Aren’t depression and anxiety causes of loneliness you say? Yes, they are diagnosed at an epidemic level in the USA and increasingly in other countries as well, but often acute anxiety and acute and even chronic depression are fueled by our isolation and feelings of loneliness.
Statistically, one of the groups of people reporting the greatest loneliness are 18-24 year old adults. While media shows happy young adults hanging out together statistics point to a different conclusion. While not exclusive to this group, there are significant transitions being experienced. Transitions that can be related to living situation, vocational changes, and/or the beginning or ending of significant relationships.
As with any group that is going thru transition there is an increased risk for depression, anxiety, and general dissatisfaction with where they are relationally. This is not to say that the 18-24 year old group has to be struggling with depression, anxiety, or loneliness from transition, but that there is enough studies of these issues to make a significant statistical impact.
It is truly enough of an issue that appears in repeated studies that many colleges are instituting anti-loneliness campaigns to combat issues of loneliness.
It would seem that our constant connection thru social media platforms would create less loneliness, but reported levels of loneliness and isolation are higher than in any historical statistic has indicated to date.
The “snapshot communication” while producing the quick dopamine blast associated with affirmation or initial connection is not the same as walking and talking with someone (even on the phone or Skype). Social media can be like being stuck in the infatuation phase of a relationship and never moving to the deep commitment phase, a bit of a rush but not really satisfying over time.
At best, most social media platforms could be classified as pseudo intimacy, enjoyable times to show highlights of life, or trully intimacy with very little chance of vulnerability.
At worst we hide carefully behind phone and computer screens creating idealized and even narcissistic views of ourselves, narrated and photo shopped with little chance of others seeing the real ups and downs of our existence.
Sitting in a restaurant recently I noticed a couple sitting across from one another both engrossed in their phones reading and vigorously texting for most of the hour that they sat there. Was there nothing to talk about? Was their no new joy or pain in the day, week, month? Too tired to talk but not to comment on posts? Maybe there was something going on I don’t know about, but personally I could comment on stuff at home over ramen noodles and save the money of going out with friend and paying $12 to not talk.
Have we traded the art of conversation for one sentence typed comments on idealized snapshots? It would seem we need more than this. When did this become the norm?
This was an excerpt from the first google article that came up when I searched loneliness statistics in college students.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/university-loneliness-back-to-school-1.3753653
“More than 43,000 students were surveyed for the National College Health Assessment (Canada).
It found about 30 per cent of students “felt very lonely” within the last two weeks.
The study also found nearly half of the students surveyed felt debilitatingly depressed in the past year.
44 per cent said they “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function.”
That’s almost 13,000 students struggling with loneliness, and almost 20,000 that were so depressed that they not functioning effectively.
Long before the days of social media I found the profound loneliness and depression that can be associated with the early adulthood time frame of life.
May of 1992 marked the beginning of a very tough and lonely year. I was 19 years old and I was about to have my world shook.
On May 6th, 1992 my mother suddenly passed away. It was unexpected and traumatic for my Father and myself. After the condolences and platitudes I was left to be alone with my questions and grief. 2 months after that I had a girlfriend left for college in the Midwest. It was August 1992 and I felt more alone and purposeless then I ever knew to be possible.
My Father was deep in grief and medical debt and most conversations would turn to one of those 2 subjects for the next 2 years. I struggled with the loneliness that grief, the end of a relationship, and being very young and not really having a strong identity could produce. I thought that going to college would help, but as I have mentioned in another post I did not have a real vision or purpose behind this so I did very poorly. By the time Christmas rolled around I was frequently sitting in my room for hours doing nothing, but thinking about how bad things were, grieving the loss of the life that I had known, or ruminating on not really wanting to be alive anymore. Life didn’t feel like it really had any hope in it at that point.
In 1992 and 1993 there wasn’t any social media or really any real internet to speak of yet. So phone calls, letters, and face to face conversations, were how connection happened, and it really wasn’t happening for me at that time. I also did not have a current support system of relationships because I was raised in very isolated fashion. I had a church I attended at the time, but it was the prime example of being alone in a crowd.
