From Grieving and Resting ... To Healing

I have only shared the following with a hand full of people... When I was at the Mayo Clinic in March, three doctors thought I had a rare disease that has a horrible prognosis. If the "still under research" medication didn't treat this disease, I would only have one year left to live.

I have almost lost my life before. This wasn't the first time for me to hear these type of words. But for some reason, I was very certain that I didn't have this disease, and refused to let this information and possible prognosis upset me.

I felt as if I was giving life to this disease if I told anyone about it.

Fast forward two months to the present. I received a phone call from one of my doctors at the Mayo Clinic; and praise God, I don't have this disease. (The test results take a long time to process.)

Not many days after hearing the good news, I emotionally crumbled.

Oh, how I cried and cried. Sobbing tears of relief. Something I thought that I had been "ignoring," had been more like denial.

I took a couple of weeks to just grieve. I grieved the fact that once again in my life, I was told I might have a bad health prognosis. I grieved for all the healthy years that sickness has taken away from me.

I hibernated a little bit. I needed a place to heal.

I read. I rested a little extra. I saw my counselor and shared all this information with her.

And a single tear or two will still occasionally fall.

Living with sickness is difficult enough, yet we still have to deal with the emotional part of it - which (to me) is sometimes harder than the physical.

Matthew 11:28 says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

I've been laying in my Father's arms, and resting a lot lately.

It's okay to grieve. It's okay to rest. There is not a right or a wrong way to live with an illness and all the baggage it brings along.

I will rest and heal some more. I hope that through this blog, you'll know that grieving and crying sometimes are part of the healing process. And it's okay. The Bible even says so. ;)