Tag Archives: biography

We Both Had Insomnia

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A few years back a set of experiences changed how I spend most my waking hours, playing a large role in why I’m pursuing ordained ministry. First I was promoted at work (a positive, right?). A couple months later a good friend passed away far too young. A few weeks later my mother-in-law passed away too. You can read about this in more detail in an earlier series, Why I Walked if you’re curious.

Long story short all this change messed me up pretty good, which led to many sleepless nights. For six weeks I averaged three hours of sleep a night. Over time this took a toll.

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-insomnia-image26498603

Not being able to sleep, I went to a psychiatrist to get sleeping pills. When that didn’t work, and thinking my challenges were tied to focus, I added in prescription medication for ADHD. When that didn’t work I added in anxiety pills for particularly stressful moments of life. When all of that failed, I finally went to a psychologist – really should have started there in the first place – and was diagnosed with a major depressive episode. Within days the dark fog of depression began to lift and I began to heal. I began to live again.

While all this was going on I also tried another treatment: God. I read scripture, searching for answers in ancient wisdom. I read Christian books, thinking some nugget of Truth would leap off the page. I prayed – A LOT – begging God to take this ailment away. Each attempt the answer as I understood it was the same. God was silent. I was alone.

Many men still believes that erectile dysfunction is something that is solely related to the erections of a person and hence it is important to prescription free levitra steer clear of the product as erectile dysfunction is a real concern of men’s lives. It is known to affect men on the wrong side of 50 or experiencing any erectile problems due to any reason. best viagra in uk This is not to levitra 20 mg scare you, but recovering from a fracture usually involves stitches. Men can make use of this buy cheap viagra great drugshop exercise in order to buy drugs from online drug-stores. Reflecting back on this, with the benefit of time, healing, and a perspective on the Almighty that has evolved some, I see the experience now for what it was.

I know now God was with me through the depths of depression that included pills, prayers and pain. God was present through the love and patience of my wife, who both supported and challenged me, and most importantly stayed by my side when times were tough.

God appeared through phone calls from friends and hugs of empathy, from people determined to be present in my pain.

God showed Godself in the wisdom of a psychologist, who within 15 minutes spoke with clarity. “I know this problem” she said confidently, “You are clinically depressed. We can do something about that.”

Thinking about all those sleepless nights filled with tears I realize I was not alone at all. God was there. In that space. In that place. God hadn’t fallen asleep on me. We both had insomnia.

Why I Walked – Part 7 – Answers

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On August 14, 2012, after thirteen years with the same company, I quit my job, with no plan about what would come next. In retrospect it was more than that; I walked away from a career, away from a six-figure salary, and toward something entirely different. Here’s why.  (Part 7 of 7).  Missed the start? Rewind to Part 1.

Answers

Once I decided to pursue the pastoral gig things just began to fall in place. There are only nine seminaries in my Lutheran denomination, and the closest one is in South Carolina, a long hike from South Florida. Initially I thought taking this path would require moving to seminary. When your wife has a good paying job, you’re a father, homeowner, and plugged into to a supportive local faith community…well, that’s a lot to consider. Then my wife learned Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN, had a distance learning option that enables students to take many classes online. Excellent!  Scratch having to move off of the barrier list.

Next came jumping through the various hoops of getting the green light to enter seminary from the local Synod. In Lutheran terms a Synod is a regional group that helps coordinate various things for local congregations. They also walk with people that have the inkling to journey toward becoming a pastor, giving guidance and support along the way. Working through these various hoops involves lots of little steps, things like a 1-1 interview with a pastor, getting background checks, being evaluated by a psychologist and taking three hours of psychological inventories. That part was fairly interesting. Beyond wanting to see if potential clergy have any red flags – fortunately nothing big popped up there – some of the testing is designed to measure what careers or vocations would be a good fit. The career inventory came back with “very high” for “social domains including religion, spirituality and counseling.”  Excellent, so far so good.

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writers-block
one last ‘lil block to sleuth out…

Something I struggled with was writing a 10 page paper about my faith journey, one of the many requirements from the Synod. Likely the goal of this paper is for the Synod to gauge your writing skills. The other goal is to get a better sense of who you are as a person of faith and to understand how you got there. Sitting down and putting pen to paper my mind froze. What the heck was I supposed to write? Fortunately my brother invited us back home to visit for the holidays which turned out to be a great way to remove this roadblock. After going to two church services on Christmas Eve, including to the church of my youth I was able to compare and contrast where I had started this faith journey as a child and where it had led. At that point the words for this paper flowed out of me.

