#church health

[paularoseauthor]

Best Tips: Navigating the Return to Work or Church After a Break.

I am returning to Church and work after a period of sick leave. For me returning to Church is an exciting and uplifting experience. laptop work My return to work from sick leave signifies a significant step towards recovering my health and reclaiming a sense of normalcy. You can also apply my principles if you have been away from your Church Fellowship for some time. Here are some reasons why…

[lizardho]

I came out to my dad as bisexual at 14 and I was PANICKED because I had a crush on a guy in my Boy Scout troop and thought I was Going To Hell Forever and he was so kind and understanding of my distress, but he had NO idea what bisexuality was. He just said “yeah but you like girls too? This is normal. Everyone is like this.” And I love my dad and trust him with my life to this day and the idea that the concept of bisexuality had not occurred to him had not occurred to me so I put it off.

By 16 though I had a crush on like THREE boys. Three entire boys in my Boy Scout troop. I felt like my sin was slowly advancing, until like an untreated cancer it had become metastatic. I remember bawling my L’il limp-wristed sissy eyes out in his big rumbly truck on the way home from a scout meeting and him telling me that it was OK, that he still loved me if I was gay, but that he knew I wasn’t gay because I still had crushes on women and that meant I was straight. I didn’t quite know how to explain that those felt *~*different*~* and that I felt like I was losing a fight to evil inside me but I again felt comforted by his reassurances and his genuine fatherly love.

At 18 I was like “hey I’m realizing all my friends are going on missions. I don’t wanna do that. Idk how to say that and I don’t have a ‘good enough’ reason to not wanna go.” So I just put it off. Again, my parents were extremely supportive of the information I gave them (I blamed it on perpetually forgetting to start the paperwork.) and one day my mom texted me that she had done the paperwork for me! And that all I needed was to get a physical! So I did that (it was awkward af tbh, my hernia check was done by a trainee doctor and she spent like 3 minutes fishing around my inguinal canals before her attending rescued me) and was sent to Mexico City where I learned that in addition to dipshit himbos with strong hands and scruffy guys with artistic hearts I was REALLY into chubby Latin men with strong personalities who bullied me a little when I lived in Mexico.

I remember my first companion got annoyed with me during an argument and said we were just gonna wrestle and whoever won the wrestling match won the argument (I stg I am dead serious this happened.) I was like…SWEATING when he tore off his tie and threw his white button-down shirt onto the ground (I won btw, don’t ask me how).

I remember one of my companions with this really intense, almost manic energy telling me that he was gonna make sure I was safe in a new area I didn’t know very well. He cooked breakfast for me and we’d go shopping together on P-Days and in the mornings before breakfast he’d jog around and do pull-ups with his shirt off and I’d do anything but look at him because my face would break out in a sweat so intense he’d think I was crying and come over to see if I was OK and somehow make it worse. He let me play D&D with myself in the evenings even though it was against mission rules because he knew how lonely and stressed I was.

I remember one of my companions was a big chubby man with a loud voice and a great sense of humor. He was kind and direct when addressing conflicts with me, and always bragged about how he knew the secrets of women’s minds and it felt like he really did since it almost always boiled down to “Treat Them Like People and Love Them a Lot. Don’t Stop Being A Person For Them. Also Eat Them Out Sloppy Style.” Our P-Day activities sometimes felt like dates, and it seemed like he was more attentive to my emotional state than I was since he was always the first to suggest we slow down our Divinely Mandated, God-Ordained, Super Sacred Work and Wonder to get a snack or check out a Pawn Shop (I love Pawn Shops).

I remember another companion who asked me to bully him every time he did something against his goal of losing weight. It was like he gave me Carte Blanche to take out my crush on him by being a nuisance and I LOVED that. I remember having a breakdown one day after we’d spent the afternoon frantically cleaning our disgusting-barely-habitable mission house to make it look less vile that it was (not our fault imo?) and I started bawling and he pulled me into a hug and he smelled good and he told me he knew it wasn’t just the house and that I was mad at him for being a Huge Dickhead for about a week (true) and that he would work on it. (He’s also a huge chaser but that’s a separate thing.)

I remember one of my companions waking up early (and our schedule is already built for sleep deprivation) to make me a “birthday cake” from knock-off Nutella and bread. He used matches for candles and woke me up, lit the ‘candles,’ pulled them out, then smashed it in my face and took a bunch of pictures while I was still madrugada and disoriented as fuck. He had the same sense of humor as one of my HS crushes and I could push his buttons pretty easily which was so fun.

