Tag: jesus

A Soapbox on Anxiety

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

ANXIETY IS NOT A SIN.

Can we stop perpetuating this idea that experiencing anxiety means we are doing something wrong, whether unintentionally or knowingly? Can we stop labeling things like anxiety and depression as ungodly emotions?

I realize now that what I experienced as a child (and have continued to experience throughout my entire life) is anxiety—and whether this is a result of a neurological defect, a personality difference, something spiritual, or a combination of all three, I have no idea. Regardless, anxiety has been a life-long foe. Yet, I have watched the progression throughout my life.

As a child, my difficulty in social situations was merely labeled as ‘shyness’ and was always something I would outgrow. By the time I was a teenager, though, shyness was no longer something semi-cute—it became anxiety that caused meltdowns before and after social situations, that left me sitting quietly away from groups rather than interacting, that left me constantly on edge in relationships, that made me feel absolutely crazy. Suddenly, my internal chaos wasn’t so easily stuffed into a box of childhood shyness. In the realm of church, it was labeled wrong and sinful, and it meant I wasn’t trusting God and that I didn’t read my Bible enough and pray enough.

So please tell me: how is it that experiencing anxiety as a child is ‘acceptable’ to a degree and only mildly concerning, but when you turn 13, it becomes a sin? And when you are an adult, it becomes a sign that you aren’t actually a follower of Jesus? Church, we can do better. So much better.

Anxiety comes at me from all angles at any given moment. Back in August, I was standing in the grocery store getting milk, of all things, and in a moment, my heart was racing, and I couldn’t breathe. There was no imminent threat. My brain was just overwhelmed by the lights and the other people and not being safe at home, and the way that my body typically translates that overwhelm is into panic. Was I sinning in that moment? Was I disobeying God? Was I experiencing something ungodly? Or is it just a way that my brain chooses to respond in its most foundational, human form?

I could be washing dishes and the panic comes; or driving into church, and there’s the panic again. I could be making a grocery list or answering emails. It really doesn’t matter when or where. And, if we are talking socialization, most of my in-person conversations involve me stumbling over words, despite the fact that I teach English for a living, and trying to stay calm while my heart races. Over the last year, I have learned tools for better managing anxiety and for staring it in the face and not letting it win. But it’s still there, ya’ll. It’s still there.

Is this because I don’t trust God enough? Gosh, I’ve never trusted God more—I trust Him to see me through THIS. I trust Him that there’s better to come. I trust Him that HE IS GOOD. I trust Him that one day, He is going to redeem all of this and set me free. I trust Him that, no matter what happens this side of heaven, HE IS WITH ME. And I’ll be honest, anxiety has let me see a lot of God lately because when I have nothing to give, He shows up and does something I know I could never have done or orchestrated myself.

Could anxiety cause me to behave poorly? Sure. If my anxiety is under-managed or stuffed, it has caused me to lose my cool and say things to my children, my spouse, or a friend that are not kind. That is wrong. Anxiety can lead me to isolate, and that is not healthy. Anxiety has caused me to attempt to control situations or people, when I need to surrender those to the Lord. But, at its root, I don’t know how it is that we can continue to say that the experience of anxiety is sin, and that people who struggle with it are not strong enough Christians who don’t have enough faith.

I think sometimes we are afraid to let anxiety off the hook because then we might be giving people permission to use anxiety as an ‘excuse’ to behave poorly. But, we could do that with just about anything, right? Instead, I think that if we could acknowledge anxiety for what it is and give people who struggle in silence a voice, we could begin to step on the Enemy’s toes and find some victory in this. We would begin to see people who have been drowning in anxiety rise up with courage because they could believe that God still has a place and a purpose for them. We would begin to see chains broken and people set free because they’d realize that God is for them, not mad at them because their brains enjoy being chaotic.

There is so much to this conversation, and I am only getting started. I have gotten so many answers in the last year, answers that I have been searching for since I was in elementary school. What I know for sure is that we can’t keep generalizing the topic and bemoaning that “anxiety and depression are on the rise” (that’s a whole other soapbox which I vehemently disagree with); we can’t keep blaming things like screen time and social media; and we can keep offering ‘churchy’ answers, as if reading my Bible 10 more minutes a day would totally make this disappear. Dealing with anxiety from a healthy perspective is multi-faceted and requires a variety of tools and management plans to be successful.

