Embracing the Dances of Life

I memorized II Corinthians 12:6-10 at a very early age. Initially, I had a vague understanding of this passage. As I have shared in the first chapter, I had what I thought would be a lifelong adversity that I initially thought would plague me until the day I died. Little did I know God had plans to work a miracle in my life as He did. For those who aren’t familiar with II Corinthians 12, the passage speaks of the Apostle Paul when he penned: 6Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say. 7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Throughout life, my plea with God to remove my thorn in the flesh was ongoing. I didn’t stop after the third time like Paul. Perhaps if I would have embraced the dance of adversity earlier on, that would have expedited God’s answer to my prayers more quickly than He did. Perhaps it was a result of me, like Israel, being hard hearted and a stiff necked person. Let me take you down memory lane to shed some insight of how I dealt with this adverse part of my life and how the Potter patiently shaped and molded me, His clay, into the vessel He has wanted. He continues molding me; an ongoing shaping and defining of my character. “Father, I submit myself and my will totally to You and Your purpose.” I was in 7th grade, when the medicine I was on could no longer contain nor control the seizure activity. I was quickly approaching adolescents and regulating the drug therapy was a roller coaster experience at best. I was sent to a specialist who took me off of Phenobarbital and placed me on a mega dose of Dilantin. I was literally sleeping 18-20 hours per day. I didn’t have the ability to function and stay on task much less stay awake. I was pulled from the public schools I had been in previously due to medical cause. I was tutored by a retired teacher for my entire 7th grade year. Life for me had become extremely adverse. While my classmates were taking pre-algebra and geometry, my tutor was teaching old math or business math as it is identified as today. By the end of my 7th grade year, they had adjusted the meds enough to regain at least a good part of my functionality in the thought process. When I returned to the scene of the public schools, seizures were manageable but far from controlled. By the time I was a sophomore, I was excited to be able to sign up for theater arts. I have always been attracted to the arts of theater. I was elated when I was one of the students in that class. What I didn’t realize was the fact that I got the easy credit, but the teacher would never take the risk of me on her stage for fear I may seize during performance. That was a risk she refused to take. My adversity was painful for many events in my life when I was looked at differently because of my infirmities. My junior year I signed up for French class. To gain your diploma at the end of high school, you had to take at least the introductory to a foreign language. Following in my sister’s footsteps, I decided to take French as well. We were 5 weeks into the first semester when I seized in French class during the classroom hour. I was immediately released from that class indefinitely and placed in a study hall for the rest of the semester for an involuntary seizure I had no control over. That teacher, whose name I will spare, had zero tolerance with anyone who had infirmities to the level I did. Today she would be called to task thanks to the class inclusion in our public schools to this day. It is not appropriate to punish a person for what they cannot control. Now some readers were likely to have been emotionally put out after reading about the atrocities I had to endure through life. Throughout life I was unjustly treated by many a people in my day. Nevertheless, through most of my childhood, I had embraced the Nahum1:1-3 and let God repay with His vengeance rather than placing myself in the Judge’s seat. He did just that. My theater arts teacher had a daughter who became epileptic and my French teacher was with child when she expelled me from class. Four months later, she gave birth to a disabled child. God has chastened all of us for our iniquities in His time. With all of my uphill battles I had to encounter throughout my educational years, I still graduated high school at the age of seventeen, diploma in hand. Being epileptic was what gave me the fortitude to become the tenacious fighter in thought and word ever since. I refused to embrace status quo. God continued to remind me how I was fearfully and wonderfully made; how He knew me and knit me together in my mother’s womb. He knew the number of hairs on my head and gave me His unique signature in my finger print that is uniquely different from anyone else. God spares no detail when intricately weaving us together physically, mentally and emotionally. We are made in His image. I know many readers are scratching their heads right now, wondering how a loving God could even allow and encourage us to embrace the dance with adversities. Read on and hopefully you will be given a glimpse of the necessity of embracing the dances of life with adversity. Consider the parables of Jesus. A grain of wheat will remain a grain of wheat until it totally surrenders itself and its will to the hands of the Universe Maker. Apart from its surrender to God, it would remain as that and only that; a grain that has extreme potential to make a harvest far beyond its comprehension, but a nonproductive grain nonetheless because it refused to yield itself to its Maker. By itself it can do nothing but in its total surrender to its Maker, it feeds thousands.