Things I Didn’t Expect When Healing From Trauma, Part 2
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We’re back with part two of our three-part series with Rachael Clinton Chen, where she candidly shares personal insights from her own journey of holistically healing from complex PTSD and anxiety, and the things she didn’t expect when healing from trauma.
In this episode, Rachael explores how trauma disrupts not only our mental and physical well-being but also our spiritual formation and imagination. Rachael reflects on her own healing journey, navigating the ways in which early spiritual experiences compounded her trauma by framing symptoms as moral failings.
From the heart-wrenching lows to the moments so absurd they bring laughter, and every breakthrough in between, we hope this series of heart-to-heart conversations will bring you hope, make you laugh, make you think, and most of all make you feel like you’re not alone.
You can listen to Part 1 here, and stay tuned for Part 3, which will be released on August 2.
Episode Transcript:
Rachael: Good people with good bodies. Welcome back to Things I Didn’t Expect When Healing from Trauma Part Two. Today we’re going to be talking a little bit more about the impact of trauma on our spiritual formation and our spirituality. Just in case you’re not sure what you’re listening to, this is a three part series that I have the privilege of being a part of solo on the Allender Center podcast. And as I mentioned in part one, we’re going to be engaging the nonlinear and very human sized journey of healing from trauma through story and discourse. We’re going to hold together that we’re whole people and that trauma disorders, our brains, our bodies, our spirits, our relationships and communities. We’re going to honor that trauma is really the way in which our personhood, brain, body, spirit, bears witness to the horror, suffering and heartache of the world in which we live. That we are individuals and a part of a collective. And we’re going to do the good work of holding the both/and of our beauty and brokenness. So there will be laughter and grief and both are honoring.
Again, this is a three-part series and just a small recap of part one, I talked a little bit about my own journey with complex post-traumatic stress disorder or CPTSD and anxiety as the primary symptom, at least initially in my journey of healing that had to be contended with. I shared about my childhood and early adolescent and teenage and young adult experiences with anxiety leading up to a very pivotal moment that will return to at the beginning of this podcast where I actually decided that whatever was happening for me was worthy of pursuing good medical treatment and was able to get on some anxiety meds that helped tend to the disorder and my brain and my nervous system, the imbalance that was starting to become unmanageable. And as I said before, this really is my love letter to those of you who are high functioning trauma survivors and also those of you who are in this long healing journey and you’re in the messiness of it and you just need some encouragement to keep going. And again, these stories… these are stories. This is hard won wisdom. And just to be clear, I’m not a licensed therapist or clinician or a medical professional. And even though I work in trauma and have a lot of experience and skill sets that have been developed, I also have a lot of anecdotal experiences. And so that’s where this is coming from. And I’ll just repeat again that from my colleague out in the field, Aundi Kolber often says, “Take what you need and leave what you don’t.” And I just want to say the same to you. So let’s go back to where we left off in part one.
After years of suffering anxiety without a diagnosis or proper treatment, things finally came to a head my senior year of college on a trip to Italy where I felt so beyond my capacity to reign in my symptoms and keep things even somewhat reasonable. I would say even when I was high functioning, there was enough symptomology to say things are not well. But I finally reached a point where I decided I was unwell enough to seek proper medical attention even if it meant disappointing God or family or friends. As I mentioned in part one, part of the symptoms I was experiencing leading up to this trip to Italy, my senior year of college as I was having some OCD symptoms, mostly in obsessive thoughts. And one of those thoughts was deeply tied to what I want to talk about today. And that’s the reality that trauma not only disorders our brain and disorders, our body, which we’ll talk about in part three, but it also disorders our spiritual formation, our spirituality, our spiritual imagination. So that’s a lot of what I want to talk about today and some of the healing journey for me of engaging the many ways in which my experience of trauma got compounded because of many of my early spiritual formation experiences, which often just recoded trauma symptoms as sin. So kind of what Jesus says to the Pharisees, like why do you heap heavy burdens on already burden people and do nothing to lift them? That was a little bit my experience and that’s some of what I want to talk about.
