Slow Driver

I never thought it would happen to me… no… never. But it has. I am embarrassed to admit that I have become one of those dreaded… slow drivers. I’m not 100% sure how it happened but I have my guesses and I suppose when I sit down and put it all together, it does make a little sense. Looking at my past driving record, it's probably a good thing!

I think it started back in November 2010 when my therapist told me I needed to learn how to slow down and learn to take care of myself and relax. Since slowing down was not my forte, it really took a large effort for me to do this. I supposed slowing down even seeped into my driving skills a bit back then.

In December, someone got mad at me on the highway for driving too slow in the left lane. When I looked down at my speedometer I realized I was going only 75 in a 70... only 5 mph over the speed limit. I got out of his way as he flashed a nice finger gesture at me and sped off. Three things happened in my mind that day.

1.  Anger: I got a little angry as the self-righteous part of me awakened and said, “Hey… my tax dollars pay for this road too! The law says the speed limit is 70 and if I want to drive in the left lane going 70, that is my right!”
2. Realization: I realized that when other people are in a hurry… it has absolutely nothing to do with me. We are all responsible for our selves and if he was late… it wasn’t because I was driving the speed limit in “his” lane. It was for completely unrelated reason.
3. Grace: Certainly not grace from me... but a heavenly gift of grace from God... a glimpse into His way of doing things came over me.  I became acutely aware that everyone we come across everyday has their own battles and secrets. Instead of flaring up, I said a prayer for the hurried driver's safety and the safety of the people around him. I asked God to give him peace.

I have since spent more time driving in the middle lane to avoid making others mad but hey… my tax dollars do pay for the road too so you might still catch me in the left lane from time to time.

In January, as I drove my son to school in the mornings, I became keenly aware of the people who were using our neighborhood as a cut through to avoid the stop signs and a school zone on their way to work. It began to annoy me. Not because they were using our neighborhood roads, but because these “cut-thru-commuters” were speeding and ignoring our stop signs. In addition, if one of them got stuck behind me, they would get mad because as I stated in my title – I have become a slow driver. In my neighborhood I especially drive slow since there are lots of kids, bikes, dogs, cats and families. Why wouldn’t I respect my neighborhood, especially on my drive to take my son to school? I recently wrote a letter to our mayor and city counsel asking what could be done about the cut-thru artists. That is so not me.

In February, I got really sick. One thing I have noticed about myself through the years, even as a young lead-footed whipper-snapper… when I was sick… I drove slow. In fact, that was one of the ways I would judge how ill I was. “Oh man… I must be sick. I’m driving under the speed limit!” As you probably know, I have remained ill for quite sometime, I am working at my recovery from a bad bacteria infection but it is a long, slow and tedious process.  I stopped looking at my speedometer to gauge how sick I was feeling because... I was feeling sick all the time.

I guess through all of this, driving slow has just become my new normal.  I said in the beginning I was embarrassed about that but now that I'm typing this, I don't think I really am embarrassed.  I think I'm thankful.  Driving slower shows me that I am doing something right in my attempt to listen to God and slow down my life.

I went to the post office to mail two packages a few weeks ago. The line in the main area was really long, 15 or so people, and there were only two tellers so I decided to use the self-service postage machine. It’s pretty cool and I’ve done it many times so I knew I could fly right through the process without much trouble. As I began to weigh my first package, a man came and got in line behind me. As I progressed through the machine prompts he began to sign louder and louder to show his impatience, as though his noticeable displeasure would make me go faster. I was definitely in his way. Another woman got in line behind him and then another… so I was at the machine with three people behind me. I zipped right through the first package and started my second one. The man sighed more, and began commenting about how long I was taking. Seriously though, it had only been maybe 90 seconds. I ignored him, and neither of the people behind him in line said anything either. I was literally about to push my last button to retrieve my postage sticker when the impatient man behind me said, “I’m just going to go get in the other line… you are taking entirely too long!” then stepped out of line and huffed off to the main postal area line. Right then, my sticker popped out of the machine and I was done. I turned and looked at the lady who was next and said, “His impatience is your gain… I guess its your turn now.” She smiled and said, “Yep!” I let my son put the packages in the super cool alien-esk package eater and we began to leave. I decided to look over at the main postal area to see where Mr. Impatient-Pants was in line. I counted the people in front of him in line now… 22. He was going to be there for awhile. I’m not going to lie… I did a little evil laugh in my head… but only for a moment (okay, maybe two).

As I drove home from the post office, God really spoke to me through this experience. I have lived most of my life in an extremely impatient state. I want what I want and I want it now. I don’t want to wait in line, I don’t want to have to work too hard, I don’t want to be obedient… I want immediate gratification. I want to cruise right down the highway as fast as possible so I can just get where I’m going and get on to the next thing. God has been telling me to slow down for awhile. But I realized, that wasn’t all He had be asking of me… He was also asking me to enjoy the journey along the way.

