Fear and Faith.
My worst fears have come true.
The whole reason I wanted to build this farm.
The thing that I have been threatened with many times over the last few years has happened.
I’ve had warning signs before.
But not like this.
I suffer from autoimmune disease. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Doesn’t sound to scary to the average person I know.
But to the sufferer…it’s a nightmare!
Your body has flares that cause it to hate you from the inside out. Every normal thing you do causes severe pain. Brushing your teeth. Writing your name. Walking to the kitchen.
Everything is painful.
But when you are me….you don’t listen well and can tend to be stubborn and determined and hard headed. I'm not weak. I won't be defeated.
I pushed it back. I didn’t want to be a victim to it. So I would ignore it and carry on like I always do. Busy. Hard work. Manual labor. Physical. Demanding.
Until this round.
This round has defeated me. This round has literally left me crippled both physically and emotionally. I lost.
Autoimmune is easy to dismiss because on the outside it is invisible. On the outside I look fine. On the outside you don’t see the pins and needle and hell fire my body is feeling.
But it’s there.
So I broke. And I went back to the doctor this week. Something I swore I would never do again because of the trauma from previous specialists and medication.
God is good y’all.
I was a nervous wreck. And the appointment was so hard and I had to hear things and acknowledge things that I was avoiding. I had to have hard truths spoke over me. And I had to understand that the reality is I do have a disease. A disease that won’t ever go away. And that will progress. And at the rate I’m progressing I would be in a wheelchair sooner than later.
Doesn’t really tell you how good God is though does it…but He is and He was that whole appointment. Even if it’s taken me 3 days to begin to wrap my head around all of it.
You see God is so good and cares so much for me that He let me walk into an appointment with a Doctor I had never been to and I was immediately comforted. He gave me someone that came in and sat down and got into the whole story with me…and he listened! He heard me when I shared my fears of medicines and why. He listened when I said I felt trapped in hell by my own body. He listened when I said I was desperate.
He listened so much that even without knowing a single thing about this farm he gave me ways to start that didn’t include drugs. He started with one question…what do you do for you?
What do you do for you? Have you ever tried to answer that?
The single most important and difficult question for someone like me to answer. And I didn’t have one. My answer was I work. I work all the time. At work and at home. That’s how I’m programmed.
And that’s the leading cause of my number one trigger….because it causes stress. I don’t like letting anyone down. And I will literally run myself in the ground to avoid doing that. I don’t trust anyone else to do things the way I want them done. I don’t count on anyone else. I need to be in control or I stress. I overload my plate so I stress. My body flares up because of the stress…so I stress.
Stress is not just an emotional response. It also has physical ones. It has an effect on your body. And when your body is already in a battle with itself that just makes it a war.
Then he began to talk about things that are so near and dear to my heart I’m building a whole farm around them. Things I so truly believe in that I’m pouring my heart and soul into this 20 acres.
Nutrition. Real nutrition. And how destructive our food system is to our own human health.
The amount of chemicals and engineered products that we consume is killing us. It’s fast cheap and easy…but it’s a slow and painful death.
Cue the eye roll and audible sighs…
Those words have become such a marketing ploy and tactic and mainstream sales pitch that it’s almost unheard by people anymore. That’s sad. It breaks my heart really.
But God placed me in a room with a doctor that believes in that very thing so much that that’s where he is starting this battle at.
Taking care of myself so that I can take care of those that need me AND making sure my body is getting what it needs to fight the war.
I am on day 3 of the 90 day strict nutrition plan. I will share my results at the end.
I am on day 4 of learning to accept what I’m facing and how to move forward.
And I’m on day 1 of putting the whole thing in Gods hands. He is the ultimate healer. He did not leave me even when I got lost in the emotions of that visit. He surrounded me with caring medical staff and family in the aftermath. He caught every tear I shed that day.
So for now I rest.
I let my body adjust.
And I have faith in a God who sees me.
-Farmer Mandy
Eph. 3:20-21
“May the soil be fertile, the harvest be bountiful and the farmer never grow weary.” -Farmer Mandy
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