But one of the intrusive, obsessive thoughts I kept having in that season when things were coming to a head for me. And one of the things I talked about is my anxiety got unmanageable, started to become very unmanageable when I quit running long distance. So I ran cross country and track in college all the way starting from middle school to college. And that was one of those graces of God to keep me, to give my body good biochemicals to help counteract some of the really overactive limbic system responses I was having, which is a big part of what it is to experience anxiety. And so things were really starting to go south, but I was trying to make sense of why I couldn’t experience this peace of God, which transcends all understanding why knowing that I was doing everything to confess sin, to really be holy before God, I didn’t have access to this really important Fruit of the Spirit, peace. And so here I was working really hard, like as hard as I could to have access to things that are being told to me would be mine if I was just a little more faithful, that I can’t access. So as I shared in the last podcast, the only kind of rational place I could come to with this is that because at the time I really had a strong kind of theology of the rapture and the end times and grew up in a youth group where we read the Left Behind series and we watched all the scary movies and we had a whole summer studying the book of Revelation and kind of projecting what the end times would be before the rapture. And so if you’ve ever been in a kind of fundamentalist context like that, one of the periods of time that will come, that’s like a sign of the end times is this time when God removes God’s spirit from the earth. And so I, in this very OCD, very haunted, very troubled emotional physical space of being very unwell, had just decided, well, we must be in that season where God’s removed God’s spirit from the earth because I could not find another rational reason why I couldn’t access peace.
And so it wasn’t my only rapture anxiety. For those of you we can laugh and cry about this. I mean there were numerous times. One time I remember on my college campus where I was studying in the study hall in my dorm and everyone’s stacks of books were there and there were a bunch of people. And I went to the bathroom and I came back and everyone was gone, but all the books were there and all the notebooks and some people had laptops at that point. And then I looked outside and there was no one out on the campus lawn. And I thought for sure I just got left behind, which as a Enneagram two who was incredibly codependent, I had kind of already told God I would be willing to sacrifice myself to stay behind because someone had to help the people. So again, you can see some of the disordered imagination I was working with that wasn’t just a result of my own trauma, was also a result of some of the spiritually abusive theological context that I was in.
And I just want to add a caveat that so much of the work of healing is being able to enter some of our stories with particularity and also recover the good, to recover the parts of us that were meant for a lot of goodness that were drawn to certain contexts because the perception of goodness was being offered. And so I’ve done a lot of work to be able to reclaim some of the really beautiful things that came out of seasons of life that shouldn’t have because it was also a really hard, painful, scary seasons of life. But I think as people growing in maturity, we get hold that complexities. I just want you to know that’s part of my posture. Even though for the purpose of this podcast, I’m mostly going to be sharing the hard scary stuff.
So I talk a lot about disordered imagination. It’s something I’m really passionate about because I’m a pastor by orientation and so much of the work I do with spiritual formation is in the realm of the imagination. Now we often think of the imagination as something completely separate from us or it’s disembodied, it’s oh, artists are imaginative. And I just want to kind of give a really simple sense of our imagination as the way we’re making sense of the world, the way we’re making meaning. You know advertisers depend on us having a vivid imagination because we’re constantly being convinced that we need something or that this will make our world better. So that place where we encounter and experience persuasion or manipulation or genuine learning, that’s like integrating all kinds of critical thinking and emotional experience. So that’s what I’m talking about.
