unrest

It's 3 in the morning and my head is pounding. The back of it feels like it wants to explode. The right side is still protesting the earlier attack. I can't see keeping hubby awake since even putting my head on the pillow is difficult, so I got up and took a Vicodin and a Xanax.

While I'm waiting for them to kick in, I made a batch of banana muffins for breakfast. I did some of the dishes including the ones I messed up with my baking, the pot pie pan from last night, and the leftover meatloaf container. I made hubby's lunch for today, fixed up his Gatorade, and opened a can of peaches so he could take some to work with him.

I fight sometimes, especially in times like this, with feeling almost a condemnation from my fundamentalist Charismatic background. I remember well-intentioned but often misguided people saying that prayers aren't answered because people praying them don't have enough faith. I've been beating myself up for that one since I was young, feeling somehow flawed because so many of the answers in my life have been no. Then I remember Job, and how he lost everything he had; and Joseph, who ended up in a hole in the ground and in prison; and Ruth, who lost her husband and her people and wandered the desert with her mother-in-law after her husband died. I remember the disastrous marriage Kathryn Kuhlman had, and how a prominent revivalist of this day and age lost his daughter to cystic fibrosis after his healing and revival services brought relief and renewed hope to probably millions of people. Those kinds of memories help me to regain my perspective and to remember that sometimes, for whatever reason, God says no to our prayers, fervent and heartfelt as they may be.

I have atypical trigeminal neuralgia. I have occipital neuralgia. I have allodynia, and I have chronic migraines. These conditions prevent me from working outside the home in gainful employment, and they interfere in my life in several unpleasant ways, most recently last night and this morning.

I have come to the conclusion in my ever-unwise way of thinking that perhaps learning to live with a chronic condition with grace and not giving up is at least as significant as being miraculously healed. Sometimes living with something is harder, and builds more character, and gives us an insight into things we never would see otherwise; and maybe that is what God intends when He allows "bad things" to happen to "good people." Maybe it never was His intention to remove all our struggles, or to take all our pain away, or to make this an easy, breezy, always-and-forever-victorious kind of life. Maybe learning to deal with what's been handed to us on a daily and sometimes moment-by-moment basis is more important than learning to demand instantaneous release and relief from trials and tribulations.

And then maybe I'm wrong...

But I like to think not.