Chronic pain

 

Some random and hopeful thoughts for today

 

Naomi Judd And Our Difficult American History

A friend of mine has been reading River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope by Naomi Judd. My friend was moved enough by the book to offer the following comments on Facebook:

I just finished a memoir by Naomi Judd, addressing her struggle with profound depression, anxiety disorder and PTSD. I had the book for a couple of years, but hadn’t started reading it until she committed suicide.

The book ended with her climbing out of her depression and giving lots of advice about how to cope with it. It’s heartbreaking that all of those struggles and a seeming recovery, she couldn’t make it. She and Wynonna made an appearance at an awards show, announced an impending tour and were finally to be inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame. The day before the ceremony, she put a gun to her head and ended her life.

Her struggles with depression , anxiety disorders and PTSD resonated with me because I’m coming off of 18 months of nearly unbearable physical and mental anguish.

Ms. Judd made a comment about feeling alone and isolated, but feeling unable to interact with others. Mine developed into one of my infrequent bouts of agoraphobia.

I actually walked over to the Clubhouse last evening and played Bingo with other residents, most of whom I was just meeting. I also walked both yesterday and today, things I thought I was unable to do even a few days ago. It took a lot of encouragement from friends and my therapist giving me homework, for me to follow through on it.

If you suffer with mental health issues, please reach out. There are people and agencies willing to help, although Covid has greatly exacerbated the issues with overextended resources along with increased demand for services. Reach out, you are loved and needed and worthy. You are NOT alone.

Reading these comments has brought some unexpected or unacknowledged feelings up for me about the Judds and their music, but I don't want this post to be about me. I think that the comments above show a sensitivity to life and death and demonstrate how someone's life and writing and music can touch people's hearts after they die. I think that this also cuts through so many of the judgmental attitudes about suicide that prevent us from coming to grips with what suicide is and how to prevent it. Depression is real, and these days you might well be taken for crazy if you're not struggling with depression or being swept away by it.

We try to affirm and encourage people on this blog, but I know that it takes much more than this to really help and be present for folks. I do believe that you're precious and a necessary part of a larger picture. I hope that that is of some help.   

I think that my friend's commentary also begins to cut through the prejudices against country music, and against women country musicians and singers in particular. Those women get stereotyped and looked down on and commercialized or Nashvilleized, but at their best they are telling stories that people can see themselves in. That looking down on the music and the musicians and performers is looking down on the people who see themselves in that music.

Kerry Leigh Merritt published her book Masterless Men about five years ago. This is a tough book to read, and its not for everyone, but it tells a true story of poor whites and their relationship to slavery in the Antebellum South. A significant number of poor whites living in the Deep or Solid South had no material interest in slavery as an institution and likely either opposed it or were indifferent to it prior to the Civil War. They had to be forced to join the Confederate armies in large numbers, and many deserted. As many as 100,000 white southerners crossed the lines during the Civil War. Large numbers of those who stayed behind helped cause the slave economy to collapse. It is a lasting tragedy of our history that there was not greater unity across racial lines in the anti-slavery struggle in the south, but Merritt helps us better understand why that was so.  

Kerry Leigh Merritt does a great job in building on work done by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in tracing the Black freedom struggle before and during the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But I think that she is at her best in describing white poverty, mass white disaffection in the south in the early 19th century, cooperation between oppressed whites and Blacks where and when it did occur, and the conditions of dictatorship that the white southern ruling class used in order to separate Blacks and whites and terrorize each group.

The anger and listlessness (I cannot think of another word) that poor whites held onto as they hid in isolated communities or became an itinerant and precarious population that sometimes threatened the social order are in some measure the seeds of white depression and anger in the south. And that depression and anger (I think) helped birth country music. Seen in this way, Naomi Judd was living history, or was representing a history that we have not yet acknowledged as a nation.

I don't know that we will ever get to a point of stopping suicide if we can't confront this history and come to terms with it and turn this country around.

If you're struggling right now, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. 
       

Naomi Judd Opens Up About Long Struggle With Severe Depression

River of Time - The Judds 1991

"Scripture is full of lamentations because it reflects real life, and real life has moments of deep sorrow and pain..."

“When the world looks to Christians for lament, this is an opportunity to embrace the suffering of others, to join in fellowship with those who are hurting. But too often Christians are silent, or apathetic, or even combative to the lament of others.

Scripture is full of laments. There’s an entire book of the Bible entitled Lamentations. Roughly a third of all of the Psalms are forms of lament. Psalm 9: 9 reflects the willingness of God to accept our laments, stating that “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.” Matthew 5: 4 reiterates God’s desire for us to lament, when Jesus exclaims “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” And Psalm 34: 18 declares that “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

Scripture is full of lamentations because it reflects real life, and real life has moments of deep sorrow and pain. Social justice asks us to lament, because justice cannot be passionately pursued until injustice is fully understood, and known, and felt. When you feel, see, and know the pain and suffering of your neighbors, you will lament.

