A Message for those of you with A Message

Holy Facebook UpRoar

People are up in arms about the National Anthem, Proper Flag Etiquette, and Professional Football Players.

I'm sitting here hitting my head against the wall, AGAIN because us Americans sure do like a ruckus. We get upset but we don't seem to know how to get others to HEAR our complaint and respond accordingly.  We are really good at making noise, but we aren't very good at being heard.  Point in case, today's social media uproar.  It appears that NOBODY seems to remember WHY football players took a knee during the anthem to begin with.

What I'm hearing right now is that the collective NFL is protesting our country, our flag, or president, our anthem....but that wasn't the original point being made.  No surprise there is confusion, when the message isn't clear the voice may be heard, but it won't be understood.

This isn't a blog about my opinion on flag etiquette.  It isn't about showing respect.  It isn't even about the merits of any particular complaint.  What it's about is HOW to protest in a way that MAKES SENSE.

I had to google what the original protest was about. FYI, it was concerning police brutality.  Seems like I'm not the only one who forgot.

Let me be clear.  I am all for a good protest.  I've even organized a few.  What I'm NOT for is people raising kane with no clear agenda, a fuzzy message to an inappropriate audience.

So, here is my personal "cheat sheet" on how to protest in a way that is effective.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Specifically, point by point, what is it you want to happen? "Ending police brutality" isn't clear enough. How about, a specific demand of increased training in police departments centering on the issue you feel officers need more education on. When specific, you can know when your demand has been met and when you can END the protest.

WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE
I get gathering media attention, but lets be real, blocking roads, impeding businesses ability to operate when those roads or businesses have nothing to do with what you are protesting is only going to make people mad and NOT WANT TO LISTEN TO YOU.  The Lyme Community has a yearly protest at IDSA headquarters in Washington DC.  The audience is the IDSA.  That's where the protest is and that is appropriate.  If you want your audience to include the population at large, making the general population mad at you isn't the way to get your message heard by them!

DOES YOUR PROTEST CONNECT TO YOUR MESSAGE?
Here is the bottom line.  If I have to google what you are protesting, then maybe your form of protest isn't working.  Kneeling during the national anthem does not connect clearly enough to ending police brutality.  Yes, maybe these football players are taking advantage of their national audience, but getting attention isn't enough to create change.  And you know what? It's kinda lazy.  How much time and effort are these players putting into their cause with actually "boots on the ground?" How much money are they donating to help improve the police force?  I don't know, I'm just asking the question. That leads me to my last point...

ARE YOU PUTTING ACTION TO YOUR WORDS?
It's simple, you had better be putting as much effort personally into a cause as you put time into making noise.

Hope Comes From Unexpected Sources

I remember when I was at my sickest, lowest point, I took a break from the online "Lyme World".  I did this because reading the daily posts of those who were sick and not finding healing took away my hope.  The posts from people who had reclaimed their lives were few and far between, making it seem as though getting well was more of a dream then a reality.  I was stubborn enough to refuse to let hope be robbed from me, so as hard as it was, I pulled back and turned my attention towards anything that made me feel as though I was "living" my life, whatever the definition of "living" was for me at any given moment.  My intention was to one day return to the "Lyme World" when I had regained my health and give the hope I found to others.  I didn't want to disappear forever.

Four years after starting treatment I now find myself able to say truthfully, that, "I'm better"!  I don't use the word remission yet, but I think I'm very close!  I have been attempting to fulfill that promise to myself to return to being a part of the Lyme Community, but it's hard.  I now understand why people pull away when they are healthy, giving hope to others is much harder then finding hope for yourself.  I see the posts in the various groups, the same questions, the same sad stories, the same confusion and desperation.  It feels redundant, giving the same information to people over and over again and having them over and over again hit the same road blocks.  Even more difficult is pouring so much time and energy into someone and then have them give up the lyme journey and resort to whatever treatment or help their general practitioner can give them.  That isn't a criticism, I get it! Still, it's frustrating that the lyme journey is so impossible to navigate, causing so many people to continue in their suffering.  It's the suffering of others that makes returning to this world so difficult.  

Still, here I am, writing this blog.  I want to share hope.  

