Left with a limp...

I wanted to write this post, especially for those who are also on their own God journeys as well as walking through the Huntington's disease one too because it is a mountain and will need much grace. I have been through many highs and lows and sometimes it has been hard to see a way forward but God has continued to meet me there in that place. 

It has been a long journey since I entered this new place in my faith and there was a point where I was not entirely certain I was going to make it through. It's hard to find a place to begin but I will start where I first felt the trembles of my life breaking apart. 

It was in the days of 2021 when I realized that I was probably never going to have children naturally. We had tried for so many years and nothing had happened. The grief felt endless but I also started to feel something new rising within me - mourning. I began to mourn this circumstance in our lives. Every place I walked through was like a constant minefield triggering off - I was surrounded by pain and I could not ease it. I felt like I was constantly spiraling out of control. 

I had kept believing all those years that God would bless us with children and a family. Yet it all started to crumble away and I fell into a depression. A depression that was not lifting and was getting worse. It was slowly starting to affect everything. 

By the end of that year, it could not go on as it was so reluctantly I reached out for help. I sought counselling but little did I know that the counselling was to become open heart surgery. It turned me inside out. I went there for my grief about children and depression but God had other plans. He used the counselling to help me face the things I had been running away from, the things I was in denial about and would not face. 

He brought me face-to-face with my tormentor Huntington's disease amongst other things that I had been hiding in my heart and so began the wrestling. A whole year of wrestling in the counselling room and outside of it. It changed my whole life and shifted me into a brand new me. 

But it also led me to wrestle with the very faith I had been building since I believed. It was hard to let go of things that I had once made important. One particular part of the faith journey has been accepting that I have Huntington's disease. This had always been something I would deny because it brought up too many questions - why would God let me be born with such a disease? 

I spent all my twenties running after healing for this disease and to bear children. If I could be healed, I believed, it would fix it all. All the brokenness, all the mess of my life and the problems. If I could be healed then I could glorify God and it would become a purpose for my life. I thought it would shortcut me from the hard path. 

I could not see beyond 'the healing'.

Yet the healing never came and the brokenness seemed only to get worse, the pain grew stronger and deeper and the mess got bigger. There was no way out of it all. 

But what I did not yet know was that there is life beyond the death of this. I had to die to my desperation for healing, for a way to escape the hard path and instead embrace what was on the other side, the side I was so afraid to reach. 

God helped me to reach the other side. It may have looked like a shipwreck on a sandy beach and a desert island for how foreign this new land was to me. I was in a new place but God was with me every step of the way and He blessed me again and again. 

He sent me new people, He sent me a support group, He led me to victories over long overdue things, He opened new doors, and He was gracious and patient and full of lovingkindness. He prepared the way ahead for me. Even on days when I never thought I'd see beyond the open wounds He led me through. He was my strength. He became my hope when I had none. 

Healing is a beautiful thing but it had just become a boat I was trying to chase when God wanted me to cross to the other side. 

My faith looks different now. I am different now. I cannot go back to where I was. I have crossed the line. Some days are still hard, still full of grief, and still days of depression. I am left with a limp. What I had so desperately longed for God to fix on the outside, He has done a different kind of healing on the inside. 

And one thing is for sure I would not change any part of the journey because where I am now is exactly where I am supposed to be. He wants me to live life with Huntington's disease, not against it because He is with me in it...