"When the bottom falls out..."

I've been reading a large number of spiritual memoirs or autobiographies lately, and yesterday I finished one entitled My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion by Patton Dodd. Like Renee Altson's Stumbling Toward Faith, Dodd's story doesn't resolve. And, I have to admit to a great deal of confusion regarding my thoughts on what he had to say about his faith journey, about the Christian church, and especially about the charismatic portion of the church.

However, I do want to share some excerpts from his last chapter with you. While I'm not as much in this place at the moment, I certainly have been here in the last few years, and even in the last few months, and I found his comments insightful. I've pared them down, giving you only a few sentences here and there. He expounds on each of these thoughts somewhat longer than what I've chosen to include. However, you'll get the gist of what he was experiencing from what I'm including here.


When the bottom falls out you free-fall. You clutch and grab. You scan about for some place to stand, some small piece of firm ground.

Whn the bottom fall out, you form a new library. "Read this book" people suggest, offering C.S. Lewis or Max Lucado or the Pope...

When the bottom falls out, hands are laid on. The accompanying prayer can be a deep and lasting solace, but it can also aggravate because the way things are prayed only adds to the questions...

When the bottom falls out, the Bible is an unwieldy book that is impossible to read. You read it anyway because you feel guilty if you don't...

When the bottom falls out, you realize that all your questions are banal. They are overasked... People tell ou that Christians have been struggling with these questions for years, and you can see that, yes, it is true. But why do the questions persist? Why do they feel so vital?...

When the bottom falls out, you stay home Friday nights and pray. You fall on your face and scream to God for mercy, for a supernatural gift of faith. You ask why what used to come so simply now has to be so hard. Was it something you did? You ask for some assurance, some indication of His presence...

When the bottom falls out, you are not sure how to conduct yourself in worship services...

When the bottom falls out, you fantasize about what life might be like if you had no faith...

When the bottom falls out, you want to reconstruct it however you can.
(My Faith so Far, pages 155-157)

This section was perhaps the most insightful of Dodd's entire book. Would I reccomend the book? I'm not sure. It was an interesting read, raises valuable questions, particularly about the charismatic movement. It was an easy read - I polished it off in an afternoon and an evening. Dodd's writing style is straightforward, if occasionally complicated by theological and scholarly language. But, it left me unsatisfied. I'm all for not resolving everything in one grand "my world's now perfect" chapter, but I wish Dodd had given some indication of how he was seeking to answer his own questions - of how he had continued to live a life of faith, despite the "bottom falling out." In short, I would have liked a Stumbling Toward Faith type of ending - some hope that this faith is something that can be valuable and lived, in the midst of the unresolved. Worth reading? Yes. But unsatisfying.

Picking Up the Pieces

I got another crisis phone call today. I wonder sometimes what it is that makes me the person to call in the middle of personal crisis... When I was in high school I remember asking the girl who was my Young Life leader and mentor if I had some sort of magnet on me that just attracted people with messy lives. I'll never forget what she said. She didn't even pause for a second. "Yes! A God magnet!" I think I told her that God could take his magnet back, I didn't want it. I still feel like that sometimes.

Mostly, though, I feel priviledged that my friends feel safe enough to call me in the midst of the chaos of their lives. I sometimes tire of what feels like picking up shattered pieces of lives - of always being called after the bad decision, or the self-destructive behaviour, but mostly I'm glad they called. I'm grateful, too, for a group of friends who provide MY support system. They usually know the people who are calling me in crisis, and I am able (with the permission of the person in crisis) to pass on the situation quickly, to get feedback on my response, to allow others to step in and form community around the person in crisis, and most importantly, to mobilize prayer - both for me as I help these people pick up the pieces of their lives, but more importantly for the person whose life is so filled with chaos and pain.

If you think of it in the next days, pray for a friend of mine. Her mother is dying of cancer, and will probably not live even to Christmas. She is alternately estranged and close to her mom. There are messy, abusive family dynamics that complicate things. Her tendency is towards self-destructive behaviour in the midst of her pain. I don't even know what to tell you to pray, but pray for her, and for her mom, and for me, and our community of friends as we hold and support her, and as we respond to her pain.

Live in Community....

Here's a random quote that floated through my head the whole night at house church tonight... It's from Blue Like Jazz Live, and as we talked about community it came back to me...
The author/actor is talking about how a friend began encouraging him to move in with some other guys, in order to have community, and how he felt that this was a strange idea, almost cultlike.... And he phrases it like this:

"You live in community. Then you drink punch. Then you die."

