If you have not yet read Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, what are you waiting for? Seriously. You need to read it. If you’re thinking about making a change in your life but you’re too chicken to go for it, you need to read it. If you ever find yourself thinking that your life is kinda…well…boring, then you need to read it. If you want to be inspired to do something great, you need to read it. Just read it already, and tell me what you think in the comments below.
Category: Beauty
Well, it’s another night of insomnia. Chemo today = steroids that keep me awake, even as the actual chemo drugs cause fatigue. It’s some kind of cruel medical joke, but one that lets me lay in bed and do a lot of thinking, and sometimes writing, before turning in.
I guess you can see that the blog got a new look tonight. I needed something happier. I hope you like it.
You know, when I was laying in bed realizing that I wasn’t going to be falling asleep anytime soon, I started thinking about a whole bunch of things. I thought about how I should write more, and how I really want to get my kids’ scrapbooks started and finish the sewing projects I’ve had sitting untouched on the dining room table for several weeks now. I thought about how I’d love to redecorate our bedroom – or CLEAN our bedroom, for that matter. And I wondered for the umpteenth time how to get months-old milk stains off of red painted nursery walls.
After a while of going on like this, I started thinking about less trivial things, like coincidences, blessings, and community. I’m a big believer in coincidences that aren’t really coincidences. I think coincidences are a gift from God – his way of bringing certain knowledge or blessings into our lives when we need them the most. They are small things that may be meaningless to someone else, but when they happen to us, given our time, place, and circumstances, they are big and powerful. We’ve all had those moments. Think about the last time you had a coincidence happen in your life. What connections did it help you make. Did it affirm something? Did it give you peace? Did it lead you to a new path or person? Did it help you grow?
Looking back on the last several months, I can remember several coincidences that I won’t get into here, but which have served to give me greater peace, love, and support in the moments I have most needed them. I can also think of one coincidence in particular where it was clear that my hubby and I were the ones giving support and peace to a complete stranger, and I think I speak for both of us when I say that being on the giving end of the moment didn’t make it any less meaningful for us. Coincidences can feel truly magical. They are a way of helping us make meaning in our lives – a way of pushing us to question, connect, take risks, wonder, and mature. But we can’t experience the wonder of coincidence if our hearts aren’t open to the possibility that they happen for a reason. And we can’t be open to that possibility without also being open to the idea that maybe – just maybe – there is someone bigger than ourselves out there. Someone who is designing our lives to be interconnected and beautiful.
Leave me a comment to tell me about the last time you remember experiencing coincidence in your life. How did that experience affect you, if at all? Am I crazy to believe that coincidences have meaning? What do you think?
On December 11, 2009 I was in the food court at a local mall with some of my colleagues, on a lunch break from our professional development workshop, when my doctor called to tell me I had cancer.
The rest of that day is somewhat of a blur. The phone calls to break the news. The sadness. The panic. The love. I haven’t been doing a great job of documenting everything that has happened since then. I have written about the experience several times, but not all in one place. I’m going to condense the info here on my blog, so that I don’t lose any of it, and then I’m going to try to remember every detail.
I don’t want to forget any of this.
First, an e-mail that I sent to family and friends at 9:19 pm on December 12, 2009
Dear Friends and Family,
I am writing to share with you both good news and bad news. First, the good news: it is very likely that by this Monday morning, we will be holding our newborn baby girl, Claudia Sofia. I’ll be checking in to the hospital tomorrow morning for an induced delivery. We are so thrilled to be able to meet her even sooner than we expected, and we can’t wait to share her pictures with you all.
Unfortunately, the reason we need to deliver her early is not so joyous. Some of you already know that I have been undergoing some medical tests in the last couple of weeks, including a lymph node biopsy. We learned yesterday that the results are not in line with what we were hoping or expecting to hear. I received a diagnosis of Classic Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – a type of immune system cancer that usually strikes in young adulthood. Needless to say, it has been a very difficult 24 hours for our family, as we are trying to process this news. We have been riding a roller-coaster of emotions and we have a load of questions that we don’t have answers for yet. At this time I do not know what stage the cancer is in, what type of treatment I will receive, or for how long. I only know that we need to work on getting me better as quickly as possible, and the first step in getting me better is delivering the baby. We will be meeting with my oncologist after we check in to Winnie Palmer (the hospital where I’ll deliver the baby), in order to start making decisions related to my treatment. I’ll probably have to go through all the normal cancer treatments – chemo, radiation, etc., and I know it’s not going to be easy. However, I have always been strong in body and faith, and I know that I can take what’s coming, however difficult it may be. The good news is that Hodgkin’s is a very well-understood and highly treatable form of cancer, with a very high survival rate, and we also have a very strong support network of family and amazing friends to help us through this.
