Gillian Marchenko's Blog

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” James 1:2-4

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When I came to scripture with the desire to know and love God above all else, my faith revived. As I read and study and grow in my view of the Lord, I see that I am growing. Time with him is vital to get to know him. They rhythms of bible reading, study, and prayer are not a check list, but a life-line in this broken world. Because God is good and sovereign and holy and loving and faithful. And I need those reminders all the time. 

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Lament is a crucial part of our relationship with God and essential in our efforts to heal. We're not called to hide. Our prayer closets are not to be confused with a courthouse or a quiet room. Jesus didn’t exchange his life for ours so that we can pretend with him or put on a show.

Lament fosters hope. It is a holy language that helps us walk in the new life we've obtained in Christ.

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Mornings were always particularly difficult during depressive episodes. I'd wake up and then check in with myself to see how I felt. I paid close attention to my thoughts. And if they were negative or if I was achy or if there was even an inkling of darkness, I assumed that it would be a bad day. I got pretty good at giving in quickly. I didn't have the health and skills to examine what I thought or felt to 1) see if they possessed any truth, and/or 2) decide if I wanted to cater to them or push back. 

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May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I’m doing something different this year in its honor.   Instead of providing facts and figures about mental illness, I am offering thoughts and ideas that might help someone with depression or another chronic issue move towards health.   I’m calling it hesitant healing. Why? About five years ago just after Still Life (my memoir) released, I began to experience some healing after a decade of debilitating depression. Although I

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Maybe I should think less about new things and focus more on now? Instead of grabbing God's hand and dragging him to the door of my perceived earthly future, maybe I need to be present here in the middle place. I should see today for what it is; bad or good or difficult or easy or boring. Because however today shakes out, it is a mercy from God.

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A few days ago, bits of wrapping paper and shimmery, sticky red bows were strewn around our living room as our four girls happily played with and examined new toys and gadgets after a pleasant Christmas morning.

Today, I’m looking at all of the twinkle lights and ornaments that need to come down with an audible sigh. The angels will go back into the rubbermaids. The wreathes and other wall decor will be wrapped with brown paper and stowed away in the basement. And just thinking about it all makes me blink fast. Christmas came and went like that. And in a few days it will be a new year. A new decade.

The new year brings new resolve. I’m going to lose ten pounds and we are going to schedule date nights and I will read to our girls every night and dutifully take the dog for walks at least three times a week. I will bake banana bread more often for my husband because he loves it and because we always seem to have a batch of browned, frozen bananas in the refrigerator anyway. Listing these things for you here quickens my heart rate and weakens my muscles. Yeah, not a good start, Gillian.

It’s also the time of year when Bible reading schedules and plans are shared around social media. (I’m excited. I’m heading into my third year of reading through the Bible.) There are new and old ideas, strategies and encouragment. All good things, for sure. But for some people, and for myself in the past, there’s a lot of guilt and fear built around the idea of reading Scripture regularly. We often let our emotions push out our resolve to try to start reading again. Schedules and discipline aren’t the only issues.

“I read Scripture, but it doesn’t make a difference.”

“I don’t get anything out of reading the Bible.”

“It’s like God’s not there.”

Friends murmur such sentiments to me under their breath with spotty eye contact and awkward pauses. I get it. They are painful admissions more prone to whispers. But my friends aren’t alone. I mumble similar sentiments in dry seasons of my spiritual life, too.

Who wants to say that Bible reading can make your eyes blurry with sleep? Who wants to confess that study becomes mundane and tedious when passages like Hebrews 4 tells us that scripture is active and alive and sharper than a two-edged sword? Nobody does. So we struggle, alone, and decide that it will take more than a fresh calendar to revive us.

For a long time, I thought my issues with Bible reading revolved around my lack of discipline. But I’ve come to realize that my dry spells and times of frustration and struggle have to do with something deeper. It’s about the state of my heart. To borrow Ezekiel’s phrase, I come to scripture with a heart of stone.

“If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.”

Psalm 66:18

What does it mean to cherish something? You think about it, protect it, and do whatever you can to keep it close. We do that with sin, don’t we? And when we cherish our sin over God, our hearts will be hard. Every page of the Bible speaks, but harbored sin is cotton in the inner ears. And then we blame the Lord if we don’t ‘hear’ from him.

Unrepentent sin turns a heart to stone. Think about it, if you sin against your spouse or a friend and don’t fess up, you hold back during your time together. You’re not fully there because it takes an awful lot of focus and energy to keep your distance. It’s similar with God. Instead of coming to him with an attitude of wanting to know him more, we come to him preoccuppied and distant.

