"NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE IN"

"In YOU, O LORD, I have taken refuge; 

Let me never be ashamed.

In thy righteousness deliver me.

2 Incline Your ear to me, rescue me quickly;

Be Thou to me a rock of strength 

A stronghold to save me.  Ps. 31:1-2

The title above is a portion of this quote from Winston Churchill during World War II.    

“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty..." Winston Churchill

They say that it is darkest just before the dawn. and I am sure that Mr. Churchill felt this many times before the end of the war, but yet he had the resolve to encourage his people to never give in.  This week, that was certainly true in my life, and I was not even in a large war but a small personal war which he seemed to think was just was important.  To him, it is just important not to give up.  I began to get frustrated a few weeks ago because I had my first flare up that I had experienced since starting the medicine in April...full on fatigue, pain, feeling like I had the flu every day...and very sure I once again had an infection beginning to rock my body.  

Then, after the flare, this week, I had the infusion and oh my, I was once again flat on my back from the first day until the 5th day.  I know I have been told that the drug is as strong as chemo drugs, but it is so hard to wrap my brain around that, because each infusion has been slightly different.  The last one, I felt pretty good even the day of the infusion.  It may be because they ramped the drug up in my system at the first and then go to a every 4 week schedule.  I also have been told I won't know the full effects until from 6 to as many as 12 months after starting. 

While I was recovering this week, I spent some times in the Psalms, and as usual, I was assaulted over and over again with who God is to me and how He is my strength, my deliverer, my covering my refuge, my provider.  And my spirit began to be lifted and my resolve again right along with it!  

I WILL WAIT!  I will NOT give up!  You want to know why? First because Christ has a plan for my life. Next, because I have already began to see little changes, like shopping all day with my hubby at my mall, which has not occurred in years.   Additionally, multiple days in a row where I actually feel "normal" like my old self.   Finally, Christ is restoring hope that I can, with His help fulfill dreams I have had for years that He has never taken from my heart that I have felt called by Him to do.  The trick is if I will listen to Him and not allow the evil one to whisper in my ear and shoot his flaming arrows of discouragement.  Fight, beloved, against discouragement!  

Jesus talks in the book of Matthew (Matt. 26:41) about the spirit being willing but the flesh is weak.  Well that describes lupus and fibromyalgia and these other diseases to a "T".  Most days it takes the energy you have to just get done what you have to and you just can't allow yourself dreams for the future very easily.  I know Jesus was addressing the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, but I sympathize with them.  My spirit to do what God wants me to do and who He wants me to be as a wife and a mother is so hampered so many days by my body's inability to respond.  I want so much to be ALL my Savior wants me to be and I just really feel like I come up short.  And I praise Him that He is so full of grace and mercy that He loves me anyway.  What He really wants is for everything you and I do to be for the glory of Him.  Our work is to honor Him and Him alone.   

Nothing takes our Savior by surprise.  He has known all along that this drug was in the making.  He wants the best for me and my family, and no matter what you are struggling with, He wants the best for yours to come out of your circumstances.  It comes down to just grabbing on with both hands.  Even on the bad days, apply 


2 Corth. 10:4-5

4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world.  On the contrary they have the divine power to demolish strongholds.

5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.


apply this verse to fight Satan's attempts at discouragement and take those thought's captive, and additionally remember

Jeremiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you", declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." 

 and believe that Christ always has our welfare and not our harm in mind!  Beloved, we must remember that never giving up is making the most of those tough days and finding the way, Christ's way for you to do His work.   

 Whatever it is you are facing today, never give up.  There are so many way to live out loud for the Lord!  Think about Paul and Silas who did it while bound in prison after being beaten.  I have to say these two men grabbed on with both hands and lived way out loud!  Can you imagine keeping a good attitude? (Acts 16:25-34)  He and Silas began praising and singing to God, and God responded with an earthquake, well, you know the story.  The result?  The jailer and his household were saved, along with a few other miracles that night.  Some days we can just sing praises to God in our homes.  What a blessing to the Lord!  Grab on my friends!  Lets not give up!  Satan will not get a foothold.!  Whatever your personal prison or bondage is right now, turn your thoughts towards the Lord.  

The Lord is my refuge, my rock, my strength, my deliverer no matter the circumstances.  My beloved friends.  No matter what you are facing, since it is impossible for Him to change His character in any way, shape or form or in any situation because God is who is, He is all of these for you as well if you let Him be. 


Whatever you are struggling with; family issues, divorce, marital issues,  chronic illness, acute illness, a recent death, the loss of a close friend, the loss of a job, financial hardships, addiction, problems with your children, or other family members, it just does not matter what it is, Jehovah, the LORD, God Almighty, Jehovah-Jireh (the Provider), Jehovah-Rapha (the Lord who heals), El Elyon (the Lord Most High), El Roi (the Lord who sees), and Elohim (the Creator God) is there for you, if you will turn to Him, trust Him and believe:  Never, never, never give in because He will never, never never forsake you.

