Sorry this is tardy! Our internet has been on and off all weekend.
This round was not nearly as draining as the previous several. The last couple of times, I pretty much slept for 3 days straight, and was mostly incoherent for several days after that. I was actually awake during the day for this one!! I was still tired, but it wasn't like I had gotten hit by a mack-truck, like how I'd felt the last few times. The nausea has been much worse though. The glass half empty mindset would say "Uggg... if it's not one thing it's another". I think I'll choose to go half full on this puppy and say "Good thing they aren't all coming at the same time!"
These were my thoughts this weekend. I've run a pretty wide gamut of emotions today though. Here are the verses that I was really "feeling" today: (read all the way to the end, or you'll get really depressed)
Lamentations 3:17-24
"My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is. So I say, "My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord."
Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it, and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. "The Lord is my portion," says my soul. "Therefore I will hope in him."
Such is the ebb and flow of the believer who is experiencing difficulty. I love Psalms, and I love the lamenting in general from the Old Testament. They didn't sugar coat things. If life kinda sucked, they said it: "Life sucks!", but in beautifully poetic language of course:) But it never stays there. It almost always inevitably follows that the writer remembers who God is. It isn't some saccharine "Let's turn that frown upside down!" kind of crap. It is knowledge. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.
There is a worship song we used to sing back when I lived in Santa Barbara. The chorus was "Why are you so downcast oh my soul? I will yet praise You, my Savior my King." I always identified with that. It's an honesty followed by discipline. It is the honest cry of someone who feels (FEELS) a hopelessness within them. And it is the discipline of reminding themselves of the truth. I know what I know, whether I feel it or not.
I was laying there in the hospital today feeling the first part of this. "My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is." I feel very strongly that when I am feeling like this, it is because I have been starving myself from the word. I have not been reading. I have not been praying. I have not been plugging into the the one that gives hope in the face of hopelessness. So I read a little. I prayed a little. I meditated on the goodness of my God. And like water flowing onto a plant that is nearly dead, I could feel myself rising from the depths, and a twinkle came back just a little bit into my eyes.
I can usually gauge how I'm feeling by how "possible" I feel like it could be for me to be a mom. I know that I'm having a good day, and feeling good, when I start thinking about having kids. It is those days that I have enough energy to feel like "I really want to be a mom. I could do that". I guess I weigh my ability to do something in the future by how I am feeling in the present. If I have energy, then I tend to plan optimistically, because future hard work feels possible based on my current amount of energy. However, it is usually inevitably followed within either hours or days, by the stark contrast of "Who am I kidding? You don't get sick days as a mom. How could I ever take care of someone else when I feel like this all the time? I can't even take care of myself." This didn't start when I found out I had cancer. But then again, we really don't know how long it had been there, so maybe it did. Anyways, today was a first. Today was the first day that I have ever felt crappy AND thought about wanting to be a mom simultaneously. (to quote Zoolander, "Just thinking about it was the most rewarding experience I've ever had!!" haha!) It may not sound like a lot for some people, but this was a big deal for me. It's some part inside of me that is having a spark of a hope that I can have a normal life in the future. I still may not. But it's nice to daydream about it though.
