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Ministry

Ministering in the Darkness

It’s been four weeks. Four weeks without church groups. Four weeks without in-person Bible study. Four weeks without the camaraderie of soccer. Four weeks without socializing face-to-face. It feels like much longer.

It’s been four weeks of suspended plans and dreams. It’s been four weeks in which trip planning has given way to saving in case we need that money later. It’s been four weeks of hearing conspiracy theories and people foolishly saying, “I’ve got more faith than I have fear. I’m not afraid of getting sick!” That’s all well and good, but what about the people they could unknowingly infect? Love for others needs to be our driving motivation, not fear for ourselves.

It’s also Holy Friday. It’s the day we Christians remember the supreme sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. It’s the day that God’s love found its ultimate fulfillment as Jesus died to overcome death for us. This is the day we remember Jesus’ example of sacrificial love. So I ask, if Jesus can sacrifice so much for us vulnerable, sin-wracked humans, why are we griping so much about sacrificing our conveniences for the safety and health of others, especially our brothers and sisters in Christ?

This time of social isolation is trying, most definitely, but it gives us new opportunities to reach out in different ways. I have found that I am being more intentional about giving positive words, whether they are delivered in person (from ten feet away, of course) or online. It’s not that hard to be encouraging. It only takes ten key strokes to type “Great job!” We are all called to minister, to reach out, to love. There are ways to do this from our homes:

  • Instant messaging or texts to tell someone you’re thinking of them, or, better, to ask, “How are you doing?”
  • An email to reach out and let someone who loves you know how you’re doing.
  • Snail mailed notes to say, “I just wanted to say hi.”
  • Phone calls or vid chats to connect. (This is especially important for grandparents.)
  • (I saw this idea in a group) A serial story that you snail mail to children or grandchildren. Imagine the heart bonds formed from sharing something from your history!
  • Encouraging words on a social media post.

I encourage us all to minister in our new and different situations. It’s hard, but it also has the bonus of taking us out of ourselves for just a few minutes, which gives us a few minutes of not feeling anxious or fearful, and that peace is valuable.

 

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Ministry

Absolution

We made a mistake, my daughter and I. Actually, I’ll take the lion’s share of the blame and the responsibility. My daughter thought it was her fault and felt absolutely horrible, despite my telling her, “Sweetie, it was my fault, not yours.”

“But, but…” she began, going on to tell me what awful thing she felt she’d done.

“I made the choice. I could’ve chosen differently. That’s on me. I absolve you of any wrongdoing.”

“What does ‘absolve’ mean?” she asked me.

She should’ve known what my response would be. “Dictionary.” She didn’t want to look it up, so I switched tacts. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. To take a burden from someone?”

That stopped me in my tracks. No, absolving doesn’t mean to take a burden from someone, but . . . Absolving means to set free or acquit someone. Following the etymology of the word further, it means to loosen or untie. Jesus absolves us of our sins. Through the cross, Jesus set us free – acquitted us – from our sins. Jesus took the burden of sin from us, so to a degree, my daughter understood the word perfectly.

While it doesn’t work etymologically, this idea of absolution taking away the burden of our sins speaks to me. We sin, and the guilt of that weighs us down. Sometimes, though, we put “sin” on ourselves that isn’t our burden to bear. We feel like we’ve sinned when we’ve just been human, when we have felt sad, anxious, or worried. These aren’t sins, though.

So now I absolve you. If you feel like you have sinned because you are feeling depressed, fearful, or anxious in these trying times, I’m here to tell you that God doesn’t agree with your assessment. Sure, you have some sins going on, but your emotions aren’t part of them. How about giving that particular burden to Jesus and accepting the grace to be human?

“Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NIV).

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Ministry

Helping Children with Anxiety & Fears

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Uncategorized

Seven Years of Quarantine Prep

Y’all, I spent seven years of my life preparing for shelter in place.

As a Gen Xer, we were raised to follow rules for staying in the house. We were the generation of latchkey kids. Every day from sixth through twelfth grade, we rode the bus home from school, let ourselves into our homes, and followed our parents’ rules. My parents’ rules are remarkably like the rules we’re following now.

Rule #1: Come in and lock the door. I always keep our doors locked, anyway. Too many years of city life following living by myself ingrained that habit in me.

