Posted on by She Who Rises

In it with me

A cloudy gray sky hovers above my head. I’m so high up that I wonder whether I can grab a piece. Its clouds conceal everything above and most of what surrounds me.

Its particular shade of gray is only slightly lighter than the gunmetal coloring the expanse beneath my feet. I’m on a ship – a giant machine sprawling around me. But it’s not just any ship.

It’s an ark, like Noah’s, with no discernable openings, yet here I am perched on its surface. The ship cuts through the choppy and frothy mix of gray and white waters below. The water, like the sky above and the ship in between, seems endless.

Though everything about this scene denotes solitude, I am not alone. There are others on a different quadrant of the ships surface, laughing and lounging in swimwear despite the gloom around them – living as if the sun is on full display.

They may as well be a million miles away from me or in another world even. But they don’t capture my attention for long. My mind is occupied by thoughts of those I left behind. People, places, things, and especially, what others may be thinking.

So, I jump.

Crashing into the choppy water, I sink just a little, the force of my weight pressing me down, then bouncing me back up to the surface. Once my head reaches the surface, I am immediately overwhelmed. I didn’t have a plan B. I didn’t think about what I’d do next. And so I have little choice but to let the water carry me wherever it chose.

I flow backward towards structures that I can only see now, at this level, on the water.  I hear a distant splash as I nearly float past the corner of a giant brick wall to my side. I grab it and hold on for dear life. Behind it, I can see what looks like a flooded city, empty and silent. I turn to look toward the sea, at the rear of the Ark moving swiftly away, and I see something headed my way. I freeze in place, anticipating the worst.

As it gets closer, I can see that it is a person, a person swimming. Then, I see that it is someone I recognize. It’s someone that I know. And at once, I feel wonder, relief, and to my surprise, love – genuine and heartfelt. Tears overrun my eyes and fall into the churning waters around me as he swims close.

It’s Jesus. He came in after me.

He swims to the wall where I am anchored in place with a look of concern and understanding on his face. He knows me. He knows why I jumped. And he knows that I have no idea what I am doing. Yet, he’s here anyway, in it with me. 💜

Posted on by She Who Rises

What therapy taught me about God and anger

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. It’s almost fall, but it’s still warm enough to wear shorts. In this mild evening air, a brisk walk has me working up a sweat as I stomp my way through my neighborhood.

I. AM. PISSED.

Someone close to me was careless about a sensitive subject in a way that really upset me. And the worst part was that they didn’t seem to notice. It’s an old issue that’s rearing its ugly head yet again.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. My brain is working overtime now, trying to find the words to describe the reason why blood now boils in my veins. I survey the homes along the block as I pass by, taken in by the dimly lit porches and the buzzing insects that together create a calming, sleepy vibe. It’s a vibe I wish I could match, but I can’t, I’m too angry.

I want to go off. But I know that won’t help. It probably won’t make me feel any better either. The adult in me wants to handle this with care, carefully sussing out what has upset me, why, and what needs to happen next. But the child in me wants to fight, scream accusations with pointed fingers, and, when done, crumple to the ground in tears.

It’s the tell tale signs of what my trauma therapists call inner-child work. The child that lives within me, who was wronged all those years ago, is crying out for justice, and she has been all along. She’s been ignored for much too long and is now fed up… and flipping over tables. All the while, the adult in me is trying to apply healthy coping skills to an untended blistering wound. It’s a recipe for frustration and confusion, which, for me, creates anger.

Anger is work for me. It burns up a lot of energy that I’d rather spend doing almost anything else. It stirs up my imagination in ways that unnerve me. And I’ve found that even if I use that angry energy to push forward into some good thing, it only carries me so far before I flame out. Yet, I have to allow it to run its course.

Holding space for anger is a healthy thing. As difficult as all of this is, allowing myself to be angry and filtering out the noise to understand why, it’s progress. I’ve come a long way. I used to think that anger was an emotion that I should run from, in part, because it would be too hard to subdue the green hulking beast that would rear up in response. But also, once I started really walking with Jesus, I thought allowing myself to be angry would cause me to make him look bad.

A thinker first and foremost, I tend to grapple with the facts and perceptions first and deal with emotions last. By the time I’ve turned my attention to the emotions, they’ve usually been cooled down by the analysis, if I still even feel them at all. On the few rare occasions when that hasn’t happened, I’ve felt so out of control that I was afraid of how far I might go. It’s a serious shock to my normally cool, calm, and collected system, at least outwardly.

