When Darkness is My Closest Friend

The Recovery Worship team helped plan and lead the Longest Night Service at LaSalle on Dec. 20th. Here is the meditation that I gave as a part of that service. --Larry

Merry Christmas! Christmas is that time of the year when you are told how you are supposed to feel. Let me prove my point. I’ll sing a few words from a popular Christmas song, and I want you to sing the rest of the line.

Ready?

Here’s the first one:

“Tis ths season to be ….. (jolly)”

Got the idea? Okay, here are some more:

“Have yourself a …. (merry little Christmas, let your hearts be light)”

“Have a holly …. (jolly Christmas)”

“It’s the most …. (wonderful time of the year)”

“You better watch out, you better not …. (pout, you better not cry)”

This is a time when we are told we’re supposed to be happy, jolly even. And we should be careful not to cry because it might lighten the load of gifts that we are about to receive. But because it is also an event that happens every year with a lot of celebration, it can be a time when we are reminded of losses we have faced over the years, or of things that we never had and lost out on. We can feel out of place in the midst of all the celebrating, as those losses hang like stones on our hearts.

The Longest Night

This longest night service is a time when we recognize losses over the past year, or losses that we are feeling now that may have happened many years ago. On the day with the least amount of light and the greatest darkness, we recognize the darkness that we face in our own lives.

Now this is not something that many churches celebrate. Modern Christianity often gives little place for darkness, loss and grief. At least that is what I learned growing up. My parents modeled for me two ways of dealing with sadness and pain. When my mom felt sad, we would see her begin to tear up and then she would head off to her room. However she dealt with it we never really saw, because she did it on her own in private. My dad, on the other hand, refused to recognize that he had been hurt. Anytime something bad happened to him, he would always try to take some positive lessons from it and move on. He tended to skip over pain and hurt so that he could look on the bright side of life. That characteristic has a lot of strength to it, but it did leave me without an example of what to do when I felt pain and hurt and no positive spin could make it go away.

Did any of you experience similar examples from your parent? What were the messages that you got about expressing sadness and pain?

For me the messages were:

“Pain is for sissies.”

“When you think of all the good things God has done for you, why should you be sad?”

“There are other people who have it much worse than you do. You should be grateful for what you have.”

The Art of Lament

Yet look again at the verses we read together. This is not how the people who wrote the Bible deal with their pain and sadness. They let it all out. In fact, they are quite creative and descriptive about their hurt, their sadness and their loneliness. In the verses we read together, what are the lines that resonate for you?

Here are some that struck me:

“When I think of God I sigh; When I meditate I feel discouraged.” Psalm 77:3

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax …” Psalm 22:14

“He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust.” Lamentation 3:16

“Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me…. The darkness is my closest friend.” Psalm 88:16 – 18

The Season of Dreaming

In the Bible passages normally read at this time of year we hear a lot about dreams. I had my own dream recently that I took as a warning about what happens when I am not willing to face my grief and pain.

The dream started with our old Dodge Neon parked on our enclosed back porch. I don’t know how or why it got there, but I did know I had to move it off the porch and into the drive. I tried to back it up and drive it down the steps (it seemed like a rational thing to do in the dream). In the process I reversed too fast and ended up driving the car through the back wall of the house. The car fell onto the fence and then onto the sidewalk, busting the oil pan and spilling oil all over the place.

I thought, “Oh no, I don’t have enough money in the account to pay for repairs on the car.” Then I thought, “Oh, and the porch too. I just wrecked the wall of the porch.” I looked up at the house and saw that not only had the porch wall come down, but the entire south wall of the house was gone as well. I could look right into our living room and bedrooms.

I went back into the house and found a lot more damage. Pipes were broken, the electricity was disconnected and the heating system did not work. As I went through the house I found two other families from the church living with us. As I talked with them I realized that nine years had passed, that most of the country was living together this way in broken down homes, and that I had no memory of what had happened in the previous nine years.

I finally asked one of the people living with us “What happened with Barack Obama? Did his administration go this bad?” Their response was, “No, he did really well. We would be much worse off if he hadn’t been President.”

