Today marks another couple of weeks since the last journal entry. It’s been hard. The symptoms that started awhile ago haven’t gone away. What I was blaming on the Lipitor hasn’t left even though I stopped taking it. Neuropathy is being blamed for most of it while other things are under consideration for what that doesn’t cover. I trust in God’s guidance as the journey continues, but my greatest hope is that it will all just go away.
I read a book once about a guy who hiked the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the Appalachian Trail is, at best, about a six month journey beginning in Georgia and ending in Maine. I always thought that would be an incredible experience. In the book he talks about the trail and how hard it is. He talks about how every day you travel — in the rain, in the cold, in the heat, through the mud, over the hills, through the pain, the sore muscles, and the thoughts that make you want to quit. Whether you are traveling alone or with others you meet along the way, you push through because there’s something transcendent that occurs when you do. There’s something spiritual that happens in your soul when you overcome all the obstacles and take that last step at the end of the trail.
He also talks about how one of the ways to make sure you’re not getting off the trail is by following the trail markers. The trail markers tell you where you are and where you’re headed. And when you hike past them, the ones behind you are reminders of where you’ve been.
I think we’re all on a journey in one way or another. Journeys that have clear trails marked out with easily identified trail markers as well as places where the trail is less clear and trailblazing needs to occur — places where there has been significant overgrowth or flooding and we need to adapt to the impact this brings on how we move forward.
I’m only two months into this journey of discovering health issues, but it feels so much longer. Since the initial diagnosis of diabetes, all of the other issues I’m experiencing have shown up in force. They show themselves like trail markers along the path. Words on markers that identify the next set of obstacles and the potential challenges that lie ahead.
None of this is unique to me. We all face a path with trail markers that are part of the story we are living. While we may share some of the same trail markers, many of them are different. Some of them are health related. Some of them are about relationships. Some of them are issues in the deepest part of our souls where we struggle to find wholeness.
This open-journal approach during this journey is new for me. In the past I would have kept as much information to myself as I could. It’s not that I would have tried to hide what was going on. It’s that the more voices that get involved the more complicated and messy it becomes to make decisions and work through information. It becomes opinion overload.
The reality that I’ve come to learn, however, is that the majority of what gets shared is because these are people that are part of a community that loves me and is concerned for me, and if I didn’t include them in the process I would not be honoring them as such.
So this journal is one of the trail markers that reminds me of where I’ve been, and it also helps me to know where I am and where I’m headed. I’m traveling with a community — people with whom God crossed my path. Some have come along more recently and some have been around for decades. And I am thankful for them all