As I sit in an AirBnb in North Platte, Nebraska and contemplate setting to work composing the second part of my "Gashena Mache" series of blogs, I'm struck by just how much of my life has been about committing to follow through....
...and how much time I spend insisting that other people ALSO demonstrate a commitment to it. Lol.
It's kind of a thing with me and, as such, one of the pop anthems on the soundtrack to my life is undoubtedly Gavin Degraw's song of the same name. 😊
"Oh, this is the start of something good, don't you agree?"
The song is only 18 years old but I feel like that opening line has been with me all throughout my life and it sort of plays like a notification tone in my head (like the kind that announces you've received a new text message on your phone!) anytime anything of importance presents itself.
I even have a video of me singing this very song at a karaoke night during a birthday party that one of Zach's colleagues had had back when we were dating.
Unbeknownst to him, it was the song I had decided to propose to him while performing (and yes, the link to that video is your reward if you read all the way to the end of this blog)!
I guess it isn't totally outlandish that I'd feel the way I do about this particular lyric from this particular song. After all, some people say that the Holy Spirit comes to us followers of Jesus like "a still small voice".
Why then wouldn't He opt to come to me via pop song lyrics? Lol!
It's kind of fun when the Holy Spirit utilizes the Billboard charts to communicate with you but it's a little unsettling when He utilizes less common methods; the type no one really hears about Him using much anymore.
Like when He takes a page out of the Acts 2 playbook and chooses to come to you through another language... like Bulgarian... and then makes you a recommendation for a homeopathic remedy to your mother's newly diagnosed renal cell carcinoma!
Yep. Unsettling. Lol.
Who in the world would've thought that back when I committed myself to be someone who transparently documents their faith journey back in 2005 that I'd *ever* wind up typing THAT combination of words?
No one. Lol.
No one but God, that is.
And I like to think that it's because He saw that first composition I penned as a newly out to himself gay 24 year old and, in response, sang to Himself a little Gavin Degraw (not unlike how He did as He proclaimed His satisfaction with His creation in Genesis 1).
𝄞"Oh, this is the start of something good, don't you agree?" 𝄞
And normally when I've felt God's Spirit serenade me with that line (like I serenaded Zach on the night I proposed!), I've been in full agreement and could answer, "Yes, God! This DOES feel like the beginning of something good!"
But as I stared at the image on the computer screen for search results of the interpretation of "Gashena Mache" and processed what it contained (see below), I'll be honest. This time? It felt more like the beginning of something... that was going to land me in a psychiatric ward. Lol!
Let me just break here to say that if you're reading this blog and have absolutely NO clue what I'm talking about, lol, you need to go back and read the entry preceding this one titled "Gashena Mache VS The Myth Of More Easily Summoned Demons".
You'll still think I'm weird after you read it but at least you'll be on the same page. 👍
Obviously, I couldn't keep this to myself.
It very much felt like a moment that you either respond to (in faith) or else regret you didn't respond to later in retrospect.
I know very little but one thing I *do* know - I didn't want regret being a factor when the subject matter was the health and well-being of my mother; the person whose friendship I had possessed the longest of anyone's!
But before I started confiding in people - even just one or two! - what I was experiencing I decided that I needed verification.
Luckily, I happen to know a book containing lots of characters who at many different junctions throughout history found themselves ALSO asking God for verification. 😉
For example, there's a story in the Old Testament about a man named Gideon.
Gideon's claim to fame is that he was a reluctant military leader during a time in Israel's history where they were being aggressed by a people known as the Midianites.
The Israelites were always getting detained in one way or another from experiencing the best that God had for them. Lol.
That's what you'll quickly realize if you start a beginner's course studying the Old Testament.
In Judges 6, they've been out from under the enslavement of Pharoah in Egypt for awhile and have been nomadically wandering in the wilderness trying to get the hang of being self-governed.
Moses is dead & they're kind of just in this place where instead of one iconic leader that they take all their directions from, they take their cues from various descendants of the sons of Jacob - their common ancestor.
One such descendant is Gideon who gets put up on a pedestal during a time in Israel's history where they had taken to dwelling in caves in the cliffs near Gaza.
