Life can hit you like an avalanche, leaving you gasping for air. Instead of filling your lungs with air, life can fill it with anxiety, defeat and exhaustion.

Today is Monday and I was considering calling out sick on Sunday because an Avalanche called Life hit me hard the week before. The final push was Friday at work when I received a text message from my mom telling me she was in the ER at our local hospital. (My mom has an irregular heart rhythm or so they tell us.) Hooking my mom up to a telemetry machine that monitors her heart drives medical personnel crazy because it goes off from the moment she’s on it until the moment they take her off it. The night before she ended up in the hospital she called me panicked with a list of symptoms, the scariest one her blood pressure 88/60. I pulled on my clothes and drove to her house much faster than I should have to find her shaking like a leaf and a complete mess.

So what else is new, right? Life happens. I’m not making light of the situation or my mother’s situation, but I will be honest about it. I am DONE. I love my mom, but she doesn’t listen to the doctors or to me. My mom skips meals, runs herself ragged for everyone else and I don’t know if she’s ever lived a day in her life. What I mean by that is, she never stops, she’s rarely positive and she fights everyone trying to help her. I know she’s fought everyday of her life, struggled everyday of her life and sacrificed for everyone else her whole life.

I am DONE, because I CANNOT watch her kill herself anymore. I see everyday there is less and less of a human being in the body of the woman I call mom. It breaks me into pieces and I beg God to help me. So after a really long conversation with God, I realize my mom’s problem is a personality problem. Which God pointed out very clearly, I cannot change nor was I put here to change. I am here to help her however I can. I am not responsible for her, for making sure she eats meals or sleeps or stops smoking. If I can stop by her house to do the dishes, laundry, vacuum or some other chore, then that is what God wants me to do.

Moving on to Monday, today. God put me exactly where I was supposed to be. I love working with patients and my heart is in being a Patient Care Technician. I love it, I love the people I can give a smile to, talk to and encourage. If I had called out sick today I would have missed out on the biggest blessing of the day that God had just for me.

I met a patient today that I couldn’t walk away from. I hear all the time that as Christians we should be in the moment, aware of what is happening right now, not what might happen five minutes from now. Today God blessed me with that. I was able to be in the moment with this patient and I tend to mention to any patient how good God is to me. It’s become the air I breathe, I guess. I don’t notice I’m doing it at times. So this patient says to me,  “I notice 3 or 4 times you’ve said thank God or praise God. I’m a pastor’s son and I really appreciate that.”

Well there went the flood gates of God’s love on me and I’d like to think the patient as well. I immediately told him how much God has done for me and honestly it was such a beautiful time for me. This man and I each shared a story of how God comforts us. This man told me how God uses the weather in to comfort him and I was just overwhelmed by his story. This man is not healthy and I ask  you to pray for him, God knows his name and sickness. So here is the story he shared with me.

**It was the darkest day of my life and the outside was dark and gloomy. Imagine the gloomiest of gloomy days and double it. I was in the hospital for a surgery and I was crying and I was there with my wife and brother. I said to God, If you are here with me right now, show me.** What happened next was a break in the clouds so bright, it lit up his entire room and he cried.

My patient and I both know we don’t need God to show HIMSELF to us for us to know He is with us, but HE DOES. HE WILL.

This conversation was worth every bit of exhaustion, defeat and sadness I dealt with this past week. We both rejoiced in the fact we are unique to God and God uses different things to comfort us because we are individuals. We mean so much to God that He will give us whatever we ask if we believe. My patient needed sunshine that day and I needed someone to praise God with today.

Belinda
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An Avalanche Called Life