As I reflect back on those days it can feel as if I am looking at another person, but at times I can still feel that part of myself alone in the crowd. In the Spring of 1993, I was coming out of the dark space I had been in, and it was because God, and other people who came into my life to let me know that there was plenty more life to live. This healing season came thru relationships, and was the opposite of isolation and the loneliness that I had experienced before. It was thru face to face conversations , real-time spent, and corporate Christian experiences.
The state of my mind did not change overnight, but I can say in truth that staying the way I had been was not living, and it was barely surviving. If I had social media as my primary form of connection I believe that I would have been stuck in the isolated world I was living in much longer.
There are as many reasons that people of any age feel loneliness or are alone.
Trading face to face or even over the phone conversations for social media snapshots and comments and then living an isolated and lonely life is akin to cutting of your nose to spite your face. As in my case, and others circumstances such as loss, grief, rejection, or even abuse and trauma can create a space of self isolation and depression. Left alone in this state more distorted options such as self harm and suicide start to look viable as a cure for the pain.
It is of paramount importance that those we know that are struggling with the above issues are reached out too with love and relationship despite their, or our discomfort in the moment. Listening to people’s struggle without judgment and with concern and compassion can help move someone from the precipice of survival to the mountaintop of life.
What then of the isolation that we self inflict due to our own insecurity and the normal social anxiety of early adulthood. Overuse of phones and other electronic devices provide the perfect way to avoid the fears of rejection and the skill of making real conversation, dialogue, or be soothed or challenged. Much like the pacifier in the mouth of a 4-year-old providing comfortable distraction, over use of electronic media stunts the ability to learn self soothing in real-time, and can create a false and unsatisfying connection with others around us. Social Media is nice short way to stay connected but it is not the same as true connection.
Many people would wonder why is this 4-year-old has a pacifier in their mouth but never ask why 30 adults in a room are all staring at their phones and never speak a word to one another. This wouldn’t be a big deal if it was just one room but it’s in many rooms, buses, homes, planes, churches, schools, bedrooms, coffee shops, car trips, holiday gatherings, board meetings, cubicles, lunch rooms, parks, hikes…..get the picture. 13000 college students lonely in just one survey ….20000 more with depression that is interfering with functioning. Our overuse of “connecting thru social media platforms” as a primary socialization tool is not making us better it is creating a false sense of intimacy at the cost of the real thing.
The nitty-gritty beauty of relationship happens in face to face, or even in video or phone calls. We need each other, so after you done with this post close Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. and go talk, or call someone (maybe they are right next to you already in your dorm, home, classroom, or even in the same bed).
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
So males; got it all together? No anxiety here! Money in bank, stable job, solid relationship, God on speed dial just in case? It’s easy to see that this is a fallacy of the highest degree, but I hope it got your attention.
I am a man, a follower of Christ, and I am a long time anxiety experiencer. Certainly anxiety is not gender specific or limited, but I write today as a male because I have talked with so many men who are isolated and miserable in their internal world. They think that they are the only one (or only one of a few). Anxiety has in the long past been almost debilitating in my life, but I have learned one important fact. I experience anxiety, but I do not want it to define me; I am not anxiety! Thru communicating with others, counsel and prayer, I experience it, but I can make the choice about the relationship that I have with it in my life. It only directs my day if I let it do that.
Predispositions to anxiety, historical trauma, and acute and chronic depression are just a few of the factors that can influence how, when, and how severely anxiety is experienced. Lets face it, we want to life to be predictable so we aren’t scared about the future, and yet so many of us walk around scared and anxious because of unresolved or undiscussed past experiences.
So many men who are locked up inside with all sorts of trauma, fear, and depression.
Some choose to self medicate by doing destructive things to themselves, and destructive things to others. Some lose their health to all sorts of chronic illnesses exasperated by stress, and still others commit suicide. Many of these scenarios have built to there painful crescendo in an isolation of a distorted view of manhood as a wall of unemotional strength, power and/or control. Help and seeking help is for the weak. Pursuits such as money, sex, and a whole host of unhealthy distractions eclipse life and eclipse the creativity of God that exists within it really is the difference between thriving and surviving.
I have even heard it said in some Christian circles that “anxiety is sin”! As if we needed another thing to be anxious about. Yes, it does say in paraphrase “Don’t be anxious” 20+ times in the Gospels, but Christ is expressing this as a concern and an affirmation of God’s desire for our wholeness and God’s providence for us. It is a wholeness of peace that grows in relationship to God, and as we relate to other believers (our proximity to relationship effects our Christian walk profoundly). “Please don’t be anxious I will take care of you!”
