CONFINED.

So recently, something changed for my little niece Tegan, and she began crawling. It is not a complete crawl yet. My mom calls it a “soldier crawl.” She uses her arms and pulls on the carpet with all her might and then kicks her feet a bit. Somehow, she can maneuver fairly well with this approach.

Suddenly the toy-covered blanket that we spread on the floor for her each week, cannot contain her anymore. In fact, this past week, I looked over and found that she had “crawled” all the way to the kitchen floor and was sliding on the tile. All of the sudden, the world has opened her. While this is exciting, it also creates a whole new set of problems and dangers that we need to protect her from. Her world just got bigger.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 The summer before I got sick, I went to Italy for three weeks. I traveled with a group of friends and explored Florence, Cinque Terre, Luca, and many other Tuscan towns. We hiked a cave and a mule trail, attended a Renaissance fair, swam in the Mediterranean and road bikes around the city walls of Luca. We traveled in airplanes, buses, cars, and trains. It was quite the adventure. During my time in Italy, the world felt huge; I felt like I could do anything.

When I returned home in August, I began to prepare my classroom for the coming school year. My family and friends helped me to clean, clear and prepare. I wrote the names of each of my students on each of their nametags on their desks and above each of their backpack racks. I prayed over each of them. The possibilities for learning that school year seemed limitless. We could do anything as a class. I was very optimistic. This year would be a year of strength.

When I got sick in October of that year, my world suddenly felt smaller- much smaller. With each day that I was confined to the couch, my world shrunk. With each month passing by, my hope of coming back to my classroom shrunk. When I had to give up my classroom, my world felt invisible.

The good news is that, with time, I have started to heal, which means that my world is expanding again. As I heal, I am able to go out, to meet with friends and go back to church. It is a slow recovery- much slower than I would like, but it is certainly going the right direction. I hope that, in time, my world will feel limitless again. This is how I measure healing- how big the world feels. Soon, I hope to go out and conquer it again. For now, I am trying to learn contentment in the confines of sickness.

~~~~~~~~