It was about this time that I woke up. My wife and I spent some time trying to figure out this dream later in the day. I came to see it as a warning. Over the past few months I have felt an underlying sadness. Especially at this time of the year I reminded of the place I used to work for 23 years, and the friends that I miss from that place. Rather than facing the sadness directly, I was finding ways to avoid it. I would stay up late watching TV and having one or two glasses of wine, trying to get good and numb before I went to bed. For me the dream seemed to be saying that if I continued in this way I could let a lot of years go by without noticing them pass. I could escape the feelings, but I would also not be present for what was happening around me. And in the process a lot of things could be going wrong and getting worse, and I wouldn’t notice.

Facing Darkness

Instead of hiding from the darkness, I needed to face it. I was reminded of another story about a dream that I had read a while ago in a book by Jerry Sittser. In A Grace Disguised Jerry writes about a family outing that took them many miles from home. On the way back, a drunk driver hit their car, and Jerry’s mother, wife and daughter were killed. For two years Jerry went through the motions of work and trying to raise his three remaining children. But he remained numb, unable to feel the grief and pain of his loss. Then one night he had a dream. He was trying to outrace the sun. As the sun began to set in the western sky, he ran towards it, trying desperately to stay in its light and warmth. But he could not keep up, the sun kept on setting. Then he heard his sister speaking to him in the dream. She told him “You never outrun the sun. All you are doing is prolonging the darkness. You need to turn the other way, to the east. If you run toward the darkness, you will soon see the rising sun.”

I needed to accept the darkness I was sensing around me, to feel the pain over my loss. For me this is a complicated pain. I resigned from my old job, where I had a senior role and was well respected, because the ways I had learned to cope with it were destroying me and my family. I had found ways to deal with the stress and travel of my job that were not healthy, but were addictive and destructive. I had to leave to focus on my own recovery.

After resigning I focused first on getting a new job, which God provided rather quickly. But now I am realizing that I don’t like this job, or the people I work with, nearly as much. Every time we have a conference call or an email exchange I am reminded of what I have lost.

With the pain I also feel shame. It was my failure, my self destructive patterns that led to my resignation. Had God given me the desires of my heart, and I blew it, so now I am being punished? I understand how the people who wrote the laments we read felt when they asked similar questions.

The laments show me how to do this. I can publicly express my grief, my shame, my failure, and my anger at God. I can know in this that I am powerless to change the patterns of behavior that led me to this point. And I know, as the song that Gary sang says, that God has led me to this point.

We celebrate the longest night as a way of remembering that even the longest night has an end. The first rays of dawn always come after the darkest point of the night. We can do nothing to make the sun rise sooner. But we can know that in expressing our pain, our anger, our fear to God that we are also expressing our faith that the God of light can shine on us again.

Sharing Loss, Receiving Assurance

The next part of our service gives you a chance to respond, a chance to express your own pain or the feelings of loss that you may be carrying with you into this holiday season. We have set this up as a kind of a journey. You will start at this side of the room, by picking out a candle from the basket. You can light it here in the middle and then tell us about the pain, or loss, or a prayer request that you might have for us, knowing that you are in a community that can hold these things with you.

For example, I am experiencing the loss of a job that I loved, and some of the relationships that went with it, and the dreams I had for myself. I am also experiencing the loss of my mother, who has not been physically present with us for the last 12 Christmases.

Then you place the candle in the sand pit and leave it there. This shows how when we can express our pain in the company of a loving community, it never goes away entirely, but we do allow others to share and carry it with us.

Then you come to this side of the room and pick out a verse of assurance from this basket. Slide the bow off the paper and then read the verse to us. This is the assurance God has for me this evening:

Micah 7:7-8

But as for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.

Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

Where’s the Miracle?