I came home from my mission and started back at BYU where I became actively and aggressively suicidal. I had a stalker the year I moved up there and my dad’s solution to that was to get me a gun. I know he wouldn’t have bought me a gun if he could have read my mind, but I had a loaded pistol under my bed during a trifecta faith/sexuality/gender crisis and that was not helpful. I remember that the day I decided to kill myself I figured I’d call the BYU CAPS and see if I could get into therapy because it felt like what I was “supposed to do” so I could check my suicide boxes. My therapist was the guy who’d helped me pick a major the year before and was this drop-dead gorgeous Hawaiian man who cried when I told him how I’d been feeling.

A few weeks into therapy I met another stunning man with soft eyes and a scruffy illegal-at-BYU beard he kept pushing his luck with. He was funny, kind, patient, married, and wouldn’t give me the time of day if he knew I was crushing on him. We were in my history of psych class, which was inarguably the worst psych class I have ever had, and we studied together for every assignment and test and I realized that my feelings for him and for all the men I’d already mentioned were in direct conflict with my faith and relationship with God. My already agonizing spiritual conflict became even more wretched and as a result of this plus some other tightly-packed experiences with Mormonisms bullshit, I left the church.

After leaving the church I decided to move back to AZ and transfer to ASU. My mom helped me get a dog since I think it had started to dawn on my family that my mental health was barely getting me through the day, and she knew that we both loved dogs. Madi made my last year at BYU livable while I got my shit together and transferred. In that last year, I went on a date with quite possibly the only semi-openly-out trans person on BYU campus. It was not a great date imo, I was not doing well, but the person I spoke with was fun and fascinating and talked to me about Gender Dysphoria and it really cemented my need to go. To leave and never come back to that fucking school.

I started at ASU a month after my last semester at BYU and within a very short time frame it felt like I was coming back together, like a puzzle magically putting itself together in an environment that wasn’t slowly draining that puzzle’s will to live.

On the 4th of July, the year I started at ASU, I saw a transition timeline photo of a gorgeous happy beautiful happy radiant happy woman and her former Mormon missionary self and I realized the light that was on in her eyes was the light that was off in mine. I looked into transitioning for 3 days, sleeping about 10 hours total during that time. I started talking to other trans people on Reddit (one of whom is now my beautiful fiancée @cintailed) and after about a month of making preparations to be disowned and kicked out, something I was not sure would happen but was ready to go through to Turn On The Lights, I came out to my family and it was amazing. I started HRT a month after that. I secretly dated some dorky guys for about a year while I applied to grad schools. I got into a great grad school for me and my needs. I got FFS. I did my trainings and classes. Me and my fiancée moved in together after some LDR shenanigans. We’ve lived together now for 4 years of basically marital bliss. We have a cat named Grandmother Esmeralda Weatherwax who bites the hell out of my feet about three times a day. My bi-cycle continues to be part of my life but now it’s not as scary. Baby gays in my life have started to look to me for advice. Idk how this all happened so fast. When the years, months, weeks, days, and hours seems to crawl by so slowly now they are rushing past me so fast it’s almost bewildering. Whereas before I felt like I was living on borrowed time, past my ‘expiration date,’ now it feels like I can Fucking Breathe. I’m training myself to slow down now and it feels worth it to Live In The Moment.

Idk why I wrote this. Idk why these thoughts only seem to come up on Sundays when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. Idk why I’m crying rn or why I feel so happy. I’m gonna post this shit then get on with my dissertation I guess. Read more Terry Pratchett and give yourselves the time you need. Get a pet. Talk to someone. Re-examine the events that brought you here. Be gayer. Love y’all 💕

[eddis-not-eeddis]

Can I please have prayers for my friend Jay?

[impossiblyannoyingstarfish]

I think Kit herondale moving to Devon to stay with Jem and Tessa was a very appropriate decision made by Cassie.

Kit was, by no means ready to be in a relationship with Ty at that stage. I definitely do not like the way things ended with them. But what I do know is that Kit needed Jem and Tessa. Kit needed their love and guidance. Here, we are talking about someone whose father showed him such little affection that he felt that he was never loved by him. And he was the only family Kit had ever known while growing up. Kit did not value himself. He hated himself. And until a person learns to love themselves they won't be able to love others properly, no matter how hard they try.

I love the blackthorns. I really do. But tbh they are a bunch of teenagers with too much baggage on them already. They are always busy with their own businesses. They don't have time to help Kit with his mental health when they all clearly need therapy as well. Living at the LA Institute would not help with Kit's mental health in the slightest.

