Work in Progress

Today I went on a home visit with one of the GP’s to see a very old man, in his nursing home. Before we got out of the car, the GP turned to me and said, the picture of nonchalence, ‘by the way – he might ask us to euthanise him – just so you know. He asks every time we visit him.‘

Sure enough, this man, who is over a hundred, with no living family, no friends to visit him, and incredibly frail health, started asking about what it means to die, and when it would come, and could we, please, please doctor, help him, now, right now? And of course, we sat and told him that we couldn’t do that, and that we didn’t know when death would come, but that when it did, we hoped it would be peaceful.  And he talked, for a long time, about what lay behind in his youth, and what lay ahead, in his dying, and the loneliness in the room was so heavy it felt like we were sitting in thick fog. Then, the time came for us to go and move on to another patient, and it made me wish, as I do so many days, that I was training to be a magician, rather than a doctor. There’s just aren’t enough magic wands in medicine. I wish there were more.

It’s things like this that remind me how good the church, or any similar group, for that matter, can be. Now that our communities lack the cohesiveness and closeness of the past, it falls to groups like the church to come in and reach out, and keep people connected. I’d like to think that if this man was a member of my church, that someone would be going to see him, taking him Communion, dedicating time to those questions that are still for him, so painfully unanswered. Patients in hospital have access to chaplains and ministers; it’s when they leave, that they so often are left lonelier than ever. I’ve been so proud to see the student charity I founded two years ago grow, to be able to provide regular visitors to elderly patients across three hospitals, if they don’t have family to come and see them – but there are so many older people alone in their homes, that we can’t reach. It’s painful. I want to do more. I want it to be better. There are so many gaps in society that I want to help fill. I know that I can’t fill them all. None of us, can fill them all.

 It’s things like today that make me want to go and shout from the rooftops that until we have a society that has a place for every person in it, we have no society at all. We talk about the community of church, so often, and yes, it’s fantastic, the things that happen when a group of people get under a steepled roof and lift up their hands and cast upwards their eyes, but does any of it matter, if we’re not taking it to those places that need it the most? Does any of it matter, if there’s still an old man, lonely, or a young mother, not managing, or dare I say, a student, dropping off the edge of depression? The people most on the outside are the ones most in need, and hardest to reach. There are so many places that just need someone alongside someone else. There are so many places that just need a hand ontop of a hand, a heart beating next to a heart.

We all know that according to Genesis, one day, God looked at this world and said that simply, it was ‘good’. For now, I’ll pass over God’s extensive use of the understatement.

Now – forgive me if, thanks to my hazy knowledge of the Bible, I’m off the mark here, but from what I know, God’s not said that, since. Our world is not being looked at and passed as ‘ok’. Can you imagine what the world would look like if God still thought it was ‘good’? I’m not sure I can. It’s so far away, from what I have seen. And I know, that Jesus changed everything and set the wheels in motion for it being ok, more than ok even – perfect – I know, that before Jesus we were living in a spiritual cemetery, and without Jesus, we’re still sitting amongst the gravestones – but our world is still not good. We, are still not good. No matter what you believe, we can do better. We need to do better. We need to sort this stuff out. We need to figure out how to stay connected. We need to figure out, how to get our hand on top of the hand that is shaking. We need to figure out, how to get our heart beating next to the heart that is failing.

Let’s all try and figure out, how we can do better. We’re all works in progress.

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A concert, a swoon and some rugged heroes

This is just a bit about what’s been happening this week – nothing too interesting!

I went to see The National this week with a friend. It’s one of my favourite bands at the moment and I’d been looking forward to it for a while. It was a great concert, though we left early after I fainted in the crowds – which happens quite often if I’m somewhere very warm and busy, particularly when I’m under the weather as I am at the moment. It was quite dramatic as it was so packed that I couldn’t get to the floor in time  when my vision started clouding and ended up properly passing out and being half carried out by a very nice guy, which has got to be the closest I’ve come to a ‘knight in shining armor’ for some time – though sadly he went back in before I could say thank you properly. If this were a Jane Austen novel, we would totally be engaged by now – just saying. Next time I’ll make sure I’m wearing some sort of empire line dress and carrying some embroidery or a sketchbook or something.

I listened to one of the band’s tracks, ‘Runaway’, so much this year – it was a constant fixture on my ‘melancholy music’ playlist. It rang pretty true, for a long time. Hearing it live kind of made me realise that I’m so much better than I was – it doesn’t grab me the same way the lyrics once did. I don’t feel quite as dragged towards drowning, as I did.  I don’t listen to it as much now. It’s strange sometimes, the things we use to mark recovery. For me, so often it is realising that I no longer read several books a week just because I lay awake not sleeping, or that I’m listening to cheerier music, or that I’m eating three meals a day, which is something I pretty much didn’t have the appetite for, for most of last year. I still have my blips, and if anything, these last few weeks have been a challenge and I’ve questionned often,  but I no longer feel like I’m at rock bottom. It’s a good feeling.

