Faith, Strength, and Determination

Side by side, me and my God

Zeph. 3:17 “The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”

Faith, Strength, and Determination

Again, after the diagnosis, I knew what I wanted and it wasn’t chemotherapy. The days following the Big C diagnosis I did a lot of talking to God and asking Him where it is that HE would have me go. I was listening, hearing, and leaning on his promise. I knew what I didn’t want and that was to be sliced open, radiated, and given chemotherapy for YEARS then be placed on meds until my imminent death. Or I didn’t want midway through the course of the treatments to change my mind THEN decide to go the healthy HEALING holistic route. No, I would need FAITH, strength, and determination!

I felt like this was a race of a lifetime. The race where I might struggle and fall at times and would surely need God to come and hold me up and help me finish each stretch of the journey. You see, I think people get the wrong impression of God being a punishing God, one who wants to take you out swiftly because you’re a sinner. They could not be more wrong. This is my take.

When God created the world and sin slithered into the picture God the disciplinarian stepped in to show mankind the path that we should go. We were aimed at leaning on Him and trusting that He knew what was right for us. Man didn’t want a Father to lean on; man relied falsely on himself to take care of matters. Selfishness and greed ruled and God in his eternal love for what he created gave discipline where discipline was due. Then he rested, He let man try and shape his moral dilemma and we failed miserably.

That’s where Jesus stepped into the picture. God, as man, lived on earth to feel the intensity of what sin in the world was in ‘real time’. What is so ironic is that God could feel the anger of mankind destroying all that He created, but he was never tempted to be like man. That is what set Jesus apart from the selfish greedy man. Man could not, then or now, accept the fact that there was perfection allowed to walk the earth. Man was and is still consumed with himself only allowing God into the picture when they need Him.

Prov. 3:5 “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”

I am deeply rooted in my faith. It is no better than yours and no worse, it is different. We are all allowed to think and feel differently about our beliefs as long as we know where to lean when times of trouble arise. Man still wants to do things for himself, a kind of not wanting to ‘burden’ God with his problems sort of matter. As for me, I always lean on God for even the smallest of things, seriously!

Well, this diagnosis was nothing small but I still turned to Him first. Was I wrong? In my mind, NO, I’m different. Some people take a doctors word as solid truth with no room for error. Some go for a second and third opinion for a reason, I like to think it’s because their gut instinct is telling them something doesn’t feel right. My gut instinct is God in me, holding me up and carrying me and giving me strength and determination in places where others might fall. He shows me the way in which to go and I follow with no doubt or mistrust in the midst.

1 Pet. 1:8 “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory:”

I got a first and second opinion and what it felt like was that same small child who was on the playground being bullied. I felt like my opinion didn’t matter and I was supposed to lay down my life for this disease and adhere to the almighty doctor who doesn’t know one hair on my head but thinks he knows what is best for me. Bullies belittle and shame you into submission. Out of fear, you crumble and fall, it's the human thing to do.

Luke 12:7 “But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

I went that route of the bullies as a kid. It didn’t work then and I was led down the wrong path and only when I trusted with everything in me, God my Father, that is when my life turned around. At the doctor’s office, I felt the taunting fingers, pointing at me, screaming and telling me I’m wrong and that I was nothing, I was not committing to their plan and no, they were not happy about it. Just as it was when I was a kid and turned to God, I was shunned, the doctors then released me and would not claim responsibility if anything were to go wrong. No tests, no follow through, nothing. Like bullies who didn’t get their way, they stomped off into the sunset, onto their next victim.

I was scared and alone but everything in me told me to trust in God. As in the past, I knew the path, I knew the trust and faith I needed to put in Him. No, it would not be an easy task but it was a route that I trusted in my very being, my soul was in the safe familiar territory.

By the grace of God, I was now filled with strength and determination. Out in the small crowd of family and friends, there would still be wagging fingers, taunting and unbelieving of the idiocy. How dare I go against what they themselves found to be truth and trust in the doctors. Who am I to go against the grain? What makes me any better? Nothing, she’ll fall! I allowed the doubts of the naysayers to tinker in my mind for a spell. Not for very long as you can see. Almost one year has passed and I’m still going strong, feeling great, am forty pounds lighter, and people now want what I have! 

Trust, faith, strength, and determination. They’re all yours! They’re already inside you, you just need to tap into them. It is hard since we’ve been conditioned to trust our fellow man but let me tell you this, in all honesty. You know how you have a friend that you trust with your life? You’ve told the biggest secret to and they carry it with them without sharing it? Then one day it happens, you come home and find that the secret has been spilled? Yeah, God’s not like that. He is the ONLY One you can tell the secret to and trust He won’t tell a soul. As a matter of fact, He already knows the secret before you tell Him, He would just like you to claim it, put it out there for Him to carry for you. That’s me! I share with Him my deepest darkest secrets and trust Him to carry it to my grave. He does, with Light and Love.

