I just read a blog of a girl who had a horrible disease and is about to go be with our Creator.
I went back through some of her old posts and read about how many medications she had to take, treatments she had to do, changes to her home that had to me made so that she could just live.
She couldn't even go outside, because she would get so ill. Her friends couldn't come around her if they had the slightest cold, because it could be detrimental to her health.
But that wasn't what she really wrote about.
She wrote about the flowers that she could see blooming out her front window. The nice man that brought her medications to her door for her and tried for years to make friends with her dog. The birds that played and ate from the bird feeders she put outside. The friends and family who visited, called and skyped her.
She wrote about Choosing Joy during the hardest, darkest, most difficult season of her life.
I read all of this early this morning. And I'll be really, super honest, and this might even make people angry, but because I read this, and it impacted me so deeply, I had to stay off the computer afterwards. I sent one birthday message and closed the lid.
Because I knew that if I logged into twitter or facebook or even looked at certain blogs, what I would see there would just upset me. People getting mad at other people because they stole their idea, left a nasty blog comment, copied something they wrote. There would be passive aggressive comments about one another and competitions over who the best mom/blogger/friend is. We've all seen it out there.
And let me be the first to say that I've typed some of those things before. I've tweeted that I was angry because someone cut me off at the Chickfila drive through, or copied a family recipe that I posted here and called it their own. I've been completely guilty of letting stupid, petty things like that bother me many times.
And then I read what I read this morning and I thought to myself how dumb I've been to let that stuff bother me. Why should I let those things weigh me down? Every day we are faced with the choice to let those petty life issues hinder our walk or stepping over them and staying on the right path.
Because the truth is there was a woman, who I never met or knew or heard of until today that had been sitting at home by herself, dealing with more pain that I could imagine, fighting for her life and choosing to live joyfully in spite of it.
To be honest, I don't know where that leaves me. I just know that I have a new perspective today and I wanted to share that with you, because maybe you were in a rut too.
And I want to choose joy today. Everyday.
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