JACQUES GAUVIN, RELIGION

My Biggest Challenge Is Perhaps Life Itself

October 29, 2006

I was once accused by a minister of the Church of God of making a mountain out of a molehill. This was part of my preparation for Baptism.

Bearing this in mind I would say that perhaps my greatest challenge in life has been to live with the fact that I have schizophrenia and need prescription medication. It might not have been the greatest challenge but I didn^t accept some of the others, like university education and marriage.

Accepting that I have schizophrenia was relatively easy. It explained why certain things were going on in my life. For example, why I was getting recurring thoughts incessantly for months on end, thoughts that I was being watched and that my apartment was being snooped out when I wasn^t home. I had the same song going through my head for many months. And other things, like loosing my right to use public libraries in Hamilton, getting laid off from work, then getting expelled from College. I attributed much of my troubles with spending too much time by myself and not having someone sympathetic or understanding to talk to.

The more difficult part was accepting that I had to take medication for my condition. I thought that this would go against God^s will. I had eating laws to live by. God had very good reasons for wanting me to avoid eating certain things. What would He think of the medical profession^s chemical concoctions. I didn^t know the answer and didn^t know anyone who did. I was accessed by a team of about six psychiatrists, plus my own psychiatrist and my family physician. They all concluded that I had schizophrenia and needed medication and so I decided to follow their advice. They are the experts in this field, they have the knowledge and experience and I had already been anointed so I thought that God had a reason to put me through this and I hoped that I was making the right decision. I started taking medication.

Then I went through rehabilitation for a year. It was a kind of buffer time to gather myself, to prevent suicide, to come to terms with my illness, to assess my situation and to plan the rest of my life to an extent. After this rehabilitation I had to face the real world of impending hunger and need for shelter. The homeless in Canada are greatly made up of people with schizophrenia. I did not intend to become one of those. I felt that I was still capable of holding a job and of doing good work as I had been all along. When I was laid off from work I was doing a very good job as an instrumentman. When I was expelled from school I was an ^A^ student. When I was put out of the library I was reading the paper. The biggest problem was not me adapting to society it was society adapting to me. Now that I was on medication, they had no excuse.

It wasn�t long before I had found work with a Land Surveyor not too far from my residence, so I did not need to move, which helped. I thank God for this job opening and the timing of the circumstances that made it available to me. It was as though the whole thing had been planned all along. I have been working for this Land Surveyor for over seven years. I do some outdoor work but mostly calculating and drafting. I think I^m doing ok.

Many Biblical characters had struggles in life. The most notable and significant is Jesus or Yashua or YHWH, pardon my pronunciations. He had the tremendous task of establishing once and for all the way to salvation for a world that was being lost in religious and political hypocrisy. He prayed fervently, at one point He wept and another He is described as sweating blood. We can hardly fathom the difficulty of this task.

Another character who has a tremendous responsibility in this end time is the one with the spirit of Elijah who is to turn the hearts of the children to the fathers and the hearts of the fathers to the children lest God send a curse to the earth. This man could have been Herbert W. Armstrong as some believe or he may be someone else alive today. I often wonder if it is not my responsibility and all our responsibility because it cannot be the conversion of a single person but rather of many hearts of many children and many fathers.

Perhaps my struggles to become a pillar of society, a disciple of God and Jesus will assist in turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the heart^s of the children to the fathers, serve to encourage you and also to lead some to salvation through Christ.

2007 Jacques Gauvin

Search for related topics. * United Church Of God - UCG - ucg.org