Faith

"Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." ~ Jesus - Matthew 17:20

The other night I was talking with my eighteen year old niece, A., who's a freshman in college and visiting for the holidays. When we had our conversation she revealed to me something that she has probably tried to hide from nearly everybody in her life. 

She has an illogical fear, really to the point of panic, that at the times she can't get a hold of one of her family members - by phone call or text message - either her father, brother, or mom, but mostly her mom, then something must be terribly wrong with them. Until she hears back from them, and sometimes, for various reasons, it can be quite some time, she gets so wound up that she can't concentrate; she can't do anything but worry and fear the worst has happened to them. If it's at night she can't sleep; for hours her fears' possess her. It's almost to the point of obsessive compulsive behavior, except without the compulsions. 

I understand my nieces fears' and worries regarding wanting her family to be safe, for them to be there for her in the morning, for them always to be there for her. You see, when I was thirteen years old - now thirty-seven years ago - I was diagnosed with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and I did have both the obsessions and the compulsions - debilitatingly so! 

This was 1977, and at that time very little was known of OCD in general, and virtually nothing of it in children. I was seen by a Duke University-educated psychiatrist who, despite all of his best medical and psychiatric training, didn't know how best to even begin to help me; he had barely heard of the disorder. My father had to educate this "brilliant" child psychiatrist on this strange and peculiar illness. And I say that literally. 

My father, a dentist (although very much involved since the late '60's in the nutrition movement and by default, holistic medicine) had to literally take the psychiatrist and teach him about OCD, about the limited research, about the adult medical trials that were in their infancy, and about the one program in the country at that time that was beginning to find children with the disorder and start medical trials on them. My father did all of this research, gained all of the available knowledge, even though he had a full time job, a wife, and six other children fully in need of his time and attention. And like I said, there wasn't much in the way of knowledge of the illness in children. And of course this was all done before the internet, with its websites and emails, etc., so my father did it the old school way: contacts, phone calls, more contacts, more phone calls, libraries with their medical journals, and such.

I have often talked of my father as a creative, visionary-type person, one who had the ability to not only think outside the box, but to think beyond boxes at all. And to this day I admire his tenacity when it came to problem solving - when it came to a cause of any sort that he believed in. My father didn't know the meaning of, "no," if it had anything to do with something he desired, whether for himself or for those he loved, or even for the causes he believed in. 

But even with my father thoroughly made knowledgeable on a mental disorder that at the time was only just beginning to be understood and diagnosed, it wasn't, in the end, his medical understanding or help that cured me of that debilitating illness of which I struggled with all through my teen years and into my early twenties, it was, I think, the foundation that he and my mother gave me... in religion. 

It's funny because, in the end, I think it was religion that played into my severe OCD and yet it was also the thing that cured me of it!

For me - though I have no idea how it is with others' who have OCD - almost all of my Obsessive Compulsive behaviors were tied to something bad happening (the obsession), a car wreck that would kill, an incurable illness, death by some thing or another, and I HAD (the compulsion) to do something to protect them all, whomever I loved deeply, from the bad thing. If my mind told me I had to wash my hands fifty times in a certain way or my mom would be killed, well, I washed my hands fifty times. If my mind told me that if I didn't walk twenty-five times back and forth through a door threshold my father would die, I walked back and forth through it so my father would live. If it still didn't "feel" "right" I did it all over until it did. Those are only two small examples in a day's worth of living this kind of life, so when I use the word, debilitating, in regards to my mental illness it was that and more… it was exhausting. 

Like I said, at the time I was diagnosed with OCD in 1977 there was virtually little known of the illness in adults, and almost nothing at all in children. I just lived with it. And my family lived with me living with it because when you start walking back and forth through a door threshold time after time and your family is in the car ready to go somewhere, waiting on you, it becomes their problem, too. 

It was only when I came home after I had graduated from college, and a year spent in New York City, at age twenty-three, that enough drug trials had been done with OCD patients (my mother forbade my dad from putting me in the only children's drug trial going on in the country when I was fourteen because she didn't have a good "feeling" about the doctor in charge) that I tried drugs that were supposed to be helpful. But the only thing those drugs did was make me want to stay in bed, in a darkened room all day, and sleep. My parents wanted me to be helped, to be cured, but sleeping away my life was not what they had in mind. I went off the drugs. The sun shone brightly once again through the bedroom curtains I opened each morning, but my obsessions and compulsions remained completely a part of my daily living. 

Finally, when I was probably twenty-four - so I had been living with severe, debilitating OCD for eleven years - a day came, I can remember it as clearly now, twenty-six years on, as I did when it was happening. I was driving a brand new Chevrolet truck down the road, transferring it, for my brother-in-law, from one dealership to another, and per usual a thought came into my head that if I didn't do this particular thing my mom would die. Of course it made no logical sense to me. But regardless, if part of my mind knew if was an illogical thought, the part of my mind that had control over me would always say, "Do you want to take that chance? Do you want to take the chance that you if you don't do the the compulsion one of the people you love most in the world could be taken from you?" In eleven years I had always answered, "no" to that question. I had always "protected" the people I loved and cared for most. 