Whether you are 7 or 37 or 77, if you have ever struggled with anxiety or continue to, please know that you are not broken, you are not worthless, and you are not beyond hope. On behalf of anyone who has ever told you that you are not a strong enough Christian or that something is deeply wrong with you or that you need to change in order to have a purposeful life, I am so very sorry. I’ll tell you what I’ve found this year because for the first time in EVER, I fully believe it: Friend who struggles with anxiety, GOD IS FOR YOU and HE HAS GOOD THINGS FOR YOU.

Knowing

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

It’s strange, isn’t it—how a smell can transport you back to a place, to a moment in time? For me, when the dampness of cool stone meets the resinous scent of old wood and mixes with the briskness of pine and spruce and fir, I am immediately transported to a hill in Pennsylvania, to the small spaces of a sturdy white chapel where I knew the presence of God.


In some ways, my experience with God up until that point had been fairly safe. I went to church multiple times per week, knew all of the Bible stories, and enjoyed winning the sword drills in Sunday school class. I loved Jesus and wanted nothing more than to follow Him, yet I wouldn’t say I had known Him in a way that was “real.” I think that type of knowing takes time for some people, maybe for most people—it certainly did for me. But I was eager and excited to know Jesus, the energy of youth exploding from my soul.


At the age of 12, I joined the youth group. Every summer thereafter, I made a several-hour journey across state borders and into tree-filled, steep-climbing hills where we stayed for four days in a century-old building lovingly called “The Castle.” Of course, the hours were filled with all of the fun that you can imagine a youth pastor having with 100+ kids. Some of the things we did were downright ridiculous, and if you’ve ever been on a youth retreat, you know that there were most definitely hot sauce, whipped cream, water balloons, and all manner of other strange things involved. I never remember having more fun than I had on those trips—and I’d do just about anything to wind back the clock and step foot into those weeks just one more time.


As much as I remember the games and fun and wild adventures we had in the hills of
Pennsylvania, what strikes me the most are two experiences of knowing—a knowing of God’s realness and bigness and nearness.


Apart from the mansion itself, up a gravely hill that worked your breath, though not to
complete exhaustion, to climb, there was this tiny, whitewashed chapel where we gathered on the final night, to worship Jesus. All of the other times, we gathered in the main hall to sit in plastic green chairs, plenty of space between us and fans spinning to keep the air cool. But on this final night, we—all 100+ of us, would squeeze into the weathered spaces of this somewhat tiny chapel, inching closer on the wooden benches to make space for every person. With the setting summer sun casting shadows through the long windows, we would hang on the Word of God, then stand, or kneel, or fall on our faces, as we sang.


I remember distinctly this one night, perhaps when I was 15, when we asked God to “let it
rain,” praying for His presence to fall on that place, for the Holy Spirit to meet us there. And the heavens opened, literally, rain pelting the roof and joining in with the chorus of our voices. And above it all, I heard my pastor, praying words I could not understand, over the souls of youth who wanted more of God, who wanted chains broken, who wanted to know the presence of the One we talked about in a way that could really change their lives.


Another night I remember specifically, instinctively, as if I am there right now, when one of our worship leaders was praying and—out of what felt like nowhere—spoke a word over one of the girls in the room, calling her by name. Although I knew this girl to a degree, I was fairly certain that she and the worship leader had probably never spoken more than a few words together; it wasn’t as if he knew her story. She had never even come on this retreat before. This was truly a moment when God reached down from heaven into her soul via the words and prayers of another person who knew nothing except to obey when God spoke.

But sometimes—oftentimes?–this experience of the God of Abraham and Issac and Jacob is often chalked up to passionate youth, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I had given up on knowing God in this way only a few years later, trading encounters with Jesus for a safe, Sunday-morning checklist. I put God into a box—I could pray when there was an illness or an injury, maybe write some inspiring Bible verses into my planner to feel motivated to get things done. But the rest of it? I was content—and I was afraid. I didn’t know what opening myself up to Jesus would require of me, and I really didn’t want to find out.


Until one day, I stepped foot into the walls of a church for the first time in five years, burned by people and totally strung out on the idea that God even cared a single iota about my life. With agenda in hand and a fortress around my heart, I encountered Jesus in the same way I remember encountering Him in the walls of that small, forest-hidden chapel. Though I didn’t welcome His presence as I did then—my heart beat with anger and distrust—He didn’t leave. He sat and stayed, welcoming my pain, my confusion, my questions, my doubt.


