What a Day of Rejoicing That Will Be

Room full of women, all hearts and kindness, praising and worshiping God and I felt it.  

I felt what Heaven is going to feel like.  It is going to feel like love, love incarnate sitting next to me, just loving me and I could hardly stay standing for the realization of it.  Close my eyes, breathe in deep, let the tears escape past the eyelids.  I was standing in love and on Holy ground and it was overwhelming and amazing.

As worship was over and we sat down I felt surrounded and filled by the hope and promise of who God made me to be.  It was like God was saying, "This is who I made you to be, do you feel it, little one?  Go and be all I made you to be."  

In a room full of love and acceptance being who God made you to be feels possible.  It is like a big Ole "OOHRAH" of Jesus's love and grace and you just feel empowered.

Before worship started I read a verse that had been placed on our table.  It said, "GOD holds me head and shoulders above ALL who try to pull me down.  I'm headed for HIS place to offer anthems of praise that will raise the roof!"  Psalm 27:6 MSG 

Before we started singing I had written that verse down and started doodling an image of a father lifting up his daughter into the air, her arms stretched out onto the paper table liners. 

After we sat back down I was a woman on a mission.  I colored in the Dad and daughter, then I just kept adding more and more to it.  I would think I was done, but then a voice said, "Keep going." So I did.  Then when I thought I was done, He said, "Add more."  So I wrote words into the sand.  "These words are for somebody, baby, so listen well."

Okay, now I am finished with it.  "Nope. See that sun, it needs a verse.  Look up on google for a verse about light. and see the water, you need one there too, might as well get both sides.  And see that sky, do one there. This is going to be good."  

Okay, now I am done. This feels good.

"Hey, baby, why don't you put a verse on the girl about being God's child and one on the Dad about how I am the Father."  

Okay, okay, I can do that. Now I am done, right?

"You are so cute! Add a little baby turtle climbing into the water in that corner, just so it will all tie into the message I had Karmen give this weekend......Alright! Now it is done.  Thanks, baby girl."

And then I walked away from it and just let it be after the lesson.

A little later a woman came up to me and asked if she could have that drawing.  She told me those were all the verses that she has been given over the last few weeks to help her through a rough patch. God works in such amazing and mysterious ways.  He empowered me and then used me to reach someone else.  It was not about my talent, it was just a crayon drawing after all, but it was about His speaking into our hearts and us listening.  He used a 40 year old stay at home Mom to reach a woman I had never met and He did it through crayons and a Google search.  (God uses Google, let that one soak in for a minute!)

It is miraculous what God can do in the hearts of us and others when we come together in love with open arms for each other and for Him.  That is church.  When we just lavish each other in acceptance and grace and welcome, God can work through that and it is a small glimpse of what Heaven will be like.  

Oh what a day of rejoicing that will be.

Ladies of Christian Fellowship Church in Columbus, Ohio, you are doing it right! Thank you.

1. Sing the wondrous love of Jesus; 
sing his mercy and his grace. 
In the mansions bright and blessed 
he'll prepare for us a place. 

Refrain: 
When we all get to heaven, 
what a day of rejoicing that will be! 
When we all see Jesus, 
we'll sing and shout the victory! 

2. While we walk the pilgrim pathway, 
clouds will overspread the sky; 
but when traveling days are over, 
not a shadow, not a sigh. 
(Refrain) 

3. Let us then be true and faithful, 
trusting, serving every day; 
just one glimpse of him in glory 
will the toils of life repay. 
(Refrain) 

4. Onward to the prize before us! 
Soon his beauty we'll behold; 
soon the pearly gates will open; 
we shall tread the streets of gold. 
(Refrain) 

My heart doesn't operate in the scientific: Bucking against the fence posts

*This is the second installation of this series.  My heart Part one.

I am going to travel backwards for a moment.  To share with you something I wrote but never posted.  This was written after I had gone in for my neck issues, but prior to getting any kind of diagnosis.