This time of year always makes me a little sad as it’s when friends who have graduated head off for new starts somewhere else, and this year in particular is a bit of an exodus. One thing I’ll miss a lot is that for the last two years, a small  group of girls from my concert band and the sister brass band, have met regularly for movie nights after realising that we’re all a bit obsessed with period dramas (Mr Darcy, anyone?). We named ourselves the ‘rugged heros appreciation society’. At the start, we didn’t all know each other  – sort of a group of friends, and  friends-of-friends, but now, we all know each other so well and it’s been one of the few places this year that I’ve been ‘just Char’ – as I didn’t tell them about my depression.

It was a good escape; quiet nights where we watched films and talked about other things – my placements, their dissertations and jobs, boyfriend problems, band issues, family struggles and flatmate arguments. It was a good refuge when so often I felt like I was always Char-withdepression or Char-whoismessedup or Char-incounsellingbecauseshesnotcoping. Sometimes it’s nice to be just char, with no attachments or labels, just char, who plays tenor sax and sings second soprano, who likes Mr Thornton from North and South because he has a social conscience in addition to looking good in a waistcoat, and who starts to get a bit giggly over a glass of wine. Just Char, who is the one who goes to church but doesn’t push religion on people, who sometimes takes patients’ problems home with her and who likes babies and old people and children but doesn’t like bad attitudes or green peppers on pizza. Just Char, who is good at listening and organising and bad at saying no and singing above a high G, and neutral at most other things. I’m going to miss our rugged hero evenings, not just because nothing quite cheers you up like Mr Darcy coming out of that lake in a wet shirt.

So often in the last year, I thought that it had got to the stage that depression had completely taken me over – it was all I was, and would be, and if it ever went, it would leave nothing of me behind as it had destroyed and stolen everything else that I once was. It’s good to feel that I’m just-char, again, most of the time, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing special – but someone, something, other than depression. I sometimes still feel a bit overwhelmed with the ties that both depression, and recovery, hold on me- but it’s good to feel like I’m back again, the same as I was, that most of me survived. It’s good to finally realise that after this year, I am still who I was before. It’s good to realise, that even after a leave of absence, who I am, will always come back.

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Leadership lessons

On Monday, I met my friend E for a drink and a chat, but came away with a little more than I’d bargained for. E is a few years behind me in medical school and we first met through the university windband, when he joined as a first year three years ago, the year I was band’s president. After that, we crossed paths again when we both started at the same church at around the same time, and with a similar amount of uncertainty (ie a lot), and this was when we got to know each other more on a par, as with band, I’d always been ‘in charge’ and leading things, and he’d always been following. We’re very different in some ways, and after a hard year for both of us (he is resitting a year after failing a lot of exams before finally being diagnosed with dyslexia) I really value his friendship.

We were discussing what we’ve been doing in the last few months and I was talking about the mentoring scheme I’m heading up and what’s happening with the choir and hospital volunteer scheme I founded two years ago, and he asked me why I’ve not ended up ‘in charge’ of anything at church when I seem to fall into leadership in most other things I do. And I replied that I’ve never really thought that I’m able to lead, or gifted in leadership, or however you want to put it – in ‘church life’ – that I’m always a bit unsure of what part I’m supposed to play, what space I’m supposed to stand in.

This lead to what I’m going to call ‘affectionately being completely shot down.’

E basically asked me if I honestly thought that God’s gifts were different depending on whether I was standing in church or somewhere ‘secular’, and then (somewhat amusingly) went a bit Lord Kitchener on me (your church needs YOU! Your God needs YOU!) and told me to step up and stop drawing a line in the sand, so to speak, between the parts of my life that are lived in church, and the rest of my time, where my faith is perhaps not quite as much on show.

All I could really say was ‘oh’. The phrase ‘you got told’ comes to mind.

He’s right in a lot of ways. I do have a tendancy to separate things out and think that I’m not really that useful to any church and that I don’t have any gifts, that in the world of 1 Corinthians, I’m one of the less vital, more silent, body parts, whereas it’s fairly true that outwith that, I feel confident in leadership roles (I even got an award from the university for it once) and like filling gaps I see and changing things I think need changing. I’m a project person – I’ve always got some scheme on the way, whether it’s getting the patient library together, or currently, this mentoring thing. It just doesn’t always carry over to who I am ‘at church’. Sometimes I fall back into thinking that I’m just kind of gatecrashing the party – that everyone else has an invite and a reason to be there, whereas I’ve just snuck in through the back door, and am listening in the dark at the back, and God can’t be bothered to chuck me out.