But one thing we know is that trauma disorders the imagination. So for example, if you’ve had an experience of harm, whether it’s a one-time situation or a chronic situation, whether it’s coming out of a systemic experience of the world, collective traumatic experiences, experiences of abuse, experiences of loss, and profound grief, the ways in which our body is wired to survive in the midst of a lot of betrayal and powerlessness and terror is to fragment, is to become hypervigilant, is to become numb or dissociated. So again, that’s some of that disorder I’m talking about that actually helps us survive really painful experiences. But especially when those experiences have been more complex or more chronic over time, those coping mechanisms actually become really detrimental to us, even if we might be in situations that are a little more safe, a little more holistically healing and caring, where we might be establishing more secure attachments or understanding as adults more fully what was happening with our primary care providers because of their own trauma or their own heartache or the things they were managing. It’s like sometimes our understanding or our logic doesn’t immediately translate to the kind of integration of our imagination, of our bodies, of our brains that we most long for and we’re most meant for.
And so one of the ways that trauma disrupts and disorders is it disrupts our imagination. So when you are growing up in religious environments where there’s a very intentional engagement with your imagination around how you’re meant to understand yourself, how you’re meant to understand God, how you’re meant to understand relationships and what love is and what faith is and what hope is, and these really beautiful things that are part of being human when you’re in environments that themselves might have some toxicity, whether it’s good intentions but bad theology or whether it’s on the other end of the spectrum, bad intentions, wielding bad theology in order to control or manipulate or perpetrate harm, but in justifiable ways. Wherever you land on that spectrum, what it often does is compound the trauma that you already have and especially when so much of the emphasis is on individual moral behavior modification, most often the real tragic symptoms of trauma, the disorder of our bodies and our brains and our hearts and our spirits that we’re talking about only get interpreted and coded as sin. So in my experience, one of the primary feelings or experiences of anxiety is fear or terror or paranoia or panic. And I was for most of my teenage years and some in my college years in very fundamental environments theologically. Now in high school, it was very extreme. And so what’s kind of ironic is fear was being wielded as a weapon to tell us who’s in and who’s out and create scapegoats and have very rigid boundaries around what it means to be a Christian and then who’s outside of that. So it’s like one of the tools being used to keep us in the circle is fear, but simultaneously I’m being told there’s no fear in love, be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, let your request be made known to God, the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds. Again, high emphasis on these fruits of the spirit.
One of the really tragic experiences of my adolescent years is that I was set up in a romantic relationship with one of my youth leaders and there was a huge power differential. And of course I was like any normal 16-year-old, had a huge crush on this youth leader, was also a woman coming up in a fundamentalist environment that told me I needed to be less who I was, less vocal, less smart, less gifted in some of the gifts I had. And so was being formed in my imagination to need a man who’s older, bigger, wiser, stronger, more gifted, more called to ministry than me in order to actually be who I am. So there’s a lot of setup that I won’t get into that led to this. It’s something I’ve talked about on the podcast before, but one of the things that started happening very quickly after about six months in this relationship that felt more like a marriage and a courtship than just a normal youthful dating relationship where you get to experience infatuation and see how quickly that wears off and learn about the chemicals of your body and what that brings, the good chemicals, the good experiences. Once the infatuation wore off for me, I didn’t actually want to be in the relationship, but I was in a spiritually abusive context that was telling me, if you don’t stay in this relationship, there’s a failure of love that this is just evil trying to ruin something good. And so what happened is my body started giving me signals. I’m not well with this, but everything in my environment is telling me to override these signals.
So in part one of this series, I talked about how there were other things happening in my world that were shaping me to have a very traumatic kind of response to my environment. And so here is this experience that’s intensifying that experience in my body and most of my junior and senior year, which I also stopped running for a short season because I had a pretty comprehensive jaw surgery. And so running became very hard, which was also happening in the same parallel process as the youth leader, was five or six years older than me, I think six years, and I’m a young teenager, he’s graduating college. So there’s a convergence of my already established trauma, this new spiritually abusive, I would say, emotionally abusive, sexually abusive, dynamic. And I’m being told that whatever’s happening in my body to tell me I don’t want this is just demonic. So I’m working really hard to override the panic that’s coming.