Deut 31:6  Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Psalm 9:9 Those who know your name and trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.

Deut. 31:8 The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

Joshua 1:5  No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you

Hebrews 13:5 Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “ I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,

Many blessings to you all!  Take those thoughts captive, make the most of the rough days knowing that even singing praises to God (this can also come in the form of praying as well!) makes a difference on the hard days.  Never give up, never give in, for God will never give up on you, He has a plan for your life no matter your circumstances and what I must mention above all is that He sent His Son because He loves you so much so that your sins, my sins could be forgiven through His death, burial and resurrection in order that one day we can spend eternity with Him.  John 3:16.  If you have any questions about that, please contact me.   

Have a beautiful and wonderful day and remember you are all beautifully and wonderfully made in His image.  


Blessings!
Diane

The power of forgiving words in marriage, Part 2

Part 2 - All of the above began to drive us apart because we took our eyes off the prize, which is a marriage built on the strength of Jesus.  I began to try and do things in my own power.   I withdrew from people at the church because before diagnosis, much was not understood about what I was going through at the time.  I did not even understand what I was going through for a long time even after I received the diagnosis.

Eventually, due to bills and the recession, we had to downsize and move to a smaller house...another stressor.   But even that became not enough even though we tried to work with all of our creditors and we ended up in bankruptcy.  A place I never, ever thought we would be.  Now we truly were in poorer from a financial sense.  We still had our Lord, of course.  

Through it all, I was determined to make it.  There were many days I may have not liked him so much and I am positive he didn't like me.  There were days I cried out to the Lord to heal the hard places and show me how to love Him how we deserved to be loved and help us get back to the place we had been before.  We began to go to counseling together.  We needed to find the best way to be with each other and find better ways to communicate.  I would never let what God had joined together be torn apart by me or my attitudes.  I truly did not care how long it took, and with me being a very strong-willed woman, God probably had His work cut out for Him....and of course this continues to prove to be the case!  

I can't tell you the last 3 to 4 years have been easy....they haven't.  But what I will tell you is that I am  committed to stay here for life.  Through it all....And I will tell you that there is one thing that I learned when we celebrated/renewed our vows; asking for forgiveness in marriage heals.  And I honestly do not care how long a grudge has been held on a particular issue.  Nor do I  care if the other person thinks you feel you need to ask for forgiveness in that area.  It heals.

I am SO glad we chose to go ahead and celebrate our vows on our anniversary.  We both wrote what we wanted to say separately and did not share them until the ceremony.  My hubby blew me away.  He felt abandoned before we knew I had lupus because he flat did not understand what I was going through, and I do not blame him, but in my heart I NEVER abandoned him.  I was just so sick, emotionally and physically that it was all I could do to get out of bed in the morning. It has broken my heart many times over that he ever felt that way and many times did I ask for his forgiveness.  But in this case, on our vow renewal day, something very unexpected for me happened.

God led him to ask for MY forgiveness during that time.  I felt so unworthy of that.  In one instant, years of marriage was healed.  I had felt he was so incredible during that time and it broke my heart he felt abandoned and yet he came back and asked for MY forgiveness.  What a blessing, what an automatic renewal, what a gift!!  I was absolutely, completely speechless.

Forgive.  Is it not the very foundation on which the Christian faith is based?  In one fell swoop, my husband spoke and reminded me of what our relationship should be striving for....agape (unconditional) love and forgiveness.... I should be walking in both daily.  Not only that, I should keep seeking from this 25 years now plus to love God first and then love others with my hubby being first.

My husband's words to me made me want to be better immediately and rise to his challenge.  It reminded me again of the man I am blessed to have.  Marriage is a roller coaster because life is a roller coaster.  However, if I keep remembering to see this man as a gift straight from God, keep a forgiving and loving attitude and express that when I mess up, then all the gains we have made to get us back to where we were before will just continue and in fact, I can see us becoming stronger than we ever have been before.

Wherever you are in your marriage.  Do not be discouraged if times are rough, Christ is there.  If you are in a good place, Christ is there.  If you can learn what I have learned, forgiveness, agape love, and sticking in there and asking for help when you need it, and most of all crying out to the heavenly Father to show you the way, you can make it through the rough patches.  These were learned by experience and I have to put them into practice every day....

May God bless each and every marriage that runs across this blog and reads this.  For it is ONLY by His grace I live day-by-day!

