to have to plant new crops with my Farmville reserves! I did that for a short while until I lost track of everything on Farmville and finally just stopped visiting Face book altogether. I knew that I had a choice to make and I was paying real money to go to college and that trumped Farmville, and that was that.

Until...

I began to notice things about the way I was living and the way I went about making choices in my life. It was interesting for me because it’s like when I stopped playing Farmville, the principles I learned and was using to strategically design and manage as well as prepare to make my farm a success, seamlessly became a part of my everyday life. I joked with my mom and told her that I was going to write a book called, “How playing Farmville changed my life” and she thought that was hilarious. I was totally serious. I thought it was amazing how something so simple could have such a profound impact in my life and not even realize it.

That's when I discovered that life is more like farming than we probably ever bother to think about. I mean, unless you're a farmer, why would you ever compare or connect the two? Since then, life has become like farming for me. I see things so much differently now and somehow, because I learned the virtual process through Farmville in my own life I can see things through the eyes of faith and hope because I have the mental connection to the cause and effect of when I used to play Farmville. 

In the most horrific time in my life, Farmville became the platform that helped me to distract from the agony of not being able to be with my children. For a moment I was able to get lost in the moment where for a little bit I didn't feel like I was going to die. As I found my niche in the game and found the best way to make the most money in the least amount of time, I found myself looking forward to the process as my crops sprouted and ripened to harvest. I was developing hope and I didn't even know it.

It seems silly to think of my faith somehow becoming rooted because of a silly game on Face Book. I would rather give all that credit to God...and I do! But I believe that He is willing to use whatever is going to reach us individually. I had never been consistent with anything in my life and so I suppose it makes sense why many processes were never able to take hold within me.

I played the game pretty much every day and in my real life because of what I was doing every day, day after day my brain was changing in ways I never had before. This is how our brains thrive…through consistency and repetition. I was creating new neural pathways and processes and didn't even know it. So naturally, it didn’t matter if I didn’t play the game anymore because the processes were established and the neural pathways in my brain became well worn and smooth. That carried over into my “real” life with the same thinking and the same method of choosing that taught me cause and effect in Farmville.

I learned how costly it is to miss your window of harvest opportunity and even learned how to adjust my crops and choose to plant a crop that would grow a little bit slower and maybe not pay out as much, but would allow me the time I needed to do my school work and still be able to play the game and at least not lose any more money.

Beyond Farm-ville, my life became my farm. I was able to see just how much work needed to be done in the game to get to a place where I had the ability to plant a crop. I had to buy the land, till up the land, cultivate the soil and then water it and make sure I had what I needed for my crops to grow. Once I'd plant my seeds it seemed like forever before they finally began to pop up through the ground so I could see the “fruit” of my labor. So it is with life. Most of the time I never even gave any thought to cultivate the soil of my life. I'd get an idea, run with it, and if it took too long, I'd get distracted and then fade out and onto something else. This was the dominant process that ruled my life for most of it.

I can't even imagine just how many crops I have planted in the soil of my life that I walked away from just before the shoots were about to pop up out of the ground and begin to sprout. What I do know is that all of the choices and mistakes I have spent my life making were all part of the intensive preparation for me to get here! And what I know for sure is that every ounce of drama, pain, loss, catastrophe and wrong is not in vain because I am living proof that with all I have done wrong and all of the messes I have made that are far beyond anything I know how to fix, everything has been useful in shaping me, remaking me, and reminding me of all that I am and all I have been shown how to overcome! More than anything, I know with all I am that the best is yet to come and we are the miracles of the Master’s Plan! I love you and God Bless you in everything!