Breaking Bad Habits

I have a host of bad habits.  I bite my fingernails, ignore bills until they are REALLY REALLY due, fight with people in my head, stew over problems, swear entirely too much, and eat way too much refined sugar.  And I am sure there are people in the world who would say that just scratches the surface of my sea of flaws.

Back during the surging days of an eating disorder, I had a terribly unhealthy habit.  I would curl up with a book in bed, and eat peanut M&Ms without limit.  That is kind of a gauge for me now... when I feel the impulse to curl up in bed and eat unreal amounts of M&Ms, I need an attitude check.  That occurred to me the other day when I was curled up in bed, reading a book, and eating an unreal amount of Reeses.  I had not done that in YEARS.  Hmmm.

On my way to work this morning, I could feel anxiety building in me as I thought of my massive to-do list, the chess game I call my personal finances, some big changes happening, and various expectations others have of me that I would really like to live up to.

As I turned on to the main road leading to my office, I said, right out loud, "STOP!  STOP THIS NOW!" The anxiety was starting to chew through the actually joyful attitude I'd held all weekend, actually for the last couple weeks.

I took a deep breath and said, out loud, "Lord Jesus, please enter into this. I don't know how this will all be resolved but You do, and please lead me toward Your solutions, whatever they are.  I will not let the demons of worry eat my happiness.  Please protect me from my own destructive thoughts, and anyone else's negativity.  I am rich in every way.  I am healthy.  I make good decisions when I keep my eyes on You.  With You, there is nothing I can't handle.  Thank You for Your love and protection."

I have had to repeat that a couple times as negative thoughts entered my head.  Every time I caught them, I just said, "Jesus, please come in to this" and stomped down the negative thought.  As the day is progressing... the thoughts are fewer are farther between.  God has it all handled.  I just have to show up.

Back on Track

Puffy ankles and all, Roxy and I set out for Buffalo Park this morning.  Now, realize I have not actually exercised in almost 2 weeks... I was too busy being a tourist and trying to eat up all the seafood in Louisiana.  (Hence the puffy ankles, lots of sodium in fried fish and hush puppies!)

SO, I set a modest goal for myself... run one minute, walk two minutes, do the big loop once, plus an extra turn on the small loop.  All total, that is about 3 miles.

(Okay, this was a lot longer, but I accidentally deleted 3/4 of this post and couldn't rescue it, so here is the upshot)

I ended up going for the 2min run / 2min walk and finished out that way, carrying Roxy back to the car the last 1/4 mile because she started throwing up.  Poor baby, we've never run that far!

There was a song going through my head about how God is with us through every high and every low... and I felt like Jesus was jogging along right there with me, not really saying anything, we were just enjoying each other's company.  You know how when you are with an old friend, and after everything is caught up, you just have that lovely companionable silence?  It was kind of like that.  Even Roxy could tell we weren't running alone.  She usually is darting after the other runners or wandering birds, but today she just trotted alongside, enjoying the sunshine.

So, it turned out to be a nice relaxing workout with friends.

Good Touch, Bad Touch

If you know me for me than say, 5 minutes, you will come to know that I do not enjoy being touched by people I don't know.  I'm not phobic about it, I just find it unsettling.  So, I understand I have a higher-then-average sensitivity and that some people are all touchy-feely and that isn't bad either.

So, last night I was at a business dinner and one man there came up to me during the cocktail hour, stood next to me, and not only simply touched me, but stroked my back.  I was nonplussed.  Still, I thought I might be oversensitive, so I said nothing.  He did it again.  Then he made a couple off-color jokes.  Then he rubbed the back of my neck.  He'd had a few drinks. This continued occasionally over the course of the evening.  BTW, I had known him less than half an hour.  My breathing got shallow and my stomach felt like lead.

One would expect I would have handed his hands back to him in a bag, but I was so unnerved, I actually could not speak.  I replayed it in my head as I tossed in bed later.  Was I over-reacting? Was I being too sensitive?  Did I do something to attract this attention?  I just felt all icky.

