God and Disabilties

The challenge begins....again

So as you are all very aware, I have been blogging sporadically about my on going weight loss drama. I haven't blogged about it in ages mainly because I pretty much gave up entirely.

That's right, I gave up!

Did. Not. Care. Anymore.

And it showed it my eating and exercising. I did a lot of one and not a lot of the other. I will leave it up to you to determine which is which.

I hadn't lost any weight previous to this but if I had I would have put all of it back on again. It was a few weeks of not giving a stuff.

Because I was tired. Tired of fighting against my own body. Tired of looking in the mirror and not seeing what I felt in my head. Tired of seeing photos of myself and being shocked at what I looked like. I was tired of feeling like I was meant to love myself and then simultaneously meant to want to change everything about me. I was tired of being worried and upset.

So I didn't think about it.

And then I went to the doctor. 

Well let me tell you, when it comes to weightloss the system is out to make you feel awful about yourself.

The BMI - body mass index - is now fondly referred to in my mind as the BSI - bullshit index. Apparently I am morbidly obese. I am the walking dead people. No more emancipated zombies, the real zombies are fat and coming to eat you and everything else in sight! There will be survivors, anyone who can run will be able to outwit these undead, but if we catch you we will sit on you and then you won't run anymore will you!?

Not only am I now a zombie but I also should only weigh 53kgs! I have never weighed that in my life! Who decided that was normal! I mean, I would understand 70 but 50!? Come on! They are just asking me to fail!

And when they do weigh you they don't just put you on a normal scale. Oh no, they have to put you on the industrial sized, steel reinforced, elephant weigh machine. You just look at it and it screams 'fatty!' at you. It's register has so many zeros it wouldn't be humanly possible to fill all the scale counter spaces. It is a device created to dehumanize anyone who touches it, let alone steps onto it. No maintaining you are pretty and delicate when they pull that thing out for you.

After the ordeal of being compared to a hippopotamus they then tell you that you need to lose weight. "do I?" you gasp, incredulous that such a thing could have snuck up on you unnoticed. They then assure you that yes, you are the equivalent of a zombie mammoth, and that you need to do something about it. At this point you are biting back replies of the things you HAVE been doing because, deep down, you know they won't really believe you, and listen to their advice.

Their advice? The best bit.

Go to the gym

Join weight watchers

Make sure you feel hungry all the time.

Let me address the last one first. As someone. Who has had issues with eating disorders in the past I am not a fan of starving yourself in order to get skinny. Not ok with that, weight watchers isn't ok with that, can't believe a doctor told me this.

The other two require something I don't have.....MONEY.

All weight loss solutions are aimed at those that are rich. When was the last time you saw a rich fat person? Never, because they can afford the freaking solutions!

Why is it that weight is such an economic issue? Because bad food is cheap, good food is expensive, and any support losing weight is expensive. WW costs $50 a month! I am bloody student! The gym is $20 a week, pluss the food needed to eat well.

And I know it costs nothing to go for a walk, but when you have the hurdles I have to overcome, support is necessary! I cant do this alone. And I shouldn't have to just because I am poor.

So my mother in law, bless her heart, and I have come up with a new idea. 10 weeks to lose 10 kilos. In that time she will put aside $10 a week to go towards buying me something if I achieve my goal. This is a win win, she loves buying me things, I love getting things, everyone is happy. But more importantly, it gives me a erroneous to get off my ass. It also gives me someone else to talk to and be accountable to.

If you are going through this same process it is vital that you have people surrounding you who are cheering you on and who you can be honest with about your failings, temptations and triumphs. You can do this but not on your own.

Keep it up, wee can do this!

Warrior God vs Prince of Peace

God vs Evolution: a small mind map

Theology, Disability and the People of God.

For the last three days, from 9am til 9pm, I have been at a conference. It was held at Carey Baptist College (in conjunction with Laidlaw College) and was focused on Theology, Disability and the People of God. The two international keynote speakers were Professor John Swinton from Aberdeen University, and Professor Amos Yong from Regent University.

