We chose in the beginning not to share much about Ed’s
illness with many people and we never shared all of the details of what we had
been told to expect as the disease progressed because we needed to live as
normally as possible for our church and for our family. We told our church family the name of the
disease and that a transplant would eventually be needed but that we were believing
for healing. In most instances, a PKD
patient in renal failure will need to stop working at a certain point. Their energy levels just
won’t hold up and stress only multiplies the symptoms. As a pastor, of a small congregation, we
didn’t have a staff to cover all of the responsibilities he carried. Ed was determined to keep up. Many nights he would come home and go
straight to bed or fall asleep in his chair. Most of the time, when he was at
home, he was asleep and he invested his waking hours into his responsibilities
at church. We knew that we couldn’t live
this way forever, but we were still praying and believing for God to
miraculously heal Ed and take this disease away.
That was our plan, we were waiting on God.
Plans make us feel safe.
We were created according to God’s plan.
Plans are good. Plans allow us to
live to our full potential and get more accomplished. I like plans.
The problem is that I like to be the planner. It’s a problem that has
plagued we humans from the get go. In the Garden, there was a plan in place. God’s
plan for Adam and Eve gave them everything they needed to live to their full
potential.
There were clear boundaries....
They knew who they were in Him.
They knew they belonged to Him.
And they knew what their part in the plan was.
The problem came when Eve forgot
all this and decided to make a plan of her own.
Eve made her own plans when the enemy tempted her to doubt the
goodness of God’s plans for her.
Sometime when life
suddenly seems to spin out of control, it’s tempting to forget all about the good
plans the Planner has already laid out for us. The boundaries that were once
so clear can become so blurred when we forget who we are in Him, who we belong to, and what our part in His plan is.
When your spouse or someone you love is sick. You feel the need to be strong for them. It’s
not something you think about. You just do it.
You pull double duty when you need to and do everything you can to ease their burden so they can focus on getting well.
You stay strong for them
–for your kids
– for the people who are
depending on you
But
taking on this role can lead to some pretty blurry boundary lines if you’re not
careful.
As we began to learn more about
PKD, we began to discover some ways that we could try to keep Ed off dialysis
and prolong the need for transplant for a period of time. One way was a very difficult balancing act of
a diet that limited certain foods completely while including some in small
increments never to be combined with some others. To say it was complicated was
an understatement and to a busy mom and pastor’s wife who thought she had
climbed Mt. Everest by just getting a homemade dinner on the table that
everyone would eat, it was overwhelming.
Knowing that what I gave my husband to eat could literally kill him (as
if my cooking couldn’t before all this!) was a lot of pressure and I have never
worked well under pressure.
So to avoid
feeling pressured, I controlled ....
–I became the Food Nazi.
My ideas of what he should be eating were my
offering of forbidden fruit, so to speak, MY plan to make him well.
Sounds really unspiritual, and not just a
little bit crazy to read these admitted “tactics” as I type them here, but I was in survival
mode – I had a good life, a good plan, and I needed to do everything I could to
keep it in place. In the end, none of my
own tactics worked not only that, they led to frustration, more anxiety, and
stress. Eventually it became clear that
God had his own plan in mind …and the best laid plans happen when we lay ours
down and embrace His.
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