I HATE BEING BIPOLAR...IT'S AWESOME!!!

When I got this in an email from a friend at church, I had to laugh out loud as I read it at my desk at school. It's so true it's not even funny. I will say I tend more toward the side of hating being bipolar rather than thinking it's awesome, but when I'm manic I would for sure tell you that it's awesome, without a doubt. Right now, though, I hate it. It seems like winter's are particularly difficult to deal with in regards to the bipolar stuff. You can probably guess which extreme I struggle with in the winter, right? Depression, of course. A few weeks ago I was getting pretty down, than I managed to fight it off thankfully for a while, then it hit me like a sack of bricks today for some reason again. There are certain things you can do to prevent it or prevent it from getting worse, which I'm trying to employ now. Sometimes, though, no matter how much you do, you will still experience it if you're bipolar.

Bipolar is a huge part of who I am. You see, I've had it since I was 17 I think, so it was there when I was trying to figure out who I was as a person in adolescence and early adulthood when you're shaping who you're going to become for the rest of your life. Sometimes, I let it get to be too big of a part of who I am, though. This isn't as true as it once was, I'm getting better at it; but sometimes I feel like being bipolar outweighs my being a Christian and that simply must not be. Christ defines who I am. Other things, like being bipolar, try to define who I am; but ultimately Christ alone is my ultimate 'definer' if that's even a word.

There's a book I've read on the subject of being bipolar, entitled "The Bipolar Advantage." It had some interesting perspectives, some of which I disagreed with whole-heartedly. But being bipolar does have some advantages in my opinion, just not the ones the author mentioned in that book. Having a mental illness of any sort makes one realize how weak they are, and thankfully in my case how much I need a Savior. It makes me realize that I cannot conquer this on my own, that I desperately need help in this area and all areas of my life for that matter. It protects me from feeling invincible all the time. It humbles me before my God and reminds me to turn to Him in times of trouble. It reminds me that God chooses to use our weaknesses to work through, as I've been able to give several other people hope that they can lead a fairly normal life in spite of being bipolar or whatever their mental illness might be. It reminds me that God is on the throne of my life, not me. Except for when I'm manic, of course, in which case I've been known to claim I was Jesus Himself; don't worry, I've asked for forgiveness several times and if God can't understand that I was in a wild state of mind than I don't think He'd be a God I could serve.

For those of you new to this blog or new to me as a friend and don't know what bipolar is; it's simply a mood disorder that makes a person go from one extreme to another, hence the name, bipolar - one pole to the other. One extreme being severe depression, and the other being severe mania. Sometimes you get a mixing of both extremes, which can be especially problematic. Mania is the fun side of the equation. You feel on top of the world and like you can do anything you want. For me, I tend to get very creative; some of the ideas are crazy but some of them can be worthwhile. Depression is the low side of the equation. It can range from simple melancholy to suicidal thoughts. I've been to both extremes in my lifetime.

Thankfully, there is medicine for this illness; which I take faithfully. Sometimes, though, medication isn't enough. Last year, I read a wonderful book called, "The Depression Cure" that gave some fantastic tips on how to beat depression. The author claimed it could be done without medication, and I believe him, but I stay on medication anyways, since I don't want to swing the other way into extreme mania.

Where does being bipolar fit into my walk with Christ? It makes me hang onto Him for dear life in times of depression. In mania I tend to become less engaged with my Christian walk, but I hold on even then because I know that a bout of mania is almost always followed by a bout of depression and that it's only a matter of time before it hits. Being bipolar can be extremely difficult at times, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. That being said, though, I don't think I'd trade it for another weakness at this point in my life. I've learned how to deal with it pretty well, minus a blip every now and again like I had today and a few weeks ago.

When I first struggled with the depression side of it, I remember a verse really sticking out to me. 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 "Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." What I understand from that verse is that even though there will be difficulties and trials that come along, He is enough for me. His grace is sufficient, and I will make it through this difficulty just like I have so many in the past. Christ's grace surrounds me, and He is enough, He is more than enough. I have committed my whole life to this God, and I look forward to what He's going to do in the rest of my life.