There are so many reflections that I want to make that I am not sure where to start! My overall impression of the conference was that it was wonderful. It was unlike any conference I have ever been to. There were people from all professions, Christian and secular, of both genders, many races, and of varying degrees of ability and disability. They were all given a voice through the variety of speakers and were all celebrated and embraced in a way that was truly moving and inspiring. It was a total contrast to the usual boring theological conferences I have attended.

I was privileged to be able to spend a substantial amount of time with Professor Swinton. He is a Jamaican Scot with a loving personality and a wicked sense of humour. Within a couple of hours of meeting each other we were joking and poking fun. I very rarely meet people I instantly connect with but this was one of those moments. He has a background in mental health nursing and has a phenomenal intellect and interest in all things theological. His work in theology and disability is profound and deeply moving and challenging. It was many of his words that stuck with me throughout the conference and shaped the way that I viewed and considered what I was hearing.

The entire conference was about challenging our views of what we believe disability is and how people with disability are treated in the church. The personal stories that came out in the talks were amusing, harrowing and confronting. A statement that particularly impacted me came from a man in a wheelchair who thanked the college for installing ramps for access. He said that this simple gesture was the gospel to him. I had never thought of it that way before. I am thinking now about my church's worship spaces and whether or not they are accessible to ALL people. I think it isn't just whether or not there are wheelchairs in your congregation already, but the need for churches to be wheelchair friendly from the assumption that people in wheelchairs are in their communities and so therefore will at some point come to the church (if we are doing our jobs properly!!).

Another thing that really challenged me was the idea around carer. I often approach people with disabilities as a 'carer' that is going to take care of the person who obviously needs help. I had never considered letting them be the host and me the guest, or letting them care for me. I had never thought that the gifts of the Spirit are as applicable to them as to me. I had made people with disabilities the 'other' and covering up through charity. I have been moved and convicted in the idea that charity is still continuing the thought that these people are 'less than' and not 'equal to'.

I have cried a lot the last three days. I have been moved by the bravery and love that I have seen exhibited. I have been overwhelmed by the response I got to my own paper (see previous post). I have made connections with people on ministries that I never knew existed. And I have seen God in the face of so many people who have been rejected and cast aside. 

I may reflect on this further during the week but I am still processing all the things that were said. 

At this moment, I am moved beyond words.

The Silence Surrounding Psych Wards

Just today I presented a paper at the conference for Theology, Disability and the People of God. I shared my story of my experience with mental illness and used that as a framework for working with people with mental illness. I have shared my paper below. Feel free to share this and pass on to educate others in this area. Blessings

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Today I am here to talk to you about the impact of mental illness and the importance of the church community in the healing and restoration of people who suffer from these illnesses.

10 years ago I was diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia, an illness that usually besets someone in their 30's that I started experiencing at age 12. The diagnosis was given when I was 19, just after I had got married, and by then it had been seven years of mental health issues with little help or understanding. For all my teenage years I had struggled with extreme depression, self harming, eating disorders, and audible and visual hallucinations. In some ways it was a relief to finally be told what was wrong with me, and in others it felt like a death sentence. I had been labelled as incurable. For 5 years after my diagnosis I was placed on medication after medication, I was kept in psych wards for varying stretches of time, my every action was viewed through the symptoms of my illness. I was told the damage in my brain was irreversible, would get worse as I aged and I would be a permanent mental health patient. There was no hope for me, my family or my new marriage.

While in the wards I was exposed to people and behaviours that, in my early twenties, I was completely unprepared for. I watched a heavily pregnant woman attack staff and have a fire hose turned on her in an effort to control her. I heard the same lady describe her unborn child as a demon. In reality it was her fathers. I listened to a woman for hours tell me how the skin on her face was falling off. I met a 17 year old boy who was dropped off by his parents for suicidal behaviour. He remained there for a week with no visitors. I was verbally abused by a man who thought I was his mother, and I was confronted by nurses who were in equal measure compassionate and careworn. When not in the psych ward I was a daily visitor at the day ward with other mental health patients in the community. Though this was a much more pleasant environment I was surrounded by people I did not know, that were usually much older than me, and by community workers who were understaffed and overworked.

