My morning

This morning was great. I woke around 4:30 am to use the bathroom. Instead of going straight back to bed and sleep for another hour and a half, I decided to do something different……turn the lights on and stay up. I was truly rewarded. I got a composition book to write (I no longer have internet at the house) a post I could type when I was somewhere connected. It was going to be titled “How Do I Reinvent My Life?” And it went something like this:

I was looking for the post I wrote titled “Half Time”, but found the one titled “God’s Love is Amazing” instead. This is a good reason to write our experiences down, good and bad, as reminders of what we know to be true and what we have been brought through. That one post made me feel loved all over again. With all the bad I have been through the last year and a half, this was a great reminder that God is with us all the time, even when we don’t feel it, even when we don’t believe it. I then found and read “Half Time” and wow! That was April 2016, five years ago. That got me to thinking about that famous (or infamous) question so many people ask: Where do you see yourself in five years? I can truly say I did NOT see myself having been beaten up, broken, and battered by the big “C”, chemo, radiation, parathyroid surgery and Covid. I did NOT see my faith being tested in such a way I would fail bigger than any time up to this point. I also read, “My First Post” from March 2016 and remembered how hopeful I felt. As I continued reading other posts I saw how my thoughts, emotions, and feelings, ebb and flow, rhythmically coming and going, declining and re-growing. For the entire part of my life in which I have memories, I have been taught I am not good enough in most ways, and too much in others, both in bad ways. This is why all this back and forth has made me believe there is something inherently wrong with me. Now in my 50’s (still claiming 32 haha) I am finally realizing life naturally ebbs and flows and that we can no more stay in just one place than we can lasso the moon that controls the tides.

That is where I got side tracked and used the data on my phone to look up things about ebbs and flows and in doing so I found this quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh: “We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom.” I never thought of it like that, but I do resist, in terror, the ebb. However, further reading showed me how to view it differently, such as the ebb is a time of letting go of how life has been and getting me ready for some larger changes coming in my near future.

When I read “near future”, my mind went to what I was told this past Saturday. I have nine months to find another place to live. As fast as time goes by, that is my near future. It is also the amount of time a mother waits to give birth to her precious baby. I am looking at this as God is trying to birth something new in me and my life and what better way to let me know than to give me nine months.

I decided then to start a movie just to see if I might like it and there was a quote in the first few minutes that hit home with me. It has some military in it and one of the commanders said, “Do not engage the same enemy for too long. He will adapt to your tactics”. Well, I wish I would have heard that in my 20’s, but it’s never too late.

When I reluctantly got in the car (because I wanted to go to a friends house with a pool and write) to go to work, the following songs were on the radio, in this order: I had never heard the first one.