Self Discovery on an Adventure: The Bad Stuff

I don't think I've made it clear to everyone that I recently got the chance to go on an adventure in Great Britain.  My group had been planning for about a year and we thought we were pretty well prepared (You can check out the previous installments here first and here second to see how that went). Travel is great because it's full of new experiences, sights and adventures.  It can also be full of exhaustion, confusion and short tempers.  In my pursuit of an adventure to find God in my everyday I discovered some things about myself in the testing ground that the trip became that I was pretty ashamed of.  So what do you do when you discover unpleasant things about yourself when you're supposed to be having an adventure?

My hubby and I went to Great Britain back in our second year of marriage with a friend.  It was an amazing opportunity and I really enjoyed myself.  We had a great time.  Here's the thing, our travel companion thought I had the worst time ever.  Why?  I was overweight and generally unhappy.  It was my normal at the time.  I was getting used to having a chronic illness and getting used to being a wife. 

Complaint was a normal part of my language.  I have since been called out for complaining which made me aware of what I thought was "sharing" and was really the symptom of a heart problem.  That first time to Great Britain was full of great memories but it was a great lesson afterward as I got feedback from my friend.  It made me aware of the attitudes I wear.  

This latest adventure to Great Britain was like a mirror of the first time.  I watched as my travel companion struggled and a completely unexpected thing happened.  I was impatient.  I am appalled to admit it.  Even now I feel ashamed of myself.  My previous esperience should have prompted me to greater understanding and compassion.  Instead, I kept trying to make things better with more planning, adjustments to the schedule, and trying to interact less with my companions.  The truth is, how I do things isn't how my companions did things.  While this led to further frustration, it didn't have too.  Once misunderstanding took root, every word seemed to have the potential to be hurtful.  I tried to fix it by talking less which ended up coming across as passive aggressive and sulky.  I hate those words.  They are ugly words and I hate imagining myself wearing them.

People wear all kinds of weird stuff when they go on vacation.  Stuff they would never wear at home.  Plaid beanies, Hawaiian shirts, lederhosen.  It seems we also wear our dirty laundry.  The secret things we say in the privacy of our minds that we dismiss at home because we can easily brush them aside.  In our safe places, in our familiar, we indulge in them like pieces of chocolate because we can be alone.  We don't have to constantly be on our best behavior.  On a trip, or outside our comfort zones, or during times of exhaustion and pain, there is no where to hide.  Those things we think in the privacy of our mind become an internal snide commentary that makes its way onto our face and out of our mouths.  

During the course of any adventure it is always wise to be aware of tensions and to ask yourself: 

1. Is my behavior adding to or subtracting from the experience we are having?
2. What lingering dark place in your heart came out of your mouth in a moment of weakness?
3. What am I going to do about it?

For Biblical and practical reasons the first thing you need to do about it is confess it to God and then go and apologize to your companions.  Getting it resolved gives everyone the best chance to reset and get on with having a great time.  Once that is done, I find it very useful to write it down and talk to God about it in detail.  While the immediate weakness of exhaustion and stress will go away, the underlying issue that it exposed is something you want to bring to the Light.

   

Discovering unpleasant things about yourself on an adventure gives you the gift of insight.  The opportunity to bring those things before the Lord, confess them, and ask Him to weed them out of your thought closet (to borrow a turn of phrase from Jennifer Rothschild).  It's hard, and it's ugly, but I can't think of a better memento to bring back from any vacation.

I hope my travel companions will look back on this adventure and forget the tensions, spats, pain and frustrations.  I hope they will remember the adventure for the exciting and new experience it was.  Either way, I know I'm praising God for using the adventure to teach me more about Him and who He wants me to be.    

Low Nickel Diet

Concluding our discussion on Comparison last week leaves me the perfect transition into this weeks blog post on health.  In my own life I don't think there is any subject where I compare myself negatively with others more frequently than health.  Our newest bump on the road of my families health is causing a great deal of stress for me because it involves such a steep learning curve.  Or at least, it feels steep.  My spouse has been dealing with a skin rash/eczema for the last couple of years that doctors and dermatologists have been unable to diagnose or treat. It was itchy, bubbly, red and caused hair to fall out (most notably on his eyebrows).  Spots would randomly flare up or spread and so I finally decided to make an appointment with an allergy clinic.  They concluded right away it was a nickel allergy and ordered my spouse to adopt a low nickel diet.

