Sunday, April 7, 2013

Who can say?

Click HERE for music that I posted last year, appropriate for this great day.  For more season appropriate music, click on the other entries I posted that week.

As I'm contemplating this miraculous Truth, I'm filled with the overwhelming realization that I have no way of describing how incredible and yet how beautiful this Divine Mercy is.  But I can offer my testimony in place of a fitting tribute.

For I am so incredibly grateful.  My soul has been prepared for this day in a way I could never have expected and did not understand.  Oh how often I've been in a funk that I could not shake.  Stuck and struggling, bogged down with mud and bruised with blows – I look up at God and wonder why I can find no peace in His will.  Reexamining everything I've ever done, repeating sins in Confession, praying triply hard, relishing moments of silence and contemplation, never resting or working without begging His blessing, trying to live life as though Satan was not gripping my ankles – I did everything I could to find God.  Easter came and I was seeing the light – but my ears were filled with fluid and I felt exhausted all over.  My mind was too foggy to give me grief, but my soul was not at rest.  Then, finally, a few days ago, I began to feel lifted in spirit.  I had been struggling with my self image and had been feeling unwanted and generally disliked.  However much God loves me, I will always question myself when I do not feel affection from His creation – which makes sense!  If people shun me, perhaps I'm doing something wrong and I should reexamine myself.  But I could find nothing.  And finally, I felt wanted.  I feel wanted.  In spite of everything I've done and everything I've ever thought or felt, I am wanted.  I don't understand, and I'm afraid.  But on this day, Divine Mercy Sunday, I'm reminded that no matter how dirty you get, you can still take a bath.  It might be quite a chore to get from the mud puddle up to the tub (or the pool of Siloam?), so it might take time but it can happen.  And, as when a stubborn child doesn't want to get in the tub, sometimes it takes a while before God can lift us into the water.  But that doesn't mean we're beyond hope.

We're never beyond hope if we trust in Jesus.

~Meggy

Thursday, April 4, 2013

A Friend, A Brother

Hello.  Just checking in to let those who were concerned know:

Everything is fine between the guy who was wrecking my life and me.  There are a few things that I won't excuse him for, but there definitely were a few misunderstandings and some mistakes on my side.  We're not where I would have wanted us to be, but there's absolutely no reason why we can't be in the future if our paths parallel.

On the other hand, I'm realizing the very great blessing another man in my life is to me.  Calling him a man almost seems inappropriate because he's so fun and "little."  (Physically, he's a good size.  But he's young in... you know, like, playful, cute, teasing – and totally not in a flirty way.)  He has always legitimately felt like my brother – although I'm not sure how he'd feel about that if I told him!  He's easy to talk to but, unlike some other people that are easy to talk to, our talk is very light and fun.  Even serious topics are suddenly made small.  We don't take life too seriously when we talk.  Other people deliberate too much or are too flippant about the subject.  He has a healthy balance between the two.  Perhaps this should be what qualifies him as a man.  He's mature in a simple way.  He's mature in relation to his age.  He is not overly philosophical and he is not exactly juvenile.  But he has retained some of the playful ways of boys without the mature connotations of men.

Suddenly my mood is very much lifted after a quick prayer group with him.  After our daily prayers, I talked to him about an interesting thing going on in my life – not directly related to me but my best friend.  It concerns me a little bit and, because she's dramatic and tends to throw herself at life, I don't know if I should say something or just be there for her.  I talked to him about it and we didn't really come to a conclusion.  I just felt better laughing with him about it!  We weren't discussing her, the problem, or anything negatively – just how I felt, and how I feel is kind of trapped and uncertain.  But we discussed it without being dramatic.  We can discuss things in our life that is truly serious and take it seriously, but I think we're both Listeners – so it feels SO GOOD.  Fortunately, I think he's a less philosophical Listener than I am – I sometimes take things as tending toward a depressing level that they didn't need to be on.

And suddenly the funk I'd fallen back into is gone!  I'm very, very grateful to God for many things.  He's going on the top of the list today.

~Meggy

My theme song

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

So our parents WERE being cruel...

...and now we can prove it.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithonthecouch/2013/04/parenting-and-the-theology-of-the-body-can-babies-self-soothe/


Parenting and the Theology of the Body– Can Babies “Self-Soothe”?