Have you ever done that? A toe-tapping, finger-drumming I’m here, God. I’m waiting. Show my something good, but I doubt you will. In her book, Women of the Word, Jen Wilkin says we often come to scripture with a “what can you do for me?” attitude instead of asking “God, what do these words tell me about you?” The first question isn’t wrong per say, but it is if all we are after is our personal agenda. And if the general party line is God probably won’t respond to us, then we come with suspicion. We treat him like the dad who doesn’t show up when he said he would. But we forget that God doesn’t have to show up. He is the great I AM. He already is.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Revelation 1: 8

And he has already shown himself to us as creator of the universe, the good shepherd going after his sheep, and ultimately in the life, death, resurrection, and imminent return of his Son Jesus. And we see all of it in the pages of Scripture.

Do you come to God with harbored sin? Do you come on a trial basis with low expectations? Then, I can tell you from experience, your eyes will get bleary. You will be suspicious. Your faith can dry out quick if you aren’t drinking from the deep well of God’s word.

Before you plan your schedule, check the state of your inner being. Consider what has stopped you from reading in the past. Pay attention to the posture of your heart. Ask God for a heart of flesh.

Come without demands of God, but with a prayer that he shows himself to you in a fresh way yet again. Come with a prayer of repentence. Ask God to reveal harbored sin. Come with expectancy and thanksgiving instead of suspicion.

We’ve already been given everything that we can ever need for life and godliness in Him (2 Peter 1:3). Read Scripture. Be expectant. Be ready to hear from God.

And if you continue to struggle, don’t stop trying. This world is busy and loud and we are all tired. We all have wounds. People and places and posts vye for our attention. Looking to God doesn’t just happen. If we want to have a close relationship wih him, we have to cultivate it. God speaks to us the loudest in his good, good book and as his people, it is the highest privilege of our lives to hear from him.

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heartof stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

Ezekiel 36:26

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It’s Christmas time, those days in the year when popular lyrics like “a thrill of hope” are on the tip of the tongue. And yet, for some of us who fight depression, the idea of hope isn’t a thrill, but rather a briar patch of dissappointment, confused emotions, and shame.

Depression is defined as hopelessness.

For me, hope often feels more lost than found when my mind is frost bitten by darkness. What in the world is a Christian supposed to do with all this?

“Gillian, how do you find hope in the darkness?” the podcast host asked me recently during a conversation about mental illness. A straight forward question with a layered and at times, seemingly complicated answer. How do I explain the inner turmoil that blows around my insides like a bitter, winter breeze swept up in a frenzy? Sometimes hope is a promise I can grab on to. Other times, it melts in my hands.

My friend Andrea and I are working through the book of Romans together and it talks a lot about hope. Look at some of chapter five:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 

Romans 5:1-2

Obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. This is a positional hope a person has when he or she responds in faith to the gospel. It’s solid, sure. It doesn’t melt away. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. What does glory mean here? It’s who he is. We rejoice in WHO GOD IS. He is our hope.

The wording of the question in the podcast, find hope, stuck with me. Can I find hope? Paul says yes. He talks about the already and not yet of hope, already possessed through the gospel and something that should be sought after and grown. But how do we do that? How do we seek hope and grow it?

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Romans 5:3-5

After Paul proclaims positional hope in the glory of God through Jesus, he then gives us action points to help cultivate hope in our day-to-day lives. We are told to endure in the faith (not give up) and to let that endurance grow our character (by living faithful lives obedient to God). Endurance produces character and character produces HOPE. How do we endure? By looking to the gospel and trusting God. How do we grow our character? By beholding Jesus above and beyond anything else in our lives, and we can behold him in scripture, prayer, and in fellowship with others.

The NIV adds the word ‘proven’ to these phrases in Romans; endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. Although my emotions my say differently on any given day, when I look back at my life, I see God’s proven faithfulness over and over again. And when I commune with God in a rhythmic way, Christ has ample opportunity to whisper these truths in my ear.

There’s hope positionally in me. And there’s hope for today.

We rejoice in our sufferings.

Romans 5:3

Is my depression, the one thing I would flick out the window as quickly as people flicked cigarette butts out of the car in the 70s, what is teaching me to hope?

Years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stomach the thought that my depression would produce hope. But as I’ve grown in my faith and in health, in the midst of freezing out the world in dark nights of the soul, crying out to God for healing, and clawing out of the pits of pain time after time, I have learned and continue to learn this:

When Jesus is all you have, you find that Jesus is all you need.

