Gratitude Amidst Sickness

Today I am taking a few minutes to choose thankfulness to my God and Creator.  Joining the Gratitude Community from Ann Voskamp’s A Holy Experience today with my own list of heart-swelling thank yous.

1. A job that I can go back to when I’m no longer sickly, sneezy sad
2. Nine-pound black cat that snuggles close
3. Fuzzy red socks with pom-poms for cheery frozen toes
4. Dayquil liqui-gels to avoid that awful taste going down
5. Six-pound tiger kitten who lounges across your arms while you type
6. Christmas list by dear nephew – “fake bunny, grapes for kitchen and a pogo stick”
7. Double blankets on cold Autumn days with the doors wide open
8. An extra hour of heavenly sleep in the dark, cozy night
9. Hot soup for a sore throat
10. Kind words from a distance
11. Anticipating the marriage of a sister-friend to her soul’s perfect mate
12. Book recommendations that bring tears of recognition and slow healing

The Written Word

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I decided to share my story here at But The Greatest Of These Is Love.  But I have been so graciously led by hand, baby steps, by beautiful women.  CRHP sisters – an audience of love personified.  Hugs, encouragement, smiles as I break down in their presence.  Not my will, Father, but yours be done. 

And then there are the ladies of grace words.  Speaking my language – the written, not spoken.  They share their hearts and their homes with a painfully shy girl from Florida.  I am blessed by their words, their honesty, their grace-filled lives.  I pray and pray, asking my Father to bring His daughters into my life.  And oh how he answers.  He knows this heart that knows words heal.  He knows that words from afar, on a screen, are all this heart can handle some days.  It is safe here, and in His safety I pray to grow.

Reading others’ words helped me take this step (leap?) of faith.  I may never reach out to them, but I pray that they know the light that they shine in this world.  I see Him daily because of their words, their stories.  I want to be like them because they are like Him.  And He is so good.

The Final Chapter of My Story – Part 8

I have been praying for a long time for God to draw me closer to himself and to bring godly people into my life.  I truly believe that He brought me to my sorority, to the Street Ministry Team, to my new church home, and to this blog.  Everything in my being fights against going outside my comfort zone and putting myself in new situations with new people, but here I am.  I’ve learned that God may not take away all my problems, but He gives me the strength to go through them. I still struggle with my bipolar disorder and social anxiety.  I am still cleaning up the aftermath of poor financial choices.  But I’m here – laying it all on the line so that you might see His infinite grace, mercy and love. And I’m on the right path – all thanks to our Lord.

I thank you, Lord, with all my heart; before the gods to you I sing.

Psalm 138:1

My Story – Part 7

But as the days went on after our conversation, I began to feel a nagging curiosity.  I went to apologists’ websites, specifically geared towards the typical arguments that Protestants have with the Catholic faith.  I expected to laugh at their answers, but instead, I found that everything I thought I knew about the Church was based on what other people had said about it, and the way certain Catholics I knew were living their lives.  When I took the chance and opened my mind and my heart to truly learn what the Church had to say about itself, I found answers.  I not only found answers to all of my objections, but I found that in my heart, I believed those answers.  This was a scary proposition for me, though.  Nobody in my family was very religious, let alone Catholic.  My boyfriend was Lutheran and I was scared to tell him what I had discovered and about my change of heart.  He was more than supportive and encouraging when I told him.  We ultimately decided that we both deserve a future spouse that shares in our faith fully.  We amicably split up, but still remain good friends to this day.  I know that God used our friendship and relationship to lead me closer to the Catholic Church and ultimately, to Jesus.

This brings me up to last fall, when I took another very uncomfortable step and joined the RCIA program at a local church.  One of my sorority sisters went there growing up and recommended it to me, but other than that, I knew nobody yet again.  I had already spent hundreds of hours reading and learning about the Catholic faith, but my time in RCIA was so spiritually enriching.  Our priest made certain concepts come to life in ways that nobody else could.  I began attending weekly Mass and made friends with some of the people in my class on Monday nights.  I remember praying my first rosary on the floor of my bedroom.  I remember each of the Rites throughout the past year that brought me a step closer to becoming a full-fledged Catholic.

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

John 6:35

By the time Lent had come around this year, I was getting impatient.  Each Mass was bittersweet for me because I now knew and recognized Jesus Christ fully present in the Eucharist, and I wanted to be in communion with Him so badly.  But I waited as best as I could for Easter to come around.  It’s funny looking back now, because of all the times I went to Mass when I was younger, I never took communion.  I knew plenty of non-Catholics who took communion at Mass, and while I didn’t believe in their premise of the Real Presence, I respected it and refrained from partaking.  I think that it was the Holy Spirit protecting me from eating at the Lord’s Table unworthily.  I cannot describe the abundance of emotions that I went through during Holy Week and leading up to the Easter Vigil on Saturday night.  I received three sacraments that week – my First Confession, Confirmation and First Holy Communion.  I felt so blessed.

