January 10 2015

January 10 2015 Greetings My Friend It seems to take a while to fully enter into the New Year sometimes. I wrote the year as 2014...so goes life. I caught my mistake and corrected it so I am once more into this year. Life’s lessons seem to be learned by going backwards relearning, regrouping and then moving forward. The older I get the more comfortable I am with the walk backwards from time to time. I have quit berating myself because I seem to need to go back and start over. The years are teaching me that this backward movement helps to imprint the lesson more so in my mind. I learned this lesson with exercising. I found myself building up time, stamina and muscle tone only to get bronchitis and have to start over again. As I had bronchitis one more time though I saw that I bounced back a little quicker and I am noticing that bronchitis is coming to visit me less often. These days when I have to start over I am grateful because I see that my effort is paying off. I learned the same lesson with my emotional health too. This one has taken me decades but I believe that I have worked out all the pain of life I have dealt with. I will have moments of remembering but these days I also know that I can move out of those moments quicker and I don’t stay as long. God and counseling has given me the tools to work through old hurts. I don’t shove them in a corner only to find them haunting me again. I have dealt with them one by one with God’s help so they no longer rule over me. I keep learning the lesson that dysfunction took years to build up in my life and it will take years to build a healthy life to override the dysfunction. The same lesson can be applied to my disabilities. My goal these days is to do what I can to be proactive and accept the things that cannot be what once was. I am also learning that there will be times I will lose an ability I just had and I am now okay with that. I still grieve the loss of my child’s interaction in my life. Today though I grieve for a moment and then move on. When I look back I know I did the best I knew how to do even if it wasn’t the greatest and that is all I could do. I sense God has understood me and forgiven me my past so I move forward in His love and grace. If the door opens again then the hurt won’t be in the way to building a new relationship again. I see that “old age” is teaching me to be content, accept who I have been and to keep striving to be a better “me” than I was yesterday. It is here that I am able to learn the valuable lesson “let go, let God.” My trying to help God to help me is less these days and I am able to leave my struggle at the foot of the cross more readily. People who knew me back when I was a wallflower will still respond to me as a woman with no backbone, no intelligence etc. They don’t want to see that I have changed and I can’t make them. God is teaching me to accept this and to revel in the “now” with the people who see me as a survivor. They see my strength and growth and I don’t need to prove anything to them. I can’t change those who want to pigeonhole me into the past so leave it there. The lesson I learn is to live in the “now”. God has seen my growth and He is enough for me today. May God bless you and keep you make His face shine on you. Love Janet