Posts Categorized: devotional

His Response

The seasick panic of blistered seasoned
fishers of men, uncontrolled swells
smashing faith against wake
of our doubts
and you
sleep
you don’t
care for us
our fear swamping confidence
in your claim to be
I AM is rocked to asleep
By the destruction overwhelming us
Awaken to our insecurity
“Silence! Be still.”
Secure control.
Peace.


Troubled

Taken for granted, the straight A’s

Riddled with stress. Popularity

Ostracized by the lack of interest. Neither in nor out. Depression always

Underestimated by the well meaning church choir. “Isn’t he such a nice

Boy?” they sang. “Doesn’t he show such

Leadership potential?” Until you teetered on the

Edge of the unknown and revealed your spirit was already

Dead.

Look around you, is someone struggling in secret? Notice the needs of others and be a light for someone battling despair.

The Feet of Good News

“And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10:15)

 

Dear Page Turner,

My feet have good news. Faithfully, not perfectly, I have tried to grieve with hope and walk in obedience to God’s direction. After four years of grieving with hope, I am almost done with my second book, a devotional to help anyone who has just experienced a loss to suicide. 

I have also joined The Dented Fender writing team, and am developing my speaking chops so that I can share hope more effectively. I want to be fully equipped, not lacking anything. God’s love is shining into the darkness of despair, and I love getting to be a part. So many amazing things are happening, way beyond what I thought myself capable of, but with God nothing is impossible.

Four and 1/2 years ago it was painful to turn 1 page on Jonathan’s death. I have now turned over the 2007 pages. Each page has been important, even the ones I could barely turn. My initial hope, that others would be encouraged to choose life is coming to fruition. I refuse to bow to the spirit of despair. Each page, some intensely painful, have produced new joys, new discoveries, and encouragement. I look forward to sharing with you what God is accomplishing, even when we don’t understand the fullness of his purpose.

As the work on my second book is nearing the finish line you inspire me to finish strong. Writing this book has made me look back over all that God has accomplished in four years of Turning the Page on Suicide,  I am so thankful. 

I learn from each of you. Thank you for wrestling with despair and not letting the darkness have the final say! Thank you for choosing writing as your outlet to share hope. Thank you for encouraging others with poetry, stories, photography and scripture. Thank you for commenting and blessing one another with courage for each individual journey.

 

The mental health community is made up of spectacular and uniquely gifted individuals. Don’t ever underestimate the value of your words, your courage to breathe life into others, in spite of your own physical and emotional pain. If you are just getting started on turning your page on suicide, may 1 page become 2 until you look back and find a lifetime of spreading the good news, death does not have the final say. Life is worth living.

 

 

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Karisa Moore

Poetry Collection: Broken Butterflies

 

Spark of Hope in Crisis

Spark of Hope in Crisis

A spark of hope in crisis starts with a willingness to engage others. That is how my testimony of my grieving with hope started in 2014. I didn’t one of his friends going through life not knowing that they were loved, seen, and valued by me. It was all I had to offer them, but that is powerful, and enough.

 

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:12-13

Turning My Page

A chance encounter with Ginny Shepherd sparked hope in me. This petite dynamic woman has been a part of the fight against despair for a long time. The opportunity to interview her was a delight. May she inspire you to not feel helpless on either side of a crisis. We aid others in crisis through our sharing what gives us hope, as well as find the courage to press forward in our own journey through community.

Good-Bye was an opportunity to offer hope, for Ginny Shepherd, a five-year veteran of the crisis hotline in her region.

She has a long history of standing in the gap for those in crisis. Both her own family and anyone who crosses her path. Becoming a volunteer for a crisis-hotline and later a director of training, was a natural progression in her pattern of helping others.

Ginny and her siblings wrestled with many physical and emotional challenges after losing their father at an early age. This experience and its aftermath introduced her to both good and bad ways of handling trauma and depression. She was acutely aware of what worked in mental health care and what was utterly useless in helping those on the edge of suicide.

As an adult, working for many years in the education world, Ginny observed young men and women with various levels of complicated problems. She took the opportunity to listen, encourage, and find great resources of hope for her students. She often referred students to counseling, and or campus chaplains. A friendship developed with the on-campus chaplains and his wife, who were involved with the local crisis hotline.

When thinking about becoming a crisis hotline volunteer, Ginny says, “I resisted at first because I didn’t see that I had any kind of qualifications.”

Drawing on her own experience with tragedy, and help she offered her students, she thought the crisis training was at least worth exploring. “Serving as a crisis intervention worker is a great opportunity to learn about one’s ego. We become more aware of the voices inherited from our parents, family, ministers, and teachers that may not be the most helpful in being a pathway for a person in crisis to walk on. You want to serve as a bridge and conduit.  Help the caller in crisis hear what they are saying and know they are being listened to. They are seen as a valuable person.”

