IT’S A STRETCH

Healing is a reaching up proposition. The more we extend, the more likely we are to touch the hand of God.

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My job is not to prayer harder. Although I can tell you that I’ve tried. My favorite place is in the closet, amongst all the versions of “Janene” hanging neatly colorized, like a counsel of quiet advocates lifting me up.

What I visualize in darkness is a hand stretched toward me in a generous and consistent manner. And I hear the message so clearly— it is I, not Him, that has the inclination to retract.

It is not from disbelief or willfulness that my fingers have pulled back. More, there’s a fatigue that I can’t remember ever before experiencing in this six-decades of my life.

I am growing weary. This is the sentence I never write. I am left wondering if this fatigue is how relentless optimism in the body manifests.

Building hope is not for the fragile. It is an all-in proposition that requires steadfast resolve.

Hope requires work. It’s a decision daily made.
Hope is research, an open-minded disposition to foreign, even radical ideas.
Hope is discomfort, a showing up and leaning into pain.
Hope is defiance, a questioning, a demanding of deeper answers and a shedding of trivial pursuits.  

Above all, hope is a war against the ordinary and mundane.
It’s the perpetual renewing of thoughts, the ultimate mind game.

Hope is not simply beautiful words on an otherwise blank page. It is the necessary work paired with a consistent faith. It is the verb that underpins every success story, driving me forward when all evidence suggests I may have already lived my best days.

In this context, I understand why people abdicate
the life they imagined,
the love they desired,
the one body they’ve been gifted.

It’s easier to give up and over, surrendering responsibility when so much is at stake. It’s human nature to look for someone else to blame.

 I understand what is feels like to want to take a break, deny, blame, condemn, look away. But hope and pretend cannot coexist. Hope’s supernatural power resides in the full-force acknowledgement of the mess.  

This morning, I entered my closet to choose an outfit for the day. Instead of initiating the prayer, His words generously came—

“I need you to keep reaching up.
Stay in position,” He whispered. “My touch is coming.”

My relentless optimism isn’t some naïve underestimation of a serious circumstance. It is an eyes-wide-open abiding belief in myself and Him. This is what Hope requires—that I remain radically engaged, unreasonably in faith.  No matter what comes.

NOTES:

Do I place my hope in God? Absolutely. But I believe His hope is also in me. I want to be the kind of person He can count on, someone with the consistency and endurance to stay with it, to see it through no matter how hard the journey becomes.

This isn’t a trudging through but a disposition of openness and optimism. If I retract, there’s nothing He can do.

Over the next month I will be researching the benefits of targeted, clinical hyperthermia and its benefits when paired with high dose Vitamin C…I will be eager to share the details with you.