Skip to main content

Lessons from Lyme

May is #lymediseaseawareness Awareness Month, and I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks, Lyme, for literally changing my life. Lyme is horrible and painful and terrifying and I would have never volunteered for the physical symptoms I have experienced, but it’s forced me to reevaluate so much and given me a priceless education on many subjects...

Health: health doesn’t just happen and shouldn’t be taken for granted. Health is not as simple as if A, then B, it’s complicated and takes unraveling and digging. I am responsible for my health from small daily choices like diet and toxin load to larger ones like choosing to follow a doctor’s recommendations or not and researching and asking questions when things don’t sound right.

Compassion: I had no idea how hurtful casual, dismissive remarks could be until I was told that I wasn’t that sick, it couldn’t hurt that bad, and I was probably just faking it to get what I wanted. Now I know that remarks like that can leave you scarred for a long, long time. I’m learning to consider the weight my words carry.

Mental health: Pre-Lyme I would have said, “What’s that?” I thought depression and anxiety were byproducts of wimpy attitudes... until I experienced them both. Once you have experienced panic attacks where you can’t breathe and you’ve felt so hopeless you’ve considered trying to die, you realize that there’s more to it than just “getting over it” and “praying about it.”

God: When all I could do was lie in the couch in pain, Lyme is what brought me to Christ for real and to understand that the gospel was a message of grace found in Christ’s already finished work, not a list of demands I had to meet. Lyme is also the cause of many tears and a lot of “why God” and “how long oh Lord.” But I’m learning that’s ok, God can handle my questions and my pain.

Priorities: I'm learning to say “no” to things when I’m overdone without feeling guilty. I’m learning to choose wisely where to put my limited energy. I’m learning to slow down and notice the small things. I’m learning to get real clear on what’s important to me and put those things on the calendar first.

There’s plenty of posts and info out there in the destructiveness of Lyme- it’s oh so very real- and I would encourage you to read up a little on it and TAKE TICKS SERIOUSLY! But instead of adding to the doom and gloom noise I just want to encourage especially those of us in the trenches dealing with it on the daily that it’s not wasted, and God uses it even when we’re mad and sad and super over it (which full transparency, I have been lately 🙄). The end.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe It's Not So Bad....

So apparently I don't learn my lessons very well. I was going back through my recent posts, and they were about thankfulness and giving God control of my life. This past week, I've been bombarded with small and medium sized things that require a reaction from me. And my reactions haven't been very good. Instead of looking for ways that God can use the situation, I've been complaining. A lot. Yesterday, when yet another thing had to be dealt with, I was reminded of Paul. Here I am, worried about how to fix my truck and if I can get all my homework done in time. There's Paul, rejoicing because he GETS to suffer for Christ. And he doesn't just have a lot of homework. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits...
Post a Comment
Read more

More Funnies.

To continue the "laugh at Moriah" post from like 2011... I went to DC with my college roomie this last summer. We were taking the train in and coming back after dark, and I reasoned that taking my pocket knife (read: 4 inch blade) was a logical step. Museum security checkpoints, however didn't line up with my reasoning. I was told to "get rid of it" if I wanted to come in. So, for the next 4 museums we visited, we took a stroll through the bushes before and after to hide and retrieve my knife. At the end of the day, we headed home. With the knife. Take that, Smithsonian security. Every fall, our school does the TP Game (yeah, my school is awesome). First game of the season, and when we score the first basket, we incur a technical foul by throwing rolls of [clean] toilet paper on the court. Well, the students living off campus usually help themselves to a few rolls of school provided game TP for their houses. We lived off campus, but instead of walking out w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember & Expect

As I’ve been thinking about what I want my focus to be this next year, the two words that come to mind are remember and expect. Currently, I don’t have a great relationship with those words. When your whole life (ok that’s a LITTLE dramatic but sometimes it sure feels that way can I get an amen 😫) seems like it’s been one. thing. after. another, it’s easy to get to a place where you can only remember the hard and you start to expect that the rest of life will continue to suck. You become apathetic. Cynical. And a delightful ray of sunshine to be around 🙄. I was reading Deuteronomy 8, in which Moses reminds the Israelites what God did for them in the forty years since leaving Egypt- forty years that, from a human point of view, seemed like a pointless, dead-end waste of time. It was miserable. It made no sense. And yet, God was in the details: they did not lack anything they needed. Moses also reminded them to expect what God had promised them, even though at that moment they were sti...
Post a Comment
Read more