The Way to Now

I almost forgot I had a blog!  I would like to recommit to writing a couple times a week, but I can see it coming already … with the first couple sunshiny, blue-skied days, staying inside writing might be low on the list, traded in for happy hour on a patio!  Perhaps I’ll take my computer to my back porch and set up shop there for the next month or so.

Here’s a small miracle that happened as of late …

I previously wrote about seeing Bing Lee (the acupuncturist who’s name I love), and him telling me he knew my problem – that my hypothalamus was busted – and that after he got it back in place, I should return to a normal menstruation cycle and be on my way toward making babies.  While he was saying this, I remember thinking, “I am going to try with all my might to believe that you are right.”  All the while I was having a doubting Thomas experience.  Since I went off the Pill a year and a half ago, I haven’t had a period on my own.  The last time I saw Bing, about a month ago, he said I should expect a period to start within the next couple months.  I started spotting about eight days ago and literally did not know what was happening.  When my period started, on its own, I literally wanted to throw it a party!  How did this happen?  Why did I doubt that my body would recover with the right help?  I am still dumbfounded and I don’t really know what is going to happen next … but my best hopeful thoughts are that I will ovulate on my own this month.  We’ll see.  Of course, I still have my next fertility treatment scheduled in May.  Either way, I can see the clouds parting.

The other spring-like newness in my life is my new niece, Brooklyn.  Actually, she is my first niece – my brother’s baby girl – and she is so precious.  Just 24 hours after celebrating Easter, I got to hold her 2 week-old body, and I watched how she opened her eyes and tried with all her might to focus her gaze on me, memorizing my features and storing them in her head.  There were two times I saw so clearly that she already knew her mom’s touch and voice, when she was crying in my arms, but then instantly calmed by being put in her mom’s arms.  The miracle of becoming alive!  Is this not what we are all trying to do – become alive?

The balance between work and home, the balance between desire and need, the balance between being satisfied and wanting what’s not on your plate right now …

I think the magic of Spring is that all things become new again.  We can literally watch as flowers grow, as baby animals appear, as the sun warms our frozen hearts.  Spring allows for the miracle of creation – of growth and re-birth.  What is coming up through the hard ground of winter and starting to spring forth in your life?

Here’s what I learned in the last two months: to the average young person the church does not seem relevant AND all people are searching for community.  And, I’m pretty sure many of the people I know would like to find a church that fits their needs, that voices relevant issues, that allows God’s Spirit to burst through everyday occurrences.  As a minister, it is not often that I’m not in church on a Sunday morning, but this winter I had a full eight Sundays off in a row for a time of spiritual renewal and writing.  Not only did I live a “normal” person’s weekend life, but I also observed a lot of what my friends experience without a church community.  At first, it felt odd, but I have to admit, I adjusted just fine to having two weekend days to sleep in and do whatever I wanted.  I realized that I could probably live my whole life without stepping foot in a church and not really realize anything was different in my life than anyone else’s.  But, I also was able to contrast this time outside the church with what I have known since childhood, which is the church as a personal community of friends and mentors.  One of the highlights of a church community is that you can develop relationships with people who are generations older (or younger) than you and you learn infinitely more than you would if you choose only to be around peers.  From one set of our older friends, my husband and I have learned to value the concept of contrast.  I observed, for two months, the contrast in my life with and without the church.  The conclusions I am drawing, now that I have been back in the pulpit for three weeks, are that my life became pretty insular without this broader community, and that I did not have that outside source that is bigger than me pulling me into new areas of my spirit.

Do I miss the sleeping in?  Yes, but I think I found the solution to that.  You have to be willing to forgo the late Saturday nights, (but who in our 30s isn’t willing?!) and put yourself to bed at a reasonable hour, and morning’s not so bad.  In fact, overall, I have been shutting it down around 10 or 10:30 and getting into bed and finding that morning is a much more enjoyable experience!

The other point I talked about with everyone I spent time with over my time off talked about how the church is broken, can be hypocritical, and has too many issues.  Come on, now – doesn’t that sound like each one of us?!  The church is really a reflection of us.  It is the place where people go to work out their issues – sometimes people are unhealthy in the way they do it and sometimes the church suffers for that.  But, ultimately, get a group of people together to share in their faith and you will undoubtedly get a huge dose of inspiration and Spirit.  You know, I thought I would be writing more about how church might be irrelevant.  But, I see now that the church is vital and it is time to get more young clergy into churches where young people live.  It is also time for the church to claim more boldly that it is a progressive place for people to come with their questions, with their doubts, and find community with others like them.