As I go on, He is my strength and determination. My faith is in Him and Him alone. The taunters and teasers are silenced. The naysayer is drowned out, limping along the road in doubt and fear in a sunny oasis waiting for one dribble of water. Me, I have a fountain full of faith that I’ll shower them with if only they’d be open to receive. 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things not seen. (My motto by the way) Strength is the leaning not on my own understanding and trusting God implicitly. The determination is knowing there is an eternal reward at the end.

Heb. 11:1 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

May the Grace of God be with you all! 

Faith: Your Gateway to Health

Luke 4:40 “Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them.”

Faith: Your Gateway to Health

Faith, support, determination, and change, all adds up to HEALTHY!

One by one, these will have their own individual topics along with exercise. Since HEALTH is our goal, I’m going to try and help you achieve a goal. Set yourself a small goal. A hurdle of sorts. No need to tell me what it is, maybe write it down on a piece of paper so that you can overcome the hurdle then tell me about how well you did. I want to be a person of support so please feel free to ask me questions or tell me about your success (or failure). I want to rejoice in support of you!

I know you’ve all heard the term ‘born again’ and biblically that means being born again as a new person in the Spirit of Christ. Well, by the end of the year I’d like to see friends renewing their health and feeling born again physically! I want you to feel the regeneration I have felt since last January. I don’t feel like a person of ill health, I feel the best I have in my life. Still a way to go but you’re all with me; we can do this together! 

Today I’m going to talk about faith. Now don’t go running away because you’re a non-believer, I have something for everyone, I don’t want you to be left behind. I want you healthy! The only way to become healthy is to have faith. While my faith is based solely on God, yours might be tied to a Higher Power, Mother Nature, the Universe or a spirit realm, whatever you hold to be bigger than you at times of doubt and fear, now is the time to turn and hold on for dear life because change is never an easy task to undertake.

Task, you might say, YES! You have to work for anything you want in life and if you don’t want to be sick and at the doctors all the time, now is the time for CHANGE! It looks to me like we live in a world of people who are content, content with being overweight, settled in their ugly habits of overindulging, regretting mistakes but not knowing where to begin. I’m here to tell you that faith is where you begin.

When people feel disgruntled they immediately look for a comfort food. When someone has hurt feelings they hide behind the mask of feel-good eating and drinking. They don’t try and resolve the problems of being hurt, shamed, or ridiculed they turn to something to make them feel not so bad, and food is usually the go-to culprit. For me I didn’t turn to food, I turned to drugs and alcohol but later learned to trust more in God and my inner self than an outside physical feel good vice. I don’t know if I’ve ever come right out and told you all this but I was bullied as a kid. I’m a survivor of being excruciatingly bullied!

From an early age the name-calling, hair pulling, the punches and being chased down the street, being bullied was my life. Whether it was my sister and brothers doing the bullying or my (non) friends at school who literally pushed me from their circle, I was bullied. I was teased because I was too thin, too pretty, my teeth weren’t aligned right, my clothes were from the ‘cheap’ store, my shoes were worn, my hand-me-downs evident. 

I did overindulge on candy and sweets as a child, maybe that is why I never cared much for them as an adult. They were vices to hide my pain. Heal the pain the vice is no longer needed. I turned to alcohol and drugs, other vices to hide pain and the more I turned to my faith, I no longer needed those indulgences to get by in life.

With my faith, I overcame my addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sweets. Yes, just with FAITH. Not meds and doctors, not patches and pills, not even vitamins. I thought I was healthy except for my psoriasis, the embarrassing skin affliction of which labeled me as unhealthy. I did have the chronic ailment under control at one time but you add stress and upheaval (divorce) to the mix, your ailments react and resurface.

Then January 25, 2017 hit me with a cannonball to the gut, a disease that was known around the globe as a ‘killer’. While I had lost numerous friends and family to the disease, I didn’t feel that this disease was as devastating as it was made out to be. My faith grew ten sizes too big that day as I was cradled in the arms of the Lord and told that I’d be carried along with my faith. Rely on your faith, the whispers called out. Depend on me and the strength I give you, I heard aloud in my head.

