On Losing My Joy

These last two years have been two of the hardest years of my life. I'm not saying this to complain, only to preface my return to blogging. In the last two years I have transitioned from being single to being married; during the same time period, I have also transitioned from being a student to being a full-time pastor. Either one of these transitions by itself is a lot to get used to, but both together are like smoking a joint after drinking a 12 pack of beer, no matter how much you think you can handle it you will find it hard to keep your feet under you.

Now don't hear me wrong, I love my wife very much and I am not writing this to bemoan being married. Marriage certainly has a way of showing a person just how selfish and self-serving he really is, and then grinding down those rough edges, but there's nothing better than knowing that no matter what happens in the course of the day you can look forward to snuggling your sweetie as the two of you fall asleep together at the end of the day.

However, the transition from private Bible college to full-time pastoral ministry in a small town in Southern Illinois has been a hard one. I have recently, within the last month, come to the realization that in attempting to make this transition I have lost my joy.***

One of the ways I have come to this realization is that I have found that I no longer enjoy most of the things that I used to. In the course of these last two years I have quit running entirely for almost a year (something I dearly love), quit riding and sold my motorcycle (something I dearly loved), quit reading theology (something I dearly loved), and just generally lost all hope for anything good to come of life all together. When I'm not working, I'm either escaping into my Xbox (not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself), eating, watching TV, or sleeping.

I have also found that my temper has gotten shorter and shorter. Now, I inherited my temper honest, and for as far back as I can remember I have let it fly when things have pissed me off. Even when I was little I would break toys if they pissed me off. But my temper has always been directed at inanimate objects. I may punch a wall, sling a pair of channel lock pliers across the yard, or cuss a blue streak at the lawn mower, but I've never directed that temper at other people, let alone people I care about. In these last few months I've found myself losing my temper with my sweet wife (not as far as punching her or throwing her across the yard, just being a grouch at her) and this really bothers me.

I've also swelled up like sequined jump-suit Elvis. The clothes that fit when I moved here don't fit anymore. I've always been up and down with my weight, but when I was 20 I topped out at 230 pounds. That was an eye opener so I started doing weight watchers and running and lost almost 60 pounds in the course of a summer. Now I put some of that weight back on, but I hadn't been up over 200 pounds since then. Until moving down here, that is. Back in January I forced myself on to a scale and saw that I was close to 220 pounds. Not good, dude, not good at all.

I know the symptoms I am describing probably line up well with depression, and given the disproportionate amount of time in the last two years I've spent sitting alone in a quiet empty room, sighing deeply and feeling totally empty, that's probably exactly what it is. What I want to do with these next few blog posts is to take a look at how I got here, and how I am going to go forward, in the hopes that maybe some of you out there in blogoworld might benefit from reading what I'm writing.

***Now here's the good news, after realizing that I have lost my joy, I have been taking steps to get it back. I started walking in the morning and listening to one of my favorite series of books on my iPod back in July, and now I have built back up to running a little over 2 miles a day (hoping to get that closer to 5 come spring). I'm gradually losing weight, getting closer to that 200 pound mark and hoping to get back towards 185 by next year. Most importantly, I am realizing that I am not trapped in this place or in this line of work, and that has been liberating. So all in all things are looking up!

Coming soon...The first step towards losing one's joy: jamming a square peg in a round hole.