According to one statistic in Men’s Health Forum, in 2014, in America, most of the suicides by men were in the age range of 45-59 and the risk factors identified were age and socioeconomic status. I will not fill this article with large quantities of statistics. For this purpose it is enough to say that we have a significant suicide problem. I am not writing today to figure out all of the etiology of why some men, women, adolescents, or even children commit suicide or slide into deep depression and struggle day after day with debilitating anxiety. There are far to many varied reasons for me cover in this article.
Being the strong silent type doesn’t work. Isolation and silence is our enemy. Out of isolation comes all sorts of suffering and struggle. Out of internal isolation and bottling things up all kinds of poor relational actions take place that effect us, and those around us. We live in misery with our anxiety afraid to voice it lest we be called weak or broken.
There is a great Acceptance and Commitment Therapy metaphor image, by Russ Harris that talks about acceptance vs striving and resistance:
Your life could be like a house that you purchased on a beautiful street and you desire for all your new neighbors to come over and visit. After all you want relationships that you can share your life with right. You post a flier inviting those around you over for visit. The guests arrive and you send them to the beautiful backyard for food and drinks. 1/2 hour into the party the bell rings, and you open to find your next door neighbor Anxious Smith standing there. We will call him A. Smith for short. A. Smith pushes his way past you, and out to the backyard which is fine except that most the guests are dressed pretty nice and A. Smith is dressed in filthy clothes, talks really loud, coughs a lot, and eats with his mouth open (all of the shrimp cocktail). The Party becomes very uncomfortable …for you.
You usher A. Smith into the kitchen which he try’s to push his way out of again. Alone in the Kitchen holding the door you battle with A. Smith. Hours go by, and the party dwindles. The happy attendees leave the party and so does A. Smith. Exhausted and alone you wait by the front door watching the guests leave and a new guest, Depression Smith approach. Looks like he will take the night shift in your home.
Sound familiar? Maybe, maybe not? I don’t know about you, but isolation can look a lot like this. Tons of energy keeping whatever that anxiety is about contained, and hidden. Putting on the best face, all the time stuck in the kitchen worried that the guests in our lives will see A. Smith and run screaming out of our lives. We can be alone in the crowds and miserable.
Lets try this from a different perspective. Think now about your “life” house on your street, and the party with all the neighbors there and A. Smith shows up, dirty, coughing and eating all the shrimp cocktail, but instead of pushing him into the kitchen you follow him into the backyard and introduce him to a few people. A. Smith still isn’t really any more attractive, or fun, but you just allow him to be in the space. He floats from group to group and you continue to enjoy your party. You aren’t isolated anymore hiding in the kitchen battling by yourself because you are no longer living alone in your experience. Life becomes more connected and A. Smith may be there, but you give him less attention then you once did.
Talking with trusted people and allowing them to know you, is taking back your life by stopping the avoidance and engaging in activities that make meaning in your life. That action steers you towards what is valuable to you which is fulfilling relationships. Anxiety Smith and Depression Smith will both try to tell you that keeping them secret is the best way to avoid rejection or shame. These are just thoughts to try to keep you safe, but they actually keep you stuck and put you in more danger because they don’t work.
The key is not to change the thought, but to change your relationship with the thought, and place what is valuable in front of you as a guide. In this case relationship, freedom, and intimacy. Usually secrets aren’t helpful values to live your life by!
Let me tell you, there are places and people to help. If you have been telling yourself that your anxiety (or depression) is ridiculous and just trying to suppress it down by yourself let me ask, “How is that working”? Same thoughts and feelings just a different day. Try something new if you want something new.
Whatever is feeding your anxiety there are methods that can help you change your relationship with it. Historical trauma can feed a great deal of anxiety and finding and participating in a counseling relationship can go far to unpack and heal those experiences.
