An update on life

As the months continue to pass since my graduation from Mercy Ministries, I grow continually thankful for the new life I was given through the grace of Jesus. As I've mentioned before, I was blessed to have the opportunity to move in with my sister and her family after I graduated. The purpose of this was to allow them to keep me accountable for my actions so I didn't slip back into my old habits. There have been a few close calls, but I've grown to trust them to not let me slip. They have helped me gain confidence in myself and learn how to live a drug free life. They've also helped me become a stronger person. I've had some major ups and downs since I've been back home and they saw me through each and every one...even when I became difficult. I don't have the words to express my gratitude.

Recently I put in an application so that I can move out on my own. This is definitely terrifying, but it's the next step in the process to independence. Part of me doesn't feel ready, but the other part of me feels ready to move forward and begin a life of independence and adulthood. They have been preparing me for this time since I got back. As the move out date becomes closer, reality has started to sink in. But I've become more excited about the idea of being on my own. The point of saying all this is that I've realized a very important lesson through all this.

Independence is learned through dependence. I know this idea doesn't seem that profound, but for me it's become mind blowing. Because I've never known a life without being dependent on someone, I've never been able to fully experience independence. But as I've grown in the last year, I've learned a few things about independence. The biggest thing I've learned is that when a person becomes comfortable with depending on people, it's time to make a step towards independence. This is true in all stages of life. It's a learning experience for sure. But I've learned that since I've become dependent on living with my sister it's time to take the next step. For example, with my budgeting I've become too comfortable in allowing them to keep me accountable. So here and there I'll spend more money than I know I should because in the back of my mind I know that the rent they are charging me will allow me to afford this splurge. Unfortunately when I move, I won't have that kind of money to blow. To me, this is an indicator that I need to take the next step so I can keep learning how to better budget on my own without their help. This is true when it comes to time management. and other responsibilities as well. I'm finally reaching a point in my journey that indicates it's time for me to move on.

So as I wait for the call from the apartment saying I can move, I will continue to allow myself to learn. I still make mistakes, so in those instances I know that I can still reply on the help that's been provided. But I will continue to try my best and keep pushing myself.

A tiny glimpse of an eating disorder

Being a woman has it's advantages, and disadvantages. In the culture we live in, body image is probably the number one issues women face. For me personally, most of my life I have been consumed with my body image. I've always wanted to be skinny and feel pretty. I grew up in a home of people that were skinny. My dad and brother could eat anything and not gain a pound. For a lot of my life, I was like that too. When high school hit, things started to change. I became aware of how food effected my body and became uncomfortable. A lot of girls my age were dieting or starving themselves. I always thought that things like that would never effect me, but slowly I became very aware of my body. Things became very hard for me. Eating in front of people became difficult. A lot of the times I would eat a small amount while I was around people, and then binge eat when I was alone because I was starving. But I noticed that I was gaining weight. I was never that unhealthy with my weight, but I somehow convinced myself that I was fat. I heard comments from other people that implied it. I shrugged it off in front of them, but the minute I walked away, I couldn't get over it. For the longest time, I lived with these feelings. Eventually my mind got the best of me and I began to starve myself. I began eating once a day and even that was a tiny amount. I exercised about 3 hours a day and rode my bike at least 30 miles a day. I was determined to be skinny. People began to comment that I looked good and commented that I had lost weight. This motivated me to want to lose more weight. The day before I left to go to rehab, I remember thinking that I was fat. But when I got there, they said they were going to weigh me. I weighed in at 100 pounds. I didn't think it was possible. I had to weight more. Without realizing it, I had convinced myself that eating wasn't ok. The pressure that I had put on myself was unreal. When I was away, I realized that people effected me than I thought they did. I compared myself to magazine models and 12 year old girls. I thought that women were supposed to be small to fit in.

While I was gone, things started to change. The program I was in forced me to eat. I was given the option to eat, or leave. I knew that I needed to be there so I could get rid of my drug problem and depression...so I slowly started to comply. Eventually I started eating 3 meals a day and being ok with doing so. I hit a huge bump in the road when I started to gain weight. But I learned that it wasn't unhealthy to gain weight. My body had been deprived of nutrients for so long, and after awhile it started to become"normal". I had to learn that gaining weight was a part of becoming a woman. Having curves isn't a bad thing. I eventually started to accept that I was supposed to have curves. I learned that weight isn't what defines me. I learned that God still accepts me and that people would rather see me with a few curves than see me starve myself. Sure, there have been times where I have become angry or guilty for eating, but since rehab, I've been able to overcome those feelings.

