Four Weeks Post-Op

Did you read my Facebook post about my recent trip to Dallas? How well I did? How strong I felt? My words were honest and true. But words (and situations) are not eternal. 
 
After coming home on a Saturday evening, after losing whatever adrenalin had kept me going, I slowly slid down into a funk. Monday I spent the day grouching and weeping, hating this stupid colostomy, dreading the long, long, long six months until reconnection. During that night, I ran a fever and then I understood again how my mood surely was influenced by physical realities beyond my control. 

It's the old spiral: things curving along nicely and then (whap!) things are 180 degrees from where they were.
It's the old two-steps-forward-one-step-back: things moving "forward" when (all of a sudden) things slow down, stall out, set back. 

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Isn't this the way things always work? Isn't this the way life always goes?

I sat grumping in my recliner while my gracious husband was fixing my dinner in the kitchen and I found this quote by Ranier Rilke. "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror." So I fiddled with photos of storm clouds and rainbows to create a meme that somehow represented how I was feeling on that moody Monday. 

Why is that so hard for me? I wonder. "Letting" things happen is really the only choice I have, isn't it? 

Sure there is the "making things happen" approach to life as well and I agree sometimes that works. But not all the time. Not inevitably. Life is a mixture, an amalgam of choice and chance, of the probable and the completely implausible. 

Life is a mixture of beauty and terror. And there is no way I can change that. 

Four weeks post-op and several days past the fever and I'm back in an upward spiral. I'm stronger, I'm optimistic, I'm mostly patient with the inconveniences of my current life. And I'm realistic - I know I will spiral back down soon enough; it's inevitable. But realism reminds me that I also will spiral back up; reality teaches me that there are always rainbows somewhere or another in every storm cloud. Both things are true, real and dependable. 

I am making good health happen in plenty of ways, making choices that contribute to my healing. But at the same time, I am aware of the mystery of this amazing body of mine - that healing is what it is created to do; healing happens without happenstance.

And I am aware (again and again and again) of the mystery of the Creator, "working all things together for good..." Both the beauty and the terror. Creator/Redeemer/Sustainer making things happen in the spiral toward wholeness and shalom.