After that it seemed like the more open I was to the possibilities, the more life just unfolded. Over the past year I have been accepted to and have begun seminary, started working part-time at our local congregation as their Director of Ministry, had the joy of welcoming our second child to this world, and purchased a new home to fit all this new life. It’s been thrilling.

What does this call to be a pastor look like? For me it is to offer this new life I’ve found, the life after coming out of the darkness of depression, to others. In progressive, action-oriented, Christian terms it is to encourage people to heal the sick. To feed the hungry. To stand with the oppressed, the poor, the immigrants, and those treated by society as less than.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll even be able to recycle some of those market research skills, of understanding differences between people and use those skills  for a Higher purpose. Screw helping banks sell financial products. Now I’ve got something much more interesting to market: Jesus.

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Why I Walked – Part 6 – Questions

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On August 14, 2012, after thirteen years with the same company, I quit my job, with no plan about what would come next. In retrospect it was more than that; I walked away from a career, away from a six-figure salary, and toward something entirely different. Here’s why.  (Part 6 of 7).  Missed the start? Rewind to Part 1.

Questions

Once the healing was far enough along, right around November 2012, I began to poke my head out and look around, to tackle the ‘what next’ of walking away. At first it was challenging, after doing one thing for so long my last career had become an identity. Early on my wife challenged me to clean out the garage, admittedly a simple task. I had been buying huge stashes of video games with the intention to resell them online, and had never gotten around to it. “Give yourself a job” she told me, sell those games, and clean out that garage! Not the most thrilling thing, but it was a start and I had a goal to work toward.

Cleaning the garage really is good therapy
Cleaning the garage really is good therapy

After some thought I narrowed the list of next potential careers down to three, a clinical psychologist, a school guidance counselor, and a pastor. Each field was attractive, tho I also honed in on potential downsides for each.

Being a clinical psychologist was definitely interesting, but the social isolation of sitting in a quiet room and often spending time with people in a certain dark place in life, hmm, that didn’t sound too different from what I had just come out of. As a school counselor I’d be able to help kids along their path, but then there’s the red tape of the educational system to deal with. I wasn’t a huge fan of being a middle manager in corporate America, it’s possible being a school counselor wouldn’t be that different either.

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not everyone is designed for middle management. or ties. or suspenders.
not all are designed for middle management.  or cufflinks. or ties. or suspenders.

Then there was this path that had attracted me for some time, of being a pastor. The downsides were plenty, including high expectations from others and four years of education for another Master’s degree – man that’s a long time. The bigger issue I’d heard from other pastors was also of isolation, that it’s lonely leading a congregation. Had even heard that you couldn’t have friends in the pews, if true that would really suck.

I spoke with my psychologist about this, and her insight was very helpful. Her response to this potential downside of isolation and lack of friends was, “Oh I don’t know about that. Maybe a pastor is just like everyone else in the community, being right beside them all the time, being part of the group. And then sometimes, like Sunday mornings, you’re just asked to talk a little more.”

community-manager
Maybe the pastoral gig could be the kind of leadership I so dig, if so …sweet!

Whoa, that was an angle on a career I could live with! The primary role of walking alongside others, a purely relational endeavor, with an occasional speaking part to the larger community. With that answer I decided to take the initial steps on this pastoral path.

Continue on to Part 7 – Answers.

Why I Walked – Part 5 – Resurrection

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On August 14, 2012, after thirteen years with the same company, I quit my job, with no plan about what would come next. In retrospect it was more than that; I walked away from a career, away from a six-figure salary, and toward something entirely different. Here’s why.  (Part 5 of 7). Missed the start? Rewind to Part 1.

Resurrection

In some ways my challenge with social isolation (see Peeps for more) and lack of meaning in the day job were killing me. It may be that the depression was a result of spending so much time in one world, in “Corporate America”, while yearning for another – yearning for a community with Higher purpose. Over the years these disconnects only grew:  I became more disillusioned with the values of the former while being increasingly drawn to the latter.

“Depression is a kind of death” says Parker Palmer, and looking back egad I can see that. Part of the death in depression is that the brain literally stops functioning properly. When it gets really bad, logic and reason stop working almost entirely, and the brain only functions using the raw emotions of fight or flight. When you work in market research and need to create and analyze, think logically, and be accurate this becomes a huge problem. At one point my mind was so scrambled that the basic calculations I did daily on the job would take three or four times as long to do. Often I’d do the same calculation multiple times, not able to trust my brain that I’d arrived at the correct answer. Sometimes I hadn’t.