The Jesus I had loved so much almost twenty years before had not changed. But I had changed. I had traded my trust for realism and practicality, for disillusionment and coldness. I had built walls around my soul to protect myself and given Him only a small space where I could hold on to my ways while still asking for benefits. I had, at times, blamed God for being far away, though He had never gone anywhere. His desire for me to meet Him and encounter Him had been there all along, and as I look back, I can hear His whispers along the path—though I ignored them with force, busy and weary and wounded.


At fifteen, I had a lot to offer God—or so I thought. I had passion, at the least, and energy. I had dreams and goals and vision. But at the (not-so-old, I realize) age of 33, I was already tired, battle-worn and a wildly disillusioned. My passion had my smothered by the daily demands of life and my energy depleted from fighting mental illness. People had inflicted wounds on my soul that had me questioning everything I had ever known and believed.


But it wasn’t about people or passion all along. It was never about what I could bring or do or be for God. It was about a Savior who came to give life and life more abundantly, about His desire for us to know Him as Emmanuel—God with us. It was always, and will always be, about who He is and the work He wants to do, how He wants us to know Him in a way that goes far beyond a religious checklist. He never gives up on His pursuit of us—this fact alone brings me to my knees.


It’s strange, isn’t it—how you can walk into a building, knowing not a single soul, telling God that you don’t want to be there and don’t want to have anything to do with Him, and He can gently but powerful step foot into your soul in a way that changes you forever? It has been a year and a half since that moment, and I get the feeling that it will be a moment I will remember forever, just like I will remember those moments at the Castle forever.


When you encounter Jesus, there’s simply no way to forget it, and I mostly just find myself
hungry for more of these moments—I don’t want to settle for anything less anymore.

Layers

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

I think the realization that there was a tremendous lot of “stuff” lurking under the surface began the day I bumped the front corner of my car into the backside of another mom’s mini-van in the playground parking lot. I was knee-deep in parenting three little ones under the age of who knows what, absolutely exhausted, and totally terrified by the volcanic explosion of emotions that, looking back, I now see had been buried for a really long time. The anger was the most confusing and heartbreaking, and I felt more like a monster than a mother. I didn’t expect, though, to get out of my car and start sobbing and suffocating in front of a complete stranger who couldn’t understand why I was so incredibly shaken by leaving a small scrape on her already scraped up minivan. She joked about it with grace. But for me, there was a whole lot more going on.

It was only a scrape, I told myself. No big deal. But of course, what was going on inside of me went much deeper, and it festered. Sometimes, I seemed to be able to manage it, even to ignore it. Sometimes, I convinced myself that everything was fine. But then, suddenly, in moments that smacked painfully, the wound was ripped open again, and again.

With gaping wound last year, grasping at straws in every area of my life, I stepped onto the path of healing in full belief that all I needed help with was managing stress. A few changes to my schedule, some social outlets, a hobby, a few chiropractic adjustments, and maybe a few counseling sessions—that’s all I needed.

And while I suppose that stress was the first layer, I peeled that back and found a whole lot more . . . Year and years’ worth of undealt with stuff. I wasn’t at all shocked by the exhaustion I found, by the weight of the world, by the impossible burden of perfectionism I’d been carrying. I wasn’t really surprised by the resentment or by the frustration or even the anger. And although I was shaken by the anxiety and depression that continued to scream in my ear, I’d known them as (unnamed) foes for my entire life. I worked through some things, I saw a bit of growth. Maybe that was all I needed.

I have seen progress, but I KNOW there is more. So I’ve kept digging.

Goodness, I thought the healing process would be gentle. I thought it would feel so inviting, so rewarding. But really? I’m at this point where my arms are aching tired and I’m dripping in sweat. I’m dirty, my hair is a mess, and I’ve got bug bites that are driving me crazy (southern mosquitoes, y’all—they are the WORST). My excitement about the process has most definitely waned but I’ve dug up so much by this point that there is really no turning back. I’d do anything to just be inside reading a book and sipping iced coffee right now. But I’m out here in the unrelenting summer sun digging around anxiety and depression until the process makes me want to run away from the literal world.

While digging a few weeks ago, my shovel hit something hard, something that took the breath right out of me. I hit SHAME.

Just typing that word makes the tears sting my eyes.

