Hearing Voices in the Normal Christian Life

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choose life, Hear God's Voice

The Right Question: Who’s Talking and Will I Listen?

Trigger alert: Those with suicidal thinking may find parts of this post triggering. Support is available 24/7 by texting 741741 (Crisis Textline) or calling 800-273-8255 (Suicide Prevention Lifeline).

My brain is full of voices. Right now, I can hear a faint echo of Jim Bleikamp’s voice reading the 5:30 news on WCME, the radio station I was listening to during my commute home. The voice of this essay is running faster than I can type, and I type really fast. The voice that whispers “no one really cares what you have to say” is quiet for the moment. So is the musical soundtrack that accompanies all the hours of my day when I’m swinging high into a hypomania. In this quiet house, the hissing voice of my tinnitus is buzzing nearly as loud as the humming refrigerator. Even so, I can hear the out-of-sync ticking of two clocks, plus the rattle in the kerosene heater’s blower. If I stroke the lush black cat who’s just settled in beside me, his rumbly purr will add to the quiet cacophony.

Lots of voices. And that’s still a slow night in my brain.

I remember once when my husband and I were on a road trip together. “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said.

He had to be evading, I was sure. It was not possible to simply think “nothing.” I pressed him.

“No, really,” I said, “what are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just driving.”

I couldn’t believe him, because I had never experienced what he was describing. My head was pretty much always full of voices, ideas, urges. People with bipolar disorder can hear a lot of voices. So, too, may people with other diagnoses.

Bipolar mania hears, “This is the best idea anyone has ever had! Everyone needs to listen now! Hey, you! All of you! Wake up! Get on the bus or get run over!”

Bipolar depression hears, “That oncoming bus is really convenient … you can step in front of it now.”

Social anxiety hears, “Just stay home. No one will talk with you. You’ll look like an idiot if you go.”

Chronic depression hears, “It’s too much work to get dressed. And people will be happier if you don’t show up.”

Anxiety hears: “Don’t even try going. You’ll mess up. Like you always do.”

The popular psychology of my young adult years held that the voices in our head were just looping recordings of voices we’d known … childhood memories that we can turn off if we chose to. On the one hand, I wanted to believe that idea. It seemed so simple. On the other hand, I couldn’t figure out what childhood voice I would have recorded shouting Yiddish vulgarities at me and telling me that I was a f— up who f—s everything up. I mean, sure, I probably had heard the f-word at school. But “schmuck”? In 1960s Maine? Not very likely.

So where did that hectoring voice come from? And the voice that urged me to die? And the voice that said everything is worthless because eventually the universe ends and it all vanishes? And was there a difference between the voices that caused me so much discomfort – the ones that harangued and insulted me – and the voices that gave me useful direction?

Because there was at least one useful voice. At a particularly rough moment, that voice told me that if I didn’t have a reason to live until spring, I should plant bulbs. I did, and still do, almost every fall.

And while I could recognize one of the helpful voices as God, I wondered why was there more than one voice that knew what’s what and could accurately predict circumstances.

I had learned to recognize God’s voice during a year or so when I attended a traditional silent Quaker meeting. In a “silent” Quaker meeting, there is no preacher and no musicians. But if anyone among the congregation feels moved by God to speak or sing, they stand up and do it. After the meeting, the people who spoke, if their words have resonated with others – that is, if their words are believed to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit – receive affirmation from others.

In the meeting I attended, which held to some very old Quaker traditions, people would come up to me quietly after the meeting and tell me, “Thou speakest to my concerns, sister.” Sometimes one person. Sometimes three or four. Over time, I learned to recognize in myself what were the signs of God’s presence in the room to speak through someone, God’s presence to speak through me, and God’s presence to speak through me right now.

But there were still those other voices. The nasty ones, which I did my best to push away. And one day, an unfamiliar voice came to me offering seemingly harmless advice.

I was preparing to sell my 1978 Volkswagen Beetle, the well used and gratefully owned first car that carried me to my first job after college. I’d bought it privateparty from a classified ad, so taking a classified ad to sell it made sense.

Then a voice told me: “Take it to Al Guregian’s. Someone there will pay more for it.”

Well, Al Guregian owned the junkyard where I’d bought most of the parts I replaced over the years, so I knew the guy and the place. I drove up and walked into his office. We started talking.

An employee kept sticking his head in and interrupting our negotiation. Al kept waving him out. We finally settled on a price. He handed me the cash; I signed over the title; and it was done.

As I walked out the office door, the employee sidled up to me.

“How much did he give you for it?” he asked in an undertone.

I told him.

He gasped with frustration. “He won’t sell it to me for twice that!”