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11/19/13

Our Pastors have been preaching a lot on healing.

A lot.

Our once a month Sunday night service was all about healing last night.

I went to church wanting to hide in a corner.  I was contemplating where would be the best "hiding" spot in the sanctuary where I would be the least visible.  I felt like a caged animal being poked with sticks.  Honestly, I didn't even really want to go in.  I thought about just sitting in my van for the whole service. ( I go on my own when we have Sunday night services).

I made myself go in though.  And I made myself sit in my normal spot;  middle section, second row back, second seat in from the right.  I was freezing, so I wrapped my grandpa sweater around me tight and kept my arms folded tight to my chest.  I probably looked pretty frangry (freezing and angry).

Before we started singing the pastor talked about how he really felt that Jesus was going to heal people and that if we needed a healing to be sure and ask for it.  He also said that wherever we were that we needed to meet with Jesus.  If that meant dancing, dance.  If it meant crying, cry.  If it meant laying face down on the floor in prayer, then lay down.

So I stood there being frangry.  I told Jesus, "I am here and I am really angry.  And Lord, no one had better come and try and heal me tonight, because I don't want it."

I realized that this is an odd thing to tell the Lord, especially for someone who has said she is on a healing road.  So I explained to the Lord and to myself, mostly to myself, because Jesus, He already knows what I mean and who I am.

"God, I don't want you to heal me before they find out what it is.  I want to be able to say 'SEE, SEE, that is what has been causing the hurts, that is what is causing the pain!  I am NOT making it up, it is real and it is THERE!'"  And I had an instantaneous image.  In my mind I was holding up a blackened slimy blob in one hand and the cause of the physical hurts in the other and I realized that for both my physical and emotional hurts and pains that I wanted to be able to pinpoint, name, and see that there was a cause, a reason for them.  A tangible thing to hold and to say, "See this thing, it is real, it is REAL!  This has been the cause and I am not defective.  I am really okay and this whole time this slimy black blob has been to blame for the emotional and the medical whatever it is for the *physical.*"  If healing comes before I can root that out then I will always feel defective.  I will always feel as though God merely healed me from my own overwhelming defectiveness.

************************************************************

Now go from here to Encounter weekend that first weekend of February.  When I came home I wrote my feelings from the weekend out in my journal.  This is what I had to say about part of the weekend.

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I drew this and wrote out these scriptures
after writing out my letter.

Friday night I had felt like a caged animal.  The very first assignment was to write a love letter to Jesus of all things.  

Hello!  Can we just jump into my intimacy issues right off the bat?  Yeah, great.  I told him I wanted to be the wild horse bucking against the fence posts, wanting the security of the fence, but the freedom to still buck.  I told him that I did not want to be close to Him.  He understood the why's.  I didn't have to state them out.  I told him that I could never buck like the wild horse though, because I had already been broken and told that any wild left in me was bad.  It wasn't much of a love letter, but it was my heart at the moment.

************************************************************************

I didn't even really know where those feelings were coming from as I wrote them, they were just there.  I still don't fully understand that wild horse analogy that I was feeling.  I have an inkling that it has something to do with memories that had yet to come out, and those that still have yet to come.  

I finished up the events of the weekend by saying, "I feel war torn and battered.  I don't feel abandoned, but maybe a bit betrayed.  Morning came and joy wasn't waiting."

I have  spoken  of how I went and saw my pastor after this weekend happened.  I didn't speak about what he said to me during that meeting.  (This is the man whose ear is so close to God's lips that I can see the whispers of His voice reflected in his eyes.  As with anyone I don't just blindly follow, but because of how this man lives his life and who he is, because of who God is, I have learned to listen.)  This man told me at our meeting that I just needed to take time and give everything to God, sit down and have it out with Him.  He said that God had a healing for me.  He told me that he could see me with a smile so big and my heart so free and filled with so much joy that my kids and husband would not recognize me, because I would be different than who they had always known.  I would be/feel light.  He told me that I would be the catalyst to move my family into great things.  He also told me that it was no small wonder that I was here in this place (literal location) that God had purposed to put me here for this very reason. He warned that I should not take that lightly and that opportunities like this one don't last forever.  