What he truely needs is a loving, caring family that can give him time and attention. Who can teach him to love and to be loved. Kit needed Jem and Tessa. He needed Mina. He needed church. He needed them to know the value of family, love, protection and care. He needed to be a son. He needed to be a brother. He needed to be a tol hooman for his cat.

Before he needed the Blackthorn's companionship, he needed the Carstairs family's love. I just know that by the end of the three year period Kit Herondale would be in a much better place as a much better, understanding and mature person. And most of all, I need people to understand this.

[joeexclamation]

[canadianabroadvery]

[queerprayers]

my dad put on the hymn station in the car today (i’m pretty deconstructed but just kind of in a gray area) and it’s such a weird feeling wondering why so many of these songs made me gross sob at like ten years old?? what even was that? i’ve heard of mega churches using music as emotional manipulation, would that be a similar thing? that one ‘blessings come through raindrops’ song especially, it was actually such an ongoing phenomenon when i was too little to really process it

Hi beloved,

When I was little my friends would call my church "boring"—there were no drums, the music was often plain and mostly settings of poems that taught theological concepts or were quiet meditations. Sure, someone who was grieving or especially overcome might cry, but that was not the norm. Emotion was something we might have, and was an understandable reaction to Love, but the liturgy was about participating in faith and mystery together, not about Feeling. A song might be written by someone experiencing peace or sadness, but we sang them to stand in solidarity with that emotion, not to manipulate our own. My childhood faith (thanks to my overly educated family) was quite academic. Looking back, I am so grateful. I don't know what I would have done with a mood disorder in a church that expected me to feel or perform certain ways, or a family that answered my questions with comforting phrases instead of handing me a book.

I am so sorry you were in an environment that made you sob regularly as a child—not because crying is bad, but because it sounds like it wasn't giving you space for emotion, but rather creating and expecting certain emotions. Music absolutely has a lot to do with this, based on everything I've heard from people who grew up in evangelical/non-denominational/non-liturgical churches.

You were a kid! And (based on my assumptions) instead of a space to be introduced to faith, be cared for, ask questions about difficult concepts, and react however you authentically would react, you were played songs meant to conjure up certain emotions, and probably expected to be overcome with reactions you didn't understand. Even if you weren't in a megachurch, there can be similar stuff going on. Churches so often want kids to be entertained rather than educated, convinced to keep coming back rather than given space to find inherent meaning, to become emotionally attached rather than to understand. It's not your fault if that's what you were given. They wanted you to internalize the lyrics when you were too young to process them—then they don't have to be especially meaningful or answer too many questions. They wanted you to Feel God—but that's not stable enough for a life of taking God seriously.

To be clear, I'm not against emotion in worship, and there are more lively churches than my own that have deep theology and respect for individual experiences. In my southern experience, "Black church" was always louder and more open to individual reactions than my quiet Lutheran one—gospel music is great! Dancing is holy! Communal response is generally a positive thing. But there can be more sinister or even just careless environments. If you're an adult with a fully formed faith, it can be cathartic to have a space to loudly Feel about it all. But in my opinion, this should not be the focus/purpose of liturgy. (Concerts/sharing opportunities/support groups all have a place—preferably a separate one.) Especially for kids, without that life experience and knowledge, being thrown into overly emotional faith without any groundwork can leave them reeling and confused as adults. And you hit the nail on the head with "emotional manipulation"—conjuring up sobbing is way easier than taking religion seriously.

I don't know if you've seen the tweet that's like, "I thought I was feeling God as a kid but then I went to a One Direction concert and realized I just liked pop music." Music does that to us! I love concerts! I rarely cry in church but I sobbed seeing My Chemical Romance (and feel no shame about it). But basing a community on that elevated experience is what fandom is for, not Church.

When you feel something and are told, "That's God," what happens when you don't feel it? Are you to understand that God is absent? What happens when you feel it at a pop concert? Is that a sin? My aforementioned mood disorder makes me very careful about assigning deeper meaning to emotion. God is not the emotion—God is the Love that, depending on our life and brain, we can feel many things about. There are all different kinds of churches for all different kinds of people, but I don't believe that one primarily bent on eliciting emotion will ever touch the full mystery of our God. And in fact, it too often drives people away when they want more than Experience.

God is a god of beauty, and Christianity (and most religions) have a special place for music, so I'm not ruling out that God can be present to people in "Blessings Come Through Raindrops," but. Y'know. There's more to it all. I support hymn stations in the car—a very appropriate time for casual cry-worthy pop songs—but I hope in your deconstructed gray area you can find more than overwhelmed crying. You deserve music that makes you think—I don't mean you have to only listen to Bach, but have art in your life that you connect with in a genuine thoughtful way, as well as a fun or cathartic way.