By Lenora Rand, for the December Recovery Worship Service


“It so happened that as Zachariah was carrying out his priestly duties before God, working the shift assigned to his regiment, it came his one turn in life to enter the sanctuary of God and burn incense… Unannounced, an angel of God appeared just to the right of the altar of incense. Zachariah was paralyzed in fear.But the angel reassured him, "Don't fear, Zachariah. Your prayer has been heard. Elizabeth, your wife, will bear a son by you.”
--Luke 1:8-13


I make my living in advertising, as a creative director. But truth be told, writing--song lyrics and short stories, theater pieces, screen plays, novels and creative non-fiction—that’s what I really love. So while I’ve done a certain kind of writing throughout my advertising career, it hasn’t been that fulfilling to me. And while advertising has paid the bills, all my life I’ve also been writing in my spare time—the stuff I really enjoy. But as much as I’ve always wanted to sell a novel or screenplay or a non-fiction book, I haven’t. As much as I want to get paid for doing what I really love, I never have. And most of the time I just deal with it, but as you can probably imagine, it doesn’t always feel so good.

A couple weeks ago, a good friend of mine, we’ll call him Sam, who also has a corporate job and writes “for fun” on the side, got some very positive news about his writing. He’d recently made a trip to LA and while there he made some good contacts for both screenwriting and songwriting and ended up with a few very important, famous, successful type people interested in seeing more of his work. When he told me about this over lunch one day I said “Oohs and aahs” at all the right times. I told him how happy I was for him. Multiple times. I smiled until I thought my mouth was going to fall off. I even offered to help him punch up one of his scripts. And then I promptly went home and ate about half my weight in Doritos nacho flavored tortilla chips. Why? Because it’s my addiction, it’s what I do to numb the pain and to take away the feeling that THERE ISN'T ENOUGH TO GO AROUND. In that moment it seemed like stuffing myself was the only way I could stuff back down this feeling of being ripped off and cheated, it was the only way I could get through the anger and resentment I was feeling toward everyone, including God. All I could think in that moment was that Sam is going to become this huge success doing what I love to do and I'm going to do nothing and get nowhere. And never in my life will I get what I really want.

When you read the gospel of Luke, you find a lot of miraculous events surrounding the birth of Jesus. The first of them happens with the birth of the child of Elizabeth and Zachariah, John the Baptist, the prophet who came before Jesus to preach and prepare the people’s hearts for Jesus’ message.

Elizabeth, and her husband, the priest Zachariah, had been wanting to have a baby for a long time. But it hadn’t happened for them. I can certainly imagine what that feels like. Can’t you? Can’t you imagine how sick with disappointment they were every month when Elizabeth didn’t get pregnant? How deeply jealous they felt when friends got pregnant easily—friends who practically just exchanged a romantic glance across the room and were suddenly “with child”—while they tried and tried, did all the right things, kept trying, and still nothing.

Even if you haven’t gone through this with a pregnancy, I suspect you know what it’s like to desperately wish for something that doesn’t seem to ever happen for you. While it seems to happen easily for others. Maybe like me, you have a dream of work that is actually fulfilling and enlivening to you. Maybe you wish for healthier relationships with family members. Maybe you pray for an end to physical illness. Or an easier sobriety. Or serenity. Or a deeper experience of God’s love. But for some reason, it doesn’t seem to be happening. But we can name ten people it is happening for, no problem. Maybe you want recognition at work. But your coworker seems to get it all. Or you want kids who like to be with you and enjoy talking to you and who shower regularly and with gusto. But the size 4, Lycra-work-out-leggings-wearing neighbor gets those kinds of kids, not you.

I don’t know about you but I believe in miracles…miracles that seem to fall into the laps of everyone but me.

But in the scripture we read today, Zachariah finally gets his miracle. An angel shows up while he’s at work, full of good news for him. What he and Elizabeth have wanted and wished for and prayed for all these years is finally going to happen. Cool, huh?

Zachariah doesn’t start jumping up and down too soon though. He’s like the congresswoman who got a call from president elect Barack Obama this week congratulating her on her re-election, and she hung up on him—twice—thinking it was a hoax. Zachariah seemed to be feeling the same thing. Was he getting punked by an angel?

