Beauty in the Terrifying

Their voices are as clear as I heard them years ago. I have not talked to some of them in many years.

“She lied about everything.”

“That  never happened.”

Did everything in my past really happen?

I am wrapped under the white hospital sheet. The doctors come in and ask me a few questions. It is no use when I am in this state, but I talk to them briefly.

People are after me. I believe the police implanted something in my ear so I can hear the voices of people I haven’t talked to in years. They want to get rid of me. They want to torture me.

I curl myself under the sheet. I do not want to talk to anyone. I yell in my head that I did not lie, that everything that I am dealing with and have dealt is real.

I decide to go out of my hospital room to the day room. On my way, I see another patient doing a puzzle. From far away, it looks like a puzzle I did a few years ago.

“I did that puzzle!”, I exclaim.

“Really? This exact one?” the other patient asks, as he holds up the puzzle.

I realize that it is not the same puzzle.

“Sometimes things are not always what they seem,” I said.

I start talking to the other patients. I believe that everyone is someone I used to know. I believe that everyone is in a conspiracy to kill me. I do not want to eat the hospital food, because I think they are poisoning me. I believe that the people on the TV are talking about me, telling everybody around the world not to care about me.

At one point, I believe that my oldest brother, Mike, faked his suicide and that he is still alive.

It is hard to believe that a week ago, I was working on a project involving Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics.

Terror and confusion invade my mind.

As I begin to take the medications, the voices start to fade away. I begin to realize that the people at the hospital are trying to help me and that they really are not trying to kill me. I talk to a nurse about my psychotic state and she tells me that it’s unusual that I remember everything from when I was psychotic. Sometimes I wish I could forget my psychotic episodes because they are very traumatic and terrifying. I also realize that my brother is gone, something that is very difficult for me to deal with.

My psychosis is something that is uncontrollable, except with medication. My last psychotic episode was medication resistant, though. Therapy is helpful but not when I am having hallucinations.

Even in my psychosis, God can do  and has done amazing things. As I emerged from my psychosis in my ninth hospitalization, the first thing I wanted to do was read the Bible and tell others about my life story. I have to say that I have never seen so many people reading their Bibles in a hospital psychiatric unit. The other patients and doctors watched me emerge from two days of not eating, not talking, and not sleeping to someone who was wide awake and telling of all the wonderful things God has done in my life.

Never doubt what God can do in your darkest times.  God gave me a huge opportunity to bring others to Him even in one of the worst times of my life.

I love to share my testimony even in the most difficult times because people see firsthand what God is doing. I have had many people in the hospitals tell me that I inspired them to go back to church or read their Bible. It’s not through my own strength that I am able to share my testimony. It is only through God’s strength that I am still here and that I am able to share my story.

God can truly use each of us, in no matter what situations we are in, to make a difference in the lives of others. God can take any situation and make it beautiful. He can be glorified in any interaction we have with others.

“Stop trying to escape the inevitability of sufferings and learn to benefit from them.”

-Barry C. Black, The Blessing of Adversity

We are going to go through difficult times. Loved ones will pass away. Natural disasters will happen. Relationships will struggle. But the one constant thing we always will have in those difficult times is our hope and faith in God. We can always hold on to the hope that God can turn the situations around. We have hope that he can take the deepest and darkest parts of our lives, shine His light on and in them and transform them into something absolutely beautiful.

I wanted to share a song that was on replay this morning. It is about finding our hope in God even in the rough times.