I went to a class called “Renewal In Christ” several months ago. One of the big pieces of wisdom I took from that was how important it is to remove hurry from my life. I realized hurry and busyness have become the devil’s playground in my life. I had been working at slowing down… did pretty well at it for a time but then got right back into hurrying, worrying and trying to keep myself busy. I believe God allowed me to become ill so He could MAKE ME slow down. Because of the illness, I had no other choice.

The only treatment for my illness is complete diet change... gluten free, casein (dairy) free, wheat free, caffeine free and most importantly… SUGAR free. And when I say sugar free… I mean all sugar, not just plain white sugar. Even the natural sugars in fruit are a no-no for me right now. And it’s not a quick fix… it’s a long tedious process that is going to take time and patience. I will have good days and I will have awful days. And for me, a person who wants what I want and wants it now, a person who doesn’t want to wait in line, a person who doesn’t want to have to work too hard and a person who definitely has difficulty being obedient… this is hard work. I have had to learn that immediate gratification means nothing. I have had to begin to find the joy in the journey. 

There are times, like today, when I want to give up and just say “Screw it… I’m having chocolate pie!” but then God helps me remember Mr. Impatient-Pants at the post office. Hurrying will get me nowhere. In fact, changing my well-thought out, God-directed path purely out of impatience will do nothing but delay my results. The temporary joy I may get from instant gratification is a short-lived lie of the devil. Real joy comes from obedience to the God-guided journey.  I’m glad God has made me slow down, I’m glad God has made me change my ways and I am even glad I have become a slow driver. I don't think I could have begun to learn this any other way and now that I see it, I don’t want to miss a moment.  Not even the sucky ones like today when I have zero energy, a headache and a huge poison sumac rash all over both arms.  Can I just tell you, poison sumac is not fun at all... but I hear God in the back of my mind saying... "be obedient... don't scratch... be patient."

(yes... thats me in the picture... do you like my new hairdo??? )

Triple X

Three X’s in a row can mean a few things… a large clothing size… very sharp cheese… the name of a Vin Diesel movie… a ZZ Top album… or a very unpalatable, uncomfortable subject that many of us cringe at the mere mention of… nakedness. Well, I really am going to talk about the last one… although I don’t think it will be what you “expect.” We are in the middle of a series at Community of Hope called “Sex God” and yes… it is about sex. You might think that is odd, to talk about sex at church but as Joe Carmichael so wisely pointed out last Sunday in our opening week… God invented sex… He created us to be sexual beings… moreover, sex is a real problem these days… so why shouldn’t the church be talking about sex? I don’t think any of us really expect it will just go away if we ignore it.

As a young girl, I didn’t like to read very much. In fact, I was a terrible reader, so bad that I had to give up my recess time to go to reading lab. I remember one summer my parents enrolled me in a book club just to try to keep me reading. It was pure torture!!!! The next summer, my mom bought me a membership with a book club. I got a new book every week or so and they just kept coming in. One of the covers intrigued me because it had a cute boy on the cover. That was the only reason I decided to read it. It was about a nerdy high school freshman girl who had a huge crush on the senior football quarterback. She was poor and didn’t have many friends but somehow, against all odds… she landed the affections of Johnny Jockstrap. By the end of the book, they were walking into the sunset together holding hands. I remember actually getting “high” on the ending. I felt all warm and fuzzy inside and was filled with hope that someday I would be that girl walking into the sunset with the guy of my dreams. I wanted more so I picked up the next book. This time the girl was crippled and confined to a wheelchair but by the end of the book, she was holding on tight to Rippling Rob as they soared through the countryside together on horseback. I felt “high” again and got hooked. I’m not sure how many of them I read or even how many times I read each of them but one thing was for sure… I knew for certain exactly what love was going to be like when my prince appeared.

Huh… yeah right. Part of the story line was fulfilled easily… I was a nerdy girl with very few friends… but as for the rest of the script… pure poppycock. I spent my entire adolescence waiting for my Johnny Jockstrap or Rippling Rob to save me from loneliness. I was completely disillusioned! I grew up though, and dated around a bit.

My first experience with this unpalatable, uncomfortable, nakedness subject was in New York City. A boyfriend of mine wanted to go into one of those “XXX” stores. What totally disgusted me became an obsession for him. He would rent those movies every week and I would stand by completely grossed out and baffled at how someone I liked could like “that.” We grew apart for many reasons, that surely being one of them. I thought he had a low value for women because of his fascination with it, like we were just sexual objects meant for physical pleasure. Ewww… where was the love? Where was the emotional fulfillment? It seemed all those movies did was cheapen sex and give an unrealistic expectation of bedroom bliss…to me it seemed like sexual poison. The average woman wouldn’t be willing to do half the stuff those “actors” and “actresses” did. Ewwwww! How unfair! After that, one of my criteria for dating a guy was that he not be into porn… and yes, I did ask before our first date. Of course asking didn’t prevent me being lied to.