The Theology of the Body teaches us that the body has an innate self-donative meaning.  That is;  we are, literally, wired for love and connection, and that God’s plan for relationships can be discerned by prayerfully contemplating the bodies God gave us.  Science is actually backing this claim up, and is giving us some important insights into what–given this mindset–is God’s intention not only for adult pair bonding (i.e., marriage and sex) but parent-child  bonding as well.  This line of thought has significant ramifications for important parenting questions like, “How do we get our babies to sleep!”
It is conventional wisdom that infant “sleep training” teaches babies to “self-soothe.”  These are comforting ideas to tired moms and dads who are eager to be great parents and get a decent night’s sleep but what does it mean for a baby to “self-soothe” and is it even possible for infants to exhibit this skill
Proponents of self-soothing point to the fact that after several days of sleep training–which involves parents incrementally delaying their response to an infant’s night-time crying–the baby decreases the time crying and, eventually stops and goes back to sleep.  This is what happens, and it has been assumed that the baby is able to return to sleep because of “self-soothing.”  The problem is, until fairly recently, researcher never had a way to test the “self-soothing” hypothesis and that’s an important problem.
While, again, its a nice idea that would be lovely if true, infant self-soothing makes no sense from a developmental psych perspective.  For anyone–you, me, any human being–to self-soothe, two skills are required; self-talk and intentional, conscious redirection.  When you are upset, to get yourself back under control, you need to be able to 1) Talk yourself down (“Calm down, Greg.  You can handle this.  It’s going to be OK.”)  and 2) You need to be able to intentionally direct yourself to engage in some self-soothing activity (e.g, make a plan to solve the problem, do something that reduces your stress, etc).  The problem is that babies don’t have either of these skills.  Children don’t develop any self-talk capacity until at least 4yo (usually later) and although babies do have some soothing rituals like thumb-sucking, it is not known how effective these strategies are.   New research is showing that the answer is, “not very.”
Learned Helplessness and Physiological Stress
It turns out that after several days of sleep training the baby’s behavior and biology become un-hooked.  The sleep-trained child does stop crying, but research shows that the child’s stress homone level remain as high as when he was crying.  If the baby was actually self-soothing, the cortisol levels would decrease as the crying behavior decreased.  But that isn’t what happens. Instead, the sleep-trained infant’s cortisol level remains high, but the help-seeking behavior stops.  There is a disconnect between what the baby feels and how the baby acts.   In animals, we call this disconnect between the physiological stress response (i.e., high cortisol levels) and behavior, “learned helplessness.”
Learned helplessness is a well-established psychological fact. The classic learned helplessness experiments were done years ago and over 3000 studies later, learned helplessness is a foundational concept in the study of depression and anxiety disorders.  In the first experiments in learned helplessness, a dog was placed in a box that had a metal plate at the bottom.  A lid was placed on top of the box and a mildly painful electical shock went through the metal plate.  The dog would try to jump out of the box, but be thwarted by the lid.  After several repetitions the dog stopped trying to escape the shock. He just lay there helplessly.  This continued even after the lid was removed.  The shock would be delivered but even though the dog could escape, he learned not to try to help himself–he, literally, learned to be helpless.  Superficially, you could theoreically claim that the dog learned some mysterious way to “self-soothe” and ignore the shock, but you would be wrong.  Physiologically, the dog’s cortisol levels were elevated with the shock, but the help-seeking behavior stopped.  This is the exact same dynamic seen in sleep-trained infants and that should alarm us.
Learned helplessness actually damages the human and animal brain’s ability to process stress and is an established risk factor for depression and anxiety disorders in later childhood and adulthood.
If we take the Theology of the Body’s claims seriously,  that God’s intention for relationships is written into God’s design of our body, we need to listen to research that shows that sleep-training is antithetical to the donative meaning of the body.  Genesis tells us that “it is not good for man to be alone.”  Science confirms that this is true.  Especially for infants.

I half-jokingly add, "This explains a lot of my problems...."
~Meggy

Quick, Inspirational Speech

Life is a long, miserable, and lonely road.  Find a buddy and stick to him.  – And all those people who make life long and miserable and lonely can get off the road.

On another note, I feel fantastic!

That's all I have to say.

Thank you.

~Meggy
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