Rule #2: Call me (Mom 98% of the time) as soon as you get home. This phone call usually was my chance to tell her about my day and also to get instructions. My parents and I email often, but since the social isolation started, it’s every day.

Rule #3: Don’t let anyone in the house. My own cousin who lived next door wasn’t even supposed to come over. Haha. Nope. If you don’t bathe here, you’re not coming in at this time.

Rule #4: Don’t leave the house. I could be in the yard and on the back deck, but I couldn’t go for a bike ride or a walk on the street, couldn’t visit with friends. Sound familiar? Same stuff, different decade/century/millenium, except now I can be out on the street since I’m an adult.

Rule #5: Get your work done before you play or watch TV. I honestly don’t get those folks who can binge-watch Netflix all day. I can barely sit still through a movie. Even though we have all day to play, school still happens. I tell my younger, “Get your work done. Then you can play without worrying about having to work.” We still have a rule, no matter what, school work and chores have to be completed before TV and friend time.

Rule #6: Do xyz to help prepare for dinner. Mom didn’t get home until around 5:30, and she always wanted to have dinner on the table as close to 6 as possible. Most days, this meant I had to clean chicken (ew!) or make spaghetti sauce. In these days of social isolation, cooking is still enjoyable. We experiment, and we work together to pull dinner together.

If you’re a Gen Xer, then you were made to survive. We handled being on our own for hours at a time perfectly fine. We followed the simple rules of our parents and that usually was enough to keep us healthy and out of trouble. We can do it again now, too.

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Books

Finding Peace

I’m in a writer’s group, and someone commented this morning that his family isn’t supportive of his writing. At the same time, he shared he’d had a successful book-signing event. Writers write books for many different reasons. Sure, as creators of ideas and worlds, we like some external validation for what we write. We want people to read our works and extol their virtues far and wide so we can sell more copies. I know of no one so wealthy that they have just given their books away for free.

This post started me thinking about my own first book. Finding Peace is specifically for people dealing with anxiety. It’s not my deciding one day to write a devotional guide to make beaucoup bucks. It represents success purely in its existence — my own personal success over anxiety. It was only through suffering and struggling through the feelings and treatment that enabled me to write this book. It was the discouragement that came with relapses back into anxiety and being blindsided with post-traumatic stress that made this book possible.

Anxiety and blessings from God are not mutual exclusive. They can and often do coexist. My hope is that someone who reads this book finds such a blessing, if in nothing else than in realizing that they have no need to feel guilty when a gracious God isn’t judging or hating them for feeling anxious.

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Poetry

After Church

Can I have just a minute, please?

A minute to step out of heels,

unwind pearls, slip off my dress.

 

Can I have just a minute, please?

A minute to get comfortable

in fleece and warm fuzzy socks.

 

Can I have just a minute, please?

A minute to de-people,

to rest my psyche from a weekend

of soccer and church.

 

Can I have just a minute, please?

A minute – before I hear my name

coming from three different parts of the house.

 

They gave me just a minute.

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Book Excerpts

Excerpt From “Devotionals for Anxious Christians”

Anxiety sucks, doesn’t it?

If you’re reading this book, you are probably someone who is struggling with anxiety and is a Christian and likely is feeling or have felt guilt and shame about feeling anxiety as a Christian. It’s a difficult place in which to be. I’ve been there and have friends who visit that anxious, guilty, faith-filled place from time to time.

This was me three years ago…

As a woman of faith and a minister, I know my Bible. I know all the pithy little “spiritual” sayings, and I’m sure you’ve heard them, too.

  • Fear not” is in the Bible 365 times, so every day we should remember not to be afraid of anything.

  • God doesn’t put more on us than we can bear.

  • You just need more faith.

  • Leave it at the cross and don’t take it back.

  • Just pray about it more.

These are not helpful for people going through anxiety. I prayed a lot. God and I had many conversations. Never once did I doubt God’s love for me or lose my faith. I’m not one of those people who ask, “If God loves me, why am I going through this?” Sometimes, we just go through stuff, and God is much bigger than our junk.

God doesn’t put anything bad on us. That’s just an idolatry of self-sufficiency, because some people – good, faithful, God-loving people – have to go through much more than they can endure.