And I remember sitting in these sessions with the pastor of my church where he’s drawing these diagrams about in some ways the kind of wickedness of our thoughts and our flesh and how we need to control those thoughts. And the best way I can describe it is just like it was very clear to me that whatever was happening to me was sin, was because I had something broken in me. I was somehow being left. God was abandoning me to be assaulted by the demonic, and I had this huge failure of love and I needed to work harder not only to save this relationship, but primarily to save my relationship with God.
And one of the most tragic realities of spiritual abuse or toxic theology is that often it’s such a core attachment wound, it assaults us in that place of faith and trust and connection to God, to ourselves, to our body, to other human beings. And it creates a massive sense of distrust. And the theology I was experiencing was reinforcing that. Your body is not trustworthy. Even though I would say looking back now, knowing what I know, my body was telling me the truth that I was in danger, that this wasn’t a good thing, that it’s not what I wanted, and that it was getting louder and more distressed because I was being invited to override that my world and my environment was overriding that and I was being invited to override that. And I was being told that my emotions and my thoughts weren’t trustworthy. So again, this sense of mind over matter.
And one thing that was true of me by this point is God was so important to me because God was a place I felt a sense of safety and belonging and rescue. And so I would’ve done anything to keep God. And so I just doubled down on working really hard to will my way through a season that looking back now I could say I don’t know if I would survive again, if I had to go back through it.
And so much of this therapeutic work I’ve done over many seasons to whether it’s life integration therapy or internal family systems, those are just some different modalities. This particular developmental stage 16 to 19 is some of the still very scariest places from other parts of me to trust. And I’ve had to do a lot of work to understand some of the spiritual abuse I experienced.
But I share all of that just to say again, that when we already have trauma we’re experiencing that’s impacting our bodies, our hearts, our minds and our spirit, and then we’re in an environment that doesn’t have the tools and the capacity to engage the impact of trauma. And in my experience primarily in that season, like debilitating severe anxiety, then we’re often just compounding, other people are compounding the trauma in environments where we’re trying to get help and seek help. So this was a very, very painful time for me in my life and in my body.
And eventually I was able to get out of that relationship really by I guess rejecting God in the midst of at the end of my first year of college and being like, this is what you want from me. God, I don’t want you. Which again, I can now say I don’t think that was God at all. And what followed that season was a very healing season of encountering re-encountering, kind of being reborn not just in my imagination but in my body with this God who is so deeply loving, so good. So for my flourishing and my life, that it really was kind of mysteriously like a nine month period, a feeling, just a very thin space with God where there was just a lot of restoration and a restoration of that attachment with God that was revealing a lot of lies, a lot of toxicity.
And during that time, I actually switched my major at Oklahoma Baptist University from nursing to biblical studies because it turns out the calling I had at age 12 at Falls Creek Church Camp, Southern Baptist church camp, was really real. I had a call to vocational ministry and I was in these Bible classes and these theology classes and my imagination was coming alive. And I think part of what was happening is places where I had been invited to kind of patch up my wounds with really bad theology were being very gently and tenderly opened. Where I was being invited to ask good questions and in many ways reclaim my mind. Which is a core part of our spirituality, to rebuild a deeper trust with God and a deeper trust with even theological systems. And that was a very beginning for me, but a really important one, and that I’m thinking about this today primarily because Jurgen Moltmann passed away earlier this week. He’s 98 years old. He’s a German theologian that one of my professors who I’m very fond of had us read and had us read one of his actually very a book for a lay audience called Jesus Christ for Today’s World. But it was one of the first times where I encountered a theologian, which again, he was not the only theologian writing about this, but in my context, it was my first introduction to a theologian talking about this reality that God suffers with us in solidarity because the imagination I had for God was a God who was impassable, no emotion, so deeply disconnected from the human experience even though it was a Trinitarian imagination of God. And Jesus was a part of this God, just this very immovable, non-emotional, very logical, basically a white Western man, God, because that is so much a part of white Western culture, the enlightenment like this kind of hyper-idolatrous relationship with knowledge as the primary way of being human. “I think therefore I am.” Which is also a very individualistic way of understanding humanity.
