Day 105!

Today is the 105th day of my Cipro antibiotic side effects mess and I am doing really good. I would say that I am 95% recovered. I have been pushing through all the side effects working out with increasing intensity for the last month in a pool and then for the first time yesterday I rode a bike! I have been itching to get back up and going again on a bike and finally got to that point. I rode 8.7 miles at an average speed of 16.7 miles per hour which was better than I thought I would be able to do.

It has been a long hard journey that I could really do without having to repeat again. I have wrestled through muscle tremors and spasms, muscle weakness, chest pain, tendon pain, joint pain, mental fog, depression, and hallucinations all caused by the fluoroquinolone antibiotic I took- Cipro which is similar to Avelox and Levaquin. ( see article http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/10/20/fluoroquinolones-side-effects.aspx   )

I have kept up with other people who have experienced side effects to fluoroquinolone antibiotics and began to realize I have improved quicker than other's who have had these severe side effects and I think it has to do with the 3 things that I focused upon for recovery. I discovered along the way that the people who had experienced severe side effects to fluoroquinolone antibiotics and then took additional medications to treat the side effects actually got worse with some of those never recovering and being permanently disabled so I determined from the start my solution would not include additional medications to solve the problem caused by medication.

The thing that I began doing from the start was praying and begging God to heal me because it was traumatic to go from being very physically active to being completely unable to walk in a matter of a few days. Three weeks into the ordeal the elders from church prayed over me and anointed me with oil asking for God's healing. I would have been very satisfied with instant miraculous healing but it did not happen that way. As I spent time thinking about my situation from God's point of view I began to realize some interesting things. I could imagine God looking at me and saying 'of course you are having problems, you put a stupid chemical concoction in your body that is known to cause problems because you wanted to feel better quickly.' This made me realize that there are times it is better for God not to heal us and instead to allow us to wrestle with what we've done to ourselves because quiet honestly sometimes the only way I can learn something is through experiencing the natural consequences of what I've done. 

This led me to realize that there are times that I/we put our faith and trust in something other than God. In this particular case I had put my trust in a medication to heal me. It had never even occurred to me to deal with the spiritual side of taking medicine at the drop of a hat, that is it had never occurred to me until I had no choice but to be forced to contemplate how different things would have been if I had spent some time in prayer before I did anything else. For us in the modern United States we like to put our faith in science and medicine before we put our faith in God. All in all this experience has shaken me to the core because I thought I was doing really good at putting my faith in God and instead God has helped me to see how far I need to go to honestly put my faith in Him.

Twice in the first week of dealing with the extreme side effects I encountered a secondary problem of having extreme reverse reactions to pain relieving medications which produced greatly magnified pain instead of alleviating pain. I discovered this apparently happens because of the way in which the Cipro antibiotic changes your brain chemistry. This launched me into a quest to figure out how to get better apart from taking any type of medication. In fact it has now been around 90 days since I have any medicine of any kind at all and I plan to keep it that way. I had a chiropractor who for years told me God did not make our bodies to need medicine to function correctly but I did not fully understand what he was trying to tell me until now. Consequently I began to seek out what would help my body function as good as it possibly could so that the amazing work God did of creating my body and my immune system could be maximized.

I began visiting my chiropractor which provided some improvement but the most dramatic improvement came about as the result of visiting an alternative allergy specialist who utilized a number of non invasive and non medical techniques to help eliminate my body's bad reaction to the medication. ( see www.naet.com for more information).  I discovered this group of practitioners when I lived in Colorado and had developed a whole range of debilitating food allergies. An NAET practitioner in Colorado helped to completely eliminate my food allergies and as a side bonus also eliminated my severe allergy to bee stings. It simply involves holding the substance you are reacting to while the practitioner stimulates significant pressure points on your body. When it occurred to me that I was for all practical purposes having an allergic reaction to Cipro I decided I would seek out an NAET practitioner in Houston. After my first visit there was dramatic improvement- it shut down my muscles tremors and spasms. As the NAET practitioner worked with me he discovered that I had been over exposed to a number of things including the metal lead which may have contributed to why the Cipro caused such a severe reaction. The upside is that I may come out better on the far side of this whole ordeal than when I started!

The temptation would be to say the NAET treatment is amazing and begin to elevate it to the same status as we currently tend to elevate medicine but the reality is that the NAET practitioners are simply working with our body to help stimulate the process that God set in motion within our body. The miracle here is not the treatment, the miracle is God's amazing process of creating our body so that it can heal itself. The mistake we make with medicine is that we believe that we can only be healed with medicine- which is why I am opposed to our current nationalized health care because it works from the assumption that all that everyone needs to be healthy is an array of medicines.

I have a new found commitment to  continue to discover ways to help my body work how God designed it to work instead of working against it. A few things I have discovered have to do with diet; stay away from Canola oil- it's very bad news, stay away from artifical sweeteners including Splenda- our body does not have any natural enzymes to break them down, stay away from white flour, stay away as much as possible from processed foods...But I also am at a new starting point of discovering how many ways there in which I don't put God as Lord of my life and instead put other things as the Lord of my life- I think that is called idolatry.