It was hard for him to believe, I think, because he was just tired of hoping, and maybe in his exhaustion his vision was clouded, clouded by daily life, by business as usual. That’s how I feel too often, I admit. Here we are in this season of hope and joy and angel voices and it’s hard to see much except the lists of things I need to do, the work I need to finish, the dirty dishes in the sink and the bad traffic on the snowy highway. If there are miracles around me, if they want my attention, they better get in line. If you’re going to give me a sign, it better be neon and flashing, and maybe slap me upside the head. Zachariah’s got the angel Gabriel standing right in front of him and even he asks for a sign. And Gabriel says, Hello. I’m Gabriel. I sit next to God. What more do you need? Maybe that’s why Gabriel puts Zachariah into a cone of silence for a while. He forces him to do as the Psalmist says, Be still and know that I am God. Be still and pay attention. Be still and be grateful for the miracles that are all around you. All the time.

I think another reason Zachariah had a hard time taking in the miracle that was being offered to him was that it didn’t look the way he expected. When the angel gave him the news he practically said, Are you kidding me? After all this time? I was expecting this 20 years ago not now, not like this.

I can relate to that too. About 10 years ago I went through a very bad time in my career. I got a new boss who I couldn’t “relate to very well.” He didn’t seem to like me either and he did some very nasty things behind my back and essentially took me off an account that I’d been managing quite successfully for a long time and gave it to some other guy who he liked more. And then while he didn’t take away my title, he gave me the choice of reporting to this guy (which in essence was a demotion) or leaving the company. I think his exact words were “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.” I began to lovingly refer to this boss as Satan, not to his face, of course, and I was really strongly thinking about heading out that door. But financially it would have been insane at the time…so I felt stuck, and unsure what to do.

I’d been in recovery a while, and I’d been learning about asking for help…not my strong suit, but I decided to give it a try. I prayed about it, I prayed for the miracle I knew I needed and finally decided to call one of the other big wigs in our agency, we’ll call him Bill, someone I’d reported to only briefly in my career, who was now actually one of the top execs in the company. Bill was higher up on the food chain than my boss, Satan, and I thought maybe Bill would see what an idiot my boss was being and fix everything for me. Get me what I wanted, which was my position and my account back. So I went to Bill’s office. Bill, you should know, was truly a crazy man—hugely overweight, full of barely controlled rage, mercurial on the best of days—but basically he and I hadn’t had any major run ins when I reported to him, and I knew he hated my boss, so I was hopeful he’d take my side.

As I walked into Bill’s office, he got up from behind his desk and started walking toward me. I thought he was coming over to give me a hug. I don’t know why I thought this. He’d never hugged me before. But I fell into his arms and just started crying. I cried and cried and crazy Bill just stood there and patted me on the back. When I calmed down a little, he guided me over to the sitting area in his office and we sat on his couches and talked a while about the situation. Then he asked me if I had a family. I said yes. And he said, “And they love you? And you love them?” I said yes. He said, “You are very lucky. There are many, many people who can’t say that.” And I knew he was speaking of himself. He counseled me that day to keep the job in perspective. He told me I’d always been a team player and to keep being a team player and everything would be all right.

When I left his office I felt much better. I remembered these lines from a D.H. Lawrence poem:

What is the knocking? 
What is the knocking at the door in the night? 

It's somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. 
Admit them, admit them.

And I also realized, suddenly, that when my strange angel Bill had started walking toward me when I came in the door, he’d had no intention whatsoever of hugging me. He was simply heading over to sit down on the couches on the other side of the room.

But I got a miracle that day. It wasn’t the one I wanted or expected. But it was the miracle I needed. I followed his advice and I ended up with a better job. I also ended up learning and growing tremendously from the devil boss who turned out to be another strange angel himself.

I was looking at the 12 promises from the Big Book the other day and I was thinking about what a list that is. What miracles would have to occur to see this list fulfilled in my own life:

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity.
We will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.


Wow. Hard to believe I’d ever get all that. As hard to believe as a very old barren woman and a crotchety old man having a baby.