Working a crisis hotline is not for everyone. Becoming aware of strengths and weaknesses is essential. “We learned the difference between empathy,” what we strive to practice, “and sympathy, defined as a negative emotion for a crisis worker. With empathy, one is, shoulder to shoulder with the caller, sort of at their side. With sympathy the tendency is sort of looking down on the caller. Training gave volunteers the opportunity to work out the bugs in their vocabulary.

We were not supposed to use the pronoun “you”, but it was easy to slip into giving the caller a to-do list.

 For the fixer, it takes reprogramming responses to someone in crisis. 

“Boy, we had excellent training,” Ginny declared. Professional psychologist, hospital workers, police and men, and women working the crisis phones for many years, equipped the trainees with confidence to stand in the gap for those in crisis. Much of the training involved role-playing. The trainer would take on the role of a caller, and the volunteer would respond. “We were taught to respect the place the caller is in. “And for heaven’s sakes, no judgments, and no guilt, no coercive language, no manipulation language, just trying to help the caller clarify in his or her mind what was going on. Clear away the static. When you are in a crisis, your blood pressure goes up, and your head feels like it’s pounding. It’s hard to think. 

So much of the beginning of a crisis call is calming a person down by reassuring and listening.

Anyone in crisis, particularly the young, have so many thoughts and feelings jumbling around in their mind. They are not used to someone listening to them.” Once she began answering the crisis lines, regular in-service training increased her understanding of clients. The collaboration refreshed Ginny in the everchanging nature of the calls received.

Callers were not always someone you would sit across from and enjoy a coffee chat, Ginny explained. Learning to treat all callers as valuable took a lot of training. The crisis organization brought in a local director of a battered women’s shelter to help the volunteers understand and address the unique dynamics of domestic violence calls. Ginny learned that in domestic violence situations often the batterers are in as much internal pain as they inflict on their spouse. “That was a revelation to me.” She went on to say, one of the miracles of life is that God does love all, and that capacity of of offering the spark of hope in crisis is very difficult to achieve.

To spark life in desperate situations takes practice, accountability, and flexibility.

Ginny feels she received all of these gifts through the speakers and experts in the field.

Traumatic calls ranging from suicide threats, domestic violence to pedophiles and everything in-between are bound to take a toll on the strongest of volunteers, but Ginny credits her five-years service to the training received. The initial training always emphasized, you’re not here to tell people what to do, you are not here to solve their problem, you’re here to listen and to hold up that person so he or she can believe that they have the chance to solve their problem. Effectively, Ginny’s job was to give control over their problems, back to the caller. We practiced active listening. Reflecting to the caller what we hear them saying.

And if you get it wrong?

“Don’t worry they’ll tell you.”

The goal was to help the caller to experience that moment of thinking, maybe I could or maybe I can.  As she helped the caller see they could work through their trauma, she says, “and then you cautiously lead them into a referral.

Connect them with the experts, the best possible resources.

Ginny adds, “There was always a professional on call, that if we got into a really difficult phone conversation, we could explain to the caller. I have another phone here to call someone to help me. Or, you could call someone after the phone call for help.”

She found herself in such a situation after a three-hour suicide call. “A tightrope-walking situation,” she says. The call started with just wanting someone to tell good-bye to but ended with a “well maybe I don’t need to say good-bye.” But Ginny still felt unsure, questioning if she had done all she could. She contacted the expert on-call, and he went through the call, reflecting her responses, and reassured Ginny she had done all she could to respect and offer hope to the caller.

Her recommendations to those who want to offer the spark of hope in crisis to others:

“We may fear that we don’t have the right words, but we can communicate to the person in crisis, contemplating suicide, that we see you, you are present in my life, and I care about your life.

I think all people crave to be understood and a common cry from a person is you don’t understand me. My best estimate of what to do is to say, Help me know you, help me to understand. That puts the power back into the hands of he or her who feels they have no power. Helps them to reach out on their behalf,” Ginny says.

Often call in because they feel no one in their sphere of influence understood. “You don’t know if a family member has just trodden into quicksand.” Our response should be, “Give me a chance, I’ll try.” In a call, there is always that moment where there is a spark of insight. There’s that first glimmer from them of ‘oh maybe.’ There’s a little spark of hope, and it is a very tender and tenuous moment. You wait to hear that in their voice and then tread very lightly. Ginny spent years listening for that spark, and you and I can hone the same skills.

Turning Your Page: Developing the Spark of Hope In Crisis

You may feel ill equipped to offer the spark of hope to those in crisis around you. But as Ginny shares, it does take training and practice to develop a consistent method of intervention, but there are lots of opportunities for training. Start where you are. The bottom line is that you have experiences and things in life that have torn you down and built you up. What are those, how did others help or hinder you? Utilze where you are and step into the lives of others. Sometimes the gift of your presence are all that is needed.

