ANOTHER DAY TO GET STARTED

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Yep! That's pretty close to what I looked like yesterday. Like, all day. I had "church" in my pajamas, coffee cup in hand, with this playing, while still wearing makeup from the day before, and sporting some unruly hair. 

Sometimes a girl just needs herself a day. She needs to rest, heal, pray, read scripture, and rock the smudged black beneath her eyes and have hair that only a bird looking for ready-made housing could truly appreciate.

Saturday, I was convinced that I was going up to Glory; Heaven, eternity, Jesus, forever. Chest pains which take up residency behind one's sternum and radiate up to one's right jaw, are very convincing of this said journey. 

Oh, I've had terrible discomfort intermittently, all week long. But on Saturday, that's when the pain started expanding its territory. And what's a girl to do, but to drive herself on over to her local emergency room.

There I earned an EKG, and some labs, and a pregnancy test to rule out a baby before proceeding (say WHAT???), and a chest CT with some iodine contrast through my veins to rule out blood clots in my lungs (I'll take a baby, thanks!), and four baby aspirins.  Everything was normal. They kept testing and I kept reminding "I'm self-pay here, people, let's just take a quick gander at the ole gallbladder!" That's right. Because our usual health coverage doubled in cost, we had to go with an HSA that we contribute to weekly. And it was just February 1st. I left with an expensive diagnosis of pulled muscles in chest wall. Sure doesn't feel like it.

But God is oh so good, and I am alive and semi-well. My symptoms still haven't left the building or anything. And last night hosted my most painful attack yet. My family watched the Super Bowl in its entirety, while I cried and panted enough in the other room, to have produced a live baby from my loins. I didn't bother alerting my new friends in the ER as I'm pretty sure they wrote Hypochondriac on my chart. Whatever.

I think that my gallbladder is to blame. Like, she's getting slack and can't keep up, and is expelling gas that's getting trapped within my chest. Yeah, I might have Googled that. I'm pretty sure that she hates me, though. I've gone from fearing a fatal heart attack, to believing that my gallbladder has it out for me. Have mercy.

With all of this downtime, I've had a pretty significant realization that I am 42, with a whole lot of living, blessing, forgiving, providing, learning, serving, and loving, that still needs to be accomplished. I feel as though I haven't made a dent in what I've been called to do in this life! What have I been doing all of this time? Please tell me. You talk and I'll write, because call me forgetful, but I just don't know! 

It's like a laundry pile that I promise I'll get around to, but keep getting dressed straight from the heaping basket, over and over. It's that kind of putting off with life and never getting around to later, that causes years to slip through your fingers. You know, while you're busy dousing yourself in wrinkle release spray. A day turns into a week, into a year, into a lifetime of no significant obedience or sacrifice. 

I sure have reflected with my heart about what this living translates to when put into action. Not just a heartbeat, whose activity can be recorded through an EKG, but a life that thrives through radical obedience and service.

The level of living and pouring out for others, that makes those around you thoroughly convinced that you've gone crazy or have started sniffing permanent markers. A good kind of crazy, mind you. 

I know many who live their lives to that level of crazy. For years, I believed that they were just a chosen, select group. That somehow they were designed differently, you know, got an extra dose of something that enabled them to live large for Jesus.

There are the missionaries, those who foster and adopt children, those who preach, those who use their voices in love for the sanctity of life, who travel to remote places to share the Gospel, and those who are so faithful to reach out to the ones that the world doesn't even see.  To live with such abandon!  I'll take one of those lives, please!   

I want my family of six to be praying about what that obedience looks like for us. You pray, too, if you're so inclined. I don't want us to just be consumed with heaping laundry and the routine of day-to-day. This week's painful journey has made an impression on my heart. "If He's called you to it, do it!", it keeps repeating.

Last night, just a little trail mix started my pain rolling, but my heart's still feasting with gluttony on the promises in His Word. I'm convinced that the Lord's all about His children stepping out in faith and allowing Him to grow them beyond what they could have imagined doing on their own. That's the craziness that I can see in others! It isn't just them, it's Him. They stepped out, He directed their steps. I trust that He can do that through my family and is working within me, too, expired gallbladder, bird's nest hair, and all! And I sure do praise Him for yet, another day to get started!