Other routes for removing isolation are to confide in a trusted friend, but if that doesn’t fit then a counselor or pastor to confide and talk to is a good option. Finding the right body of Christian believers to be involved in can be a huge help. First and foremost, pray and ask God to show you people to build relationships with so that you can shed the isolation myth. This may take time, but ask around for groups of men (or women if you are a woman reading this) that meet to support one another in the community, or in a Church. Pastors or counselors can usually point you in the right direction. You can live a life that is vital and abundant in spite of anxiety.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Staring up at the slowly eroding wall of dirt it dawned on me that this was really turning into a colossal disaster. In fact, it was a masterpiece of a failure. Have you ever had a masterpiece failure? A masterpiece failure usually encompasses the perfect amount of bad decisions coupled with the perfect amount of mistakes and misjudgments and a dash of wicked happenstance for extra saltiness. This was one of those situations.
While I wouldn’t wish a masterpiece failure on anyone and would not take lightly any such story that anyone has experienced or is experiencing I do not now regret one of my own. What came out of it produced many things of beauty, and dare I say……. growth.
It all started in early 2005 when I saw a small “for sale by owner” sign in the bushes while driving my then 2-year-old son around at 10PM to get him to just go to sleep. It was a big piece of private wooded property in the City and it was very reasonably priced (maybe a little to reasonably).
The “property” was in one of the most beautiful and exclusive areas in our town. Nestled on the Southern wooded and hilly edges of the community we called home. The property felt like it was in country while literally being minutes from downtown. With the sun and wind in the trees it felt like a Northwest Paradise. What made it even better was that the homes in the area were all large beautiful custom homes with 2 acre lots. This added to the overall attraction.
We bought it …oh rapturous joy …we were are on our way to building our dream home on a dream piece of property. The summer of 2006. We secured our building loan, drew our plans, and planned to General the job ourselves (as I had grown up in construction I had a general idea of the process). We broke ground in July of 2006 and slowly prepared our land for the foundation. Then it happened.
Have you ever been sideswiped, sucker punched, or just plain sickeningly surprised?
Well we were! After months of preparation and a very large sum of money and debt accrued we found upon excavation that the property was sitting on an “ancient landslide”.
By the way the Willamette Valley and most of western Oregon and Washington are full of them (just sayin). This of course changed everything.
We had to re-excavate, redesign a completely different house and the time that this took pushed us into the thick of the rainy season which brings me to standing in front of the rapidly eroding wall of dirt I started the story with.
Maybe you can relate to that feeling in your stomach, neck, chest, or back, when you realize wow this is really not good.
IN FACT, this is really awful and I can’t fix this. This was late 2006 and early 2007 by this point and some other events were happening in the US relating to the collapse of the mortgage market. Our bank backed out on us at this point leaving us with most of the bills for the excavation and dozens of other asundry services in our lap.
After 12 months of no movement in the process of building I was sliding deep into an anxious depression. My chest hurt everyday to the point that I went to Dr., worried that I was having heart problems.
Turned out it was stress.
We prayed and prayed, but it felt like it was just one of those moments where the only way out was to trust and move thru. I thought maybe I could see the light at the end of tunnel and hoped that it wasn’t an oncoming train. I slowly became consumed in the stress of trying to fix the problem while assuming all the bills with more debt. I lost all perspective.
One late night I sat out in the backyard and stared up at the sky, something that I started to do each night after this. I started to regain perspective thru looking at God’s creation. I realized that this was a small part of my life in the years that I would be alive and that I was small part of what I was looking at in the sky. I had been caught up in the sense of failure, the shame, and seemingly impossibility of the situation. The situation or more importantly my reaction to it was robbing me of what was valuable in my life such as my relationship with God, my family and even my vocation as a counselor.
God started to draw me back to reality thru his immensity.
I started to turn my focus back to what really mattered, and it took time.
In my brokenness I wanted to truly follow God’s design for our lives, but there were a lot of pieces to pick up. I felt stripped down and raw and that is where God met me.
Are you in the midst of a masterpiece failure situation?
Has a financial, relational, or vocational sure thing blown up in your face?
Are you in the position that feels Isolated, and alone?
The first and most important thing is that you should do is seek help! I stayed isolated and embarrassed way to long. God’s people are there to help shoulder the burden.
Galatians 6:2 “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
The thing that you probably should not do is to isolate for long periods, stop doing healthy activities, or distract yourself with unhealthy activities that pull you away from what is important.
This may be professional help, it may be a church group, it may be a pastor. Most likely it will be a combination of people and groups that will help you regain your perspective and start to see how to move forward. In fact, God may open some doors in those relationships that you cannot imagine were possible.
