I Get to Choose!

In the past 4+ years, I find myself rethinking what healing and happy is. I had been sucked into a culture that focused on perfection as the only path to happiness. I forgot that flaws, pain and suffering are necessary parts of life, they are how I grow, and they are not always to be avoided at all costs. I do not think I am intrinsically virtuous because of this disease and my grief, but I feel clearly empowered by it.

Grief in the broad sense, has taken me outside of the mistaken logic of happiness.  Grief sends me on a different course.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. Grief and loss broke through what I thought was the bottom of me but revealed an awareness and emotion I did not know existed. When I finally felt comfortable with this layer of awareness, it kicked through even a lower area revealing more.

Grief and fear drag me deep into myself. It has given me a new sense of my limitations, what I can control and cannot control. I am not clear how or where relief comes from. I do not understand what situation provokes peace, or eases grief. However, I have discovered that it is not the medical curing of the disease controlled by others, but the divine life healing process that exists in me.

I know I am not the master of my situation, but I am not helpless either. I cannot determine the course of this disease or my pain, but I get to choose how much I participate and respond to it.

"Barely Breathing"  Duncan Skeiks