Natalie Thinks

I am about to embark along with a whole lot of other people on 21 days without bread or sugar.  Read more about the initiative here.    I think perhaps one of the only ways I might actually do this is if I blog about it here.  I’ll be blogging as a very ordinary human being who is 44, a mother to 4 and leads a fairly busy, moderately healthy(?) lifestyle. The challenge has come at a favourable time for me as I had been exploring the Real Food/ Tim Noakes/ Banting/ LCHF way of eating and whilst I accept and laud the broad strokes (lots more veg, less refined stuff) I find it hard, nearly impossible in terms of time, money and taste, to follow it legalistically.  So this challenge which focusses on just sugar and wheat seems much more do-able.  I don’t have to stress about whether butternut is orange or green (banting joke). Also I find 21 days do-able.  Of course I know the goal is to change my habits and to feel so wonderful that I will turn...

7 July About 3 weeks ago I realised I was declining into a depressive episode which I wrote about in my previous blog about my chronic depression click  here  to read .  So this week I began to feel my mood lift a bit. Why? I’m so glad you asked. 1.         Well firstly I upped my medication.  I really can’t stress the importance of this enough.  As I wrote previously, depression for many people means lacking the emotional and mental will to do what needs to be done .  So even though we know all sorts of things we could do that might help, like calling a friend, going for a walk, doing a project, we feel unable to do these things.  That’s why it doesn’t work to tell depressed people to ‘do something positive’, or ‘snap out of it’.  It’s literally our ‘snapping’ function that is impaired.  Medication is really the only thing that changes this. 2.         I eased up on myself.  Th...

So… I just realised I am probably depressed and have been for some months now.  This may seem like a strange statement to make, but I am no stranger to depression, so I thought I would have recognised it straight away. I have experienced various levels of depression, on and off, throughout my life. Possibly starting around when my mom died when I was 13, but maybe preceding that time (causes and triggers are for another day). In the early years I just sucked it up and carried on.  Luckily for me I could manage like this and my depression was not severe enough to take me to darker places. Until I had two kids, and a business, and a church running from my lounge, and my father had a massive stroke.  Then I wasn’t really managing anymore, so I lay on the couch for a while and then I went to see a counsellor who finally gave me ‘permission’ to go onto medication.  She actually encouraged me to go onto anti-depressants, considering my long history of depleted se...

Definitions: Egalitarians “believe that leadership is not determined by gender but by the gifting and calling of the Holy Spirit, and that God calls all believers to submit to one another.”  In contrast , Complementarians “believe the Bible establishes male authority over women, making male leadership the standard.” Carolyn Curtis James. Imagine attending a church where half the congregation is BLACK and half are WHITE.  After a while you notice that no BLACK PEOPLE ever take up collection or make announcements; they almost never get called on to pray, they never lead worship and they never preach.  On the few odd occasions when they do speak or pray they always pray for THE LEADERS (who are white) and always encourage the other BLACK PEOPLE to submit to the LEADERS.  Imagine that when you ask some of the BLACK PEOPLE how they feel about this they say, “Oh, we’re quite happy being behind the scenes we don’t want to preach or pray up front.” Your mind boggles....

Yesterday I went to church and I did not find Jesus there. He was there, of course, but I did not see him. I was distracted by people, and songs with bad theology and sermons. This morning I was out early hanging washing, And there He was! In the thicket of trees outside my house... It was beautiful and He was there Enjoying the beauty with me. And the doves cooed, And He was there, And the wind rustled the leaves in the trees And He was there... And He brought joy. 

So after 40 years of ‘religiously’ attending church every Sunday, I find myself re-thinking how I’m going to do this church thing.     The last 10 years have made me re-envision church over and over again. Now I’m wondering whether to give up on it altogether. When we found ourselves living in a rural area, a few of us began to meet  as a small fellowship, first in our house and then in a school hall, at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon.  It was relaxed; it had that ‘ come as you are’ end of the weekend feel about it.  Then we caved to pressure and desires for growth in numbers and changed to a traditional morning meeting.  It was good, but it had that, ‘ have to get up early and get ready and nag the kids ’ kind of feeling. And then I after a total of 6 years I came down with an attack of spiritual fatigue.  The people were there, some were doing stuff, but mainly it was I who had to produce the goods week after week and whether it was a failure on...

I’ve always been aware that when I say “I don’t have time for something.” I’m not actually stating a fact, I’m stating a priority.   I don’t regard that particular thing as important enough to ‘make time’ for it.   But recently I realized that there are a few more layers to the whole issue of time management. I’ve been wanting to make time in my schedule for writing.  It’s a priority for me.  So as I’ve had free moments I’ve thought, “Now I can write!” Not so simple. These moments are frequently just when I’ve come home from a tiring day of teaching and I have an hour before I need to make a 80km round trip to fetch my son from school, knowing that when I get home I still have to cook a meal, help with homework, listen to my children’s stories, chat with my spouse and get myself and my kids to bed.  At this moment I’m tired and my body rightly tells me that I need to take this hour to have a coffee, relax and allow my body and brain some down time. Most...