So Jurgen Moltmann wrote about the suffering God and that being a part of our hope. And there was, again, that was just one example of many of doors being opened for me to begin to reimagine who is God, who am I, what is true about my personhood? Now, it would take a few more years to get to The Seattle School. I would still have this pretty intense breakdown where I would get on anxiety meds and work in a youth group at a church and just still be managing a lot of anxiety and a lot of breakdown and messiness in my personhood before I’d get to Seattle, get to seminary and actually start getting into therapeutic care. And even having the language of psychology as a framework that was so helpful to me to begin to understand that I wasn’t just an anxious, afraid person, that I was suffering anxiety because of very real legitimate experiences in my life and some genetic predisposition because of complex trauma passed down through generations. And so there would be so much more healing when I started to get into the stories that shaped my imagination, that shaped my body, that shaped my experience of the world. But I don’t make light of some of the kind of grace that came in my undergrad years of a real, I feel like being wrapped up in a cocoon for my mind, for my brain, for my body, that would lead to even deeper healing in the past 20 years that I’ve been on when trauma became a first language, when trauma got to become integrated with my theological work and my spiritual formation work and the healing work I do now. But I want to say thank you, thank you Jurgen Moltmann for your faithfulness to let your life, your deep heartache, your trauma inform and impact the theological work you were doing and the questions you were bringing. And so something started to happen that got solidified in my adulthood as I got to seek more care and more help. And in part three, I’ll talk a lot more about the healing journey I’ve been on and will continue to be on healing the impact of complex PTSD and anxiety on my body.
But I want to talk, I want to just put a few more words to kind of the spiritual formation that was impacted by not just the teachers in my world, but the pastors and mentors and leaders in my world and friends, good friends who were inviting me to ask better questions or to maybe to make what I would say is a hermeneutical shift. And hermeneutics is just a way of reading or a way of interpreting. So just what are the frames that we bring that we utilize to make meaning? I started to be invited to make a hermeneutical shift. Moving from seeing myself as just anxious and afraid to someone who had actually survived a lot of terror makes me think of that worship song that was really important to me in a season of life. Like I will change your name. You shall no longer be called wounded, outcast, lonely, or afraid. I will change your name. Your new name shall be confidence joyfulness, overcoming one faithfulness friend of God, one who seeks my face.
And through a lot of continued healing, I mean I went on to seminary. I studied a master of divinity. I went to The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology formerly called Mars Hill Graduate School to do that. So I got to do this integration of theology and psychology and bring my sociology and my biblical studies all into conversation in a way that let me ask more critically and more seriously, how does our experience of the world in our bodies, in our hearts and minds and spirits collide with our imagination and our spiritual formation and what hope is there? What healing is there? What aspects of scripture actually need to be released from toxic hermeneutics toxic frameworks, toxic interpretation to reveal a God who is with us even in our disorder, one who has gone before us in every way. The incarnation is so incredibly powerful. It goes before us in every way, has experienced every human experience we can experience in a body is well acquainted with trauma, betrayal, powerlessness, forsakenness, humiliation, shame. Terror is the one who goes before us and inters on our behalf. And so I got to have these years of asking really good questions of the texts that are never answered in like a, oh, this is just wrapped up with a bow. In fact, when you kind of study God, studies where spiritual formation in an academic setting, you actually just get invited to ask more questions and then those questions lead to even better questions. And you have this kind of growing maturity to be able to hold a lot of complexity again, that there’s a lot of mystery to life, that we are beautiful and broken people, that we are in the already not yet, like God has come through Jesus and changed everything and yet death still persists in our world, but we have this promise that it will not be forever and that we’re meant to be people who are pulling that future into the now, not just waiting passively for some day, pulling that future into the now, which is why I’m even talking about this stuff on a podcast because I think healing is met for us today. So that we can actually find deeper reserves of courage and kindness and vulnerability to link arms to contend against the evil powers of this world and the systems of this world and the demonic systems that want to continue wreaking havoc so that we don’t get to taste something of who God is and who we’re meant to be. And that it doesn’t have to be this way as Andre Henry says.
