A Fight For Life

           

          “I married young,” she said, “and ultimately felt cheated.  I loved my husband and kids, but felt lost.  I was searching for something, but I didn’t know what.  I made bad decisions and even when I tried to change what I was doing, it never seemed to work.  Oh I never did anything horribly dishonorable, but I wasn’t nearly the wife I could have been.

            “It wasn’t until my sister had cancer that I began to see how futile my life was.  Here I am trying to find a way to do something extraordinary and my sister is fighting for her life.  When she died, part of me did, too.  But it put me in a really dark place.  It seems life is just ugly and I’m having a hard time getting past that.”       

As my friend shared her heart, tears flowed down her cheeks.  “I guess that makes me a horrible person,” she said.  “I don’t know how to move forward.”

Have you ever felt like my friend?  I know in my own life, there have been difficulties and I’ve found myself in a dark place.  It’s really hard to see that light at the end of the tunnel, not to mention work toward it.  I’ve been blessed with friends and family who care enough for me to look past what I think is “ugly” about me and encourage me to follow my dreams.  I’d like to think I could be that kind of friend to someone else.

When my mother-in-law passed away some years ago, I was broken.  We watched as Alzhemier’s stole her zest for life.  I remember one day, before she got really sick, standing in her kitchen, she grabbed both sides of her head and said in despair, “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.”  With an illness like cancer or Alzheimer’s or any number of others, it’s very difficult to look past the “ugly” of the disease and sometimes, like for my friend, it can steal the joy from more than just the victim fighting the disease. That dark place can leave us feeling drained and cheated, even as my friend felt from circumstances, not all of her own doing.

I think when we are emotionally drained because of bad choices or even bad circumstances, we lean toward the ugly in us.  We gravitate toward what is “misery” rather than what is good, because that is what is easier to believe.  That is satan working in our lives.  He is the great deceiver and he’s very good at it.

It is so important to have a right relationship with The Father.  It is He who ultimately can put us in “recovery mode” so we can get on with life and be productive adults.  When we are children of God, He doesn’t see the “ugly” we see.  His perception of who we are is completely different, because He sees us through the blood of his Son, Jesus.  He sees the good we can be.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is, how we choose to “fight for our life.”  We can search like my friend, making bad decision after bad decision, or we can give in to the illness attacking our body.  Either way we will likely find ourselves in a dark, ugly place, because we aren’t looking in the right place.  We must look to someone greater than ourselves, greater than the problems before us, greater than anything.  We must look to the Lord, who promised to fight the fight for us when we believe in Him.