Tag: anxiety

No Shame Sunday

Ami Beth CrossLeave a comment

~Them~

Four, five or six months ago I got angry. At church. A kind of fury that made me run, punch, and eloquently and scathingly preach; hurt. My angst took me away, on a journey apart from the Heavenly Water and back into the blinding Sahara. 

Feeling abandoned is my thing, when it blankets me in the Light not just the dark all I know is shame, guilt, and anxiety. 

Am I not lovable enough? 

I feel deeply left behind by my church. My people, my community, I love them and hate them in tandem. Where are they when I need them the most?  Do they not recognize me as lost as I slowly vanish into a whisper that no one can hear? Where is my church, my people?

~You~

My God, You declare that You do not care about this hurt and anger I feel towards You.

You care about me. 

You whisper soft winds blowing the sheer curtains in the wind wide open with Your Love. 

I still yell out my anger,  my fury, and my scathing words…because it feels like abandonment and abandonment is my thing. But Not by You~

Never by You. 

The sun cascades in, warming my face forcing the dichotomy to sync; that Love and hurt can co-exist. Immediately I don’t care if they are not perfect.  I am far from perfect, so an unfair expectation has turned my heart into stone and my blood frozen as February.

I realize that they are broken and bonded by a desperate desire to be wanted; just like me. 

~Reconciliation~

 My body fights back. My Mind slips into the Reckoning. My Heart shakes with fervor to rise above. Because even when the dark loses its light, there You are. In that, I choose to keep my eyes on the Prize. My Prize. 

You. 

I get ready on a sunny Sunday morning to come running past the doors of anger and into the loving arms of my church.

Stopping in my tracks, I feel a flicker ignite into a raging flame of a dormant fire inside me; my shame explodes.   It holds me still, stuck in an avalanche of guilt and fear of the loss of love, because abandonment is my thing.  I breathe deep screaming out that I am here, in my own time because I needed a minute to be lonely and angry.  

I stare down my reflection in the mirror, push back my head and grow myself tall; forcing shame out because I did leave~ but today I come home. 

Joy is miraculously replacing shame.  A reunion is on the horizon accompanied by a magnificent celebration in the heavens, as I run back into the loving arms of…my family. I hold my head high as I burst through the doors back into the loving arms of my family, my community; my bridge to You…

The earth shivers in delight, You hold my hand, embrace my journey back as I declare it to be a… A No shame Sunday. 

Ami Beth Cross 2.12.22

The Army Behind Me

Ami Beth CrossLeave a comment

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December found me lying silent, and in that season a blanket filled with quiet I fell into a thick darkness that I know all too well.
A war was waging, a fire blazing, and I could hear the gunfire in the background of my bleakness. Sleep couldn’t come fast enough, and the thought of leaving my house left me paralyzed with a desire to black it all out. All the goodness, the light, words, and song that usually consumes me was diminished to a dismal singular flame flickering on my bedside. Barely keeping me…here.
That is depression, the enemy, a stillness that can black out a once active and fertile mind and consume it with…black.
Recently, the silent enemy of depression knocked on my door, as it does periodically in my life for no particular reason. Finding it extremely difficult to explain this kind of struggle to the world has been a challenge my entire life. It seems simple for people to understand a disease that is medically coherent.

Heart disease, a wrecked knee, cancer, lung disease…all things that are tangible.
But mental illness it isn’t visible through my smile.

My hug.
Or in a peppy attitude that is saved for the hour you may see me.
What consumes me the moment I can let my guard down, is a desperate plea to my God who knows my pain. My suffering, and the reality of an imbalance in my brain that in unseen to the naked eye. The disfiguration of such a struggle is beyond words, metaphors, and enlightening.

The reality is black yet the tangible feel for people who haven’t walked in its ugly shadows is sadly gray.  Unforeseen. And misunderstood.
I’ve fought my entire life to hide the demons that wage within my mind. For, I do not want you to see me as weak.
I know this more than I know most things, I am anything but weak. What I’ve seen and been through in my life, yet still risen above proves so. God has given me a precious gift of an armor that has shielded me, kept me, and built me up despite horrid and unforgiving odds.
Yet…a child is only as strong as she can be. The mind can only take so much, and the body will eventually have an emotional response to repeated toxicity. Hence, my lifelong battle with depression and anxiety.
It’s hard for me to write when I’m struggling in the brinks of the darkness, therefore I have been silent lately. So this will be brief. It’s difficult for me to breathe, walk, get dressed, so the manifestation of the love of my life, my words, leave me as well.
But one thing I’ve learned in this past year of returning to my faith after a seventeen-year hiatus is that I am LOVED. I am not alone, and that I am capable.
My voice, though it may be small, is needed in this world. God told me so, on a cold February night last year when I re-dedicated my life to the Lord. He spoke through the pastor, into the music, providing a spiritual army as a portal into my soul. I will speak of mental illness as loud as it is needed. To normalize it, to forgive it, and to bring peace and hope to my fellow sufferers of such a hell.
The army has always been fighting. Praying, fasting and praying again. Now in the throws of my faith, I know this. I was never alone. WE ARE NEVER ALONE. And when I feel as if I am, somewhere deep inside me I know they are there, fighting when I am too weak.