Four years ago, I stopped working when I lost the use of my legs.  My downhill spiral was swift and severe.  At my worst my husband was having to feed me.  Now, as my Facebook memories remind me of my hospitalizations, lack of answers, and desperate search for help, I'm ecstatic to be at my old job again!  The one question I'm now getting is, "What did you do to get better?"  Isn't that the question everyone with a chronic illness wants an answer to?  I wish I could give a simple answer, do this and do that and then everything will be ok.  Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this disease.  I'm sure that in future blogs, I will discuss the specifics of my treatment, but what I did to get well may not be what works for you.  This disease is so unique to the individual.  There are no cut and dry answers.  

The one thing I can promise you is this: There is no HEALING without HOPE.

Let me tell you how I hung on to hope.  

ACCEPTANCE
In darkness we see light, In reflection we find acceptance, In willingness we see hope ~unknown

Acceptance is something I had to find again and again in different ways. 

In the beginning I had to accept that I was sick and stop fighting with my body to function.  I pushed myself to the point of being unable to use my body at all.  I spent years refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of my health. For me, accepting that I was sick meant I had no other choice but to find answers.  The search for answers had been so hard the times I did attempt to find them that I would always give up and just live with my symptoms.  It took accepting that I was truly, seriously, sick, for me to have the determination I needed to find answers.  

After accepting that I was sick, I quickly realized I had to accept help.  Being sick my whole life had made me feel weak.  I was constantly trying to prove I was strong and capable, and I did this by being self-sufficient.  I didn't want to accept help from anyone, I was constantly trying to prove that I could do things myself.  It was my way of hiding my perceived weakness; my illness was my deep dark secret.  I couldn't hide all of my symptoms, but I hid as much as I could.  Accepting help was shining a light into my darkest corners making me feel exposed and fragile. It wasn't until my husband reminded me that HE needed help that I was willing to let go of my stubbornness.  I did it because of my love for him and the only means I had to help him was to accept the help of others.  

As determined as I was to get well, I still had to accept where I was at.  This was different then how I lived when ignoring my symptoms.  Previously, I was in denial there was something wrong, causing me to not look for answers.  Now, I was actively doing all I could to get better, but I also was purposeful in being at peace with my circumstances.  I wasn't going to let this disease rob me of my joy.  I searched out inspiration from the stories of others who had lived lives of purpose despite serious afflictions.  I maintained hope in that no matter how disabled I was, my life could still have meaning.

FAITH
Charity can be the outward expression of faith and hope. ~ Wirthlin

There is no way I could have maintained hope without my faith. I don't know how people navigate difficult times without faith.  I'm so thankful for having a relationship with my Savior since a very young age.  My faith has grown over the years as Christ has brought me through difficult times and repeatedly demonstrated His love for me.  I was very prepared for the challenges lyme disease would bring.

I believe the more faith you have, the more God will work in your life.  I also understand that faith needs to be demonstrated through actions.  It's like the trust fall, when you cross your arms and fall backwards trusting your partner will catch you.  That is what faith is, taking a step, and trusting God to be there.  From the beginning, the scariest part of this disease was finances.  Not only were the costs of treatment astronomical, but my disability insurance was half of my regular pay.  On top of all of this, it didn't take long for us to realize that I wasn't the only one in our family with lyme disease, both my husband and my daughters were also sick.  We did not have the financial means to treat this disease, but we had faith.  We knew that we needed to demonstrate that faith actively and did so in two ways.  The first was to actively seek treatment and trust the money would be there to pay for it. The second was to commit to paying our tithe to our church every month, no matter what.

My faith teaches me that everything I have, including my very breath, belongs to God.  It is fundamental to my faith that our finances are from God and we are merely His stewards.  I demonstrate this belief by giving back 10%  of my finances to the church. I haven't historically been consistent with this.  It was something I did sometimes and then sometimes got out of the habit.  Now, facing this financial crisis, my complete dependence on God was undeniable.  I had a choice, and for me it was an easy one to make because God had demonstrated his faithfulness to me so many times already.  I could have easily justified not tithing because of my great need for medical treatment, but if I did that I would be depending on ME and not depending on God.  So, my husband and I made a promise to always tithe first, and I'm so glad we did because it allowed us to see God work in ways we would have never experienced otherwise.  Someday I will have to write a blog outlining these miracles, there are so many.  For now I just want to say that our financial situation has never been better in our almost twenty year marriage.   It doesn't make logical sense, especially considering I lost my disability insurance two years ago.  My husband's business is now, four years later, four times as profitable.  It dumbfounds me.