Since I've graduated from Mercy, I've learned to accept who I am and accept that my body will change. It hasn't been easy, but I know that I'm not who people say I am. I'm lucky enough to survive an eating disorder. There are girls out there who have died because of the pressure people put on them to be skinny. I'm lucky enough that I was saved before things got too bad. I'm blessed that there were people who were looking out for me when I was drugged up and being irrational. And I'm thankful for the strength God has given me to keep pushing forward. There are days when I feel like my old self and want to stop eating. There are days when all I want to do is use drugs. But I know that God has bugger plans for me. This blog was only a small glimpse of the struggle I went though. But I'm thankful to be able to share this little bit in hopes to encourage just one person.

Gay? Fine by me.

So Illinois recently decided to pass on allowing gay marriage. As a Christ follower, society tells me that I should be thankful for this. But if I can be honest, it hurts my heart. I know a lot of people who read this blog won't agree with my views, but I'm willing to risk losing some readers. I'm not gonna try to back up my views with bible verses or get crazy with my views and start a debate, because fighting over this topic is tiring and stupid. I'm writing to share my feelings on life like I do in any other blog post I write.

I personally feel like denying people the right to marry isn't just. I know I go against the bible I firmly believe in when I say that, but it's hard for me to deny someone the chance to have the rights that I have for being "straight" when people that I love are forced to deal with a civil union. Honestly, I don't understand how it effects anyone else that two people of the same sex want to be married. It's not my relationship, it's theirs. I am personally effected by this topic because people who mean the world to me are not allowed to share the same happiness I can. I don't get how it's OK to tell someone they can't share marriage. I've heard every debate there possibly is on this topic, and none of it matters to me. What matters to me personally is that I have to watch those I love suffer because other people can't get over something that shouldn't be an issue to begin with. For years, marrying someone of the opposite race was unheard of...but we got over that. I grew up with the moral of not discriminating against someone for what they believe. I grew up with the moral to love people no matter what. I grew up respecting that other people have different beliefs than me, but learned to accept them. Not everything I believe is accepted...I'm OK with that. I personally want to marry a man...but that doesn't mean I think every female needs to.

I know a lot of this is just rambling, but I'm saddened that gay marriage is such a crazy topic. I see things that I don't like every day. So I turn my head and continue on with the day. I'm not gonna walk around and hate people who dislike gay marriage. I'll just continue to turn my head. But I will always support my friends and family for who they want to be. I apologize if I upset anyone, but know that I too am upset that my loved ones are being ridiculed and spit on everyday for loving someone. My loved ones are hurting, and I hurt for them. I proudly support gay marriage.

If you want to see change, you can't fight the process

Stuck. It's a situation all of us find ourselves in at one time or another. If you're like me, you hate the feeling of helplessness. I've been in situations that have completely crippled me. That feeling is one of the worst feelings in the world. I think the only thing that might be worse is feeling like God isn't with me. But that's another topic. Change. It's the solution to being stuck. But unlike being stuck, change is usually a lot harder to accomplish. It's easy to get into a situation, but a whole lot harder to get out of it. Sometimes it takes years to change. And that change is a huge process.

 I love being in control. I know that I can't always be in control. Having a leader in my life is necessary, but it's in my nature to want to control the situation I'm in. When I feel like I'm not in control, I get anxious. It's hard to tell myself that some things are just not in my control. Sometimes I have to sit back and let life take its course, and other times the situation may just be too big for me. Whatever the circumstance, it's not always possible to be in control. Trying to control change just doesn't work. Now, I'm not suggesting that in the midst of change, people should sit back and do nothing. But I am saying that trying to control everything allows God to do nothing. I cannot play God because simply put, I am not God. But I can follow God's will for my life and allow Him to do what he does. What I mean is that sometimes when life goes wrong, it's actually right.

When I was trying to quit drugs I had to remove myself from my hometown completely. I know that seems drastic to some people, but for me it was the only way. The thing was, is that it took a long time for me to realize that it was the only way. I tried everything from removing myself from friends to going cold turkey. I tried going to church and I tried isolating myself completely. Nothing seemed to work. Talking to counselors and pastors didn't even help. Everyone I was talking to told me that I needed to remove myself from my home town for awhile. And I told everyone they were crazy. I was still under the impression that I could do it by myself. I didn't think that they knew what they were talking about when they said that I needed to leave. But something crazy happened when I stopped fighting everyone and agreed to leave. Life change happened. It was a totally God ordained event that I left to go to St. Louis for 6 months. Not only did I drop the drug habit, but I completely changed my life. God moved through my heart and I found Him. Once I started letting God do work in me, other people were able to start helping me. Before I left, people were trying to help me, but my heart was hardened. But I was expecting them to heal me. I learned through this process that people can help me, but God is the only one that can heal me.