While for a brief moment in time I felt scared, I had to rely on my faith to shake any fears. Faith has never let me down once in my life, why would it now, because the odds are against me? When I was young and being bullied I felt helpless until my faith carried me through. This was not unlike those times being bullied as a child, the doctors were trying to bully me into submission but these were adult bullies. I, as an adult, have the ability to fight back. With my faith intact, I mounted an army of angels that would whisk my fear, doubt, and pains away. Almost instantly, once I moved the bully mountain, God's Light shone through and carried me once again.

Matt. 21:21 “Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.”

Your faith is your strongest asset in life. Faith being the belief in the unseen, whatever that means to YOU! Use it, trust it, and listen to the inner voice. Faith will do all the fighting for you, you just have to trust and obey. Obeying is the hard part because it is essentially giving your life over to something bigger than you that you can’t control. YOU, my friend, are never in the driver seat, you’re a passenger along for the ride of life. This gift is yours to take care of, not destroy. Your HEALTH is the gift and new batteries to regenerate you are needed if you’ve ‘let yourself go’. Have faith that you can overcome the obstacles in your way; EARNEST faith, not a passive faith. I may need to do another post on faith… it is THAT important to your HEALTH!

Matt. 9:21-22 “For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.”

I'm Different

Rom. 3:22 “Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:”

I’m Different

It didn’t take me long to realize in life that I’m different. I’m not like everyone else and to me, that’s a good thing. I was relentlessly bullied as a kid because I was different. I was prettier, thinner, dumber, poorer, you name it, I was a walking target. From my brothers and sister to the kids at school I had a big L on my forehead and kids were more than willing to just smack the back of my head in hopes it would fall off, but no, it remained.

This is where reading and writing became my only friend. The long days and nights of reading in my bedroom while hearing kids in the courtyard playing became my safe haven. I had to isolate myself because the neighbors all thought I was a bad influence on their kids so they kept them away from me and shrouded them in their own clique where to this day they still remain friends. I was different; I became a defiant rebel and lived up to my bad influence of a name just to spite my neighbors. I wanted to hang with my sister and brother’s friends but I was just Bony Joni to them.

To be one of them, I did things I shouldn’t have done like drugs and alcohol. I had no one to tell me right from wrong as alcoholism was prevalent way back in the genealogy of my family. From who I knew of, my great grandparents all the way to my brothers and sister, and even me,  were all products of the poisonous alcohol and it was detrimental to our lives as a whole.

Something drastically changed for me at fourteen-years-old when I became a born-again Christian giving my life over to God. My family was Catholic, in name only, and I defiantly went against all of my years in Catholic school and became a born-again Christian. Once again I separated myself from my family and the majority of society that didn’t then and doesn’t now accept anything Christ-like except Christmas and Easter holidays.

By twenty-one, I was so transformed I gave up drugs and alcohol, not by any program mind you, all on my rebellious own with the hand of the Lord guiding me in the right direction. Then one by one what little friends my ex-husband and me had were peeling away and once again I became an isolated young woman with only God, writing and books to carry me through.

As I look back over my many years on Earth I see what might have gone wrong, I was/am different. Even now as I’m faced with the disease of a lifetime I’m the defiant rebel handling this leg of the journey different than many others would have chosen. Granted there are other rebel soldiers out here defying the odds like me and wouldn’t you know it, in some fantastical magnetic way we are drawn to one another.

My friend said something to me yesterday that made me realize how different I am, he said:
“We may not be changing as thoroughly as you, but you are providing a continuing example.”

When I woke this morning all I could think of after my morning bible reading was how different I really am and that that comment had lingered with me. I thought back to the days when my niece was a big part of my life daily and the influence I obviously had on her. I don’t feel it was a bad influence because she went on to college to become a Reiki specialist to understand the natural part of Holistic healing and what it meant to her in her life and her developing family. 

I don’t ask to influence people. I don’t judge you for not changing your lifestyle. I don’t force, bully and browbeat you into doing things my way or else. No, just like me, you’re on your own and what you choose to do in your life is your decision, which will eventually carry you to your afterlife or grave, whatever you believe. What I can say is that I’m ‘providing a continuing example’ for men, women, children everywhere.

As I’m writing this I can almost feel your heads shaking in agreement, ‘she’s different alright’, and I’m okay with that. I’ve accepted my weirdness, strangeness, difference and today I defend myself against the bullies of the world that try to knock me down a few rungs.

As I stand here today, I am a living testimony of all that my God has done carrying me through the many tragedies of my short life. I could’ve buckled, I could’ve gone along with everyone else and become something of a robot but I chose nature over technology. I chose Spirit instead of a materialistic life and again, I’m okay with who I’ve become. I am poor, I am humble, I am grateful for being allowed to know and see the difference that someone different can bring to the cornucopia of life. 

Lev. 10:10 “And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean;”