But on this day, when all of these thoughts about something bad happening to my mom, if I didn't do some illogical thing came into my head, another voice, a new and strong voice, interrupted my thinking. And that voice said to me, "You're a hypocrite!" That voice continued, "Do you want to be a hypocrite?" A hypocrite? How? I asked the voice. And yes, it was a conversation between me and, I guess, this other part of me that had not made itself known before. 

When I asked the voice how I was being a hypocrite, how was my mental illness - an illness that I felt I had no control over - tied in anyway to hypocrisy? The voice talked to me about faith; about God. 

This strong voice asked me that if I believed in God why was I trying to act like I was God? Because, as the voice reminded me, everything I did with my OCD, every obsessive and compulsive behavior made, was made without any thought given to faith. Why, the voice continued, if I said that I believed in God - and I did thoroughly believe in God - did I try to control everything in my environment to the point of irrational behavior, why did I not feel that God was in control? Why did I not let God be in control? 

It's hypocritical of you, L, the voice told me, to say that you believe in God, in His being your creator, and yet you do these obsessive compulsive behaviors all based on fear, and doubt and worry - all based on an overwhelming lack of faith... in God! 

You can't have it both ways, L, the voice said. You have to choose. You have to choose whether you believe that you control the world around you - and really, whether you want to continue to try to control the world around you - simply because you lack faith in the one person who you should know to put ALL your faith in.

So, choose, the voice prodded, do you want to live your life in lack and faithlessness or, do you believe, with the faith of mustard seed, that God is in control of you and all of the people you love and He will take care of you and He will take care of them. Give Him your worries, your doubts, your anxieties, your fears, and let Him take control… give Him, through faith, your life.

As I sat behind the wheel of that truck, driving down the road, feeling desperate to "protect" my mom from harm by listening to the obsessive thoughts in one part of my mind and wanting to do the compulsive behavior that would "save" her, I told God that I was tired. I told God that I was exhausted at trying to control my world, and the people closest to me, by having my OCD rule my every day existence. I told God, that yes, I did believe in Him. Yes, I did have the faith of a mustard seed to know that he would take care of me and those I loved. I told God, that no, I didn't want to be a hypocrite. I told God I wanted to to live my life in faith. 

And it was then that I asked God to take over. I told God that with complete faith in Him I would not do the obsessive compulsive thing that I had felt I needed to do to keep my mom "safe." I told Him that through faith I would allow Him to take care of her, that by faith I was giving up control, and in faith I would believe that all would be well. And for the first time in eleven years I stopped; I didn't let my obsession compel me to do some behavior, that thereto for, although irrational in theory, I was, incapable of believing was irrational in thought. But I let go anyway. Purely in faith… I let go. 

Letting go, having faith in God became my salvation. For every time an OCD thought came into my head - and I was bombarded with them throughout my days - I ignored it, and instead told God I had faith in Him. I had faith that He was in control of my life and that I knew that I could trust Him to take care of me and all those I deeply loved. 

For a long time it was a constant battle between feeling the obsessive thoughts and irrational compulsions that had ruled - and ruined - my life and allowing my faith to assert itself and take control. But my faith, in the end, was victorious. My faith triumphed. And even as I write the words, "victorious" and "triumphed" with the greatest of awe because it was all of that, I know too that it was so much more. "It" was a miracle. Because to this day, twenty-six years later, I took no medicine that cured my mental illness, no psychiatric treatment that helped me, I was free and clear of my OCD, from that day onward, purely by the grace of God. 

And I have written of all of this regarding my mental illness - my OCD - because when I was talking to my niece, about her incapacitating fears and anxieties, I told her that lesson that somehow, and I can only call it a miracle, was given to me: either you believe in God and you have faith in Him and allow Him to be at the center of your life and in control, or you don't. Faith, I told her, sets you free.

I even explained, in some part to her, that while on this Dreaming Miracles journey just about everyday my mind tries to let fear, doubt, worry and anxiety in. I think to myself, how are my dreams going to come true? I'm fifty years old. I live in a small town where meeting a single, cute, well-adjusted guy is like bobbing for apples in a barrel full of oranges, how is "it," all of "it," going to happen? And then I just have to remind myself that kind of thinking is human thinking and God doesn't think like humans think. Thank God, God thinks like God!!!

And if I have even the faith of a mustard seed, which I told my niece I believe I did, anything is possible with God. All I have to do is let go, know, in faith, that He is in control and let Him work it all out. Know that even as I write these words, He's doing exactly that… working it all out! 

Often, when I have these thoughts of doubt or fear - of the enormity of my dreams! - enter my thinking, I just picture what I might call, magic dust, swirling and sparkling around me, as if, even though it may seem as if nothing is happening to make my dreams come true, EVERYTHING is happening, all around me, at all times, miraculously making sure that they do!

I live in Faith...