About two years before I got sober I began a major slide into my personal hell. I was extremely unhappy with just about every aspect of my life. I was married and pregnant but I had convinced myself that my husband didn’t love me. I remember watching the movie “13 Going on 30” and getting really mad. I mean, I was livid!!!! I remember thinking how unfair it was that this girl in the movie had two guys that loved her so much. And the fact she got to go back in time and fix a mistake she had made, well that made me even more mad (as if that were realistic in any way shape or form). How come I couldn’t have that? Why didn’t anyone love me the way she was loved???? In fact, that movie spawned my complete hatred for Jennifer Garner that is still hovering over me even today. After that I was even more convinced my husband didn’t love me. I wanted what I saw on the silver screen… no… I believed I deserved what I saw on the silver screen; love, real love, the type of love that moved mountains and stayed hot and heavy at all time. That’s right, I wanted MOVIE LOVE!!!! Movie love was the real thing and I deserved it.

Well, I’ve been sober for over two years now and a lot has changed. Yes, I still hate "those" movies but after all my husband and I have gone through together, no one can ever tell me he doesn’t love me. I know he does, for if he didn’t, he never would have put up with what I dragged him through in the process of wrecking my life and then getting sober. Our trip to hell and back is what showed me exactly what love really is.

One weekend, the movie “The Notebook” was on television and for some unexplained reason I started to watch it. See, that is another thing that changed with my sobriety. I came to despise chick flicks that painted such an unrealistic picture of what love was supposed to be. As I watched this horrendous movie, I went to my imaginary bucket with violent dry heaves at least 100 times. I was seriously nauseous as I watched it. Now, don’t get me wrong… it’s okay to like a good love story… as long as you realize that it is a bunch of unrealistic crap. If you can watch it, let your heart swoon and bawl your eyes out then get right back into reality afterwards… go for it. But for me, and I’m sure many other ladies out there who don’t have even a pinky toe dipped in reality…these movies are emotional poison that set up unrealistic expectations of love. These movies ruin perfectly good relationships every day.

So here is my point, as much as I hate the triple X industry and don’t understand it, I was once very guilty of partaking in the same addiction. It’s just that my high was achieved from the emotional variety instead of the sexual. My movies gave me unrealistic emotional expectations of my spouse. It gave me an illusion that he wasn’t being all he could be, that he wasn’t ever going to love me the way I deserved to be loved. Basically, he couldn’t do anything right, especially after a fresh viewing of “Titanic.” Lord help him! One step worse was this… I not only watched emotional "porn" and let it seep into my soul… I also wrote an emotional XXX book and passed it on to others. When I was wrote DESCO, I was at my expectational worst!

I think one of the biggest things that contributed to my unhappiness up until the age of 34 (that’s a lot of years of misery) was the fact that I had majorly distorted and unrealistic expectations of everything. A big part of that was just that I was born with a brain that doesn’t think the way it should, but there were other factors that contributed over the years. Reading books and watching movies that gave me that “high” certainly didn’t help. Drinking booze helped me numb all the disappointment I felt over everything in my life. In my 20’s I thought I had gotten a little bit better with my expectations by simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. While it may have been slightly healthier than expecting the world on a silver platter… I learned later, that mantra was just as bad for me.

The best way for me to live life is to try and have no expectations at all. When that approach was first brought to my attention, I rejected it completely. Why? Because I thought it was a negative way to walk around. In reality, having no expectations keeps things going upward no matter what. I have a great trick to learning how to have zero expectations… so if you’re interested… ask me and I’ll share it with you.

In closing I’d like to say, if you are a person who watches “The Notebook” and then goes on with life happily, able to make love to your husband without pretending he is Ryan Gosling, then I think you’re safe. But if you’re a person who adores “The Notebook” but feels totally unfulfilled by your totally normal, generally good natured spouse just because they don’t make you feel the way the movie makes you feel… you might be suffering from unrealistic expectation syndrome… and you just may have a little unhealthy addiction of your own.

Let me be clear… movie love is not real love. In addition, no person can or will ever fulfill you completely. While porn (sexual or emotional) can be visually stimulating, physically arousing and enjoyable in the moment, it is fleeting and leads to dangerously unrealistic expectations of others.

Only God can fulfill us. His love can make you feel true joy. His love is real and therefore never fleeting. I believe with all my heart that we were meant to feel as though a piece of us is missing when we don’t allow Him to complete us. If that seems unrealistic to you then I have a question… how’s what you’re doing right now working for you? Enjoy your triple X theater, whatever variety it may be. Just remember who will be there waiting for you when all the credits have rolled and you’re stuck with that horribly empty, frustrated, unfulfilled feeling… God will be waiting.