My birthday was a couple of days ago. It was pretty awesome. I had lunch with friends, dinner with family, watched a Madonna-themed Glee with one of my favorite people, and got a massage. It was pretty much the perfect day.
But when I say "massage," I'm not just talking about one from my awesome hubby. No, I got a real massage from someone called a massage therapist, as in, this is her full-time job. I have had one "professional" massage before, but it felt like it was from a hair stylist who took a few classes on the side. Now I know I was right.
A real massage therapist is amazing. First of all, that woman didn't just have magic fingers, she had seriously buff hands and forearms. She manipulated my joints and muscles, pulled on my head and pushed on my shoulders to work out the labyrinth of knots in my neck and upper back. It lasted an hour, but I could have laid there all day.
Afterward I just wanted a nap. And to schedule my next appointment.
I'm a pretty big proponent of therapy, you know, the kind where you work out all of your stuff and then go home and cry, but it eventually gets better?
I have now officially become a fan of massage therapy...where someone else works out all of your stuff and then you go home and take a nap.
Now I just need to figure out if my insurance will cover it...
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Story, part 2 - Redemption
We don't choose our endings, but God is capable of redeeming our stories.
I made a friend a few summers back. I was in the mountains of Colorado with no t.v., sketchy internet, and three young boys. I had a lot of questions for God that summer and sought answers to them in two books - The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (trust me, it's super fun:) and Genesis.
I read the divorce book to understand how my family dysfunction affected me, and I read Genesis with the question for God: "How do you feel about me, about your people?" And an amazing thing happened. Right there in the Old Testament, amid the smiting and stoning and casting out of Eden, I saw how much God loves us, how profoundly he delights in us. It was amazing.
And I saw how so much of what I believed about God was actually based on my messed up past, not scripture. It became clear to me that God loved how much I loved my family, my husband, my children. My intense love for them did not make God want to take them from me, as I had feared since I fell in love with Joel a decade earlier. I was sure that that verse on how we should hate our mothers and fathers compared to our love for Jesus meant that God would punish me for loving them too much. I saw how messed up this thinking was. How could the God of love be angry at me for loving people he loves infinitely more than I do?
How I tried to break up with Joel because I was too happy? - common among adult children of divorce. Desire to be with Joel my whole life, but terrified of marrying him? - because of the broken family. Constant fear that husband will have an affair and children will be killed in horrible accident? - part paranoid me, part serious dysfunction. It was crazy and eye-opening and freeing to have the wheat separated from the chaff, the truth from the lie, the true God from the false (and scary) image in my head.
I felt free, and had just begun my journey of understanding just how much God actually loves me.
In the midst of this journey came my friend. She was this sweet and beautiful girl who asked if I would mentor her. Our mentoring sessions consisted mostly of me sharing what I was learning in all of my studies, and her asking me questions and telling me her story, which was filled with plenty of dysfunction of her own.
Her parents had divorced years before and her father was an alcoholic. It was a difficult story to hear, but somehow God brought us together that summer and began her journey of healing as well.
A few weeks ago I was able to get with this friend after so many years apart. She had gone into full-time ministry for a few years, gotten married and is now teaching and thinking about starting a family. It was fantastic to see her and to hear how well she is doing, but one thing in particular has stuck with me.
She told me the story of how her father died.
After years of alcoholism, her father's body just started to give out, to shut down. He went into the hospital and eventually reached a point where he was no longer able to talk. He couldn't speak, but he was coherent. He was sober.
My friend visited her father regularly during this time, talking to him and somehow understanding what he was saying to her (she was the only one that was able to interpret what he was saying). And something amazing happened. This girl, who had such a broken relationship with her father, got to hear all of the things she needed to, things she should have heard years before.
Her dad said simple things like:
"I love you."
and
"I'm glad you're here."
Things she had never heard before.
He held her hand and looked into her eyes with clarity in his own and spoke words of love and affirmation to a daughter he had horribly neglected.
I sat there listening to my friend tell her story, open mouthed, in awe of God. I sat there in awe of his goodness, of his kindness, of his power to redeem, and of his desire to make things right.
