The Lost Lion

It's been a few weeks since I've been able to sit down and take a moment to focus on writing a blog.  Being a mom to a busy two year old who wants to be involved in all you are doing because he is so curious about everything, a wife to a basketball coach who takes his job seriously as he should, and there was the whole Thanksgiving and Christmas thing right?  But there's this picture that I've kept on my phone because I felt like it would make a great visual of an idea for a blog post.

The photo is of a wooden lion.  It's a puzzle piece to one of my son's puzzles.  I didn't even know this piece existed in our home.  As long as I've seen the puzzle, the lion had been missing from it.  But my husband assured me that he had seen the lion at one time.  Where it was the next time he saw the puzzle was the mystery.  And there was no way that we were going to find out from our (then maybe a one year old) son.

How did this item get found?  It was found by me, the one who'd never even seen it in the first place.  I was vacuuming and my foot bumped the back of the recliner and something moved underneath the fabric.  I had to investigate.  Of course that involved digging into the crease between the seat and the back of the recliner which to me can be rather gross with crumbs and lint and who knows what.  But I wanted to find out what was in the chair.  And then I was able to reach far enough to grab it.  I was rather amazed as I never thought about pulling out the missing piece of the jungle puzzle.

I set him down and immediately took a picture to show my husband that the lost lion had been found.  The lion we hadn't really thought about unless our son got out his puzzle was now before us.  And then I just looked at the picture and thought, that's people, that's those who suffer with chronic illness.  We get lost.  We go day after day focusing on what ails us.  There are numerous doctor's appointments (with numerous doctors sometimes).  We get blood drawn so much and maybe spend so much time in the hospital that we feel more like a pin cushion than a human being.  And we take so much medication that we feel like we look anything but human beings.  Essentially, the idea of living beyond the day to day is lost.  A life beyond illness is possibly a dream but definitely not a reality and not something we believe we'll find.

I think that was me for a long time.  It was a big factor into feeling lost after graduating high school.  It seemed like so many of my fellow graduates had these goals and dreams beyond high school.  I was still reeling from just trying to make it through high school with what health I did have.  And certainly wondering when my next flare was bound to happen.  How does a person find themselves amidst all the chaos of dealing with a chronic illness?  For me, it took a long time.  It's like I lost the idea that I could be more than a person with Crohn's Disease.  As a kid, I wanted to be this or that, but by the time I got to high school, I had no idea what career path I wanted.  As volatile as my Crohn's was, I had no idea how I would ever be able to succeed at anything I tried.  There was a lot of fear for the future.

There's still fear to some degree.  But now, I look back and think that it all happened for a reason.  The ups and downs all happen to form you into who you are.  And they made me see God.  When I got so sick that all that was left was to remove my colon, I realized He was all I had.  And of course, all I needed.  As long as I had Him, He'd place the right doctors and medical staff around me and He'd give me the peace I needed in order to make a life changing decision, one that didn't make sense to most people.  And with that surgery, I got my quality of life back in order to fight other battles as I would get lost again in that even though I felt great physically, emotionally I was still struggling.  Friends and family were having great things happen to them, things that I had longed for for a long time: getting married and starting a family.  And I wasn't happy with my career choice.

Again, I was lost in a massive gray cloud.  But not because God had left me, but more so because I still wasn't giving myself to Him and letting Him do what He does: guide my life.  It's sort of like I thought that if I had my health back, life would be great.  But it just allowed me to see that there was more buried inside than I even knew about.  And the only way through was prayer from me and others and trusting that my timing would always be imperfect, but His will always be PERFECT.

And just think, the finding of a lost lion made this blog happen.