I often write about Compassion International, a children’s aid non-profit that is doing amazing work in third world countries around the globe.  Compassion aids 65,000 children in the country of Haiti alone.  Around 6,400 of those children are in the epicenter of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince.

If, like me, you are feeling hopeless in the middle of this disaster and want to get involved, please consider Compassion.  All funds raised in response to the Haiti earthquake will be used immediately to reequip Compassion’s local support structure and to provide for the immediate needs of Compassion-assisted children and families.

Whatever you do, please get involved somehow.  Sure, our country is in an economic crisis.  However, even the poorest of us in this great nation still have so much more in comparison.  Please give and even more importantly – please pray.

Read the Compassion Blog here: http://blog.compassion.com/tag/haiti/ 

Unfortunately, today I heard the type of cry that makes a mother’s heart stop dead in her chest.  A bone chilling scream echoed from the bedroom and when I charged through the doorway the first thing to catch my eye was blood pouring from my little boy’s side.  Thankfully, the wound was not severe enough for stitches, but as I assured him earlier, “It’s gonna leave a really cool scar!”

On my right knee I carry a scar from a bicycle accident in the fourth grade. The skin was ripped open in three different sections and tiny bits of gravel and sand were jammed underneath the surface of my flesh.  The doctor gave me a cream – I don’t remember what it was, but I hope the FDA has outlawed it – that, I swear, melted the scabs off every time they tried to form.  It was like bathing in battery acid.  I also spent the next week at summer camp on crutches.  Twenty years later, when I look at the purplish discoloration just below my kneecap I don’t remember falling of the bike – I remember the battery acid and my bruised armpits from the crutches.

Isn’t that often the case with scars?  The healing process is usually more memorable than the initial injury.  It certainly takes longer and is generally more painful.

I consider the many scars I have that are unseen.  The deep gashes left in my heart, my soul and spirit from choices I’ve made in my life.  Bad decisions are easy.  They are usually quick and even, initially, painless.  It’s the recovery from them that is so bitterly agonizing.  You never forget the moment when you recognize the villain as the face in the mirror.  When you realize that you have failed, you have wounded those that you love, and that your own pain is caused by your own hand. 

My scars show themselves in my relationships, in my hesitations about my future, and certainly in my parenting.  However, I am learning to remind myself that they are just scars.  The pain is gone.  The wound is healed.  All has been forgiven.  They scars are not eternal penance for my sins, but simply a reminder to never turn back. 

I’ve also learned that the right decision is almost always the more difficult one to make.  It’s usually not the one that you think you want.  On the bright side though, the right decision doesn’t lead to daily doses of battery acid on wounds – and that, my friends, is worth avoiding at all cost.

“No honey; you have nothing to worry about,” I sort of lied. I do believe that spirits roam this earth – call me crazy if you wish – but I didn’t want to divulge this belief to an incomprehensible kindergartner just before bed time.

Why do I believe in spirits? Because I’ve seen them at work. Here’s a true and truly spooky story for you. Happy Halloween!

When I was eighteen I spent nine months in a Christ-centered drug rehabilitation center in Nashville. Just before I was ready to graduate from the program a new woman was admitted into the home under what we were told were “emergency circumstances”. My roommate had recently left the program and after some verbal preparation from the staff members, the new girl, whom I will refer to as “Reagan” from the Exorcist, was given the spare bed in my room.

Reagan was thirty two years old, much older than all of the other girls in the home. She was tall and slender with skin reminiscent of rice paper and fiery red hair that needed a generous dose of conditioner and good brush. From the first glimpse I caught of her, her crystal blue eyes were wide with terror as if she were stuck in the climax scene from a Wes Craven horror flick. Her left leg was secured in a walking cast and her hands were rigid and clenched in a way that I was sure her nails drew blood from her palms.

“I threw myself down some stairs,” she whispered to me, nodding to her broken leg as we sat on our opposing beds the first night of her stay.

“Really?” I asked watching her clasp a hand around her elbow and rock slightly.

“I was supposed to break my neck,” she added. “I was supposed to break my neck.”

Despite my apprehension, when it was time for lights out, I fell asleep peacefully knowing securely in my faith that no harm could come to me. Around two a.m. I was awakened by a strange sound. I sat up in my bed and by the moonlight I could see that Reagan’s bed was empty. A quiet tearing noise was coming from somewhere unseen in the dimly lit room. I rose up out of bed and slowly padded across the room toward the sound. In the corner between her bed and the wall, Reagan was curled into the fetal position not facing me. The tearing noise was coming from her ripping her red hair out with her hands.