Cave dwelling was en vogue at this point in Israel's narrative because it provided quality shelter high up in the mountains over the fields that they farmed... the one down side?
The afore-mentioned Midianites.
This clan was the thorn in Israel's flesh during this particular era because they didn't take kindly to nomads. Especially nomads who were faithful to a competing religion.
The Midianites expressed their dislike for the Israelites by waiting until they retired to their caves in the evenings to journey over and pillage their fields and kill their livestock as they slept.
Not very neighborly. Especially considering that their former leader, Moses, married a Midianite chick!
This wasn't just some foreign tribe terrorizing them; it was their inlaws. LOL!
As you read about Gideon, you don't exactly get the picture that he was auditioning for the role he ended up playing in the back and forth between his tribe and the Midianites.
Seems upon first glance that he's just a guy... a guy who was born into a nomadic life... who threshes wheat... believes that God has a working order for the universe... loves his family and countrymen... hopes that they eventually incorporate God's plan more fully into their daily lives and existences but beyond that?
Not a guy out looking to have the spotlight shine down on him.
And then one day while he's out working the fields he spots... an angel... sitting under an oak tree.
I think that as I process a lot of what has been happening to me in my faith journey that I understand some of what Gideon's conversation with that angel was about. Lol.
This angel tells Gideon that God is aware of Midian's constant destruction raining down on them *&* he tells Gideon that God expects him to "Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand..." - (Judges 6:14).
It would appear from this brief exchange that one thing is obvious - when we expect salvation, God expects follow through once He provides it.
I'll say that again. Lol.
God. Expects. Follow Through.
Not only does He expect it, but He provides the strength (according to Gideon's angel, lol) we need to secure it...
...when your neighbors & loved ones are being vandalized as they sleep the night away in a cave...
...when the love of your life is sitting in a karaoke bar and you suddenly know it's the right moment to propose...
...when your mom has kidney cancer and you want God to know you'll be a channel through which she can find some relief if He wants you to be...
God looks at all our situations across the vast swath of time and space and responds consistently with not JUST love but with an opportunity to exercise faith.
𝄞"Oh, this is the start of something good..." 𝄞 😊
And because God is love, He knows that we need reassurances...
If you keep reading the story of Gideon, he asks God for LOTS of signs that he's hearing the message correctly and that he isn't just losing his mind.
First, (randomly, lol) he hurries to his house on an ingredient run and when he returns to the oak tree? He has the angel prove he's legit by using its staff like a giant point and click Bic lighter to cook some sort of random OT goat casserole (sidebar: this is my favorite part of the story, lol)!
He does a couple of different experiments using the fleece from a sheep, lol.
And when all else fails, Gideon out and out says to God, "Pardon me??? (Judges 6:15).
Like I said, lol, living through the last several months? I can relate.
But Gideon got a real, live ANGEL who HAND DELIVERED a message about God's intent for him to facilitate the rescue of his family and friends!
I?
I practiced praying in tongues (on something of a whim) for ten years and got a Google search results page that seemed to suggest I'd been repeating a phrase in Bulgarian that indicated I needed to get my mom some catnip to treat her cancer! LOL!
Care to trade, Gid? 'Cuz I think I'd trust my faculties a bit more following an actual angel visitation than from sitting in the dark in front of my laptop being redirected to the website for Vitamin Shoppe. #justsayin
One thing that I don't see Gideon doing as I consider the parallels between his follow through and mine?
I don't see him divulging the details.
Gideon didn't take to the internet to announce to everyone that an angel had shown up, tasked him with scoring a military victory & then thrown together some stew with ingredients from the kitchen.
He didn't tell a soul that they'd talked about God's plans for him to become a conquering leader who would flex Israel's muscles to take down the Midianites. Lol.
Gideon just figured out a way to get the ball rolling towards the objective God had told him that He wanted him to accomplish.
And I know I'm writing about it now in detail but initially?
I kept my supernatural game plan to myself just like Gideon did.
And it was a relief to not have to explain anything to anyone, if you want to know the truth. Lol.
The last thing that I wanted to do was figure out a way to sit down with my mom at their dining room table... she on her side and me on mine... and tell her, "Mom, I've been maintaining a practice of saying prayers in some other language and your announcement that you have kidney cancer got me curious as to whether or not they contained insights into things we're supposed to do to facilitate a good outcome for you!"