Hmmm, I thought. The voice was right. There was someone at Al Guregian’s who was going to pay more for my Bug. But the voice wasn’t God’s voice. How could a voice that was not God give me information that was true?

I let that conundrum drop into a back corner of my brain for processing. A couple of days later, the answer emerged.

God knows everything. God doesn’t just know truth, God is truth. He is the way, the truth and the life. (John 14.6). When we know God, we know the Truth that sets us free (John 8:32).

But a spirit who is not God can know our material world as readily as I can – more so, because without the constraints of a physical body, a spirit potentially has access to much more information. So a spirit who is not God can be in the room when one of Al Guregian’s employees is talking with a buddy about wanting to buy an old VW to fix up. A spirit who is not God can observe Al Guregian’s sharp business dealings and anticipate accurately how he will behave when a car comes onto his lot for which he knows he has a ready buyer. And most of all, a spirit of greed – who is most definitely not God – knows in what direction greed can push an ordinary series of business transactions.

So the spirit who knew someone at Al’s garage would pay more for the car … that was the greedy spirit that set the employee up to pay Al more than double what Al paid me.

And a spirit of greed had told me what greed was doing. Just because a voice speaks truly doesn’t mean the voice is God.

That recognition, in turn, pushed me to a startling insight about my mother’s remarkable ability to see future or remote events – bad events, exclusively.

I remembered in particular one day when she’d come home from shopping. She hadn’t gotten all the way through the door before she demanded, “What happened to my blue cup?”

She couldn’t see, from where she stood in the entryway, the fragments of her blue porcelain mug in the dining room. I can’t remember who knocked it over or how it was broken. I just remember that Mom knew something had happened to her blue mug before she even made it into the house.

Mom was, I came to believe, “wired” for hearing from the spirit world. And not having committed herself yet to Jesus, she heard readily from spirits who were not God. They spoke truth, but not on behalf of the truth that sets us free. Mom was like the fortune teller who truthfully told all the world that Paul and Silas were “servants of the Most High God”, but lost her special knowledge after Paul ordered the spirit who gave her information to depart from her (Acts 16:16-19).

My own ability to hear voices represents the same kind of spiritual atunement. When a Christian listens to God, we call it prophecy. But in my experience, this special ability to listen in on the spirit world, a gift intended for good, is usable in some measure by any spirit who might pass by. The responsibility I hold, as a Christian who has that gift, is to discern among the voices I hear and choose which voices I will attend.

This is what Jesus talks about when he tells us that his sheep know his voice and they will not follow any other (John 10: 2-5). He doesn’t say that we won’t hear any other voice. Just that we’ll refuse to follow it.

(Please note: I only acknowledge that Christians may hear from passing spirits. I am not suggesting that any unholy spirit has access to enter and hold the temple of God which is the believer’s life.)

The voice I have to ignore most frequently is the one that tells me that on any given day, I can choose to end my life. This voice dogs me. It pretends to be comforting me. “Today was hard … you don’t need to do tomorrow,” is its seductive message. “You can stop right now. Forever.” Although it has never spoken as gently as that. Nor has it made its separate existence evident by addressing me from the second person.

This unholy voice speaks in an urgent, first-person shorthand that sounds like my own voice. “I can suicide,” it says to me on my pillow as I try to fall asleep. Night after night, year after year.

And night after night, day after day, year after year, I choose instead to listen to God: “I set before you this day life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life …” (Dt. 30:19).

It’s like Martin Luther said: “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” The thoughts come. It took decades before they finally (seem to have) stopped. But even when they came nearly every night, when they pretended to be my own thoughts in my own voice, I refused to give them a home.

In the 21^st century, people like me who hear voices are labeled as suffering from psychosis. It’s considered to be a symptom of a very serious mental illness that creates dangerous life situations.

After hearing many different voices for more than 40 years, I would say – with Jesus – that hearing voices is as ordinary as seeing sheep follow their shepherd. The only danger is if the sheep pay attention to voices other than God.

As long as you choose to follow God, you will learn to know God’s voice. And, as Jesus promises (John 10:8-10), you will follow God, and God alone, into the fold and out into the pasture and you will be kept safe.

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Finding Silence in a Run-On Brain

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silence

Even when there’s no noise, there’s no silence for me.

I’m not one of those people whose brain is always running down the list of what’s next, what needs to be done, whose post needs to be liked, how to fit in all the many people and tasks that a day requires.

I have a brain that multitasks. All the time.

I’m typing this post while I’m listening (inside my head) to one of the songs from this morning’s worship set and (outside my house) to the cars passing by. My mother used to wonder how I could watch afterschool TV while doing my homework while (intermittently) crocheting granny squares. “I guess I just have an eight-track brain,” I told her.