  • Write down the names of people in your life that have encouraged you and offered hope. Send them a note of encouragement or thanks.
  • Read 1 Corinthians 13 which is a guide for speaking life into others. What are some of the ways we can do harm to others? How can you show faith, hope, and love?
  • Write down a three minute and five minute testimony sharing what you have learned or are currently learning about hope

Lord, I need your spark of hope in my crisis. Use others to speak life when I am overwhelmed. Equip me to offer hope when I cannot see your faithfulness, promises fulfilled, or unconditional love. Amen

Develop mind, body, and spiritual resilience

When Motherhood isn’t Playing House: Living Beyond Imagination


“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

John 15:55

Dear Page Turner,

I loved holding my baby dolls as a little girl. I sat in my rocker singing them to sleep and kissing their boo-boos away.

Motherhood did not turn out as I imagined.

It has been full of pain, laughter, surprises, mistakes, and successes. But what no one prepares you for when they place that new wiggly crying baby in your arms–loss.

Why would they? How could they? Amid the balloons, gifts, cards, and celebration, life breathes fresh, expectant, and new. Hopes are not tainted by the darkness of health problems or overwhelming trauma. How do we live beyond the life imagined?

As hard as losing a child is, there is life beyond the grave. It is possible to draw the first breath, then another and another. Jesus prepared his disciples for such a new life. But they had to walk through his death first. And even though Jesus tried to prepare them, the disciples scattered in the crushing betrayal of dreams. The death of Jesus spiraled them into confusion, abruptly stopped all they planned, all they imagined. Why didn’t he fight, why did he not defend himself or call his heavenly army? Was he really the Son of God? Jesus rerouted the disciples’ lives from an earthly kingdom to a cross on Calvary. From royal court to servitude. Victory over the Romans to disgraceful defeat. There would not be a single one who sat beside Jesus’ throne.

Yet, Jesus raises all things from the dead and makes a new life out of the confusion of the grave. Here how he is making things clear to me:

  1. He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Revelation 21:5
  2. So he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Luke 7:22
  3. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people— the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel  that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.

I am learning to live vibrant beyond the grave because I know that what I experience in this life is not all there is. Jesus’ will is that none perish. The gospel is my heartbeat. I find joy and delight in the unexpected breath I now breathe more deeply because Christ is not limited by the grave my son is in.

I would not trade the joys of motherhood for an untroubled reality. I came to Christ through a child’s heartbeat, and I now breathe life into others because Jonathan, Daniel, and Natalie are a part–not the whole of my story.

Love Always,

Karisa

Life is So Worth Living

Embracing Joy in Suffering: Podcast

Turning the Page on Suicide Podcast

  • Read John 16
  • What are you currently experiencing?
  • What does Christ say about the suffering because of faith?
  • Where does our joy come from? How does it remain secure?
  • How can you embrace the joy of Christ in circumstances?
    • Jesus said he has told the disciples “these things” What things did he tell them? (Further reading starting Chapter 13)
    • Meditate upon John 16 this week

When Life Happens: Be Present

“Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, made in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7 NIV).

I am trying to post more consistently, but sometimes life happens. I found myself growing frustrated with my day yesterday as deadlines loomed and nothing I wanted done, was done. But, a much-needed commitment to my son took center stage and revealed how off my priorities had become. I was leaning towards doing, rather than being.

How easy it is to make life into a to-do list. And while checking off agendas can be a nice feeling for the moment, just like any addiction it is only a short and a temporary high that requires more and more doing. God is looking for men and women who make themselves available to those in front of them. As long as I can remember I have always looked to do big things for God. But God is teaching me to skip stones and change the waters a little at a time, in individuals, rather than making a splash in the crowd.

So as I watched my son race around a track with his friend, I realized the depth of importance this moment has. Daniel needs solid friendships, he needs experience, and he needs to know his life is valued. My time with this growing young man is fleeting and what I do for and with Daniel and his sister matters. Turning the Page on Suicide is a big deal and I love the unique details of your purpose and lives dear reader. But speaking life into my children has far bigger implications because we are face to face, day in and day out.

Who is in front of you Page Turner? How can you spend time with them? Be intentional to speak life into their circumstances? Lean into Christ’ purpose for all you encounter.

It can be easy for us to look for opportunities to do and miss out on being present, right where God plants us. Christ was very good at being present with those in front of him. Notice his habits, where he positioned himself and who he spent time with.

  • temple
  • streets
  • meals
  • homes (rich and poor)
  • outcast camps
  • boat
  • road (Can you imagine how many saddles he wore out)
  • wells
  • market place

So excuse me if I have moments of catch up, but I am being with my children, and what a delight to speak God’s life into them.

The Importance of Being Present
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  • Devotionals post every Tuesday at 7 pm
  • Poetry posts every Thursday at 7 pm
Suicide & Prevention Hotline

National Suicide Hotline

If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call the National Suicide Lifeline at 988 or go to the website at https://988lifeline.org/