I’ve heard it said many times from many different people that life never goes quite how you expect it. I can definitely vouch for that. In the past couple of years I think that I’ve seen the very positive ends of that truth, being thankful that life didn’t fall in line with my plans. This past year came like a gradual storm, blasting my expectations in most areas of my life. This school year started with me going to as many classes as I could and missing the ones I had to because of migraines. The semester hasn’t even ended and I’ve been living at home for two months because I can’t fully take care of myself.

This year has been a continuous battle, as if a long-term storm is positioned over my head and it hasn’t stopped raining. It becomes incredibly taxiing when you wake up every day to pain and you wonder how much you’ll body will allow you today–on good days I can walk around the house myself if my body doesn’t ache too much and manage to stand in a room semi-full of light for a little bit, on bad days I’m icing my neck and my head off and on all day in bed and it takes a lot of energy to eat, if I can keep the food down.  It feels a whole lot like i’m beginning to rust from all this rain, especially when physically i can barely walk around.

Last summer I went to the ER for a dizzying migraine, and the drug knocked me out for a couple days. I didn’t even know then that the pain could get a lot worse and that I’d be at this point where I couldn’t handle any more major drugs and I’d have to just lie here and moan until it’s gone the next day or maybe four days after that. After sooooo many tests and appointments each month, a specialist in Minneapolis has finally ordered genetic testing for a couple possible genes and syndromes. I thought I’d be used to something this constant but it never gets any easier, only a lot harder. I never thought it’d get to the point where my parents and I were meeting Deans and school presidents discussing medical withdrawals and begging for passing grades, or not seeing people I’m close to months. Feels like the rain has washed away a lot more than my health right now.

When you lie in bed for a lot of the day, you think….A lot. And it’s crazy how much your thoughts are more likely to naturally fall in step with what you’re going through rather than take a farther walk in the future to look at the bigger picture. It’s easy to compare, to look around you and be crushed by the progress of others or to worry at the sight of people who’ve had illnesses similar to this for years. The fact is, your thoughts can destroy you faster than your circumstances ever will. That is, if they are rooted in your circumstance alone. I have to force myself to read the verses in my bible that talk about having faith through the waiting period over and over again, because I know that is truth regardless of what I think about my circumstances. Faith is not built around my thoughts, but it will be the thing that builds my thoughts, and my willingness to wait.

I’ve learned that the people in your life that will help get you through this are the ones that actively remind about the faith mentioned above. They’re the ones that don’t worry about getting their shoes wet from my constant rain, but instead rush right through the downpour to sit with me through it. The ones that understand that the raindrops feel different on my skin than they might on theirs, but they’ll listen anyways without questions.

I don’t think this is storm will last forever….well sometimes I do, but I’m still training my mind with God’s word 🙂 I know it feels every day that my body is just rusting more and more, but maybe God has a completely different plan, you know, another one of the “that did not go as I expected” ones. —–And just maybe what I’ll see later down the road, was not at all a rusting because of the rain, but a washing clean in preparing for a new chapter.