Landmines are a very interesting form of warfare. Buried and essentially unseen, they lay waiting for the enemy. Trained as a Combat Engineer at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, I was taught that there were things to counteract other things like mines. I knew how to operate a ‘minesweeper’. I was also taught how to probe with a stick to find mines that could not be detected. In the heat of an Ozark summer, I would be coated with a red mud after crawling on my belly through the Missouri dirt.
There are landmines in the Church.
Buried they simply wait on a believer to step on it. Wisdom would tell us to advance with caution, but the counsel is not always taken. They only await our careless step. We can know they exist, yet we can step on them without thinking. It is a definite form of deception. There are definite things which can cripple us spiritually.
Mines such as fear, doubt, unforgiveness, jealousy, lust, pride and selfishness lay waiting for us. When you step on a mine, you’ll hear a distinct click. This is the downward signal that you have engaged the mechanism of the mine. At this point it gets grim. It is highly unlikely that you can move quickly enough to get away from the explosion.
We are incredibly vulnerable to the mines of our walk as a believer. However, the Holy Spirit holds the maps that can enable us to transverse that which is ahead of us. His presence gives us a safe awareness to progress difficult ground. He is there to direct us to pass through the danger.
Too many people are getting blown up.
They make a misstep and the resulting blast is awful. Unless we listen to the Spirit’s direction we will find ourselves in a very hard place, full of difficulty and danger.
We need the Holy Spirit to help us navigate difficult places.
Without Him present we will step in places that are extremely detrimental, and very dangerous. He must guide us, step by step, through the danger that surrounds us. He will do this, if we only ask.
I wrote this poem a couple of months ago. I wrote it while trying to process the struggle of dealing with one sister who suffers with mental illness (bipolar disorder and bulimia) and other family members who don’t understand.
I have experienced seven years of major clinical depression myself, and over the last few years have come to the realization that ending up there again is not outside the realm of possibility if I’m not ever vigilant. But that doesn’t make the family relationships any easier, and I often feel like I’m the only glue or buffer holding things together, and I’m not doing a very good job at it.
I share this here to maybe give someone else the strength to keep being that glue or to appreciate the one in the family who is the glue or . . . well, frankly I’m not sure why. It just seems like something I need to share.
A note on the final stanza: I do not, in any way, wish that the person this poem is about was dead. Far from it. I’ve lost too many other family members, including another sister who died of cancer two years ago. But on the day I wrote this, that felt like it would have been easier to take than the present situation.
Impossible Madness
Why does it feel like I’ve lost you
when you aren’t even dead?
Why am I the only one
who wants to make amends?
Why does it have to be so hard
after all these years?
Maybe it’s the tears
mine and yours, and theirs,
that makes breathing and living
loving and forgiving so impossible
I guess sometimes families and madness
can’t survive one another
Because that’s what you are, you know,
mad, or crazy, or mentally ill
whatever you want to call it
It’s torn us apart
because you don’t understand
why they can’t begin to comprehend
what’s going on inside your head
It’s torn us—you and me—apart
because you’ve convinced yourself
that I don’t at all understand
what’s going on inside your head
You forget I’ve been there
that those crazy, mad thoughts
have been inside my head, too
But then you’ve forgotten a lot of things
all the times I was there for you
just to listen
and the times you were there for me
Forgetting the good
is a tragic side effect
of medications meant to help
Somehow they don’t erase
memories of the less-than-perfect moments
My greatest desire is to forgive
and to be forgiven
to live and laugh and love again
to mend what has been torn asunder
to heal the thoughts inside your head
But right now, in this moment
it feels like you might as well be dead
at least that would be easier to live with
Note: This article was posted last November on my page at The Mighty, a great resource and community for people with chronic or mental illnesses.
I have long, straight, super-fine hair. When I was a kid, it would often get tangled and I didn’t like to brush it. So my mom would brush it for me, yanking the brush through the rat’s nest knot. “Ow, quit yanking,” I would say with tears streaming down my face.
“That didn’t hurt.”
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that phrase, I could buy a small mansion. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I did hear it a lot. Sometimes I still do, or variations of it.
A Lack of Understanding
Several years ago, my sister and I visited an aunt and cousins in Texas. We got to meet one cousin’s grandkids who lived with him.
The impish face of one granddaughter was adorable. I so wanted to play this game she’d made up.
“Hold these,” she chirped, and handed me three pine cones. I don’t even know where she got pine cones in Houston, Texas. I hadn’t seen many pine trees.
Try as I might to hold them lightly, I could barely stand having them poke my tender palms. “I can’t hold these,” I finally said, as I set them down on the coffee table. “They hurt my hands.” That was an understatement.
My sister looked at me with puzzlement written on her face. “Does that really hurt?”
At least she’d asked.
More Failure to Understand
On another trip, this time with my husband and son, Mexico was the destination. Cancun, to be specific. A place of sunshine and beautiful coral sand beaches.
Mid-trip, my husband decided he wanted to have his hair cornrow braided by a merchant in the local outdoor market. He talked me into having mine braided too. I should have known better.
While he was enjoying what felt like a wonderful scalp massage, I endured torture worse than all my mom’s hair brushings rolled into one. I felt certain the woman braiding my hair was going to pull every hair out of my scalp. I will not be doing that again. Ever.
