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.”

Spring Cleaning My Soul

Job 37:21 “And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them.”

The tiny seed knew that in order to grow it had to be set in the dirt, covered in darkness, and struggle to see the light! I myself have plunged through the darkness as it tried to envelope my soul, I stretched out toward the light and that is the time I burst forth with growth. The dirt (darkness) enriched me and cleansed my soul.

I know it is early for Spring-cleaning but it is never too early for cleaning of the soul of all the leftover fragments scattered behind from the previous year. With the doozy of a year behind me, the dismantling of the Christmas season, I’m faced with a liberating feeling of cleanliness. That is what happens when you clean up and put away the old and make way for the new. 

Only five days into the New Year and already I’m feeling the presence of change, so much so that it is moving along in a smooth flow: of words, of actions, of deeds and of promise. This year is setting itself up to be a rapid succession of energy that spills out into my writing, my cleaning and my meditating. I’m in awe of the visible transition.

Some people would rather wait until spring to clean out closets, toss away old clothing, get rid of unused stuff and junk, but me, I do my spring-cleaning when my soul calls me to make some semblance of this clutter that has filled these four walls. I didn’t start off the new year wanting to clean and shake this house up and get rid of the excess baggage tagging along collecting cobwebs. It just came upon me as I slept, hugged me when I woke, and moved me into action.

Granted my back is in no better shape than it was last year but this year I’m not letting my disability alter my active lifestyle I had before this thing called arthritis gripped my NOT-OLD back! I have not even reached the half a century mark and my back thinks it is moving into the seventies. Since my mind is still back there in time, where the thirty-year mark saw the seedling spurt with growing pains, now my nearly half a century old mind is giving a speeding ticket to my body and telling it to ‘hold on now’! But hi ho silver and away I go growing like a newly planted seed.

I’m not one to hoard because I learned quite a few years ago that they are all materials and can be gone in the blink of an eye and all you have to hold onto is memories of the physical hindrances, sometimes called artifacts of your past. This ‘stuff’ that I’m soul-cleaning is newly acquired stuff lodged in my mind as new experiences, new thoughts, and brighter comfort zones. 

I have a tendency to hold onto my old ways, my own pattern of thinking, not allowing the new age of things to play games in the basketball court of my mind. My soul-cleaning is going to consist of closing the doors on the negative thoughts that sometime ensnare me in their web and cloud my God thoughts as satan has set out to do on this earth. 

If I seem to be living my life out there on a cloud, distanced from what some call reality, it is my way of clinging to the new growth that is before me awaiting the springtime air, the season of MY New Year, and the bringing forth the solidarity of strength in my eternity. If I dip into the pool of confusion, like so many cling to this day and age, I will lose sight of my self worth and become stagnant in a clouded puddle. 

Pss. 91:1 “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

I will continue on the path of soul-cleaning, bouncing back refreshed and renewed with a new perspective on life. Some will enjoy the change, some will hide because they fear change, some will embrace my soul-cleansing and come along for the ride.

John 15:3 “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.”

May God bless YOU on whatever journey YOU are embarking on this year.