I was incredibly discouraged when I left, because didn't he know that I did not know HOW to do those things?  I hoped for his vision of my future, but I saw no way that it was going to happen.  Joy? JOY?! Beaming, BEAMING, out of me?!?  Doesn't he know that I am  the girl who doesn't know joy?  He might as well have asked the lame to walk, the blind to see, or the captives to go free.  And now that I write that out, that is exactly what he was asking. Only I felt as though he were asking me to figure out how to go about doing that.  But it was never the lame, the blind, or the captives who saved themselves was it?

(to be cont.) 

*I have been told that this cancer is most likely not the cause of the previous physical ailments and that they are probably not related to one another.
**linking up with faith barista/white space even though the prompt is Easter and I don't speak to that directly this is the story in continuation of my personal Easter story of stones being rolled away.

And the story grows

Somewhere along the way I must have left it behind.   It wasn't until someone mentioned  it in their writing  that I even noticed it was missing.  As I read their words I expected it to rise up and pull at the waters in my eyes and dig at my mind, but it wasn't there. 

I took a mental note of the year; there had been no clearly marked line, no parting of a sea where I walked through and it was left to wash away.  Never the less, it wasn't there.  Shame had left and I hadn't even noticed. 

I wrote last about how I don't have a word or a theme for this year.  I still don't, but as I was thinking over my last year I decided that if I were to put a word over it like an umbrella to cover all it contained then that word would have to be MOVING. 


Tonight during our Wednesday night service our Pastor started off by asking us to answer this question in groups of 4 -5 : Why did Jesus come to earth?

There are lots of answers to this question. 

Our group of 4 came up with these reasons: 1. To pay for our sins  2. To die on the cross 3.  To heal the sick, the hurting, and the lost 4. To show us God 5. To fulfill the prophesies.

I am sure that there are many more answers to that question.  The particular answer that the pastor preached on was that He came to heal the sick and the hurting.  His scripture reference was Luke 4: 18-19

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour." ESV

His  message when condensed down to its most basic form was that we are all broken, lost, and hurting people who need Jesus, because you don't go through this world unscathed. 

Since Adam and Eve ate the fruit way back in the beginning we have all been hurting and in need of a healing and a covering from God. 

When he talked about the nakedness of Adam and Eve it reminded me of a blog I wrote way back in the beginning of my blogging.  (If interested you can click on the Adam and Eve link above to read it.)  Remembering it made me go back and take a look at it, re-read it, re-ponder where I was when I wrote it and where I am now. 

I wrote in there about God's covering and how Christ's sacrifice covered me where I couldn't.  When I wrote those words I was in the deepest depression I had ever been in.  A depression so deep I wasn't sure I would make it out alive.  (This is not an exaggeration.)  After that depression eased with the help of medication I went from pondering God's provision to being a very prodigally prodigal child.

When I came to my own realization that God's provision was better than the pig slop I was feasting in I felt like the most mangerish manger person to ever return home.  

I had essentially said to God, "Forget your fancy coverings you have given me I am going to go get me some forbidden fruit! You aren't cutting it." 

Talk about feeling naked when I came walking back down that road to Him. 

I felt completely EXPOSED and fruit stained. 

(And here is a little something extra, a little something that God just showed me, cuz He is really cool like that: Even when I was feasting on pig slop and forbidden fruit God still had me covered..... because God will never leave me nor forsake me..... He loves me and covers me despite my anger and confusion, because He knows where and who I am.  This is not to advocate sin.  This is not to say once saved always saved, this is just to say that God is awesome and graceful and He knows His children and when they are lost and hurting He doesn't give up on them.)

I hid from humanity for a long while after that.  I felt so stained and dirty and unacceptable that even though I had God's covering I couldn't forgive myself and didn't see how anyone else would be able to accept me as well. 

