I was looking at my blog posts and noticed that my last post was Sept 2!! Yikes! I have thought about blogging, told myself I need to blog, and even sat down to blog, for a good two weeks! I just couldn't figure out what to write about. My life has been quite...normal. Which seems really strange to say because having a normal healthy life is awesome! But due to that I feel I don't have anything worth sharing for people but here I am. :)
I was thinking the other day that I should give an update on my life since it has been a little while since I have done that. Then I had a discussion with a friend and former college teammate and he gave my an idea, I don't think he knows he did, to write about. He has been going through some tough health issues recently so I reached out to him to see how he was doing. One thing he mentioned to me was, "I am amazed at how positive you are through this whole situation." It isn't the first time I have heard that from someone through this journey so I wanted to take the time to explain my thoughts as to why people may think I have been so positive through this.
I want to start by saying, I am not always positive. You see and hear about the positive stuff, and just like normal social media lives, you don't hear about the struggles and I have struggles. I told my wife and a couple close friends about a recent struggle I had while up a Mayo Clinic getting treatment. I feel very normal, my symptoms are fairly minimal and I have learned how to function with them and kind of forgotten about some of them because it is my new normal. Most of the time I don't feel like someone who has MS but there is always one specific day when I do. It happens to be every time that I go up to Mayo Clinic and get treatment. I go to Mayo and get treatment where a lot of cancer patients get treatment and it is hard to see. Here I am sitting in a waiting room, waiting to get called back surrounded by other people who have life altering illnesses. When I think about treatment I think about people who are fighting for their lives and taking a drug that attacks their body before it starts helping their body. And here I am sitting with them in nearly the same boat they are. Taking an incredibly powerful drug that only certain treatment centers have authority to give to patients. A drug that alters the way my body functions to protect myself from myself. I wouldn't consider myself someone who is fighting for my life right now but I am a lot closer to that reality than my wife is and my friends are and that is a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Luckily once I leave Mayo and recover from the treatment I am able to go back to everday life and feel "normal" again.
As you can see I do struggle but the days I struggle are few and far between luckily. Then the question remains, why do I think people tell me I am positive the rest of the time? It is crazy to see how God works and orchestrates peoples lives and how His ways are higher than our ways. One of the best things I have heard recently is that you need to have your relationship with God figured out, at least the big stuff, before something big happens in your life. You need to know scripture and have it in your head so you can fall back on it during tough times. It was crazy to me how much scripture came back into my head during the initial diagnosis period. To be honest, that has been what has gotten me through. That has been what has given me strength through all of this. I always end my posts with "Take Heart" becasue John 16 : 33 was one of the first verses that came to my head in my time of need. And it is the verse that sticks with me and is how I now live my life.
I was explaining to my college friend about this scripture and my thought process and I will explain it to you. We live in a broken world, with broken bodies, relationships, and people. When Adam took a bite out of that apple we were doomed for a life of imperfection. To go along with that brokenness is pain, suffering, harships, death. It happens and there is nothing we can do to prevent it. Jesus explains this in John 16 : 33. "...In this world there will be trouble." We were never promised an easy, perfect life. We were actually promised the opposite, and if verse 33 were to end there then I would have reason to doubt. I would have reason to be negative. Jesus just told us there is going to be struggles and that was it. Luckily verse 33 goes on by saying "...but take heart, for I have overcome the world."
Jesus follows up his promise for struggles in this world with an even bigger and better promise. That we should have peace in the fact that Jesus has overcome the world. Jesus has overcome the sin, the brokenness, the struggles, the imperfection so that we may one day live a life of perfection. A life without brokenness, without sin, without struggles. And to top it all off we have this for eternity!! We will end up living on this earth for the length of a snap of your finger. That is it. We live in a broken world for the snap of our fingers. But we get to live a perfect life in a perfect world for eternity! I don't know about you but I don't need much else to keep me in a positive mood.
If there is one take away I hope all of you get from this post is the following. Life isn't going to be easy. There will be pain, suffering, illness, and even death. And you aren't always going to be happy and positive. That is fine. You don't have to be positive all the time but always remember that despite the hard times God is with you and walking next to you through it all. He will never leave you. And remember that Jesus overcame the world by dying on the cross so that we may have eternal life with Him. You aren't alone so Take Heart.
John 16 : 33