My Life. I am simple yet complex.

  I for a minute would like to take a moment and introduce myself as “me” for a moment. Yes ,my name is Rachel but I am a person with deep emotions that can be very complex. I am sure a lot of us are like that but don’t want to admit it. I am not going to speak as the mom my children think I am, or the christian my church sees me as, or the wife whose husband puts me on a pedestal. (I’m still trying to figure that one out) I decided to blog about my life, and my feelings and see how I got to this point, where I feel I needed to do this. 

   For starters I am a born again christian. Now before you go “Oh great another religious zealot” , I can assure you I am not. I am not a person that acts like I’m better than anyone else.I believe on the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and that He died for my sins and yours. I believe if you trust in what he did on the cross and have that child like faith in him and ask him to be your savior then he will saveyou and take you to heaven when you die. That’s as simple as that.  I love listening to the sermons at church and the peace and hope they give me. This is a major thing for me to help me though life becuase …… I am absolutely terrified of death.

  If you’re a christian reading this you’re probably wondering, “if you have faith then why be afraid of death?” Let me ask this, if you knew you were going to die tomorrow I don’t think you’d be looking forward to it no matter how strong your faith is. I am a person of logic and a deep thinker, which can be bad because I dig so deep at times into life’s mysteries I scare myself. I mean Im afraid! Is it going to hurt? How am I going to die? Am I going to be old? Will I be afraid when it happens?  More importantly the thought of never being here again scares me to where I’m jumping up and down hyperventilating because I feel helpless. I can’t stop it. It’s the one thing in my life I cannot control. None of us can.  My logic tells me that when my heart stops then in a several minutes my brain will die and then i will be dead. In that logic when the brain is dead I shouldn’t be anywhere or anything. Im getting goosebumps as I type this. This is where I turn to God and cry “HELP ME! Im frightened! Please come back soon, PLEASE COME BACK!” Have any of you felt like this? This contributes to many sleepless nights because I feel like Im wasting time. 

  This fear of death originally started when I was 9 years old. I was studying the bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and I was always raised to believe about going to heaven after death. My family was protestant but even at the age of 4 I had the sense of heaven and that it was nice and that was where my “Pop pop big Tom” was. I was ok with him being gone because I knew he was there and that he was ok.  During a bible study when I mentioned about heaven, the JW teacher I had corrected me at that point to tell me that I will not be going to heaven and that none of us are and that my loved ones haven’t either. Being a 9 year old girl I wanted to know that famous question that kids ask…”why?” If my family did not believe this way I wish they would have stopped the study, but all she explained to me is that when we die, we go to sleep. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that so the following week when bible study resumed I had more questions. Even as a little girls I was always asking questions..even if I had a strong feeling I may not want to know the answer. The questions and answers about death lasted for about 3 weeks for most of my study because now I was puzzled, angry and demanded to know more. I don’t remember what exactly set my body into panic mode but after that whole thing at the age of 9 I experienced my first panic attack. I thought I was dying. My grandmother then stopped the lessons and told off the teacher for scaring me, I used to be angry with her for feeling like she took my innocence from me in that sense but she was only doing what she thought was right. What she was taught to believe and so believing that she was doing God’s work ‘tried to teach me.”. Im not angry anymore.

How do I deal with my fears now?? Sometimes I ignore it or distract myself to do something else so I don’t think about it. Other times I pray, read comforting books about Our Father, what  Jesus had done on the cross and I feel better. Other times I tend to think unrealistically and say “well maybe Jesus will come back before I die”. It’s a sobering thought and it’s not impossible but 99.99999% not likely in my life time. 

I chose to write about this because it seems to me that the fear of death has contributed to alot of things I could have changed in my life but haven’t. I was supposed to have surgery but didn’t because I was afraid of the anesthesia. what was I afraid of?  No big secret here, I was afraid of not waking up. The more I write I think Im afraid of the transition between here and heaven. I know the bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:8 “to be absent from the body and present with the Lord” but I mean Im sure the body goes trough SOMETHING in that transition? When do we leave our body when our heart stops or our brain dies? 

See?? Deep thinker…bad thing to be. 

This was something troubling my heart and so I needed to get it out. I hope I am not alone but perhaps there are other Christians I can learn from. I am currently looking for a new church to attend. I am comfortable in the baptist churches, but  I am not a fundamentalist though. There are certain things in an IFB church that I learned and I have convictions about  them. However, there are things that are taught that I think are just a bit much. They seem to be more of the pastors personal opinions than doctrine, Sometimes even pastors forget that they are sinners too.

The biggest issue I have with other Christians is that they come across awfully judgmental. There is a way to express concern for someone without sounding harsh. some call it ear tickling, i call it having compassion. I mean I don’t understand how someone can get crass with me but when you point something out to them that they’re doing they’re extremely offended. If people actually loved each other they way they should then we shouldn’t sound so harsh! Especially new Christians see that and they don’t want to be bothered. Now I am a christian who believes in eternal security so even though these people won’t lose their salvation, they’re not going to grow.

I have my days too where I will post something on FB and then I’ll get a post that says  ”you shouldn’t feel like that ,smile and trust in our Lord”. and all that. I am a christian who can agree to disagree and I DO TRUST my Lord. We may not always see eye to eye on what we believe but the foundation is the same and that’s Jesus Christ. That’s the most important. Im not always going to be happy and cheery, as I am still in this flesh and still a human being. Im not a mindless drone that won’t react to certain things and situations. Ok my rant with how we behave as Christians is over. 

I am a mom of 4 children. My oldest is 18 ,the second child is 16, (she’s a whole other blog story in itself that I will write another time)My third child is 9 and my last one and the only boy is 8.  These children are what keep me sane. There energy and what they do keeps me focused on them I can’t imagine a love greater than that of being a mom but I guess Im going to find out soon about a differenthuman kind of love because in July, I’m going to be a 38 year old grandma. Im so excited and yes, I feel blessed,

Im also married. My husband has been my husband for 8 years but I have been with him for 12. He too is an experience that I have to write about at a later time. I love my husband very much, but I have a relationship with him that I can handle just one day at a time. No matter what hardships we face though, my loyalty and devotion is to him and no other with the exception of God of course. I have been down that road in my younger years doing stupid things and cheating on who I was with but there comes a time where you have to grow up and put God in the drivers seat  of your life. 

Right now,today my heart and mind are heavy. I am physically disabled and I miss the person I once was. I also suffer from depression and panic disorder in which the pastor of my former church doesn’t’ believe in. He would say there is no such thing our hearts aren’t right and that made me feel worse. I find myself often thinking about my youth,  missing my childhood summers and the house I grew up in. I would do anything just to relive one of those days. 

I am not anything or anyone special. I am just a sinner saved by the grace of God who is backslidden and I feel lost. I haven’t resumed drinking or smoking but some foul language has returned and I hate it, I catch it as soon as it happens.

I read my FB statuses from 3 years ago and I as so in tune with God and right now I feel like “where am I?” I don’t want to feel this way. I still pray and read my bible but I miss the fellowship I had with some good people.