SACRIFICE
If you don't sacrifice for what you want, what you want will be the sacrifice ~unknown

It isn't easy giving things up, in fact it's down right scary.  I see so often people say that they can't afford treatment, but they also seem unwilling to give things up.  I was also this person.  Before I knew what was wrong, I often didn't follow the advice of others because their advice involved me spending money I didn't think I had.  Maybe I was lucky to get as sick as I did because I had no choice but to seek help.  It was scary realizing how fragile I was and how helpless I was to hang on to the life I had carved out for myself.

I had to give things up, BIG things, things I believed God had given me.  Our biggest sacrifice was our house and one of our two businesses.  We had been blessed with a large home that included space for our karate studio.  It was my house I decided to give up first.  We did this not knowing where we were going.  After living in a rental for two years, circumstances allowed us to move into a house three times smaller then the one we left.  Anyone looking at this from the outside would think this was a horrible sacrifice, but I've never been happier.  Besides the fact that this house is so easy to take care of and is also significantly cheaper, it sits on a lake.  Who can complain about that?  If I had known ahead of time that this is where I'd end up, giving up our large house would have been easy. The second sacrifice was letting go of the licence we had for a large martial arts school.  We spent years training, earning certifications and building a reputation in our community, to only let it all go. Once again, I am shocked at how happy I am!  We created a small martial arts club that we don't run for profit, but as a community service.  I have found a love for the martial arts that I didn't even realize I had lost.

My point? Giving things up is often the best way to hang on to hope.  Loosing things is hard, but it doesn't mean there isn't something better waiting to replace those losses.

My Conclusion

I never thought I would tell someone that accepting their circumstances, demonstrating faith by giving up the very thing you feel you need the most and being willing to sacrifice the things that are most important to you is how to hang onto hope.  On the surface it seems like those things aren't connected.  It comes down to our attitude.  I never said I would give you hope that your life would be exactly how you dream it should be.  I just said I would give you hope.  We all want so much from life, but I think what we all want most is to have a feeling of peace.  My hope wasn't that I would be fully recovered, that was my GOAL, but that wasn't my hope.  My hope was that I would be at peace in my circumstances, that I would have joy in the life I was living, and that I would feel a sense of purpose.  Focusing on those things is what made this struggle so bearable and it is what is helping me not live in fear of having a relapse, because a relapse won't steal my hope.  I don't know what the future holds, but I'm so thankful for the lessons I continue to learn.

It Is Well LYRICS - Kristene DiMarco & Bethel Music (You Make Me Brave) from Faith Community Fellowship on Vimeo.

We all find our own way to manage struggles-my daughter's imagination is her escape

We all struggle, and we all have to cope with struggle. Some of the ways we cope are healthy and productive, some of the ways we cope only causes us more harm. It's up to us to decide if we will take our challenges and turn them into our strengths.

As I have shared before, my whole family has struggled with living with chronic lyme disease.  This blog is going to be about my daughter Jenna, who I think may have had the hardest time out of all of us growing up sick with lyme.

We didn't know Jenna had lyme until she was a senior in high school.  I use to take her to the doctor constantly with physical complaints, but no real answers were ever found.  She also struggled with psychiatric symptoms, before school it displayed itself as emotional instability and separation anxiety.  Once she hit 1st grade my highly intelligent child began to struggle with reading, things spiraled down hill from there.  Her school age years were spent seeing psychiatrist and psychologists for school refusal.  Whenever I brought up physical symptoms they were always attributed to anxiety.  It was such a difficult time for all of us.