And he said, ‘What is impossible for human beings is possible for God.’

Luke 18:27

My Story – Part 6

It didn’t take very long for me to start being convicted about all sorts of ways I was living my life for me instead of for God.  The clothes I was wearing, the music I listened to, the movies I watched, the binge drinking.  I was seeing my life through a whole new set of eyes.  My family, who is still to this day largely non-religious, definitely noticed, but they weren’t very pleased.  They thought I had been brainwashed.

Around this same time, God began moving in new ways in my life.  A long-distance friend of mine came to me one day and asked me if I could help a friend of hers out.  Her friend lived in Jacksonville, ran a Street Ministry Team for the homeless downtown, and needed someone to come along with his group that weekend to take photographs.  I am certainly not a professional photographer, but I agreed to help in any way I could.  Again, I put myself in a situation that is terrifying for me – going somewhere new and meeting all new people by myself, but I knew that God’s hand was all over this.  I went that day intending to be a passive spectator, but He had other plans.  I saw God in the faces of the dozens of homeless people we met, talked to and prayed with that day.  I was hooked.  My new friend’s church was all the way over on the Westside, near where I was working, but I started attending services there on Sunday and helping out with the Street Ministry Team and the Youth Group.  It felt great to be serving in a community, and I thought I had finally found my church home.

As much as I loved being of service in that church, I found myself missing something each Sunday morning.  The music was beautiful and touched my heart, the people brought me in like I was family, but it still didn’t feel like enough.  I felt like I was missing out on something deeper.  I went back to my books and to the internet and starting researching all the denominations all over again.  I was so hungry for the truth I could taste it.  But nothing seemed to fit.  Nothing resounded within my heart with any real certainty.  At this time, around the beginning of 2009, I had been dating a good friend of mine for a few months.  We shared a deep faith in God and he was my best friend.  He was Lutheran and tried gently leading me there, but again, it just didn’t sit right with me.  Finally after exhausting nearly every possible Protestant denomination, I felt hopeless.  He suggested that I look into the Orthodox Church.  I dismissed him right off the bat because it seemed so foreign to what I was used to.  Then he said something that has forever changed my life.  “Well, why don’t you just become Catholic?”  Catholic?  I couldn’t be Catholic.  They worshipped Mary and prayed to dead people and thought Jesus was present in their communion. I could not, would not, be Catholic.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence rely not; In all your ways be mindful of him, and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6

My Story – Part 5

We finally got my medications under control, and I was pretty stable for a while.  In August of 2007, I noticed an ad on Facebook for a Christian sorority that had just formed at UNF.  Rush week was the first week of school, and completely against my nature, I responded to the ad and made plans to attend the first event the following week.  I wasn’t practicing my faith at all at this point, but I firmly believe that God drew me there to overcome my fear of meeting new people.  That first week was a lot of socializing, fellowship and prayer.  Most of the girls were practicing Evangelicals.  I was honest with them that I wasn’t really sure where I fit in, but that I believed in God and in Jesus Christ as my Savior, and that I wanted to deepen this relationship.  I spent almost every day of that semester learning about my faith and spirituality.  I learned how to pray, I learned about the beauty of the Gospels, and I learned that I was a sinner.

I knew that I hadn’t been living my life right, but it was just a vague sense of disobeying my parents and not living up to some sort of moral code.  I had never really looked at my life in terms of obedience and sin.  I became heavily involved in my sorority that semester, and also in a small church that a lot of my sisters attended.  We had small group meetings each week, Bible Studies, and retreats.  It was the first time I’d ever met a group of people my age that loved the Lord and seemed unashamed of it.  They cared for each other like family, and I felt so blessed to be brought into their flock.  

They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.

Acts 2:42 

Although I was no longer having manic episodes or dealing with the reckless behavior associated with it, I found myself with a big mess that I had to figure out how to clean up. I was thousands of dollars in debt and had no way to pay a penny of it back. Creditors began calling, I dreaded going to the mailbox each day. I finally had to change my phone number just to escape that anxiety that raced throughout my body every time my phone rang. I remember getting down on my knees in my walk-in closet, shaking and sobbing, and I begged God to make it all just go away. I began reading lots of Christian self-help books – everything from prayer to relationships. In October of 2008, after reading a particularly moving book about relationships and having a deeper relationship with the Lord, I had one of those aha moments that people sometimes talk about. I wasn’t sure that I believed in the Evangelical idea of being born-again, but if it was true – that was the closest I was going to get to it. I spent a lot of time in prayer and made a promise to God to stop living my life for myself and to start living it for Him. I asked Him to come into my heart and to cleanse me of all my past sins and to guide my every step from there on out.

