To think that I’d walked into the year overtly confident— wanting to make my mark, hoping to reach my goal.
Because with the turn of a new year with new hopes burgeoning where you’re about to turn mid-life —
Owning your life isn’t about clenching your fist, gritting your teeth, or controlling every outcome …
When you’re living in the tension of a global pandemic and a recent prognosis, living certain in uncertainty is about letting go —- so you can let God.
There’d been eight months of us shooting arrows in the dark. Nine and counting with the coming Spring and the Husband and I firing off cannons, aiming nothing.
Sometimes the hard season doesn’t seem to cease — and I flail under the uncertainty of a prolonged prognosis.
Could it be me, please, instead of her?
There’d been eight too many missed weeks of school. And with that?, my sanity.
A few more long weeks of pathetic, staggered return to life and a semblance of somewhat normalcy.
When you’re battling head-on with a chronic medical condition where the recovery isn’t smooth nor straightforward, you can be desperate for directions, and feel pulverised in your powerlessness to change things around or regain control.
My days scrawled busy with numerous medical trips. Driving around from doctors to dietician, from the paediatrician to the physio, the surgeon and the gastroenterologist, and three rounds of hospitalisations within the span of 6 weeks — those too can leave you feeling hollowed.
Even after a series of stringent, investigative tests to rule out anything anatomically wrong or gastro-intestinally disordered — there was still no shortcutting it.
Nothing to cut corners to shorten the duration of treatment, or reduce the amount of nauseating laxatives orally administered, or the many nights stretching long into our dire lack of sleep.
Life hurries and I hurry along with the early morning sport practices and late evening games, dashing busy from home to school to hospital, and all the music lessons in between.
These dissonant chords amazingly still make very sweet melody as we embrace each other and cherish our togetherness over home-cooked meals, snuggly read alouds, and a lot of humour to pepper our hard.
Then my breakout.
My broken skin, my fissuring fingers, my bleeding palm.
The dermatologist said my problems piled on top of another. The Golden Staph is famous for residing under the skin to resurface with any stressor on the heart or the body. And maybe? — this is the reason why I hadn’t healed — in trying to control everything and in juggling all the balls in the air — I am not letting go nor letting God.
The blizzards hit and I’m stripped thin, but they have an amazing way of narrowing life down to essentials.
Perhaps more important than my falsies is my faith — would that hold in times of testings?
Perhaps more to be prioritised than my gymming is my working out what God has worked into me — can I live out His redemption when my reality seems a stark contrast?
It all comes down to this — when you live in the uncertainty of a pandemic or a prognosis — all you need to do is be a window —-
Be a window to let all the lights through — and let love and truth and the power of God to blow through you —
Because I suppose no one will ever whisper it to you —
That when a woman hits a brick wall or feels the impossibilities of it all — as long as she flees to her ‘Makhseh’ and finds refuge in her ‘Maween’— two Hebrew words to explain the refuge of our God — she will always be able to retreat and find a dwelling place, she’ll be able to hide and be refreshed.
So, the blinding blizzards need not blind her.
The whirlwinds need not cloud her.
If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
Psalm 91:9-10 (NIV)
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
Any challenge can become part of her calling.
The stiff days are sacred.
The hard is holy.
And if she keep breathing the air of faith, her children will be enriched, regardless.
That there is mystery of the deep seeing of miracles in the mess…