My depression is training me to hope. Suffering produces hope.

Because of Christ, I can rejoice in my achy limbs and muddied thinking. They aren’t happenstance. They have purpose in me. They stretch me to endure. They mold my character. Hope exists whether I feel it or not because hope isn’t the desire of a future want or need fulfilled, but rather Jesus Christ himself. It’s his life, death, resurrection, and pending return. And when I focus on these truths, my weary world rejoices.

Hope is a promise, not a feeling. And God, by his grace and in his great wisdom, is growing hope in me today.

And that actually is pretty thrilling.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

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None of us parents want our kids with special needs to have a life lived small. But it can happen quickly, can’t it? Evie went to basketball practice last night for special olympics and here is my confession: I didn’t want to take her.

I feared she’d get bumped by other players or upset or clobbered by the big round orange thing essential to the game. I’m often quick to assume what she can and can’t do without even providing her the opportunity to decide for herself. (Note: It’s not about ‘the can.’ The can shouldn’t be a factor. A lesson I’m clearly still working on.)

My assumptions about Evie, if not dealt with, result in a life lived small. And my bones ache at that realization. I know it’s not okay.

Sometimes on our special needs journey, I struggle with what’s known as chronic sorrow, a reoccurring swell of grief some parents experience over certain aspects of life with disability. For me, it presents like a nostalgia for a different life. A longing for a world I control and direct. But these thoughts cheapen the gracious lives gifted to us by God.

After thirteen years of parenting kids with special needs, I’m starting to understand that making decisions for my kids and “protecting” them from the big, scary world where basketballs can drop on your head are sure ways to induce the very chronic sorrow I’m trying to avoid.

So, I took her to practice and she stood and rocked and got overstimulated. She also caught and threw the basketball and made her coach chase after her passes.

I realize that trying new things isn’t easy or cookie cutter. It takes a lot of heart to branch out. There are attempts and modifications made and at the end of the day, sometimes our plans still don’t come to fruition. But there’s value in the trying. Our efforts, either failed or resulting in success, are worth it.

The simple act of walking out onto that scuffed up gym floor underneath buzzing, fluorescent lights and handing her a ball expanded us both. It only took an hour. Showing up is a big deal. An hour made more space. And it was scary and good. Because no one, disability or not, should live small.

Now, friends, here’s your assignment. What part of your life is small? Can you give an hour to expand it?

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[image error]Photo by Nick Miller on Unsplash

Years ago, my husband Sergei preached a sermon about following Jesus (OK, all of Sergei’s sermons are about following Jesus. But this one stuck out to me).

He said that a lot of us tend to follow Christ to get something out of it. We follow Jesus the life coach or Jesus the marriage counselor, or Jesus the CEO. But when God calls us to follow him, it’s not for our own glory but for his.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. – Luke 9:23

We are asked to follow, not lead, and to be fine with wherever Jesus takes us, as long as it’s with him.

Then Sergei used our kids as an example.

Often times when he runs errands, he takes a kid or two with him. Our oldest daughters, Elaina and Zoya, usually want details. “Where are we going? Is there a chance I can get some gum?” And after receiving the facts they decide whether or not they went to go. But Polly, our third daughter with Down syndrome and Moyamoya disease is always ready to go without question.

“Polly, you want to go with Papa?”

“Yes! Go with Papa! Yeah!” and she runs and gets her shoes.

Polly’s always ready to go with her father because she trusts him. She wants to be with him. She loves him.

Most of the time, Sergei is taking Polly to the grocery store or to drop off books at the library. But there have been times when he has taken her to the doctor for a shot, or even to the hospital for brain surgery. And still, when he asks his little girl if she wants to go with him, he receives a resounding yes.

“That’s how we should be with God,” Sergei said. “Whenever he asks us to go somewhere, regardless of the destination, we should answer with a resounding yes, and run and get our shoes.”

Life is bumpy. There will be more trials and struggles. But my prayer is that I will gather up my family and move closer to God in those times like the Psalmist tells us to do in Psalm 84. My prayer is that with each new day, I will trust him more and more, and that when he asks me to go somewhere I’m unsure of, I will run and get my shoes.

The Lord is great and faithful and trustworthy. Let’s be careful not to come to him for handouts, but rather, come to him in awe and appreciation of the Almighty God that he is.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. – Proverbs 3:5-6

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