Resurrection: raising up the good

How can I be unafraid of death, but continue to live in fear? Sometimes death would seem a welcome relief to the pain of living in this world. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal, just constantly battling to live in a world that seems backwards, upside down and contrary to loving one another.

This attitude makes no sense to me. Somewhere I lost the knack of looking at the glass half full. I was always an optimist. So what's changed me?

Almost 15 years of fibromyalgia. That anniversary approaches this month and my prayer is to surrender all that is not of God that has attached itself to me as a result. Since June, Spirit has commanded me to lay it down. It is fear. Fear of the future. Fear of pain. Fear of fear. Anger at the past. All of this has been diminishing me and I need the opposite right now as I aim to follow God's calling. I can't be in a conflicted state.

In the middle of the road, near a Unitarian church at an intersection south of Yellow Springs, OH, a college student failed to stop and struck our Jeep on the driver's side. My oldest child, an only then, wasn't even a year old. Her window shattered. Thank God my husband is such a careful driver, he sensed what was about to happen and slowed. There was no clean escape. The car was mangled on one side, undriveable. I was concerned for my daughter; a couple of days later she checked out fine. I hadn't seemed hurt until I awoke the next day and felt as if a semi truck had rolled over my bones. That feeling lasted weeks and has never completely faded. I had been turned toward the back tending a fussy baby when we were struck. I think my body froze in that position at the shock of the impact.

Fallen/pastel and Conte´ crayon on paper

Through many tests, therapies, a lawsuit, male docs scratching their heads and indicating they could find nothing, my Inner Teacher whispered the diagnosis years later. Too late for legal remedies. That same voice told me to go to what you know in a moment of sheer pain and panic as I followed instructions to immediately cease an SSI drug, prescribed for relief. I had contemplated just slipping lower into the tub of warm water to end the dizziness, ringing and intense pain. My youngest's arrival home from kindergarten in an hour stopped me and the interior voice drove me to the internet where I transformed from suicidal to almost homicidal discovering I was in drug withdrawal.

That was my lowest point. Since then I have grown stronger, wiser and closer to Spirit. Of course I dream of waking up symptom free. I've had days of that. Yet I've clutched at something: trying to be the way I was before.

That's not my desire anymore. That person was unawake, unenlightened. Yet, she was ever the optimist. I want to remember that part and share it with who I am now. I've already lived through the worst and chosen life.

This scripture, 2 Corinthians 4:7-11 (NIV) really speaks to me about this particular challenge:

⁷ But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ⁸ We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰ We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹ For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.

Exactly how am I carrying around the death of Jesus and also his life? Can the two co-excist? Perhaps it's a process of that which is not of Spirit dying off in us to reveal more of God's light and energy.

Early Quaker Robert Barclay wrote of the "good being raised up." To me that phrase speaks of personal resurrection and what the passage in 2 Corinthians echoes to me. My yoga teacher recently mentioned that negative thoughts carry a heavier vibration and the good, a lighter. Can that also be the good being raised up? That's my prayer as Sept. 21 approaches, that Spirit raises up the good in me and helps me to let go of all else. I'd love to know your prayer.

• How do I live in fear?
• How do I conquer those fears?
• How do I surrender them to Spirit?
• How does 2 Corinthians 4:7-11 speak to me?
• What prayer is currently in my heart?


overactive nerves,
this dis-ease is called

switched on a long
time ago

controlling too much
of my life, covering
me in darkness

and, yet, I also
know the light
fully and deeply

the light of God

in that light,
Spirit asked me
to surrender
my fear

to let it die,
using Jesus'
example

so that the
good can
be raised up

and the rest –
discarded

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