Bi-Polar Bears

Can I just vent for a moment here? Because He must think we can handle them, God has sent our church several women who have Bi-Polar disorder. If you don’t know anything about this illness, it’s characterized by extreme highs which then swing to extreme lows.

In the beginning, it was extremely easy to deal with. In fact, the first woman that we were aware of was one of the hardest workers and founding members of our plant church. We always saw her “up” and happy. There would be month-long stretches where she wouldn’t make it to church and her family would tell us that she was home with a “headache”. Then she would suddenly show back up again. We didn’t know there was actually a legitimate issue until my husband was asked by her to help her deal with a marital issue. It was here that we found out she had bi-polar disorder… and we did our best to love her through it all.

The year her middle daughter graduated from high school, her youngest graduated from middle school. She was under a ton of stress planning parties and she was also upset about the wording of something in the bulletin that week. She showed up after youth group one night and, I think the terminology is…“ripped me a new one.” Made me cry, the whole nine yards. In the middle of it, I wasn’t thinking, “She has Bi-Polar disorder… this isn’t her.” I was just hurt. When I got home and thought about it, I knew I shouldn’t take it so personally- that this wasn’t my friend. She called the next week and apologized. That’s how it was with her… constantly up and down and feeling like the “responsible” person in the relationship, because she couldn’t control herself. She tragically took her life during one of her lows about two years ago.

Her death greatly affected another woman in our congregation who was also bi-polar, even worse than my friend, I think. She went into a deep depression and then, as she started to come out of the depression, decided to start a LifeGroup, which our church supported and encouraged her in doing. We tapped into the DBSA (Depression & Bi-polar Support Alliance) and became charter members. The group has remained intact, meeting faithfully, even through her recent hospitalization for severe depression.

She, however, never apologizes for anything ugly that she says. Her bi-polar is a crutch… a get-out-of-jail free card so that she can say whatever she wants to whomever she wants. Usually it’s me she finds a way of making feel lousy. Since she came out of the hospital, she’s been emailing me deep theological questions and I have literally been spending hours researching and responding to her emails, I take time from my family after I get home to be a friend to her. It never fails that I’ll say something that offends her in one way or another, and believe me, knowing this; I take great care in being very careful about how I word things.

She sent me another snippy response today, and I’m just about fed up. I have loved her until I’m used up and I know I have to keep loving her more. I’m just angry about it right now.

It doesn’t matter if my feelings are hurt, because once again, I am the responsible party in the relationship, and I’m supposed to be able to let things just roll off my back, no matter how ugly she is to me. It’s not fair that she can say whatever she wants with no consequences…just an easy shifting of the blame. What she said today insinuated that she thought I had “forgotten about her” again, after many times of doing it before. Which is bunk. It obviously doesn’t occur to her that she isn’t the only person in our congregation of 300 that we are caring for and the effort that I put into our friendship that is SO not worth it.

As I was writing this, the perfect name for this entry came to me… because she does act like an angry, hungry bear that attacks and takes no prisoners; and she makes me feel like the prey. I dread our interactions. Hey, I know all the right answers; what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to react. And I’m always going to do the right thing, the thing Jesus would do. But I’m human, and I have feelings. And these, though they aren’t pretty… are them. GRRRRRR.