Read, Write, Love, Repeat

It snuck up on me, took me by surprise yesterday. I looked at my calendar and realized it was July 9th. Six months. Half a year. 26 weeks have slid by since God did what doctors said was “impossible,” healed my fibromyalgia. In the space of a heartbeat, in the moment of a prayer, God lifted my chronic pain and fatigue away. I have had zero flares. In six months.

I am astonished. Still. Not that God CAN do this, but that God chose to give this gift to me. So what, you may ask, am I doing with it?

I’m reveling in the pain-free, energy-restored body I have now. I’m resting. I’m serving at church and mentoring others. I’m working hard. I’m working out hard. I’m relishing every day that I wake up with sore muscles from exercise instead of widespread pain from just being alive.

I’m eating all the foods that were strictly taboo for all those years, foods that were guaranteed to spike my pain levels and make me feel like a bus hit me the following day. And, oddly, you still gain weight doing that even if they don’t send you into a flare. Go figure. My doctor scolded me and now I’m working on reversing the upward creep on the scale. Hence the working out hard. But I digress…

Lovely things, all. But what will I do next with this gift of a restored body? I will write. But it will be different. Since so much of my writing these past years was about my illness and what God taught me on that path, I’ve balked at writing these past months. Because I don’t know what it “should be.” What I should write about, how I should approach this ongoing journey?

I’ve thought, I’ve prayed, I’ve listened. So. I will continue to write about what God is teaching me. On a very different path than the one I’ve chronicled before. One familiar and new.

You may have seen on social media that I’m gearing up for a new school year. I am. And I’m thrilled to say that will be teaching all four grades of high school English.

Full. Time.

Another “impossible” that God has overcome.

I’m leaning into all the things, all the BEST things, that I will be teaching these kids, pouring out what God is teaching me. So this is what I will write. I will tell you these stories. What God teaches me, what I teach these precious teenagers, and what they, in turn, teach me.

I will write and tell my story. And I will teach my students to tell their own stories. 

We each have stories only we can tell, and the record of the mountains God has helped us climb could be the guide book for one who comes behind us.

God has led me in more unexpected directions, up seemingly insurmountable mountains and into uncharted ravines, than I can count. What have I learned? Trust His way. It may make zero sense to you in the moment, but it’s the best way. The only way.

Trust His way, then tell the story.