I’ve been reminiscing today about life as a kid. This week, our church has been discussing God’s creative nature and how, being made in His image, we people are all creative.  One of the questions we discussed this week was what creative things we used to do as kids.

The question brought memories flooding into my mind, and I’m feeling so blessed today to have such amazing siblings to have shared so many fun times with!

-          We improvised radio shows which we taped, with presenters, interviews, our own music, ads

-          We wrote comics and magazines

-          I vividly remember making blueprints for a blackberry jam factory to operate from my bedroom, designing a cart that would need to go up and down the stairs with blackberries

-          We used to make up all sorts of pretend games outside – we made the garden into a town and each of us had our own tree to sit in. I spent many happy hours up my tree with a penknife and an old block of plaster, carving little things.

-          We got hold of an old wooden go-cart one year, and spent the whole of a summer going up and down the road on it

-          I used to have a box of mechanical parts to make inventions out of. I wrote a little book of my inventions, which included a bendable fence so I could sneak across to our friends’ garden next‑door

-          We had a typewriter, which opened up a new world of fun - I used it to type stories, menus, order forms, magazines

-          We loved collecting conkers – and I guess we had conker fights, but all I remember is the collecting!

-          Once we decided to make an underground house in the garden. It was very important to us that it be a secret, so we would go out early in the morning in our pyjamas with a spade and take turns digging. I think we were also hoping to reach China. I’m sure we couldn’t have kept it secret more than a week, and once it was discovered we had to fill it all back in again

-          I made a little doll’s house out of old boxes and covered the insides with wallpaper samples

-          The game of Monopoly featured heavily in our summer playing. We would play over several days, steering a tortuous path through the unavoidable disputes and fatal interruptions by the cat, only to arrive at the end and find my brother had won yet again, to everyone’s consternation (well, probably mostly mine!)

-          Sunday was a day of rest, which generally meant going somewhere outdoors in the afternoon. When we got home we’d have tea instead of our normal supper, which involved sandwiches, a pot of tea under a rabbit cosy, and chocolate cupcakes at the end. One of the cupcakes would often have an extra silver foil case, which would become the treasure in a treasure hunt, or a paper aeroplane that we would all take turns flying down the stairs

-          We used to play complicated story games with duplo, which revolved around Superbaby and which we all found hilarious

-          Jumping off the top bunk wearing a plastic bag around our neck was good for when it was raining

-          Sometimes we turned the volume down on the TV and narrated it ourselves. I remember one James Bond movie Joel and I narrated, where he was desperately trying to get home to his baked beans. We were both in stitches.

Togetherness is a beautiful thing. Joel, Han and Rach: I couldn’t have asked for better friends and siblings. I miss being ten with you.

One Year of Gluten-Freedom!

Yesterday I was celebrating one year of gluten-freedom! I wanted to share some of my story with you, as a testimony of what God has done in me recently, and also to give my friends more of a window into my life. I know I haven’t been very good at communicating what’s going on with my health to people who matter to me, so apologies for the frequent silences and I hope this goes some way to explain where I’m at!

One year ago, I was living with severe symptoms of something. It was a huge struggle to get through a day without a nap. I would go to bed at night tired and often wake up 10 hours later just as tired. My muscles ached. My stomach was bloated and sore. My brain was in a permanent fog. I would forget words, people’s names, the point of what I had just started saying. Conversations were very difficult. I couldn’t follow what people were saying. It was very hard to process things going on around me. My brain couldn’t cope with any extra stimuli. If there was any background noise or activity while someone was talking to me, I couldn’t tune it out. And I couldn’t express myself in conversation. If I could write it down, I would get it out eventually, but in person everything moved too fast for my brain to keep up. I dreamed of being able to shut myself in my room with a pile of books and not have to talk to anyone. Most days I would assess my energy as 1 or 2 out of 10. It was a huge achievement for me if I was able to get dinner ready in the evening having looked after Esther during the day. I had mood swings, feeling snappy and impatient, worried, stressed, cross and sometimes unbearably sad. My creative spark was gone. I clung to routine. I would aggressively avoid trying anything new, because it would use up so much precious energy to process all the new stimuli involved. Even things that should have been restful (a trip to the beach, a backrub or a meal out) were hugely stressful to me. All of these things were impacting on my relationships. Being around people was such a draining and frustrating experience (being unable to fully express myself), that it was hard to develop friendships. As mother to a talkative, inquisitive 5 year old, I struggled to give Esther all the care and attention she needed. It was more and more of a struggle for me to get out and do things with her. Sid was amazing through this, listening, reassuring, comforting, cooking, but it was a continual battle for us to stay connected emotionally.

