Moving Through Life

I've had an amazing week and its taken me awhile to be willing to share that. I am excited, don't get me wrong but since being in California a lot has changed for me. It wasn't easy for me to see at first but now that I'm physically doing more I feel like I can see more. One of my biggest fears was that when I started to get well that I would push myself to do too much. That I would go back to how I used to be, and I feel like I have come too far and learned too much to do that. On my lyme boards where I communicate with others who have this disease I constantly hear the same complaints..."I just want to have my life back." And, I have thought those same thoughts. But, I see now that it was that old life that contributed to my illness...pushing myself all the time, always wanting to do more, keeping up with everyone else, and doing those things I thought I was "supposed to do." I don't want my life back, I want to truly live. No more surviving, no more barely making it from one to-do list to another.

It wasn't until Bob and I were running some errands together for the first time that I felt myself moving differently "out in the world." Stopping in at Starbucks to get the kids something I realized how much I enjoyed the fact that I could move slowly through the store. It didn't bother me that I knew I didn't look well, or that I've gained some weight. I was able to take in so much more because I can't just whip in and out of places. I was saying under my breath, "Thank you, Lord, for letting me be in this store today and smell the wonderful coffee." I guess its our version here in Seattle of "Stopping to smell the roses." Rather than complaining and feeling sad about what I can't do, I have moved to a place of gratefulness for the things that I can do. In the past when I've had good days and felt like maybe this was it, maybe I was going to start getting well again I would start planning, thinking, analyzing. Only to have everything yanked out from under me again a week later.

It has seemed as if for me that the past two years have been like the movie Ground Hog Day. Everything was the same. I kept waking up to the same debilitating dizziness, fatigue and weakness. And, that's all I could dwell on. I knew in my heart that God wanted to heal me from the inside out...meaning starting with my heart and then moving to my body, but it felt like nothing was happening. Not until I walked into Starbucks. It felt like God was saying from Isaiah 43:18 "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I AM doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" I knew from that very moment I would never move through this world again without remembering there was a time that I couldn't move at all. That God was giving me "a garment of praise instead of a spirit of dispair." Isa 61:3

But, there's just a little bit more to the story. This journey that I'm on, which is far from over, has taken me to a new place. A place where my life is no longer defined by what I do, who's mom I am, who's wife I am or even where I live and what my house looks like. My life is defined by who's Daughter I am. Ignatius Loyola, a Basque priest from Northern Spain sums it up with this prayer:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will--all that I have and call my own. You have given it all to me. To You , Lord, I return it.

Everything is Yours; do with it what You will. Give me only Your love and Your grace. That is enough for me.