The funny thing is my Mom is a Sunday school teacher... lol!
She is probably the first person I ever heard the story of Gideon from back when I was growing up and she's probably taught it to countless other children over the years... and she's certainly no stranger to the story of the Apostles collectively praying in tongues together at Pentecost, either.
Not to mention, mom and I have a standing arrangement where we both know we can tell each other just about anything... even if it's difficult...
I'd certainly had to tell her difficult things in the past.
Things I knew would not be easy for her to have to process.
Things like, "Mom, I'm gay."
Things like, "Mom, I met someone."
Or things like, "Mom, I'm getting married."
Because I know how both of my parents feel about gay relationships, those three things had all been extremely tough to admit.
But every time I had ever gone to her with something that I envisioned her struggling to bear the weight of? I walked away from the conversation letting the Holy Spirit sing the refrain to me again like an inside joke meant to reassure me...
𝄞"Oh, this is the start of something good..." 𝄞
It was His way of telling me He loved her more than what even I did; that He was going to stay close to her as she made her peace with whatever non-traditional way her son Nick was going to start pursuing living more authentically.
But this time?
This time felt like it needed to be different.
You can be true to a changed up prayer routine without anyone ever being the wiser.
You can't seek out healthy relationships... or date... without having to own and be open about the fact that you're something other than what others believe you to be.
Therein lies the difference.
Prayer works well in closets.
Honesty about one's sexual orientation requires one come out of the closet. Lol.
And so I decided...
Mom didn't need to be burdened with all the worries I knew she tended to let rent space in her brain each time I'd share some new thing with her re: my journey towards the non-traditional manifestations of my Christian faith.
Not when there was a kidney cancer diagnosis.
Not when I'd already told her I'd be praying.
That in and of itself, I knew, was the piece of information that mattered the most to her.
And as I considered Gideon, I realized - he didn't "come out" about his experience with the angel before setting to work doing what it was that needed done.
He kept his self doubt to himself, got the verifications he needed and just set to work!
And so would I.
I found the following articles that anecdotally made reference to a compound in catnip thought to have a positive impact on renal cell carcinomas.
These articles were my angel-simmered goat stew and my dry fleece on the ground.
They were all I needed to feel justified placing an order for a bottle of catnip. Lol.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i46/Catnip-Fuels-Route-Cancer-Killer.html/
&
( https://guardian.ng/features/local-plant-cures-kidney-breast-lung-cancers/ ) <---this article doesn't mention catnip by name but does talk in detail about how plants similar to catnip contain the compound "Englerin-A" which is believed to destroy cancers of the kidneys.
I messaged my mom that she was going to be getting some supplements in the mail, lol, and that I wanted her to promise me she'd ask her doctor if there was any good reason why she shouldn't start to proactively take them as we waited for her surgery day to have the carcinoma removed.
And, boy, did we WAIT.
Mom was diagnosed in August and didn't have her surgery until the end of November; the week of Thanksgiving.
I'd routinely message mom while running sleep studies at night as I worked at various hospitals across Kansas and Nebraska, "...did you ask your doctor yet about the supplements? Does she think there'd be any harm in taking them?"
And I'd pray as I drove from 'berg to 'berg... both for mom's comfort to be intact and for God to impress upon her the need to ask her doctor about making the supplements a part of her routine.
For. Three. Months.
Why?
Because I wanted to believe that it wasn't just all coincidental.
I wanted to believe that Jesus and His intentional supernatural interventions in our lives were as REAL as what the faith communities of my youth spent all their energies reinforcing to me that Satan and his interventions in our lives were!
Re-read the first part of this blog if you need to; the bottom line is that when we are talking about Jesus vs Satan? Satan's accessibility over Jesus is a MYTH. He is not the omnipresent entity. He is not the entity with more power.
He's just the entity we're often, irrationally, more impressed with. Even if we insist we aren't.
We are all products of contemporary Christianity and, as such, have been led to believe Satan generally gets more victories on his side of the score board.
But for this head to head???
This wasn't going to be Nick bandaging up his hands in fear of Satan having a chance to do something evil while I slept at night.
