“I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.”
Psalm 118:17
I just said this to a friend here in Virginia… Writing is how I share with the world what Jesus is doing, what He’s up to right now. So it’s always good, even when I don’t feel like it, because I always walk away remembering oh DUH… God’s got this. I mean, 2019 was my impossible. It was the thing that I wanted so very deeply and in a way like nothing else.
There’s nothing quite like God answering a prayer after years of waiting, after having given up even praying and asking for Him to move because you’ve just lost all hope that anything could ever be different.
As I said, 2019 was my impossible. And since 2019 happened? Like, really happened? Now anything is possible.
I’m actually a little surprised that I haven’t heard more 2020 jokes of “new year, new you, now you have 2020 vision!”. But that 2020 vision… I think in some ways we can equate the person who is able to hold great faith that God will move and that miracles WILL happen to someone who has 20/20 vision. I mean really – if I can only have one kind of 20/20 vision? The vision that allows me to have faith would absolutely be the kind of vision I would choose.
That great faith, God moving mountains, 2019 being my impossible that became possible because of Jesus…
I think it’s great to have multiple “life verses” from scripture; I know that I have so many that mean different things. Some are more biographical, some are more missional, but some are just plain and simple a very broken down explanation of my life and what I want it to be moving forward.
“I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.”
So the gift I want to celebrate… I want to celebrate life. I want to thank God for the life that He has given me, for how many times He intervened and spared me when I really was so close, when death was straight up knocking on my door.
There are so many statistics out there regarding mental illness and suicide and risk factors and diagnoses… I could actually do some research and look into what it might be, but given all of my circumstances, all of my symptoms, given how much I’ve been to hell and back in recent years… when I say that statistically I probably shouldn’t be here, I’m not kidding. I never really concretely had a major plan in place, but I have a feeling that God was intervening through all of it because He knew that if I ever did get to the place of having a plan, I might not have made it.
But… I’m here. And I never thought I would live to see ANY day that I would wholeheartedly and down in my bones be grateful to be alive, let alone that I would see nearly eight months of that confidence in our Perfect Peace.
On top of all of that, though… I never could have dreamed that I would knowingly walk into the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and that as that season would progress some of my symptoms would return, some of them even returning with a vengeance… but that in the middle of all of that?
I never could have in my wildest dreams imagined that I would spend so many nights in my apartment with the loneliest broken heart, crying my eyes out…
… and that I would still be grateful to be alive.
For this beautiful gift of life we have in Jesus.
Talk about a juxtaposition! Oh my goodness. But as I just wrote about, so many things I’ve been learning have to do with that beautiful dichotomy, that it’s okay to stumble and have heartache and to question why. And that in all of that, we can still be grateful for this life. We can still be a perfectly beloved child of God.
One of the many aspects of mental illness… trauma. Many people define trauma as any event where you fear your life is in danger. That’s very simplistic and could be too narrow or basic of a definition, but for what I want to share… it works.
Shortly after my plane landed in May, I started experiencing what I eventually would refer to as “trauma responses”. It was pretty much PTSD symptoms… flashback kind of stuff. For me it was a lot of really intense “what ifs”, but thinking that would lead to significant anxiety and almost panic in a few cases. There were only ever a few very distinct and major episodes of that trauma response, and in looking back, both cases were triggered by something that was once a significant suicide trigger for me.
Example – the Golden Gate bridge. For anyone here in Virginia reading this (or anyone not in Sonoma County!), the bridge is only about a 50-55 minute drive from my home back in California. Anytime I did an airport pickup at SFO? I would cross the bridge. Giants game? More than likely it involved driving across the bridge. It never got to the point where I got out my car and walked out to jump, but for a long time I would call someone if I knew I would be driving across… just to be on the safe side. Just to make sure.
This particular instance, this past July, was actually on the way home from a Giants game. The route we took home took us down across the marina, driving along the north side of the city down at water level. I think it was largely due to that angle, being down at water level and looking up at the bridge. But all of the sudden I was in the middle of a trauma response, full blown anxiety, wanting to jump out of the car. I thank God that I was with a safe person at that moment, someone who loves the Giants as much as I love the Cardinals but who also knows that a) baseball is amazing, and b) that there is far more to life than just our team or even baseball itself.
Why do I share this story, though? As I said… trauma can often be defined as an experience where you feel your life was in danger.
… and I could say that about most of the last seven years.
I’ve actually had to learn to start processing and viewing so much of that time as trauma. Not only for the PTSD type moments, but also for what happens to our brains when we are suddenly – and finally – removed from prolonged trauma.
It will be eight months next week. Eight months since my life changed forever, since I finally started walking into a season in which I can be grateful for my breath each morning when I wake up – instead of angry when I wake up still breathing and still alive.
Coming back to that verse in Psalms that I used to open… I first heard the verse in a recent Louie Giglio sermon on mental illness. I want to relisten, but I first watched it when I was in Chicago for my training for the job here in Richmond. And in the middle of talking about suicide, about that pain and that darkness… He quoted this verse. I remember almost sitting up in bed as I watched it, because the verse it just so… simple. Straight up. Real.
And now that the second half of that first phrase has come to fruition in my life? Now that – yes, I WILL live?
I want nothing more than to proclaim all that God has done, in all of the moments for all of my days.