Today I'm linking up to Lisa-Jo, aka gypsy mama, who chooses a topic every Friday and writes for five minutes.
Only five minutes.
And the rule is that whatever she writes about in that five minutes is what she posts. No editing her thoughts.
Today, her topic choice is "Whole…"
So I'm going to set the timer, write some thoughts, and then I'm going to stop.
Ready? Set. Go.
:::
Whole.
I have fought this word a lot in my life span of being sick. Because so many {truly well-meaning} people have used the word in order to tell me what I could be.
If I would just take another remedy.
If I would just pray a certain prayer.
If I would just… fill in the blank.
If I would just do any one of the magical things that they have just heard about from their aunt's cousin's mother, then I would be…
…wait for it…
WHOLE.
I couldn't figure out for the longest time that *that* was the part that was hurting me. That they were looking at my life and viewing it as something other than complete.
I was less than.
Less than perfect. Less than their idea of what I could be. Less than I was. Less than I should be.
It took a long time for me to sort through all of the noise and clutter of it all to realize that I am whole.
I am in pain, sick, frail, homebound, bedbound, without great possibility or potential in my future.
In all of that, I am whole. I am complete. I am exactly what God made me to be in the exact time He created me to be it.
My Uncle Barney is struggling with cancer, and it has changed and stripped his life. We talked a few weeks ago about his frustration of having talents his whole life that he can no longer use. And I told him that he used them when he was supposed to. And if those things were no longer in his abilities, then they were no longer what God wanted him to do.
Because he is perfect just as he is. He is whole. He is perfect in God's eyes and doing exactly what God needs from him in his life. Just by being himself.
I could speak those words to him because I had experienced those losses. And if all of my suffering was simply so that I could speak those words to an uncle I love when he needed to hear them, then this is worth it.
Because God made me as I am. To do exactly what I am doing.
And I am whole.