Many of these symptoms had been there to some degree since I was a child. I remember at age 6 or 7 needing to leave the table at mealtimes to go lie down because my stomach was so painful. They have definitely had a profound impact on my social life and my interactions with people right through my life. Then I was diagnosed with anaemia when I was 17 and an underactive thyroid after Esther was born, so it was easy to assume that any tiredness was related to one of these. Looking back, my symptoms did take a turn for the worse after we moved to Tanzania in October 2010. But I had had problems with my health for so long, I felt like there was nothing I could do to turn the situation around. This was just my lot and I was stuck with it. I really didn’t have any faith to see it change.

Until, one day I was talking with a friend about her health problems… She has low energy and we were talking about possible causes of it, and food allergies came up as we chatted. But it was something about her attitude that struck me. Where I had given up and let it take over, she was frustrated by her lack of energy, and didn’t want to accept it. I remember her saying, “It is not normal to have so little energy!” As I thought later about her reaction, I started to feel increasingly unwilling to let my life slide by in a haze. My mindset changed and I started to think that there has to be a reason for my lack of energy. And, taking it one step further, if there’s a reason, I can ask God and He can show me what it is! The Bible says we should call to God, so that He can show us great and mighty things that we don’t know (Jeremiah 33 verse 3), and that we should seek wisdom, so He can give it to us.

I started reading about food intolerances, and singled out gluten intolerance as matching with my symptoms. I read for a couple of months about how intolerances worked, and how to do an elimination diet to find out what’s causing the problem. While I was reading, I became hyper aware every time I ate gluten that I could be damaging my body even more. So when the date came that I had set as my first day of gluten-freedom, I had actually not consciously eaten it for weeks. It was the 18^th of May 2011, and I was so excited that this might be the solution to all my problems!

As it turned out, this year hasn’t been all smooth sailing. I initially felt better without the gluten, but then it’s been up and down on a daily or weekly basis as I’ve tried to adapt my diet to reflect what my body needs and can cope with. Overall, my health has steadily improved but I have had to turn detective every time my symptoms change or worsen to analyse the links between that and my diet. Did I eat something that might have contained gluten? Do I need to increase my intake of something? Decrease something else? Change one of the supplements I’m taking? Of course, I’m seeing a very good doctor, who has been fantastic, but at the same time I saw very clearly the need to understand this for myself as he is not there at mealtimes!

I have figured out that I most likely have celiac disease (2 close family members just got diagnosed with it). As a result, I suspect I have some major vitamin deficiencies. I also have pernicious anaemia and had a candida overgrowth through my digestive system and possibly something called Leaky Gut Syndrome (which is as nice as it sounds!). I had to drastically change my diet, cutting out a heap of foods (most carbs, almost all processed food, all refined sugar, additives and preservatives on top of gluten). As I cleansed my body of the candida, I lost more than 10% of my body weight in the space of a month and a half. 9 months on, I am just now starting to very slowly gain it back. Many days have felt so frustrating as I would have an energy crash which brought my symptoms flooding back and left me unable to do much more than sit on the sofa, going over the last few meals in my mind.

