Time...

Isa. 58:8 “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.”

Time...

Do you remember the days where you took a test in school; you were sitting there sweating and looking at the clock, tapping your pencil on the desk, tripping over questions and answers as if your shoelaces were tied together? Do you remember the anxiety as the clock ticked and tocked and you were still sitting there with questions unanswered?

That’s what it’s like when you’re diagnosed with cancer or any other life altering illness I imagine, you keep looking at the time. Time, seconds turn into minutes, minute’s turn into hours and before you know it…the day is over, time has run out. 

Every second becomes more precious in each day and you wonder did you study hard enough to pass the test or did you just ‘wing it’? While the test in school was to see if you remembered everything you read, the test of life is going to be about you and all the knowledge you’ve gained and what exactly did you do with that knowledge up to those last minutes of your life. 

This is why it is important to make every minute count because you never know if this is your last one on the clock and you don’t get a redo of the test, once the day is over on your biological clock and your called home, is home going to be the place you had tried to attain while your breath sustained you while alive? 

I strive for eternity, not a place where seconds and minutes become days and years, I want time to be erased and live as if eternity is within my grasp. The good news is, eternity IS within my grasp with the saving grace of Jesus. I try to tell everyone else about the eternity we have as part of our biological plan but many are too busy making up for the menial minutes in a physical day to see the picture that’s right before their eyes playing out in front of them. 

My husband’s aunt is in the hospital as I write, hooked up to feeding tubes to keep her alive battling her last days with cancer and chemotherapy. When I asked hubby’s mom if auntie was in hospice, she said no, she’s on the ‘transition’ floor. The transition floor? Out of respect, I didn’t want to ask what a transition floor is but I have a pretty good idea.

A year ago we were sitting with this same aunt as the family was gathered to celebrate Christmas. As we piled bite after unhealthy bite of food on our plates from mashed potatoes to salads, meat and desserts, I watched his aunt speak about battling cancer and listened to her say how it was sucking the life out of her. I asked her if she had heard about turmeric and she said yeah, and that she was taking it, in between globs of potatoes and gravy crossing her lips.

Here’s the thing, chemo is not going to take cancer away, it will give cancer a resting place and that is it until it’s time to wake up again. A pill is not going to take cancer away either. There has to be a life-altering plan of your intake of food that got you to this point of unhealthy living that fed the cancer cells all along. From everything that goes past the lips to everything that comes out the other end, there HAS TO BE a life-altering change! 

I understand that when you hear the word cancer, you automatically think you’re going to die. So, many people go the chemo route trying to add a little more time to clock. It doesn’t add to the clock it takes time away. Time spent hooked up feeding radiation to your system, time spent vomiting, time of worry and stress, time spent going to the doctor, time spent looking for a parking spot! Precious time that is consumed by an illness and a treatment without a cure.

Maybe adding time to the clock should have been your first priority, to begin with. Why did the alarm clock need to go off for me to say hey, wake up, you’re not going to eat the chemical filled processed food? If you think that the processing of the food you eat was brought to you in the cleanliest of fashions, you are sadly mistaken. 

From the steroid injection of the farm animals to bring you a meatier slab of pork, beef, or chicken, to the handling, to the added chemicals of giving food a longer shelf life, to the people who all breathed and touched that pork chop before you purchased it and put it in your mouth! You are what you eat takes on new meaning to me now that I’m battling these nasty little demonic cancer cells!

Cleansing; that is what the soul needs to bide time and nothing else; a mind, body and soul synchronicity cleansing. You can see the detoxifying of the chemical laden body as torture because you’d rather choose to permit the very thing killing you to own you. Or you can take the all important life test without studying for the exam. It’s up to YOU and no one else what you choose to do to pass the exam of eternity. 

I have chosen to do my homework and look forward to exam day, no tapping of the pencil, no tripping over shoelaces, no ticking of the clock. It’s not about taking a vitamin to beat this. Beating cancer is about CHANGE; a swift major shake-up to your everyday living and eating habits. People can’t be bothered by drastic change because it takes up too much time? Well, I’ve got all the time in the world to make a change; time to LIVE! Holistically going to win this battle! 

Jer. 17:14 “Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for thou art my praise.”

What? No Change?

When you are through changing, you are through. 

~Bruce Barton
***

Well the week of change is coming to an end as we near Friday. I’m sorry again for boring you but really, writing is all about change so in actuality, I AM writing about, writing. :)

You know, as with anything, everything takes time. In it’s own season and for a reason. When one decides to BE a writer, there are things that you go through and years of persistently grinding the stone to the curb, and in the end, you’ll feel as if you’ve accomplished something. Then there comes a season where you wake up and smell the coffee and realize things aren’t working out as planned, so you begin making other plans.

My entire life has been about change, but until recently, one thing that has never changed, has been my love of writing. Only recently have I begun to think this is the season to change plans, take a turn down the road, hop off this moving train, give back the oars ‘cause I ain’ta paddling! Thank you September incidence's, you marred and scarred me for life.

So what exactly ARE my plans? I may be heading into the mentoring field at WVU, since I am dedicated to Mr. Hembree and the Institution of higher learning.  I’ll continue to embark on educating others in the writing field as a side job in my ever changing world as I grow and learn myself. Then it will be off for a world of change for me.

What is with all this change going on? Well let me tell you, you don’t have a miracle plop smack dab in your lap, molded and shaped by the hands of God Himself, and go back returning to your old ways. No way, no how! Normal takes on new and supernatural shape and form. Never considering myself normal in the first place, life was slugging along at a snails pace, and we were just patiently waiting for change to whack us upside the head.

I don’t really think anyone can understand or grasp the depth of what happened to us. Trying to put it into words has been quite a challenge in and of itself. Plain and simple, he was blind, and now, he sees! On a more complicated level? Everything shifted! The earth moved, literally! Look at the recent earthquakes in the Va./Md area and in Oklahoma too. We’re not the only ones who FELT the shift, apparently the Earth took notice too.

And what is so sad, is that as this shift happens, everyone goes on as if nothing has moved in the transformation. Maybe this was just meant for us? Are we the only ones who’ve experienced the altered state? Am I talking to myself here?

The windowed world holds nothing for me now. Once I’ve been given the chance to see things from a new perspective everything transitioned into a new and improved life altering phase of light. You look different, he looks different, life in general has taken on the variance of shapes and colors that are all meshing in my brain and while people say, “How are you?” I can only answer with “Fine.” because in all honesty, I don’t really know myself.

Things change, people change and nothing is ever the same again. We muddle through, do what we do, and wake up every day doing the same-old-same-old, mundane routine. For me? I’m alive...in an altered state. Grasp THAT!