Before moving to Groton I wrote about how  we were moving, but God was too  .  Little did I know then how much He was and how He was orchestrating this move to Groton to bring healing back into my life and draw me back into humanity and out of my shame. 

There is so much to this story that keeps unfolding and growing and deepening, but this is where it will end for now. 

An open letter to pastors

I wrote this letter to my new pastor.  Really it could have probably been written to any pastor anywhere about the deafening silence coming from the pulpit about sexual abuse and how it has a huge voice that needs listening to in discussions of sexual purity.

July 1, 2013

Dear Pastor .......,

                I sat through service yesterday and listened to you talk on purity.  At one point the room went hazy and it became hard for me to see, so I knew it was something I probably really needed to hear.  But the more I heard the angrier I became.  Angry, because for every time I have ever heard a sermon preached on purity not a single pastor, not one, has ever touched on the sexual sins that adults commit on children and how those sins fundamentally change those children.  Not one!  And so I wanted to stand up and point my finger and shout out:  “Okay, OKAY!  I HEAR what you are saying, but what about us?!  What about those of us who were used as others sexual dishrags before we had any say in the matter, or when we were in that in between stage of child and teenager and we were so confused by what happened and our reaction to it that we felt somehow to blame for it?  What about those of us who grew up thinking that our purpose in life, or worth, was nothing more than that dishrag we were used as, maybe even made to be?  You tell us to be pure, to control ourselves, but you never once touch on how to do that when someone else’s actions fundamentally has changed everything about whom God created us to be. It changes who we are, how we see ourselves, how we see the world around us. Pastors love to speak on how sex is a gift.  I have never known it that way, so I understood when you spoke of the man who asked for his sexual drive to be taken away.  To me sex is more like a poison.  It isn’t intimate, it isn’t holy, and it certainly has never felt like a gift.  It is and always has been a thorn: a deep piercing, infection producing thorn, so how about we as a church discuss that sometime.  Because I know that I am probably not the only one.  I am guessing that just about 75% of any congregation at any given time has been or will be sexually abused, maybe even more.  So where are the sermons on that?  Where are the sermons telling the adults to stop using children as rags for their desires?  Where are the sermons talking to those raggedy children turned adults addressing their shame, their guilt, because they had desires from the time that they could remember that the church says is impure and wrong.  Where are the sermons that will stop making them feel shamed and guilty and start helping them figure out how to change those desires, because shame and guilt sure aren’t getting the job done.  Where are the sermons that discuss how to move sex from the shame/guilt/ poisonous thorn in my side box to the intimacy gift box, because boy I would sure like to know how to do that?!  Are pastors afraid to discuss this?  They aren’t afraid to talk about homosexuality, adultery, pornography, etc., but I am pretty certain that in a large number of these issues if you did a little digging that you would find that the root of many of these sexual sins would be childhood sexual abuse.  So yes, I am pointing my finger, yes I am angry, because why don’t we as a church, as a people address the root of the weed instead of just pulling at what we see coming out of the ground.” 

Please understand that I am not really angry with you.  I am angry with the situation, the silence, the deafening silence from the church when it comes to sexual abuse.  Do people think it doesn’t happen in churches?  That Christians are immune from this plague?  Are pastors afraid to offend the abusers or is it just nicer in general to pretend they aren’t there?  Because trust me they are there, in your congregations, sitting in your pews, invisible, but there and so are we… the sopping wet or crusted over stained and used dishrags. 

Sincerely,

Karmen Madan

Getting kicked out of youth group

I figured I would tell you the whole back story on why I was kicked out of youth group.  I think it was a series of things that kind of added up.  We got a new youth pastor.  He was the kind of guy who didn't like to be questioned. I am the kind of girl to ask a lot of questions.  I don't blindly accept things, so I would often question what he was saying.  It wasn't ever intended to question his authority, but more to get at the truth and to find out how and why what he was saying was true.

