Five Weeks Into Faith

Five Weeks Into Faith

By

Lori Hickox-Monjaras

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design Kessick Blech

©2013

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Called to Write

One evening in 1995 my phone rang. I was sitting on my sofa in my one room apartment after having taken my portfolio for National Boards to the post office and sending it off for scoring. That box represented the last 7 months of my life. Day and night I had lived the thing preparing it lovingly and hoping that it would be good enough to help earn me National Certification. This night should have been a moment of celebration, relief at finishing something so big, but as I spoke to my friend that night I didn’t feel any of that. I couldn’t celebrate, I couldn’t even move. I seemed to be paralyzed. A million thoughts raced through my head but I couldn’t act on anything. Something was terribly wrong. Looking back now I can see that this moment was the one in which I became aware of my condition but the symptoms had been there for a very long time. Focusing on National Boards had just given me a diversion for a while and now with nothing left to hold them at bay I was awash in a flood of emotions so overwhelming it held me immobile.

My friend rescued me that night but the next morning I couldn’t seem to find a reason to get out of bed. Weeks passed, I went through my normal activities in a haze. I was emotionally frozen, consumed with self-doubts, self-pity, self-loathing but I could not have told you why. The more time that passed the deeper into the hole I seemed to slip. One evening, sitting in the dark, tears streaming down my face, I thought who would even notice if I died, really who would even care? Even in this dark hour I realized that I needed help so I called my doctor the next day. If you haven’t already guessed I was diagnosed with clinical depression and prescribed anti-depression medications.

Fast forward 13 years, my 10-year-old son is lying on his bed, crying. This has become a common scene over the last 2 years. Through his tears he reaches out to me and confesses that no one should like him because he is such a horrible person. I felt like I was slipping through a time warp, carried back to my own childhood. Along the way I was struck by the milestones I’d measured in emotional distress, self-hatred and an inability to enjoy what others seemed to take for granted. Here I was, 45 years old and if I carried my son forward in time what would his life hold? At that moment I knew without a doubt that I did not want my son to end up where I had been so often in the deep hole of depression over and over again. I knew that he deserved better. I knew in my heart, because of where I was in my life, that this was not where God wanted either of us to be.

This became my starting point for writing this study. At the time I was doing a Beth Moore study on being who God says we are. I was supporting a friend who was writing a parable and Bible study about Prayer and I found little pieces of a story beginning to take shape in my own mind. The story made little sense to me but I felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to work on it. I prayed for guidance, asking God to help me help my son. I searched the web and found little of value to guide us. So I posed the question to God, What does your Word say about depression? I was left alone with God to find the answers. The story that was swimming through my head began to come alive with symbols and meaning for my situation. As I wrote and studied and went in deep to the Word the guidance I had been looking for took shape. God began to reveal to me truths that he had placed in the Bible for people in emotional distress. I began to see that what my son and I were going through was a storm that been weathered before by some of the biggest stars of the Bible.

I’m no Biblical scholar, I’m not a leader in my church and of course I’m no expert on depression or emotional distress. I’m a teacher, actually, but more importantly for this journey I was just a mother looking for answers for my son. I was hoping that I could find a way for him to live his life unencumbered by the emotional roller coaster that had marked my own life. God has responded to me and helped me write these pieces to help him and I’m offering them to you as well. I offer them not because you are at a bad place in your own life, although you may well be, but because they are a road map for living a healthy emotional life. They help you look at the challenges that others had and how they found the spiritual gifts God had provided for them to help them weather the storm. One thing that God made clear to me is that this is only a small study about the kinds of emotional distress that come from focusing on the negative things in our lives. These lessons while they can be applied to many situations were not written to counsel someone who was suffering from grief, loss or questions concerning depression brought on by things outside the realm of our control. While I believe the principles of F.A.I.T.H. that God has allowed me to lay out in this study can be of help and comfort in these situations there are other deeper lessons that God has for those who have suffered great loss or are dealing with life altering catastrophes. He has not led me to write about those at this time.

We will never be free from emotional distress in our lives. God did not intend for us to be without pain or grief or stress. But he never intended those things to take over our lives and alter our focus from Him. Instead he intended that they would shape and define who we are as Christians and allow us to see that when we trust God completely with every detail of our lives we have no need to hold on to such things because He has already taken that burden from us.

This is what I know; depression is real! It is physical as well as mental. It has the potential to sneak up on a person like a thief in the night and to drain away every ounce of happiness from their lives. Medication is one way to treat the symptoms of depression and it works. It can take you to emotional middle ground devoid of the lows that can suck your soul dry and it is appropriate for some people and in some circumstances. But my experience with it also showed me that medication has the ability to steal away the great emotional highs that leave you giddy with laughter and speechless with delight. I also know from my own experience and my mother’s experience that medication works at some times but not always. This is not what God wanted for us. If it were, then he would not have carefully provided us with a road map to live differently. Proverbs 17:22 tells us that when we are happy our hearts are strong but when we are depressed it can draw away our strength. . So we have to be looking for ways to bolster our own emotional well being when we can. God wants us happy and rejoicing in Him. When the greats of the Bible, such as Jacob, Gideon, and David suffered emotionally, and they did suffer emotional distress, God reminded them of the spiritual gifts he had provided for them to bring them out of the dark times. God gave us a plan for a life focused on Him that leads us to our greatest potential, a plan that is not free from pain but a plan that helps us see how that pain can shape our lives positively and help us become closer in our walk to God. The gifts he shared with the patriarchs of the Bible are ours for the seeking. We only have to accept them, understand them and use them to God’s glory.

