"I can't lift my arms."

I stood in the kitchen, looking at the kettle and the water pitcher next to it. Somehow, I needed to get water into the kettle to boil for my coffee, and more water into a drinking vessel on the counter behind me, and apparently I was going to have to accomplish it without my arms and hands.

I debated spinning and flopping my arms upon the countertop, but then what? I took a couple breaths and summoned the strength to make my arms obey my wishes, but they protested.

I want to be healthier, so I began strength training again, and had just completed a familiar circuit I have used successfully in the past. My arms missed the memo about the familiar part and had apparently gone on strike. My legs were showing signs of following. I was already dreading the aches that would come the next morning, and the morning after.

"I just have to get through these initial days," I told myself, and my body will adjust to the new routine.

You know this feeling. You have looked into the mirror and known what you needed to do. You have struggled with a decision you knew had to be made. You've garnered the courage for treatment, or to encourage another facing it. And you knew that comfort would come later.

There's an odd passage in the book of Numbers about God telling Moses to raise a bronze-cast serpent on a stick for the people to gaze upon and be healed from the snakebites plaguing them. They're sick, injured, hurting, and crying out for relief. It's a bizarre passage, but so profound. They cry out to God. God's response is for them to face the thing they fear, hate, and suffer from, so they can be healed and made whole. Jesus references this story later when he talks about spiritual wholeness with Nicodemus. Jesus says that just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, he, too, would be lifted up for all.

This confirms what we already know from our own life experiences. Healing and wholeness come from embracing the hard path and all that comes with it. God doesn't wait for us on the other side, but engages us throughout, leading us forward. In that engagement, in that leading, a love ever more fierce, more complete, and more enduring is revealed and available to us.

When you hear yourself whispering, "I just have to get through these next days," remember that you aren't on the journey alone. Your strength isn't all that carries you.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that when the hard thing rises up to meet you,
when the mirror demands more of you...
the decision taps its foot impatiently...
whatever stands ominous before you...
You hear your soul whisper the words to get moving, and you remember what you already know: You're not walking this journey alone, and you will find in it a love more fierce, more complete, and more enduring than you expected. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa