Here I Am!

I have so many projects in my life.  Too many to keep up with, for sure, but so many things that I am passionate about.  I recently started a new business, Tippie Toads, that I love, I keep a family blog, and  I partially keep Penelope's Pitstop, a blog of my favorite things that I started several years ago.  I am in the midst of raising three little chunks of testosterone, attempting to maintain a home and a husband AND keep it all together.  The keeping it all together part is debatable, but I am plugging away one day at a time, living straight from my calendar.  I covet my calendar, that is still the old-fashioned pen and paper calendar.  If I ever lost my calendar...oh dear. 

I am in the midst of a fabulous Bible study by Beth Moore called The Patriarchs.  Just when I thought I was going to learn about Abraham and Jacob, I found myself learning invaluable lessons about myself and my life.  It is through this study, in fact,  that I felt moved to start this blog.

I have always been uncomfortable when people ask me or those around me about a testimony.  I don't have a testimony!  I am so very fortunate and grateful to have grown up in a strong Christian home and I took that for granted until a few years ago.  A friend of mine, who did not grow up in a home that ever knew or talked about Jesus, told me her goal for her children was my life.  She didn't want her children to ever not know a day when they didn't know Jesus.  I knew I had great parents and a great home, but I never heard it put to words that what I had was what someone else wanted so desperately for their children. Wow.  It took me back and I have never forgotten it.  I am so fortunate.

I have never had a life-changing testimony that so many people say they have.  Just in Sunday School a few weeks ago, a friend told me how lucky I was to not have that testimony, to have not had to go through all the muck and yuck in my life to have to overcome be it spiritually, emotionally, physically.  Again, the same little thoughts as above.  I have truly been blessed by my family, my friends, my husband.  I am extremely humbled to say God has blessed me with an amazing life. 

However, Beth Moore has told me otherwise.  Leave it to her...:)  All of the trials we face in life are ours for a reason.  That can mean the little bitty things to the way big things.  Trials are trials and our process for getting through them makes us stronger.  Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?  Where ever they came from,  God knows how to grow us, strengthen us and arm us with truth...as well as make lemonade out of the lemons we have been given.  I do have one large lemon in my blessed life and that lemon in my life is certainly my poor health. 

In the last few years, I have learned so much about my disease, my healing, getting free from incredible amounts of pain and survival!  I have learned who to trust and who doesn't know much :)  But I won't use their names... Through my dramatic change for the better in my health that my friends and family have witnessed, I have had oodles and oodles of friends and strangers ask me about my diet, what changed me, what helped me and how they can either help themselves or a loved one.  The people that have come to me have been mind-boggling...people that need to talk to SOMEONE about their bowels or even other illnesses.  And, evidently, I am that someone.  I love it.  I have been through every procedure, many of them I cried through, but I am here to say, "I have done it!" and through those hard times, I have discovered that I, too, have a testimony!  Rather, and Intestine-mony.

My goal for this blog is to be a resource, a sounding board, an encouragement, and a friend.  I find that my background in working as an Occupational Therapist in Acute Care, having two major abdominal surgeries, among other minor ones, and having given birth three times, I am numb to the word "gross."  My husband is still disgusted by the dinner table conversations my sister and I have when my family gets together.  I've got the lingo and I have the history.  So, let's go to town and let me help YOU begin your journey of getting healthy.  And a journey it will be.

Why This Blog?

I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease in 1999 when I was 25 years-old. It has been a long journey, but not a journey without hope. If I had known then what I know now, I would have saved an incredible amount of pain and heartache for me and my family. I would have prevented multiple painful surgeries. I wouldn't have missed a best friend's wedding, or seen fear in my parent's faces after my first surgery that didn't accomplish all we hoped. I wouldn't have missed work or moved back home twice to be nursed back to health. I wouldn't have seen my parents cry or spent nights sleeping on my bathroom floor. I wouldn't have missed school programs because of important procedures or been faced with my sweet children finding me motionless in pain on the floor. My husband wouldn't have missed work to take care of me and I wouldn't have missed days in my life while I fought through pain. I wouldn't have taken enormous amounts of drugs or worried for the life and health of my third child as he grew inside of me. My children wouldn't worry, my husband wouldn't worry and my parents wouldn't worry if I knew then what I know now. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have suffered nearly as much, but I also wouldn't have clung to my hope in God. I wouldn't have found myself praying desperately to be healed, and I wouldn't find myself here writing a blog of hope for all those who suffer from Crohns, or any disease.

If I knew then what I knew now, where would the miracle be in my story?