Think on Such Things

With great struggle comes great victory. If you sow sparingly you will also reap sparingly.   For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.”  I hate the struggle of autism. Now don’t get me wrong and let me be VERY clear. I do not hate my son! I would die for him. Moses is not autism. He is a happy, empathetic, loving, passionate kid. He is not autism. That is not his identity. He has autism. There is a big difference in the way that we say it. I never say that my son is autistic because that is not who he is....

  --> So, this is my fourth go around at trying to write down what has happened to me today. No matter how I write, I can’t seem to find the words to describe my awe and wonder. I can’t seem to adequately explain how I feel about what God did for me today. I’ll try though, because I want to praise Him with my lips, or my fingers.  Today, I went to the doctor to have a follow-up on the nodules that have developed on my thyroid over the past several months. About six weeks ago, I went through a pretty scary time of thinking my heart was literally going to fail because my thyroid was so out of wack. Doctors were confounded. Tests were coming back strange and what I was left with was, “Let’s just wait and see how this goes for the next several weeks.” That’s always what you want to hear when you think that you may be dying right? WRONG! I walked away from all those appointments six weeks ago with a diagnosis of Hashimotos Thyroditis and possibly cancer. The...

I’m laying here right now, totally and completely depleted, wasted, exhausted. "What from?" you ask. My family has been put through the gauntlet with a stomach bug that has earned us one urgent care visit, two emergency rooms, and one hospital stay, all in the span of a week. And now, I lay here out of necessity because it is my turn to do battle with the norovirus. Being sick, stinks. Especially being stomach sick because it is so contagious and leaves you feeling so dirty. So, naturally I take a shower to wash off all the virus junk, try to keep this monster at bay. While I’m no longer the child who enjoys being sick because that means she gets to stay home and just watch tv all day, being sick does have one advantage. It forces me to slow down. Everything around begins to slow down and it’s no longer my fulltime job to take care of the family, I have to take care of myself too. Laying in bed has afforded some good time to just read. Not endless amounts of facebook po...

Sleep. I love, love sleep! Anyone who has known me for an extended amount of time will tell you that I sleep a lot. I pulled one all-nighter in college. Not because I was so ahead of the game but because I was willing to take a lower grade to get more hours of sleep. Sleep for me pushes the restart button. It makes my day new, even if it means taking a nap in the middle of the day. That's how I felt today, in need of a restart button. I took a nap this afternoon and I woke up feeling like this morning was a distant memory. It made it feel like God was pushing the restart button on my life. The results today were better than what I could have hoped for and God used taking a nap to wipe away all the anxiety from the days before. This morning we went to the hospital to get the results. We were pretty sure that it wasn't going to be good since the scan the day before didn't go well at all! What we were told to hope for is functioning thyroid nodules, or "hot" n...

This is the sign that I see when I go through the doors of where my test was supposed to take place. Comforting, huh? What’s going through my mind at this point is, “They are going to put radioactive material into my body!” Pretty ironic for the girl who makes her own toothpaste. Yep, I love to have things super duper natural! His ways were definitely not my ways today with that one. But, that’s what I had to do to get this test done. They broke the test down into two appointments at the hospital. One was me sitting at a table while they explained the procedure and then took a pill with all that lovely radioactive crap, sliding down my gullet. Next appointment was the actual scan. It was really two scans. One was a contraption that had the word “gamma” in it and all I could think about were all the Marvel comic movies that I’ve had the privilege of watching since I've married Dan. As I sat there, the Spirit of God which God put inside me when I believed in Jesus, re...

       Surreal. Very, very surreal. That’s the only word that I can think of for the past two months. I mean, what else do you feel when you’re trying to find out if you have cancer? Thyroid cancer to be exact. Apparently, thyroid cancer is one of, if not the most treatable cancer to have. A doctor actually said to me, “If you could choose a cancer, you would definitely want to choose thyroid cancer.” That didn’t help. And, even though it’s treatable, treatable meaning they just remove the entire organ, I’m still not comforted.                       I’ve kind of lost my faith in doctors. Now don’t get me wrong, I value the knowledge and opinion of doctors. If I wasn’t in my early thirties, I’d probably go back to school to be a doctor. I LOVE all things medical. Never knew I had this passion in high school or college. I never knew that I cared so much about how my body functioned until I had my second child. ...

Today was corporate gathering. Since we have been at 121 Church we have gotten in the habit of calling it that. Good reminder that going to a service on Sunday doesn't mean that we are going to church. We are the church, hence corporate gathering. Anyway, went to worship Jesus and saw God the Father in a new light today. Today we had a time of public confession. First of all, I don't know that I have ever been challenged to worship Jesus publicly like that so it was a little weird. Of course there was the typical public silence...no sounds...just breathing. I could tell that my heart was starting to beat faster and normally when that happens it means that God is asking me to speak. Speaking in big groups about Jesus isn't one of my gifts because for some reason I usually start to cry. So, I spoke up. Jesus gave me the strength to speak and the tears started to come. I confessed that my idol can be security. How often do I try to create that feeling of security in my life ...