Skipping around

I'm actually skipping the rest of Monday night's lesson in order to post what was on my heart yesterday to post about D's words Monday night, but I got off on a tangent with how awesome the meaning of the Levite sacrifices are to me.

When D said that Leviticus was written for anyone who was broken or in pain, it was as if God put His hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, "See, you asked to be put in the right place, and I have done that for you."

I've started counseling to work on my depression and to also learn how to deal with anxiety and the pain my fibromyalgia brings me. For years I have battled depression and had feelings of sadness, incompleteness, worry, not belonging, and all of the other feelings and emotions that awful disease brings. It seems I've always been able to keep those at bay just enough to continue to live a normal life -- or seemingly normal life.

Since the onset of fibromyalgia, though, the depression has worsened and my pain level is constant now. It gets to be very overwhelming at times.

Since early 2004, I have really had a hunger to study the Word and form a closer relationship with God -- I wanted to do it. Repeat: I wanted to do it. (Remember my earlier post about not being prayerful when I have sought a closer relationship with Him?)

In October 2006 is when things began to slowly spin out of control, though. That's when I developed a very bad ear infection, on my birthday, which also happened to be a day I had to escort members of the media all over our lovely hilly campus. It wasn't until after that ear infection that I suspected I had fibromyalgia -- and within about a month, my doctor diagnosed me with it.

Since then I have tried dealing with the depression with medication, then we added medication for the fibromyalgia pain. It's helped, but there are still those days when things -- life, the depression, the physical pain -- are just too much to handle, and I end up in bed for a day or two...or more.

I began with my counselor last month because things had gotten just too out of control. I began having small panic attacks, and I felt a horrible sense of dread about work. (She happens to be a Christian and prayed for guidance in our first session together.)

Rewind to the hunger I felt to learn the Word: I knew what I wanted -- an in-depth, exhaustive study of God's Word with other Christians. Finally when I went to that first intro meeting with K, the message was about --- prayer and seeking God's will.

Heh.

Ever feel like you've been hit in the side of the head with a brick, but in a good way? Yeah, well that's how I felt.

So I prayed. And within a week, I had been placed in a discussion group (after I had been "warned" that it could be weeks before they placed me in a group.

This week, as I went to the meeting, I asked God to get me in the door. Then I prayed that He would bless the evening so I would want to come back. By the time the night was over and I was crawling into bed, all I could do was pray and pray some more.

I've also, since then, done somthing I have never done before in my life -- kept an actual prayer journal. I've written down and "remembered" prayer requests people have given me in the past, but I've never had an honest to goodness prayer journal, though. Just writting in it the names of those in the group that had asked for prayer was so powerful. And before I started this post, I spent about 10 minutes praying, asking God to bless my time with Him, then going through each and every request in my journal and praying for them as I laid my hand on their name. Of course I also prayed for those people I never have to write own to remember.

It's funny, but I feel that tired, but refreshed feeling you have after a good cry. Like something bad has been emptied out of me so that good can enter.

I've always had this pained, sad feeling in my life, and I have numerous times asked God to remove it -- but I never did anything for Him to improve my relationship with Him. I went to that first night of BSF very scared and feeling very broken -- a bad feeling I have had for a couple of months. Instead of coming with a tone and heart full of desperation, as I have done in the past, and asked God for help without doing anything other than praying hard and crying a lot, I have a true, strong desire to simply build my relationship with Him.

I want to fellowship with God as I never have before, and I want to have that relationship with Him I see other Christians have. I have always felt comfortable praying to God, but now I want it to be a totally natural thing, something I do every day, all of the time, instead of just when I need something.

And I pray that God fosters and builds that desire in me on a daily basis -- that He keeps that hunger I am feeling alive and grows it, so that a single day without praying, communing with Him and reading His word feels like an incomplete day to me.