My brain becomes more quiet when I have a task outside myself that engages more of its channels. The best is physical activity with a purpose. Gardening, for example. When I garden, one brain channel is deciding what needs to be pruned or raked or cut down or weeded, one channel is directing my hands and feet and maybe my huffing lungs (if the job requires heavy hauling, as the best jobs do). Another brain channel is measuring the project’s current status against some anticipated outcome: beds clear for winter, rose bushes free of strangling vines, lilac shrubs in beautiful bloom because I’ve taken down with a handsaw the five 20-foot maples that overshadowed them.

Work — hard, physical work — is where I find silence. With all my channels fully occupied in the task, there’s no place for my brain to run. It can focus on what it is doing and nothing more. Silence.

I suspect that others with a bipolar diagnosis have discovered the same thing. Silence doesn’t come with a meditation discipline. Thoughts that seem to run in four or five separate channels simultaneously can’t be quieted by trying to become quiet — or even by trying to follow the standard instruction and simply letting the thoughts pass. A brain built for radical multitasking keeps running on all five or eight cyclinders until it’s exhausted. That exhaustion can begin a serious downward slide. Other choices are essential.

Gardening works. Dancing works. Trying to play the piano — even just practicing scales — works. Playing music requires me to read the lesson book, to move my hands ways that are not easy for me, to keep track of each finger’s correct position in relation to the scale, to hear what is right and what is misplayed.

I don’t find silence in quiet. I find silence in big occupations — occupations big enough to require all the channels I can play at once and far enough outside me to make any of the yammering internal channels become irrelevant.

I am happy with the silence I find. I hope you find the kind of silence that suits you.

This post is part of the Five Minute Friday linkup: this week’s prompt is Silence.

Bipolar View: Steady is as Steady Does

Sure, sometimes you wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

You probably can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up not knowing that there is a world beyond the thick blackness of the blankets pulled up over your eyes.

And some days you’re excited. It’s the first day of a vacation trip. It’s Christmas morning.

You probably can’t imagine waking up five or six times that enthusiastic, without any reason at all.

Having bipolar disorder means that steady is as steady does. Because the feelings are almost random.

When blackness enfolds, I \write down a list of tasks — even tasks as mundane as “wash the dishes” — and work through them. Otherwise nothing happens. At all.

When enthusiasm overwhelms, I have to choose to write down a list of tasks — especially tasks as mundane as “wash the dishes.” Because otherwise I’ll enthuse in 10 or 12 or 20 different directions, almost simultaneously. At the end of the burst, I’ll find myself surrounded by a clutter of unfinished projects and the clutter of an untended life.

I stay steady by trying to focus on what I need to do. And I stay steady by remembering that the way I feel today is not likely to be the way I feel in three or four weeks.

 

Not me!

I ride my feelings like surf: the enthusiasm powers forward movement; the blackness cannot be allowed to fuel anything bleaker than anticipation. Happily, God has promised a future that is extraordinarily bright, and allows that I live this life in the brilliance of God’s presence, even when God is invisible through the envolding darkness.

Steady is as steady does. No one is more steady than God.

Today’s  Five Minute Friday writing prompt is “Steady.”

How Being Mentally Ill Helps Me Know God Better

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Mental illness is part of what it means to be me. It shapes my life in ways that many people define as “broken.” Living with bipolar disorder generally makes me an outsider. It often generates thoughts and behaviors that make other people anxious if I allow them entry to my world. Having a mental illness makes me subject to discrimination in many subtle and not so subtle forms.

Still, I would say that my illness adds value to my life and to the Body of Christ. It allows me to serve in places where others are afraid to go and challenges me to seek God in ways others feel uncompelled. Here are 7 ways I’ve noticed that mental illness helps me to know God.

1.       Being mentally ill means I’m less afraid of the unusual.

Being unusual myself tends to segregate me to a community of other people who are also set aside as “unusual.” M friends over the years have included a wife struggling in her cross-cultural marriage, a single woman who (literally) fell out of her chair laughing during a dinner party, and a disabled vet who wanted an editor for his science fiction novel. (He later turned out to be wanted for murder). A regular guest at our church’s dinner for people in need bragged for weeks that I was “the onliest person to come” help when her kitchen table collapsed. (It was a simple repair, just like the fix I’d recently done to my own vintage dinette table.) When you aren’t afraid of people who are unusual, you are able to engage with people that others overlook. You can see opportunities to be God’s hands and feet in

When you aren’t afraid of people who are unusual, you are able to engage with people that others overlook. You can see opportunities to be God’s hands and feet in service, because you interact with people who are – like yourself – open about living in need.

