The Ugly Truth About Denial

We are getting ready to start our 4th year of Celebrate Recovery at Cottonwood!! AMAZING! I m so grateful for the changed lives that we have seen these three years. So, tonight we kick off year number four. 

Celebrate Recovery involves 12 steps, which take one year to go through. We will start next week with our first lesson, which is Come out of Denial. I was thinking how hard that is sometimes. 

The problem with denial is that if you are in denial, you may not know it. You may have hidden your problem for so long that you actually believe it is ok. Or you may think that it is just something that you have to live with, not something that you need deliverance from. People who live in denial don’t always know they are in denial.

There is a funny line in the movie “Steal Magnolias”. One of the characters is an older woman named Weizer. She is VERY difficult. She complains all the time and can’t get along with anyone, very negative and unhappy. One of her friends suggests that she may suffer from depression, and her reply is, “I’m not depressed, I’ve just been in a bad mood for 50 years.” That might be denial. 

If you are convinced that you don’t have a problem or an issue, and you are sure that you are not just in denial, spend time the next week listening to yourself, and then to the people around you. Do you hear yourself saying things like this?

·  “Can’t we stop talking about it? Talking only makes it worse.”

·  “You don’t have it so bad. I am a better husband than John..”

· “If I tell him that it hurts me when he says that, I’m afraid he will leave me.”

· “She really doesn’t drink that much.”

· “It really doesn’t hurt when he does that; I’m fine!”

· “Joan has been married three times; I’ve only been married twice.”

·  “If you didn’t nag me all the time, I wouldn’t …”

· “Look honey, I have a tough job; I work hard. I need a few drinks to relax. It doesn’t mean that I have a problem.”

·         “I don’t have an anger problem, people just do things that make me mad.”

Many times, we know we have a problem, but we accept it, thinking, "that's just the way I am". " have always been...sensitive, melancholy, a worrier, timid, hot-tempered..." That's just another form of denial. 

Face it, quit denying and get on the road to recovery. 

Maddie

I'm crazy about small town living. Stephenville is an awesome place to live and raise a family. This week, the high school athletics department will honor our grand daughter, Maddie, at the Friday Night football game. The post below is taken directly from today's edition of the local paper. 

Maddie McLemore believes her life to be a puzzle, and she believes the puzzle has an answer.

Maddie, 12, is the daughter of Stephenville ISD school board trustee and local business owner Doug McLemore and Stephenville High School teacher Emily McLemore. And by all appearances, she is your typical seventh grade student at Henderson Junior High.

But McLemore is not your typical seventh grader. Because she suffers from a very atypical disease.

"Maddie looks so healthy. When you see Maddie, you don't see a child who is struggling just to make it through the day," reads a release from the SISD athletic department. "Yet Maddie struggles almost daily with chronic joint pain, respiratory problems and fatigue, and this is when her kidney disease is in remission."

McLemore lives with an autoimmune kidney disease call IgA Nephropathy and a number of symptomatic conditions such as chronic pain, fatigue, respiratory problems, allergies and a compromised immune system.

This Friday, she'll be the honoree at Stephenville's annual Heart of Gold game when the Yellow Jackets host three-time defending 4A Division II champ Aledo at 7:30 p.m. at Tarleton Memorial Stadium.

T-shirts are being sold for $12 at all SISD campuses to commemorate the special week, and proceeds will go to the McLemore family.

Even after years of testing and seeing teams of specialists, the root of Maddie's struggles has not been found. This is largely because of the extreme rarity of IgA Nephropathy in female children, with only one girl per 100,000 victims of the disease. Because of this, very little research has been conducted, prognosis can only be predicted and no certainty given."

Maddie, however, has remained positive through it all, sharing with those closest to her her own heart of gold.

"The way I think of it is like you are given one puzzle piece every once in a while, and without knowing how many pieces there are, but that doesn't matter," Maddie said. "Your life will add up as the whole puzzle if you believe there is an answer."

Stephenville athletics wants everyone to give Maddie another piece to that puzzle Friday night; the kind that can only come from a community that shares her heart of gold.

Jet Skis

This summer we bought Jet Skis. After our traditional Family Lake-house Adventure the week of July 4th, my husband Les, (who does not like sun, sand, water, heat, sweating, getting dirty...) said we should buy jet skis. He searched Craig's list and we bought two very old, cheap jet skis. We have really had a lot of fun. I know that Les bought them for me, and I appreciate that VERY much. Here we are the day we bought them. We've taken them out every week since we got them.
We took them out this morning, and I got to thinking about one thing.
I go a lot faster than Les does. There are two reasons for this.
1. My jet ski is faster. We don't know why. They are both 1993 model Yamahas with the same engine, but, when you go full throttle, mine goes a little faster.
2. I go faster. Whatever I do, I do full throttle. I even walk fast. I can't help it. Les has always said that the one verse that I truly live by is Col 3:23, "And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men."

Whatever I do, I do it heartily, with a lot of zeal and enthusiasm. This is not always a good thing. I mean, if a little cleaner will get the floor clean, a lot will get it REALLY clean. If a little comet will clean the tile, a lot of comet will...actually make a mess that is hard to get off.
But, most of the time, I am happy to be a zealous, whole-hearted kind of girl, full throttle all the way!