I recently joined a Christian Writers group and it has been full of Zoom meetings, daily writing prompts, new friendships and encouragement. So much fun! Hopefully you'll be able to see an improvement in my writing!
Yesterday we did a new thing for the group, complete with technical issues! They worked to get a Zoom meeting live on Facebook so seven writers could share their Life Stories in seven minutes each. It was an amazing experience, and I enjoyed being one of the seven. I had to be ruthless in my editing to keep it within the guidelines, but I came in under the seven minute limit! Since I don't know if the replay will be available to share, I decided to share my story here.
“Live to be 100?! I don’t think so!” I scoffed. “Why would I want to prolong the agony that long?”. I was reading a book on how your emotions and thought life affects your health. In it, was a series of questions to probe your thinking and bring issues to the surface. Having spent too much of my life already dealing with a chronic, undiagnosable and invisible illness, I didn’t look forward to having a long life.
And, yet, the question lingered, poking at me. I chewed on that for awhile. “OK”, I admitted, “I don’t really want to live, I’m just going through the motions.” Since childhood I knew that dying meant going to be with Jesus, so who wouldn’t want that? Paul says in Phil 1:21 “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” I got the ‘die is gain’ part. But that first part? A familiar rallying cry for Christians, but what did it really mean? I had no clue.
Shortly after that, I was jolted with fear. How was it even possible to bleed from lady parts I no longer had? In a panic, I cried out to God, pleading in desperation for answers. Into my mind popped the reference “Ezekiel 16”. I’d heard a message before about this beautiful reference to God’s tender care for Israel. I got out my Bible and started to read. Then I got to verse 6 “... I said to you in your blood, “Live!” Yes, I said to you in your blood, “Live!”. I sobbed with relief. He had heard me! He knows my situation! And he is speaking to me! LIVE! Twice!
OK. Got it. Kind of. Well, not really. What does that actually mean, to ‘live’?
Clearly just going through the motions like I’d been doing wasn’t going to cut it. I had to dig deeper. The first step was to realize that if God My Healer just told me to live, then I wasn’t going to die from this weird bleeding. So, I sent fear packing and the bleeding stopped and never returned. Well, off to a good start!
Then a year or so later came the diagnosis of cancer. That lump near my knee turned out to be a sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. But I had this mandate to live! It was firmly lodged in my head. So, I determined that I would live every moment to the full. I never once thought I would die from it. (Suffer maybe, but not die.) How could I? I was too busy learning to live! Embracing LIFE!
Cancer is wonderfully focusing. All the extraneous things we tend to add to our lives fall away and life becomes about the essentials. I was well on my way to understanding what living is really all about.
A pivotal time came when I felt this tug to step across the line, to be ‘all in’, holding nothing back from the Lord. Up to this point, I had let fear and doubt keep me from being totally sold out to Jesus; playing it safe, not getting too crazy. But finally, his love was so compelling I just didn’t want to hold out any more. “OK! I’m all in, Lord. I’m all yours no matter what. No more trying to play it safe. It’s your way or not at all.”
Wow! Why in the world had I been holding back? THIS is what it really means to LIVE! Jesus at the center, really and truly at the center. Now I understand all the superlatives people use. Now I know what it is to struggle to put into words the sheer wonder of walking closely with him, hearing him speak to me in all the myriad ways that he does. Seeing things through his perspective. Now scripture comes alive like never before. No longer just words on a page, but Life and Truth! How I love to read it. How I love to spend time talking with him. The more I become like Jesus, the more I become my best self, the one God designed me to be, with purpose and joy and wonder.
Thank you Lord! Thank you for this mandate to LIVE, thank you for the Life you have brought to me. For the healing you have done. You have said that when we seek you, we will find you. What a find!
LIVE! There is such a wealth of meaning in this word and I have spent the last decade mining its depths. What treasure I have found! What Life I’ve found.
Yes, LIVE!
