knowing that healing will come, not knowing when

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Click {here} for all our health-related posts. Read below for an introduction to those posts... 

While they don't define me, my health struggles are part of who I am. I once prided myself in being healthy, playing water polo in college and lettering in swimming and golf in high school. If I was a dude, I would have fit the bill to be carried off to Babylon in Daniel's day.

No longer. Now my list o' conditions includes:
Of the three, RA is the one that is the hardest to manage and live with and the one that sends me to my knees regularly (well, not really to my knees, 'cause kneeling hurts. but you get my meaning - it spurs me to prayer). Here's a description of RA from the Mayo Clinic link above: "An autoimmune disorder, rheumatoid arthritis occurs when your immune system mistakenly attacks your own body's tissues. In addition to causing joint problems, rheumatoid arthritis can also affect your whole body with fevers and fatigue."

In other words, my immune system treats the lining of my joints as if they are germs to fight. As that lining - called synovium - swells, my bone wear away. I was diagnosed just after I turned 26, and because of the amount of bone erosion I experienced in the first few months of the disease, doctors have described my RA as "severe" and "aggressive."

In simple terms, when my RA is acting up, I stay as still as I can in the morning when I wake up because I know that's the only pain-free moment of the day. Once I move, I feel that all my joints are stiff and sore for more than an hour in the morning. And I hurt. A lot. I have to ask strangers to unbuckle my kids from their carseats or to unscrew the cap on my gas tank because I can't do it by myself. I do hit the gym, but each workout is planned around that day's limitations. It's not the life I planned.

There is hope here, though. And I'm not just talking about the hope of finding the right combination of treatments, which I do think will happen in the next few years. The hope I cling to is that I know healing will come. God promises it. I just don't know if it'll come on this side of heaven. Until it comes, we're asking God to teach us through this.

And He is teaching us. And I love that. So I wouldn't erase the pain and IVs and blood tests and MRIs of the past few years, because through them I have gained sweet intimacy with my God. Praise Him for bringing beauty from ashes!

All of my health related posts (including some about your normal childhood viruses) can be found here, but you might want to start with these: