New Perspectives

I’m the kind of person who has never minded having a wild medical history. I always felt like it was just another way that God was helping me learn to see Him throughout life. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel like my life was hard though.

When I look back at what my medical history is like, it’s not the kind of journey that every man would desire. I started having absence seizures when I was 7. I started having grand-mals when I was 11. I’ve been told that ages 11-13 (since my seizures are drug-resistant) I would have approximately 7 grand-mals a day that would typically pass me out for 1-1.5 hours (the longest I’ve heard is 4 hours) and approximately 25-30 absence seizures a day. My seizures were so bad that I lost both my short term and long term memory. We were finally able to get a little bit of control on them once I started the keto diet (which was approximately for a decade). That diet has made it so that I’ve had kidney stones multiple times. I’ve gone to the hospital multiple times. I’ve almost died multiple times. There was a time I had a seizure that made one of my teeth get knocked out which later caused me to have gum problems. I got in a bike accident, whiplash twice, and fell off the top of an 8 foot ladder all last year.

There’s a group of people with epilepsy that I talked to yesterday, and I just heard a whole bunch of stories that were way worse. Seizures that lasted longer, made people pass out for a longer period of time, seizures that happened more often, parents who weren’t allowed to stay at the hospital with their son, more surgeries than I’ve had, and so on.

This kind of makes me think of a story that one of my grandpas heard and mentioned before. There was a man who was complaining about what it was like to have one of his feet missing. He later saw someone who couldn’t walk at all, and he started to think about how much easier life must’ve been for him than the guy who couldn’t walk at all.

I’ve always been aware that my life is not the worst. It was interesting hearing those stories yesterday though. I still feel like life is hard sometimes (everybody’s life is hard sometimes), but it just made me realize what I knew in a different way. I didn’t just know that there were people who had it harder than I did, I came across a whole bunch of people with examples of it.

Do you ever have moments like that? Moments when you think life is hard but then come across someone with an even harder time? How does that make you feel? Do you feel like God has protected you from a worse life? God gives you the option to choose how you want to view things. I hope you realize how God has made things easier for you though. There are definitely ways that things could’ve been harder in your life.

If you can’t find a viewpoint of how God has made your life easier for you, that’s okay. In all honesty, we shouldn’t expect life to be easy. Instead, we should trust that God will be with us throughout the hard times. God loves you. He doesn’t want you to suffer. He will always be with you. Just pray for strength for whenever life does feel hard.

We often desire to live easier lives. I can guarantee from personal experience that a hard life is still a life you can love… even before knowing what a harder life could look like. Don’t judge how wonderful your life is based off of how easy or hard it may seem to you. God has great plans for you.