Reagan spent the next day with a team of counselors and psychologists. As we prepared for a second night in our shared room, she confided in me that before “everything started happening” she was some kind of social worker with juvenile sex offenders. I can only imagine what kind of evil she had been exposed to.

Once again, I fell asleep easily only to be awakened in the early hours of the morning. Through the darkness I saw Reagan walking toward the door to the hallway. “Where are you going?” I asked startling her.

She whirled around in her white flowing nightgown (which was eerie all by itself). “What did he say to you?!” she screamed at me. “He’s here! He’s here!”

Oh. My. God.

At this point I started quoting every freaking Bible verse I could think of. She was hysterical and shaking uncontrollably. Thankfully, the night staff was right next door to us since Reagan was positioned between me and the door. They rushed and in and took her out of my room.

The next day Reagan left in the back of a patrol car. She was too much of a threat to herself and to the rest of the residents to stay in the house. I imagine that she was properly escorted to a padded room somewhere and rightfully so. I don’t know whatever became of her.

Looking in her eyes, I knew that what I was seeing was NOT schizophrenia in action – it was someone very evil staring back at me. It made me wonder how many people locked away on psych floors will never been fixed by modern medicine.

Now I’m going to have to try and go to sleep.

Do you have a spooky story that has happened to you???

Happy Halloween friends!

A year ago, I began visiting my sister’s church.  It’s a protestant non-denominational congregation that meets in an old retired convent.  Apparently, this pastor skipped class the day that his seminary covered the rulebook for organized Southern religion.  It is unlike any other church I have ever been a part of.  There is no elaborate production to their worship.  No one stands on a stage to perform.  Instead of expensive stained glass artwork there is a simple cross made of drift wood that hangs on the wall.  Each prayer request is called out loud and new visitors receive a handwritten card in the mail.  This, to me, is church done well.

Yesterday, I noticed for the first time that they do not collect an offering.  There is a non-descriptive box by the door for collecting donations.  I’ve worked in the church world for ten years, so I know how important the offering is.  If the congregation doesn’t give, the lights get turned off, VBS doesn’t happen, and the staff members don’t get paid.  Some churches overdo the offertory and people quickly become jaded by church leaders “beating the sheep” to receive donations, as the pastor said yesterday.  Their philosophy is based off of 2 Corinthians 2:7, “So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.”

I believe that everyone should donate to something, whether it is church work, world relief or a children’s hospital.  Donating encourages a healthy perspective on money and allows us to feel like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.  In 2008, despite the economic crisis, Americans gave more than $307 billion dollars to charities.  Based on that fact alone, I don’t think our great nation is going to fall apart just yet.  We still have a lot of heart left – and heart will carry you a long way.

For where your treasure is… there your heart will be also.
Where is YOUR heart?

Want to get involved but don’t know how?  Here’s a ministry I proudly support and highly recommend.

This year has challenged many things about my existence: my faith, self-worth, capability to forgive, capacity to love and ability to survive. I’m sure that my writings often appear a little schizophrenic. Well, to tell you the truth, maybe they are. I feel like a walking contradiction most of the time.

In an effort to “live honestly” here are some conclusions about myself that I am able to own today:

FAITH
I believe the Bible. I believe in a Savior named Jesus who came to Earth, died on a cross, and rose from the dead to mend the chasm between me and the Father. I don’t understand it; I’ll even admit that the entire concept often sounds COO-KOO when I try to reason it out, but I choose to believe despite my doubts. I believe that God gave me a brain to question, reason and challenge even Him. I believe He is a God capable of accepting me as wildly imperfect as I am. I do not claim to be better than anyone for I am the epitome of fallible. The term “Christian” has become profane in modern America. I have worked in the Christian church for ten years and I can’t say that the bad taste left by the word is 100% unmerited. The church is broken because it is filled with a broken people. I do not subscribe to lip-serviced, religion-imposed behavior modification. I believe the simple truth that because I walk with a faithful God, to whom I am often unfaithful, I am being made perfect in His time. That the good work He began in me He will be faithful to complete. I do not preach; I live. Whether my life example is an admiration or a disgrace to “Christians” everywhere, it is honest.