Now, the second part for me is this: how do I make my career manageable and meaningful without giving up my Sabbath time?  This might be a question that accompanies me throughout my career.  Since I have been back at work, I definitely feel a new sense of balance and delight in my work.  I guess this is why people should periodically take time off.  There are some things that have fallen off, like my writing.  I desperately wish I would keep writing with the same depth and intensity as I was this winter.  But, the reality is, I expend that energy at work and in my sermons now.  Here’s hoping I can figure out a balance there.  Back on the Sabbath search, I have been practicing using the whole afternoon and evening on Sundays just to relax and do exactly what pleases me.  That’s what Sabbath is, you know.  It’s a day of rest and delight in the Lord.  It’s a day to recharge and be still and separate yourself from the cares of your busy life.  Try it!  Don’t pay bills or prepare for work or work on the house (unless you love it) or run errands.  Instead, read a book, watch a movie, take a walk, have dinner with those you love (casually and without great effort), and catch up on sleep if you need it.  I am amazed at what even eight hours of Sabbath time does for me.  Don’t feel guilty about it – God actually commanded it.  You will rest on the seventh day.

A note on my continued quest for health and healing of my body … I downloaded a book on PCOS and natural ways to cure it (specifically how you eat).  I had a procedure last month that included an IUI, but it was unsuccessful.  It just goes to show that even when the circumstances are perfect, sometimes it doesn’t work.  However, I finished my treatment with the acupuncturist, Bing Lee, who was working on restoring my hypothalamus.  He feels like after the month of taking the supplement and continuing with my regular acupuncture, that everything is restored in my brain – hallelujah!  I am always skeptically on the fence about whether that is too good to be true or whether my hypothalamus is truly restored and ready to start kicking out hormones.  Time will tell, I guess.  I do feel better and more balanced.  I actually get tired at night now (it produces the sleep hormone, serotonin), so that’s a positive sign for me.  I will continue pursuing natural and western medicine on my journey toward restored fertility and family.

For now, though, I am resting in God.

The other day I had one of those moments where it feels like it’s all coming together – hallelujah!  It is sort of like the moment of realizing graduation is actually going to happen, or the moment of seeing that a great plan came together, or the feeling of taking a big deep breath of rain-soaked air.  As I kind of expected, it took a whole month to get my backed-up system to download and unload and be in a position to rest.  And, it’s funny because rest now is not what it was one month ago.  Rest a month ago meant not talking to anyone, sleeping in, lounging, not planning anything besides a daily workout.  Now, it feels like I have more energy and want to do more things, but not busy things, Sabbath things.  I’m resting in the goodness of God, resting in the joy of friends, resting in the peace of my life.  Can I get an amen?

The thing about perseverance is that it gets you anywhere you really want to go.  There isn’t a thing I can think of that would not eventually happen if someone persevered through what looks like hazardous road signs or stalled progress.  With all this talk, you would think I was going to announce I was pregnant.  Nope.  But this whole journey that I first thought was a journey to become pregnant is really about learning to find balance.  Since August 2009, I have been seeing an acupuncturist who is also a practitioner of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine).  I have been going weekly.  After the Haiti earthquake happened in January, the clinic held a fundraiser with free appointments and donations going to Doctors Without Borders.  I thought this would be a great time to see another woman at the practice who does Acutonics and is a natural health practitioner.  Acutonics is the use of metal tuning forks that vibrate.  When they are put on certain points of your body, you feel the vibration throughout, like a deep centering gong.  During our abbreviated session that day, she asked if I wanted to make an appointment and it just so happened that my usual acupuncturist was out of town the next week.  When I went, she listened to all of my concerns, she suggested great readings, she prescribed a Bach Flower tincture and she said I should go see yet another acupuncturist in town.  I guess each practitioner is different in the same way that each church is different.  The guy she was referring me to has a gift for reading the body’s systems and pinpointing any imbalance.  He had a particular supplement she thought I might need.