Lamentations are happening all around us. The sorrows of the oppressed are being communicated, but are we listening?…

…To not lament is to not understand, to not empathize, to not have compassion, to not care, and to not love. When we lament with our neighbor we offer them our purest form of comfort, which doesn’t rationalize, excuse, or shy away from the pain, but rather wholly embraces the reality of their being.
There are countless opportunities to lament, to love our neighbors: Bombings. Wars. Shooting. Murders. Racism. Bigotry. Today, lament with those who lament.”

-On Love and Mercy: A Social Justice Devotional

Anxiety and what it looks and feels like

 

Be the person who breaks the cycle...

 

Abuse is not always physical or outright verbal...

 

"Ride Out Your Storm"---A Song/Hymn For All Of Us

 

Sometimes we need somebody...

 

Why would God allow so much suffering? Why do we?

 

Watch, dear Lord...

 

"Redemptive suffering is ghastly theology..."

From the Church of the Covenant website:

Mark Sandlin is an ordained PC(USA) minister and a self-described progressive. Mark received his M. Div. from Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity and has undergraduate degrees in Business Administration and English with a minor in Computer Science.

Mark is a co-founder of The Christian Left and blogs at The God Article. He has been featured on NPR’s The Story with Dick Gordon, PBS’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, and the upcoming documentary film Amendment One.

He joined the staff of Presbyterian Church of The Covenant to serve as Interim Pastor in December, 2015, and was elected as Pastor in May, 2019.

2022 Lent Devotional: Week 3 By Emily Burns/Methodist Federation for Social Action

A Lenten meditation provided by the Methodist Federation for Social Action:

 2022 Lent Devotional: Week 3

By Emily Burns

 Psalm 62: 5-8, 11:

“Rest in God alone, my soul, for my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I will not be shaken. My salvation and glory depend on God, my strong rock. My refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts before him. God is our refuge. God has spoken once; I have heard this twice: strength belongs to God.”

One of my favorite authors, Kate Bowler, describes Lent as a time when, “We ask God to show us the world as it is. We begin with the reality of our finitude rubbed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday...then we walk through that reality in a kind of dress rehearsal. It’s the downward slope of God-the Great Descent, where the whole church walks toward the cross. A time when we all get a minute to tell the truth: Life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone.”

Lent is a season of grief to acknowledge Christ’s sacrifice and the reality of our suffering. We live within the sacred tension that “life is so beautiful and life is so hard.” We know Easter is on its way, but we sit with the brokenness of the world as we wait. We cannot ignore it. We sit with the grief of more than 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States and more than 5 million worldwide. We cannot look away from the reality that even before the pandemic, 1 in 4 households experienced a major form of economic hardship and that number rises to 1 in 2 for Black and Latinx households. Many of us have felt the toll that this pandemic has had on our mental health. We are experiencing more anxiety and depression than before the pandemic but struggle to access adequate mental health care. The list goes on and on. COVID-19 has exposed the gaps in society’s systems, and those who have been the most deeply affected have been the most disadvantaged.

We sit here with the reality that the world is not as it should be. People are hungry, grieving, scared, and sick. As the “end” of the pandemic is declared to be nearing, some of us may wonder why we do not feel relief. We have all been going through a collective stressor. As we are finally coming to the point where we can breathe, the reality that is our changed world and all that we have experienced feels like it is crashing down upon us. Many of us are grieving the loss of loved ones while others may be feeling the exhaustion of being both a parent and teacher to children. Some have lost their jobs and others are managing the effects of Long Covid. Whatever your experience has been, life feels unbearably hard for many of us and it can be hard to hope.

This Lent, I will look for God to meet me in those places of despair, helplessness, grief, sorrow... I will “find my rest in God alone and remember that my hope comes from them.” I may not get the easy solutions and answers I want, but I receive God’s presence within the unresolved. That presence gives me the strength to continue to seek justice and work toward systems that care for the most vulnerable. Rachel Held Evans writes that “sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerabilities than in our safe certainties.” This Lent, may you encounter God in your vulnerabilities, in your grief, and in your sorrow. May “the strength [that] belongs to God,” sustain you as you seek justice and make change.

You make our collective work possible by your witness for justice every day in your church, community, and Annual Conference. MFSA does not receive any financial support from the United Methodist Church's giving channels. 100% of our budget is funded through your membership dues and your generosity in giving.

I screamed at God...

 

I believe in...