Don’t you just love this verse? Current application for me: V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N
We are immersing ourselves in white sugary beaches and tantalizing blue water.
Rest for a while, he says.
Vacations of my past were filled with the stress and anxiety of addiction, migraine headaches and seizures. Especially at the beach. The glaring sun and blistering heat set up perfect conditions. Those vacations were anything but restful—only stressful and guilt-ridden. My family suffered the consequences of my depression.
But no more.
I’m enjoying every little bit of this vacation, thankful for every minute of freedom, good health, and happiness.
So as I take a little time away from my blog, I pray that you will be enjoying a little rest as well as this summer comes to an end.
I’m sure I won’t be able to stay away for too long though. I’ll see you soon!
October 19, 2011
Antidepressants apparently keep a lot of people functional, according to new data from the federal government.
The most recent statistics about antidepressant use in the United States, released Wednesday, show 11% of Americans ages 12 and older take the medication. Antidepressants are the most common prescription drug used by people ages 18 to 44. Almost one-quarter of all women ages 40 to 59 take antidepressants.
Click here to read the entire article. You will be stunned.
What if some disaster happened and drugs were suddenly unavailable? Where would that leave us? Our need for medication keeps us imprisoned. Sometimes this is unavoidable, and we deal with it.
But are 11% of all Americans over 12 years of age really clinically depressed?
I don’t think that’s part of God’s plan. Do you?
P.S. Click here to go to my delicious stack with more articles on sound therapy and depression.
P.S.S. In case you’re really interested in Sound Therapy specifically, Here are some links for sound therapy providers, but I think the right music on iTunes can be pretty effective 😉
I wouldn’t trade my crazy zoo for anything. They all bless me. But things around here must get under control!
I know the answer; I just don’t like what it takes to get there. I’ve had the “sign”—literally—for years:
So my {make-a-change} this Monday was buying the following book. I’ve been trying for years to simplify…it’s obvious I need some help! The title caught my attention. One Bite at a Time sounds like it’s all about small changes. Right up my alley.
It’s a $5.00 e-book and hopefully well worth the money. I’ll let you know how it goes in upcoming posts. Maybe I’ll share some of my changes and some pics with you on upcoming {make-a-change} Mondays and you can join along with me. Although, hopefully, you are not all as hopeless…
Well, here it is Saturday evening, and I haven’t posted my {tip to a happier you} for today yet. But I have a good excuse:
Miranda, my 18-year-old, had her wisdom teeth taken out this week. So I have played the roll of caregiver—which for Miranda means making her jello and spaghetti, escorting her plethora of friends in and out to see her, and sitting beside her to keep her company while watching the show of her choice—One Tree Hill. 
Miranda is one of those girls that loves for her friends to spend the night. I have always loved it that she wants them to come here, so we frequently allow them to.
This week, however, held one obstacle: our air conditioner upstairs is broken and must be replaced, so everyone is sleeping downstairs. Did this deter her friends from wanting to spend the night? Nope. So downstairs this week, I’ve had all three sofas made into beds, an extra twin mattress beside one of them, and a double air mattress beside another. Between kids coming and going, fixing meals for Miranda, for my family, and for any extras that may be here, and being kidnapped into the world of One Tree Hill I’m exhausted! I don’t think I’ve loaded and emptied the dishwasher this many times in years—all in the midst of giving birth early to the twins and escaping from the drug dealer kidnapper of course.
When I was depressed, I often found myself watching television and getting wrapped up in others lives so I didn’t have to think about my own. But I would DVR them and only get to watch them when they aired on television. Now we have Netflix. You can sit and literally watch 84 episodes back to back—pausing for potty breaks of course. I suppose it’s a good thing we didn’t have Netflix when I was going through depression. Sitting absorbed in someone else’s life for hours at a time would have been just fine with me, but I think my family would have thrown me to the curb.
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it,
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
~Ogden Nash, Marriage Lines: Notes of a Student Husband
Such a simple poem, but so hard to do! No one can get under our skin quite like the one we live with every day, wake up with every morning, go to bed with every night, pay bills with…you know. And Satan loves to keep us too busy to really communicate, so things we thought we said, we might not have; things we do say may not come across the right way. Yep, that can be marriage sometimes.
Busy has been the state of our household this summer, so communication has suffered. It seems like sometimes it’s easier not to say anything at all than “start” something. We have found ourselves going to bed too late, getting up earlier than we’d like, with too much to do, and not enough time to do it in.
I think as couples we often forget we are a team—two individuals with the same goals in mind. Really! Don’t we forget sometimes that we both want to enjoy some fun; we both want the best for our kids; we both want to get the bills paid with a little money left over; we both want to go on a great summer vacation. Why is it so hard to remember we are working together toward the same goals?
I think it all comes down to the word “love.”