So one passage I want to share with you that I think I’ve talked about on the podcast before, but for me is probably like they say, every good preacher has really one sermon they preach for the rest of their lives. And this will probably be mine because I desperately needed good news for my disordered body, imagination and heart. And I grew up in Southern Baptist Church, so we had something called the Romans Road where you memorized different parts of Romans that are like the path to salvation. And I think, oh gosh, what a like a reductionist way of engaging this mountain of a theological book in the text. But Romans 8 is probably a passage I’ll come back to again and again and again. And I just want to share a little bit of some ways that we need to hear good news for those of us who are in the lifelong healing journey from trauma complex PTSD, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and all the other symptoms that we’ll talk a little bit more about when we talk about the body. But we have this passage where it starts out with just this declaration that in the Spirit we are not under condemnation. We have been freed from judgment, from shame, from contempt and condemnation. And then in the middle of the passage you have this language of being like the children of God, joint heirs, brothers and sisters with Jesus, that we get to cry out Abba Father like papa daddy when we’re afraid. And then that continues to talk about the suffering of the world and our suffering and this groaning of creation that’s crying out for the redemption and full restoration and this sense of like we suffer with God, God suffers with us, not just toward annihilation and not just because, oh, we have a God who suffers with us, but toward a future glory and restoration of all being made whole. There’s language I’ll come back to about the Spirit interceding when we don’t know how to pray. This language of God working for the good and ultimately that even when we’re facing tremendous violence, that there’s nothing, not one thing on this earth that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Now, often when people are suffering or have experienced trauma or have experienced loss, where people go is the verse in Romans 8, I think it’s 8:28. I could be wrong. Even though I was a biblical studies major, it’s not Bible trivia. Try to tell people that it’s a lot more comprehensive, but just this sense of someone will often say, we know God works for the good of all those who love God, which is a really good truth. It’s a really good truth, but it’s not the best way to talk to someone who is in profound suffering when there are so many rich resources right around that. It can be a part of it, but it shouldn’t be where we start. Why? Because in this passage we have the sense that we are beloved and we are connected, secure, securely connected to God through the Spirit, even in our terror, right? We don’t have to have a spirit of fear. We can cry out. And I hear that as like we don’t have to have a spirit of isolation or somehow we have to figure out what to do to be okay and good enough in God’s eyes to then cry out that our suffering is real and it’s pervasive. Even creation is crying out. We don’t have to minimize suffering to somehow protect God and make God look good.
And some of the best news for those of us who are traumatized, who are incredibly anxious, and sometimes when we are suffering, when we are afraid, when we are triggered, don’t know how to pray because we’re not in our prefrontal cortex because that’s part of the impact of trauma. So we’re not in our language center. We have this passage that says, when we don’t know how to pray, the spirit groans with language too deep for words interceding on our behalf. And God who’s searching the Spirit and the Spirit knows the heart and mind of God hears and responds and answers. That’s really good news for traumatized people with disordered imaginations and wordlessness and panic that we can fall into the groaning of the spirit who is interceding and groaning is such laboring language. It’s such laboring language, and it’s both a contending fiercely and providing comfort and birthing life in impossible places. And again, this closing of, there’s nothing that could separate us from the love of God, not even death, not even death.
And that to me is just an example. It’s just one way that I don’t think we have to throw a whole of scripture out. There are ways we can encounter something really restorative and more holistic of who God is and these places where we’re well acquainted with trauma. And just in case you think that me sharing this is an indication that I’ve arrived at some place where my panic never gets the best of me, and I just always believe that I’m not under condemnation, that I’m beloved and secure, insecure, and that I can trust that God is with me and working things out. I want to just share a small story that I actually can laugh at pretty intensely, but I want to share a story about a time I had a panic attack when it really mattered and I thought I was healed.