Can you guess what foods have nickel?  If you thought none, you would be incorrect.  If you thought all of them, ding ding ding, you are pretty close.  Nickel is in the ground, therefore, things that grow from the ground or eat things grown from the ground are going to have some nickel.  The trick seems to be choosing those foods that are lowest in nickel to avoid having an allergic response.  Here's the part that has been stressing me out.  All the lists I have found so far either contradict each other or only feel comfortable sharing the foods you can't eat.  Few will tell you what foods you can eat without doing some research.  

I want to emphasize the fact that I am not a medical professional.  I'm just trying to figure things out and thought it might help some people.  For me, I needed to figure out what I could feed my family in a practical sense.  I will also say that this is only the first step in figuring out how to live with a nickel allergy this severe.  I have personally found a great deal of information and encouragement from Christy Cushing.  Allergies are always a complex issue and my spouse apparently has quite a few.  Figuring out what will cause a reaction will require a lot of trial and error.  So to organize the information into a format that would be useful to me, I made a spreadsheet.

The problem with the above list is three fold.  

• One
•  it's not exhaustive.  I have no idea if quinoa is allowed yet. I don't know what other vegetables, like jicama or other root vegetables, we can eat.
• Two
• the nickel quantity in any given food is dependent on the soil it's grown in.  Manufacturing can introduce nickel into foods as well as pots and pans in some cases.  Identifying which items have nickel apart from the food equation is a whole other kettle of fish (which we really can't eat now) and so I won't go into it at this time.  
• Three
• We have to set aside the "healthy" diet/lifestyle we were pursuing and start completely from scratch.  I can't follow Whole 30 or Paleo because a good portion of what we eat under those plans are now not allowed.  Are we going to get enough nutrients on a low nickel diet?  What is healthy now?

It's been easy to get overwhelmed with all the effort that is going into learning right now.  Learning about a low nickel diet, learning what has nickel in it, learning about all the other things I'm pursuing right now.  More than any of those, I'm learning to humble myself.  I hate feeling dumb.  I hate feeling like I don't know what I'm doing.  I absolutely hate feeling like I'm doing something wrong.  And right now I feel all those things.  It requires humility to set aside my need to "have it all together" and be a student.  It requires humility to give our silent struggle to God instead of holding onto it so we can compare how much harder we have it than anyone else.  

What things are you struggling to set aside to be a student?  What does being a student mean to you?  Does it immediately conjure up images of youth, ignorance or weakness?   Whether you're struggling with comparing yourself to the seemingly healthy masses and wondering why you, or whether you are struggling to humble yourself as you learn to do better, you can do this.  One step at a time, in the chunks you can handle with God's help.  

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Balancing Act

I was watching a Korean escape room live action show this week.  That sounds weird doesn't it.  I do believe I warned you that I was an Odd Duck.  One of the challenges had the teams trying to solve a puzzle that involved weights that they had to pass from one side of a platform to the other while the whole team stood on it and had to keep the platform balanced.  Each over correction or miscommunication in the team sent the platform tilting into the penalty zone.  It got me thinking about balance.  In this season of rest that God asked me to enter into, I have been struggling.  One of the reasons I don't like resting is that I feel predisposed to laziness.  In my youth I poured out prayers to God asking Him to give me discipline.  I've always known that I had a problem.  It's one of the things I liked least about myself growing up.  Those people that know me now laugh at this idea.  I'm always busy.  I've got a schedule that has to be carefully maintained.  But that's the thing, I schedule.  I to do list.  I took my desire for discipline and I built a framework that would allow me to maintain it.  This season of rest has shone a spot light on the fact that without my careful constructs, I still don't have any discipline.

I knew that God had some things to teach me during this time of rest and it was clear from the start that when He asked me to clear my schedule, He meant it.  Just like God didn't move in Abram's life until after he had done ALL of what God asked of him (see Gen 12:1).  God told him to leave country and family behind but he couldn't do it.  He traveled with his nephew for a time but didn't get further direction from God until he parted ways with his family like God had asked him too.  So I set aside my scheduler and my to do lists.  They have been sitting blank and forlorn for weeks.  I blocked out huge swaths before our Hawaii trip to remind me that I didn't have tasks to do, I had rest.  