Ultimately, you deserve art/communities that take theology seriously, that hold space for more complicated feelings. You deserve a faith (or a meaningful agnostic life) that is present regardless of whether you feel like you're seeing One Direction or not.

<3 Johanna

[srisrisriddd]

Imagination leads to manifestation - ideal - mystic video

The ideal you seek and hope can't manifest

Until you imagine realise you already are that

- Dr Devang H Dattani

- Infinite SriSriSri DDD

See esoteric church ceremony ritual christ Jesus Video

Good Morning

Quote / Poem / Poetry / Quotes Of 

Bhagwan Sri Sri Sri

Doctor Devang H Dattani

Infinite Sri Sri Sri DDD

Posted By TheBlissCity DDD Team

See The Media Photo Video For

Quoteoftheday

God Morning

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[paularoseauthor]

The Theology of Wellness

Rooted in a theological perspective, the theology of wellness ...

In the intricate tapestry of human existence, the pursuit of wellness is often viewed through the lens of physical health alone.  However, a profound and holistic understanding of wellness extends beyond the confines of the body, delving into the realms of the spiritual, emotional, and mental dimensions.  Rooted in a theological perspective, the theology of wellness weaves together the sacred…

[waifwastecity]

real

[that-one-girls-blog-posts]

"Oh she's such a believer" "she literally reads the bible everyday" "She can't on sundays, she has church" "you can tell she has the Jesus glow"🥹🩷🫶🎀🤍

[itsyouch]

no because I regret EVEN saying that I hate tex as a joke. This scene hurt man....

[thewales-family]

The Prince of Wales visits St. Michael's Church of England High School in Rowley Regis, to learn about the award-winning student-led initiatives available to pupils to support their mental health and wellbeing, in Birmingham, England -April 25th 2024.

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

I am returned! Crazy things happened on hiatus, and here is a play-by-play:

Spent the bulk of September with our dogs at my great-aunt's lake cottage (which is a 15-hr drive from here), due to the abundance of birthdays this month.

Shortly after arriving, I got a cold from my sister, which as per usual, turned into bronchitis, which lasted the entirety of the vacation (I still have the cough).

Around midnight on the eve of our departure, I had a gallbladder attack (first one since early spring).

Except it was way worse. Like, I couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, couldn't even cry.

Called 911, got in the ambulance, and the pain suddenly vanished in the space of a minute.

The wee mountain hospital didn't have imaging equipment beyond a CT scan and the Dr. was like "If the pain is gone, you shouldn't expose yourself to that much radiation" (which I appreciated)

My labs were normal, so we conclude this must've been the passing of the gallstone. Big, if true.

I take hydrocodone and we all go to sleep.

In the morning, my mom and sister pack my stuff for me and my parents and I drive the 15 hours back home so that dad can make it to a job interview the next day.

During the last 45 minutes of the journey, my mom's very very old & frail chihuahua experiences a sharp decline in his already poor constitution.

I'm knocked out on hydrocodone, but my dad is up all night with the dog, and in the morning, he takes him to the vet to be put down.

My mom is devastated, this dog was adopted to be her bedside companion during chemo twelve years ago.

My dad's interview goes well.

I still have bronchitis.

Two days later, my sister (who stayed longer at the lake house to clean up) drives back to her home in Southern GA, but for hurricane Helene reasons, the highway is closed and she gets lost.

She finally makes it home to find her power is out, for hurricane Helene reasons (it's still out)

Three days later (last night), I have another brutally painful attack (clearly I'd NOT passed the stone), so my parents drive me to the ER.

Am able to get an ultrasound there, which confirms I still have either many gallstones or one huge one, but my labs are still normal.

Unfortunately, this makes sense because I underwent some rapid drastic weight loss after my attack in the spring.

ER Dr. thinks my pain is instead being caused by gastritis for genetic reasons (which reminded my mom that as a teenager she passed out at work from gastritis).

He prescribes me a trio of gastritis drugs.

I'll be going to a trusted functional medicine doctor next month because my dad got the job (an amazingly good job, praise God) and we can afford it at last. My hope is that this Dr. can point to causes beyond genetics for the gastritis and also get rid of the stones once and for all, even if that means going on Ursodiol.

My dad's new job requires him to move to the Middle East in three weeks.

Oh, and my personal Instagram account (which was about to become the cornerstone of my small business) was inexplicably terminated during my hiatus and I have no means of getting it back besides writing to the state Attorney General.

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

questioning sexuality is so exhausting

[vaguely-concerned]

also "every text says I should be dead or impossible"... weirdly hits dude