And I was actually preaching a sermon at a big church in Houston on Romans 8. And part of the invitation to come to this church was that I had been told that they were looking for a female pastor. This was a season of my life where just God was bringing a lot of redemption of my calling and affirmation. This was a church context that a lot of the pastors there had come out of a Southern Baptist context so it felt like a full circle opportunity. And it’s one of those churches that’s big enough that they had four services where you preach the same sermon. And so again, I’m coming out knowing I’m kind of being evaluated. It’s an opportunity to show myself that I can be faithful to this call God has on my life. I can preach to people, which is a whole story in and of itself, and I am going to talk about how God loves us and we don’t have to cut off these parts of us that maybe are a little more messy, that there’s hope. The title of the sermon was Hope for the Disordered Imagination. Oh gosh. So it’s just too much. It’s good. So here’s this moment. I’m coming in. I’m trying to be my best, most theological, mature, academic, strong self, and I made the mistake of not inviting someone to come with me, which would’ve been the first kindness I could have offered myself if I had taken seriously how I’m wired, what this environment, the setup of this environment. And so I preached my first sermon on Saturday evening. So that’s the first service, and then there’s going to be a nine o’clock in the morning, an 11 o’clock, and then a five o’clock on Sunday. I preached my first sermon. I am sowing. I had lunch earlier in the day with some of the elders. It was clear they were not enjoying me. That was really hard. So I preached my first sermon. I have my notes. If you know anything about me, you would know. I don’t write out things verbatim. I have a good outline and I follow it. I am feeling exposed. I am feeling intimidated. I am feeling judged. There’s a lot of young seminarian guys who come after the sermon. It’s not terrible, but it wasn’t great. They came up and give me a lot of feedback, things I need to change for the following services. I get home to my hotel and I am like, oh my God, I have to do this three more times. I’ve got to revise this. That wasn’t even good. I felt out of my body. I start feeling incredible anxiety. But the truth is I had anxiety like I got to fix this. But what was happening is my body was starting to have symptoms of anxiety. And usually when I have panic attacks, the panic is directly linked to a very real fear. Now, again, in this moment, I should have connected the reality that this was a very real fear. This is a terrifying experience because this isn’t just a moment of like, can I do this thing? This is a moment for me of like, is my calling real or should I just throw in the towel? There are big assumptions in my own heart and mind for this moment.
So I’m feeling my heart racing. I’m feeling pain in my chest. Now, please hear me. I’ve had many panic attacks prior to this, but for me, my panic attacks were more often anxiety in my head. That’s then amplifying stuff in my body. It always leading with my head. I thought, I can do this. I can revise this. I just got to change some things. It just wasn’t that good. But I start having a racing heart. I start having pain in my chest, and I did that thing that a lot of anxious people do where you go to Google and you just put in your symptoms. And what came up for me was, okay, you flew. Have you flown in the past like 40 hours? Yeah, I just flew from Seattle to Houston. Do you have pain in your chest? Do you have shortness of breath? Yes, all these symptoms, you could have a deep vein thrombosis. Okay, this is already something I’m afraid of. I’m already wearing compression socks on the plane. Alright, I got poor circulation. So I’m already afraid of this. I called the nurse hotline, which is another thing as an anxious person you do, which I now know you should still do if you’re in an emergency, but you should know if you mention any symptom that could possibly lead to death, which is like if you Google a very common symptom racing heart, it’s like the spectrum of what could be possible is so intense. So the nurse says, well, have you flown? I said, yes. She said, you could have a deep vein thrombosis. So this has been confirmed. And she’s like, you need to go to the emergency room. By this point. It’s like one in the morning. But I’m like, well, I guess I got to go to the emergency room. I’ll figure out the sermon stuff later.