LOVE
Have I ever been in love? Well, I don’t know. That’s a difficult admission to make since I have been married and in more relationships than I can count. I believe that there is a difference between love and in-love. I’ve loved many and I’ve loved well. I’ve meant it every time I’ve uttered those three little words, because love comes easily for me. I am accepting and forgiving, believing the best in people even after they’ve proved otherwise. At nearly 28 years old, I believe I am finally learning that being In-Love is not a fairy tale. In-Love, much like faith, doesn’t just happen. In-Love means taking a risk on the uncertain. By nature, uncertainty makes me fearful and that fear hinders me from taking risk. I finally own this area of jacked-upness and take responsibility for it. The next time I say “I love you” I will never have to wonder how I mean it.

LIFE
To those who say, “I have no regrets”… I call bullshit. We can gloss it over all day long that “we are who we are because of the mistakes we’ve made and we will never regret anything.” If that helps you sleep better at night, then more power to ya. I will never be grateful for the pain I’ve caused others. I regret the horrible things I did to my family when I was young and stupid. I regret their sleepless nights, worry, lack of safety, emotional anguish and every hateful word they had to hear from my lips. I regret not understanding matrimony before I said “I Do” and being part of setting my marriage up for failure. I regret not answering my husband’s phone call the morning he died – whether or not he actually called me or the phone dialed my number during the crash. I am learning to own my regrets, not to be controlled by them but to be better IN SPITE of them.

OWN IT. LIVE HONESTLY.

Be daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burnt in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony you are.
– Brennan Manning

Tap! Tap! Tap!

For those of you who don’t know, I am an avid reader. Over the decades, my taste for literature has gone through all kinds of phases. There was the Anne Rice obsession, the historical European fiction addiction, the chick-lit romance year and of course, the Harry Potter lifestyle (yes, I said lifestyle). I can get hooked on just about any genre from Romance to Horror, Self-Help to Fantasy. I do not discriminate on the playground of Barnes and Noble.

The same goes for movies. While scary movies, as we’ve already covered, scare the BEGEEZUS out of me, I do enjoy most everything else. I can even respect (from an eyes closed position) some of the horror ones, as long as I don’t have to sleep alone after watching them. J

I enjoy reading a lot of material that is deemed religiously inappropriate in a lot of my circles of influence. I am no stranger to being “one of questionable judgment” when it comes to books and movies. I guess it all began when I wrote my senior research paper on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is still, in my opinion, an excellent novel. While I understand and agree with a lot of the points made by the church against such writings, I’m still amazed at the amount of religious fanaticism that goes into deeming books and films as “evil”.

My earliest memory of this witch hunt behavior was probably the whole “Boycott Disney” thing. Anyone else remember that? I was still in the Southern Baptist ring during that time and until some overzealous adult pointed it out, I HAD NO IDEA that there was a penis on the cover of my Little Mermaid VHS! While I do not condone the inappropriateness of such oversights, I do believe they were oversights. I’ve worked with jokers like the ones I’m sure were in the drawing room that day. I imagine the conversation went something like this, “Dude, we should put a $*(% on the cover of the Mermaid movie and see how long it takes someone to see it!” Whatever the reason was behind all that scandal is really irrelevant. The fact of the matter is I would’ve been better off to have not ever noticed the cover. The Little Mermaid is still my favorite Disney movie to date and I do not blame it or Alladin for any sexual experiences I may (or may not) have participated in over the years.

Book burnings, picket lines, anti-whatever parades, blogging rants… it’s all the same thing. It’s hype and it’s publicity and in extreme cases such as depicted below, it’s ignorant.

Harry Potter book burning in New Mexico. (tear)

I pose this thought. If our eyes are so bent on finding evil under every stone, isn’t the devil winning? Surely our sights are on him and not where they should be and isn’t that exactly what he wants?

I will not advocate for anyone to go against their religious convictions and ride down the Harry Potter or Twilight trail with me. However, I don’t believe the devil is going to be any more or less interested in me because I happen to appreciate excellent literature.

Now, if I start filing my teeth into points and drinking TruBlood, feel free to say, “I told you so!”

My journey has covered a lot of ground in my 26 (almost 27) years. Next month will be the 9 year anniversary of a really difficult time in my life. The tragic state I was in was admittedly self-induced by a lot of poor decision making on my part. It’s the same old story… “I was a good kid, from a good Christian family that got mixed in with the wrong crowd… blah… blah… blah.” What should’ve been one of the best years of my life was actually one of the lowest times I’ve ever experienced. While most of the rest of my graduating class was preparing for college I was living it up in a fine establishment called Bent Creek (my NC fan club will recognize this). Bent Creek is part of the national forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. My friends and I “lived” there for nearly a year… most of which I don’t remember due to high amounts of LSD and THC pumping through my bloodstream. In a nutshell, we got busted with our friend, Sweet Mary Jane on federal property. It wasn’t much, but to our surprise ANY amount of illegal substance in a national forest is a FELONY. Happy birthday to me. My boyfriend (at the time) took the rap for it and was carted off to big house. A few days later came the news that would bring me to my first major “bend in the road”. I was pregnant.