I love what it says in the Big Book at the end of this list:
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

I don’t know what miracles you’re looking for. Hoping for. What miracles you desperately need in your life. But just for today, I can tell you this. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

Maybe to see that, we just need to be still, be quiet, pay attention and open our eyes to the strange angels.

And I’m also learning to listen to these words, straight from the mouth of the angel Gabriel: Do not be afraid. Your prayer has been heard.

Mucked Up

By Lenora Rand. For September Recovery Worship Service, based on Matthew 19:16-26.


A couple years ago my husband Gary and our two daughters Zoe and Hannah and I were spending a beautiful summer day in Galena, IL, a lovely little tourist town near the border of Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, just a couple miles from the Mississippi River. Galena has its own river running through the town, in fact, that empties out into the Mississippi. And that day we decided we were up for a little adventure so we rented canoes and took off on a trip down the lazy Galena River. We even packed a lunch—I say that proudly because Gary and I have in the past gone on canoe trips without bringing any food or water because Gary had told me there’d be someplace to stop along the way and I’d believed him—I guess he was envisioning a canoe-through restaurant or something. And hey I bought into that vision. Clearly we’re not big outdoorsy types. But we did learn…so we packed a lunch for this trip.

After canoeing along, slowly for an hour or two we decided to pull off to the dry land to eat our lunch. It had actually been pretty hard going because there wasn’t much of a current and the river was kind of low, sometimes really low, and we’d been getting stuck in the muck on the bottom of the river a lot. Plus the girls were young and inexperienced canoers and we were old inexperienced canoers, so we really needed a break from all the fun we were having, as you can imagine.

Anyway, Gary and Hannah pulled over in their canoe and then Zoe and I managed to maneuver our canoe to the embankment. I was in the back of the canoe so I got the front end positioned up on the shore and Zoe hopped out the front onto land—muddy land, but land nonetheless. Then I attempted to get out. I however made the mistake of stepping out of the canoe not at the very front, but a little bit on the side. The water wasn’t deep there, so I thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but it was. It was a sucking mass of mud problem. I put one foot out of the canoe and immediately I was knee deep in quick sand like mud. One leg still in the canoe, one leg knee deep in the muck. My family rushed over to the bank yelling words of advice and encouragement, suggesting mostly that I pull that one leg back into the canoe and walk up to the front to get out, that sort of thing. But I couldn’t pull my leg out, I told them. Because I was afraid I’d lose my shoe. I was afraid my leg would come out but my shoe would stay down there deep in the mud and I didn’t have on a pair of $5 flip-flops unfortunately. I had on $100 Dansko sport sandals…OK, once again, not an experienced outdoorsy type. So I was worried that when I took my foot out, the mud would engulf the shoe and I’d never see it again. And I couldn’t let that happen. Those shoes were too important, too expensive, too irreplaceable—I think it was a discontinued model even. So I was stuck there. Knee deep in the muck. While my family waited on shore with an idyllic picnic lunch spread out and ready to eat.

The guy in our story from Matthew was also really stuck, knee deep in his own ideas about the right way to live his life. Knee deep in his own illusions about what was really important and valuable, about what would guarantee him the outcome he was looking for and give him a “good life.” He was born into a world that said wealth and power will save you. He was born into a world that said doing what is expected of you would save you too. And when you think about it that way, it doesn’t sound so different from our world.

But he comes to Jesus and basically says, I’ve been doing all this stuff I’m supposed to do, I’ve got all the stuff I could possibly have. But I still feel like I have nothing. Like I’m missing out on life. Like I’m not really living. Jesus gets right to the heart of things. He tells him to let go of all that stuff, let go of the illusion that he can save himself, let go of whatever he’s holding onto and afraid to step away from. He tells him to trust. To let go and surrender.

If you want to have real life, Jesus says, you need to let go of what you’re holding onto for dear life.

Letting go of what we think is holding us together isn’t easy. Like trying to gallop on a camel through the eye of a needle.