“Leave it at the cross and don’t take it back” is a favorite saying of my Dad’s. Anxiety doesn’t like being left behind, and no one wants to take it back. We can take our brokenness to the cross, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be healed for being there. The two thieves who were crucified with Jesus were at the cross in the moral brokenness, but they didn’t leave alive. They left in death, still condemned thieves. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was at the cross, an emotionally broken wreck. She left, still broken and sorrowful down to her soul.

In addition to these little secular quips cloaked as “spiritual” wisdom, there are ample Bible verses about being strong and courageous and about trusting in God. In fact, these verses present as commands directly to the reader of the words. Eventually, they become almost like new commandments, as iron-clad as the Ten Commandments and as inviolable, just more “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” to weigh upon people’s mortal souls. Those who fling these sayings around in an attempt to bolster themselves ultimately end up layering guilt and shame on top of their anxiety. My heart broke as I watched a friend do this to herself.

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Writing

Fabulous Writer’s Tool

As an emerging writer, I don’t have a database, either mental or physical, of names that I can pull out of the air when I need one. This often leads me digging through a mental stash of male or female names based on the characteristics of my characters. I was writing earlier today and needed a last name for a character in my story. I thought, Hmmm.  I wonder if there’s a last name generator out there? Well, lo and behold, there is! It’s not just for last names; this site will help you generate all sorts of names. This is definitely a huge “win” for us writers, especially emerging ones.

If you’re writing and you need help with names, be sure to check out the Name Generator. You can use it to create all sorts of names for your story or book. If you want to have a bit of fun, play around with the dating profile generator. However, do NOT do as I did and play with it in the silent section of your local college library. The librarians are not too fond of patrons laughing while students are trying to study. Just trust me on this. (That dating profile generator might be quite useful if one were to create a Bridget Jones type character.)

What’s the best tool you’ve found for writing, besides the pen or keyboard?

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Writing

The Best Hormone

In yesterday’s post, I listed some neurotransmitters and hormones that writers and speakers use to manipulate their audiences, making them feel and hopefully respond exactly how the writer wishes. I forgot one, though, and I would call this one the best one.

Endorphins are the best hormones in our bodies. They make us feel so divinely good. Think about when you’re exercising, especially if you do serious cardio for a prolonged period of time. You feel the agony when you start to hit your stride – your muscles are screaming and your breath is burning in your chest. Then you get about fifteen minutes in and you start feeling amazing. You feel so good, you’re smiling. That’s from the endorphins.

We feel that endorphin rush when we are in love. We also feel it when we have occasion to laugh. When a writer or speaker can make us laugh, we have positive associations with them, their message, and their medium.

My younger daughter loves to read, but she also likes it when I read to her. She loves books about animals and conservation. Recently, she found a book about a twelve-year-old girl living with a wolf pack in the taiga. The author didn’t anthropromorphize the wolves; they didn’t speak or have other human characteristics. The girl spoke to the wolves, but except for a couple of brief scenes in which she encountered other people, all the conversation went one way, At the same time she checked out that book, I got a book for us to read called Nothing But Trouble. It features two sixth-grade girls who pull off inspired hacks in their school and community. That book featured many human characters, and I like doing voices. This often led to my daughter and me laughing our butts off every time we read. I’m looking forward to reading that author again. I’m not looking forward to reading the author of the wolf series. Why? All those endorphins made reading with my daughter all the more fun, as well as made the story move that much better.

When you’re writing, be sure to create some humorous moments. Whether these moments pepper your story or you use humor to de-escalate your audience after a frightening or intense scene, the endorphin kick from humor helps the reader destress after certain scenes.*

 

*You can see an example of how these chemicals play out in the play Les Miserables. After Fantine’s death scene (sadness, oxytocin), the scene switches to the tavern and the humor of Master of the House. The audience needs this reprieve from the intense sadness and pain of the previous scene.

 

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Writing

How to Manipulate Your Audience

Words are powerful. Words have the power to build up or tear down, the power to start movements and revolutions, the power to communicate ideas. In certain hands, words have the power to manipulate your audience any way you want. My early background is in psychology and counseling with ministry having come later. I often joke, “I know how to manipulate people. If I didn’t, I’d feel honor-bound to return my degrees to the university. But I choose to use my powers for good.” In other words, while I have the academic and practical knowledge to use words and tones to manipulate people’s feelings to make them do or think what I want, I realize that’s wrong and choose not to do it. Well, most of the time. There was that one time I manipulated my husband to follow through on a six-week promise to fix our oven, and it worked. My parents were at the house, and I remember looking at them wryly and saying, “Darn. I almost hate that that worked.” They laughed.