I hope that as you complete the Bible Studies that you will see what God has shown me. I hope that you understand that you did not ask for emotional distress to come into your life but once it is there it can be either used by the enemy to tear us down or by God to build us back up. We do have guidance to help us find our way out of the darkness through prayer and the gifts of the spirit. But we have to maintain our FAITH, continue to seek God even in the darkness. This is our salvation from the emotional distresses of our life.

Chapter 1

Week One

Focus

Introduction to Focus

In many ways I can now see that God has been slowly preparing me to write this series of Bible Studies for much of my teen and adult life. Perhaps if I’d caught on earlier I would have saved myself some grief, but on the other hand I would not have had such a vast and rich set of experiences to draw on as I write.

One of the more emotionally difficult times in my life came out of the blue. It happened as a result of some decisions that my husband and I made together. We were both in pretty bad jobs, and extremely unhappy. I decided to look for another job at higher pay. I found one very quickly. Once I was in that position my husband, who had become a target of his unethical boss, came to me wanting to quit his job. Normally, I would have insisted he have another job first but the situation was dire and I at once felt compassion for my husband and at the same time feared that if he was fired, no matter how unjust the firing might be, it would be more difficult for him to find a new job. I had found a job quickly and I assumed since we had similar careers that he would have the same experience. My new job paid more and I felt sure that if we tightened the purse strings for a little while we would be fine. So in the end I agreed. He quit his job and asked that I give him a few months to gather himself back together before he looked for another one.

Someone once told me that the world was round for a reason, so that no one could look too far into the future, it always curves away from us just hidden from our sight. I had no idea that these decisions for our lives were about to lead us down a path of long term unemployment, lack of trust in each other, feelings of being taken advantage of and thoughts of divorce. My husband despite both our best efforts was unable to secure employment for a very long time. Months I was sure I could handle, but the months eventually turned into years. On and off I helped him look for jobs, create resumes and send out letters of interest but to no avail. Nothing worked. On one hand I felt that there must be a reason he could not find work, a bigger plan one I was not privy to. On the other hand I was very frustrated feeling like I was doing most of the work looking, knowing that if I was in my husband’s shoes I would do things differently. My faith and trust in him began to feel the stress of a stretched checkbook and diminishing savings.

During the first 2 years of unemployment well meaning friends questioned why I would stay with a man who was not providing for me. They encouraged me to leave him, take our children and strike out on my own; after all I was already paying all the bills myself. I felt a great deal of pressure to make ultimatums on him, to set dead lines. I felt like my life was spinning out of control and I needed to bring it back into order. One way or another I wanted things to go back to what they had been. But as these ultimatums unraveled and deadlines came and went I could not bring myself to break up my marriage and my family. I loved my husband and I was quite sure that God did not want me to seek a divorce as the answer to this situation.

Please don’t think for one minute that I didn’t pray. I prayed for a job for my husband, I prayed for more money for me, I prayed for strength and guidance. I prayed for deliverance. I prayed more in that period of time than I think I had prayed in most of my adult life and I was someone who prayed a great deal. I just didn’t seem to be getting any answers. Then two friends in one week suggested I read the book Hinds Feet On High Places. Neither friend knew my situation very well. I felt compelled to buy and read the book, perhaps if nothing else it would help me find some sort of peace.

I have to tell you that I sobbed all the way through. My husband would come in and see me crying and he would sit with me and we would talk about the situation and look at how close our marriage really was to crumbling. Lines of communication opened that had been closed off for a long time. I could identify with the heroine of the story and her struggles to have faith and follow her Lord when the world around her ridiculed her and belittled her choices. I realized as I read that I had lost focus in my life of what was really important. I had been listening to the voices of the world and allowing them to drag me down into emotional upheaval. I was praying for everything except for the one thing I had been taught as a child to pray for first that, God’s will be done.

Once I changed my focus and turned it back to God, I saw many things more clearly. I saw that financially God had provided for us for years on a single income. I saw that my marriage didn’t need to be in trouble, if my husband and I were willing to work at this transitional time in our lives so that our marriage grew instead of dying away. I saw that God had provided me guidance as I had requested. All the time I was focusing on my husband going back to work instead of putting things in perspective and focusing on God and allowing His will to be fulfilled in the lives of my family.

I tell you this story as way of introduction to this week’s lessons. These lessons are all about Focus. Our first step into living a more faith filled life is to learn how focusing on things other than God can lead us into emotional distress and depression and away from the lives that God has for us to live. Each day of this week