A LIttle Perspective

I have now completed 3 more chemo treatments and will have another PET scan on Tuesday, March 3. I still appreciate more than words can say all of you awesome friends and family who continue to pray for me. As always, I pray that YOUR prayers will be answered along with mine but I know that the Lord loves me more than I can even imagine and so whatever happens will be part of His plan for me.

Last night for our stake Relief Society program, a young mother of four, who has been through more trials than I will ever see in my lifetime (including losing her husband in an automobile accident which also broke her neck, back, and ribs necessitating her leaving her four small children alone in a small rural hospital while she was flown to Phoenix) shared her story with us - along with some awesome music written by a friend of hers who played the guitar and sang.

One analogy she used was particularly powerful for me. She talked about planning a trip to Italy. You would spend months reading about it, studying maps, saving for the trip, learning at least a few key phrases so that you could communicate, planning the wonderful places you would visit - Rome, the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Italian alps, Venice, etc. You plan, prepare and pack and finally the day arrives that you board the plane and head off for the trip of a lifetime. When the plane lands, however, you find you are not in Italy at all, but Holland and that's where you will end up staying. At first you focus on all the people that actually got to go to Italy and its hard not to be jealous that they have seen the sights and been where you really wanted to go. As time goes on you can choose to see only those lucky people that have been to Italy, or, you might discover that Holland is a beautiful country, full of flowers and windmills and wonderful people. In other words, we can spend our entire lives focused on where we could not go, or we can appreciate all of the unique things the journey we had not planned on has brought to us.

One of the most important "gifts" of this journey I did not plan to take has been the "heaven sent" friends and the incredible support of my family. No one who has not taken a journey such as this one can truly appreciate what it means to have friends and family praying for me and feeling the power of those prayers and the faith they offer in my behalf - for the endless acts of service and caring that have been offered to me. For one who has always wanted to be the one doing the serving - I have also learned what a blessing it is to allow others to give of themselves - the increase in love I feel toward them is many fold what it would have been had I been the one serving them. You are all angels to me - indeed "heaven sent".