The Good, the pure, and the lovely

  Journey Part 3 - The Conclusions ~  Forgiveness is my key to emotional healing.  ~ I believe that forgiveness and emotional healing aid physical healing. I have been given so much help in the area of emotional healing. Family, friends, Sunday School teachers, pastors, teachers, our awesome family counselor and so many members of my healthcare team continue to support and encourage not just my physical needs, but also my emotions. I have been blessed to also be given forgiveness liberally from others which frees me to forgive more easily myself when I need to.   Forgiving, I learned over the years, is my key to digging out bitter thoughts, angry replies and over time releasing the hurt that drags me back to the pain in my mind. I have 43 years of solid “practice in forgiving”, but please, please don’t ask for my report card.  I hesitate to share that I rarely felt the "feeling of forgiveness" until recently, and that feeling occasionally wavers. That’s th...

Rooting out the Problems Part 2 🕊 We chose to NOT take legal action against our physician. It took a great amount of time, thought, prayer, personal consideration, and input from trusted advisors. The first moment I wondered if I should, I prayed to ask God’s guidance.  I asked him to guard me from rash decisions. I asked for protectection for every individual involved or touched by my choices. I wondered and prayed about my responsibility to others who faced similar struggles.  My very short prayer, which covered all this and more, was simply the words "Help Me". I utttered those words of prayer in the middle of the night, in desperation and exhaution after I read and re-read material that deeply concerned me. Those words helped me lay down my burdens. I cried “Abba, Father” (just "help me) in my heart, curled up in his emotional arms and cried myself to sleep. We have come a long way since this thought first crossed my mind. We worked through our personal decisions ov...

May the Light I See Become a Blessing to You 🌟 Last week began a series of posts that came to me after a long year of health struggles. They re-open a personal dream of blogging that I laid aside when I lost the time and energy to keep up with my posts. Through these last weeks of heart-struggles, I rediscovered the dream, still rooted in my heart and growing. While I stopped blogging when life got busy, I occasionally blogged privately after cancer changed our lives. While writing these new posts, it encouraged me to see the old posts, including the darker ones from the early years of fighting cancer. I keep them all there as a record of our young family and of the hard, early years battling cancer. With these pages, I re-open my blog and renew the old hope of sharing my thoughts and words. I have more than just one new hope, but a small collection of hopes that l hold in my heart while on this journey. While I begin writing and sharing again, I must guard my time and energy carefull...

  A Valuable lesson of forgiveness from my/our cancer Journey Part 1 လ I didn't sue my oncologist. It was complicated. While life is complicated in general, life with cancer gets even more complicated. Until it suddenly gets too simple - all that's left is to push through and focus on that one little goal in front of you. Maybe concentrate on swallowing that applesauce. Perhaps struggle to climb that normal, wait . . . . .that’s become an enormous set of stairs! Just sleep. It sounds so deceptively simple. How many routines, habits, rituals and pills does it take to get some sleep? If only getting clean was as simple as it was in my childhood when a shower or bath with a face scrub and a good teeth brushing completed the job. Some days and times, it can be that easy.   Other times are filled with obstacles and complications. Larger tasks take more time and organizational energy. Forget cleaning the house, working in the kitchen, facilitating school, thinking through me...

     The inevitable cancer question circles around often, "So, are you in remission?". This emotionally charged question challenges me, but I know that those who ask the question care about me and it is comforting to know that they hope for healing. Each time it comes up, my answer becomes a little more calm and confident. "Medically speaking, remission is not a possibility for me." It hurts to speak those words some days. No cure for Stage IV Lung cancer exists today.        Most of the time I closely follow that sentence with, "With God, all things are possible, (Matt 19:26) I know he CAN do a miracle, if he chooses to."   I believe deep within my heart that IF God chooses to sweep away every last cancer cell in my body, He will.  While I ground my soul in that knowledge, I keep in mind the apostle Paul's  words in to the Corinthians, "Everything is permitted, but everything isn't beneficial (for me)" (1 Corinthians 10:23, ...