I have been resting today most of the day.  I have been thinking what to write on this blog of mine.  I find that it has become my daily reflection time and I look forward to what I will find when I face myself each day.  Some days it is something good like hope and encouragement.  Other days I am afraid or anxious.  I guess in the scheme of life that is normal and in crisis situations it is magnified. 

I only have 4 more dressing changes on my wound vac torture machine!  While this is a welcome number and it brings hope that this part of my journey is near an end, I still fear what tomorrow morning will bring.  Monday when the nurse came it hurt again.  It hasn’t hurt like that in awhile and now I find my pendulum swinging back from hope to fear.  I think that physical pain can bring me to my knees faster than anything else.  There isn’t much questioning, just “please help me God.”  I know that even if it hurts tomorrow that it will be quick…because the wound is less than half the size it started as.  It is healing.  It is getting well.  Mixed emotions don’t make sense with such possible hope on the horizon.  Yet the pain is so strong that it overshadows all the gain I have made. 

I think life is like that sometimes.  We make progress in some area of our lives only to find that some pain is pulling us back…pain from the past, from some failure, from some loss.  It seems to me that God wants us to look at the progress, like the memorials the children of
Israel made in the desert.  ‘Don’t forget what I have done for you.  Remember the miracles.  Tell your children.  Always look to me.’  And then there is the enemy constantly reminding us of the pain so we will stay immobilized.  The thing is that the pain is temporary and the progress is more permanent.  Either way God is in control and he is doing work on so many levels. When you see the progress and remember the miracles the pain seems diminished.  The focus isn’t on the present but on what is being formed in you; that God is using life to conform you into his image…compassionate, kind, loving, caring.  Only God can use pain to form such valuable traits.  He is an awesome God.  Now if I can just remember that in the morning!