The light - and light - literally leaves
Brainscan of depression: the light literally leaves

The death of the job came on August 14, 2012, when I handed in the two-week notice. Not able to fend off the descent into depression that came this second time, not able to fully embrace the corporate values I was asked to foster and uphold, it seemed like the only sane thing to do. Several people close to me encouraged me to take FMLA, some time away from the job to heal up. Looking back that was probably a more viable option than I realized at the time, I just couldn’t see it from within the fog-cloud of depression. Looking forward it still wouldn’t have resolved my issues with these underlying corporate values I was never quite sold on, so maybe the whole thing would have just repeated itself again anyways.

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Then an amazing thing happened, I began to heal. Many people speak of this rebound from the ailment as when the Fog is lifted, and I totally understand that metaphor. Personally my reaction to healing was of shock, I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’m still here, I’m still here!’

the fog lifted, and light began to shine down again

Another metaphor that started to come into focus once the healing began was of being raised from the dead, of new life. Over the past several years, while all of this was playing out, I became more and more involved in our local, Lutheran church and had met and befriended many Peeps. In this other world, of faith and grace, things began to make more and more sense.

In Jesus there is a role model for death and rebirth. The rebirth can be understood as a means for how we choose to treat others, and why we do what we do. Have problems? Bring them to the cross, die to self, and be reborn with purpose. This always made sense to me on some level. After coming out of the depths of depression it has taken on new meaning. It also created some questions on where to go from here.

Continue on to Part 6 – Questions.

Healing-Hands

Why I Walked – Part 4 – Disbelief

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On August 14, 2012, after thirteen years with the same company, I quit my job, with no plan about what would come next. In retrospect it was more than that; I walked away from a career, away from a six-figure salary, and toward something entirely different. Here’s why.  (Part 4 of 7). Missed the start? Rewind to Part 1.

Disbelief

Some of my personal challenges working in corporate America have been around for as long as I can remember. On an off day, when asked “What do you do?” I’d respond nonchalantly “Help banks make more money.” While technically true, yes, I did do that, it speaks to a larger issue – is unfettered capitalism good for all? If you look at the rise of income inequality in America over the last 40 years, and that globally we still struggle feeding the people of our planet – despite having the resources to do so…maybe therein lies the answer.

Reality, perception, and an ideal - and likely a future post
Reality, perception, and an ideal – and likely a future post

I was fortunate to have good managers over the years for the most part. They had a knack for reframing the question of what we did in a positive light and would point out the good that banks can do. Banks help people buy things like houses and cars, pay for college, and start small businesses.  That’s all true, and good can come from this. For loans there is also a catch, a debt to be paid, an obligation. From a global perspective, most of you reading this *ARE* crazy wealthy, check out www.globalrichlist.com for some perspective on that.  Despite this vast wealth we have been well trained to believe what we have is never enough, and seek desperately to keep up with the proverbial Jones.

The Good Book also speaks to this at length. A favorite verse on that is proverbial in its own way, from Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” If you just consider common forms of debt, things like carrying credit card debt, having a mortgage, school and car loans, approximately 80% of American adults are in debt to some extent. Slavery, of this sort, is alive and well in these United States. Ouch.

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This is how debt feels to me. *NOT* a fan.
How debt feels to me. *NOT* a fan.

I was never able to fully reconcile this belief internally. In my mind I was working within a system designed to keep people in the shackles of debt. Over time not being able to come to terms with this cognitive dissonance between what I did for a living – and how it can negatively impact society – wore me down.  Fortunately, my wife and I had been working to remove our own shackles, with a plan that offers freedom from this kind of slavery.

Six months before walking from the day job my wife and I hosted a mortgage burning party. At 36 years old we had done it, paid all debts, no car loans, no credit card debt, no student loans, and no mortgage. Part of this was luck; we’ve been blessed with decent education that led to stable careers. Some of that luck is the randomness of being born at a certain place and time, with skills and interests that society happens to reward financially.

...and how freedom feels, me and the missus, with our pastor, and surrounded by friends. Burn, Burn, Yes Mortgage, You Gonna Burn!
How freedom feels. Burn, Burn, Yes Mortgage, you Gonna Burn! -me and the missus, our pastor, and surrounded by friends.

Other parts of becoming debt-free were entirely intentional. We chose to wait later in life to have kids. We set goals of paying down debt, prioritized how to do it, and celebrated each milestone. We don’t live simply, per se, tho we live more simply than many. We dreamed of second careers, retiring early, and just being. When the darkness of depression covered me, there was a viable exit from the pain, one that I understood to be a bad job, of just walking away. Fortunately this walk would allow me the space to get back to living.

Continue on to Part 5 – Resurrection.