You probably don’t know what to say or how to react, and that’s ok. We don’t know either. We are first-timers with this sort of thing. Many people have been asking us what we need. My response is this: I know that we will get through this, but in order to do so we are going to need a lot of love and support. I have never been good at reaching out and asking people for help, companionship, distractions, laughs, etc., but I know that I am going to need all of those things in the coming months. I am going to try to get better at asking, but my natural tendency is to be more of a home-body. Edgard and I are going to need people to surround us, drag us out of the house, show up unexpectedly with funny movies, call us until we’re so annoyed we have to answer the phone, talk openly about the cancer and joke about it with us in order to take it’s power away, and all those sorts of things to help us feel normal and remember that there is so much more to life than this mountain we’ll be climbing for a while.
More than anything, please surround Edgard and let him know he’s loved. I know that he will be feeling the pressure of being a caretaker to me, our babies, his parents who now live with us, and our pets. He’ll be the only breadwinner for a while, and I know that will be difficult for him as well. And of course, he is very worried about me, as anyone naturally would be for his or her spouse. No one gets married thinking that the “sickness” part of the vows will happen this soon, and no one wants to see a loved one suffer. Please reach out to Edgard, if you know him and feel comfortable doing so. He will need it very much.
I am so sorry to be telling you all this via e-mail. I would love to be able to call each and every one of you and tell you personally, but the truth is that we are running out of time to do that, and I need your positive thoughts and prayers ASAP. We’ll be waking up early tomorrow to make it to the hospital by 7 am, and from then on I have a feeling that there is going to be a whirlwind of action in our lives. We know that you are here for us and we will be thinking of all of you. You are our support system. I hope to have a chance to talk with each of you in the coming days.
If we don’t talk before Christmas, please know that we love all of you, and we wish you a beautiful Christmas with your loved ones.
Warmest wishes,
Melodie and Edgard Robelo
Here’s something I don’t understand about the creation story – why are there two versions of it? In the first one, God creates the light, the dark, the water, the sky, the plants, the animals, and then humans. In the first account of creation, when God decides to make humans, we read this:
“God spoke: ‘Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of the Earth. God created human beings; he created them godlike, reflecting God’s nature.”
In the second one, God creates Adam out of the dirt, then decides Adam needs a helper. God proceeds to create all the other animals and have Adam name them. None of them are suitable as Adam’s companion, so God finally creates Eve from Adam’s rib. I get how poetic that part really is, when you think about it. God gives Adam a job to do and makes him spend a long time alone doing this particular job, so that when Eve finally appears in his life, Adam can truly appreciate the beautiful gift of her companionship. After spending so much time in solitude trying to think of names for all the animals, I can imagine that he would have felt a lot of love and gratitude to have another person in his life. That’s a beautiful message when you really think about it.
But really, to me, that is one of the only parts of the second creation story that makes any sense, unless we think about it in a new and different way. If humans were created in the image of God and made responsible for all other life forms, how was it that a lower life-form – a serpent – was so easily able to trick Eve into eating the fruit? If she really was made in God’s image, wouldn’t she be able to see right through his deception? Because humans were supposedly made in the image of God, I have trouble understanding and accepting the concept of original sin as we know it. I think maybe the serpent’s role is not really the point of the story. And maybe we Christians have been basing our belief system on a misunderstanding of what sin really is.
Eckhart Tolle says that the word “sin” is derived from a Greek word having to do with archery, meaning “to miss the mark.” Defining sin as “missing the point” of life rather than “disobeying God’s commands” makes a whole lot of sense to me. And I think that maybe the mark we were supposed to hit was learning to love and appreciate the beauty in our relationships with other people. I think of how many ways I fall short of that goal in my own life. I know I’m not the only one. We all fall short; we all fail to love as well as we could. It has been this way since time began, since Adam and Eve. Even after all his time spent alone it didn’t take long for Adam to stop appreciating Eve and start blaming her instead for the outcomes of his own poor choices. I think that maybe the real original sin was not Eve’s decision to eat the fruit & share it with her husband, but Adam’s reaction to God’s line of questioning. Adam says to God, “The woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree and yes, I ate it.” He blames not only Eve for giving him the fruit, but God, for giving him Eve as a companion in the first place. This is a man with only two relationships in his life, and he goes and makes a stupid comment that is damaging to both of them. Adam created the first in a long line of dysfunctional relationships. Maybe he, not Eve, was the one who missed the point.
It’s interesting to me that Jesus spent 33 years walking the earth, creating relationships with the unloved and teaching people how to remove the dysfunction from our relationships with one another, yet so many Christians focus their attention on Jesus’ death instead of his life. Jesus died to free us from original sin. If original sin was simply disobedience, and Christ’s death is really the key, why was it necessary for Jesus to live so long and teach so much about love? He could have died an infant and accomplished the same goal. But if our original sin was one of relational dysfunction, rather than disobedience, then Christ’s life and death both make a lot more sense to me.
I have been keeping up with my resolution to read the Bible in it’s entirety. In case anyone wants to keep up with me, the version I’m using is called The Daily Message: Through the Bible in One Year, by Eugene Peterson. For anyone who doesn’t know, The Message is a translation that presents the stories of the Bible in modern-day language. It presents a fresh perspective on some rather old and sometimes tedious material.
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