If it was up to me, I never would have gone to St. Louis. But something in my heart was telling me I needed to go. Before I left, I knew God but didn't really have a huge relationship with Him. So when I felt the urge to go, in my heart I knew it was God. I knew this because it was an urge that I personally would have never felt. While in St. Louis I felt a whole lot more of that. I learned that those feelings to do something that I normally wouldn't do was actually not a feeling, but the Holy Spirit prompting me. Through obeying those promptings, I learned how to trust people again and ultimately learn how to trust God again. I learned that life isn't meant to be done alone and that I need help. I learned how to humble myself and throw away my pride. I still struggle with all of these things, but I'm getting better. I'm learning to led God be the leader in my life. I'm learning that he places people in my path for a reason. I learned all of this by learning to stop fighting the process of change. All of the things that have happened over this last year and a half  would have never happened if I would have continued to fight the process and do it alone. I'd still be a drug addict and still be hanging around the same people that brought me down. None of this was easy...in fact it was literally one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I can honestly say that it was more than worth it. The life I have now is so much more fulfilling than any bag of drugs I ever bought. I'm surrounded by people who love me for me and have my best interest at heart. I'm surrounded by unconditional love and most importantly I'm at a place in my life that for the first time, I can accept unconditional love. Life has not been the same since I started to let God in and stopped fighting the process. I miss it sometimes, but I would NEVER go back.

Childlike Faith

Whilst pushing my niece on the swing the other day, she randomly said to me, "you know those bad guys that try to steal you at night? Well when them try to take me, hundreds of mosquitoes will bite them and then I won't be scared. Them will probably die cause of all those bites.". This conversation and many others with that sweet little girl remind me of the innocence of children. 

Sometimes I need to remind myself to go back to the simplicity of having childlike faith. When I was younger and watched movies, things like talking animals or objects was just accepted. I never questions how those things or animals talked...they just did. Now when I watch movies like "Cars" with my nephew I wonder why their eyebrows don't show enough emotion. I get lost in contemplating the small things, instead of just accepting the big picture. While my nephew is enjoying himself, I end up missing the entire movie because I can't wrap my head around how those cars reproduce and if they did mange to, what kind of car would result? Would car brands have to merge?

As Children we don't think about how pure we are. Everything in life is so simple, and accepting things is easy. The choices we have to make aren't that difficult and if it happens to be difficult, taking the advice of a parent or guardian is easy. There are questions about why things are, or how we got here, but those questions have simple answers when we are young. As we start to grow older and form our own opinions about life, things become more difficult. We become aware of the bad in the world and start to wonder if we are safe.When we doubt the goodness of the world, there is always God to rely on. But as adults that's not always easy to remember. Little kids don't think to doubt things like that if we just tell them that God is good and his goodness overrides any bad. I wish that I had more childlike faith when life got hard. I need to start going back to the basics again and tackle life with a new perspective daily.

A Glass Half Full Kind of Love

Have you ever thought to yourself that your "love tank" was running a little low, even though you were being surrounded by a whole lot of love? Or have you ever went looking for love and found yourself falling short and getting hurt because it wasn't what you wanted? I've personally been in situations where I've wanted to experience a "certain kind of love" from someone and discovered that what I was looking for in that person didn't fulfill the hole in my heart. Love isn't something that that can be forced and love isn't something that you can alter. You can't experience the same love from every person you come into contact with. A parents love is different from the love of a best friend. The love you find at church is different than the love you find on a mission trip to another country. We are all wired to experience love from one another, but sometimes someone else's love doesn't measure up to our own standards of how we think we should be receiving that love. I believe that the reason a lot of us come up short when it comes to feeling loved by others around us is because we are looking for love in the wrong way. God's love is the only love that can make us feel whole. It's the only love that completes who we are. We were made as a result of His love for us. We were made by Love, out of Love and to love and be loved.