Many Blessings

Diane

The Power of forgiving words in marriage, Part I

Twenty-five years ago this May, I married my best friend, the love of my life, my soul mate....and every other name that is supposed to go with the person you want to spend the rest of your life.  And today, I still feel the same way about him given that I was 17 years old when I met him and 19 when I married him.

It absolutely amazes me that it has been 25 years since we looked at each other and pledged our vows and made our covenant before God to love one another for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, to death do us part.

We were SO young when we got married...I was 2 months shy of 20, and he was 3 months shy of 21...and honestly, we said those vows with our whole hearts and with as much as we knew about life at the time.  We were SO young and so innocent.

It amazes me that those vows the proverbial marriage nail right on top of the head.  While some marriages may make through many, many years without having one or more of these tested, I daresay that most of us have many of them tested.  I cannot speak to what makes one marriage stay together and another one call it quits and I will never, ever judge another couples lives....all I know is what we have gone through.  And no matter where you are...early in your first marriage, deep in a second marriage or even in a third, God intends and wants to bless it and desires that we love one another with HIS love...His unconditional agape love to the best of our ability.

I honestly have no real true idea as to why my hubby and I are still together today except for sheer determination, relying on God, the absolute commitment of my husband to the vows he made, and the same for me.  And the only other thing I can say is that I feel I got lucky and found my soul mate at 17....which doesn't always happen.

I want to encourage by example...  so here is our story.... The first 4 years were just awesome!  We fought little, played a lot, moved into a little 900 sq ft. home and always seemed to have just what we needed!  I worked part-time, he worked full-time and we played with friends and just enjoyed early married life.  The only snag was when we decided to get pregnant, it took longer than we expected, but eventually, I became pregnant with our first child, a boy.... I was deliriously happy!  My dreams were all coming true, finally; the man of my dreams, I was going to become a Mom, God was indeed good.  Then, on Easter morning 21 years ago, at 20 weeks gestation, my water broke, so we rushed to the hospital and due to my white count sky-rocketing and my increasing fever, there was nothing we could do to save our little Joshua, who did not live through labor anyway.  We had very early experienced one of our for absolute worst.  It challenged us as a young married couple, because we grieved very differently, so it was either learn about how the other one grieved and give them that space, or it would have torn us apart.  Instead, we chose to let it draw us closer.  I do not know how I would have made it without my God and my husband.  Today, I thank God for the experience, which may seem odd...but because of it, a passion was lit inside of me to understand the Lord my God better....to understand how such a good God would let such an awful thing happen.  I am still on that journey on a daily basis.  Digging into the Word would be necessary for the 4 difficult pregnancies that were to follow....BUT out of them, God blessed us with our three beautiful children we have today.  There were times when the oldest was in the NICU, and when I was on bedrest with my daughter and my youngest that I relied so heavily on the Word and the Lord to make it through the fears of losing another... but He did so...  Amazingly, Greg and I grew as well during that time.

He helped us through a move to Houston that was lonely and then He saw fit to bring us back.  Little did we know that some of  our hardest years were just over the horizon.  A few years after my youngest was born, about 12 years ago, financial strain was already beginning to hit due to all the premature babies, the hospital stays and we constantly had medical bills that put a strain on our finances.  About this time, I all of the sudden began to have daily migraines which required many trips to doctors to get help get the pain to stop as we could not figure out what was happening, next came the panic attacks along with severe depression and I also started getting sick a lot.  Additionally, I was having a lot of pain in various parts of my body that just did not makes sense.  None of it made sense.  Here we are in the throes of  "in sickness and in health".   By this time it was putting a strain on our marriage... Greg was beginning to have to take up the slack for me and I had been on the team at my church called Keepers of the Home, which was where my heart completely lay, yet my body was cheating me...the fatigue, the migraines, the depression/anxiety, and now the guilt that my poor husband was having to start helping with the children and laundry.  Yet, he never complained...

 I did try to continue to work at various jobs during this time until Thanksgiving week 2003.  I became very, very ill with three different illnesses.  I do not remember 4 days of that week.  I pneumonia along with two other illnesses that were serious.  The doctor told me I would be acutely ill for at least 3 weeks and chronically ill for 6 weeks after that.  Little did we know that my life actually would never be the same.  However, it would take until 2006 to get a proper diagnosis and in the meantime, my husband felt like I had abandoned him and was just giving in feeling bad.  I could not understand just how bad I felt and that I felt in my gut something was truly wrong.  It took my dentist to find out, but praise God for her!

In the midst of my illnesses, Greg became ill with Crohn's disease and had 3 hospital stays and a major surgery.  Through all of mine, his medical issues and all, we were now definitely experiencing for richer for poorer.  End of Part I....

A new view on the word EXPECTATION!

Blessings my friends!