About 10 or 11 years ago now, I remember having a conversation with my therapist, a recovery specialist, about one of my many addiction issues--smoking—which happened to be the one I was ready to deal with at the time--and I was saying how much I wanted to quit smoking, but I was afraid that if I did I literally wouldn’t be able to function throughout my day. I couldn’t keep going on, I couldn’t hold it together. I knew it was crazy, but still it felt like having a smoke was the glue that was keeping me from falling apart at the seams. And my therapist told me I could always call someone if that started happening, if I started falling apart. I didn’t really like to call people that much, I told him. And with a little smile he added I could even call HIM. See, I never called him. I went to see him at our appointed times once a week, but I didn’t actually need him, you know? You only call people if you really need them. And I didn’t like needing anyone.

So finally, a few months later, armed with his phone number, a nicotine patch and the Zyban he prescribed for me, I quit smoking. And guess what, my worst nightmare? It turned out to be true. I stopped smoking and I started crying. I mean really crying. At the drop of a hat. For seemingly no good reason at all. AN EMBARASSING AMOUNT. I had at least one of what I now fondly refer to as the “blubbering idiot incidents” pretty much every day.

But I lived through it. I started calling my therapist and cried into his answering machine. I cried with my husband. I cried with my friends. I cried in church. I cried in recovery groups. I cried in the ladies room at work with whoever happened to be in there at the moment.

I stopped smoking and I started crying and I also started living. I starting having a real life. What I was holding onto, the cigarettes and the illusion that I didn’t need anyone and that I didn’t have any feelings, the illusion that I could take care of myself, I finally started to let go of that. And the result wasn’t pretty. But it was good.

The addictions I’ve dealt with in my life have all basically been about holding on to what I think will protect me. Or save me. Or make me feel better. Whether that addiction has been to food, or achievement or trying to control others, or to blaming or to hiding my real self or to smoking…it’s all the same thing.

For me, the simplest definition of an addiction I’ve ever heard (and I think this was from Barbara Brown Taylor) is anything we hold onto instead of God. Whatever it is that isn’t God that we think will make us whole, make us happy, make us feel safe, help us feel more alive, that’s an addiction. And we need to let go of it. And the longer I’m in recovery the more I realize I’m addicted to.

And just like the guy who comes to Jesus in our story, I’ve needed to take in what Jesus was saying, if you want to have real life, you need to let go of what you’re holding onto for dear life. I’ve needed to do what Jesus invited that rich young man to do…stop grasping at straws and start opening my hands and heart and life to the good things God might actually want to give me.

You’ve heard that expression haven’t you—grasping at straws? It comes from a proverb written in the 1500s. A DROWNING MAN WILL CATCH AT STRAWS – And it means “A desperate person will try anything to save himself, no matter how unlikely.”
I know what it’s like to feel desperate and like you’re drowning. Maybe you do too. So it’s not surprising that we’d try anything to save ourselves.

The problem is when you’re holding on desperately to one thing, you can’t hold on to something else. Something sturdier, and richer and stronger and more life-giving than a straw.

When you’re stuck knee deep in the mud holding on to your expensive shoe, you can’t have a feast with your family. When your fist is closed tightly around something, there isn’t room for anything else.

And yet we grasp at straws all the time, don’t we? I know I do, at least. Whether that straw is a cigarette or a donut or a drink or a big win at work or an expensive pair of shoes. Whether it’s our own sense of rightness or denial or shame…whatever it is for you and whatever it is for me, I’m coming to believe that it’s still always a flimsy piece of nothing to hold on to. And by holding on to that straw my hand isn’t able to reach out and hold someone else’s hand. My hand isn’t able to wait empty and hopeful and trusting and ready to receive what good gifts God might have in mind for me. Even gifts that might not seem so good when you first get them, like the gift of excessive crying.

But that’s where my recovery seems to be taking me. Step by step. And that’s what I pray to be able to do every day. Let go of what I’m holding onto for dear life.
Release my grip.
And have real life.