We’ve already established that I was raised in the Southern Baptist church. If you’ve ever known a Southern Baptist during an election year you know that our moral sun rises and sets around the abolishment of abortion… among other valid but pointless arguments. Therefore, abortion was the sin I couldn’t commit. Drug abuse, lying, stealing… I was ok with at the time, but when that little blue world-altering line appeared I knew that I had created a life and therefore I would not let myself end it.

My parents had at some point read some book called “Tough Love” (or something like that) and had basically closed the door to me. They told me not to call, come to visit, or try to contact them in any way until I was ready to get help. When I was finally ready, I picked up the phone to make that call and they were waiting on the other end of the line. Less than four weeks later I was on my way to Mercy Ministries in Nashville. Mercy is a free of charge home for girls dealing with everything from pregnancy (me), drug addiction (me), eating disorders (yep, me again) and anything else damaging that you can imagine. It’s a Christ based treatment program that I liked to refer to as “The God Bubble”. They take girls out of the world, but them in a Jesus-cocoon and nurse them back to health.

I was there out of obligation to this unborn child I was carrying and that was it. You can imagine what the next “bend in the road” felt like when I miscarried my only reason for saving myself. It was insane to me how losing a child that I didn’t even want could be so devastating. As I lay in the hospital I knew that my time in Nashville had come to an end and it was time to go home and finish destroying myself. My parents cried when I told them I wanted to leave because they knew that certain death awaited me. Now, I’m not sure what happened to me while I was under anesthesia that day in the operating room…. I like to believe that it was angels or whispers from God while I slept, but when I woke up I had a newfound hope that life was going to go on. Seven months later, I graduated from Mercy.

What does this story have to do with my dining room “non-art”? I named that baby Journey in the days before he/she died and I found the framed quote shortly after giving birth to my daughter almost five years ago.

Lately, my days seem to be laced with bend after bend after bend. But every morning I am reminded that “The bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you refuse to take the turn.”
Mercy Ministries is celebrating 25 years of changing lives this year. For more information visit www.mercyministries.com

The letter to the Colossians says to “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth”. The letter to the Philippians goes on to tell us “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy–meditate on these things…. Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Granted, these passages of scripture I’m sure could be exegeted out to mean something entirely different than the point I’m trying to make here. (I’m sorry to my Veritas scholar friend, as I am sure the word “exegeted” doesn’t actually exist.) Anyhow, I think that these truths were recorded to remind us that God has given us all the tools that we need to be in control of our emotions, our bodies and our minds.

Sometimes we need a little push in the right direction. I’m all in favor of “happy pills” (see previous blog), counselors, friends, psychotherapists, and obviously blogging out all your feelings to the cyber-world. But when it comes down to it at the end of the day… you and only you are responsible for how life has effected your day.

It is now time for my happy pill and a hot bubble bath. Goodnight friends!

Today on our ride home Moira was trying to teach Canaan the latest song she learned at church. Some of you might know the song from children’s church. It goes “Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Hallelujah – Praise Ye the Lord!”

Canaan and Moira were in the far backseat of the van. Moira was bobbing her head and singing, “Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Lu, Praise Gee the Lord!” over and over and over and over again.
Moira asked Canaan, “Do you want to sing with me? It goes Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Lu, Praise Gee the Lord!”

Moira started the song and it was Canaan’s job to finish.

Moira began, “Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu LU!”

Canaan sang, “Praise Jesus the Lord!”

Moira stopped and started shaking her head. “No, Canaan. It’s Praise GEE the Lord!”

Canaan tried again. “Praise GEEsus the Lord!

“Ugh! No Canaan!” Moira said. “Praise Gee the Lord!”Moira started again. “Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu Hallelu LU!”

Canaan was now determined to get it right. She shouted, “Praise GEE!sus the Lord!”

“No Canaan!” Moira shouts. “Not Jesus! It’s Praise GEE the Lord!”

Canaan just looks at her open mouthed for a moment, then turns to her window and sings, “Hey Hey You You! I don’t like your girlfriend!”

I about died.