Just like me, this blog is a work in progress. God seems to be writing it one word at a time. Not me. It's His voice I'm listening to. I'm just the one holding the pen. If I can help just one person, then all my years of crying out were worth it. You've got a friend and you are not alone. Maybe you can see yourself in me. READ FROM FIRST ENTRY TO LAST, IN THE REVERSE ORDER THEY APPEAR.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Not in Control

Not only did three types of depression converge, three things happened beyond my control: a doctor had performed two episiotomies that would cause untold problems in the future, an inexperienced nurse had pulled an organ out of my body, thinking I was passing a clot, and a second surgery had to be performed because I was hemorrhaging from behind the bladder, for some unknown reason.

When I woke up from surgery was I going to be a different Teresa? The answer was a resounding, "Yes!"

For the first time in my life I was not in control. I could not lift my children, cook, get out of bed, shower, shave my legs, make love to my husband, even urinate, without someone or some thing assisting me.

I came home wearing a supra-pubic catheter to let the bladder heal until it could work on its own; I wore it twelve days.

Still having stretch marks from having a baby, I could no longer conceive.  Not being able to lift ten pounds I had a five month old little girl who needed to be carried.

Being the care-giver, I was now the one being cared-for. God had removed the props that defined me. Being forced to come face to face with myself, I became aware of  the smallness of my greatness.
When I was less than two years old, the story goes that when momma told me not to go out in the rain that I said, "Al-bite" and went out anyway. I was the strong willed child James Dobson wrote about in his book I entitled, it just hadn't been written yet. Now that strong-willed child became the helpless adult.

At the time of my surgery I thought I had had faith. I thought I had walked by it for twenty years.

I had been a Christian since the age of twelve, attending three services faithfully every week, marrying a Christian whose dad was an elder, and teaching or attending Bible classes all my life.

I had lived for twenty-nine years thinking I had had faith, when in reality I had never had a problem so large I couldn't handle it. I learned if you can see the solution, then it's not by faith. "When we come to the end of ourselves we come to the beginning of a vital relationship with Jesus Christ."* Remember?

Control had never been an issue for twenty-nine years. God had always agreed with my decisions. (That is absolutely laughable now that I'm fifty-eight years old looking back to a young woman half my age.)

I did not have a clue what real faith was or looked like. But, now that God had my total, undivided attention he could teach me. The pit would be deep. I had a lot to learn.

My best friend from 1985-1990 was Belinda Curtis when her husband, Tim, was our campus minister. Belinda died on November 5, 2013, just twenty days ago.

How ironic that on the day Belinda died, I created UP DOWN DISTRACTED. How proud I know she would have been, had she have had the opportunity to read about me now, so different from the me then.

I consider Psalm 40:1-4, the passage she told me to read, to be the one passage I've held onto, and shared, more than any other, especially when it comes to giving advice to the mentally ill.

Psalm 40:1-4
I waited patiently for the Lord;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear
and put their trust in the Lord.

Slimy pit, and mud and mire, perfectly describe where I was. It would take ten years for my feet to be planted on the rock. I wanted to stand on the firm place then. God's timing is perfect and I was, and am, a slow learner.

All I could do was cry and wait, cry and wait -- all the person in Psalm 40 did -- two requirements necessary when being put through the fire.

The perfectionist I was, God would humble. I had been so full of myself he could not work through me. He would make a person so full of herself come falling at his feet.

I believe God placed Dr. Pfohl in my life in 1992, to teach me this lesson -- eight years after my surgery. When the student is ready, the teacher comes. He would be the one to verbalize, "Perfection is not a goal, it is a disorder."

"Where are you, God?" I asked over and over again. "Why am I here? Have you forgotten me?" He would answer years down the road, "You are never closer to me than when you're being carried -- where you are right now." I know today he spoke the truth. But I felt, then, he had never been farther away.

I was getting ready to learn my first lesson.

* Approaching God  by Steve Brown

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