To this day, Jenna doesn't understand how strong she is.  Despite her struggles, she graduated from high-school with honors.  She won competitions.  She earned her 2nd Degree black belt and was an extremely talented martial artist.  Most importantly, she has an imagination like I've never seen.  A psychologist told her when she was 13 that he could see her as an author.  She hung onto that idea, and began writing.  Now, seven years later, she has finished and published her first book.  I'm so proud of her.  What I'm most proud of is how honest she wants to be about herself and her life.  So I will now share with you what she has to say in her own words:

"I wrote because I had nothing else to do while I was sick with lyme and having sever panic attacks several times a day. I couldn't leave the house because of the anxiety, I couldn't go out with my friends or even go to school half the time. I wrote because it was my own world, away from everything I really didn't want to do. I wrote characters that were strong willed, and snarky, and could stand up to anything because that's who I wanted to be. Because in the real world where I was plagued with anxiety, lyme disease and depression, being bullied and tormented for all these issues I had, it was so much easier make up a different world where I could be someone else and where I was in control. In the real world I had no control and that caused and still causes me a lot of anxiety from all the uncertainty. In my life of chaos, writing was a way for me to have some solid ground. When I couldn't leave the house, my characters went on grand adventures. When I couldn't stand up to my bullies, my characters beat their enemies into the ground or handled their issues with awesome snarky comebacks. Writing was how I coped.

I dream of one day having my books become famous, to be in real interviews where people ask me in-depth about my books and are amazed with what I have created. Did I ever think it would actually happen? No. So I can't tell you I pushed through all the torment, and sickness, and the hardship, and held on to my dream that I would someday achieve all my dreams, because I didn't. In fact, I gave up on writing many many times. I must have started a hundred books and given up half way through. I hated writing more often than not, because even if I had my characters be strong and smart and go on adventures, I still wasn't. And living through them suddenly only made it worse for me. It rubbed it in more that I still couldn't do these things. New World Mechanism is the first book I have ever finished in entirety, and it has actually been published! It still baffles me. Though, now I am faced with a new challenge, my book is a series, and if people like it, they will want to know the rest. This is so much pressure on me and takes something I did for fun, to escape the real world, and turns it into work for the real world. The pressure I feel for my books is both inspirational and horrible, So, Im not going to tell you that writing for me is a heavently release and escape, because it wasnt at first. It was selfish and a way for me to hide. I'm not going to tell you I sit on a beach all day, drinking ice tea, and writing away like its nothing, because I dont. I sit in my studio apartment, at my disaster of a desk - filled with ripped up pages of book ideas- and cry and glare at my computer 90% of the time. And then there is that 10% that I actually have inspiration and enjoy the writing process. Its not easy, for me to write, and it never was. But I guess that's how dreams work."

Puchase a Kindle Version of this book


Or a PaperBack Copy
https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mechanism-J-L-Bell/dp/1535187034/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1468521945&sr=8-2&keywords=new+world+mechanism

Chronic Illness and Church Attendance

Another Sunday goes by where instead of attending church, I laid in bed.  Nothing is more frustrating to me about this illness then my inability to regularly attend church.  Despite all of the improvements I am making in my health, regular church attendance is something I have yet been able to achieve.  It isn't for lack of trying.  And my legalistic baptist upbringing ensures I have plenty of guilt.  Every weekend I have to remind myself to lay it at the feet of God and not to stress or feel bad when I am unable to get myself through the Church doors.  I spent a lot of time today reflecting why I feel so guilty for my lack of attendance.  Today was especially frustrating because a week ago when I made it almost to church only to have Scott turn around and take me home, I made a commitment to ensure I would not expend to much energy the days leading up to church so that I would be able to go.  So, what happens? I come down with a cold this week, and then on top of that woke up this morning with a migraine.

So, after lots of reflection I wrote down the reasons I feel so much guilt.  Now I will explain them in this blog and hopefully be able to finally let the guilt go.  It's absolutely silly I feel this way.  I don't feel guilty about anything else I am unable to do as much as I do this.