There is definitely a lesson in reminding yourself that obeying all of what God has asked of you is important.  Lifting one finger on the clenched fist you have around the thing He's asked you to let go of is not obedience.  It's a step in the right direction but it is not the end of the journey.  

So here I sit, feeling adrift.  What exactly is God asking me to do.  I've got things I could be doing but without my schedule and my to do list....I've done pretty much nothing.  I wasn't even spending quiet time with God for a while, which was not okay.  What exactly did God mean for me to be doing while resting.  It can't seriously be nothing, because that's awful, and yet that's what I was doing.  That's why this moment on the TV program hit me.  Life in general seems to be a balancing act.  We're trying to maintain moderation and sanity.  I didn't realize how often I tilted on a huge fulcrum.  All busy or all lazy.  Frantically over balancing myself trying to correct, leaning too far one way or the other.  So afraid of leaning to the lazy that I never even attempted to correct my seriously tilted life.  

Most people would tell you that the secret to physical balance is all about staying centered and micro corrections.  But stress responses usually throw that knowledge right out the window.  Just like physical challenges that affect balance, we have mental traumas that can have the same effect. It can start to feel like the deck is stacked against us when it comes to balance.  It's easy to forget the easiest trick to maintaining proper balance...

a point of focus.

You see, over correcting my flaws is what happens when I take control of trying to fix them.  

So, I'm learning in the quiet to do one thing.  Focus on my Savior.

How about you?  Have you over over corrected your balance?  Do you need to take some time to refocus and regain your balance?  You're not alone.

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Watch for traps

I’m an action comedy kind of girl.  When I watch a movie I want it to thrill and delight me.  Luckily, my hubby is the same way.  Our favorite is the Princess Bride and I’m sorry but we can’t be friends if you don’t agree.  ;)  I was thinking about some of my favorite films recently and thinking about the fact that the hero always seems to have some inexplicable immunity or special skill that just so happens to meet the requirements of any given situation until the story needs to give the sidekick something to do.  Have you ever noticed that? 

Life doesn’t work like that!

  

In fact, it's the exact opposite.  The pitfalls and traps in life that cause us to trip up, fall down and spin about are insidious.  Unlike an action movie where the hero encounters generic traps in which they are naturally skilled, our traps are specifically tailored to our weaknesses.   

The traps are so specifically tailored that I often feel that I will never be able to overcome the pitfall.  I think we can all admit that there are some weaknesses we have struggled with our entire lives.  If God is growing and changing us, why am I still struggling with a specific area of sin?  Why does that trap always seem to work?  

It may be because God is not General Akbar yelling from His throne “IT’S A TRAP!”  Or does He?  Maybe He does yell from His throne that it’s a trap.  So often we are drowning God’s voice out with other things so we can’t hear His warnings. 

Maybe it's because God is trying to make us aware of our shortcomings so we can learn to overcome them.  I often find that I'm unaware of an issue until someone or something points it out to me.  

No matter what God ordained reason for the trap, I know why I fall for them.  I get caught in these traps because my hand is reaching out for something it shouldn't.  I don't know about you but the traps I seem to fall for are not subtle once you notice they are always there.  

The third Indiana Jones film is my favorite (I know, not a popular choice) but one of the reasons why I love this film is the theme of focus.  Good guys and bad guys alike are after the "holy grail" but their intent and motivations are different.  After being told the grail can't go past the seal, the femme fatale takes it past the seal.  Consequences ensue.  The hero saves her from falling only to have her pull herself out of his grasp as she tries to reach for the grail.  This leads to his fall, which is halted by his father.  Now stay with me here.  This is our moment.  While hanging there, the hero takes his eyes off his father and onto the grail.  He almost makes the same mistake the femme fatale made.  The grail isn't a bad thing.  Most of the things that cause us to fall into traps aren't.  It's taking our eyes off God the Father for any reason.  Sometimes it's because He's holding on to us to prevent a fall.  Sometimes it's because anything less than God is an idol.  We pull ourselves out of the grip of a God who is leading us by his strong right arm to grasp hold of something else.  Whether that thing is good or bad the point is that it is just a thing.  It's a creation, not the creator.  

So what are you reaching for today?  Is it your Savior or something else?

Linking up with: #freshmarketfriday, #destinationinspiration, #faithnfriends