So I know a blog is long overdue. A blog about ministry in Nepal a blog about the freedom I have been walking in since debrief. But for now you are going to hear where I am really at ….at this moment.
Since I was 9 years old I have struggled with stomach pain; pain that all through my childhood plagued me, nights were spent sitting up with my Mom crying, I went home from overnight school field trips, slept through tons of afternoons hoping to not feel the pain, I didn’t stay all night at sleepovers, I spent my time in pain, excruciating pain. I underwent one painful test after another, tons of Doctors, specialists, and a Homoeopathist and nothing the diagnosis: always IBS. If you talk to anyone in my family they will say that is the diagnosis they give everyone when they don’t know what to do.
Through all of this I developed a feeling of not being enough.
That I would never be enough because I couldn’t do what everyone else could do, I couldn’t always push myself as far as my friends could. But as I got older the pain got better; it became fewer and farther between; I found a Doctor who worked to help me manage my pain instead of finding a cure for something that no one seemed to be able diagnose and as time went on it became less and less painful. Did I still have to do things different than my friends? Yes. Was the pain really bad occasionally? Yes. Did I spend every night awake in pain? No.
Fast forward to August 2012; I was signing up for the World Race; the pain didn’t really even cross my mind. It was no longer a huge thing in my life.
Fast-forward this time to Month 5: Kothe, Nepal. While I had a bad go of it in Mozambique, I assumed it was my stomach adjusting to the race, to the heat (I went from 50 degrees in San Rafael, California to 114 in Dondo, Mozambique) to the different food. In Nepal I spent much of the month is a lot of pain; ignoring the suggestions of my teammates for remedies, it was during Debrief in Kathmandu when sharing my past with this with my team leader that I realized that I had never shared this part of my life with my squad or my team.The very last night of Debrief the pain was beyond anything I had experienced in 10 years as I sat crying on the bathroom floor while everyone else was sleeping crying out to God that I realized that it was easy to overflow with joy when everything was easy, but not quite so easy to be joyful in this situation. Today as we sat debriefing our Morning Prayer walk I shared with the amazing woman of my squad this part of my story. Sharing that the lies that I am not enough and never will be, that I will never be free from this, that I don’t have joy have been creeping in. But while sometimes I feel like I’m not enough God says:
I AM ENOUGH!
I AM JOYFUL!
I AM FREE!