It's my fault
     I have spent alot of time through this illness retraining my brain so that I would no longer blame myself for the things I am unable to do.  I use to feel like a horrible wife and mother before I understood how sick I was.  I never could function in the way I saw other's function and always felt weak because of that.  I have absolutely let those thoughts go and am now working hard to help my girls to stop judging themselves harshly when faced with their limitations.  Despite all this, I still am blaming myself for not attending church.  I thought for the past year or so that it was because I wasn't prioritizing my time well.  The thought of church on Sunday was so daunting because I had stuff to do that day and if I were to attend church in the morning the likelihood of doing anything else later that day was null. It's hard because I can only do so many things in a day.  Literally, a weekday is a good day if I can do both housework and teach a taekwondo class, or do housework and do an errand in town.  I rarely can do errands in town and taekwondo, but sometimes I can.  So, by the weekend there is usually alot of errands and housework to be caught up on and I can only get caught up on non-taekwondo days.  The guilt stems from my feelings that I am placing work and chores, and kids school activities above church.  I didn't know how to flip my priorities around.  It took a few months, and Scott also rearranging his work schedule to help me on Saturdays, but we finally got a system down where I can usually have nothing to do on Sundays but church.  Problem solved? Nope. And this is where I think God is trying to teach me something.  Because despite all I have done to prioritize my time, I still struggle with feeling healthy enough to do anything before noon.  I am trying now, really hard, to let go of the guilt and blame I place on myself just like I did with other areas of my life.

I am setting a bad example for my children
     I grew up with the knowledge that if the church doors were open I would be there.  It is really hard not to have that same mindset with my own children.  Especially where they are sick too.  I worry all the time that if I don't attend church, they won't see it as a priority to set in their own lives.  If I don't go then the family almost never attends either.  Once again, it isn't because they don't want to, its because they also have serious health issues.  Scott and Chelsea work so hard during the week and really need the weekends to rest.  Jenna struggles with the sensory overload that happens at church. As much as I've worried about this, I have realized over the past few years that the girls have a strong sense of trust in Christ.  They may not have had the example of weekly church attendance, but they have definitely seen how much Scott and I have trusted God to meet our needs.

I'm a people pleaser
     One of the biggest obstacles in my spiritual growth was my need to have acceptance and praise from others.  When I was younger, if I wasn't getting positive feedback from those I looked up to then I didn't feel like I was where I should be spiritually.  It took me a long time to move past that and understand my relationship with God was what was important more so then the opinion of others.  Through this illness I am seeing that I still struggle with this.  I don't want people to think I have moved away from God simply because they aren't seeing me involved in the body of Christ.  I wonder if I am sick so often on Sunday mornings because God is still working on this area in my life. My desire should simply be to be living in God's will and I shouldn't be worrying about what other's think of me.  I also am realizing that I have made judgments of others when I stopped seeing them in church.  I've made assumptions without having any understanding of the person's situation. I know one thing for sure,  I will never make that mistake again. It is never our place to make judgement of where someone is at spiritually.

I desire to connect with others
     My biggest sadness in my inability to attend church regularly isn't from guilt, but from a lack of connection.  I feel completely isolated from my church family.  It is hard on the Sunday's I do come to church because I see all that the church body is doing and I am unaware and uninvolved.  What's worse is when I am greeted by someone as though I am new to church or just visiting.  I see people who I have known for years interacting with people I have never met as though they are all very close, and these new people have no idea who I am or that I exist.  That makes coming to church hard because I feel like I'm only looking though a window at everyone else who is actually in church and involved.  It makes me not want to come until I know I can come regularly because I want to feel a part of things and I don't know how I can feel that way until I can come to church regularly and also give time to ministry. Despite feeling this way, I will still try to come to church, I'm just saying it's another reason it's hard.

All I know, is that I don't think you can truly understand the motives behind someone's actions or inactions unless you have lived in similar circumstances.  I am taking from this a deep understand as to why it is difficult for some people to attend church regularly if at all.  I hope to someday find ways to take this knowledge and use it to be a blessing to others.  I hope that in sharing this I have at least given you a glimpse of what it's like to live on this side of the window.  There are many more people besides me who are looking in from the outside and just simply are unable to come in and join the party.

The Next Chapter, Steps to Healing

Just an FYI: my ability to read and edit what I write is difficult.  So excuse grammar or spelling errors!

I have been aggressively treating chronic lyme, babesia and bartenella for over two and a half years.  I knew it would be a long journey, but what has been most difficult is having patience and faith through the slow improvements that are coupled with huge set-backs.  When I don't improve at a steady rate I feel like I'm fooling myself and maybe I'm not really any better.  I know this isn't true, but where I live with this disease so publicly, set backs feel like failures.  

