Kevin Johnson - Pray the Scriptures When Life Hurts: Experience Hope and Healing Through the Power of Gods Word

dream

I knew I needed help when I dreamed I killed myself.

I had long tried to navigate a grim life situation I felt I could neither escape nor change. By day I twisted in pain. By night I tossed in anguish, rarely sleeping more than three or four hours. Several times a week I screamed in my sleep. My wife and I at least found dark humor in her attempts to rouse me from my nightmares. Lyn slapped me. Or pulled away my pillow and let my head drop. Or hosed me with a spray bottle she kept ready on her nightstand. After a while even a shot of water in my face lost its surprise, and I would lie in bed awake but not awake, paralyzed and terrified, until I jolted to full alertness. After many months, my lack of sleep led to exhaustion, then depression, and finally despair.

Years before, I had helped lead a group where hurting students could get and give support. Each week I watched other staff members skillfully coax youth to open up, asking them to start by sharing a one-word feeling and rate their week from a 10amazingto a 0wretched.

I came up with my own personal scoring system. For years I rarely rose above a mildly happy 6 or 5... 4 was a grinding day-to-day existence... 3 meant I wished I could curl up and die... 2 meant I was thinking if and how I could make that happen... and 1 meant I was on the verge of ending my life. Most months I lived at a 3. For weeks at a time I wavered around a 2. At times I sunk close to a 1.

Mind

I woke from that dream that I had taken my life just as my consciousness was fading away. It was a long time before I told Lynmy soul mateabout my nightmare. As a pastor I looked around and saw few safe places to bare my soulnot bosses, not co-workers, not church members. I worried about scaring family and friends. So I went to my doctor.

I counseled hurting people all the time. I did what I told them to do when I referred them to specialized help. Cut the crap. Get to the point. No one can x-ray what goes on in your head. You have to speak up. So I handed my physician a list of everything I was thinking and feeling. Some of those blunt realities:

• Im in a bad situation that takes enormous energy to face day after day.
• Every day brings some new situation that feels like being stabbed by a knife.
• Were all suffering but suffering alone.
• I dont get joy out of things that should overjoy me.
• I could nap at any moment, but if I lie down I feel too agitated to rest.
• I want to eat all the time. I have gained thirty pounds in the last eighteen months.
• I tell Lyn to hit me over the head with a brickto make this stop.
• I have really good coping skills but still feel deep pain inside.
• I have gone from thinking my feelings are a reaction to stress to seeing them as something dark inside me that won t go away.
• I think about dying and suicide, but at this time Im still able to get back to a purely rational responsethat death isnt an appropriate response to the situation. These thoughts have been going on for months.

Everything boiled down to one statement:

• What keeps me goingwhat keeps me aliveis Lyn and the kids.

My doctor offered a concise summary: Obviously, youre depressed. With his simple words he acknowledged where I was at. He promised that I didnt have to stay there.

Body

For more than a year I fought my way back from mental and emotional despair. But when my head was finally in a better place, my body broke. One morning I felt something like a cell phone vibrating on my calf. Not a phantom ring but an actual buzz. My doctor said it was probably a fasciculation, like an eye twitch but in a different spot. If it got worse, he would send me to a neurologist.

It got worse. Within a week I noticed twitching, buzzing, and electrical sensations all over my body. I felt random freezing and burning. I jumped at piercing needle stabs. At times my feet felt wet, like I was sloshing through a puddle. Constant spasms in my arches looked like worms crawling under my skin. I was weak and scared.

After a tense physical exam with Lyn watching, the first thing out of the neurologists mouth was ALSamyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often called Lou Gehrigs diseasea degenerative nerve death that could cause the symptoms I was experiencing. For most of the summer doctors and technicians scanned and poked me. They sent shocks down my legs and arms to measure nerve velocity. They stuck me with needles and listened for muscle noise. I learned that neurologists are known as vampires because of the quantities of blood they draw to rule out possible ailments.

Lyn and I knew people who had died of ALS. We happened to know two more who were trapped in rapidly failing bodies even as their minds remained perfectly clear, and we began to anticipate that fate. But in the early fall I got a nonlethal diagnosisbenign fasciculation. Its an annoyance that recent tests again confirmed.