Taking the Cure

At our Recovery Services someone gives a lead, usually a reflection on a Scripture reading, as it relates to their recovery. This is the lead that I gave in April, 2008--Lenora

When I was 5 years old my extended family rented a house together at this big Southern Baptist conference center in NC for a week. While the adults went to seminars us kids were put in this day camp program every morning, hearing Bible stories, singing cute songs, and playing morally uplifting games. At the end of the 2nd day our teacher announced we'd be creating a mural the next day of the story of the Good Samaritan, which we'd been learning about. She assigned us each different characters in the story to draw. I was assigned to draw a Sanhedrin. I left day camp that afternoon in a quiet though raging panic. I had no idea what a Sanhedrin looked like. And I felt like there was clearly some correct way to draw a Sanhedrin which I SHOULD know but I didn't. And I felt so ashamed. Too ashamed to ask for help or advice from my parents or anyone else in the family because I could already imagine their response: You don't know how to draw a Sanhedrin? What's wrong with you? All afternoon as I played with my cousins my anxiety about the Sanhedrin drawing continued to build. Finally though, I figured out a solution. All of us kids were amusing ourselves by jumping off the big, tall front porch of the house to the ground below. One of the adults seeing us do this, warned us to be careful because we might hurt ourselves. And then it came to me. I took a flying leap off the porch and when I landed, I crumpled to the ground. I had "twisted my ankle" and it really hurt. And it continued hurting all night--I kept what I thought was a pretty convincing limp going--and when I woke up the next morning I managed to make my parents buy my story that my ankle was still hurting so bad that I couldn't go to day camp. When my ankle was “better” the following day, I went back and checked out the mural. I remember looking specifically for the rendition of the Sanhedrin which some other poor 5 year old had been saddled with in my absence. What I don't remember is how the other kid ended up drawing the Sanhedrin. To this day, I couldn't tell you what a Sanhedrin looks like.

I tell that story because as silly as it is, this is the story of my life. Most of my life, I've been trying to get IT right, whatever it may be in the moment. Say the right thing. Write the perfect thing, sing the correct note, give the right answer, look the right part, live in the right house, drive the right car, practice right religion...you name it. Or I’ve been in complete rebellion against the need to do everything right. And pointedly trying not to do “the right thing, or the expected thing.” Either way, though, I have been filled with shame because I can't do things perfectly, I can't do things the way they're supposed to be done. I've walked through most of my life filled with this deep down to my bones feeling of not-rightness, experiencing myself as SO inherently flawed and not good enough that I don't really deserve to take up space on the planet. I don't deserve to live. Of course, you might never know that by looking at me. Or even by being friends with me. Because just as I did as a little girl, I've also tried for many years to keep all that shame hidden, keep it a secret, sometimes even from myself. And how I've dealt with the shame has been similar to my trick as a 5 year old too. I've hurt myself rather than admit to the deep shame I was carrying around. Through the years I've hurt myself in lots of different ways--primarily through addictions of various kinds--addictions to work, to taking care of other people, to trying to fix, manage and control, to being judgmental and competitive, to cigarettes, to food. All of these addictions have proven to be great ways to hurt myself, to practically kill myself, AND great ways to keep me isolated and alone, guilt-ridden and ashamed, great ways to avoid the deeper and more profound pain of facing how worthless I feel pretty much every waking moment. I went to my first recovery group meeting nearly 20 years ago--and started working on some of this stuff. The addiction that brought me to my knees and led me there was food. I am a compulsive overeater. But as I began to confront my addiction to food, I started to realize how broken I was in so many places--it was kind of like going to the doctor for a sprained toe and discovering that actually, practically every bone in your body is fractured in multiple places. Yet along the way, step by step, I've been mending, I've been experiencing healing--though frankly, it hasn't always happened how I expected it to or thought it should. It hasn't always happened the "right" way.