Despite the struggles, I come to the end of this first year of gluten-freedom with energy! My life looks and feels very different now, praise God! Most days my energy levels are 5 out of 10 (9 being Jack Bauer J). Along with energy crashes, there have been amazing step changes for the good. There was the day when I took a different route home. It was such a small thing, but it was a sign that I was becoming more able to step away from my routine. Then the day came when I realised that I am having ideas again! I had started to wonder, “what if…?” and suddenly I couldn’t stop the ideas coming! This had been absent, and it was amazing how noticeable the change was. A few months ago, another change came as I realised that I felt much more sociable and wanted to spend time with people! I now feel like I want to invest in friendships and am able to start doing that in small ways. I’m also able to process auditory data a lot better, and can even join in a conversation with several people after 7pm! This was unimaginable just a year ago!

As I recover and build my body up nutritionally, I am meeting new challenges. Issues of identity have kept surfacing recently. As I have more energy, I am finding that who I am has been buried under tiredness for years and I now need to separate out the patterns of behaviour that were due to illness, and those coming from my heart. This is an amazing task, as I find what God has put in there! I have always been told, for example, that I’m quiet and shy (because I have always behaved that way), but it always surprised me when people told me that. It didn’t line up with my heart. I’m just at the beginning of the journey, but as I feel my way along I can see that what is in my heart will be expressed more easily with time and healing. I’m excited to see these changes and find out who God made me to be!

Through it all, God is good, and He promises peace for each one of us. John 14 verse 27 says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” The word ‘peace’ here is the Hebrew ‘shalom’, which has a much richer meaning in Jewish culture than our narrow word ‘peace’. In Strong’s Concordance, ‘Shalom’ is listed as “completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquillity, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord”.

I pray this Shalom on you.

Dreams

How do you tell the difference between a dream that’s from our own desires and a dream that comes from God? A new friend asked this question a couple of weeks ago on his blog(http://davidscoffeestains.com/) and as I dug into my own thoughts on this, I was surprised by my answer! I believe all dreams originate from God. Any dream you can think of came from a seed planted by God – desires to grow, multiply, flourish, connect. He is the One who creates and inspires, and all good things come from Him. He puts a desire in our heart, with the expectation that we will flesh it out, bring it forth into reality in a way that’s true to our own identity and context. And you can be sure Satan will do what he can to twist, pervert and crush those dreams – that’s why some dreams end up looking so far from what God intended.

God’s ultimate aim in this process is for His Kingdom to be extended on earth. Once He has planted the seed in our heart, whether it goes on to fulfills His purpose or not depends on how we manage the dream. As we recognize the divine origin of the dream, there is a real temptation to cling to the dream, to hold onto it tightly. We want to push it forward, defend it, bind ourselves tightly to it, because here is something concrete that came from God and it is far easier to align ourselves with the concrete dream than with the ethereal God who gave it to us.

I think the process God calls us to in birthing a dream is rooted in submission. Have you seen sports players run down the field side by side, throwing a ball back and forth between them as they run together? This is how I see us working with God. He plants a dream in our heart, and then sets off running alongside us, expectant, arms ready to receive it back from us. He’s looking for us to give up the dream to Him, to say, “God, You are number one in my life. If this dream never happens but I still have You, I’ll be happy.” As we let go of the dream and run further, we will often hear God yell across, “Ready?” and he tosses it back to us.

I love how organic this process is! God takes immense pleasure from seeing us bring our own unique brand of creativity to bear on our dreams, making them a reality in a way that no-one else would do. So if He gives your dream back to you, just be sure to keep running with it! I also think He designed this way of partnering with us to strengthen our relationship with Him. His heart is always for relationship with us.

So how does this view help if I have a dream in front of me and want to know whether to invest in it? I think looking at the dream is always going to show up God’s fingerprints, because He planted it there. What if we instead chose to look at our hearts? Am I submitted to God? Have I given this dream to Him and really let go of it? Am I ready to partner closely with Him on this, His way? A heart submitted to Him is God’s dream, because no matter what state we are in, He can work with that.