This morning, I spoke to a friend who happens to be attending the same conference I am and asked, "Okay, this is what he did" and I demonstrated.  Her eyes got big and she said, "No, that was wildly inappropriate.  You should tell someone at his company."

I'm still in a bit of a quandry.  I can feel the porcupine needles sprouting from my skin and my eyes getting all stony as my inner warrior princess pounds the spearbutt on the ground and shrieks, "I choose who touches me!"  No one will likely sit next to me at lunch my shields are up so high.

So, my prayer today is that the love of the Lord be my sword and shield, and that His protection will make my porcupiney-ness unnecessary, and my breathing light and easy.

Security and Alligators

The world is an insecure place.  Jobs are lost, money stolen, bodies break down, natural disasters strike.  It is so easy to lose oneself in worry about misfortune, or excessive striving for some sense of security. "I need to check the locks and save more money and work harder and get lots of promotions and raises and live in a low-crime area..."

A person I know actually researched the safest city in the world because she believes her current city has too much crime.  Now, nothing has ever happened to her personally, nor to anyone she knows, but she is convinced it will probably happen if she stays where she is.  She lives in constant fear and worry.  Now, when I start to feel scornful about her choices (I have NEVER EVER chosen a place to live based on crime statistics, and my addresses in "transitional" neighborhoods will back me up!) I remind myself that just because my fear manifests differently, doesn't mean I'm behaving with any greater trust in God.

I do not go into basements by myself.  Whenever I enter a room, I scan for exits.  I do not like being touched by people I do not know and will sometimes panic just a bit if my hands or feet are constrained or a space is too small.  I find certain noises unnerving. I never, ever, ever walk into a dark room alone.  My dad, who loves me, realized I was still sleeping with the lights on in law school and when I admitted I left the lights on when I left the house, just in case I got home after dark, he gave me a remote switch so I could turn the lights on from the outside.

As my faith gets stronger, these fears actually do ease and in some cases leave entirely.  As I trust more and more that God will keep His promises, I find myself worrying less, needing to take fewer compulsive precautions, being less stressed and more open to possibilities.

I am actually not a fearful person by nature.  I'm actually quite adventurous and brave and outspoken and resilient.  Feeling safe means my best self can emerge.  Feeling safe is exactly that, a feeling, not an objective state of being.

Yesterday my friend Dee and I went on a bayou tour in Lousiana.  As the boat stopped under an oak tree swamped with Spanish moss, the water green and murky and flooded with alligators, the guide, a short and powerful man called Lil Lou, called out, "Who here admits they's a candyass?"

My hand whipped into the air.  I admit, I'm fearful.  Heck, just show me a photo of a small dark room and my breathing gets shallow.

I was the only one to admit it, and the guide laughed.  Then he reached into a cooler and whipped out a 2-1/2 ft long baby alligator.  The other tourists gasped, and I just grinned and said, "Can I hold it?"  The guide laughed again and said, "Really??  The candyass is the one who wants to hold him??"  Cracked us up.

In my wonderment in the swamp, I forgot to feel afraid.

This is a fallen world, and wandering about like Pollyanna is not going to serve me well.  But in my wonderment of the world, in my wonderment of God, it is good to forget to be afraid.

Paul even reminded Timothy that God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but of power and love and self-control. (2Tim 1:7) so maybe others too sometimes need to be reminded that choosing to fear is not the choice God made for us.

Five Acres

It is so easy to get distracted and downhearted when I focus not on the problems actually confronting me, but on the problems that MIGHT confront me, or the problems actually confronting someone else.

I had a conversation with someone last night who was complaining about a colleague and her list of complaints seemed to have a wide variation.  At the end, I advised her that since she does not report to that person, and that person has no real effect on her day-to-day existence, that falls outside the five acres she is responsible for.  I encouraged her to refocus on her own responsibilities.