I took the braids out the very next day because the pain wouldn’t cease until I did. My husband still didn’t understand.
Looking for Answers
The denial of my physical pain by those who know me best often makes me wonder if I’m losing my mind. Because it does hurt. At least that’s what my brain tells me.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that a doctor gave my sensitivity to pain a name: fibromyalgia. No one could tell me why I had this thing that can’t be tested for or proven. Sure, there were theories.
One pain specialist asked if I’d ever been sexually assaulted, because that kind of trauma is connected to fibromyalgia. I was, when I was 14, but I’d been ultra-sensitive to pain long before that. An online article suggested a link between the Epstein-Barr virus, also known as mononucleosis, and fibromyalgia. I had mono when I was in the seventh grade. But again, my pain sensitivity existed before that five-week illness.
The first doctor to mention fibromyalgia to me wouldn’t commit to a diagnosis. She prescribed amitriptyline saying that “empirically that’s what we’re treating you for.”
In addition to the chronic muscle pain, I have osteoarthritis, although I’ve been told the degeneration in my neck doesn’t look bad enough on an MRI to cause the pain I complain about. In other words, it’s really all in my head.
Happening upon Relief
As with most fibro patients, I have some other health issues, including GI problems. At one point, my doctor suggested I quit eating gluten. When I replied that I hadn’t eaten gluten in over a year, she suggested I quit eating dairy. I rolled my eyes, feeling like she had no real solutions. But I did try it.
She also wanted me to quit taking ibuprofen, which I wasn’t happy about because it was the only thing that took the edge of my chronic pain.
For four weeks, I read every label. If a food contained whey, casein, or any dairy products, I didn’t eat it. Then one day I realized my muscles didn’t ache all over. I didn’t even wish I could take ibuprofen because I didn’t need it.
So I kept it up. I didn’t eat dairy at all for four months. Then came my birthday and dinner out at The Cheesecake Factory. I decided I’d been good, so I deserved a piece of cheesecake to celebrate. I ate the whole thing, which, if you’ve ever been to The Cheesecake Factory, you know is a huge slab of pure dairy and sugar goodness.
The next morning, I awoke to a feeling like I’d been hit with a Mack truck. Every muscle ached.
I’ve been mostly dairy-free for several years now and feel much better.
Still Pain Sensitive
Which is not to say I don’t still deal with pain. I still don’t understand why pain scales have a 0 on them. Are there people who, at times, don’t feel any pain? I suppose there are, but I wouldn’t know about that. Every day something aches or I do something that results in acute pain beyond what those without fibromyalgia would feel.
But the pain is more manageable without the added inflammatory reaction from bombarding my body with dairy products it doesn’t like.
It’s also easier to deal with when I quit listening to those who don’t understand tell me, “That didn’t hurt.”
“We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.”
Isaiah 64:6, NLT
There are bad things that happen to us— ugly, awful and evil things, that only God himself can explain. We read theology and we read our Bibles, we listen dutifully to preachers, but we still ‘can’t’ fathom this terrible ‘mystery of iniquity.’ “Filthy rags is what we wear. Our sins have destroyed us.
We are seem to be playing ‘ping-pong’ with the most challenging issues. We come to Him, because there is no one left who can answer things that have perplexed everyone else. Why do we suffer? Why does evil exist? Why do people who live in blatant sin, succeed? Why am I sick all the time?
If God is really God, why doesn’t he just give us an explanation about these questions? Our title talks about being “spellbound.” Are we really that inured, attached to a truly sinister evil, that we are being confused about what is real or true? To be spellbound means we’re being hypnotized by something quite awful. A cobra rises up, and opens its “hood.” Its victim is entranced by what it sees in front of it. He soon becomes supper.
Being held captive seems to be an ordinary occurrence for human beings. Captivity implies imprisonment. Usually in a dark, dirty and unpleasant place. But yet, it intrigues us so much, and after all the “light” is such a boring and dull thing. We feel great as we trade the truth for lies. We never realize that satanic power has blinded us.
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the bodyand the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
Ephesians 2:1-3, ESV
From this new and fresh influence we come under the control and will of ‘the dark side’. (And this is not merely “Star Wars” mythos. It is very real.) We gradually give ourselves over to the dark. We think we are pretty much impervious to being deceived, but the truth is that we’re already blind. In our lostness we can only stumble through life.
”And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”
John 3:19
At this point things have gotten desperately grim. From a human standpoint, there will be no way to avert the inevitable. Sin will roll over you, blasting into your life, and worst of all into the hearts of your family. In a stark way— things get very dark, very fast.
Sin will always enslave. It will turn on you and rock your world.
But we are so entranced by what it wants to give us. It looks so good…one could call it “self-actualizing.” (Maybe even “liberating!”) But in one of the many purposes of the Old Testament, is to clarify what happens in people’s hearts when we step down and let the sin and confusion take over. You could say, that there will be pleasure for a brief season, but it will always have a very savagely grim and a black conclusion. ”For the wages of sin is death.”
Jesus forgives us, and lifts the darkness. We start to see things as they are, reality breaks out in our minds. He has changed everything. His blood covers us, and we start to walk in what is true. We finally understand what sin has done to us, and we turn from it to what He now gives freely.
“If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will then we may take that it is worth paying.”
Broken Believers 