Dear Friends and Family
Hopefully this space will be a place where Michelle and I can keep you updated on what is going on with her recovery & treatment. Please send us your comments and check back as often as you like. We will do our best to update you regularly.
Love to you all,
Sherry
5 comments:
I love you Michelle and Sherry! Thanks for keeping us informed, and I will see you both on the 14th.
Sending lots of love and healing thoughts.
I see Michelle on the road to recovery to wellness. I offer this prayer ...
In the stillness of Your presence, God, we feel Your healing life flowing through Michelle now, bringing peace to her mind and energy to her body.
Enfolded in Your powerful healing love, God, we know that Michelle experiences health and wholeness in mind, body, and emotions.
Thank You, God, for Your healing life that surges throughout every cell of Michelle's entire being, strengthening her and restoring her to wholeness.
To You, dear God, we release any concern about Michelle's health. We trust Your healing love and Your life-giving presence to renew her.
Dear God, we are open and receptive to Your healing power. Your light and life energize every cell of Michelle's being, and we are grateful.
Thank you to each person who is holding me in the light of wholeness and healing.
I was given a wonderful book, "Kitchen table Wisdom" by rachel Naomi Remen. It is a book I highly recommend.
One of the chapters, titled "On Naming and Awe" really speaks to this process.
"A label is a mask life wears.
We put labels on life all the time. "right", "wrong", "success", "failure", "lucky", "unlucky", may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic", "epileptic", "manic-depressive", or even "invalid". Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. this expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself.
Which brings up the idea that we may become as wouldned by the way in which we see an illness as by the illness itself. Belief traps or frees us. labels may become sefl-fulfilling prophecies. Studies of voodoo death suggest that in certain circumstances belief may even kill.
We may need to take our labels and even our experts far more lightly. Some years ago I served on the dissertation committee of a woman in the Midwest, who was studying spontaneous remission of cancer. Among the people who answered her ad in the paper asking for people who thought they may have had an unusual experience of healing was a farmer who had done exceptionally well despite a dire prognosis. On the phone one evening, she told me about him. She felt his outcome was related to his attitude. "He didn't take it on," she said.
Confused, i asked her if he had denied that he had cancer. No, she said, he had not. he had just taken the same attitude toward his physician's prognosis that he took toward the words of the government soil experts who analyzed his fields. As they were educated men, he respected them and listened carefully as they showed him the finding sof their tests and told him that the corn would not grow in this field. He valued their opinions. But, as he told my studnet, "A lot of the time the corn grows anyway."
In my experience, a diagnosis is an opinion and not a predition. What would it be like if more people allowed for the presence of the unknown, and accepted the words of their medical experts in this same way? The diagnosis is cancer. What that will mean remains to be seen.
Like a diagnosis, a label is an attempt to assert control and manage uncertainty. It may allow us the security and comfort of a mental closure and encourage us not to think about things again. But life never comes to a closure, life is process, even mystery. Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
Michelle,
You are in my thoughts and prayers!! If there is anything that I can do please let me know. Remember the Amercian Cancer Society is a great resource for many things including some financial help, to gathering information about your specific type of cancer, to just needing someone to talk to, to providing things that you might need along the way. 800-227-2345 or www.cancer.org
I am currently the chair for the Buda/Kyle relay For Life so I can help with gathering information if you would like.
Keep your chin up and BELIEVE in the power of prayer!
Becky Fisher
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