Church and my changing views on relationships and marriage

Today was our 3 year anniversary for our little church plant here in Sarasota, Florida. We had an absolute blast and had a great picnic afterwards. I love my church; I get this natural high from being around the people in my church. It helps me wake up on Sunday mornings with something to look forward to that really recharges my batteries from the week. This comes from a couple of things I believe. First off, it comes from reconnecting with God through song and a time of communion. Secondly, I get recharged after being around people that I love and care for. My friends are the best friends anyone could ask for, and I continually thank God for this church. We made it to 3 years, which a lot of churches don't make it to so we're super thankful for that. I can't wait to see what God has in store for us in the future years to come. Lord, help us bring your kingdom to earth and spread it among everyone we interact with on a daily basis. There have been times of discouragement, yes, but overall it's been a phenomenal ride.

A friend of mine gave a testimony today that really touched my heart. She said she had been reading this book about a girl who gave up everything and went to Uganda at age 18 and has adopted 14 children since then. In the book, the author mentions how we just need to say 'yes' to God and He will do amazing things. Now my friend has started this play date group for moms and babies and it's going great so far. I can't wait to hear what doors God opens through this friend of mine saying yes to Him. What a great way to end a service today, hearing about that.

We start our Creek communities either this next week or the week after and will be spending 8 weeks I believe in the Tangible Kingdom primer so I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully I can have a group over here a couple of times once my place is more ready to go. My mom wants to do a lot of projects when her and Uncle Mark come down so we'll see how that all goes. My Uncle Mark is about the handiest guy I've ever known so I'm sure we'll get a lot done. I just hope he can be patient while I try to learn some new things. Anyways, back to the Creek communities. I really look forward to connecting with others and learning about what this book study will have to teach us. I read the book that it's based off of and really enjoyed it so I'm sure this will be good as well.

In other news, my views on marriage are starting to change ever so slowly. For years, I have always seen a wife as nothing more than an unnecessary burden that I simply don't need. That has changed over the past couple of weeks for some reason. I attribute it to nothing short than a work of God because my heart has been really hard in regards to women for a really long time. Now I'm realizing though, that a wife is more of a helper (as is a husband, not being sexist here at all.) They can help you get through the rough patches of life. It kind of hit me when my mom was down here and listening to her and dad talk on the phone a lot and just care for each other. I suppose it only makes sense to me that my views are changing. I'm surrounded by married couples on every side of me who have very healthy relationships. Geez, what is going on with me? What happened to the guy who was never going to get married? Another thing has happened recently that has got me rethinking the whole relationship thing. A dear friend of mine said she had to break off our friendship for a while because she was still in love with me. It hit me that I really care about this girl and maybe I'm making a mistake by letting her slip through my fingers like so many girls have in the past. I wrote her back an email about how I respect her decision but that I was really going to miss her. That has proved true over the last week or so. I don't know if that means I have feelings for her or not, but it's certainly got me wondering. Like I said, my views are changing on the relationship and marriage thing, and quite frankly it scares the crap out of me. What if I actually commit to someone and settle down with them? Does that mean all my traveling around the world ceases? Am I just being selfish to still want that? Could I still travel with someone else? I'm used to traveling solo, could I handle traveling with another person? Would they even want to? So many questions, guess I'll just wait and see what plays out.

SAVE US SUCCESSMAKER!!!

This year, I've had the pleasure of teaching kindergarten. One of the nicest things about it that I didn't fully realize until just this past week was that I don't have to deal with Successmaker anymore, grades 1-5 do but not kindergarten. We have our own software program, mind you, but not the god at our school known as Successmaker. Successmaker is a reading and math program used to instruct students in different areas. Before I sound old-fashioned, I have to say that obviously not all technology is terrible and even Successmaker and programs like it can be used to enhance instruction. However, we at our school have turned it into nothing short of a modern-day Savior. As I understand it, we're not alone in this misled endeavor.

We and other schools are actually going to take away P.E., Art, and Music so students can have extra time on this program. According to their data, if certain students just spend more time on the program, then they'll pass FCAT, our state standardized tests. Anyone else see a problem with taking away those specials? I sure do. What if that's the only class that a student looks forward to all day, and then you're going to take that away from them? And with the whole reason being that they'll have a better chance at passing some stupid test?