Part of the problem is my own impatience.  I start to feel better and I push myself till I can't push any more.  This always backfires on me and I end up in bed and frustrated.  I'm blessed to be seeing a new neurological chiropractor in our area. (I will post a link to his website at the end).  He has given me such simple tips that are helping and I am starting to understand how my body works and why it is failing me so badly.  One simple tip is to stop and rest BEFORE I feel tired.  What a concept.  I think I needed someone giving me permission to do this to actually get me to not run myself into the ground.  Once I understood why I should pace myself this way it was easier for me to follow this advice. I have felt so much guilt for not contributing as much to the family and the business as I feel I should be.  Stopping when I still had energy to expend felt selfish.  Now that I understand that I'm killing my endurance by the way I have been utilizing my energy, it's easier to allow myself to rest more often. It's easier because I know that by resting more often now, I will be able to do more for longer periods of time later.  So far so good, my endurance is better.  It's hard sometimes to follow this pattern of going and stopping, and I notice how much more fatigued I am when I push myself harder then I should, but I'm trying to make resting a priority and I am saying 'no' more often.  It stinks, ALOT, having to tell my daughter no, sorry, I can't make it to your track meet because I have to rest to utilize my energy somewhere else. But my eye is on the long term goal of being completely healthy, thankfully my family understands that.

I'm also changing more things in my diet.  There is so much to learn in regards to this.  The change has been on going for me stemming back well before I even knew I had lyme: no gluten, no sugar, less dairy.....ok, maybe LESS sugar, having NO sugar is really hard.  I'm getting there, slowly.  I had my gut bacteria tested, my lyme brain doesn't function well enough for me to even begin to explain that, but needless to say I have basically almost no gut bacteria.  I'm sure my gut was a hot mess before I started treatment and probably one of the factors in my quick decline.  Now, after a couple of years of antibiotics, my microbiome is really messed up.  My body isn't going to be able to do its job and keep the lyme bacteria in check if my immune system isn't working.  So, if I ever have a dream of getting off treatment I need to mend my gut.  I'm now learning all about kiefer, fermented foods, and prebiotics.  These are things that I had a superficial knowledge of, but when in treatment there is so much to learn, and I could only focus on the things most pertinent at the time.  It wasn't until recently that I was able to allow my brain to stretch a little further.  I was only able to learn this new information now because I was ready for this next step in my journey.  

So, right now my biggest goal is to get off antibiotics.  I attempted recently, but only lasted about 10 days. I'm now on a doxycycline pulse with some brief bursts of cist busters.  (Doxi drives lyme into the cist form quickly, so we are blasting those cists to allow the doxi to work) I will attempt to switch to complete herbal treatment again in a few weeks.

I'm treating bartenella herbally with success, I'm herxing which tells us the A-Bart tincture is working. The most exciting news is that I've been off babesia meds for six weeks and am still symptom free!  WooHoo!

Check Out Richard Matthews Site: http://www.neurodoc4u.com/

I'm ready to rejoin the fight

It's been a long time since I have written a blog.  I abandoned this site for awhile for a couple of reasons.  The biggest reason was that I simply needed a break.  When I reread my last blog entry I'm reminded of where I was at emotionally at the time.  I was at a point in treatment where I felt stuck.  I wasn't making improvements like I should and I was financially unable to access the treatment that I knew I needed.  Chelsea had become bedridden and completely stopped attending school.  We knew she needed either IV meds or IM injections but were unable to afford either.  Financially we were a mess.  It was the middle of winter and our bank accounts were at zero. All of this was happening, and online I just seemed to be reading post after post from other people with lyme who were not getting better and were unable to access treatment.   All of this, and the many stories of people losing their battles with lyme, I was feeling hopeless and knew that I needed to put my attention elsewhere.

One of the most import things I have learned on this journey is the importance of where your focus is.  If I am to get well I need to be paying attention to things that will pull me towards healing. I didn't want to ignore the suffering of others, but I need to take care of myself if I ever had a hope of being able to help others. So, I pulled back.  I stopped following alot of the lyme pages I use to follow on facebook.  I placed my attention on things that had nothing to do with lyme disease.  I didn't want to live as a sick person anymore.  So, my body remained sick, but my head became the head of someone who was healthy.  What I mean by that is, I set goals for myself.  Goals that had nothing to do with lyme disease.  Goals that I knew I would need to be well to achieve.