I also questioned myself a lot.  I questioned my faith, whether or not I was really a Christian or not.  Not from a lack of faith in God or in the Bible, but more so because I felt dirty inside and as if I wasn't lovable enough for God to really love me.  I said once that I wasn't sure I was a Christian.  This statement was repeated to my Youth Pastor. He never came to me about it, but I think it skewed his opinion of me.

One night, he was teaching us about sex and that we should stay away from it.  He said that sex was like a bomb and that you should never get close to a bomb.  Me, being me, wanted a more decisive answer than that.  A bomb was too vague.  I asked him what the line was, what was too far?  When did physical activity change from innocent to sinful?  Kissing, past kissing, what?  All he could say was to stay as far away from the bomb as possible.  I believe I just rolled my eyes at him and he assumed that I was much more "active" than what was anywhere near the truth. 

None of this was why I was kicked out of youth group though.  All of the youth sat in a certain pew together during church hour.  I would sit and listen to the sermons and take notes, most of the time.  Other of the youth would act up, pass notes, and be disruptive.  Instead of just talking to us about it, the Church's great plan was to make it so that those pews we sat in were no longer open for use.  They said that it was supposed to be left for the late comers.  Interestingly, that was only the case during the service that the youth attended.  I found the rule to be ridiculous.  I sat and listened, that is where I was comfortable sitting, and I figured that they should be more concerned with the fact that I was sitting in a pew at all instead of worrying about what pew I sat in.

One Sunday I moved the rope and sat down.  My friends came and joined me.  We were told that we had to move.  It was not a request.  I grabbed my things and walked out and went back to my house.  I began attending church with my parents who had left that church about a year before.  I continued to go to youth group though.  One night the Youth Pastor called me into his office and told me that I was not allowed to come to youth group anymore since I no longer went to church there on Sundays.  Interestingly there were about 4 or 5 other people who didn't go to that church on Sundays either, but they were still allowed to go to youth group.

A couple of months later a couple of my friends stopped at my house and said that I should come back.  When I told them that the Youth Pastor had said I couldn't they told me that it would be okay, that he would let me now.  I figured that since one of them was the pastor's son that it would be okay.  I was wrong.  As soon as the Youth Pastor came in and saw me he told me to leave.  He said that I wasn't welcome to come back to Youth Group.  He had a meeting with me later and told me that if I wanted to go back to that Youth Group that I would have to apologize to the church for walking out of service and I would have to start going to church there on Sundays.  Suffice it to say, I don't hold a lot of love in my heart for this man.  Oh, this is the funniest part of our discussion that I remember, he told me that I was the kind of person to be easily led astray.  The kind that would blindly follow someone.  I never have understood his logic or reasoning in saying this to me.  People who question, don't typically follow easily, thus his main issue with me, but I digress.

I went home and told my parents what had happened.  My Mom asked if I told him to F off.  If you knew my Mom at all, you would realize how funny this is and how angry his behavior made her since my Mother NEVER swears and especially not that word.  I told her I didn't, but that I had wanted to throw a little paper weight at his head as I sat there and listened to him.  I also told her that it was a good thing that I had a strong sense of who God was and that I didn't see the Youth Pastor's behavior as a reflection of who God is, because otherwise I might not ever go back to church again.  I never did go back to that youth group, or that church.

 So, that is the story of how I got kicked out of youth group.  Wasn't I just such the wild rebel?!  LOL....I still have to shake my head at the whole experience.  So, when I say that I don't follow rules that are ridiculous and put into place just to control someone, that is an example of what I mean. 

Fashionably Funky

I bought myself some new slippers today.  They are soft and fuzzy with bold stripes of color.  Fashionably funky is how I would describe them.  I love new slippers more than I think I love socks. (Although, of course I did pause and look at the socks, but none of them called out to me to take them home.)  I think I might even wear my new slippers to church tonight.  Just because I can and because they make me smile.  And maybe if you are at church tonight, you will see me in my new fashionably funky slippers and you will smile too.