I get in a taxi, go to St. Joseph’s, which is in downtown Houston. I go into the emergency room. Now again, this isn’t my first go round with panic, and this isn’t my first go round with panic that leads to seeking medical attention. I go in, I’m trying to be cool. I’m telling the guy, look, the nurse told me I needed to come in. I know it could just be a panic attack. I am not here trying to get drugs. I’m just trying to do my due diligence to make sure something’s not bad. It takes a while. They get me back in the room. I am there with most of the people who are coming in off the streets needing acute care for withdrawals or mental illness. And I am actually feeling quite at home because here I am in the midst of pretty profound unwellness in places that I feel incredible shame still. I still hear these judgments of like, there’s something wrong with you. You’re too weak, you’re crazy, you’re not fit for ministry, whatever. There’s a woman in the room next to me literally screaming, help me, help me, help me. And I’m like, you know what? Yes, Jesus, help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. And here I am by this point. If you go to the emergency room by this point, it’s like four in the morning. I’m starting to count the hours I have until this 9:00 AM sermon and I am panicking. I mean, this is where I start to go. I can’t do this. And I’m feeling like, and in fact, I will never preach again. I will never preach again. And I’m trying to concoct all these ways to come in and prove that I am trustworthy and I’m professional. And all of them mean leaving this part of me a hundred percent outside the door. So I get out, I finally get discharged. I’m waiting for a taxi to come. Turns out, no taxi wants to come to St. Joseph’s that early in the morning. I keep waiting. I keep waiting. I see a huge giant rat run by down the street. The security guard is, I mean, it’s just the most bizarre eight hours of my life. I don’t know what dimension I’m in. Security guard was like, I can give you a ride. And I’m like, stranger danger. No. There’s a woman cleaning the window. She doesn’t know. I’m not saying any of these things out loud. She turns to me and she says, God’s got a plan. God’s got a plan. You’re beloved. You belong. God’s got a plan. And something in my nervous system was just like, I don’t know what that plan is, but I guess God’s got a plan.
And I felt this invitation from the Spirit of as humbling as it might be to bring this kind of vulnerability into your sermon, to talk about how there are still messy parts of you that bear the impact of the heartache you’ve experienced in the world, and that sometimes they’re really present and that what they need is welcome, radical welcome, radical care, and invite people to ponder where are the places they’ve exiled parts of themselves that aren’t welcome in the room as a part of inviting them to encounter this God in Romans eight who honors our suffering, who prays when we don’t know how to pray, who there’s literally nothing that can separate us. Even our own psychosis can’t separate us from the love of God. And so I felt an integration and I went into those three sermons, wisely not starting with that, but letting that story come into the room in a way that was risky because there were those self-righteous people who needed to come up and tell me like, oh my God, I’m so sorry that happened to you. And I’m like this is an invitation for all of us to engage our humanity. Certainly I think it confirms that I was not the right person they were looking for, which is okay because I think where I am today is where I’m meant to be. But for me, it just reaffirmed the theological truth that it is in our vulnerability, that God radically brings transformation and power and shames the powers of this world.
And so I share that story because it’s something I can genuinely laugh about. I mean, it was a crazy moment. And again, not the last time I called the nurse hotline, been told you need to go to the emergency room. Felt like how can I not go to the emergency room and kind of realize I’m just having acute anxiety. And so this is a place where my kind of healing journey will continue to come into more integration, to more healing, to more care. But I hope if anything that maybe the places where you are in your own healing from trauma, trauma with your own experience of what that means, your own stories of what that trauma is, where you find that you thought you should be past this, or spiritual truths that actually bring you a lot of comfort. Don’t always work with cognitive ascent. May you encounter something of the Spirit that groans with language too deep for words when you don’t know how to pray. And may there be a sense of radical welcome for parts of you that desperately need a place to rest, a place to belong, a place to be called beloved, and a place to be healed. And next time, we’re going to talk a little bit more about the impact of trauma on the body. And so I hope you’ll join me. Until then.