Abba

Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." ~ Galatians 4:6

I often sleep in while my kids get up and get going on their breakfast and school work. But this morning, I feel the warm presence of my son in bed next to me. He's feeling bad. Sore throat, stuffy nose, tired. He'll be fine, and he'll go about his day. But right now, he tightens in beside me so I can wrap my arms around him and make him feel better. If not physically, at least emotionally. It's what parents do - we kiss the boo boos and give out the hugs. Our kids climb into our laps so we can make them feel better. 

There are so many days that I find myself wanting to crawl into the lap of God. I want him to kiss whatever is hurting me that day, and give me strength in his hug. And why not? The term Abba means father, but not just the title father that Jesus uses so many times to refer to his Father in heaven. In the context, it's an intimate title, like a child calling out to her daddy. And God wants us to relate to him as children - to come to him for what we need, cry in his arms, and ask him for help. He is God, yes, and deserving of all respect and glory. But he is also a daddy that invites us to snuggle up and let him comfort us. 

On the really bad days, I cry out to God as King of the universe. The One who has the power to move mountains and do miraculous things in my body. On my good days, I thank him for the respite from my suffering. But it's those days in between - the kind of days that most of my days are - that I can forget that my daddy in heaven does care about me, and he loves for me to call on him and get a quick spiritual hug. Because that's what parents do. And through the blood of Christ, we are adopted children of God. 

Do you ever forget that you can relate to God as your Abba? 


Lord God, help us to remember that we have a father in heaven that cares about every little physical and emotional bump and bruise. Help us to come to you as little children, crying out "Abba, Father." And help each person reading this to lean on your strength to get through whatever challenges this day brings. Amen.

Getting Back To It

Have you hopped over here from the A to Z Challenge list? Or maybe my other blog? Or maybe you follow this blog and you've been wondering where in the world I've been...

You'll see my last post was last April, when I suddenly dropped out of the A to Z Challenge. Life had become too difficult. It goes like that with me. I have good days and bad, good months and bad months. Sometimes I feel bad for a really long time. Last April started a decline in my health that made it difficult for me to keep up with all I had going on. So this blog got ignored, and my other blog limped along.

But I'm back again. I'm starting an upswing, thanks in huge part to a wonderful Hematologist I started seeing a few months ago. It's still a battle, but I'm winning for now. So once again I will attempt the A to Z Challenge. This year I'm doing something a little different - and a lot scary. I'll be attempting to write my first devotionals for the chronically ill.

I ask for prayers as I try to prepare my heart and mind for this new experience. God is able to give me the strength to complete this challenge. And I hope that is what His will is. We'll see.

So for everyone planning to follow me and/or pray for me this April - thank you. It means more to me than you can imagine.

Falling Behind

This blog is about living with chronic illness. Illness which has reared up ugly in the last week or so. I struggled to maintain both my blogs, as well as edit my daughter's daily blog post. But, as you can see, I fell behind in the A-Z Challenge on this blog.

My intention is to catch up. I do have a story to tell. And I love the challenge and all the great people I'm meeting. So, by Monday I hope to be back on track, caught up with all my missed letters.

In the meantime, check out:
Coffee in the Garden (my other blog)
Growing up Victoria (my daughter's blog)
Mothering God's Children (my sister's blog)

Great Physician

Tomorrow we celebrate Christ risen. This Great Physician conquered even death. How can I not trust Him to take care of my life?

Happy Easter! He is Risen!

Forgiveness

Today is Good Friday. I'm not writing a post about myself.

F is for Forgiveness. And I'll direct you to my other blog, Coffee in the Garden, for my thoughts on that.

Have a beautiful day!

The E.N.T

One of the issues I deal with constantly is doctors not being able to tell me what's wrong. I went to my PCP because of horrible ear pain I was having when I was in the cold or wind, and sometimes just randomly. They told me there was pressure behind my ear, but no infection. Of course, it's always, "come back and see us if you are still in pain in a couple of weeks."  After a few weeks, I decided to go see an Otolaryngologis, a.k.a an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor. Having been to sooo many doctors, I get a feeling almost right away about whether I'll like anew doctor. I liked this one. Yay! A little victory.

Alas, after a thorough exam, he could not find anything wrong that could be causing my ear pain. There is a possibility that my TMJ is irritating the nerves near the ear, or that it's part of my neuropathic pain. Either way, I walked out of there with no real answers, and advice to talk to my dentist and neurologist. Every unknown requires at least one, usually multiple, trips to other doctors. And I get tired of that.

But God knows what's wrong with my ear. He knows what's wrong with my foot. Maybe at some point He'll choose to have these things revealed to me and treated. Maybe He won't. But He is my ultimate Physician, and I know His care for me is greater than any doctor out there. So I trust in that truth.
 

Dermatology

Since the age of 18, I've had a problem with my foot just show up randomly. It starts as a small red dot, on the side of my right foot. Over the next couple days, the whole side and sometimes part of the top of my foot will get red, swollen, hot, and excruciatingly painful to the touch and to walk on. This would go on for a couple days before it slowly went away. After the first couple times, I went to my family doctor. He said "Hmmm... we'll just see what happens with it."

It only happened maybe twice a year in the early years, so I just ignored it. But then in my mid-20s, it started happening more, and lasting longer - every couple months or so, lasting about a week. It really started to interfere with my life, because while it was going on, I couldn't sleep well (even the touch of the sheets against it would be horrible), and I couldn't walk well, if at all, because of the pain. Pain relievers barely helped. So I went to my new family doctor (new state, new doctor). He diagnosed erythema nodosum, which is usually occurs secondary to one of a bunch of other illnesses. But since I was healthy, it was more likely idiopathic. The choices were to get a ton of testing to try to hunt down the cause, or to just let it go and deal with it every couple months. I hate tests. So together we decided on the latter option.

Fast forward a few years, and I notice that it is coming in clusters. It would happen two or three times a month for three or four months, then not happen at all for another few months. During that time I was having test after test for a bunch of other issues, and I just did not want to deal with this stupid foot problem - which obviously wasn't going to kill me after all these years.  But during the few months of it happening over and over, it greatly affected my life. So my husband insisted that I go see a specialist. 

Enter the amazing team of dermatologists at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. It takes months to get  into a place like that, so the first time I got in to see them, my foot was fine. But based on my description and the pictures I brought, they said, "No way it's erythema nodosum. ... but we don't know what it is." At that point, I had an open invitation to just show up whenever it happened next (except a weekend of course). It happened to be in a quiet time, so it took many more months before I was able to get in there while it was going on. They thought it was a fixed drug reaction... but that it must be related to food because I hadn't been taking any one particular drug since I was 18. I barely ever took Tylenol. So they did a biopsy. I should note that I had been tracking it over the years, trying to find something I was doing, eating, or being exposed to it seemed connected to. Nope, as far as I could tell, it is just random.

Here was the result: "It's not a fixed drug reaction... we actually don't know what it is... come back when it happens again and we'll reevaluate... we'll take you down and present you at NIH (National Institute of Health) if we have to."  It's not very comforting when this awesome team of highly-respected doctors looks and me and says, "We don't know."

And that was almost a year ago. It's happened maybe twice since then, during times I was unable to make the hour drive to DC. Interestingly, my neurologist is thinking I have some variant of Lupus, and put me on high dose vitamin D (which is being used to treat some autoimmune disorders) about the same time I had my foot biopsy. I'm wondering if the vitamin D has something to do with the decrease in the occurrence. But those are the questions I'm sick of trying to figure out...