Lupus is sneaky. It invades you from the inside out – causing your body to attack itself. It’s exhausting,

painful, destructive, and totally unpredictable. It saps your strength, steals your plans, and changes everything about the way you live.

What once gave you joy, now makes you sick. Your free time once filled with creativity, is now spent waiting in sterile doctor’s offices. Or, on the roughest of days, it’s spent curled up sick under a blanket – trying to will away the pity party.

Learning to live with this has been a real challenge – one I obviously still struggle with. Yes, I do.

One of the most puzzling aspects to accept has been the timing. The mysterious symptoms appeared while I was in nursing school, and grew increasingly worse as time and semesters progressed. Lupus was mentioned right before graduation, and I actually started treatment the very same week I began working as a nurse on my current unit.

Ironic, huh? Nope.

Obviously none of this was my plan. Just like spending this beautiful and precious day off huddled aching under a blanket was not my plan either.

Yet here I sit.

Because the same God who created the universe and holds me in the palm of his hand wrote every bit of this into my story long before I ever came to be. Even me sitting here today. And I’m actually thankful. Really.

Simply because I trust the one who wrote the plan.

Living all this out has taught me that there is so much beauty to be found in just being still. It’s forced my conversion from being a “perpetual doer” to becoming an “intentional ponderer”.

It’s taught me to rest in God’s perfect plan for my life – to remember that “he has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This means I not only can trust him with my eternity, I can also trust that every single moment he gives me is bursting with love, purpose and unfolding beauty. Even when I hurt.

Nothing that happens is out of his hands. The good, the bad, and the painful – will all “work together for good” (Romans 8:28). This is comforting because, on days like today, knowing that there is a point to all of this helps. Truly. It just helps.

Because, at the end of the day, we each have to figure out how to “use” what happens to us, right? We can’t just let it stay inside of us festering – that would be useless. And God doesn’t do anything useless.

So this is the point of “Growing Nurse Debi”. It’s not to write about me. It’s never about me. Or my whining.

It’s about God meeting me in the struggle. It’s about Him pointing me by my rebellious chin to see the beauty that outwardly appears ugly. It’s about me learning to trust that it’s there. And learning to trust that HE’s there. And it’s about passing it on. Indeed.

What’s he asking you to do with your story?

Thanks for growing with me. ❤

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”  (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)