Always A Challenge

Ecc. 9:11 “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Always a Challenge

It’s not easy

It’s really hard waking up every single day in a peppy mood. I wake and am so grateful to be awake one more day but let me tell you, every day is a daunting challenge to merely stay alive. While my mind is focused on the positive the dark and evil of the world try too often to slither into my thoughts and screen.

While most wake, go on in a mundane fashion as if their whole life is in front of them because honestly none of us really know when the time will come, I wake to the challenging days before me. Life for me has changed so much in five months, I used to take for granted eating a slice of pizza, or eating something from Subway or placing food on my plate that, while unhealthy as all get out, was delicious. 

Each morning I look at the sunrise differently as if this was my very first dazzling one, the sunset as if it was my very last purple-glazed one, I fall asleep praying that all will be right with the off-kilter world. I wake to a new unblemished day and face challenges, minute after minute, hour after hour. Everyone else seems to be going about life in a ho-hum matter-of-factly manner.

I watch as people shuffle about, children laugh and play, parents doing what parents do and that’s loving on their children. People are hurriedly rushing from point A to get to point B. I feel as if I’m sitting high on the balcony overlooking a flurry of activity and me, just an observer biding my time.

I didn’t want life to change for my husband either but such as it is, it has. I try to continue to make home cooked meals but that in itself is a challenge for me. I stir the delectable sauce or check to see if the noodles I can’t eat are done and place a meal on the plate that I can’t partake of. No, I now make two different meals one for me and one for him. Yes, he says he is more than capable of making his own meals, and I get that. My duty as his other half for fourteen years is now shifted, like a planet off its axis, so I try to keep it as normal as possible and do what I can.

I do believe change is good in so many ways. Maybe that is what God had in store, to wake us (my husband and me) up so we could appreciate the smell of the fragrant roses or enjoy the simple fluttering butterfly more; to bow down to His gloriousness as many just pass the wonder of it all by without a second thought.

I thought I was the most appreciative person alive but now I’m even more appreciative if you can imagine that. But please take note; every single second of the day is wrought with a challenge. With three illnesses upon me, I’m not just facing one mind-bending dastardly disease; I have to be blasted with three, tiring, pain-filled, hurdles to coast over every single livelong day.

I’m not whining I would just like you to think twice before finding my journey somewhat lighthearted. I’m doing so much better than I was five months ago, feeling great and not knocking the hurdles over, nope, I’m soaring but it is not without its grunts and groans. To be honest, I feel as if I’m climbing Mount Everest in blizzard conditions, being tossed about by the winds; or crossing the Sahara Desert in a windstorm where the sand on my face feels like shards of glass being slung at me. 

If I disappear for a day or two, it is more than likely because I’m tired and beat. If I don’t write for a day or two, it is more than likely the Sahara has dried me up, words and all. If I seem distant, you’re not to blame, I am being challenged and am out here trying to do the best I can to overcome everything thrown my way. As humbling as this is, I have to bow down and admit first and foremost…it is always a challenge.

God bless each and every one of you! 

Heb. 12:1 “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,”

Hope In The Hopeless

2 Cor. 1:3-4 (ESV) “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

Hope in the Hopeless

Shocked, saddened or heartbroken, that is the reaction you get when you tell people your diagnosis. The Big C has always carried with it the equality of a death sentence. They don’t see the hope of Christ living in us and working through us, they see disaster, dread, empathy, basically, they see death in us.

I’ve learned in my life that Jesus overcame death and it is not something to be feared. If we feared death with every downfall we have in our life, every affliction, every illness, and disease, we would see it as a disaster about to happen. Opportunity knocks in the strangest of situations. Some people are used to show you the Glory of God in an affliction as we show you the Light of Christ shining through us.

There IS hope in the hopeless; you just need to be willing to see past your own hardened observations. Empathizing is a lot different than sympathizing.  Empathizing is almost like feeling sorry for a person going through a difficult stage in their life where sympathizing is feeling equal in understanding what the person is going through. 

Definition of:
Empathy – the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Sympathy -- harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.

When my Dad, Aunt, and Uncle were all battling this same disease, I felt sorry for them because I couldn’t do anything so I felt helpless and I didn’t understand what they were going through because I had never been through the same thing. As individual and unique as this disease is, we all handle the diagnosis and treatment differently. 

Many are conditioned to see a death sentence. Many see no hope in the hopeless, many also would rather turn their heads to ignore the situation than bringing HOPE to the hopelessness people feel.

I’ll admit, after hearing the initial diagnosis, it crumbled me like a cookie. I saw my life slowly flash before my eyes and I saw an imminent death sentence awaiting me. The oncologists fed me their lies and I believed them, even after I had accepted this illness, they continued to shovel in the fear and hopelessness. I would enter the office full of hope, I would leave wondering where the broom was to sweep up the mess I’d leave behind. 

I would regain the hope I walked in with not long after leaving the office and I promised myself I wouldn’t put myself through that series of negative mud-slinging ever again. I would build on my strength with the Lord and I would walk a path few are brave enough to face. Even if it is not considered bravery, there needs to be an inner strength and willingness to walk the path that might look dim to others but to you is a path of Light.

I see hope in the hopeless. Just like the rain filled days, I always saw the sun shining through. The stationary bike is a perfect example. I could see the days on end of rain as taking my newly formed walking routine away from me but instead, I saw the bike in the basement as a ray of light! And this week, I learned from hubby’s mom, who gave us the bike, that it had a story behind it.

Just a reminder, things always walk through my door free of charge or of minimal price when I need them the most, the bike rode in when my husband was suffering from blindness. The bike sat in his mother’s basement doing nothing and she didn’t want to get rid of it, but when her son needed something to keep his idle body busy, she offered the bike to us.

Many years ago, his mother had found out that someone had entered her name in a raffle. She is not one to sign up for raffles for her own reasons but this person signed her up and guess what she won? The bike! It’s a nice stationary bike, a Schwinn to be exact, with an arm exerciser as you peddle too! She took it not knowing what to do with it so it sat in her basement, years on end until her son went blind and she offered it to him. Little did she know that it would be a blessing to me also. We moved to Nebraska eight years ago BECAUSE of his blindness and had we remained in Texas, no bike, no story. His sight was restored in another miraculous moment that I wrote about, years ago.

God works in mysterious ways of bringing HOPE to the hopeless! I frequently see meme after meme telling me not to donate to the Goodwill because they are making millions off of us people. I have to disagree, I have never gone into a Goodwill where a Cadillac was parked outside and the manager was wearing an expensive Armani suit. No, I see people of my class or lower, working the register, working the backroom unloading donations, I see people WORKING and not for millions of dollars either. That is the only place where I can go and AFFORD nice jeans and clothes and I’m not ashamed to admit it either! I donate clothes to them and I buy clothes from them. 

Hope in the hopeless, from a 2011 post of mine: “Ok, Shady Brooks is a place in my mind where water ripples downstream, I create the illusion of the rainbow permanently above my head inspiring me to move forward in life, sitting on the edge of the water with my notebook in hand. No laughter, just the rushing water, wind-chimes off in the distance and me sitting there, alone, waiting for sanity to brush my face and as they slowly appear, I realize, they are all new people, that have entered my life and are lifting me to the heights that I need to be.”

It isn’t just me bringing hope to the hopeless; it is my friends bringing hope to me, too. They are surrounding me with support and without them, I don’t feel this path would be as easy going as the past four months (fourteen years of friendship for that matter) have been. Sure I have my down days but there is HOPE waiting for me at the beginning and end of every single day! I make the most of a day and I find a peace in my affliction and will continue to share my HOPE and Light with you!

God Bless You, one and ALL! 

Pss. 111:1 “Praise ye the LORD. I will praise the LORD with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.”

There is no one like our God!

God of this City

Peeve Of The Day ~ "Just Get Over It."

1 Pet. 4:12-13 “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”

My peeve of the day? People minimizing pain.

“Just get over it.” 

“Suck it up, buttercup, life goes on.”

Yup, those words right there grate on my nerves like screeching nails on a chalkboard. Telling someone to just get over their pain, depression, or anxiety, whatever burden they bear or cross they carry is minimizing what they are going through on a daily basis. 

If you’ve been through the depths of hell and have come back to tell the world about your experience that’s just great, you’re the one human God has chosen to break the gates of hell but if you’ve suffered in similar pain as someone else, don’t minimize what they endure daily by telling them to just get over it because YOU survived a similar pain.

You don’t know the pain someone is going through unless you’ve walked in his or her shoes and I’m pretty sure no one has walked [metaphorically] in another person’s shoes. No, we are on our own path in life and while you may have comparable pain, similar circumstance, identical health issues, you need to know that the person enduring the affliction owns what is happening to them, it can’t be borrowed or stolen it has to be LIVED.

Offering sympathy is one thing but comparing your incident with their daily struggle takes away the healing that they have in place and the prayer that they utilize by making their illness seem like they will just ‘get over it’ when that is not the case at all. They need time to drink in the healing that they are going through so they can make plans for what they need to change (if anything) and possible routes they might take.

Can you imagine if we were all on the same exact journey? Life would be no fun that way and would we all arrive at the same destination? Of course not. Just because the journey was ‘similar’ does not mean they are the same. Life is like that sometimes, we all think we’re headed to heaven but we do nothing in our life to get us there.

Reading and believing the bible isn’t going to get you there. Attending church isn’t any assurance that heaven will be your end destination. People tend to be misinformed when they think that the outward appearance of being a Christian is going to get them into heaven. 

All Christians may ‘appear’ to be the same but that is the farthest thing from the truth. We all are different in our journeying path but the one thread that unites us in a genetic strand of life is the blood of Jesus Christ running through our veins. 

Our disability isn’t what bonds us together. Our illness doesn’t define who we are in the living world. Our outward appearance isn’t the link to an eternal heaven. The only thing from the physical realm that is universally ours that we carry into the spiritual realm is LOVE. Love binds us all. Without love, the path will lead straight to hell and there will be no coming back to tell us about it on twitter, or facebook or through images on Instagram. 

So before telling someone to just ‘get over it’, or to pray more, hope for more, be more to the world; dig into the depths of your soul and find the love that lives there. When you want to hate…find love. If you feel the need to compare…do it with love. When you find a burning fire in your soul…douse the flames with love. 

Love is one of the hardest paths to journey on. You might think it is a simple task but tapping into the well of love on a daily basis is a struggle we all must face. You can give someone directions but that doesn’t mean they’ll follow them. Just as life and the trying storms we muddle through; we own our journey, it is ours alone. We might all strive to get to the same destination but we’ll all take different routes to get there.

May the God of love bless you all!

1 John 4:16 “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

Amen!