I had thought shame was for people who had done something wrong or had something wrong done to them. I thought shame was for miserably poor people or for prostitutes. I thought shame was for drug addicts. I thought shame was for people who had been abused. I thought shame was for people who stole, for people who drank, for people who looked at inappropriate photos online.

But there I was, a church girl who grew up in a safe and loving environment, the girl who basically lived under a rock half of her life and still doesn’t know the popular music and is so hyper-sensitive that she can’t watch movies rated PG-13 without hiding behind a pillow. Yeah, that girl—drowning in shame that I had taken on for myself and shame that other people had poured on to me. And I realized that, quite the opposite, shame is an experience that anyone can have because shame says, “You are bad.” Shame says that there is something wrong with you, that you are an outcast, that you are worthless, that you are beyond repair, beyond hope, beyond love—because of some way that you are, some thing you have done, or some thing you have had done to you.

Shame is the Enemy’s tactic, and he can and will whisper it into the ear of anyone.

As I’ve peeled back the layers, I see shame woven through the threads of my life, shame that began when I was a young girl trying to make sense of my quiet personality, my tendency toward tears, my many irrational fears, and the dark crevices of my chaotic, overwhelming, and unpredictable mind; shame that has increased with every wave of depression, with every suicidal thought, with the people I reached out to in desperation who told me that I was in sin or that I wasn’t actually a Christian at all, with every attempt to get up earlier, pray harder, do more only to still be staring mental illness in the face. The shame has increased layer over layer and become mangled into a mess of anger and exhaustion all of which landed me on the precipice of hopelessness last year.

The pieces are starting to fit together, a little bit.

Studies of the brain show that it reacts to shame as if it is confronting physical danger. Shame evokes a physical response, a desire to run, a need to hide. Shame produces an exhausting race of self-preservation, a race against the potential of being exposed or the potential of hurting others. As Welch writes, “Shame has a natural affinity with self-protection and unbelief. It hides from others, feels undeserving of anything good, and believes it will contaminate whatever comes close.”1

As I look back, I see how I have furthered the distance between myself and the possibility of healing or freedom because of shame. I have built walls between myself and others but mostly between myself and God. In shame, I found myself asking, “Is there a place in the Kingdom of God for me?” If I’m only going to contaminate others and/or disappoint God, maybe walls a million miles high are the way to go. But although isolation may feel safe, it is actually the nightmare of shame – the realization that I am so broken, contaminated, and worthless that I am all alone.

Although so much is beginning to make sense, and I think maybe there are things that have been so dead inside of me that are starting to come alive, I know the process is ongoing. I’m currently, daily, taking a sledgehammer to those walls—and allowing Jesus to dismantle all of Shame’s lies. And I just want to say, at the moment, these three things:

  • Friends, if you are in a process of healing, of dealing with pain—keep going. I know it isn’t easy, I know it probably doesn’t look like what you thought it would or how you want it to, but it IS producing good things, maybe things that you don’t even know and likely things you can’t even imagine. Keep digging. Keep asking questions. Keep hanging on because GOD IS WORKING, and He isn’t finished with you yet.
  • If you are asking God for more, keep asking. Believe and speak this: “Jesus is far better than I think He is or could ever imagine.” I’m doing the same. I know it’s not easy, it doesn’t come naturally, and everything within us wants to protect ourselves by believing that really, God can’t be that good, and at the very least, He can’t be that good to me. But keep asking for the more because if nothing else, what I have seen this year, is that HE KEEPS SHOWING UP AND BLOWING MY MIND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, and I’m no longer chalking that up to random coincidence or good luck. He HEARS you and He SEES you.
  • If the experience of shame resonates with you, name it for yourself and speak it to someone you can trust. My pastor said to me recently, “The enemy’s power is dispelled when we don’t allow shame to isolate us.” Seek help, wisdom, counsel, and encouragement from people who will cover you and support you, and, most importantly, help you take that shame to the feet of Jesus, the One who can and will bring you the healing and hope you need.
Footnotes
  1. Welch, Edward T. Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness & Rejection. New Growth Press, 2012. p.137 ↩︎

This Is Faith

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

I have sat down to write so many times this week and grown incredibly frustrated—because I can’t give solid answers. Because everything I write comes out making no sense, like the swirling mass of thoughts in my brain. Because I can’t tie everything together nicely in the end.