Eventually my illness took its toll on my loved ones and my marriage fell apart 3 years after it had started. My mother had to quit her job to become my full time carer. She had to wake me up, make me shower, take me for walks, and made all my food so I ate well. We were all told that this would be a life long sentence. There was no hope for recovery. Despite my mothers care, my mental health continued to deteriorate and I lived only for my chance to die. My family described me at that time as a zombie with no purpose or care for my life.

It is with this experience that I speak to you today.

I find that when I speak of my experiences with mental illness I am met with 1 of four reactions by the listeners.

The first is ambivalence. These listeners cannot relate, or don't know how to, and so are quick to change the subject and to move out of the area of a topic of which they have no understanding. They may think that mental illness is “all in your head” and something that can be changed by will power, or they may simply have no interest in the matter.

The second reaction is nervousness and confusion. These listeners mean well but simply do not comprehend what mental illness is or how to respond to it. They may look at you like you are about to pull out a gun and start a rampage, or they may ask to pray for you to release you from the demonic stronghold over your life. These are the listeners that will offer to pray for you but end up lost for words as they become confused as to what to pray for. They often super-spiritualize your experience in order to bring the conversation into a language that they understand.

The third group is perhaps the most interesting of reactions. They are the group that leans forward with eyes shining lapping up every word. When you have finished speaking they will say things like “that is so cool” and ask questions like “so, you could actually see people that weren't there? Was that freaky and what did they look like?” They are curiously excited by what is being said and can ask insensitive questions about experiences in the psych wards. They will also be the ones most likely to call people with mental illness 'crazy' or 'psycho'. They also tend to be under the age of 30.

The fourth group is the minority. They are the listeners who will find you alone later, share their own experiences, cry and pray with you. They usually have had an experience with mental illness and have genuine compassion for what you have been through. But these listeners are few and far between.

Unfortunately mental illnesses have stigmas attached to them that cause reactions of fear, disinterest, and wariness. People buy into the stigma that schizophrenics, and other mental health patients, are WORTHLESS, DIRTY, INSINCERE, DELICATE, SLOW, TENSE, WEAK, FOOLISH, INCOMPETENT, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIONS, DANGEROUSLY VIOLENT and UNPREDICTABLE. It is my experience that these stigmas are found just as much within the church as from without, but with the added labels of LACK OF FAITH, DEMON POSSESSED, and ANGRY. With these labels it is easy to understand why mental health patients find it hard to contribute in a world where the stigma of your illness is often worse than the illness itself. It is also easy to understand why mental health patients often talk of feeling isolated and rejected by their communities and churches.

The simple fact of the matter is, people do not know how to respond to mental illness.

Mental illness are two words that create a lot of confusion as they encompass a plethora of issues from emotional depression through to full blown psychosis that requires institutionalization. There are also very few mental illnesses that are truly understood, even by the medical profession, and this leads to misunderstanding, fear and isolation within families and communities.

Diagnosis of a mental illness creates greater issues for the patient than suffering the illness alone. Diagnosis locates the illness entirely with the individual, apart from their family and environment. It claims that there is something 'wrong' with the person that defines them as outside the acceptable 'norm'. This reduces hope of recovery, creates stigma from labelling, and turns a person into a category.

Currently in NZ today it is estimated that 1 in 4 people will suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives. It is estimated that 38% of europeans, 62% of Maori, 59% of asians, and 59% of pacific islanders will be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia, in their life time.[1]

Despite a quarter of the population having experienced one mental illness or another at some point in their lives, it seems to be a human issue that we cannot comprehend or relate to, a suffering that cannot be physically manifested. People will react out of fear and amusement, but very rarely out of genuine compassion.

And this is true of the church as well.

I was healed 6 years ago. Some ladies from the prayer group at church answered my mothers cry for help and started a chain of events that means I am able to stand before you today and speak for those that often have no voice. In the last six years I have had to relearn social cues and behaviours, get use to being on my own with no other voices to keep me company, try to reclaim what of my memories are true events and what were hallucinations, and to survive on my own outside of my family's care.

