There was beautiful music... I remember there was beautiful music.
There were words on a page...
I remember them swirling.
There were people whose faces I needed to see...
I remember the warmth of their necks as I hugged them.
And there was salt...
I remember sitting on it for half of the service.
A service I walked into clutching my cane because my head was spinning and my heart was pounding and I kept thinking “Sweet Jesus, please don’t let me fall…not here…my dignity…I need it today…”
The truth is it had escaped me several weeks over.
Lots of sickness. Lots of pain. Lots of dignity-stealing medical tests.
This six-month vigil of fighting through my postpartum immune response and praying for the tender mercy that it would be stroke-free had worn me down.
I was tired of fighting.
I was full-on, battle-worn and tired…
All I could see was my diagnosis, my limitation, my pain, my eight-days-stuck-in-bed-out-of-the-last-twelve. All I could feel was the weight of the word stroke and my sweet daddy’s absence because of it. And all I could hear was this voice that said, “This is the first time your body has let you be here in weeks…it may be the last time for that many more…don’t let it touch you too deeply…”
But then I sat on a package of salt and felt this anthem wash over my weary soul,
“You are made on purpose for a purpose, Sara-girl.
You are worth fighting for…
You are worth dying for…
You are my light…
You are my treasure…
You are MY Sara girl.”
And my heart wept…
But my tears waited...
Until later that week when I laid down on a hospital bed in a quiet room for a test that was the height of indignity and the tech looked in my eyes and said, “I remember you!!!” She touched my hand softly and went on, “Let’s see, how long ago was that now---seven years? You just can’t forget someone so sweet. And that giggle…how can you forget that giggle?”
So I giggled, of course.
Light.
His light.
Light that had survived seven years of brutal physical, emotional and mental war.
It still spilled out all over the places He needed me to go. It still shone when I was tired and worn out and broken all over. It still...
Which is why the next day as I lay in bed…again…I wept.
I wept right over the pain back to the place where the beautiful music filled the air and I could say out loud…
I am not my disease. Or my diagnosis. Or my patient number.
I. Am. Not.
I was made on purpose for a purpose.
I am worth fighting for…
I am worth dying for…
I am His light...
I am His treasure…
I am His sitting-on-salt, falling-all-over-the-place, giggling-like-a-boss…TREASURE.
One who knows that no matter the journey that brings her Home…
She is forever HIS Sara-girl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiI0xHAonxY