The Benefits of a Good Old-Fashioned Mid-Life Crisis

I'm praying for a miracle tomorrow. Actually, I'm asking our pastor and elders to pray for a healing miracle. I'm still managing fairly well but don't want to lose any more health and would really like this to just go away or go into remission. I'm also praying for the miracle of courage though should God choose to not intervene with my ears.

It hit me again this morning. I have such an internal drive to move forward in life, a drive to go back to work, a drive to go back to school, a drive to define my family differently than my health can currently handle. I know that part of this process, part of this journey is learning to validate all my needs, not some at the expense of others.

I have put off my cognitive needs for so long that they are screaming at me, but I know that I need to honor my physical needs as well. Does it do me any good if God heals my body, only to allow me to push it again beyond what is healthy. My cognitive and physical needs need to be seen as equally valuable.

Desperately praying for a miracle of healing tomorrow but also praying for wisdom to value a balance in learning to meet all of my needs and for courage to accept what comes.

There is something empowering and life-changing about moving towards one's forties! The closer I got, the more I realized how much of myself I was sacrificing to make my children happy. You can sacrifice your wants for someone else, but you really shouldn't sacrifice your needs. That's a balance as well that needed working on. Lots of upcoming changes in the next couple of years I hope... as I choose actions that apply to different values than I've had in the past, values that honor the needs of the family unit as a whole, not just the needs and wants of children, values that honor cognitive and physical needs, not one over the other, values about my body, values about what it means to be a woman and a mother.

I don't want to role model to my daughter that you should pursue your passions until you are a mom and then give them all up. What kind of message is that? My kids, especially my daughter, would much rather see what it means to live life as a fulfilled adult, contributing to society, to my family, to myself, and most of all, to the purposes for which I was created!

I wish I had had that much courage in my thirties. I'm glad I have it now!

So, I continue to pursue health, a career, and role-modeling the importance of living out what I was created to do and to be. Fear needs to move out of the way, b/c this middle-aged mama is plowing ahead (with balance :) ).