2.       Being mentally ill makes me less afraid to be different.

Reality is, I don’t have much choice about being different. No matter how carefully I try to mimic your behavior, your wardrobe, your activities, your interests, I know by experience that there will be a moment when my differences are publicly exposed. Maybe the boss will throw a curve by opening the team meeting with an ice breaker. “Who is your favorite movie actor?” And the question is so far from anything I ever think about that I stumble and mumble until she interrupts. “It’s not a hard question,” she says. Except for me it is.

Knowing that most people – Christian or not – will name me as “different” means I can’t let myself be concerned about it. If my worldview places me outside the American cultural norm, I can live with that. If my worldview places me outside the American Christian norm, I can live with that. I find it easier than many people to acknowledge that I am who I am – and sometimes even to know that I am who God made me to be – because I am largely without the option of molding myself into whatever is currently “socially acceptable.”

3.       Being mentally ill makes me less afraid of differences.

A person like me doesn’t have an instinctive understanding of almost anyone. You see me as awkward during a Bible study or at coffee hour when I fail to behave as the middle-class American Christian that I, in fact, am. And because I find it difficult to navigate these “ordinary” circumstances, I don’t find it more difficult to address situations that involve greater differences.

I once worked with a brilliant computer guy who was a first-generation immigrant. When he answered my question about his accent with a hard-edged, “I grew up in the jungles of Barbados,” I didn’t think twice before responding, “There are no jungles in Barbados.” We had many conversations after that about his experiences of American racism, including being spread-eagled by police as he walked from the MIT libraries back to his apartment late one night.

I find it easy to listen to other people who also experience themselves as different from others and to speak into the ways they experience their lives. A couple years ago, I spent a couple of weeks driving an out-of-state friend and her wheelchair around town while she had her last visits with her dying mother. One night, as she called for a third Margarita at her hotel’s bar, she asked me to explain the Old Testament sacrificial system. I would never have been there if I were uncomfortable with asking how to collapse her chair so it fit into my Prius, or what assistance she needed to get from chair to car and back again.

4.       Lacking some of your abilities, I have learned to take risks.

I’m not very good at reading social cues, and other people often find my reactions inappropriate – if not totally confounding. That means that there are very few settings where I feel secure.

But because I know from experience that I’m likely to put my foot in it every day, I’m less likely to worry about taking another opportunity to put my foot in it. Every day feels risky, which makes me paradoxically more willing to take risks: whether engaging a stranger in conversation about God or offering prayer to a colleague in distress. When very little feels safe, then very little feels relatively dangerous. You might keep your distance from a gay colleague who practices Kabbalah; I’m no more anxious with him than with you.

I cannot trust myself so I must trust God. That’s a good thing.

5.       My illness has made me more practiced in resilience.

Bipolar disorder is an illness that can destroy careers and relationships. At its least damaging, it tends to create a person who runs in shame – over and over — from the embarrassments she has created. People with bipolar start over again, and again, and again.

Paradoxically, one word to describe this behavior is a positive one: “resilience.” Resilience is a popular topic right now. We use it to describe how people who have experienced adversity bounce back. We tend to believe resilience is the product of a stable and loving family, solid training in basic life skills, and a certain sense of life purpose. For me, resilience is a learned skill. When I experience a disaster or create a disaster, I have learned to bounce back – but only so far. As a person with bipolar disorder, my innate “bounce back” tends to vary from Superball zing during highs to uninflated ball flop during lows. My learned response is simply to stand … again. Instead of having the skills that keep you from falling, I have fabulous skill at getting off the floor. God calls this “perseverance” and reminds us that God provides what we need so that after we have done all we can do ourselves, we will stand (Eph. 5:13).

6.       I’m more (consciously) practiced in discernment.

“Normals” often turn from something because at some subconscious level, schooled by church or culture, they “know” it’s out of line. I have fewer clear subconscious guides. My brain runs fast and full of ideas. Which idea is good? Which idea is helpful? Which idea is for me to carry out and which is for me to pray into existence through someone else’s activities?

Sometimes it’s easy to tell that an idea is not good. When my mind insists that life is without value, that I might as well be dead, that there is no one to whom I matter, some part of me knows that the ideas are “bad” but no part of me can turn them away on my own. Usually I try to find another person – often a crisis-line staffer – to help me remember how to survive that day or night. Once God interrupted directly: “If you don’t have a reason to live until spring, then plant bulbs.” I’m glad I knew to believe God’s voice. I’m glad I had been schooled in listening for God’s voice. And yes, I still plant bulbs.