Then I declared my sin to you; my guilt I did not hide. I said, “I confess my faults to the Lord, and you took away the guilt of my sin.

Psalm 32:5

My Story – Part 4

Finally, my worst nightmare came true.  My mom called me one evening and asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell her.  I said no, and she pressed further.  She asked me point blank if I was still in school.  I tried lying again, but finally I just broke down and began sobbing.  Over the next few hours, I tried my best to explain things to her.  She was in Gainesville a week later and moved me out of my apartment there and brought me back home to South Florida.  She and my dad were shocked that the lies had gone on for so long, but they tried to be as supportive as they could.  They made two conditions for my coming back home and living in their house – that I would go see a psychiatrist and that I would get a job.  Within a few weeks, I had seen a doctor and was diagnosed with major depression and social anxiety.  There was a little bit of guess and check involved, but we finally found a good combination of medications for me.  I found a full-time job, my first real job, and had enrolled in the community college down there.  Things were really looking up for me. I maintained a 4.0 GPA at BCC and completed all but one class needed for my AA.

In May of 2006, I moved up to Jacksonville to transfer to UNF.  My younger brother, J, had just finished his freshman year there, so he and I found an apartment and moved in together.  My parents were nervous about letting me go off on my own again, but we all agreed on open communication and honesty.  Unfortunately, within a very short period of time, I had stopped taking my medication and was falling back into old habits – skipping class, not showing up for work, sleeping day and night.  My brother called me out on it pretty quickly, and I went and found a doctor up here to get back on track.  I had a really rough time with the medications this doctor prescribed, and had my first manic episode that fall.  I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and began a nightmarish rollercoaster.  At one point, I was on eight different medications each day.  A couple for the bipolar disorder, a few for my social anxiety, one to help me sleep, and a handful more to counteract the side effects from all the other pills.  I was a walking zombie.  Never asleep, never awake.  I began having hallucinations and having bizarre urges and behavior.  I found that I couldn’t sit still for even a minute.  Every fiber inside my body was aching and I felt like I wanted to tear my skin off to make it stop.  Walking was painful, but pacing was the only thing that seemed to help.  I was taking a full course load at UNF and working three part-time jobs.  The mania kept me up long hours at night.  I’d wake up in the morning and vaguely remembering having driven to Wal-Mart at 3am to purchase hundreds of dollars worth of scrapbooking supplies.  I was spending money like crazy.  I had opened up at least half a dozen credit cards and quickly maxed them all out.  I’m still not sure what I bought, but the bills didn’t lie.  

My family was very worried about me at this point.  I finally stopped seeing this doctor and went in search of one who didn’t dispense medicine like tic-tacs.  We found out that the muscle aches were caused by a condition brought on by one of my medications.  It was called akasthesia, and from what I have read about this condition, I had a very severe form of it.  I bounced from doctor to doctor, and therapist to therapist, trying to find someone who would fix me.  I was scared and felt very alone during this time.  

Lord, hear my prayer; let my cry come to you. Do not hide your face from me now that I am in distress.  Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly.

Psalm 102:2-3

My Story – Part 3

My first year in Gainesville, I lived off campus in a single bedroom.  I never made any friends freshman year. I found it harder and harder to make it to my classes, to get up the energy to do my homework and to study. I would go for 3 and 4 days at a time without changing my clothes or showering.  I once went about 2 weeks without going outside.  I had developed an intense fear of going out, and I was diagnosed with major depression.  After three semesters of dropping classes and failing others, I received a letter in the mail that I had been dismissed from the university for poor academic performance.  There were no warnings, no probation.  I was just kicked out, and I was terrified of what my parents would say.  So I didn’t tell them.  I went back to school the spring of 2003 like nothing had happened.  I made up a fake schedule and managed to sound cheery whenever my parents called.

I spent another year and a half living a lie, scared to death that some day someone would find out.  I tried not to think about what would happen if they didn’t and graduation time came around.  What would I say?  Nothing scared me more, so I just stuck my head in the sand and pretended that everything was just fine.  

I am wearied with sighing; all night long tears drench my bed; my couch is soaked with weeping.  My eyes are dimmed with sorrow, worn out because of all my foes.