But when I first started working with a trauma therapist a few years ago, she helped me see that I don’t need to fear my anger. I learned that I could embrace it as an extremely useful signal. Because when it shows up, it’s a sign that someone has crossed a major boundary.

My issue was that I thought even feeling the emotion meant that I wasn’t honoring God. In my mind, I wasn’t supposed to get angry at all. But how in the world do you control that?

You don’t.

My reaction was to smother anger as soon as it started to rise up. So that’s what I did… for more than a decade… until I was challenged by that therapist.

For the first time, I actually thought about God’s anger. In the bible, both Jesus and the Father displayed a variety of emotions like joy, sadness, frustration, anger, and even, in the Father’s case, regret. They often used those emotions to communicate something important about who they were or the situation itself, like the crossing of a boundary.

At times, they definitely felt one way and behaved in another (just think of Jesus the night before he was crucified or all the times God held back from taking out ancient Israel). I realized that if I’m made in their image, then of course I’d have the same emotional palette AND the ability to decide how I wanted to respond.

From that moment on, anger was no longer a scary monster to be avoided, but a tool that God gave me on purpose for a purpose. I began to see anger as a signal and a call to action – an opportunity to make a choice. I didn’t have to run from anger or pretend I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling.

I could feel it completely and not be consumed by it. I could thoughtfully decide what the next action would be. And that action didn’t have to match how I felt. I could still think it through. Finally, dealing with anger didn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. And it was freeing.

So yes, I am angry, but I’m also very much in control. Thank God.

Posted on by She Who Rises

Beautifully Human

Here at the start of the year, I found myself teetering on the edge of a (yet another) depressive episode. In the last few days of 2023, I found joy in a quiet Christmas, a beautifully reimagined The Color Purple, and a simple NYE. But as the new year began, heavy rain and the threat of snow did whatever it does to my brain that shuts life down.

It set off the migraines, drowsiness, and fatigue that keeps me stuck in a dark room, huddled under the covers, barely coming out to eat or even bathe – much like a depressive episode. And with the addition of some unwelcome medical news and the ending of some important relationships, my personal cache of hope began to slip through my fingers.

This odyssey with my health followed me into the new year, along with a very real and recent job loss. Last year, my deeply analytical brain couldn’t muster the cognitive strength to do my job. I couldn’t even fake it. As 2024 approached, I tried not to think too much about how I would manage, much less overcome all of this, until I was firmly in the new year.

At this point, I am convinced that God has gotten me every job that I’ve ever had. In each scenario, there were too few options and resources to see it any differently. And through prayer, I had been reassured that the God that did that for me so many times before would do it again when the time came. So, again, I tried not to dwell on it… until the new year.

But when 2024 came, I felt overwhelmed that I didn’t have a single idea of how I would navigate any of this. To be honest, I’m still crawling my way out of those feelings. And you know what else? It’s frustrating as hell.

It’s frustrating to believe in a very real and personal God, yet still struggle with doubt and fear that makes me want to control everything. I used to believe that all I needed was to be reassured that God had it, had me, and all my worries would melt away. But more and more, I’m seeing that faith doesn’t exactly work that way all the time, or at least not mine.

I’m seeing that faith still takes work, no matter what reassuring words the Holy Spirit whispers into my heart in the quiet hours of the night. I’m learning that I may still have to hold on to the word even when I can’t see it happening for me, even when there’s no evidence that it ever will.

Sometimes, building this muscle of faith sucks. But I’m also seeing that it’s okay to acknowledge that it does sometimes suck.

So often, I want to push myself to shake it off or beat myself up when I find myself dwelling on the hard and uncertain stuff. I get angry. I get sad. I become unforgiving of self. But emotions are just signals to be investigated, right? And, make no mistake, they are God-given.

If I’m made in the image of God, in mind, body and spirit, and the God of the Bible gets angry, is grieved, or has any other emotion, then so can I. I have yet to see Jesus, the Father, or Holy Spirit try to repress how they feel in the Bible.

There’s no mention of Jesus beating himself up for being frustrated with the disciples’ lack of faith or after running the money changers out of the temple. I’ve never heard of Daddy God pretending not to regret that he had made people during all the antics of Noah’s time on earth. Nor have I known the Holy Spirit to pretend not to be grieved when I’ve gone my own way or made a mess of a gift I’ve been given.

They feel their feelings… they just don’t stay there. And made in their image, I can allow myself to do the same.

I can love God and still be frustrated that building and exercising faith can be hard, frustrating, and not at all fun. It’s okay, I can feel those feelings even as I keep walking forward with God. After all, it’s how I’m made.