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.”

Journaling

Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough. ~ Arthur Freed
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Keeping a journal is a good way to keep your fingers active, your brain functioning and also it is a wellspring of ideas for writers. Sometimes as I’m writing in my journal I think, now there’s a good blog post, then I start writing my 500 words for the day for my blog and maybe even get a few more ideas as the journaling continues.

Remember that journaling isn’t for the public to read. It’s your private thoughts on paper. It’s the machinations of a day-to-day mom, writer, or worker but either way, your journaling is the secret you that nobody needs to read.

Maybe some of you write in your journal so that other people CAN read your thoughts on your day to day activities, but me, as a writer my journal holds my deepest thoughts and through my deepest thoughts come ideas for a story, usually a short story.

My safe haven is my journal. It is a place I go to, connect with my inner being, sometimes I’m even caught talking to God, and I don’t come out of the ‘zone’ until I feel it is a safe place to go.

I’m not one who likes to carry bitterness around with me; always the pleasant happy-go- lucky person, (and sometimes talkative!) that when it comes time when I feel that bitterness and resentment, confusion, or torment are surfacing in me, I, like a robot, automatically head to my journal, get it all out and find myself relieved of all the tension that was trying to build in the first place.

I’ve said this numerous times, and on many occasions have I relayed this information to you, my reader, writing is an emotional healer. You may be sitting there chuckling at the idea but I’m telling you, if you have a journal, release all the pent up feelings that you are harboring, you will find yourself with a leg to stand on, you will find a part of healing that guess what, you don’t have to pay some Psych doctor for.

Not that I have anything against psych doctors. They can be a great help to the not so sane of the world in need of their services. But for me, there are things that I’d tell my journal that I would never tell another living soul. I’d rather have someone pay ME for my insane thoughts than to give a doctor my thoughts and pay him for me to give him them? There’s something wrong with that idea to me.

I’m a writer, so all my insanities will fall onto the paper like fine drips of blood from a paper cut. My words will roll down the page and color the white sheet in crimson marked with pain and torment, but in the end the white LIGHT of the page will shine through and everyone will grasp the inner me that they thought was such crazy mundane triviality. And the reader will love the tale as if it has seeped into their veins.

It’s what writer’s do. Now Write Right!!! 

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Your life may be the only Bible some people read. ~Author Unknown

Gen. 1: 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
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When in doubt, write it out. Hey, that’s mine. *smile*

I always like to write what I’m feeling. I know many of you have a journal that you write in and keep daily tabs on what you’re doing or going through, right?

Journals are important because they walk you through your day- to- day boredom, I mean life, and can get you through some tough times. I’ve had a journal ever since I can remember and still have most of them too, just so I can look back at where I was, where I wanted to go, and where I wound up.

Not always a pleasing sight those journals. The outside covers were beautiful tapestry, but inside on the lined pages is ugly reality. No one ever said reality was appealing, I guess that’s why they dress journals up to look real pretty.

Did you ever notice, or maybe it’s just me, that in your journal, you often write the bad tortuous stuff, and as the book fills out there seems to be more grotesque looking images than beauty? How many of us write every day, just to say, today was a gorgeous uneventful day?

We write about storms sweeping over our houses, but not the blossoms surrounding us. We’ll dictate a happy event with family that we don't live with, but skip the the menial dinner you had with your family at home. We’re unlike the media, in that we decorate our journal with the wrinkled lines of everyone’s face, and never divulge the airbrushed version.

Yesterday as I sat in church, things whipped me in my face and had me scrunching up my nose. Pastor Mike talked about the sanctity of SEX in marriage. Oh dear, a minister speaking about sex? I know a lot of the old timers are thinking, “How could he!” And in his defense, I’ll say, “Very easily.”

God didn’t place Adam and Eve, a man and woman, here on earth, to just look at each other. They were told to go forth and multiply and well, sorry folks, there is only one way to do that. Through the sanctity of marriage, you bring forth fruit.

I respect the man because he took on a difficult subject that, had ministers had the nerve and guts to really do the Lords work, would have delivered the message years ago possibly saving our promiscuous society from a darkened downfall.

He did something I’ve never seen done. He didn’t hide the word SEX, he didn’t cover it up with, “Shhh...we don’t talk about those things.” Instead, he took it head on and gave us a sermon on the WORD! What the BIBLE says about Marriage, SEX, and Singleness.

He didn’t give us an airbrushed version of reality. He didn’t put a dainty little cover around the subject and call it, The Talk. He took a page instead out of God’s journal to US! All of the good and the bad and delivered them to us, with, what else, GRACE!

A Journal of Thought

"Journaling ~~~~ a place where soul and words convene." ~joni

A lot of times you’ll be riding down the road looking at the beautiful scenery passing you, drinking in the sun-swells of the road. Looking and listening to the alluring trees whispering from afar, inhaling the newly-fallen rain and from out of nowhere comes an idea for a story!

Do you impede traffic and dig out a notepad and pencil? Do you cause an accident by pulling off the side of the road to dig in your purse? NO! You have already had in place a Personal Voice recorder. Voice activated so that you can ensure your idea is not lost in the wind.

Now journaling doesn’t always have to be on a recorder. Sometimes you can be sitting on the sofa relaxing with a cup of tea, staring off into space as an idea comes to mind. You have your journal on hand, (because you’ve placed many of them throughout the house) and you write the complete thought down into your little journal.

A journal can also be used to write your day-to-day activities. A diary is different from a journal (in my mind’s eye) because a journal holds story ideas and the potential for articles or novels. A diary will hold all my deep dark secrets and will more than likely be hidden from daylight so as not to be ‘accidentally’ read by unwanted prying eyes!

My journal however SHOWS all the wondrous activities going on around me throughout my day! If I see a squirrel running up a tree, holding an acorn tightly in his mouth, my mind can think of an entire story out of just that whimsical event. Maybe the squirrel has family, maybe he is going to be selfish and hoard the goodies for himself. Maybe a kid with a BB gun is going to pop that running squirrel right in the stomach and I’ll have to watch him fall to the ground,(and think of yet another story.)

Journals are also a good thing to take with you on a lunch date with the girls. You know how we all love to gab and basically have a gabfest at every sitting? Well, your journal can be the window that you look out of and highlight the lunches gossip. It doesn’t necessarily need to be from your table of gossip maybe you overhear a couple breaking up? Maybe Arthur has died and now the elderly woman is all alone?

Whatever the case may be, behind every word there lies a story, and YOU need to be ready to get the idea down so you can turn it into a masterpiece! Whether it is on a recorder placed in your vehicle or pocket, a notebook in every accessible place in the house (including a small pad in your purse), or whether it is one square of toilet paper that holds your idea. Get the idea out!

Build a story, construct a piece of art out of words