I can do that, too, though.  As I rub along through life, I do get distracted by the people around me struggling with difficult or dissolving marriages, relationships that are not sustainable, unhappy work environments, and like most people, wish there was something I could do to help.  Worrying on their behalf, however, never does seem to help.  Being stressed in solidarity does not make others less stressed out.

I read a story a few years ago about a person who worked in an extremely poor area marked by violence, and every night as he left the settlement house, he prayed, "Lord, please help all these people.  These are not my people, these are Your people, and You can protect them all better than I can."  It was his way of acknowledging that he is not a messiah.

It is important to offer help and support, but equally important to know that salvation for anyone from anything, comes from God alone.

delight and joy

I did not realize how very tired I was until I left town and headed to the swamp.

This past month, I spent almost every spare moment sleeping, and yet always seemed tired.  I did not realize it wasn't my body that was tired nearly so much as my head and my heart until I had a few days with a dear friend, and we talked about nothing particularly deep, and I got to hold an alligator.

Sometimes, the only way to refresh a tired soul is to give it something new to encounter.

I've spent the past year and a half dealing with some really heavy stuff, and recent events in my family caused another muddy swirl of digging up old issues.  This is emotionally exhausting work when you actually take it on and don't just pretend Everything Is Fine.  This path leads to joy, but sometimes it feels like a slippery climb.

My normal way to take a few days off is to either stay home and sleep the entire time, or go somewhere and pack in a ton of stuff to see and do and experience.  This time, I went to Louisiana to visit a friend, and we actually, you know, relaxed and ate well and fit in a few fun and easy touristy things like going on a swamp tour which involved holding baby alligators.  That was pretty cool.

We talked about life stuff, but nothing particularly deep, and I found I was quite content to just let everything be -without constant analysis or rethinking or finding hidden meaning or creating a higher level of existence.  My mind finally found a place to rest somewhere between ghost stories at a haunted mansion and listening to a tour guide sing "Desperado" while playing a 100+ yr old Steinway at a plantation dating from the 1700s.

Delight may not be quite the same as joy, but it is a lovely place to take a nap on the way there.

His Grace is Enough... really???

My friend Betsy, who is awesome, shared a story recently to give me some hope.  She is well aware of how freakin tired I am of being alone, as in un-coupled, not as in a dramatic, "I am all alone in the world..."  Anyway, she shared the story of a friend who was praying and asked God that if He wanted her to be single the rest of her life, she was okay with that, but to give her a sign.  The very next day she met the man who eventually became her husband.

So I repeated my plea, Lord, my life is Yours, but I am tired of being alone and really, what do you want??? and opened up my book of daily meditations, and there was the answer: "My Grace is sufficient for you."

Oh, hell, no!  I slammed the book shut and mentally stomped off to fume.  NOT the answer I wanted on any level.  I shared that with Betsy at a soccer game later, and we both laughed.

Okay, so, God doesn't just tell me what I want to hear. FINE!

Still, over the past couple weeks since that discussion, I have been getting the repeated message that His Grace is enough.

No matter where I put the emphasis on the words in that sentence, it rings true, if I can accept it.

One of the ideas that has been repeated consistently lately is the knowledge that coming into my own identity meant the sloughing off of identities that simply weren't true.  One of these has been that much of my identity has been through other people -my mother's daughter, my brothers' sister, my friends' friend, my boss's downline staff, etc.  When I decided to figure out who I was, without anyone else's definition of me being the guideline, I realized quickly that I had accepted that my VALUE was through my human relationships and from being useful to them, and NOT needy, ever, not by simply being a child of God, belonging to Christ.

That is actually defining myself through a relationship, I know, but I'm strangely okay with that.  We all have to belong somewhere, and at least God actually knows me and He does not care how needy I get.  And I'm learning new things about myself all the time, like how I like my eggs cooked, and that I am freakishly strong for a woman, and that my favorite color is all of them.

And I am slowly, painstakingly learning that His Grace is, in fact, sufficient for me, because who I am is sufficient for Him.  He does not measure me by my productivity or my usefulness, but by His own Love for me, Who loved me into existence and Whose great Love nourishes and heals all.