Always A Challenge

Ecc. 9:11 “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Always a Challenge

It’s not easy

It’s really hard waking up every single day in a peppy mood. I wake and am so grateful to be awake one more day but let me tell you, every day is a daunting challenge to merely stay alive. While my mind is focused on the positive the dark and evil of the world try too often to slither into my thoughts and screen.

While most wake, go on in a mundane fashion as if their whole life is in front of them because honestly none of us really know when the time will come, I wake to the challenging days before me. Life for me has changed so much in five months, I used to take for granted eating a slice of pizza, or eating something from Subway or placing food on my plate that, while unhealthy as all get out, was delicious. 

Each morning I look at the sunrise differently as if this was my very first dazzling one, the sunset as if it was my very last purple-glazed one, I fall asleep praying that all will be right with the off-kilter world. I wake to a new unblemished day and face challenges, minute after minute, hour after hour. Everyone else seems to be going about life in a ho-hum matter-of-factly manner.

I watch as people shuffle about, children laugh and play, parents doing what parents do and that’s loving on their children. People are hurriedly rushing from point A to get to point B. I feel as if I’m sitting high on the balcony overlooking a flurry of activity and me, just an observer biding my time.

I didn’t want life to change for my husband either but such as it is, it has. I try to continue to make home cooked meals but that in itself is a challenge for me. I stir the delectable sauce or check to see if the noodles I can’t eat are done and place a meal on the plate that I can’t partake of. No, I now make two different meals one for me and one for him. Yes, he says he is more than capable of making his own meals, and I get that. My duty as his other half for fourteen years is now shifted, like a planet off its axis, so I try to keep it as normal as possible and do what I can.

I do believe change is good in so many ways. Maybe that is what God had in store, to wake us (my husband and me) up so we could appreciate the smell of the fragrant roses or enjoy the simple fluttering butterfly more; to bow down to His gloriousness as many just pass the wonder of it all by without a second thought.

I thought I was the most appreciative person alive but now I’m even more appreciative if you can imagine that. But please take note; every single second of the day is wrought with a challenge. With three illnesses upon me, I’m not just facing one mind-bending dastardly disease; I have to be blasted with three, tiring, pain-filled, hurdles to coast over every single livelong day.

I’m not whining I would just like you to think twice before finding my journey somewhat lighthearted. I’m doing so much better than I was five months ago, feeling great and not knocking the hurdles over, nope, I’m soaring but it is not without its grunts and groans. To be honest, I feel as if I’m climbing Mount Everest in blizzard conditions, being tossed about by the winds; or crossing the Sahara Desert in a windstorm where the sand on my face feels like shards of glass being slung at me. 

If I disappear for a day or two, it is more than likely because I’m tired and beat. If I don’t write for a day or two, it is more than likely the Sahara has dried me up, words and all. If I seem distant, you’re not to blame, I am being challenged and am out here trying to do the best I can to overcome everything thrown my way. As humbling as this is, I have to bow down and admit first and foremost…it is always a challenge.

God bless each and every one of you! 

Heb. 12:1 “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,”