As I have been writing in earlier entries about my recovery, my source of healing did not come on my own, in contrary, in came in part during my time at Hope Chapel Healdsburg. As I said, I was forcing myself to sit through the services at Hope Chapel Windsor (nothing against this church) when one day I had a full blown anxiety attack on the freeway and had to get off immediately and my car led me straight over to Hope Chapel Healdsburg. They recognized me immediately, knew a little bit about my suffering, and welcomed me as family. I felt welcomed and warmed, and for the first time in along time, was able to truly worship the Lord and hear from God. It was inspiring. In this, my recovery was not set out in isolation but with the family of God I found at this church. It was there that I met Red-Hot Renee. She wandered into church, any church, would do for her that day and met me. She knew she had to be in church that day and that was the one that God led her too, and led her to me. Wherever you are, Renee, I owe my a great deal of my healing and dedication to Jesus to your presence in my life.
A woman by the name of Irene Smith, from the book "The Feminine Side of God" inspires this entry today because it talks about her own recovery through prostitution and drug abuse to finding her value, her sense of self, and ultimately her Jesus. Her healing started out from an honest opinion of her brother who told her in my own paraphrase that she looked like crap. She immediately looked in the mirror and made a conscious decision to change. As she says, "I need to be totally quiet." As in my recovery, she says that she "had my cat a a loving companion and I knew that I had to get up when the sun got up and go to bed when the sun went down, and in between I just needed to be with me and nobody else."
She had her first divine experience with Jesus when she was detoxing the chemicals out of her body through her own self made sauna "Oh, Jesus," she recalls saying aloud as she watched the spray descending over her, "I can't believe this water is so beautiful. It is so beautiful." She said her prayer life started then. This is a kin to my experience of going to that Assembly of God church and coming out of there, crying out to Jesus and proclaiming my love for him, after days of telling him I hated him.
Also, like her, I went through years of suffering based on stuffing all my pain deep within myself, which was forced upon me by my dad's insistence that no emotion other than happiness ever express itself in our household. ( I think I remember him beating us if we cried, argued, or got upset.) Irene went through her own cathatris: "All the pain that had been stuffed down through long years of acquiescence and drug-induced denial began to surface in full force. Kicking and screaming and beating pillows, Irene began to release a lifetime's acumulation of fear, anger, and grief. During this process of release, she acquired the tools she would later use to help others open up the closed-off parts of themselves."
After I got in trouble for screaming at Karissa, Randy, and my students, I started screaming in my car. Although I would cry uncomtrollably afterwards and punish myself by biting myself for even showing the emotion of anger, I believe this was one of the healthiest outlet for me to do. No one heard me. It was a free time to just let it all out and looking back I thank God for those moments I had to freely express myself, and thank my friend with the name of the elite university for always pushing me to "feel my feelings".
One of the ways Irene felt healing was by truly feeling heard. Although we, humans, can try our best to learn skills to actively listen, in my opinion the only person who really heard me was God. Also, my good friends, Tony Fleisher and Will Richey were helpful in stirring me along the right path. Irene's step towards awakening came when she admitted aloud: "I'm a prostitute and I'm going to be a counselor."
She then went onto be a masseusse for those afflicted with the AIDS virus, the ones that we normally are afraid to touch. Last night at my healing and prayer night, the leader of the group was listening to a woman share about her pain. I noticed that he touched her shoulder when he was sharing what he had heard from her.
When someone touches you, you can feel the meaning behind it. When my own father touches me because of the years of physical and emotional abuse he has caused, I tense up and do not welcome it. But, when loving friends and my husband touch me, if I feel any pain, whether it be a back pain or a heart pain, a little bit of me unfolds. Touch can be the most powerful gift that we can give one another, within one's boundaries. From my own experience, its not necessarily a good thing to just go up and hug anyone you see on the street, but use discernment. People who refuse touch, especially when they are in immense pain, suffer the most.
Irene explains: "I had a deep need to do service and surrender myself to Jesus for my own healing and I also needed to prove to others, as well as myself, that I was good and kind. And I had a very deep need for love and affection that was not in any way connected with sex. I could go and sit down with these people who were terribly sick and hold and stroke them. Sometimes I would cry, I was very open and responsive. It's hard for most people to touch and hold those who are dying but I had learned to sit with others in pain during Elizabeth's workshops. I think the personal clearing I went through at that time gave overs the permission to expose their pain with me. Being touched in a loving way says "I care" and I so much wanted to feel the caring."
In my daily reading today, I read "For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self control." During my time in recovery, I decided to do some work in a Senior living home. I was afraid but saw past my fear to the need for those to receive the love and care that they may not otherwise receive. My experience was one of true blessing; I went in with this notion that I would somehow reach out to them with the gospel with words but maybe I did so with my heart and my actions; in any event, they did so with me. To put it all honestly, I relied on the Lord to give me the power to withstand my fear and to learn and love these individuals who so desparately needed it.
Bonhoeffer writes: "What Jesus really wants me to have is faith. But my faith is not necessarily tied up with riches or poverty or anything of that kind. We may be both poor and rich in the spirit. It is not important that I should have no possessions, but if I do I must keep them as though I had them not, in other words I must cultivate a spirit of inward detachment, so that my heart is not in my possessions. Jesus may have said: Sell thy goods, but he meant, "Do not let it be a matter of consequence to you that you have outward prosperity; rather keep your goods quietly, having them as if you had them not. Let not your heart be in your goods."
Well, dear readers, my challenge for myself today and for the rest of the week, is to reach out to someone and to truly touch them, whether physically or emotionally. In my profile, I say that my favorite thing is to "give gifts to my friends and family" and I truly do. I am sorry if this entry seems like a lecture of books and scriptures but I am merely inspired by these books and wish to share what I am learning from these texts...Use what you learn here, or forget all about it....But my heart wants to reach out, to touch, to serve, to pray, to change the world in my own quiet, gentle, and profound way...the way Jesus calls us to, I believe.
So, whatever you believe, whatever religion or belief structure you hold onto, I encourage you to "fan into flame the gift of God" given to you. Remember, reaching out maybe scary but we were not given a spirit of fear but of power and love and of self control.
God speed, dear friends and readers, and may the Holy Spirit rest upon you this evening.
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