Psalm 6:7

While in Gainesville, I rediscovered my Christian faith in a roundabout way.  Even though I wasn’t living my life as a good Christian, I had come back to my spiritual roots and began a search that would last for years. I had grown up in a Methodist Church that was more of a social hour than anything spiritual or sacred.  I didn’t know what I believed or what was true, so I started researching different world religions – Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, which was the religion my mother was born into, and lots of New Age philosophies.  Ultimately, I decided that I was a Christian and that I would never forsake my faith again.  That didn’t really help me decide where I fit in within Christianity, though.  There were so many forms of Christianity, so many denominations.  I went to church on occasion with friends, and would go to Mass with my Catholic friends on holidays and Holy Days of Obligation.  I wasn’t really ready to make the serious changes in my life that deep down I knew were necessary, so I never got involved in a church myself up there, but at least I knew where I stood.  I was a Christian.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

John 3:16

My Story – Part 2

School became a nightmare for me in the middle of 6th grade.  I loved my classes and classmates, but I had encountered every pre-teen’s nightmare – the mean girls.  There was a group of three of them who lived in my neighborhood and rode my bus who tried their very hardest to make my life miserable.  They alternated between talking about me just loud enough so I could hear, all while pointing and laughing, and outright taunting and harassing me. I found myself dreading getting out of bed in the mornings, feeling vague senses of illness every day.  I did everything in my power to get out of having to take the bus in the mornings.  I’d deliberately try to oversleep in the mornings, or exaggerate or even make up symptoms – headaches, stomachaches, sore throat, coughing.  You name it, I learned to fake it.  These girls literally made me hate my life. These were some of the darkest times of my life and I didn’t know that I had anyone to turn to.  God was still a pie in the sky concept that our pastor talked about on Sunday mornings.  I had no idea that He was someone you could turn to when nobody else seemed to care, that you could talk to Him and that He would always listen, and even help you if you asked.  It was just me against the world at that point in my life, and I held a lot of shame, embarrassment and anger inside. 

I look to my right hand, but no friend is there. There is no escape for me; no one cares for me.  I cry out to you, Lord.

Psalm 142:4-5

Towards the end of my 8th grade year, the mean girls finally laid off me and I was able to regain a sense of normalcy again.  High school actually ended up being a lot of fun for me. When other kids were out partying on Friday and Saturday nights I worked my tail off my last year of high school and took all academic classes both semesters instead of slacking off like most of my friends were doing, and I made it.  I applied to and received acceptance to my dream school, Boston College, under Early Action and was offered a space in their Honors Program.  My parents were very proud and supportive until the numbers were crunched.  We simply couldn’t afford it.  I begged, pleaded and cried with my parents.  I wrote back to Boston College and asked them to please re-evaluate my file and they did, but it still wasn’t enough.  My parents didn’t want me to put myself into debt for an undergraduate education that I could get for free here in Florida.  My dreams were shattered, and in the fall of 2001, I headed off to Gainesville to the University of Florida with a huge chip on my shoulder.

We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

My Story – Part 1

I was not born into any particular faith. I was not baptized as an infant, and my parents did not belong to any church. However, shortly after my younger brother, J, was born in 1987, they made the decision to send me to preschool at a very small Episcopal Day School nearby. This is the first tangible memory I have of God, church and faith. I started there as a 4 year old and spent the next five years in a classroom with the same small group of children. We went to chapel every morning and had a Wednesday morning service each week that lasted about an hour. At the end of my 3rd grade year, my parents told me that I would be starting public school in the fall along with my brother who would be starting kindergarten.

The first day of 4th grade was basically a nightmare. I knew nobody and sat by myself at lunch. My oversized glasses, frizzy hair and knee-length denim skirt did not make a very good impression on the other kids in my class. A couple months into the school year, I finally started fitting in with a group of girls, and my teacher who had scared me a little in the beginning was becoming one of my favorite people. She pressed my parents all year long to have me tested for the gifted program until they finally relented. I passed with flying colors and could not wait to start the program the following year. At this point, I had basically forgotten all about church, Jesus and God. We had never attended church on Sundays at my private school, and now it was definitely out of sight, out of mind. However, my mom surprised me the next year when she told my brother and I that she had found a church and that we’ d be attending services there every Sunday. She enrolled us in Sunday school and we were on our way a couple days later.

My whole family was baptized that year in 1994 – Dad, Mom, J and I. Church became one of my favorite places, but for all the wrong reasons. I made friends with a girl in my Sunday school class and she invited me to the Youth Group on Sunday nights. Church was a time for passing notes, gossiping about other girls, and deciding which boy you thought was the cutest. I don’ t know how I spent so much time there each week and never once really thought about God. Even though I wasn’ t thinking about Him, He certainly was working behind the scenes in my life.

 For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for woe! Plans to give you a future full of hope.

Jeremiah 29:11