Good speakers and writers know how to use words to make us feel. They use words to make us feel exactly what they want us to feel, knowing that how we feel will impact how we respond. They try – and in many cases succeed – to control our emotions in search for a specific outcome. In the case above, I hit my husband in the wallet; I told him I was going to use part of our tax refund to buy a new oven since he refused to execute the $60 repair on our existing one. He didn’t want to spend the money on something so unnecessary, plus I dinged his manhood: He could fix that oven, dang it!

Think about the books you like to read and how they make you feel. Ever read some Stephen King and have trouble sleeping at night? How did you feel when you read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? You had flipped page after page, chapter after chapter, and Rowling did what??? Your breath was coming hard and your heart likely shattered inside of you. If you’re like me, you were probably hoping for that not to be the end, that she was going to – pardon the pun – work some literary magic to undo that scene (you know which one I’m talking about). Yet, it never happened, and we were left dealing with the emotional fallout. She wrote to get that emotional response. (I’ll also confess that I started Deathly Hallows hoping for that reversal. The denial was strong in this one.)

These writers are masters at putting words together in order to get emotional reactions. News pundits and politicians are also experts in using words to manipulate their audiences. They know that their readers and listeners will glom onto key words and ignore the rest. One alt-right yellow journalism source used to tout headlines like, “Envoy of Troops Spotted on Interstate as Obama Possibly Prepares for Martial Law!” They knew that readers would see “troops,” “interstate,” “Obama,” “Martial Law,” and the exclamation point. Cue sudden fear response of “Oh my gosh, Obama is going to enact martial law!” Every election year, there are reports from all sorts of sources digging into people’s fears of losing some right, losing government benefits, war, or any of a plethora of “other” people, people who are different racially, ethnically, sexually, or any of a number of adverbs that we can use to describe people who are not like us.

How do they do this? They use our bodies against us. Whether it’s for entertainment, such as with King or Rowling, or to impart dubious information to sway our opinions, these writers use words to create chemical responses inside of us. All day long, our bodies are producing chemicals, both hormones and neurotransmitters. They produce chemicals to make us feel hungry, sad, happy, scared, worried, sleepy, or excited, and every one of these chemicals serves a biological function.

One of these hormones is oxytocin (not to be confused with oxycodone, the narcotic drug). Oxytocin makes us feel sad or sentimental. It’s the chemical that our bodies release when we feel that tug on our heartstrings. Think about how you may feel when you see a pair of big milk chocolate eyes staring out of an adorable puppy face on the humane society’s website. (Chances are, just thinking about that puppy made you melt a little.) That’s oxytocin. You see oxytocin-producing commercials a lot, especially around the holidays with themes of giving and family. Those commercials make us feel, and when we feel, we remember. There’s a commercial put out by a British grocery chain that produces all the feels, and though I live on the other side of the pond from Britain, I still go back and watch that commercial every year, just for the feels.

Another of the chemicals our bodies produce is dopamine. This neurotransmitter is fascinating to me. When our bodies are in balance, all is well. Too little dopamine in the brain causes schizophrenia, while too much causes Parkinson’s Disease. Yet, it’s so vital to our brains, again, in balance. Dopamine is the “hook.” When you read the first sentence in a book or story, if it produces enough dopamine in your brain, you’ll continue reading. Dopamine makes us want to read the next chapter and the next book. It makes us tune in when the dreaded “to be continued” flashes across the screen at the end of your favorite TV show. Both J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are two great examples of writers who can get the dope going.

Finally, we have a pairing of hormones that the aforementioned news sources and politicians love to use: Cortisol and adrenaline. I call cortisol “the worry hormone.” Our bodies produce this hormone when we’re worried. Whether it’s a big exam, a looming bill when funds are tight, or anxiety over the future, our brains produce cortisol. Cortisol production disrupts our sleep, leading us to find other ways of staying awake during the day – copious amounts of caffeine, carb loading, or drugs – all of which have adverse affects on our health and can lead to strokes, heart disease, or diabetes.