Part of this is probably down to the last year, when standing at the back of a service was as much as (and sometimes more than) I could handle, and I’ve been conscious as I recover that I shouldn’t overfill my time or take on too much (not that I’m managing this well at all). Another obstacle is that until this year, I just wasn’t stable enough in my faith to feel as though I could really be that involved, or active in things – as Ulysses Grant once said, you can’t blow an uncertain trumpet. I didn’t really comfortable spreading a gospel I wasn’t that sure of. I didn’t really want to infect anyone else with my perpetual, and often consuming, doubt. I didn’t feel ‘qualified’ or ‘capable’ or ‘allowed’ to be an active Christian – I had too many hours still to spend working things out. I thought I was better suited to sitting quietly at the back and trying not to lose my place in the hymnbook. My trumpet was certainly uncertain for quite a while.

Now however, talking with E made me remember that everything I am comes from God, and that I need to step up more and contribute my share to the kingdom we’re all trying to build. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where I fit and what I feel called to change, so this conversation was certainly timely. I’ve got a feeling that the Bible study some friends and I are starting might be the start of a more well defined path for me, but only time will tell, at the end of the day.

And in other news, the GP let me stitch someone’s head cut today. Sorry if you’re squeamish, but it was AWESOME. The things that make me happy…..

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Telephone theology

For a while, I’ve been thinking about how I would explain to someone what it’s like being a Christian with, or recovering from, clinical depression. Sometimes, I think that although ‘depression’ is a word that we often toss around with little thought, a lot of people don’t really understand it. So, here is, as my gran would have said, my ‘twopennoth’.

When I think of my relationship with God, I think of it being like two phonelines, one going direct from me to Him, and another in the other direction. In order for any phone system to work, you need a few things:

1) Both parties have to be willing to pick up the phone when the other person calls

2) Both parties have to be willing to talk to the other person

3) The lines need to carry the message from one receiver to the other

4) The receiver needs to relay what is said, to the right person, without distortion.

Depression can knock all of these, in some way. Probably the easiest one to understand, is that when things get tough, you just stop wanting to either hear from God, or talk to him, at all. Your prayer life falls by the wayside. You don’t want to be in church. You don’t want to be around God, or anyone. And when you know so clearly that God is speaking, you block it out. You ignore Him; it’s all too painful. Depression stops you picking up the phone, at all. It rings and rings, but you just can’t find the courage to pick it up. You leave it be. You run until you find some place where you can’t hear it ringing. These places, are often not good places.

Sometimes, however, the problem isn’t that you don’t want anything to do with God – sometimes, it’s as though you’re shouting and shouting down your phone,  pleading for help and guidance, but for some reason, it’s as though no message gets through, and God just leaves you be. People tell you to ‘pray your way out’ – but you’re already praying, you’re already on your knees, and still, the blanket of depression closes in and shuts you out. You’re shouting as loud as you can; the line just seems broken. Depression breaks the line between you, and God; at least, that’s how it feels, even though it’s not true. Eventually, you might give up. Shouting wears you out, after a while. The silence you’re hearing is overwhelming and cuts you to the core. The threat of abandonment feels like the deepest of wounds. You think God is ignoring you.

And then sometimes, depression distorts the messages you hear from God.  Either you hear what is said, you hear about the love and the grace and the faithfulness of God, but just can’t believe it was meant for you – you think it’s gone to the wrong number, so to speak- or, more dangerously, the message gets completely distorted and the meaning gets lost, and before you know it, you’re believing something that’s not true at all. I believed, at the height of my depression, that God had marked me for suicide, as some sort of modern-day martyr to mental health. I had started my preparation and was literally just waiting for a signal to ‘go’. Was it true? No. Was it dangerous? Yes, undoubtably. I thought I was hearing God’s voice clearly. I was wrong. I had the wrong message. I was listening in the wrong language. Depression changes your ability to hear God, just as it alters your ability to speak with him.

However, what I’ve learned is that no matter how many times you shut God out, stop talking, stop listening, or get it wrong, he never stops speaking down his receiver to us. His line never fails. He never hangs up, and then, when depression lifts, it’s like you get a load of messages on that answer machine you’ve not been checking, that remind you of how faithful he has been, that remind you that no matter how alone you felt, you weren’t alone at all. We’re told so often that prayer is a ‘two-way thing’ – and I believe this. For the last year, my line with God was disrupted in so many ways, so many times. When I think of it this way, I find so much comfort in remembering that God didn’t, and doesn’t, let me go.

Depression isn’t the only thing, that stops us talking and listening to God. We all think that we’re standing outside of grace at times. We all think we’re standing outside of forgiveness, at times. We all get the messages mixed up, at times. We’re all learning. I guess the most important thing is that, no matter how long a gap we leave, the phone’s always there, when we’re ready to pick it up again. It never disconnects. God’s always on the other end. He doesn’t hang up.

All I can say, is thank goodness that God doesn’t have to pay phone bills.

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