Never Stop Thanking God for Your Mental Health

I am far too exhausted to write anything today; plus I have to work a full shift alone at the bookstore. Yesterday we moved my mom into a new facility that is a world away from the retirement complex where she has been living. She is now decidedly a part of the health care system, living on a floor with other residents, some of whom are, to put it politely, not higher functioning.

This leaves me with four initial observations.

First, she is now counted among them. Because of her hearing difficulties, I am sure some of the workers will write off her cognitive abilities. It reminds me of the old question: If you suddenly found yourself in an asylum, how would you convince them you shouldn’t be there? (For this, I recommend a classic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

Second, I have great respect for the people who serve the health care industry. This would not be my career of choice. Not for a single day. The nature of the work itself, the demands of the residents, the government bureaucracy; these all combine to create a lot of stress.  God, bless them every one.

Third, I thought a couple of times yesterday about Jean Vanier and Henri Nouwen.  You can read five different Henri Nouwen items — a man who gave up a lucrative university academic life to work with developmentally challenged people who sometimes need two hours just to get dressed in the morning — at C201 here.

Finally, thank God for your mental health. You are sitting at a computer which I assume makes you one of the more higher functioning people in society, unless of course you are about to forward pictures of funny cats to everyone in your address book, in which case I take it all back. 

God Made You Special and He Loves You Very Much

I can’t remember which famous statesman said what forms today’s headline.  Was it Larry the Cucumber or Bob The Tomato?

I said yesterday that I’d skip the story of changing the headlight on our car. It’s very self-depreciating. And actually, my wife did most of the work. The last time we did a headlight we both ended up cut and bleeding. We really should leave these things to the experts, but as Orison said in the original 22 Words blog, “That costs dollars. I don’t have any dollars.”

There was a video online explaining how to change the headlight on a car of the same make and model. I clicked on it only to discover it was over 32 minutes long. Definitely not encouraging.

The scene of the crime

Other challenges that defeat me include changing the fluorescent light bulbs in the ceiling of the place where I work, and adjusting the shelving in the same location.

“God, why did you make me so stupid?”

I’ve actually prayed that.

More than once.

I tell everyone I have “mechanical derisons;” even though it’s not the correct usage for ‘derision.’ Maybe I have grammatical and syntactical derisons as well.  I have a flight-response that makes me want to run from the battle.

Actually, I’m not stupid. I skipped a grade in elementary school; a history I share with my wife. They don’t let anyone do that. I was accepted into the Julliard School of Dentistry. (Okay, not the last one, but I do have a BA from a prestigious university, which, as the Apostle Paul would say, “I count as rubbish.”)

I’m just not good at everything.

Surprise!  Who is?

Here’s Romans 12:6:

NIV: We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us

Weymouth: We have different gifts because God has blessed us in different ways

NLT: In his grace, God has given us different gifts for doing certain things well.

MSG (5b): …let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.

AMP: Having gifts (faculties, talents, qualities) that differ according to the grace given us, let us use them.

…You know what? Everybody has something that humbles them. Everyone has something about which they are hypersensitive. Everybody experiences what it’s like to covet someone else’s gifts and abilities.

Maybe you can’t cook anything beyond making toast.
Maybe you can’t do your own tax returns.
Maybe you can’t land a basket when shooting hoops to save your life.
Maybe you’re short.
Maybe you’re short on cash all the time.
Maybe you are tone deaf and church services serve as a constant reminder.
Maybe you suck at open heart surgery.

The point is we all have things that remind us that we are meant to live in community.

But I’ll bet you have a gift or talent that God can use to serve someone this weekend.

So do that thing.

Taking Emotional Inventory: Revelations and Confessions

I have no idea what the post title implies. It just looked good. Then again, I have a fairly good idea.

Yesterday I attended two different morning services at two churches. In the second one, a well known couple in the church — the pastor called them a “power couple” — shared a little of their journey through marriage counseling earlier in the year. It sounds like they were facing some rough challenges, and it would be easy for someone to be smug and say, “Boy, I’m glad our marriage never got to that.”

But then I got thinking about the whole idea of counseling. Some very high profile pastors go to counselors on a regular basis and are very public about it. I’ve never been mostly because I can’t afford it; it would be an expensive luxury given our budget.

What would a counselor find?

