“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away,

our inner self is being renewed day by day.” 2 Corinthians 4:16

 

Once upon a time I was the picture of health. I could eat whatever I wanted, travel wherever my budget and schedule allowed, and teach six or more hours a day at the ballroom dance studio. My moods were a little wobbly at times, and I got hit by insomnia on occasion. Otherwise, I didn’t give my health a lot of thought.

Suddenly, the picture changed, and I started giving my health a whole lot of thought. Sleep logs and food logs accompanied frequent visits to the phlebotomist, naturopath, and, of course, Google. That wasn’t the direction I’d planned for my story to go. It didn’t feel like it ought to be my story at all.

I suppose that’s the way it is with a lot of interesting stories. Lucy Pevensie (before she was queen of Narnia) certainly didn’t plan for hers to include a war-induced move to stay with an elderly relative in a house old enough to entice tourist parades through the halls. She must have felt something had gone awfully wrong to so dislodge her from ordinary life. Yet, in that misplaced place, she found a door into another story altogether, with a way of life and a cast of characters she’d never imagined.

 

So it was with me.

 

Only, instead of creatures with curious abilities and unexpected features—the talking beavers and fauns in the land of Narnia—I met people with an assortment of curious symptoms and unexpected limitations. I met them in the back end of the doctor’s office, all of us hooked to IVs for hours at a time, living long, hard, wintery days, losing hope that spring or even Christmas would ever come again. Hard winter had staked a claim on our bodies: problems with digestion, sleep, pain, focus, memory, and energy, all tied up with not-so-tidy bows of anxiety, depression, or both. All the expensive and tedious “cures”—IV protocols, special diets, and supplements—bringing inadequate solutions and new frosty symptoms into our Christmasless stories.

 

We shared a lot of hard stories in the IV room.

 

I bet you’ve heard a few sad health tales yourself. Perhaps someone in your circle doesn’t really look sick but is always making appointments, trying some new supplement, or bringing the latest gluten-free, dairy-free, practically food-free recipe to your family party. Health issues aren’t always food related, but you’ll notice we affected know enough about GMOs and depleted soil to suspect dietary change is the secret sauce to bring the spring thaw we’re prayerfully awaiting. So we try.

The deepest part of my dark winter limited me to white rice, chicken, beef, fish, eggs, butter, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, squash, onions, salt, and a few oils. If I stuck to those foods and spent a few hours a week hooked to IVs, my symptoms were manageable. The managing was sort of exhausting and time-consuming, and bringing my own food to eat when dining away from home was awkward. But I was grateful to have found relief from symptoms. So I counted my blessings and accepted my somewhat wintery life.

Then I learned about neuroplasticity, the limbic system, and all sorts of fearfully wonderful things about the bodies God designed for us earth people to inhabit. More to the point for me, I learned controlling the food I allowed on my plate wasn’t necessarily the dietary answer to ending my long winter.

You know the saying “Food for thought”? Well, it seems some of the thoughts I’d been subconsciously chewing and chewing on lacked the nutrition my body’s headquarters required. Instead of running the everyday systems of rest and digest, my thought fuel kept my body operating in fight-for-your-life and run-for-your-life modes. Those are just the thing when a bear happens to be tearing after a person but are overkill for a person threatened by a spoonful of sugar. That kind of vigilant attention is akin to employing a machine gun to shoo a housefly.

 

I blasted bullets every day.

 

All the live long day.

Through the nights too.

(You can imagine the dings in the furniture!)

 

In recent decades, science has made giant strides in understanding the brain. We’ve learned it isn’t hardwired in youth as once believed but retains the ability to make new neural pathways throughout our lives. We’ve learned how thoughts release chemicals that communicate whether we should operate with war or peace responses—with supplies from the ready-for-war closet (cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine) or the peacetime closet (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins). We’ve seen how extended interior war results in an array of mysterious and chronic illnesses.

If I sound like a brain nerd here, that’s what happens when a person is set free from the IV room to lie down in springy green pastures and take a seat at the lovely, full table her Good Shepherd has prepared for her. Looking back toward the IV room, I’m eager to tell friends still trapped in winter all about my new view.

You may recall I consider making connections my thing. So I’m grateful my story supplied opportunities to connect food with thought, science with Scripture, and scared and suffering people with hope and relief. Those connections are the best of the good things yielded. Things that point to the Power who brings good from every hard story this broken world can throw at us.

I created a list of resources during my journey back to health and make it available to anyone who asks. But I’ve long wished I could point the chronically and mysteriously ill to one well-organized scientific program built on the biblical principles I dug up for myself along the way. Principles like being transformed by the renewal of the mind¹ and letting the mind dwell on whatever is good, pure, honorable, and praiseworthy.² Principles like demolishing strongholds by taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ.³

I’m writing to you today because last month, I made one more good connection. I found the biblically based, brain-retraining program I’d been seeking!

If my hard story sounds a bit like yours or that of someone you know, I encourage you to click on that link and explore.

This encouragement may feel like a Narnian invitation to a mystery, but if you have enough Lucy-like courage or curiosity to step into the wardrobe, I believe you’ll find good adventure and a few kind friends at the back end of that effort to venture in. Please count me as one of those friends. I invite you to pass my story on to others, comment below, send me an email. I don’t have all the answers, but I would love to pray for you. May you be blessed to discover good things in your own hard stories.

1. Romans 12:2
2. Philippians 4:8
3. 2 Corinthians 10:5