Paranoia Won't Win

Pss. 3:8 “Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah”

Paranoia Won’t Win

The holiday season is slowly creeping up on us. While Sunday the fifth was a family event for me, it was basically a prelude to what I can expect at the family get together for Christmas this year.

I think I can say without a doubt that this year has been a year filled with paranoia where toxins, food, and family are concerned. Oddly enough (or maybe not) my faith hasn’t been shaken as I fight for my life out here in the real world. I am more concerned with the food that’s being served at get-togethers and being around his family who might have questions, but paranoia didn’t win in the end. I shrugged off the anxiety and faced the people and event head-on.

When we walked in the door on Sunday, the aroma began its assault on me but didn’t break me. Society breaks me more than the family gathering ever can. Empty plates spread out on the tables and the attendees just finishing up, now in the chatting mode as laughter could be heard throughout. When we walked further into the house, his aunt asked me if I wanted something to eat and I kindly said, no thank you, we had already eaten. My hubby wasn’t hungry either as he ate a nice big cinnamon bun before we left our house. He’s been trying so hard to cut back on soda, sugar, and sweets that he turned down the brownies that his mother offered him until she placed them right in front of his face and kept asking over and over if he wanted any until he buckled. The man cannot refuse his mother. No means no goes right out the window.

The only one that opened the discussion on my health was his cherubic aunt. She is eighty years old but looking at her wrinkleless face, you’d never know her age. I’m telling you, my face has more wrinkles and age than her beautiful smooth face. She has the face that I’d imagine that of an angel having, it also helps that she reminds me of one of my grade school nuns. She drives down to Nebraska from Sioux Falls South Dakota to see her family a couple times a year!

She wasn’t intrusive, she was compassionate and I have no problem at all telling her how my protocol is going and all that I’m doing to keep myself alive. She is very supportive and agrees with everything I’ve done so far and will continue to do. She told me she prays for me every night and adds me to her church prayer list weekly. 

I realized something this weekend. I have an iron will! After being bombarded with what I should and shouldn’t eat for nine months, gently nudged with every beat cancer newsletter out there, with aromas abounding from every direction, I’m being, to me, brutally attacked by the toxic invasion.

Speaking of toxic invasion, I use my writing as a safe haven. My blog is my corner of the world that no one can bully me into submission. I write what I want and when I want, typos and grammar shreds to pieces in my hands and I don’t give a flying fig! If people worried as much about their health as they do my grammar incapability, I imagine they’d be pictures of health. I’m out here fighting for my life and you’re worried about a run-on sentence, a missing comma, and lousy punctuation? Honestly, I think you need more help than me. Just saying.

I write my blog as a journal. I share my blog so people can see what I’m going through and maybe in some small way help just one person to change their life. I’m not writing to be published, I’m writing for ME, to share with YOU, and hoping along the way, you see a glorious God working in me. That’s it, that is all I’m doing.

I think I may just need a break, from writing, from sharing, and basically from the world. God has given me the strength to get through this year; He has helped me decipher the positive from the negative. He’s given me loving caring friends who walk this walk with me and had it not been for them, I don’t feel I could muster the strength to get through all of the paranoia that invades my comfy zone.

I have changed so much this year, inside and out. I’ve allowed paranoia to try and take hold of me like the toxic everything that surrounds me. I am gently moving into what is good for Joni phase as I weed out the ‘I don’t need that phase’ and what OTHERS want for me. This journey is about ME. If your doctor wants to load you up on drugs and you take it all in like candy, good for you. Me, I am adamant about not accepting drugs as a normal way of living. I’m on a journey of health. If that offends you or makes you cringe, I’ll pray for you, it’s all I can do at this time.

I told my niece this weekend, “I feel great! I feel alive!” She asked me what I was drinking. I said I’m high on life! For four years I could barely walk, I was, many days, walking with a cane, unbalanced and depressed that my life was descending into a bottomless pit. God pulled me out of that pit with CANCER! While some see that diagnosis as a death sentence, I see it as a life sentence. I will have this illness for the rest of my life, but I am embracing the change of seasons not being swept out by fear and paranoia. God has granted me the STRENGTH to ACCEPT the things I cannot change, CHANGE the things I CAN, and the WISDOM to know the DIFFERENCE! (and no, I never went to A.A.) 

As God has abundantly blessed me on this journey may He bless you also on your journey. 

Pss. 24:5 “He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.”