And this is where I can so relate to the story of Naaman we heard from the Old Testament a few minutes ago. Naaman's got a disease and he's looking for a cure. He gets this tip from an unexpected source--not from a wise man or a peer, but from a slave girl. But Naaman is desperate, at the end of his rope, he's hit bottom enough to finally be able to take in the help. And he does what the slave girl suggests. He packs up cartloads of riches, and travels to Israel to find help. He expects the help to come from the King--a big rich and powerful guy just like him--but the King actually doesn't have a clue about how to help Naaman. Then Naaman gets the word that the Healer he's seeking is a bit off the beaten path and he loads up his big piles of riches to go find his cure from the prophet Elisha. But even then Elisha throws Naaman another curve--my guess is what Naaman was expecting from Elisha was something wild and scary--like Elisha would send him on a heroic quest, or ask him to jump through some difficult and dangerous hoops to prove his worth. And Naaman was prepared for that. What he wasn't prepared for was Elisha, not even coming out in person to meet him, but sending his servant out to tell Naaman to go take a bath in a muddy river. Naaman was like, This is absurd. This is humiliating... Naaman, the big powerful man, was essentially being told none of his own strength and power and effort was going to heal him--he has to strip down to his naked need and surrender to a cure that is quite possibly more shameful than the disease itself. He wasn’t going to do it, but his servants, sounding for all the world like a support group saying, “it works when you work it,” convince him to at least try.

Two years ago I found myself firmly planted once again in Naaman's shoes. After all my time in recovery, and all the progress I'd made in so many areas of my life, the one area I'd found very little healing in was my relationship with food and my body. I walked into my doctor's office one day weighing well over 250 lbs with blood pressure that was dangerously high. And my doctor started telling me about this surgery she thought I should have, a relatively new bariatric surgery which she had seen excellent results from. But my immediate response was, "I don't need to do that, I've lost a lot of weight before, I can do it again," because I had--when I’d first started in recovery I lost 120 lbs. I'd gained it all back though and over the last several years, no matter what I'd tried I couldn't seem to get or keep the weight off. Of course, what I was thinking was, "This surgery isn't right. This isn't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to lose weight by working a program, going to therapy, following a food plan. That's the right way to do this." I told myself EVERYONE I knew would think I was a cheater for having this surgery, that it was frivolous and vain and that I was a terrible person for even considering it. And I told myself everyone in recovery circles would be appalled by the very idea... they would think I was an OA failure, a recovery screw up. So, No I said to my doctor, I can lose the weight without the surgery. But my doctor looked me in the eye at that point and said, "Lenora, I'm not sure you'll live long enough to do that." Here's the funny thing: as I began to explore the surgery and talk about it in therapy, with family and with friends in recovery over the next several months what I discovered was I was the one with all the judgments about doing it the "right way"...not them. I was the one with all the shaming messages. I was the one looking for a heroic quest to go on rather than a nearby river to take a swim in.

So I took the dip in my muddy river. I surrendered to the cure God was offering me and had the surgery. And I did experience and continue to experience what has been for me a miracle. I wasn't miraculously cured of my compulsions around food...I continue to deal with that one day, one hour, one minute at a time and I am still learning little by little, moment by moment how to love my body. Yet I have had what seems to me like a miraculous amount of physical recovery...and I'm a lot less likely to drop dead tomorrow from a stroke. But that's not the only healing I've been experiencing. In the middle of the noise that plays in my head all the time, like a radio you can't turn off, with the message that I'm not good enough, I'm not doing it right, I'm totally worthless, the miracle has been that I can also hear a little more clearly the message that God loves me and wants good things for me, the message that God wants me to Live --As Jesus said, “I have come that you might have Life and have it abundantly”--and I don't have to do everything "by the book" to earn that love or deserve to live. It isn't about doing anything perfectly. It isn't about making heroic efforts. It's about letting God's love wash over us, surround us, engulf us, in the midst of all our imperfections, all our flaws and failures. I suspect I will always have a part of me that feels like I should know how to draw a Sanhedrin. But I am also learning there is always a river waiting for me, whenever I'm willing to stick my toe in, not a picture perfect looking river, but a muddy river of vulnerability and grace. A river for washing away the shame and letting in more love than I can even ask for or imagine. There is a river of love waiting for me. A river of love ready and waiting for us all.