Often we think the reason we need to put God as the Lord of our Life has to do with an eternity with God in heaven but the reality is that it also has to do with having a better life right now.

What Makes Christianity Different From Any Other Religion?

The Youth Ministry at Sugar Grove has been learning about various world religions by letting 2 of the teens teach a class each week about a pair of religions. Some of my kids have taught some of those classes so we have had some fun conversations at home about various religions as well as about Christianity in the last couple of weeks. During this same time period I have also had a great time reconnecting with a 'kid' from one of my youth groups who I have not been around in almost 20 years. She has shared with me her horror story about marrying a Mormon guy and the conversations with her bishop questioning her dedication to the Mormon faith since she wasn't having enough babies.

These conversations recall an ah ha moment I had about 18 years ago when I was teaching a religions class with a group of teens. As I taught through this class the question that began to surface in my mind was "What makes Christianity any different than any other religion in the world?" I had grown up learning that Christianity was about going to church on Sunday, being baptized by being immersed in water and saying the right words, not using a piano to worship God, and a few other things like this. As I researched and taught through this religions class it started to stand out to me that all religions were similar; you believe something about a deity, you have a set of requirements to do in a formal setting, and you have a set of requirements to do in life. And why do you do these things? So that the deity or the higher force will be happy with you and move you to a better place.  In other words... you earn your way into the presence of the deity or a better place. The deity is important but ultimately it is what you do, not what the deity does.

The 'kid' from my youth group told me when she first married the Mormon guy that Mormonism has a much better set of rules than Christianity- their rules were much more concise than the rules she had grown up with in a Christian church- so that was why she was converting to Mormonism. This was for me another ah ha moment. If picking a religion is nothing more than finding the set of rules and beliefs that work best for you then what is the point? If it is simply about a set of rules and beliefs then the core of the religion is actually nothing more than a myth- the power of that religion is not in the reality of what it believes but simply in the rules you must follow.

In the class I had been teaching I had to confront the falseness of what I had been taught growing up- that Christianity was about doing the right things and going to the right church. This is not Christianity. It is a humanistic offshoot of true Christianity. True Christianity is different than any other religion in the world. True Christianity is not about what we do (even though we like to make it about what we do), it is about what Jesus did.

God made the world including us. Sin entered the world and separated us from God. God then began a process to ensure that we had the chance to once again be with him- to again walk with him in the garden. This process centered upon Jesus Christ satisfying the demands of sin. What is my role in this process? Accepting the gift He has offered. Period.

Viewing Christianity as a set of rules cheapens all that Jesus did. It is much easier to view Christianity as a set of rules. It is much easier to think that if we go to our priest on Friday night and confess our sins we are ok. It is much easier to think if we are immersed in water then we are ok. It is much easier to view Christianity as a legal requirement than a relationship. However the consequences for viewing Christianity as a set of rules are immense. We take the power from God and put it in our hands. And since we are not God we make our religion no better than any other religion and we end up in nothing more than a pissing match arguing about whose set of rules is best.

Christianity is not about rules; go to church, be baptized, take communion, don't do this, do this... But on the other side of this pendulum we also make a mistake in thinking that we can detach Christianity from boundaries, behaviors, and beliefs. We go to church on a Sunday morning not to satisfy the legal requirements of being in a worship service but to gain and give encouragement to other believers as we focus upon our God through worship. We are baptized not to meet the minimum required standards to enter heaven but to express through an outward symbol the passion within our hearts to accept the gift of grace offered to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism does not save us, Jesus Christ saves us.

What makes Christianity different than other religions? It's not what we do, it's what Jesus Christ has done for us.

Disciples

Since January Sugar Grove's elders and ministers have stopped their normal meetings and instead have been focused upon praying and seeking God's guidance about what He desires Sugar Grove to be and to do. There has been a great deal of prayer and as time has gone along more and more discussion. One thing that God has continued to bring back to our attention has been Jesus' words in Matthew 28  "...All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of  all nations..."

Disciples... what is a disciple? Freedictionary.com tells us that a disciple is:

a. One who embraces and assists in spreading the teachings of another.

b. An active adherent, as of a movement or philosophy.

 

In the context of Matthew 28 Jesus command is to go and make disciples of Jesus Christ.  The question Sugar Grove's leadership have wrestled with is two fold; are we ourselves being shaped into being Christ's disciples? Are we going and making disciples of others? 

Another question that is being asked is how do we know if we are a disciple of Christ. Traditionally our measuring stick of discipleship has focused upon a few external actions; Do we go to church every time the door is opened? Do we study the Bible? Do we believe the right things about God, the Bible, and his church?

However the problem with using these as the measuring stick for being a disciple of Christ is that even Judas Iscariot meet these criteria. He believed the right things. He walked the road with Jesus. He was there every time the 'doors' were opened. He knew and did everything right but it did not make it into his heart. 

A disciple is someone who allows the teachings of their master to penetrate their heart and in turn impact every single dimension of their life.