I carry with me the memories of people who have not been as fortunate as I. The haunted eyes of the lady that believed the baby in her womb was a demon. The dead eyes of the man that received shock therapy at age 8 and has been institutionalized ever since. The fear in the eyes of the lady who believed the skin on her face was melting off. The sadness in the eyes of the young teenager with suicidal tendencies. I remember the sadness, fear, anger and finally hate in the eyes of my ex-husband who received no support and who lost all hope.

I hold in my heart the conversations I had with the other patients about being forgotten, rejected, hated by our communities. I remember the questions I received when I told the other patients I was a Christian as to why no one in my church came to visit me in the ward. I remember the loneliness each one of us had wrapped around us like a blanket.

Jesus is a friend to the broken.

I believe this with all of my heart. Yet is it so difficult to befriend a person who doesn't speak sense, who may not even notice your existence while you sit with them, who can act in a way that seems barely human sometimes.

 

Yet Jesus is a friend to these broken.

Often these people who hear and see things very differently from us don’t suffer beause of their own psychosis. They suffer at the hands of people who tell them that they are abnormal, strange, ill, and crazy. They suffer from the side affects of medication and from the isolation and loniless. They suffer from feelings of guilt as they are told how much of a burden they are. They suffer because of us.

I knew this couple who had met in the psych ward, fallen in love and, against the wishes of their families, got married. Everyone expected them to spiral out of control mentally and end up back in the state's care. To everyone's surprise, they found a house, moved in, and, when I met them, had been happily married for 10 years. Their love and care for each other meant that they reminded each other to take medication and see the doctor. But the most profound thing that she said to me was “he makes me feel human, he doesn't care about my labels.” They had discovered in each other a person who saw and loved the intrinsic value that the other contained in simply being human. It was through this love and acceptance that they were able to move back into the wider community and form relationships there. Their mental illnesses didn't disappear or even get much better, but in being treated as human rather than as an illness they have been able to find wholeness and healing.

It was in their example that I saw a vision of what the church could be. Loving the broken is more than praying for their healing. It is more than listening to their stories. It is more than asking questions about experiences.

It is teaching the church as a whole to view people as human rather than as broken. To value the humanness of a person is to see past the brokenness, the medical labels, the sad stories, the stange behaviour, and to see the heart of a person who longs only to be treated as worthy of attention. It is to act out the continuing mission of Jesus to all who are difficult to relate to and to understand and to reincorporate them back into the community.

In my experience I have seen this love of my humanness a handful of times. I saw it in my next door neighbour who would come over for coffee everyday and sit and listen to me ramble, help me clean my house, tell me off if I did something silly, and give me advise on my struggles. I saw it in a fellow student who discovered that I had difficulty in picking up social cues and developed a system of signals to tell me when I was doing something wrong. I saw it in one of my lecturers who let me breakdown in his office when things were getting on top of me. I saw it in my new parents in law who accepted my history and embraced me for it.

These people listened, heard the issue, accepted it and worked with it, rather than trying to change it. For me, they are the church being lived out.

I still don't know how this love for the humanness of people works in churches. There is no 5 step program about reintegrating the mentally ill back into the congregation. But in a country where at least 1 million people will be diagnosed with a mental illness at some point in their lives, there needs to be a beginning of a conversation. And it is a conversation that includes those that it is about. They may be unwell, but they will be very aware of what they feel is missing, what they don't like and how they want to be treated. We need to start asking ourselves and our congregations some deep searching questions and listening to the answers from those who live with these illnesses.

I would love to say that I now run a ministry within psych wards. To be honest, I have found the very idea odf stepping back into that environment so terrifying that I have not been able to face it yet. It has been 6 years but the scars on my heart are still healing. Yet I do what I can to show that people with mental illness are worth time and effort. One evening I sat with a nextdoor neighbours mother when she turned up at their house while they were out. I found her yelling at the fence after not taking her medication for three days.

I sat with her all night as she told me about the things that only she could see. In that seemingly meaningless rambling I heard her fear of being alone, her joy of being able to talk to others and share what she was seeing. I saw her love for me as she told me I was smarter than Einstein and had the faith and feet of aborigines in the desert. I heard her concern as she asked me about my imagined Maori husband Steve and why he was angry at me. She talked about things that weren’t physically true, but in it she cared, she loved. And I loved her by listening.