When I met with her so many years ago I prayed that she would find strength in God, that she would seek out the healing I believed he offered. I hoped that she would find people to love her wherever she was, but I never dreamed that the story of her dad would be redeemed, I didn't dare to hope for that.
That goes deeper than any Hollywood ending. That is redemption of a life, and that is pure God.
I know that my Redeemer lives, what comfort that sweet sentence gives...
How amazing that we serve a God who not only redeems souls, but stories, too.
I made a friend a few summers back. I was in the mountains of Colorado with no t.v., sketchy internet, and three young boys. I had a lot of questions for God that summer and sought answers to them in two books - The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (trust me, it's super fun:) and Genesis.
I read the divorce book to understand how my family dysfunction affected me, and I read Genesis with the question for God: "How do you feel about me, about your people?" And an amazing thing happened. Right there in the Old Testament, amid the smiting and stoning and casting out of Eden, I saw how much God loves us, how profoundly he delights in us. It was amazing.
And I saw how so much of what I believed about God was actually based on my messed up past, not scripture. It became clear to me that God loved how much I loved my family, my husband, my children. My intense love for them did not make God want to take them from me, as I had feared since I fell in love with Joel a decade earlier. I was sure that that verse on how we should hate our mothers and fathers compared to our love for Jesus meant that God would punish me for loving them too much. I saw how messed up this thinking was. How could the God of love be angry at me for loving people he loves infinitely more than I do?
How I tried to break up with Joel because I was too happy? - common among adult children of divorce. Desire to be with Joel my whole life, but terrified of marrying him? - because of the broken family. Constant fear that husband will have an affair and children will be killed in horrible accident? - part paranoid me, part serious dysfunction. It was crazy and eye-opening and freeing to have the wheat separated from the chaff, the truth from the lie, the true God from the false (and scary) image in my head.
I felt free, and had just begun my journey of understanding just how much God actually loves me.
In the midst of this journey came my friend. She was this sweet and beautiful girl who asked if I would mentor her. Our mentoring sessions consisted mostly of me sharing what I was learning in all of my studies, and her asking me questions and telling me her story, which was filled with plenty of dysfunction of her own.
Her parents had divorced years before and her father was an alcoholic. It was a difficult story to hear, but somehow God brought us together that summer and began her journey of healing as well.
A few weeks ago I was able to get with this friend after so many years apart. She had gone into full-time ministry for a few years, gotten married and is now teaching and thinking about starting a family. It was fantastic to see her and to hear how well she is doing, but one thing in particular has stuck with me.
She told me the story of how her father died.
After years of alcoholism, her father's body just started to give out, to shut down. He went into the hospital and eventually reached a point where he was no longer able to talk. He couldn't speak, but he was coherent. He was sober.
My friend visited her father regularly during this time, talking to him and somehow understanding what he was saying to her (she was the only one that was able to interpret what he was saying). And something amazing happened. This girl, who had such a broken relationship with her father, got to hear all of the things she needed to, things she should have heard years before.
Her dad said simple things like:
"I love you."
and
"I'm glad you're here."
Things she had never heard before.
He held her hand and looked into her eyes with clarity in his own and spoke words of love and affirmation to a daughter he had horribly neglected.
I sat there listening to my friend tell her story, open mouthed, in awe of God. I sat there in awe of his goodness, of his kindness, of his power to redeem, and of his desire to make things right.
When I met with her so many years ago I prayed that she would find strength in God, that she would seek out the healing I believed he offered. I hoped that she would find people to love her wherever she was, but I never dreamed that the story of her dad would be redeemed, I didn't dare to hope for that.
That goes deeper than any Hollywood ending. That is redemption of a life, and that is pure God.
I know that my Redeemer lives, what comfort that sweet sentence gives...
How amazing that we serve a God who not only redeems souls, but stories, too.
Story, part 1 - Endings
I watched this movie the other night that really affected me. I don't want to tell you the name of it:
1. because you'd make fun of me
and
2. because I'm gonna give away the ending.