It may seem a paradox, but I am glad to say that I can’t end this story with a quick fix miracle. The truth is that we made these decisions, mistakes happened, and part of the story did not go well, there were tears and struggle, but that was not the end of our story.
Thru this experience God was present to help us learn a great deal about ourselves, His grace and provision, and compassion for others. The “others” that I am referring to are those that find themselves in the beginning, middle, or end of a masterpiece failure.
2 years after the triumphant breaking ground and after being for sale for 6 months the neighbor bought the bare ground for the mortgage owed on it. This was the only offer in the midst of the worst recession since the 1920’s. The neighbor was only in town for one month and it was a take it or leave it situation. God was gracious and we sold it. 10 years later we have finally paid off the rest of the money we accrued in our magnificent failure and I don’t begrudge a dime of it. We struggled with the repercussions of the situation for years after and it took me over 5 years to even drive by the property without feeling horrible, but God is sovereign, and has created in me, and my family something special in spite of and because of this struggle.
God has revealed himself in ways that I may not have ever been open to sitting in my beautiful home on my beautiful property in my beautiful town.
I would not wish magnificent failure on anyone, but it seems that they can come whether we are prepared or not.
Sometimes it is someone else’s doing that has brought us there leaving us bitter and estranged feeling the weight of their failure impacting us! We are left to figure out those next steps.
Magnificent Failure can be the catalyst for transformation to have magnificent life. I do not say this lightly because there were many night, weeks, months, and years where I did not have the perspective to see living anything, but the failure. What it said about me, and my vision of the future was that I was a failure. I was not a failure….I was a person that had experienced a failure. That eroding wall of mud can be a metaphor for many things that happen to us as humans.
God has a desire for us to transcend even our most magnificent failures turning them into vehicles of newness and creativity. This is not a forced thing. I believe that God collaborates with us when we are willing to see a new perspective, experience pain, and move forward rather than avoid pain and stay stuck. Time will move forward and you can too.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
So here we are 6 years and 3 months from the first one! When I talk to most people who are getting one it seems that there is always more than a little apprehension at the unknown. What will it mean if it is back? What will I do? What will we do? It’s okay there aren’t any symptoms, this time …right? These thoughts grow more remote as time passes, but these thoughts are many times a part of the road of survivorship of the diseases of cancer. You go days, maybe even weeks, and months without thinking about it, but then there is this scan to just check and make sure. For me this was my last one in this season of my life. I have reached the cure mark of 5 years.
I am excited and blessed by this information:
Guess what? Life still has other unknowns!
What is it about the unknown that gets to us human beings? It’s as if 1000s of years of biology tell us that something horrible is waiting around the corner about to eat us, and if we worry enough about it we can prevent it. The truth is something will eventually eat us (metaphorically I hope), take our current physical life, and usher us into a new plane of life. Nevertheless; we are afraid, concerned, and spend some serious energy grasping at keeping what it is that we think we can control. The truth is (unlike in the past) I was not overly concerned this time about the scan. It now less of journey and more of a conclusion and beginning. I also got to drink this delicious berry flavored drink with low-level radioactive materials so the machine can map my insides. This marks number 25 of CAT scans and 17 of PET scans so I think I am glowing. God is closing some doors and opening new ones. Yes there are unknowns, things are challenging, hard, joyous , difficult , and beautiful. Just like they are supposed to be.
In July of 2012 we bought a house and moved. In the process of moving we finally let go of a bunch of stuff that we had inherited from our now deceased parents. We decided at that point that it was time to conclude a chapter and begin another. I was very ill from salvage chemo at the time, but we had this huge garage sale, and my friend John came to check in. John had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 2-3 years before and had gone thru just about every type of brutally wild treatment there seemed to be. He had been told conflicting timelines for his life span, and he had outlived all of them. He told very funny stories about his treatments such as being put into a chamber and exposed to Gamma radiation while the technicians stared at him thru a window. He made a joke about turning into the Hulk.
John was now on a medication to keep the cancer at bay , and he was working part-time and caring for his family. He was a well liked man and a loving involved father. We talked on the porch about the future, and how his family was dealing with his illness as well as how my family was dealing with mine. Looking over our giant sale he joked about the unimportance of stuff, and talked of his love for God and the fact that you can’t take it with you. I thought, ” if I have to take this with me, I’ll just stay here”. He then said something that has stuck with me, and was a key to my acceptance of the “unknown” what was happening in that moment.
