An Introduction

I have always admired those that have the gift of words and use that gift to write books and blogs that inspired and encourage.  I’ve always dreamt of being one of those writers someday.  However, the idea of actually sitting down to write something important baffled me.  Sure, I’ve written papers for school and quippy status updates on facebook.  But sitting down to write, just to write, with the hopes that it would one day be an encouragement to others - that seemed beyond me.  But it is exactly the point of what you are reading. This is an act of obedience.  This is obeying a whisper.  Let me go back to the beginning...

August 12^th, 2010.  This was an ordinary day.  I went to work as I normally do.  However, there are days that God takes your ordinary and makes them extraordinary.  As I was working with a patient, my back went out.  I am talking extraordinary pain.  I struggled to get through my work with that patient without showing that I was in pain.  As soon as the patient left, I burst into tears, revealing to my coworker what had happened.  Working for a physician has its benefits.  My boss examined me, handed me meds and sent me home.  When I got home, I could no longer stand up straight.  It was as if I was bowing before royalty.  That is when my life became extraordinary.  God used my physical position to teach me humility.  God used my physical position to teach me His power (and that I had no power at all).  He began the process of stripping me of myself and the barriers that I had put up.  God placed me in a physical position of surrender.  No longer could I stand up straight, doing things on my own.

I spent a year and a half searching for answers, searching for healing.  Here’s the grand list of options I exhausted (emphasis on “I” and “exhausted”): 

-          Chiropractic

-          X-rays of my back and neck

-          Kept a food diary for a month- I remembered feeling really bloated the day of the initial incident.  So I tried to determine if there was anything gastrointestinal.  The food diary listed all the foods I ate and how I felt each day.

-          My primary care sent my for an abdominal ultrasound

-          I stopped working out, and then started again, stopped then started.

-          When another flare up happened, I had labs drawn to see if there was some kind of rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. 

-          I tried pain meds.  First the ones that my boss gave me, which didn’t touch the pain. I found an over the counter medication for joint pain which helped. So I began to think that there was something rheumatoid going on.  I’m really sensitive to meds and not crazy about taking them in the first place so I wanted to find another solution.

None of these things gave me any answers. All the tests came back negative.  Everything in my back was properly aligned thanks to weekly visits with the chiropractor.  Meds would dull the pain but I didn’t want to continue taking them because the tests for arthritis came up negative- I didn’t want to take meds with no proper diagnosis.   All this investigation did was make me very tired.  I was so tired of analyzing what I ate, what I drank, how I slept, how I sat, how I stood, how much I carried in my purse (I eventually switched to carrying a backpack like a middle schooler because the weight was more centered and balanced than a purse).  I was constantly thinking about my pain and how I could fix it. 

One day I made a discovery: when I felt the back pain, I would get REALLY anxious.  I’ve always been an anxious person so that was nothing new.  However, I thought “what if I went to counseling to work on my anxiety?” which lead to “what if my work on anxiety would rub off on my back pain?” 

I went to the first of many sessions with my counselor. I spent 50 minutes describing my pain and my background.  My counselor summed it up with one sentence: “I think if you work on your resentments, your back pain will go away.” Whoa.  Never thought I was a resentful person.  Never thought I held onto bitterness. Never thought your emotional pain could cause physical pain.  Let me tell you, friend, it can.    After a year of agonizing back pain, I spent a few months working on my resentments.  My back pain was gone. 

Please let me take a moment to be clear.  This is something that God has taught me.  I am not saying that everyone who has physical pain should go to a therapist instead of a doctor.  As you can see above, I exhausted medical options.  I like to picture God up in heaven watching me grasp at straws and after having gone through all of this, he says, “Are you done trying to solve this yourself?  Let me give it a try.”  That is when he tapped me on the shoulder and whispered “counseling”.  God is gracious in giving us so many ways to find healing.  I’m thankful for the many options he has created and the many talented physicians and therapists out there to help us.  Through counseling, I learned that my back pain is a prompt.  A prompt to change.  A prompt to look at what God thinks, not what I think.  A prompt to get right with the people around me.  It was also deeper than a prompt.  I realized that on August 12^th, 2010, God gave me a call.  God placed me in a physical position of surrender.  No longer could I stand up straight, doing things on my own.  I was given a calling.  I was called to bow.

Psalm 95:6-11

Come, let us worship and bow down.  Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God.  We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care.  If only you would listen to his voice today!  The Lord says, “Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did at Meribah, as they did at Massah in the wilderness.  For there your ancestors tested and tried my patience, even though they saw everything I did.  For forty years I was angry with them and I said, ‘they are a people whose hearts turn away from me. They refuse to do what I tell them.’ So in my anger I took an oath:  ‘They will never enter my place of rest.’”