I think that it's fully possible to sustain a happy life living off of the love we receive from one another. But I believe that the love we receive from one another, as well as give out to others isn't love to its fullest potential. It's a glass half full kind of love. This is where it may get a little tricky. I personally believe that when I love someone, I'm loving them with everything I am. But the person who is receiving that love may not feel like I'm loving them will all I am. I know I've felt that someone should love me "better". But to me, the love I give is the best I've got. And to you, the love you give is the best you've got. This is why I call it a glass half full kind of love. In my own life, I've fought very hard for the love of my earthly father. Sometimes I walk away and I don't think he loved me"enough". But to him, he was showing love to me the best he knew how. I walked away feeling kind of empty. None of that is his fault. To him, he was giving me love to his fullest potential, but I felt empty because I know in my heart what love to it's fullest potential feels like. I know what God's love feels like. And nothing...I mean NOTHING compares to the love of God! My dad loves me very much, even if I don't always feel like it. But God loves me more than I can even comprehend.

The love we receive from God is the only love that is love to it's fullest potential. His love overflows our glasses. God is Love! How can we personally love anyone more than God loves us? We can't. We can give our best, but it's still nothing compared to the love of our creator. He is the definition of love. None of this should be discouraging though. If anything, it should be ridiculously encouraging. In those moments when you feel like your coming up short and that your love tank is half full, you should turn to God. God can make your heart whole, and God can make you feel more loved than any human being on this earth is capable of. God's love saves people. All we as humans have to do is accept that love. It's ours for the taking. We don't ever have to feel like we've come up short when it comes to love. God has all the love we will ever need!

Root Systems

Growing up with a father as a landscaper, I've always been interested in the outdoors. I'm not the most amazing gardener ever, but I always loved helping my grandma in her year when I was younger. One of the first things I learned about gardening is that weeds will destroy anything you're trying to grow. In order to kill them, you have to pull them out by the roots. If you just take the tops off, they will grow right back the next time rain comes. Effectively taking the roots out will allow a healthy garden to grow and prolong the life of your plants.

This analogy may not be mind blowing, but when it comes to dealing with problems in life, I think we need to go about solving said problems in a similar way that I was taught to garden. Attacking problems in life at surface level is like sticking a band-aid in a cut that needs stitches. It may heal the wound for a moment, but it will leave a lasting scar. But finding the root of the problem will allow you to really deal with the issue at hand. And just like weeds, if you don't take care of something fully the first time, the minute a storm in life hits you, the problem grows even bigger because you never handled it all to begin with. This results in making it difficult to get through something that comes up. Sometimes trees and plants grow so close to each other that their root systems start to grow together. In the same way, sometimes one problem that you have may have began as the result of a previous problem. This is another reason why it's important to take problems out by the root. Otherwise, you may not even know where to look when you're trying to solve a problem. And when that storm hits, instead of only needing to pull one root system out, you don't even know where to begin.

A lot of us carry baggage with us from our childhood. I know I do. Things happened when I was a child that scarred me for a very long time. When I was younger, I never dealt with those problems. As I grew up and started to use drugs, the thought never occurred to me that I may have been using so heavily because I was masking out the pain I never dealt with. So when I tried to quit on my own, I never ended up succeeding. I always figured that in order to quit I had to just remove myself from the drug and try to steer clear of temptation. Where that was partially helpful, it wasn't effective because every time I began to feel down about life, I'd forget about trying to resist temptation and go right back to using. It was the only way I knew how to cope. Finally the time came that I knew I needed a better way to deal with life other than drugs. But because I had just been putting band-aids on my wounds for so long, I had no clue where to start. While I was in treatment for 6 months dealing with my depression and drug abuse, I started to learn about root systems. I was told that I needed to face the problems from my past and really deal with them. I had no clue that a lot of my trust issues and depression stemmed off of events of my past. I had just figured that I was young and this is normal. But as I began to dig deep and discover some things, I started to learn a lot about the root systems that had grown over the years within me. And when I started to pull the roots out, one by one the heavy burden I'd been carrying for so long started to be lifted off of me. It was crazy how dealing with one huge root made it easier to cut off smaller ones. And it was interesting to see that a lot of the struggles I was facing weren't that big of a deal once I started to deal with the real underlying issues.

Today, when struggles happen I try to think back to what I learned while being away for 6 months. I try to remember that just coping with a problem isn't going to help me in the long run, even if it appears to take care of the issue at first. It has slowly become easier to cope with life knowing that I've gained the tools I need. Life wasn't intended to be easy, but it wasn't intended to be hard all the time either. I've had times where I've made it more difficult than it needed to be because I wasn't able to deal with it the way I needed to and humble myself to ask for help. So as life continues to happen, I'm going to continue to go back to my gardening guidelines and remember that the first step to a healthy garden, and healthy life, is to pull up the weeds that begin to take over by the roots!