Testing is the name of the game though, and will become even more so as soon as legislation is enacted in 2014 that starts performance pay. Half of our salaries will be tied to how our students perform on tests. You think schools are too focused on helping their students pass standardized tests now? Just wait until then. It will get much worse before it gets better. I don't mean to sound like a doomsday prophet or anything, but what do you think will happen when a teacher's salary is directly tied to their students' performance on tests? Think of how much corruption will go on when that law enacts. As a kindergarten teacher, I know how easy it would be to game the system for the testing that we do in that age level. Of course, I never have gamed the system, but it sure will be more tempting when my pay is directly tied to those tests.

What's next? Are we going to start tying policeman's pay to the crime rate in the area that they patrol? Who would want to patrol in the rough areas of town then? Kind of like who's going to want to teach in the rough areas of town with this new law? Our students don't know if they're going to eat at home every night, do you really think doing homework and excelling in school is a high priority for some of them?

I talked to a friend about this law, and he thought it was a good thing. He said that teachers get tenured and then they just sit back and collect a paycheck. Really? You think teachers want to get a crappy salary and deal with 20 kids all day just because we're tenured and can collect a paycheck? I do agree that it needs to be easier to fire a bad teacher, but there's other ways of doing that. My own dad says that it's a fair way of doing it if you're measuring the growth of each student. Never mind that poverty is a huge influence of how a student does in school and you're really comparing apples and oranges when comparing my students to students at a school with a wealthier demographic.

Well, I definitely have more left in the tanks but I'll stop there for now.

communion meditation

Tomorrow is Sunday. Currently, I'm the one in charge of setting up who communicates the communion meditation. This past week, I had someone set up for it but completely forgot to tell them about it. Minor problem, right? This has happened in the past and what I usually end up doing is just communicating the meditation myself. Tonight, I'm sitting here wondering about just how to do that.

How do I communicate something that is so central to the Christian message and so central to my life? Communion is that time every Sunday in my church (other churches do it once a month or once a quarter, each denomination cites various passages as to why they do it in different intervals as I understand it) when we reflect on the sacrifice of Jesus to reconcile us to God.

Different religions have various methods of getting to God. What makes Christianity unique is that we believe you can't earn your way into heaven. Being a good person doesn't mean you get to see God for eternity when you die. To me, though, that's not the point of having faith. It isn't to make life easier, if anything it makes it more difficult as promised in Scripture. The point to having faith is that it leads us into an understanding of how to glorify God, which we were created to do from the beginning. Outside of bringing glory to God, people ascribe glory to all sorts of things. Money, power, sex are some of the more popular ones that come to mind. Oh, and the self is in my opinion the biggest idol of all. We tend to be more concerned about our own security than in bringing glory to God.

Jesus wasn't just a great moral teacher, He was the Son of God. He died, was buried, and raised from the dead. How can a modern person believe that? By faith. It took some apologetics reading on my part to confirm it but ultimately you have to have faith. Just like you have to have faith if you say we came from monkeys. Which is more ridiculous, to say a deity in human form raised from the dead and that God created the world or that we come from monkeys and the intricacies of life that we experience on a daily basis all just come from randomness? To scientists, I know that sounds ludicrous. Some would even say heretical in a sense to the scientific world, which is ironic since heresy originated in the world of religion.

Anyways, back to the idea of a communion meditation. I wonder if they gave these in the early church? I've read through the book of Acts before and the early Church sounds a lot more like a commune today than a 'typical' church like we think of in today's world. They listened to the disciples' teaching which was centered on Christ, so in that sense it's similar. There was a book I once read that talked about living eucharistically. What he meant by saying this was living a life that was poured out for others. Maybe the Eucharist has more to do with how we live on a daily basis than the 5 minutes on a Sunday morning when we hear someone talk about Christ's sacrifice and listen to music in the background. Do we live in light of the Resurrection? Do we live with an awareness that Christ is reconciling all things to Himself? Or do we merely compartmentalize our faith like we do with so many other aspects of our lives?