In following this whole path of people who were connecting me to other people, I sensed I was getting closer to where I needed to go.  I made the appointment with Bing Lee (I love his name) and proceeded to follow a trim Asian man down a hallway to a treatment room.  He only asked what my primary concern was.  I told him it was fertility issues.  He asked me to lie on the acupuncture table and he would read my system.  I didn’t know if I should close my eyes during this seemingly critical moment in the treatment, but I was too curious.  I kept my eyes open and could see him out of my periphery – his eyes were closed and his hands were sweeping my essence toward him.  It sounds weird, but here’s what he came up with.  He said, “I know what’s wrong.”  After hearing about a dozen people say they don’t know what’s wrong, this was crazy.  He said my hypothalamus is burned out.  There is only one way the hypothalamus can be fried (essentially), and it is from over-thinking!  Over-thinking – who ever heard of such a thing!  I knew immediately what he meant.  I am a chronic over-thinker.  It’s a habit, like smoking or biting one’s fingernails.  It comes without effort and with an obsessive-like fervor.  Feeling sheepish for having burned out my own hypothalamus, I was all ears for hearing how we cure this bad boy.  He said he had a supplement to give me, a hypothalamus supplement – it contains pig hypothalamus, and he wanted to see me back in two weeks.  I would think this is all crazy-talk, but he did not know a thing about me and he nailed me on over-thinking, and said that it was mainly about unresolved issues over career – hello, two months off from work so I can regain my sanity!  I am currently taking my pig hypothalamus and I will see him again in a couple weeks.

Not only did this come about, but I also saw my western doctors who gave me the go-ahead for starting another round of fertility medicines.  Bing Lee assured me the treatments would not interrupt one another, but that if I do not take care of my body’s imbalance, I will pass it on to my child.  Yikes!  I am pretty sure my mom passed it on to me – I love her, but she is an over-thinker like no one’s business.  Here’s how the day continued coming together.  I picked up the book that the natural health practitioner said I should read and I read the chapter basically pinpointing where I missed the mark in all this western ambition we seem to have been bred to showcase.  The book is called Sabbath by Wayne Muller, and is fabulous.  In this passage, he is pointing out that Buddhists have these philosophies about desire and happiness that really get at the crux of the suffering so many of us feel.  Desire is what comes about through our natural impulses.  Our society cleverly eggs us on with advertising and lifting up a culture of consumption.  As soon as we feel desire, we are bound to feel suffering.  This can happen in a number of ways.  One is that once we desire a bigger house, then we will suffer because, down the road, we will want a bigger house still.  If there is an expensive item we desire, and we convince ourselves to buy it, we will feel suffering because of our empty bank account.  It is very hard to allow desire to come without suffering.  The alternative to desire is happiness.  Seeking happiness happens in a very different way.  Happiness comes not in consumption, but in generosity.  Simplifying, not complicating.  Being happy usually comes with experiences and people and time.  Give yourself one of those gifts.

As all my paths converge, I hope to continue seeking happiness.  My priorities will include meditation, rest, and time for friends and family.  Sometimes, we must persevere even to achieve the simple things in life.

I was at a lunch today to plan a fundraiser to ship medical supplies to a hospital in Kenya I’ve had the privilege of visiting.  Together with Project C.U.R.E. and The Center for the Church and Global AIDS, United Methodists all over Colorado will be raising money – our part will be with a golf tournament in May.  While this would usually just be another project in the work I do, I had a different feeling about it today.  Today, I felt “there” in a way I haven’t felt in the past year.  I was present – fully present.

Why was today so different?

Months ago, I was feeling something many of us in our 30s do.  I was having a bout with depression and I felt at the end of what I could do for others.  I was not even caring for myself.  I needed rest.  I needed to be.  I needed my house and home cooking and time apart.  For most of 2009, I felt this set of needs come and go in waves.  I would push them aside or tell myself, yes, I will care for you later.  By September, I remember getting ready to celebrate my 31^st birthday.  That day, I cried.  I could not celebrate.  I felt so sad, so empty, so ready to fall apart.  I finally started talking about my pain and sharing my sadness with my husband.  It broke a cycle that I had let occur for months.  I would feel ok and work at my wonderful job and be thankful for all the gifts in my life.  Then, I would come back around to the reality that I really wanted to start a family.  With so much fullness, there was still emptiness.  It was a devastating feeling, knowing I lived four hours from any specialists or doctors that even offered fertility help.  I also revealed to my parents how empty and sad I felt.  While I think it scared them a little, they were quite supportive of my need to explore the ways to get help.  I had already started seeing an acupuncturist, a tall dancer who was raised in Grand Junction, and had just received her doctorate for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine.  I really liked how acupuncture felt, but mostly, I liked that I could talk to my actual doctor every week.  Unlike my western medicine OB/GYN, whom I almost never spoke to in person, April was personable and knowledgeable.  I remember the moment clearly, when she asked, “How are you doing today?” and I replied, “You know, I think I realized that I’m putting on a brave face when anybody asks me that question.  Really, I’m not doing good.  I have never been so sad.”