If you look up the word “love” in the dictionary, here’s what you get:
love |ləv|noun1 an intense feeling of deep affection : babies fill parents with intense feelings of love | their love for their country.• a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone : it was love at first sight | they were both in love with her | we were slowly falling in love.• ( Love) a personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid.• a great interest and pleasure in something : his love for football | we share a love of music.• affectionate greetings conveyed to someone on one’s behalf.• a formula for ending an affectionate letter : take care, lots of love, Judy.2 a person or thing that one loves : she was the love of his life
***
Cupid? Really?
Now here’s just a little the Bible says about love:
And then there’s the little matter of the greatest commandments:
Here are a few things I know about taste and mood:
We crave whatever is a part of our life—what we do, who we see, what we eat, what we drink, etc.
The neat thing is, though, that the flip side of this is true as well.
“Whether we’re on the path toward victory or defeat is determined by the very next choice we make. Not the choices from yesterday. Not the choices five minutes ago.” ~Lysa Terkeurst
I’ve often said that anyone who has not experienced true depression cannot really understand it.
About four years ago, while still in the midst of my depression, someone recommended The Shack by William P. Young. As soon as I realized the youngest daughter in the story disappears, I put down the book. Marlee was five at the time and it was more than I could bear to read. But since God lifted my depression, I picked it back up and finished it. I’m so glad I did.
As I describe my years of depression as The Great Depression, this author refers to it as The Great Sadness. When I try to describe the way depression feels, I suppose the pharmacist comes out in me, because I always describe it as “all of the nerve endings in my body were heavy and weighing me down.” I think William Young’s description in The Shack is more understandable:
“Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don’t feel, the world becomes dull and colorless. Just think how The Great Sadness reduced the range of color in your life down to monotones and flat grays and blacks. “
The dictionary defines “dark” as the absence of light. Depression is darkness. God tells us in John 12:46 that he has come into the world as a light, so that NO ONE has to live in darkness.
When Isaac Newton was dabbling in his many scientific experiments, he used a prism to see what exactly made up the color “white.” What he found was that white light is the effect of combining the visible colors of light in certain proportions. In other words, white is the combination of all the colors of the rainbow.
God came as the light. He also gave us a promise when he created the rainbow.
I think being raised with religion all around me, I took the light for granted. I couldn’t see the colors in the relationship. As a friend of mine explained it well, those were my “ivory tower” days. I lived in the white tower but I couldn’t see the colors that it contained.
During my depression, a black tunnel lay before me. Now I see that Jesus was my “light at the end of the tunnel.” Now that I have experienced darkness—the absence of light—colors have a whole new meaning for me.
My Great Depression led me to freedom. It painfully guided me to the color that Jesus provides in my relationship with Him. My world is no longer shades of gray. Whether you feel like depression is an obstacle for or not, Jesus can make your life into the most beautiful rainbow you’ve ever seen.
Jesus is the light. Seek Him. Read about Him. Talk to Him. Have faith in Him.
Religion will always let you down. A relationship with Him will never let you down.
Oh how I wish I could find more time to write. My brain seems to overflow with ideas, none of which come to fruition on paper. And today’s topic—I’ll be honest—is not terribly exciting, but is very important. One that I’ve done more than my share of research on over the years.
Finding a prescription verse for today’s topic was a little tough. I don’t think the Bible actually addresses putting preservatives in our food. I could go back to Genesis 1:29 that I’ve used before about food that God gave us on the earth. I’m not about to jump into the whole clean and unclean meat thing. That’s a theologian’s battle, not mine. So I realize I took this verse out of context, but I thought the whole mutilate the flesh part fit. So cut me a little slack on the verse today 😉
Preservatives in meat. Have you ever really thought about what we eat when we fix a ham sandwich? Okay, we know it comes from a pig, but how old is the meat we are eating? How long did it take to get from the you-know-where to the grocery store? We are essentially eating old, rotten pig. Yuck! And it’s not just pork; it’s all meat products.
Well, the food and drug administration so generously allows the luncheon meat manufacturers to use sodium nitrate/nitrite in our meat so it stays “pretty in pink” until it makes it to our town, our grocery store, and finally, our refrigerator.
I could write a long sciency bunch of gooble-gobble about how sodium nitrate and nitrite convert to nitrosamines in your stomach depending on the pH of the juices there, and how certain levels of nitrosamines are actually fatal but the FDA makes sure we don’t get too much, and how the levels we are exposed to cause esophageal cancer, pancreatic cancer, thyroid disease, leukemia, colorectal cancer, heart disease, and diabetes just to name a few.
But I won’t.
I’ll just give you the link to my delicious stack that contains more information that you could ever want to know.
Obviously, today’s {make-a-change} Monday tip is to avoid luncheon meats that contain these preservatives. Applegate Farms (they have a great turkey bacon) is one of my favorite manufacturers of healthy alternatives, but here are a few more:
