I am almost out of days until I start my next round of chemo, but am beyond thrilled that today I actually have started to feel 'normal'! Oh my, today I actually went out for coffee with my gorgeous friends Sal and Chelsea and it has literally been two whole months since I have been practically anywhere. (Sal and I even fit in a quick trip to the op-shop...ahhh bliss..I adore a good op-shop outing)
It felt so strange to get dressed in something other than trakkies and bedsocks. I'm so glad they took me out though - It's been hard to keep perspective being at home in bed for so many days straight. When I got home I immediately wanted to go out again! Don't make me sit in my house unless I absolutely have to...i've had enough of being in my room to last a lifetime.
Then I read this as I was lazing by the heater in the afternoon:
'You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet God's beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is'.
One Thousand Gifts
Ann Voskamp
Hmm.
That is extremely challenging for me at the moment.
I have lost almost total control of every.single.part.of.my.life.
I have family and friends helping with everything from meals to childcare to transporting my boys around, to taking them to the doctor. We have just enrolled Soul in childcare, and True and Brave will be going to after school care a couple of afternoons in a row. Our church family and neighbours have been making us meals, and my beautiful mum and mother-in-law have been cleaning and washing and tidying and putting away on repeat for the last few months continually.
That overwhelms me.
That feels like I'm letting the 'we are healthy people' down.
Actually I would love to be able to help someone else the way we are being helped, but instead I am on the receiving end.
That feels harder in some ways. I like very much to be self sufficient.
Anyway.
This experience which I'm walking absolutely feels like an interruption (that's an understatement) and I have complained sometimes aloud and lots and lots in my head about the hardship of this cancer.
And so, 'nothing happens to you except by the will of God'. This is pretty full on to take in. I need to change my theology! It has always comforted me that God is 'sovereign' and absolutely holds the whole world in the palm of His hand. I love that I can have this as the bedrock of my faith. God isn't going to change. He is in control.
But.
That leaves me reeling a little when I think about all the grief I am walking through thinking about leaving my boys so young, leaving my Huz when I want 50 more years of being married to my incredible husband. When I think of all the 'life' I'm no longer participating in as I lay in my bed trying to recover from awful toxic drugs pumped into my body. When I think about the revolting 'cloud of chemo' that shrouds me until the next time I'm due for the same concoction all over again.
It's easy to sink into self-pity. It's easy to want to jump into a big ol' pit and just stay there.
I don't think that's what the God wants for me. The butterflies in the pit of my stomach are showing my desperate desire to control some of this, to write it off as a huge 'interruption' to my life. In so many ways I don't like the thought, but there is a comfort to knowing that this is God's path for me, and He will not let me go. I need to keep holding His hand.
A very wise friend gave me that advice a few years ago when I was first diagnosed. 'I can't choose the circumstance, but I can choose Whose hand I'm going to hold'. This just about sums up the dilemma. And really what would I choose? Him of course. A thousand times Him.
I am more than blessed.
No comments:
Post a Comment