In response to the anxiety over all the “unknowns” and the anxiety of his own friends and family he said, “in the end it will be okay, for all of us, nobody gets out alive”. You are probably thinking, “that’s a buzz kill”, but as with so many things, it was about timing. It fit that moment and that context brilliantly. What John was saying was that he was at peace with the bigger picture. Even though he was accepting treatment he wasn’t focused on the disease, dying, or even trying to live forever. He was focusing on the things that mattered to him which were his relationship with God, and his family. It was not fatalistic, it was freeing.
In that moment I was calmed. The acceptance of life and death by this man who maintained humor and love for the people around him thru all of his pain and struggle was freeing to me. I knew I would still feel sorrow and joy, and the cycle of it all was inevitable, and I needed to put myself into what really mattered, just being alive right now. The life that God gives me. There is a difference between avoiding death and living life. One is surviving, clinging, and anxiety filled, and the other is living (even with pain) into what is important and valuable.
Here we are close to 6 years later, and I am still thinking about that day, and I thank the Lord that He helped me thru. I still deal with reminders each day that things are a bit different now. Much better in some ways and challenging in others. I am glad to be alive, and I believe that there is more life to be lived, big and little things to do, and more people to reach out to in this world. I am also glad that John said that me in that moment because it has increased my ability to be calm about this life when I feel like things are too difficult, and too unknown. I know that there is more beyond this.
With this scan there is an end and a beginning. There is an end to this season and beginning to a new one. I am sitting at Mt Hood Meadows today writing most of this with a fractured foot ( another story), and my son and his friend are snowboarding. I am glad to be alive, and see him enjoy his life. I am glad that I get to go drink radioactive juice, and I am glad I get to eat ribs with my family tonight. I am glad that my daughter is going to college next year, and I accept that I’m not sure how to pay for some of it. I am glad that my truck needs a new water pump. I am glad that my wife planted flowers in the front yard, and talked about it for 1/2 and hour with a big smile. I am glad …. Do I hurt, worry, or struggle with unknowns? Of course, but I know that I am alive, and I know that no one gets out alive, and I am free to live thru acceptance!
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Today is February ….8th, and 5 years ago I came home from my stem cell transplant. I came home not really knowing all of who I was as I ventured back into life. Apparently I was a cancer survivor…I sure was hoping I was a cancer survivor, but I really didn’t know yet. After living at a medical facility for about a month. I came home.
Maybe you have come home. Home from the battle field, home from the hospital, home from college, home from the grocery store, home from church. All you wanted was to get home, a home, a place, a safe familiar place; a safe familiar feeling. Maybe you are at work right now and you want to go home..;)
Such was my journey at that point, for several weeks I looked out the window at unobstructed million dollar views of Mt. Hood from the 14th floor of a hospital in Portland, Oregon. It was a last effort for something that I never thought would go this far. For days I wondered where the tiny cars on I-5 were going as I watched them in my decreasingly lucid moments till I ceased to care about cars on the freeway, the spectacular beauty of the Mountain, or the flowing Willamette river.
Our Lives take unexpected turns many times that create dips and potholes in the road that we once thought to be pretty strong flat and passable.
When I was a kid, my Father and I would go into the hills in the coast range of Oregon to cut firewood. Frequently the logging roads (which were often goat trails made by heavy machinery) were cut into by the hydraulic force of the ever present rain that fell (whenever we went to cut firewood of course). That rain, rushing down these roads would create it’s own path, cutting, and eroding away even heavily compacted rip rap (giant gravel). The rain relentlessly fell, and seemingly relentlessly eroded the path that was once passable and flat.
Sometimes our lives and the experiences that happen in the space that we call life feel like that rain. Relentlessly falling, incrementally wearing at the road surface that we took as strong, maybe even impervious to the thousands of pounds of machinery that have rolled on it before. We don’t think too much about the passing rain storms or the passing machinery. Then more rain drops starts to fall into our lives. Job changes, a health care scare, a wayward child, your social group changes, a loss occurs, a bully at work, then a year later another loss occurs, and then your job changes (for the worse), healthcare becomes a real concern. I can’t create an exhaustive list, but we as humans know what I am talking about.