Today, I did  not feel like a Proverbs 31 or Titus 2 woman as I started to write this.  I absolutely 100% disliked the word EXPECTATION (but keep reading!).  I want to say before I keep writing that I love my precious husband with all my heart.  He is my soul mate, I would marry him all over again.  He is the most precious thing in my life next to my Lord and Savior, Jesus.  Having said that, I will say now that chronic illnesses are very hard on even the best of marriages and it often takes counseling and good communication skills to stay together.  But most important, it takes relying in the Lord and placing Him front and center.  In our marriage of 25 years,  we have been most definitely disagreed about the meaning of the word expectation.

My precious husband is my best friend, but I would be lying to say if this illness had not a strain on our marriage.  It was so much easier, and now?  All I think is will we ever find that perfect blend again.  He EXPECTS so much of himself and from time-to-time on our journey has seemed to think that I do not do as much as I am capable of doing, or that I stop before I should when I could have pushed on through and accomplished more, because that is HIS expectation of himself.  He is a good man and I do not know what I would do without him, so please hear and understand that.  But no on completely understands another unless they have walked a mile in their shoes even if they live with them.   If any one of us are honest, there is not one of us alive who does every thing we are supposed to every day.   Lets admit it, real  "Super Moms"  are few and far between, if they even exist.  And truth be told, most of us fell a little short before we had chronic illnesses.  Now that we have these insidious diseases, we tend to spend every day playing catch up on our list from the day before.  I think this means that our expectations of what we truly can and should be doing may be a little off.

Therefore, lets start with the very word itself.  Expectation.  What does it even mean?  A couple of definitions for the word expectation I discovered were:  expectation is the belief that someone will or should achieve something.  Second, expectation refers to believing that something is going to happen or believing that something should be a certain way.  Synonyms for expectation are hope and anticipation.  Automatically, you can see the problem.  Expectations involve somewhat nebulous things that are naturally going to vary from person to person.  No wonder we struggle with defining them in the home.  Next throw in diseases that change who and what you were doing especially if your beliefs about things were more closely aligned and obviously, you can see it just complicates the issue. The most interesting definition I found  was the definition of expectation used in the medical field (Mosby's Medical Dictionary, 8th edition) which defined expectations as being based on a knowledge and understanding of a person's abilities and problems.

This, I believe, is the missing piece to our puzzle.  What if we and our significant others actually adjusted our beliefs about expectations and incorporated our knowledge and understanding about our diseases into them.  What if we helped our families and educated them as well?  If we adjust for our current abilities and problems that have been altered (and most of the time drastically altered) by these rheumatological diseases, and readjust our thinking of what is normal and expected, I believe that each day we would wake up with more of the synonyms of what God intended, that we wake up looking for hope and anticipation that we can fulfill what is on our list to do.


I have spent  too many years feeling guilty, both before I was diagnosed and in the 6 years since diagnoses, feeling guilty that I am not living up to husband's expectations nor, frankly, as much as I dislike the word, my own of what I can get done in any given day.  I was so blessed to find this new idea and I think I will go with the change!  These disease are hard enough on us.  They do not need us being hard on ourselves and it is frankly, how Satan keeps us down.  Yep, I have lupus. Yep, I have fibromyalgia until God decides to heal me or I go into remission. 


One additional thought, if I am honest about the bad days and try to help them understand truly what it means to have this disease, then am I not becoming a better mother?  I am teaching compassion, empathy,  teamwork and communication.  We are so much more than cooking and cleaning and laundry.  We, as mothers, are to teach our children how to love, to teach them to be aware of the needs of world around them, to teach them to be able to listen.  I think it is so easy to get caught up in the dust on the coffee table and forget the eternal calling we have.  There is SO much to do that does not require making sure that coffee table is spotless every week.

In closing, I praise God for opening my eyes to this new take on expectation and can not wait to share it with my best friend.  On the good days, by all means, do those things I can do that I am called to do as a Prov. 31 and Titus 2 woman of God,  but I must forever remember that it will always be the eternal things that we feed into our children and husbands that will matter in the end.  Remember that all that you do counts, even  the days we are resting, we can still find a way to live in God's will  We have to give myself permission to rest  on those bad days and understand we are not lazy.  For whatever reason I have been given a lot in life that this side of heaven I will not understand, but I do trust my Lord and Savior to show me the ways He wants me to use it.  And of  this below, I can be completely assured:

 "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,^[a] for those who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.   Rom. 8:28-29 (ESV) 




Many blessings my beautiful friends!  Keep relying on Him for it is by His grace we are saved and it is through Him we do all things!  Keep on fighting daily, beloved!  I will keep you updated on the new lupus treatment!  Expect the unexpected with the most positive attitude you can, and I bet we all will be surprised!


Only by His grace,

Diane in Edmond, OK