I don’t know if my actions made an impact on her or if she even realised who I was or if I really existed, but to this day I am in contact with her daughter and the daughter’s partner and have been able to introduce them to a Christianity that loves even their broken mother.

I would love to stand here before you and say I am totally free of all impairment. I am not. I still suffer from chronic anxiety issues, depressive episodes, and intense migraines. I have had to take time out of my study to deal with these issues and I thank God for my husband Luke who is as steady as a rock and reminds me to breathe slowly. He is my reminder of God's redemption and resurrection power in my life/

Our congregations should have these people in them. The fact that often they don’t reflects on the fact that we have not questioned the way we practice church. Questions like:

What would it look like to have mental health patients not just tolerated in our worship meetings, but celebrated and embraced?

What does it mean to learn from the broken, rather than to teach them?

What would it look like to seek friendship with the friendless, not for their health sake but because they are human and have something to offer?

What would it look like, as Swinton talked about on Monday, to stop having to act as the host or hostess and instead receive hospitality from people with mental health issues?

What does it mean to act towards the least of these as we would Jesus?

What would it look like to treat them like we would our Saviour?

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[1] Wheeler, A.  NZ Medical Journal 2005

Warrior God & Prince of Peace

This semester I have taken on the mantel of running a young adults group at my church. I love it! It is awesome to just sit and chat with people about real stuff that they are struggling to understand in the bible and to offer any wisdom or knowledge that I may have accumulate over the years. 

The dealio goes, if it is bugging you then ask and we will study it. So one of the peeps decided to bring up the issue of how do we reconcile the violence of the old testament with the 'love your neighbour' of the new?

Brilliant question. I am now officially leaving as leader....

Jokes. Though this question is one that I have struggled with for years. It is a question that usually haunts anyone who has been a believer for any length of time. In the Old Testament you have a God who is proclaimed as the Warrior God of Israel (Ex 15:3). In Jesus you have the acclaimed Prince of Peace (Is 9:6). 

Juxtaposition much?

I really don't like the violence in the earlier half of Scripture. It really bothers me when genocidal actions are attributed to God. It is totally at odds with everything I know of God being kind, loving, and a healer. It makes me unhappy.

Based upon a comprehensive study into the prevalence of violence throughout the Old Testament, Raymond Schwager calculated there to be “six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Scriptures, one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described, a hundred passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason (e.g. Exodus 4:24-26). Violence, Schwager concludes, is easily the most often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible.” 

That is a lot of killing.

Some Christians have found this to be waaaaaay too much to handle so they, like a dude called Marcion in the 2nd Century, throw out the OT and focus only on the NT. This is a heresy called Marcionism. The thing is, we may not literally tear our bibles in half and throw away the first lot like he did, but a lot of us don't read our OT because we don't understand it. Instead we read the NT, the stories about Jesus and the church, and we stay in our safe zones, not venturing out into the vast unknown of the Israelite world. 

But you can't understand Jesus if you don't know the OT.

Jesus came to fulfil the law, not to abolish it, and that means that in everything that Jesus was and did he was the pinnacle of what went before.

So you have to know what went before to understand how he fulfils it.

Which means delving into the angry God stories.

I am not going to do that today, the point of this blog is very different.

What I want to do is to encourage you to read what makes you uncomfortable, to wrestle with it, struggle with it, pray about it, and talk about it. Don't ignore it or run from it, that solves nothing! Take the bull by its horns and stare it in the face knowing that the God you are trying to learn about won't let you fall if you are placing your faith in him.

And the God we place our faith in shows us most fully what he is like in the person of Christ. So while you are struggling and wrestling with difficult passages, remember that it is in Jesus that we see the full picture. It is ok to come back to the person of Christ as a safe zone while you roam through the foreign land of the Bible. It is ok while sitting in the tension of how to reconcile the two to look at Jesus because he is the FULL image of God. 

Just don't give up. It is worth it if you keep pressing forward in hopes of understanding God.