As I thought about this I realized that my emotional life is characterized by a number of negative things. I mentally listed seven yesterday, but can only recall five today. I’m going to be very honest with this confession, and this on a blog that tends not to get personal.  For simplicity, these are alphabetical:

• anxiety, apprehension, fear, worry — about health, finances, the children, my mom’s health, business, etc. (This one concerns me the most, as worry and trusting God are spiritually incompatible.)
• indecision — not that I can’t make decisions, but I feel like I don’t have a good track record, and therefore I don’t trust myself to make good ones (This one makes it hard to move forward; I tend not to plan things.)
• isolation — for most of my life I’ve been flying solo in business and ministry projects; it would be nice to play on a large team sometime (This one flares up at the oddest times.)
• regret — not that I spend a lot of time looking back, but as the song says, “Regrets, I have a few…” (This one probably brings out the greatest sadness, reminding me of another song, “If I Could Turn Back Time.”)
• rejection — with a common thread to the isolation mentioned above, a lot of projects I’ve tried to start just haven’t clicked with the Christian community (This one just makes me angry, I feel like it’s other peoples’ loss.)

 I could flesh these out in greater detail, but basically, these are some things I deal with, and it’s not a very happy list.

But I think it’s a very accurate picture of what lurks beyond the superficial, and while I don’t expect to resolve all these today, by sharing them here, you just saved me a few of the initial counseling sessions!   I should also add that my days are not spent focusing inward; I don’t see myself as a candidate for depression, rather, these are themes that are lurking in the background.

So now that I’ve left myself emotionally naked and vulnerable today — can’t wait to see what the search engines do with that phrase — does this resonate with any of you? You guys don’t leave a lot of comments, but this would be a good day…

Guest Post: The Music That God Likes

Today’s guest post is from Ruth Wilkinson who may or may not be related.

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It was hot. I was tired.

I was spending the summer working in the kitchen of my favourite camp, supervising and cooking. And when you’re doing work you believe in, with people you like, it’s easy to run to 16 hour days.

I’d finally hung up my ladle, made a cup of tea, and sought out a quiet, dark and relatively cool spot to relax before going to bed.

The porch. Concrete floor and walls. Old wooden pews against the wall. An unimpeded view of the moon on the lake. Behind me, a window, open to the ‘lounge’, which was busy with other staff playing games, chatting, making music. And me in the shadows outside, listening.

Under the window indoors there was a piano. If not for the wall, I’d have been leaning against it.

Two people came to the piano and sat down. His camp name was Rocky, one of the senior summer staff, full of character and wit.

Her camp name was Joy.

If you met her, you’d know that it could never be anything else. She’s one of those people who carry light with them into the room. A 100 watt smile, always ready. Hugs, encouragement, hope.

She was also about 80% deaf. A hearing aid in each ear. Her parents, as some do, had decided not to have her taught sign language. They wanted her to grow and live in the world of the hearing. So her interaction with the people around her was through lip reading and her own slurred, exaggerated speech.

But Rocky and Joy had decided that it was time for her to learn to play the piano. ‘Cause camp is like that. Behind me, out of sight, he sat down at the high end of the keyboard, and she at the low end. I doubted they knew I was there.

He hit a C chord and sang “Je – sus..” and showed her where the C note was. She hit it. Bom.

He played a G chord, sang “loves me…” and showed her where the G note was. Bom.

A minor. “This I….” G is one up from A. Bom.

C. “Know…” Back to the first one again. Bom.

F chord. “For the…” Which one’s F? Yeah, that’s right! Bom.

And on they went, all the way through 2 verses and 2 choruses, patient with each other.

C chord. “So….” Bom.

They laughed and high fived each other. He was called away.

I thought, “Well, that was nice. I’m glad I heard that.” Sipped my tea, looked at the moon, rested my head against the wall and thought about grace.

But she stayed at the piano. Playing notes, combinations of notes, what she thought might be chords.

I thought, “Oh, dear.”

She began to play more loudly, more confidently. Crashing and tinkling.

I sighed.

She started to sing. The singing of the deaf. Loud. No tone, no melody. No rhythm or any relation to what her hands were playing. Right out the window, over my head.

I groaned.

She sang, “Jeeeeeeee – sus! (crash) Jeeeeee – sus! (bom) I love you Jesus! (crash) I love you God! (bom) Thank you for saving meeeeee! (tinkle) OH, GOD, I LOVE YOUUUUUUUU! (crunch) YOU ARE BEAUTIFUUUUUUUL! (kabom) YOU CREATED THE UNIVERRRRRSE! (CRASH BOM)”

I thought, “God, I’m tired. I just wanted some peace and quiet. Is that so much to ask? How much longer is she going to keep making this NOISE?!”

I’m not exactly sure how to describe the next sensation I experienced. The closest I can come is when you’re a kid at the grocery store with your granny, and you say something rude to the guy behind the counter and she slaps you across the back of the head.

SMACK!

And in that moment, I heard that voice that you hear with every nerve and fibre of your body. Whispering.

“She’s not singing for you. And you have no idea what she sounds like from here.”

~Ruth Wilkinson

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– Let the message about the Messiah dwell richly among you, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, and singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.–

Christian Media in the Home

I’ve previously written here about how we’re big fans of sermon audio when we travel, and as someone who works in the Christian bookstore environment, it’s a given that I’m a huge booster of Christian books and music.