As an English teacher for the better part of the last fifteen years, I have gotten really good at understanding the mechanics of a sound academic paper: there is a beginning with a clearly stated main idea (the ubiquitous thesis, anyone?); the middle portion of support and defense; and the end, in which all things are brought together in a way that creates a cohesive whole.

Exploratory writing about challenging topics seems to be quite the opposite, however, and I find myself spilling thousands of words onto the page and coming up, somehow still, with literally nothing.

I find that the best words and ideas also like to leap into my brain at 11 PM when I am supposed to be going to sleep—most definitely not helpful. And somehow, those wonderfully worded sentences I worked out on my pillow are nowhere to be found when I sit at my laptop the following day. Then, my brain is blank. My fingers fly but very little of it makes sense, nothing works together in a way that screams “blog post” or “book chapter,” and I’ve got no nice sentiment to top the whole thing off.

It just feels like a mess . . .

I think there is this very weird thing about walking out healing in real time. I am not writing from a place that I can say, “This is all in the past, and I don’t struggle anymore. If you follow my twelve-step program, you too can be free.” I am writing from a place of war and a place of deep faith.

But that brings up a whole other point, this whole topic of faith. There seems to be this idea that real faith is something that eliminates struggle, grief, tiredness . . . and most definitely doubt. I can’t count the number of times I have been informed that depression is a lack of faith, that anxiety means I don’t trust God enough. Au contraire, faith is defined as trust, hope, reliance, dependence—and those are all things I actually need to stare depression and anxiety in the face on the daily.

I guess I wish I could say that I had this permanently optimistic type of faith that says, “I believe God can do anything, and I am so happy all the time, and I never struggle.” Conversely, my faith is more like a “death grip until my hands are raw and bleeding.” (So lovely, right?) It is the kind of faith that produces desperate reliance on God because He is my literal only hope, and I am counting on Him to come through because I’ve got nothing else.

Is it just me or is that type of faith not very marketable? That type of faith doesn’t sell books or programs or churches. That type of faith sounds hard and really, rather, quite uncomfortable. We like to talk about the kind of faith that gives us energy and motivation; we like to talk about faith in terms of “positive vibes.” We don’t like to talk about the kind of faith we must have when there is no energy or motivation left, when all the positive thinking in the world doesn’t make a difference in the reality of suffering or grief, in the ache of longing for how God intended life to be.

But if this isn’t faith, then what is? Is faith only this idea that if we trust God, we won’t suffer? Is faith, “I trust God, so of course, I don’t struggle”? Or is faith, “I trust God even when I do struggle.” I am finding it difficult to articulate my thoughts on the subject, but let me say this: I trust God that no matter how much my brain screams at me about my worthlessness that His Word says that He is for me, that He loves me, that He sings over me. I trust God that no matter how dark the day or how hard I find it to breathe that He promises He will never leave me nor forsake me. I trust God that at the end of this road of humanity, heaven is waiting for me, and that one day, I will be made whole—body, mind, and soul.

But this trust, this faith—it doesn’t come easily. It’s a daily war, of reminding myself of what is true. It is being willing to get up every day and fight. I think if we are all willing to be honest, following God in the long haul requires a deep sense of faith, and not the kind that sells t-shirts and coffee mugs.

My confidence is in a God who shows up in the literal trenches, not in the absence of trenches. My faith is in a God who shows up when things are a mess not once I’ve cleaned up all of the mess. My hope is in a God who is bigger than the brokenness of the world, of your body, of my mind, not in a God who we can only say is bigger when everything is going well.

Like I said, there’s no way to tie this up because this is an ongoing process for me. I realize that part of the reason I have ignored writing for so long is because I have known how messy the process is and how much I cannot offer pithy answers. I cannot pretend like I have it all figured out. For a long time, ignoring has been easier than writing, easier than digging, easier than feeling anything, easier than staring sorrow in the face. But I feel this urge, this need to write—for myself, and for the people who wake up each day to a battle and are convinced that it is because they lack faith.

If you’re in the trenches, for whatever reasons that is, know that I am there too. And more, know that God is there with you. He sees you. He doesn’t condemn you. He doesn’t belittle you. He doesn’t call you weak or worthless or faithless. In fact, He meets you there. He fights for you. He gives strength when you have nothing left. He binds your wounds. He heals your soul. He covers you, protects you, comforts you.

He is for you. He is with you. He goes before you and behind you. He surrounds you. He is faithful. He is good. He is kind. His promises are yes and amen.

I’m preaching to myself. This is faith.