THIS was going to be Nick trying to respond in faith to Christ and believe that His consistent character meant that He intended to do something miraculous while I watched with eyes wide open.
The first was - intentional or not - what I was raised to believe devoted Christians occupied their time doing.
Watching out for Satan and warning others to watch out for him, too!
The second was what I *hoped* would prove to be what Christians should be doing instead; elevating intentional interactions with Christ and the Holy Spirit over fear of falling prey to the devil.
It's a complex thing to try to communicate but I think that what all of this has taught me is that the Christian faith can't prioritize equally 1.) an awareness of supernatural evil that yields supernatural destruction AND 2.) an access to supernatural strength intended to be harnessed and used in the pursuit of defeating said evil.
One has to be constantly superior to the other.
A lot of people like to say that America lost touch with its "Christian roots" when prayer was eliminated from the public school day... or abortion was legally backed for decades... or gay people began to own who and what they were and insisted that their attractions didn't make them mentally ill...
But it's NONE of those things.
The thing that has handicapped Christianity in America (& the world, really) is that its practitioners have switched to a mindset that equates sharing faith in Christ with being hypervigilant about the devil and his schemes to entrap you.
And when you hype up Satan and his every victory... and talk more about how he is "winning the battle for America's soul" with every movie or tv show that comes out that contains anything you find objectionable?
That reduces your faith to something very small and puny... and altogether worthless in pursuits like acquiring a victory over cancer.
You won't ever be able to harness the faith needed to believe God intends to save your mom from kidney cancer by sitting around listening to Pat Robertson tell you that your rummage sale finds might need to be purified of demonic entities.
Sidebar: He actually said this! One of America's leading evangelical minds wants you to be on the lookout for demons in your tupperware! THAT is how off track we are at equipping believers in Jesus to anticipate leading lives of victory over evil.
"It couldn't hurt anything to pray over those items." Pat says.
Actually, Pat, it can.
It can reinforce a message that God isn't powerful enough to protect you from the things that YOU don't make an effort to ASK Him to protect you from.
And that message is crippling to faith.
In fact, that message is one that inadvertently promotes the idea that I'm not safe without my efforts.
And Jesus is all about us realizing our efforts are actually what doom us and that His efforts are the ones that both save us and allow us to flourish.
You won't ever experience Jesus' power over Satan by sitting around believing you're called to be Satan's punching bag until one day when Christ comes back to rapture you.
That is not, in my belief, how God expects us to be using our time.
"All we can do is pray" should be a phrase that gives us unprecedented hope - not one we find ourselves saying in a tone of voice that reveals profound doubt.
And in my case, whether my mom took her catnip supplements or not, I was becoming addicted to feeling empowered for once as all this logic finally started to surface within me!
I was beginning to be able to believe God wanted to be more involved than what some faction of my faith community would ever permit themselves to believe.
Because in their paradigm God's blueprint for our time together on this earth is to bear witness to "...things just getting worse and worse all the time."
In my soul, with "Gashena Mache" as my mantra? I think I transitioned into that rarest of things... a Christian who was fed up... ready to stand up in the face of adverse circumstances and pronounce all this perpetual helplessness as being what it truly was - bullshit.
I was ready to "...step up to destiny to start changin' it, just to play with it, rearrangin' it..." 😊
Both the affliction and the watered down religious experience that church goers (for as long as what I can remember!) appeared to want me to believe represented my best hope for resolution was NOT going to cut it anymore.
I was beginning to see and make my peace with the fact that Christianity is a powerful faith but that in today's world (much like Judaism in the time of Christ!) it had become a misery inducing religion.
I was so afraid that embracing all this profoundly beautiful PROMISE & POSSIBILITY was going to make me look and sound insane that I forgot the textbook definition for what "insanity" ACTUALLY was - doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results!
What is religion if not doing the same thing over and over again?
And does it get results?
Not if you audit the typical American adherent to the faith! They're constantly victimized.
Just ask them!
If you ask most people of faith how their lives are going these days, one song lyric that they probably won't reference is the one that I've utilized ad nauseum in the authoring of this blog.
You're not going to hear them describe their circumsta'nces as "...the start of something good."