But today I want to approach this from a slightly different perspective.  Over the past few days I’ve written about the battle that goes on for our thought life, and how this takes place on a moment by moment basis.  Back in June, I posted a great analysis of the types of thoughts, that are going on in our heads at any given point in time.

I don’t spend a lot of time commuting, but I am increasingly aware of the contrast that exists between the mental processes that take place when I omit to turn on the radio — which is mostly presets for Christian stations — and the times I have worship songs playing. This is a giant contrast, not a mild difference.

Listening to Bible Teaching

Yesterday we listened to sermons from North Point and Crosspoint.  We tried to find another “point” but left it at those two, plus what we heard in church that morning. The day before I listened to one at Mars Hill (MI), a few days earlier it was a conference talk streaming at Elevation.  You can find all these churches linked in the sidebar of this blog.

Life was not always so.

I can remember asking my parents why they had to constantly listen to more preacher programs. Their media of choice was WDCX, an FM station in Buffalo, and WHLD, a Buffalo AM outlet. Of course, my choice would have been Top 40 rock station 1050 CHUM in Toronto. I think that was the real issue.

But today, although I hunger to learn and grow and discover more about Christ through what others have learned, I also am acutely aware of what happens in the absence of Christian media in the home.

Bible teaching can come in other forms besides radio and television. There are the aforementioned sermons-on-demand and live-streaming church services on the internet, plus some teachers, like Bruxy Cavey at The Meeting House often do a separate podcast. But there’s also CD audio and of course books.

Listening to Christian Music

For some Christ-followers, the dominant form of uplifting, inspirational and wholesome media is Christian music; which may consist of hymns, mass choirs, southern gospel, adult contemporary, Christian rock in all its various genres, and the current favorite, modern worship.

Again, these can be accessed in various forms. Some choose mp3 files which can be played back in the car and in the home. Many people are still buying CDs. Christian music song videos abound on video sharing sites like GodTube, Vimeo and YouTube. There is an abundance of Christian radio available online, and here in North America, most people live within range of a broadcast station that plays music, teaching or a mix of both.

But I have to say that as a worship leader, nothing compares to the songs that you experience in a worship environment with your faith family. Maybe it’s because I was playing in the band yesterday, but one particular song — an original song written by our guest musician — stuck in my head for hours yesterday, and in a good way.

For a listing of some of my favorite songs with video, visit the sidebar in the right margin at Christianity 201.

Listening to God

These varied media I find to be a positive alternative to anything else, and in fact fulfill a direct instruction from scripture:

^{Phillips – Col. 3: 16-17} Let Christ’s teaching live in your hearts, making you rich in the true wisdom. Teach and help one another along the right road with your psalms and hymns and Christian songs, singing God’s praises with joyful hearts.

What will control your thought life this week?

Information You Need to Know

So Saturday night dinner was running a bit late, and I walked into the kitchen and picked up a nearly empty package of potato chips, or as they say in the UK, a package of crisps.

The package had been folded over and sealed with a clothespin, but they were getting a bit stale.  I shook a few of the small bits in my hand and ate them, and then repeated this; the second time noticing something in my hand that looked like a dead ant.

Panicked, I said to my wife, “I think I’ve just swallowed some ants.”

Of course, I have no reason to believe this; it just existed as a possibility. 

I quickly tore the package apart and there was in fact, evidence of some other dark thing among the crushed chip bits that remained.

Mrs. W. continued quietly cooking dinner.

And that’s when it hit me.

If I had a Twitter account, I could simply say something like, “I think I accidentally swallowed some ants.”

Surely that would garner the sympathy I was looking for.

And then something else hit me.

This is exactly why people have Twitter accounts. To share the minutia of their lives with people who for some reason have decided to follow them because there is in fact some perceived value in knowing the minutia of their lives.

Like the intern who decides to shadow the Kramer character in the television series Seinfeld, large numbers of us apparently want to thought-monitor both friends and people we will never meet in person; and equally large numbers feel compelled to share this information. Our interactions are now thousands of miles wide and a millimeter deep.

(Note: The previous sentence mixes metric and non-metric measurements and uses a spelling of the word millimeter that is largely unacceptable to people who actually use the word on a regular basis.) (Wow! What an astute observation. I could totally Tweet that.)

All this to share one very important principle:

You should look at what’s in your hands before you put it in your mouth.

(…Of course if you spell it millimetre, then you also spell it minutiae.)

Living in Two Financial Worlds

The large piece of Styrofoam has been put into position in the master bedroom for another winter. 

Measuring about 28 inches across and eight feet tall, it is placed so that it is propped tight against the wall by a dresser, a second-hand dresser manufactured in the 1940s. The two-inch thick giant surfboard’s purpose is to keep this particular section of wall, which has a chimney running behind it, from icing up in the winter.  Our belief is that there was a chimney fire in the house before we purchased it, and the effort of putting out the fire destroyed the insulation at that point. Or perhaps there just never was insulation.