It was a moment of pure honesty.

Where was I to go from here?  Next, I found a therapist/counselor, whom my insurance covered.  The first session I had with her, I just cried through my story.  I couldn’t believe how heart-broken I felt over not being able to conceive.  After that first session, I took the rest of the afternoon off from work, and that night, I told my husband how shocked I was to realize the state of my heart.  He listened, looked me in the eye, and said, “What should we do?”  We talked about waiting for nature to take its course, waiting for acupuncture and herbs to revive my body, looking up fertility specialists, or trying to work with the limited options my OB/GYN was offering here.  While still talking, and sniffling (mostly me), he Googled the specialists my brother and sister-in-law started seeing on the Front Range.  They are rated as the best, not only in the state, but one of the best in the country.  As he read this, I felt my heart perk up and heed the good news.  Suddenly, Eric was saying to me, “I just filled out two forms, and should definitely have someone contacting me.”  Two days later, he told me our phone consultation would be in a month!  The husband got extra points for taking the lead on getting something in the hopper.

That is the medical side of how I started to breathe again, feeling the solid hope in my heart that we would, indeed, be parents.  But, still in the midst of feeling completely disconnected, and very distracted at work, I knew I needed to take a break.  We were just going into the program year at the church, and the busy time of Advent and Christmas would be right around the corner.  This was definitely not the time to take a break, but it was also not the time to have a break down.  I came clean to the people I had been acting my butt off around for months and said I needed to take some time off for me, but I didn’t have a clue what that might look like.  Over the next months we worked out a plan that would begin around the 1^st of the New Year.  I combined a renewal leave for the purpose of writing with a medical leave and was able to work out an eight-week leave from work.

As Advent and Christmas rolled around, I was counting down the days until I could have seemingly endless hours of doing exactly what I wanted, what I needed.  My husband and I worked with our new fertility specialists and devised a plan.  We actually did one round of fertility drugs in December.  I was almost giddy thinking the large and looming task of getting pregnant might be taken care of by the time I was on my break!  One of my friends said only a person having fertility issues would call getting pregnant “work” or a “task” – touché.  The result was not the one I was looking for – a period instead of a positive, but the good thing is, I ovulated (not a usual occurrence for me).  The beginning of January came and I began my time off and I felt almost immediately a weight lifted.  I pinpointed it on that same day – finally I wasn’t caring for anyone else but me.  I took a brilliantly selfish deep breath, and have every day since!

While I was talking with my acupuncturist the other day, in the midst of this month of extremely cold temperatures, we settled into a discussion about winter.  Winter is a time when you are supposed to take it easy.  You are supposed to tuck yourself in a little earlier and eat warm soups and drink hot tea.  Winter is a time for your body and soul to recharge and recoup.  What are most of us doing on the contrary?  We are hustling back to work after a few precious days off to get back to the task of multi-tasking.  We actually get mad at the sun for setting early because we lose out on more productive time that we could have had fitting in one more thing.

Aren’t you exhausted?

There hasn’t been a winter I can remember when I felt energized and ready to tackle the world … but I’ve still trudged ahead.  I’ve made New Year’s resolutions and goals for work and many, many plans for losing weight and looking great by springtime.  But, have I ever tried focusing on rest?  Have I ever thought, hmmm, maybe my body needs something else now?

This is the first winter I have actually listened and done something about it.  I have actually been eating my soups and drinking my tea.  I have been getting more sleep and planning less events.  I have been curling up with a blanket and a book more often and have cooked almost every dinner this year.  Ok, that last one doesn’t get a whole lot of credit because it’s been 20 days, but still, I’m cooking and eating really healthy meals.   I actually feel like working out because I like the physical feeling of being tired at the end of the day.  It’s very different from the tired of over-working and over-functioning.  It’s a good-tired.

To my credit, my acupuncturist, April, commented that my “shen” was really good.  I think that means my countenance, my face, had a glow.  Let me be the first to admit that I am not working right now and maybe that is why I have this glow and all the time to do all these relaxing things.  But, now I will be on a mission to keep this balance with work.  The point of all this women’s lib was not for us to make ourselves sick and stressed with this newfound reward of working and voting and having a voice.  In fact, the point was to have the choice and to be counted.

How often do we feel now that if we don’t perform, and usually over-perform, that we still don’t count?

In our 20s, we may want to climb mountains and be skiing every weekend in the winter, but I have to say, in my 30s, I think I get more out of curling up with a warm drink and a good book.