Most Christian people will tell you straight up how bad their lives are and invite you to wallow in that reality with them while pretending that their alleged faith gives them some sort of infecund upper hand.
And what is the point of having an upper hand if its infecund???
The "Follow Through" for most people after they answer God's invitation to them to give Jesus their lives is to just be Satan's doormat.
An angel didn't visit Gideon so that he could manifest that type of surrender.
And God wasn't speaking to me about all of this and chiseling away at my heart on these matters so that *I* could either.
Not when it was my mama.
I was going to learn about whatever long neglected piece of the puzzle I had to... whether or not any church approved of its modern day usage OR approved of an attempt by someone like me (who called themselves both gay and Christian) attempting to harness its power to effect change.
If all of what I was experiencing was real? It was meant to be put into practice... consistently & confidently.
I was feeling a proper volume of rage at western Christianity in general as I worked through all this, lol.
So much so that I randomly exploded one night while over at my mother and father-in-law's house.
It's funny to me now as I recall it but in the moment I was just so furious.
We had all gathered around the television just to watch whatever was on after dinner and a commercial came on for a reality show called something like "1,000 Pound Identical Sisters".
This was not the commercial I needed to see as I processed my rage at American Christianity's inability to help people do something other than embrace defeat.
LOL!
Because, really, what says you've embraced defeat more than symbiotically gaining 1,000 pounds with your sibling and then letting a camera crew into your home to document your shared, self imposed hardships?
*poor Zach and Janet and Clarence, lol**
I'm sure none of them had any idea what had set me off but I lost it.
"For the love of EVERYTHING holy! JUST LIVE YOUR LIVES, ladies!" I screamed at the television, begging them to get up off their shared XL cots and be the very type of victorious Christians we all needed to see portrayed more commonly.
Those sisters were for me in that moment the representation of everything wrong with the world!
An embrace of dysfunction.
A surrender to defeat.
It. Was. Infuriating.
The Bieghlers, I'm sure, all exchanged glances between one another and probably hypothesized that my anxiety medications needed to be adjusted. Lol.
The three month wait for mom's surgery day had definitiely taken its toll.
Gideon may not have confided in anyone that he had become reliant on a supernatural element to help him reinstate victorious living into the lives of his kin and countrymen... but I?
I had reached the place where I had to.
And on the drive home from Hutchinson with Zach, I did.
I thought it was going to be the beginning of revealing a side of myself that would lead him to believe he'd married someone unstable; someone he'd be uncertain as to if he ever really even knew!
Letting Zach in on the details of all I'd been experiencing felt like it teetered on the brink of violating one of the vows I'd made to him when we got married.
On September 3, 2016 I had stood in a park in Hutchinson, KS surrounded by a large group of friends and family and I'd promised him a long list of things including the following...
"...I vow to you that I will remain rooted in Jesus; the Source of all knowledge and literally the ONLY thing that I truly revere... that I will always be a portal through which you can look and find access to Him... but I also vow that you will not be my 'project'... If God wants to talk to Zach Bieghler, I will celebrate it and encourage it but I will not for a moment be so prideful as to think that I am the one who is supposed to facilitate it."
I've always known that Zach and I are on different journeys, spiritually speaking.
I believe that those journeys have the same destination but that Jesus is obviously taking him a different route than what He's taking me.
I grew up one way. Zach grew up another.
I think that at the end of our lives we will together represent a very complex testimony of how Christ finds different people at different times and in different circumstances and leads them into the same, exact reconciliation with Him.
And the reason I believe this is because I feel confident that Jesus enjoys authoring stories that are not carbon copies of one another. 😊
With that said, when Jesus MERGES two storylines into one - the way that I believe He has with Zach and myself - there's going to be times when you feel like you struggle to get on the same page.
The night that I decided to let Zach in on my "Gashena Mache" experience (and open up to him about some of the things I was going through in my spiritual life) was a night where I had to exercise faith that his story and mine were ready to fuse together in a way that they never had before.
I remember wondering - if I let myself be transparent with him, would he feel like I was forcing him to cover ground spiritually that he wasn't ready to cover yet?
Would I be instigating a conversation that would make him feel pressured to undergo some spiritual growth that he wasn't ready to undergo?