Incrementally, the furrow grows deeper into the path of our life making it incrementally harder and harder to move forward or be the person that we want to be or sometimes even need to be just to function. Passing on the road becomes more difficult, more slippery and more discouraging. All we want to do is that feeling of being home. Home hopefully where we feel that safety, support, and familiarity. Home not just as a place (geographically), but as a feeling and a thought inside of us.
I was in grade school and middle school when we would cut wood out in the forest. I really didn’t like to do it very much. We got up early 4 AM (early to me) to get the “very best wood” (or so I was told).. We would drive sometimes for over an hour out into the middle of nowhere only to find that the other wood cutters were there already cutting the best wood (yea, those guys), and did I mention that it would rain. We would pull logs out of piles of slash heaped up after logging operations were over. The whole time I dreamed of being home rather than standing in the rain breathing chain saw exhaust with freezing feet. Feel sorry for me yet? 😉 …poor kid. Wanting a place to be and feel home runs thru us from our basic neurology to our profound spiritual desires.
Our pursuit of that feeling can lead us to make some really healthy choices and some really poor ones too. This writing is not about how to make poor choices because I think most people can figure that out on their own. It is an encouragement to make choices that steer our lives from adversity into the best relationship that we have with our Creator. The word that I choose to use is home because it is the best word that I can relate to in this experience. In my story and maybe in yours, the road home has been cut into by the raindrops of life.
Struggles with feeling home didn’t start when I got cancer, although cancer was the downpour that really made one of the deepest furrows in my life road. My feelings and thoughts were in flux in the financial struggles, the death of close relations, and the underlying dissatisfaction with where my life was before I was diagnosed. One rain drop I could endure, one shower of rain I could recover, but this felt like the mother of all storms furrowing deeply into my life and making the road ahead seemingly impassable. The winter of life seemed forever at that point in so many ways. Here I was 39 years old and diagnosed with lymphoma, a wife, 3 children, 2 jobs and a very old cat. The day really did seem like a February that had went on for a decade. My focus was on the rainy impassable road in front of me always just about Spring, but not quite Spring, and certainly not home. Little did I know that God was changing me to know this home in a more real way then I ever had.
In April of 2012 I knew that things weren’t going too well. Instead of improvement after 6 cycles of chemo I was having new pain in other parts of my body. I had a private practice as a professional counselor and it was declining (and so was I). The truth was that I was tired and burned out. I was working bi-vocationally as a pastor with my lovely wife who is also a pastor ( and working bi-vocationally as well). We were at a small loving Church in Springfield, Oregon. Financially, physically, and emotionally the rain was falling, falling hard, and eroding even more of my road. I called out to God in my office one day and a very still solid voice spoke into my Spirit, “I will take care of you”. I knew that it was April, it was Spring, but it was feeling like February.
In the months and years that have intervened it hasn’t been platitudes or deep sayings that have intervened in tough moments it has been that one or two profound moments when God has spoken in a dark place to create hope, when I was focused on his presence. It has been the gracious words of a believer half a world away saying that their child prayed for me every night when I was sick. It has been Christ’s face in the hundreds of people that showed up to a Papas pizza fundraiser on my 40th birthday. This is not a grandiose or magical thinking kind of hope, but a deep manifestation of his Spirit mystically and profoundly touching my pain and my joy.
In that month of April my practice income fell by 75% and a loving gracious individual at our church handed me a $1000 check and quietly walked away. “I will take care of you”.
God wants us to move into the Spring he has designed for us, but he won’t shove us there, he nudges. There is an interesting passage in the Bible (John 5:6) where Jesus approaches a man that had been ill for 30 years and asks what I used to think was a really strange question, “do you want to be healed?”. Now one would think that after 30 years someone wouldn’t want to be healed, want to be whole, want to change from just existing, even just surviving, to living, and thriving.The assumption is that Jesus was looking for something more in this man then a demonstration of healing, but change of focus, a focus on living not just surviving, a focus on Christ himself and not just on what we get out of knowing Christ. Christ has made his home in my heart and although the rain falls I know that my place and my identity with Him is my home.
Thank you to my God, my wife Daleasha , my kids, Nate, Daisy, and Silas, and all those who have prayed and stood by us when things were tough.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
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