Adrenaline is a necessary hormone. Adrenaline fires when we have a “fight or flight” response, diverting energy to our muscles and firing up our heart rate and respirations, ensuring our bodies have what we need when we need it. Adrenaline has an evolutionary purpose; it helps us survive. Given that adrenaline causes our heart rate and blood pressure to soar, it’s unhealthy to stay in this state for a long period, and, in fact, being here can be tiring, leading to an “adrenaline crash.” When cortisol and adrenaline are firing in our bodies, we make poor decisions. Think about the chick running through the woods while the serial killer is chasing her. She’s scared – her adrenaline is up – and she turns back to see how close he is and trips over a tree root, at which point the serial killer catches up with her. On any given day, sans homicidal maniac, she’d likely tell you that’s it’s not wise to look behind you when you’re running through the woods because you can trip and fall.

Stephen King is expert at writing in such a way that these hormones flood our systems. He also brings his readers back down, giving them a resolution and not keeping them in that heightened state. The media isn’t nearly so compassionate. They will use own bodies against us to drive an agenda. For example, in 2012, North Carolinians were called upon to vote on Amendment 1. This amendment would recognize all domestic partnerships for the sake of child custody, health care decision making (only health care powers of attorney or spouses can make decisions for someone in North Carolina, not domestic partners, friends, etc.), and provide laws protecting people in non-married domestic relationships from abuse, heterosexual and homosexual alike. In short, this law would provide some much-needed protections to women, children, and other vulnerable segments of the state’s population. What this law would not do was override the existing prohibition against homosexual marriages that would later be overturned at the federal level. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the news outlets were calling Amendment 1 the “gay marriage bill.” The media worded their news coverage in such a way to tweak the insecurities and prejudices of the citizens.

Politicians are also known for using words to manipulate people’s opinions. Also in the great state of North Carolina, a few years later the governor called a special session of the General Assembly to vote on and pass HB2, aka, “the bathroom bill.” This law requires transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate. The law also created room for discrimination based on sexual orientation state-wide, but that article didn’t get the coverage the rest of the bill did. The lawmakers’ argument behind passing this bill was to “protect women and children” from these transgender sexual predators. They argued that transgenders would go into women’s bathrooms to sexually assault innocent women and children. In fact, when the former governor was running for re-election, he ran as a hero of women’s safety. It doesn’t matter that transgender people are more likely themselves to be assaulted than to assault anyone. Nor does it matter that, if I see someone who appears to be a man in the women’s bathroom, I’m likely to go on the defensive, regardless of whether that “man” has a vagina under his trousers; I’m not going to wait around to find out. So, in fact, the law allows for men dressed as men to go into women’s bathrooms under the guise of being unaltered transgender. The politicians cloaked their behavior in terms of protecting vulnerable women and children, feeding the citizens of the state this lie that there actually was a problem the lawmakers needed to solve with a discriminatory bill. In the aftermath of this law passing, transgender people no longer felt safe in the towns and communities they’d called home and felt it prudent to leave for other states. One reported feeling scared when she went into places she’d frequented many times before, and this lady is a total bad-ass.

In phrasing their news stories the way they did, the media played on the fears of conservatives who were afraid that allowing homosexuals to marry would destroy the institute of the American family – that “textbook” model of mom, dad, and two-point-two kids. They created the threat of the “other” in order to get support for shutting down this amendment that provided protections for some of our most vulnerable citizens. Likewise, the politicians used words to convince the citizenry that there was a problem they needed to fix, creating a problem when one didn’t exist and causing many more problems as a result. Again, they used fear of the ubiquitous “other” to gain support for their agenda. They played on fear, driving up the cortisol and adrenaline, making people seek for a “savior” to protect them, and delivering that. In a calm state, most people probably would be pretty blase’ about the idea of transgender people using the bathroom of the gender they identify with, realizing it’s happened many times and they didn’t even know. However, with the manipulative messages and their playing with the hormones of North Carolinians, the media and lawmakers had the citizens of North Carolina convinced that a real danger existed. It does, but not in members of the LGBT+ community.

As you listen to debates, speeches, and news blurbs and read the same, beware of the messages these sources are conveying. Ask yourself, “What are they really telling me? Are they suggesting I should be afraid of something or someone?” Now try it yourself. Practice writing sentences or paragraphs – you may get carried away – to generate dopamine, oxytocin, cortisol, and adrenaline in your readers. Share your creations below in the comments.

 

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