Would that not be a violation of something I'd vowed on my wedding day never to do to him?
It all weighed very heavy.
Shortly after I blew up at the promo for the 1,000 Pound Sisters, lol, Zach suggested we get home to Kingman.
On the way home, he began to tell me about some neck and shoulder pain he'd been having.
This was something he'd told me about before and that I knew that he occasionally struggled with but on this particular night and on this particular car ride home, I don't know... I guess that instead of hearing my mate voice some familiar concerns and deciding that I was powerless to do anything about it other than "just pray", I instead honed in on the Holy Spirit sounding the old familiar beacon call in the voice of Gavin Degraw.
𝄞"Oh, this is the start of something good..." 𝄞
It wasn't time anymore for prayers that carried an undertone of doubt and defeat...
It was time for actual Follow Through. 😊
"Would it be weird if... since we're just driving for the next 40 minutes anyway... I said some of my Super Deluxe-O prayers for you?" I asked him.
Zach cracked a smile.
"Like the kind you prayed under your breath the entire way back to shore when we tipped the jet ski on our honeymoon in Miami Beach?" he replied.
"Yeah..." I said, remembering that one of the only other times Zach had ever heard me pray in tongues was after I had been flailing aroud in the Atlantic Ocean, convinced that if I didn't get back on our shared jetski that I was doomed to become lunch for an orca.
" I guess that'd be ok," he said. "What exactly happens when you're doing this?"
"Usually," I began to answer, "I just set a timer... say for 8 minutes... and I tell God that I have faith that the Spirit He put within me when I asked Jesus to live in my heart REALLY does live there... and that I believe that He has insights into things I need to pray for and about HOW to pray for them that I don't have... and that I want Him to pray for those things on my behalf in a way that will yield results that actually change things... even if it's in a language I don't understand."
"So, instead of trusting in yourself to say the best prayer possible you're basically saying you're giving God permission to say it for you?" Zach asked.
I remember being blown away by that question.
Here I'd been doubting that Zach was going to be able to follow me down what felt like it might be my own personal trail towards eventually being a resident in a mental institution!
And, delightfully, he didn't question my sanity at all after I'd initiated an invitation for him to participate.
In fact, he had been able to summarize it in a way that showed the ability to understand and *be* a participant.
I stuttered.
"That... that's it exactly, actually."
"I guess that that'd be ok. I mean, what could it hurt?" he said.
What happened next has become one of my favorite memories of me and my guy. 💓
Zach and I have done a lot of awesome things together in the almost nine years since I met him.
We've eaten lots of good meals... had countless laughs... traveled together on trips everywhere from Austin to Virginia Beach to Seattle to the Yucatan and at least a dozen others!
But I honestly mean it when I say that those eight minutes in that truck, traveling south on Highway 17 with no other lights than the ones coming off the dashboard... and no other sound than the hum of the engine and me nervously chattering away in my prayer language as I reached over to place a hand on the back of Zach's neck... those? Those were 8 of the most awesome minutes I've ever shared with another human being. 😊
And I feel confident that Zach realized the importance of the moment as well because there was a lot of of followup conversation about it! LOL!
The Follow Through had started.
I wasn't sure if my mom's surgery was going to turn out ok... if she'd even feel led to twist open that bottle of supplements I'd ordered her... or if it ultimately even mattered.
However ANY of that all turned out, I felt confident God had set me on a path to the next destination He had for me to experience spiritually...
And He was making me brave enough to keep my eyes faced forward with no looking back allowed.
Like Gideon... fresh from having everything verified that he needed to have verified and ready to follow through with what needed to happen next.
Blog readers, I HATE to do this but there's simply still too much of this story to tell!
I've taken a month to write the second part of this entry and I feel like I need ANOTHER month to write a third segment.
I've got a lot left to say and I want time to put it all together in the way that it deserves to be assembled.
I hope you'll bear with me... because I believe "...the story isn't over if the story isn't good."
For now, here's the promised video footage from the night I proposed to the guy who is on this crazy journey of faith with me.
It all started with this song!
And it's still something that I agree is the "start of something good." 💗
https://www.facebook.com/507761836/videos/10153152921071837/