The first winter we noticed that the wall was a large vertical skating rink was disappointing to say the least.  But through years of painting the kids’ rooms, replacing shower tiles, doing retrofit windows in seven rooms, and all the general maintenance homeowners do, we’ve never really attended to our own room.

Most people reading this will never see one of these -- or its equivalent in your country -- in their lifetime

We live a very ‘geared to income’ lifestyle which is complicated by the fact that we have no fixed income. And haven’t for about sixteen years now, which was the time I left the comfort of mixing part-time employment as Worship and Outreach Director for the local Christian & Missionary Alliance Church, with other part-time employment teaching grades seven and eight at the local Christian school, with part-time employment writing a weekly column for two local newspapers, with part-time employment running a mail-order book and music business.

Ah yes, I decided to leave the riches of all those part-time jobs behind and step out in faith, as if we weren’t already living rather hand-to-mouth. No the $35 weekly from the newspapers — as much as it bought all our groceries back then — and the stipend from the school and the honorariums from speaking and leading worship at other churches; all that was too secure and I decided what we really needed to do was open a storefront ministry that would augment the work of local churches, self supporting through the sale of Christian books and music.

I was nuts.

It had all the financial scope of a child’s newspaper route. I’ve seen better profit-and-loss statements from lemonade stands.

But it was my calling, and it became our lifestyle.  With my wife tied up with our then special needs child, we had one income stream, and we tried to keep that income from becoming a negative number.

If one partner wants to do something that is a ministry first and a business second; it helps if the other has something really good going on career wise. We still don’t. We were the subject of a federal audit a few years back because they couldn’t figure out how we were surviving without either under-reporting or doing something illegal. Fortunately, we got an auditor that understood the dynamics of walking by faith in response to a ministry calling.

A few years back my mom sold her home in Toronto and decided to give us some of the proceeds to see if we could learn a thing or two about money from the perspective of actually having some.  I decided that we were going to be good stewards, and reward the faith and trust she put in us by keeping it safe. 

Now we had a miniscule interest income, but we were still afraid to spend it.  The needs of our special needs child had diminished over time, and my wife started doing volunteer work among the poorest of the poor in our community. In many ways, we could relate to their economic condition. Every six months the bank calls to renew an investment, but beyond those phone calls our lives haven’t really changed all that much.

We discovered that money as a concept was something somewhat foreign to us. We could do poverty better than we could do investments and fund management. It’s actually more relaxing being poor, though we don’t want to be like the servant who buried his master’s money in the ground, which, in today’s economy is a fairly good description of what the banks have to offer. So we know we need to step up at some point and get financially creative. I think we’re both watching for the right opportunity that reflects both an entrepreneurial spirit and an interest in Christian mission. So far, we haven’t found it. 

I also have an understanding as to how it is that people of modest means can win millions in a lottery one year and have burned through it all a couple of years later. You tend to school yourself in the relationship to finance that you know from experience. The guy asking you if you’d “like fries with that” rarely knows what the Dow Jones Index doing that week.

In the meantime, the piece of Styrofoam shifts when there’s movement in the room and it can wake you up in the middle of the night. It’s a reminder that at least we have a roof over our heads, which is more than some people have. And that roof is located in what is probably the top 2% of the world’s wealthiest communities, given the state of the world right now.

It does look really ugly, though.

Personal Note: Thanks for Your Prayers

I just wanted to add a short note here to thank those of you who were praying, for your prayers and encouragement.  The medical test results were good. 

However, it could have gone either way, I suppose, and I wondered if today I would be writing an entirely different blog post.  I had already determined that if I was writing something different, I would enclose the short text which follows.  I realize most of you are familiar with this, but there may be someone reading this for the first time, so I’m going ahead with it anyway, because there may be someone here right now who needs this…

What Cancer Cannot Do

Cancer is so limited…
It cannot cripple love.
It cannot shatter hope.
It cannot corrode faith.
It cannot eat away peace.
It cannot destroy confidence.
It cannot kill friendship.
It cannot shut out memories.
It cannot silence courage.
It cannot reduce eternal life.
It cannot quench the Spirit.

Here is another version which is actually the text of a plaque which intersperses scripture between lines of the text…

Cancer is so limited.
Yet in all these things

It cannot cripple love, it cannot alter hope.
We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

It cannot corrode faith, it cannot destroy peace,
For I am persuaded that neither death, or life…

It cannot kill friendship, it cannot suppress memories,
Nor principalities nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, depth,

It cannot silence courage, it cannot invade the soul.
Nor any created things, shall be able to separate us from the love of God,

It cannot steal eternal life, it cannot conquer the spirit.
Which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:37-39.

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