It's the story of these two people who fall in love. The kind of love that consumes you from the inside out. I know, it's Hollywood, so what other kind of love would there be? But I'm a romantic and totally bought into it. Anyway, they both have these kind of tragic pasts which makes their love for one another that much more intense and magical. (And which made me love the story even more).
It's a typical movie in that you root for them to figure it out, to make it work, to forgive each other when they mess up, and they do. But then something unusual, for Hollywood, happened. One of them died. On one hugely tragic day, a main character died along with many others. I watched transfixed as the significant other and the character's family grieved this loss. It was so sad to think of them going through yet another tragedy. It was too much. No family could survive under that. The story wasn't supposed to be over...but the movie was. That's how it ended.
It wasn't a typical Hollywood ending because no one watching wanted it to end that way. No one thought, "Yes, the main character should die tragically at the end of the movie and leave the other person to grieve another crushing loss. Yes, that would be really satisfying." No one thought that. No one wanted that. But that's how the story ended.
As I left the theater, though, I thought how no one who died on that day in real life (it was 9/11) was done with their story either. No one went into work thinking, "I've lived my life, I've loved enough, I'm okay with not making it home today." No one thought that, because their stories weren't over either. They had husbands or wives, kids or roommates, moms in the hospital or little brothers needing to be picked up from school. They had dreams of the next day and year and decade. But their story was over. Just like that.
They weren't in a Hollywood movie where a test audience decides if the ending is just right. I heard once, though I don't know if it's true, that Pretty Woman's original ending had Julia Roberts strung out on drugs in some seedy hotel room while Richard Gere went back to business. It was a romantic comedy with a decidedly tragic ending. But (not surprisingly) the audiences didn't like it. So they changed it all around and gave the insanely happy fairytale ending where every need of every character is met and they ride happily off into the sunset together.
We don't get to choose our endings. I don't mean to be morbid, but today reminds me of this fact. We don't choose our ending, but the miraculous fact is that even when the ending is most tragic, God can redeem the story.
To be continued...
1. because you'd make fun of me
and
2. because I'm gonna give away the ending.
It's the story of these two people who fall in love. The kind of love that consumes you from the inside out. I know, it's Hollywood, so what other kind of love would there be? But I'm a romantic and totally bought into it. Anyway, they both have these kind of tragic pasts which makes their love for one another that much more intense and magical. (And which made me love the story even more).
It's a typical movie in that you root for them to figure it out, to make it work, to forgive each other when they mess up, and they do. But then something unusual, for Hollywood, happened. One of them died. On one hugely tragic day, a main character died along with many others. I watched transfixed as the significant other and the character's family grieved this loss. It was so sad to think of them going through yet another tragedy. It was too much. No family could survive under that. The story wasn't supposed to be over...but the movie was. That's how it ended.
It wasn't a typical Hollywood ending because no one watching wanted it to end that way. No one thought, "Yes, the main character should die tragically at the end of the movie and leave the other person to grieve another crushing loss. Yes, that would be really satisfying." No one thought that. No one wanted that. But that's how the story ended.
As I left the theater, though, I thought how no one who died on that day in real life (it was 9/11) was done with their story either. No one went into work thinking, "I've lived my life, I've loved enough, I'm okay with not making it home today." No one thought that, because their stories weren't over either. They had husbands or wives, kids or roommates, moms in the hospital or little brothers needing to be picked up from school. They had dreams of the next day and year and decade. But their story was over. Just like that.
They weren't in a Hollywood movie where a test audience decides if the ending is just right. I heard once, though I don't know if it's true, that Pretty Woman's original ending had Julia Roberts strung out on drugs in some seedy hotel room while Richard Gere went back to business. It was a romantic comedy with a decidedly tragic ending. But (not surprisingly) the audiences didn't like it. So they changed it all around and gave the insanely happy fairytale ending where every need of every character is met and they ride happily off into the sunset together.
We don't get to choose our endings. I don't mean to be morbid, but today reminds me of this fact. We don't choose our ending, but the miraculous fact is that even when the ending is most tragic, God can redeem the story.
To be continued...
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