What I did pay a lot of attention to what my spiritual life, even more so then I already had been.  Over the course of the winter of 2015 things slowly improved.  More positives were happening for us then negatives.  Work became available to Scott, we were awarded grants to help pay for Jenna and Chelsea's treatments, and as the snow of 2015 finally started to melt, things continued to get better.

 For the first time, in a very long time, we felt things were finally going well for our family.  I won't blog about the details of last year, at least not today.  But, 2015 was by far, the best year Scott and I have ever had together.  Thank you to all of you who were a part of giving us so much hope.

And hows our health? Well, Scott is working six days a week and doing more physically then he has ever been able to do in the entire time I have known him.                                                                                              Jenna is slowly improving, we are in the middle of making some changes to her treatment plan, but just today she texted me all excited from the top of the Beehive in Acadia National Park! Yes, she climbed it!

Chelsea has attended school all year, done after school activities, maintained straight As and is currently slowly getting back into shape as she is a part of the spring track team!

Oh, and what about me?  Well I have learned some hard lessons about not over doing it, and am now slowly regaining my strength and increasing my endurance.  I will be blogging more about my healing journey as long as my brain functions well enough to allow me to do so.  I was ready to return to the lyme world and share my journey last fall, but unfortunately I had spent most of the winter unable to read or write well.

  We are all at a crossroads in treatment.  We are still fighting the tick born diseases, but now at the same time, are trying to repair the damage the diseases and the antibiotics to treat the diseases have done to our bodies. We are all attempting to transition to herbal treatment protocols.  Scott and Jenna are at that point now, and Chelsea and I are very close.

So, bottom line, I'm back in the saddle. I have gotten through the dark valley I was in and am now ready to not only become active in the lyme community again, but I have some pretty big ideas for my future professional aspirations as well. Don't worry, I'm pacing myself, but my eyes are way ahead of my body and I'm envisioning myself as a healthy person who is helping others.

What Takes More Faith

It has been a year and a half since lyme entered our daily vocabulary.  My husband, my daughters and I all now have experienced the joy of finally having an answer and the fear associated with the difficulty of treatment.  God has been faithful to us, and we are all using this time to grow spiritually.  We try to focus on the amazing blessings we have experienced and be thankful even in the midst of struggle.  

We are all improving, but at different rates.  This journey is long and even when well there is always the risk of relapse.  It's easy to focus on the financial burden this disease has placed on us, but God has given me numerous reminders that there are many more people in our community who are just as sick and unable to even begin the steps to diagnosis due to the financial cost.  It is absolutely, nothing short of miraculous that we have been able to continue to pay for treatment.  

Here we are, in January, the hardest time of year for our family financially.  I have been praying all this past summer and fall about how we would continue to function once we hit this difficult time of year.  I've been seriously hoping that I would be able to return to work part time this month, but here we are and I am not feeling ready to return to work, even part time.

We had been hoping to go into January caught up in our 2014 expenses.  Unfortunately, this chimney season wasn't what it usually was.  Because of this, we have some serious bills hanging over our heads.  I fully trust God to supply our needs, but the question I'm not sure the answer to is this: Should I continue to wait and rest and trust God to miraculously take care of our needs, or should I take the step, in faith, and attempt working part time, trusting God to supply the energy and strength I need.  I don't know the answer.

It's funny, how things work out.  Scott was provided with the perfect job a few weeks ago, and he also got a handful of chimney calls last week.  I thought this was the answer.  Then, Scott develops a severe health issue and not only did it cost a lot of money out of pocket, but it severely affected his ability to work.  This current health crisis will soon pass, but I'm still left with the question of HOW God wants me to show my faith.  

Here is my prayer, or test:

This week I am going to attempt to get up everyday as though I was going to work.  I am going to see how well I function.  I am going to be in prayer that one of two things happen, either I am able to have the strength to function or we will be provided needed fiances through another venue.  (God seems to like to provide chimney jobs when we are in financial need.)  I am hoping, praying, that I can be given some clear direction.