Thankfulness

I had one of what are becoming all-too-usual lie-awake-and-stare-at-the-ceiling-for-hours evenings last night. Usually, my brain just spins like a car stuck in second gear: engine is working furiously, but you don't really get anywhere.

But I somehow started thinking about what my doctor said to me last week or so, that I didn't really yet know how to live with MS, and then I remembered... I'm not even remotely thankful for having MS.

Why is that important, you may ask. (I know I did.) Well, I guess it basically boils down to coming from a comic book version of Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place that I read nearly thirty years ago, in which Corrie quotes her sister Betsie reminding her, while they were both imprisoned in a concentration camp, to "give thanks even for the fleas." Betsie's point was that yes, they were fleas and yes they were awful, but because the guards didn't want to get infested, they stayed away, so she, her sister, and their friends had a great deal more freedom than they would have had, had they been flea-free. So the fleas were, for all their disadvantages, a gift.

When I can look God in the eye and say, truthfully and from the heart, "Thank you for the MS," I can finally move forward to where I'm really supposed to go.

I'm not there yet.

I've been able to do that with many quite arguably horrible things that have happened to me at various points in my life (many of which were my own fault, and enough said about those for the moment), and every time I had to do it, being able to do it took a whole lot of work.

I'm not there, with the MS. Not yet. But that may be, right now, where I'm supposed to go.

Gotta think about this some more...