As Christians, everything we do should stem from our belief in God and in Jesus His Son. What if we lived sacrificially to the world around us? What if Christians were known for their hospitality instead of their hostility? What if we were as generous as Christ called us to be? A lot of Christians argue that welfare is the job of the Church, not the government. I'd like to agree with that, but that being said we have to face reality and admit that our giving is no more than the world around us. Look at the things we put our money towards in the American church. It is said that you can tell what's important to a person by looking at their checkbook. The same can be said of our churches. We have billions of dollars worth of land and buildings while there are millions in our own nation who are homeless. Why is the Church not known for creating more homeless shelters as opposed to creating more mega-sized churches? The other big part of a church's budget is staff salary. Maybe I'm just defending this since I'm on staff at a church now and am on salary that I've raised, but I don't think the staff salary would be such a big portion of the budget if every Christian gave a tithe. That being said, I might take myself off salary once my year is up and just work for the church as a gift. If every Christian gave a tithe, what could the Church do? Would it simply waste its resources like it often has in the past? I have a vision for my church to get to 50% of our budget to go towards outside missions. I have the same vision for my own life. As it turns out, a good starting point in my opinion is to go for a percent per year, for example 12% in 2012, 13% in 2013 and so on. If we want our people to give sacrificially than we must set the example in our churches' budgets.

What does communion mean to me? It means that Christ paid the ultimate sacrifice, and expects nothing less of me than to pour out my life for others in obedience to His will. How can I live more sacrificially? It's a good question to ask for a communion meditation, don't ya think?

updates on resolutions

Well, the resolutions are going well for the most part so far. The only one I've really struggled with, and I knew this would be the hardest, is the cutting back on my sweets intake resolution. Holy cow I crave sugar like a child or something! Just on Monday, it was one of my student's birthdays, actually two of them shared a birthday; but one of them brought in a cookie cake. Now, I can usually say no to the store bought cupcakes as those are usually pretty gross. But a cookie cake?! Oh man, now THAT is a weakness if I've ever had one! So I indulged my sweet tooth and then some like ya do when you're trying to keep resolutions. The same student brought me a venti sized cup full of chocolate that he meant to give me at Christmas but his mom forgot to make it then. What do I do when I'm stressed out earlier today? I eat about half of that stupid cup of good good chocolate! Ah man!

I've also been tracking my walking with RunKeeper, a cool little app on my iPhone that makes tracking your workouts really easy. So far, I've been doing right at about 2 miles in about 30 minutes worth of walking. To me, that's a fairly brisk pace, at least enough to keep my heart rate up and burn some calories. I've got to try and prepare my body for the running club coming up here in a couple short weeks. I even ran a little, mind you a very little, bit the other day when I went out for a walk.

The Bible reading has been coming along, I just finished day 4 today so that was good. For some reason I don't struggle as much with that one as I do with the diet and exercise. Sometimes it seems like I could sit and read for hours. I've always enjoyed reading, for as long as I can remember. It is a simple joy that I cherish to have the ability to do. Fast reading has never been my forte, but I still enjoy reading a good amount of books on occassion.

Well, I just felt like updating my blog with how the resolutions were coming along, hope you enjoyed this short entry!

New Year's Resolutions, 2012

2012 holds a lot of promise. My most recent post was about 2011 year in review, now I hope to try and preview 2012, which is impossible to do of course, but I can at least share some resolutions. These are ones I made up the other day when I was sitting around not really doing anything. Here goes...

1. Read through the Bible at least once. I have a 90 day Bible to help with this so hopefully I can get through it again like I did about a year ago. 90 days is a shorter time period but it helps you get a better feel for the overall narrative of the Bible.

2. Lose 5 pounds by March 1st. I'm hoping to lose more than that of course, anywhere from 25-40 pounds would be nice, but I've got to start somewhere and that seemed a manageable goal to start out with.

3. Don't drink soda. This goes hand in hand with #2 I think, but I'm pretty sure I've been packing on the pounds just through soda intake alone so I figure if I can cut that out I'll be much better off.

4. Run a 5k again. I'm signing up for a running program in order to achieve this so that should definitely help.

5. Finish saving for a 3 month emergency fund. Ideally, I will have accomplished this within 2 months.

6. Cut back on sweets intake. This will probably be the hardest as I have a sweet tooth the size of Texas.

I also put in some resolutions about different conferences or books that I read that gave me some different ideas, but those are my main 6 for starting out the year. They're all very doable, now it's just a matter of self discipline and not giving up like I usually do. Resolutions are good to help plan a year. Often times they're hard to keep, but being the idealist that I am I don't know what I'd do without them :)