Cracks me up. Every time. Community. Punch. Death. I just about died laughing inside as we stood around our house church community, drinking our standard iced tea. Community. Iced Tea. Death. Maybe my sense of humor is slightly warped!

"Real" Emotions

So, I'm sitting with a friend on Sunday night, and he's praying for me, listening to God, and praying about the stuff we'd been talking about. I'm half-way paying attention, half-way distracted by everything going on around us, and all of a sudden he says, "God, give Lisa real emotions." Then, he turns to me, grins, and goes, "P.S. I don't know what that means." His way of saying it was a God prayer, and not a him prayer.

I'd already started laughing. I had a pretty good idea what it meant. It was something I'd been thinking about recently. What has been at least two and a half years of depression has done a number on my emotional health. I have mostly been deadened, bombarded by so much pain, and depression that my emotions began to shut down. They stopped allowing me to experience things as deeply. I would put on a emotion in the same way I put on clothes. It's time to be happy now, sad etc. I would especially do it in church services - okay, the worship needs me to be excited, longing, happy, etc. Not a problem, because the emotions were never deep - they were there to mask whatever was really going on. It was a coping mechanism that has allowed me to survive the last couple years.

Recently, I'd become very aware of my limited emotional span. I can't cry - that was the biggest indicator, because I've always been a person who cries easily. And so, my friend prayed that I would feel "real emotion."

I wish he hadn't.

Let me rephrase. I don't wish he hadn't, but, when I started getting hit with emotion tonight at house church. There was no putting on the "right" emotion for worship. All I could do was sink into the couch, close my eyes and let the music and singing flow around me. I was/am exhausted, and I would guess that it showed. I don't know if some of the other emotions were playing across my face - the sudden sadness, the confusion over this place in my life, the insecurity, the sense of isolation while being surrounded by people. Wow. It was tough. All I could think was "I want to get out of here, but I can't leave because I drove 5 other girls, and it would disturb everyone, not to mention make them angry if I needed to leave in the middle of the study."

I think I may have taken some of the emotion out on others, and for that I'm truly sorry. I was VERY cranky. The combination of the last couple weeks, the emotions of tonight, hormones, frustration, lack of sleep, major school stress this week, and "real" emotion was more than I could cope with gracefully. I was feeling bitter and angry at what I was experiencing, believing God was in it, but not wanting this - not knowing what to do with it, and mostly just wanting to go home and crawl into bed and bawl my eyes out with the tears and release that never comes.

So, if you're thinking about me in the next couple days, pray that I survive. I have a couple of very intense days at school, followed by work, and a couple more intense school days. Pray that I will find release, that my mind will remain functional and clear even in the midst of emotional turmoil, and that God will continue to release things in my life - because that is my greatest desire at the moment - to be released from the things that hold my life so tightly in the grip of fear and depression - to be free.

Stiff

My back and neck are protesting my very existence today, and my eyes are fighting to stay open, even in the classes I'm most interested in. I spent something like nine hours yesterday starting the process of moving back into my bedroom. I carried umpteen boxes of books, clothes, odds and ends, etc, etc. up the stairs from the basement. I'm mostly there.

My computer isn't back in my space yet, so it will still be a little while before the "serious" writing begins again. Plus, I have two midterms and a paper due on Thursday this week. (Here's hoping I get the extension on the paper that I've requested!) But soon - I have lots to hash out in writing, and can't wait for the release of curling up at my desk, in my own bedroom, and writing my little brain out!

In other news, nothing much came of my uneasiness on the weekend. I talked with one friend about it - we prayed together, and he said the sense he had was that it was my own emotions - not a God thing, not an attack. Okay. Still not a great thing that my emotions can get that out of whack, but okay. I was so distracted. It got worse through the whole day. I had such a hard time concentrating at church on Sunday night - which sucks, because Sheri preached a great message, and I just couldn't focus or respond the way I would have liked. But, I'm thankful for friends with greater discernment than me. Friends that I can grab, and throw something like this overwhelming sense of uneasiness or fear in their lap, and know that they will catch it, pray with me, and help me deal with whatever's going on.

I must be off. I need to go to one more class, and then I'm ditching my last class to go home early, start studying, and maybe catch a nap before house church tonight. My head aches. My next class is boring - world history - but material I've covered a zillion times. I'm hoping to get some reading for one of my midterms done while the prof lectures, and if that doesn't work, then I'll pretend to make notes while really journalling, or outlining my paper.