7.       Because I’m chronically ill, I focus more readily on God and the life beyond.

Many people who live with chronic illnesses live our faith in the prospect of God’s glory, not our own daily success. The victory we claim in Jesus is ultimate, not imminent. We know that God spoke truly when God told us that in this life we would experiences tests and temptation and pain … that we would only be liberated when we attain the new heaven and earth. There, the tears that have watered our lives will cease to exist, and our sorrows and suffering will vanish.

Having what we call a mental illness is a challenge. But it liberates me from some challenges that other Christians face. I am, perhaps, one of those unpresentable parts of the Body. And God assures me that those parts we consider least worthy of honor are still essential (I Cor. 12:22). My value in the Body of Christ is not measured by whether I have an important place or even am found acceptable in my church. It is God who determines my place and my value. With that, and with my own insufficiency, I must be content.

The Heroic Epic Comedy of My Life with Bipolar Disorder

Everyone is trying to create their life narrative and establish the story behind their personal brand. To figure out the storyline for my life with bipolar disorder, I’ve been reviewing some old English lessons and some new century graphic novelists.

A Circular Narrative

Choosing a circular narrative structure is easy. A circular narrative starts and ends at the same geographic location, but lots happens in between. I was born in Brunswick, Maine and almost six decades later moved back to the house where I grew up. That’s the basic structure of my entirely circular story.

The house where I grew up (next to the little store) is about 4 miles from the house (left) where my mother grew up. If I included her circular narrative in my own story, that would be a “framed narrative.”

An Epic

Epics describe events that take place over an extended period of time (think the 30-year journey of Odysseus) and involve a protagonist who has a level of courage and bravery that can stand as a role model for their culture.

Odysseus urges his companions to battle the raging storm in this image by contemporary Italian contemporary artist Paniotis.

I know, I know … the cultural role model thing seems like pretty grandiose thinking, right? But here’s the awesome thing about epics: grandiosity is part of the norm! So the expansiveness that bipolar can demonstrate is ordinary in the epic, and — without making claims about whether anyone does or will ever consider me a role model — it does take a lot of courage to keep doing this. You probably don’t understand how much.

A Comedy

I can’t say I’ve seen my life as a comedy in the past. But there are some comedic elements, and I’m not liking how a tragedy would play out. Drawing on a comparison between comedy and tragedy presented by Philip Irving Mitchell, director of the honors program at Dallas Baptist University, I’m seriously considering a transition from tragedic modes to comedy for my last couple of decades.

Before I give you a full review of Mitchell (who bases his summary on John Morreall), let me give you a summary how I think a new comedic lifestyle would play out for me:

In a comedy, when you pull the rug out from under someone the audience laughs, the character makes a face, stands up and dusts off her backside. The audience laughs more. The character and the rug-puller eventually embrace. Life goes on.

 

Charlie Chaplin takes a fall in an early 20th century film.

In a tragedy, when you pull the rug out from under someone, the audience gasps. The character slowly rises while drawing her sword and bellowing an aria about injustice. The audience holds its breath. Someone’s going to die.

 

I’m ready for life to go on.

So, Heroic Epic Comedy it is. More later.

Resurrected from My Death Wish

Tags

aspergers, gardening, hope, sense of belonging, spring bulbs, suicidality

This post deals with topics that some may find triggering.
If you are currently struggling with the desire to end your life,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255.
Compassionate people there will help you rediscover your possibilities.
Hugs and God’s love to you!

The crocuses I planted some 30 years ago at my parents’ home come up year after year, thicker each time. After this astonishing winter that wasn’t, they bloomed before the end of March.

As I write, “the winter that wasn’t” has slapped coastal Maine with what we hope is its last dose of ice and hazardous travel. Good Friday’s freezing morning mist coated even sand particles, making my unpaved driveway a slippery, treacherous mess. In the afternoon, a freezing rain frosted the pine needles and slicked roads. By Saturday, it had bent trees and broken branches.

Still, this ice landed on New England streets and yards almost entirely clear of snow after the extraordinarily warm “winter that wasn’t.” A thicket of crocuses is already blooming in my front yard. Budding daffodils are 4 inches high. Tightly furled tulip leaves have begun to push through the soil.

Most of the spring bulbs in this yard were planted more than three decades ago, when I began to create my little legacy in flowers.

Until then, I had spent dark years through my teens and early adulthood. I cried so much of my adolescence that I propped a favorite stuffed toy at one end of my bed and designated that area “my crying corner.” Throughout my days and nights, I heard a voice tell me over and over, “You shit. You schmuck. You fuck up. You fuck everything up. You can’t do anything right.”