Friday, November 18, 2011

Panning for Gold

I've made an important decision tonight.  I'm going to stop (or greatly reduce) my talk about my pain and my being sick...I just looked over my last 9 or 10 posts...almost ALL were about illness and pain.  I'm sure you're sick of it. I know I'M sick of it.  So enough.

I'm sick.  I'm in terrible pain.  You all know that if you've hung around here at all.  So there is little point in reiterating it constantly.  I was just working on a goal I've made; I'm going to begin at  the beginning of Sara Frankl's blog "Gitzen girl" www.gitzengirl.blogspot.com  and read all the posts..from 2008 on.  As many of you know, Sara very recently died from Ankylosing Spondylitis, the disease with which I've recently been diagnosed.  I've been following and reading  her blog since she began it.  But now I'm reading it with a new perspective.  Sara was only 38 when she went to be with Jesus.  I have a full decade (and then some) on her.  But you know what? She was more grown up about it all than I've been at all.  She had a lot to teach me.  And she's already taught me a lot.  But I know that NOW there is even more there for me to know...to integrate and to BECOME. I'm not trying to become Sara-with-wrinkles.  I just want to have the joy in her that drew people to her so irresistibly.  I want to please God like I know she did.  And I want the welcome in heaven that I know was waiting for her.

Already, just in the first month of her blog she taught me several things.  1) There's nowhere to go, but through it.   And that being the case, I want to stop whining about it...and go through it with courage, making Jesus smile on my way.  And 2)  It's all about your life and not your death.  There is so much about my life that I haven't  told you.  And I'm sure that by remembering, I will also learn.  And maybe I will be able to lift the shroud of fog that covers my recollections...and see them clearly...and re-discover things long gone.  I had 15 bilateral ECT - electraconvulsive therapy - "shock treatments" in 2009 when I was very psychotic and depressed. These resulted in massive memory loss which has never returned to me...although bits and pieces have returned..  But if I chase a memory trail-taking an image or a recalled sentence and pursuing it with all my might - sometimes more will return....

What is a life...if not recalled, not recorded, not realized or benefited from? 

So stay tuned...and please return to this blog...I promise: no more "woe is me" posts.  Because woe is NOT me.  I'm blessed.  In so many ways.  And it's time to focus on these blessings and to be grateful for them.  Trauma, if that's where you decide to live, can only keep on hurting.  Yes, my life has been difficult and painful...but with all these storms, there just had  to be lots of rainbows.  So I'm going to go treasure hunting (to badly mix metaphors)  because after all is that NOT the point of this blog?  This is not about darkness.  It's really about the treasures found there.  So time to start panning for that gold (okay yet another metaphor) and to stop drowning in the river.

Here's the theme verse of this blog - in a different version than you may be used to: the Complete Jewish Bible.  Which gives the verses as they are really translated from the Hebrew.

Isa. 45:1-3
Thus says ADONAI to... his anointed, whose right hand he has grasped, ...so that doors open in front of him, and no gates are barred: 2 "I will go ahead of you, leveling the hills, shattering the bronze gates, smashing the iron bars. 3 I will give you treasures hoarded in the dark, secret riches hidden away, so that you will know that I, ADONAI, calling you by your name, am the God of Isra'el. 

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