That's what I want
/
It’s inevitable as I do medical searches in online journals (yikes! Graduating in December means I’ll be cut off from my ECU library privileges, which means it will become much harder to search journals for full articles) that I stumble across an article title like this one: “When and how to evaluate mildly elevated liver enzymes in apparently healthy patients.”
I might skim the article, but I don’t usually spend much time with these. It’s those pesky last words, “healthy patients,” that tell me it's not for me.
I’m not sure when exactly it happened in the past three years, but somewhere along the way I stopped being one of those.
It used to make me sad. I had to grieve the loss of that healthy girl.
And, if you don’t know me well or if you’re new to this blog, let me explain a bit: I don’t always feel sick. And hopefully I will reach a point at which my rheumatoid arthritis is in remission and my other health issues are managed well. Then I should feel pretty normal. I long for that day. Even then, though, I’ll still be a chick with two chronic health conditions. Two diseases that won’t go away before God performs a miracle, a miracle that I know will happen. I just don’t know that it will happen on this side of heaven, and I’m trusting God to make that miracle happen with His perfect timing. I do know one thing, though:
if it will bring Him more glory in my life and in the lives of others not to bring the miracle before heaven, that’s what I want.
Let me say that again in a different way: If I am healed before heaven and that act of healing glorifies God, I’m all for it. However, if God’s glory is magnified more through my chronic conditions, then that’s what I want,warts RA and Hashimoto's and MRSA and all. I can do without the label of "healthy girl" because I'm glad to trade it for "Christ's ambassador" and "daughter of the Most High."
I don’t know which would glorify Him more: a total healing or continued trials. I don’t have to ponder that, though, because it’s up to Him. And I trust that His plan is perfect in whatever He chooses.
Healthy girl? I liked to think of myself that way, even if that’s more of a memory now.
Christ’s ambassador? I’m humbled to take that role, and I’m asking God to use me, chronic illness and all, to reflect His glory.
Love,
The okay-with-not-being-the-healthy-girl girl
I might skim the article, but I don’t usually spend much time with these. It’s those pesky last words, “healthy patients,” that tell me it's not for me.
I’m not sure when exactly it happened in the past three years, but somewhere along the way I stopped being one of those.
It used to make me sad. I had to grieve the loss of that healthy girl.
And, if you don’t know me well or if you’re new to this blog, let me explain a bit: I don’t always feel sick. And hopefully I will reach a point at which my rheumatoid arthritis is in remission and my other health issues are managed well. Then I should feel pretty normal. I long for that day. Even then, though, I’ll still be a chick with two chronic health conditions. Two diseases that won’t go away before God performs a miracle, a miracle that I know will happen. I just don’t know that it will happen on this side of heaven, and I’m trusting God to make that miracle happen with His perfect timing. I do know one thing, though:
if it will bring Him more glory in my life and in the lives of others not to bring the miracle before heaven, that’s what I want.
Let me say that again in a different way: If I am healed before heaven and that act of healing glorifies God, I’m all for it. However, if God’s glory is magnified more through my chronic conditions, then that’s what I want,
I don’t know which would glorify Him more: a total healing or continued trials. I don’t have to ponder that, though, because it’s up to Him. And I trust that His plan is perfect in whatever He chooses.
Healthy girl? I liked to think of myself that way, even if that’s more of a memory now.
Christ’s ambassador? I’m humbled to take that role, and I’m asking God to use me, chronic illness and all, to reflect His glory.
Lord, please keep me from getting so wrapped up in myself and my fleeting trials that I fail to point to you. May I never communicate the good or bad of my health as a me-focused story. Instead let me share the story of Christ.
And, on the topic of my health, here’s an update: liver is still not doing so hot. We’ve dropped one drug and will do bloodwork again on September 7. Please pray that my interactions with office, lab, and nursing staff that day point to Christ and that the labs will show that my liver is on the rebound.
For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Love,
The okay-with-not-being-the-healthy-girl girl