Rick Beeman

  Yesterday was intense.  I did not like it.  I can remember the moments in my life where I just stopped and sobbed.  It was surreal because it just doesn’t happen that often.  I felt truly broken while at the same time comforted because God knew ahead of time of how I would feel.  Now you might call that chance encounter I had, a coincidence. You can almost decry any Act of God as a coincidence.  I chose NOT to do so.  If God knows the numbers of hairs on my head (Matthew 10:30) and collects my tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8).  Surely he must care when I am broken in spirit. Yesterday I was truly broken.   I do miss my family.  But God promises that He heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3).  That is what I am counting on.  I just have to realize the healing may not come overnight as much as I want it to.  It could be days weeks/months/years.  I have to be prepared for it.  This is...

  I have been writing quite a bit lately about the confounding peace that I am experiencing in the midst of all the unhappiness. I am quite surprised by it all even as I experience brief moments of joy and happiness.  I am trying to keep this all in perspective as I know that there will be good days and bad days and a lot of Blah days.  Today was a bad day.  I’m just really discouraged.  I know intellectually that I’ll get through it and tomorrow will be a better day.  But right now I’m just down.  I can’t do anything to fix my situation or make it better and that is the frustrating part of it all.  The only thing I can do is just not make it any worse and endure.  I have found a good strategy when these moods come upon me (other than the obvious with a lot of prayer and praise) is to call it a day and go to sleep early.  That surprisingly has been quite effective.  Yet at 8:41 pm as I write this, I just can’t bring myself to go to ...

  I am getting comfortable sitting in my discomfort. I was able to make it out today to go exercise after nearly 2 days of being iced in.  For my fear of abandonment issues and my distaste of being alone, I managed fairly well.  I actually had a few moments of joy thrown in there as well.  I have to slowly retrain my brain into my new reality.  I don’t want to embrace it but I also don’t want to mope around for the rest of my life. Feeling sorry for yourself only traps you further into the muck of despair and discontent.  Instead of fighting for yesterday I am attempting to embrace tomorrow.  Along the way I have to be at peace for today.  It’s all a bit poetic but it seems to be working little by little.  I am living out the serenity prayer in real time.  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.  With a few setbacks every now and then, I’...

  It’s been such a strange, different and wonderful day. I remember getting the impression last night as I went to sleep that tomorrow was going to be a good day.  Sometimes God speaks to me to warn me of impending difficult days or impending good days.  Most of the time these thoughts or feelings turn out to be accurate.  But I scoffed at this notion.  How could it be possibly be a good day?  I was alone with the prospect of being snowed in for the entire day with everything around me closed or at least I thought it was closed. Last night I drove around Raleigh around 8 pm looking to buy eggs.  I couldn’t find any.  Either the stores were closed or they were out of eggs, bread and milk.    I slept in, and kept sleeping and stayed in bed for another two hours.  Normally on a Sunday I get up for church but church was all online today.  So i stayed in bed until I felt somewhat slothful.  I got up and my street was blank...

  It’s been a rough couple of days for me. Nothing much has changed.  However, the grief seems to come in waves.  This time it was accompanied by sorrow.  I think the impending winter storm was a reminder to me that I’m on my own.  My core fear is the fear of abandonment (which I’ve learned from lots of therapy) and right now I’m feeling it.  I know that God has never will ever abandon me as he promised “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”  (Hebrews 13:5 and a few other places).  So I’m relying on that promise to see me through this time.  I know this period of sorrow is temporary and I’m not over reacting to it.  Instead I’m trying to do something different.  Normally when we feel pain we want to fix it immediately or as soon as we can.  But this emotional/psychological pain is different.  I can’t fix it immediately.  I know I can’t fix my situation, I can only make it worse.  So I’m trying to do something ...

  Is it possible to have a good week and a horrible week at the same time? Is it possible to filled with grief/dread while also being filled with Hope simultaneously. Sometimes I am a living, breathing, walking dichotomy.  I feel as if I’m a locomotive riding the rail of sorrow on my left and and a rail of peace on my right.  It doesn’t make any sense.  It’s been a very difficult week but I’m trying not to over react.  Some people have questioned my motives in writing this blog.  I’m not trying to elicit sympathy nor am I trying to win in the court of opinion. It reminds me of when I wrote in the original iteration of this blog when I lived in Bahrain.  I had a reader that started disputing my notions of God.  So we went to Fuddrucker’s to meet and talk.  Instead of an argument of who is the true God Allah or Jehovah, I instead talked about what is wrong with me and what is right with my God.  This so disarmed him that he started regular...