Here the writer warns against hardening our hearts.  The Life Application Study Bible says, “This does not happen all at once; it is the result of a series of choices to disregard God’s will.”  God began to show me the way I had hardened my heart to Him.  I have never, flat out, denied the existence of God.  He has always been present in my life since I accepted Christ as a young girl.  However, there are ways that I have disregarded His will.  There are choices that I have made, even just in attitude that have put God on a shelf and not in the center of my life.  These choices build up like plaque.  Don’t you hate going to the dentist?  I HATE it!  The reason I hate it is because of the choices I have made in doing a quick brushing instead of a thorough brushing or never flossing. These choices lead to the poor technician having to scrape the built up plaque on my neglected teeth, while I am white-knuckling the armrests on the chair.  Plaque. That is what we allow in our hearts when we do not listen to God.  Our hearts harden. 

The spiritual version of the dentist chair is God’s discipline.  God must begin the scraping process. And there are times when God does drastic things to get our attention.  This is the place that I found myself on that fateful day.  God was grabbing my attention, much like he grabbed Israel’s attention on multiple occasions in the desert.  The passage above mentions Meribah and Massah and the reference is found in Exodus 17:1-7.

“At the Lord’s command, the whole community of Israel left the Wilderness of Sin and moved from place to place.  Eventually they camped at Rephidem, but there was no water there for the people to drink.  So once more the people complained against Moses.  “Give us water to drink!” they demanded. 

“Quiet!” Moses replied.  “Why are you complaining against me? And why are you testing the LORD?”

But tormented by thirst, they continued to argue with Moses.  “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?  Are you trying to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst?” 

Then Moses cried out to the LORD, “what should I do with these people? They are ready to stone me!” 

The LORD said to Moses, “walk out in front of the people.  Take your staff, the one you used when you struck water of the Nile, ad call some of the elders of Israel to join you.  I will stand before you on the rock at Mount Sinai.  Strike the rock, and water will come gushing out.  Then the people will be able to drink.” So Moses struck the rock as he was told, and water gushed out as the elders looked on. 

Moses named the place Massah (which means “test”) and Meribah (which means “arguing”) because the people of Israel argued with Moses and tested the LORD by saying, “Is the LORD here with us or not?”

Do you ever get frustrated with the Israelites?  I do.  God does AMAZING miracles for them.  They literally see him working- the plagues (Exodus 7-11), parting of the red sea (Exodus 14), Manna and Quail from Heaven (Exodus 16), the list goes on and on.  I don’t know about you, but if I were to witness the parting of the Red Sea and be able to walk through walls of water on dry ground I like to think that would be it for me.  My faith would be solidified right then and there.  Is it though?  Think about the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows of our spiritual lives.  Think about the huge things God has done for us and then how we distance ourselves again.  I think I get so frustrated with the Israelites because I see so much of myself in them.  I see how I see God’s fingerprints and then how quickly I forget and do my own thing again. 

My back pain was a way that God got my attention.  God continues to use it as a prompt.  I have been through this enough now to know that when that spot aches, it is time again to surrender.  It is time to allow God to “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life (Psalm 139:23-24).” 

There are times when God does drastic things to get our attention.  There are times when he calls for obedience.  August 12, 2010 was when God grabbed my attention.  He wanted to start a conversation about obedience.  He has taught me some tough lessons the past few years in this area.  As hard as these lessons were, I’m grateful for the work He has done in me.  I am grateful for the prompts he has called me to.  I am grateful and excited about the times when I have said “YES, Lord”.  I want to take some time to share some lessons in obedience that God has been teaching me.  Imagine what this world would look like if we heard God speak and followed His lead, no matter what.  Imagine the world our children would live in.  I would invite you to look with me at how God speaks and what that looks like.  Let’s look together at the kind of things he asks of us.  The Bible is full of requests from God.  That is not the only place He speaks, Friend.  He will do what He has to do to get our attention. He speaks now.  He calls us.  He calls us to bow.

I wrote this a few years ago hoping that someday I would work up the courage to start a blog.  Many are wondering when I will start talking about losing our babies, which is our most recent trauma.  I bet you’re wondering why I started the blog to talk about grief but you just read an entry about back pain.  However, when I finally got the courage to put this blog together, I had a hard time deciding where to start.  God is writing a big story in our lives so its hard to determine where it truly begins.  I believe that this story started back on that day, on August 12^th, 2010.  That is when God began to work on my heart in the areas of anger and resentment.  God knew what was coming.  He knew that if I did not prepare my heart and protect it from hardening, this experience would kill me.  He planted a desire in my heart to share our story long before I knew I had a story of this caliber.  He desires my life to glorify Him and my desire is exactly that.  I want my story to point to Him.  However, if He had not dealt with my tendency towards resentment, my story (His story) would stop right there.  I would be so wrapped up in bitterness and anger that I would not be able to share about His presence, His grace, His love. 

So this is where we begin- the healing in preparation for more healing.  We are on a journey.  We are leaning on God’s love daily to get through.  Daily we bow to His will for our lives.  Daily we surrender our anger, our sadness, our fear in order to be in a position of raw dependence.  Raw dependence isn’t a bad thing. Dependence means the pressure is off of us, and properly placed on Him- the only one who can truly handle it.