My posts are still being moderated, and I don't know if the content of this will be allowed here. If so, great, if not, please let me know where it would be appropriate to post it instead.

Here's my dilemma: I am really struggling with my relationship with God lately. In 2012, a friend went WAY out on a limb and came to my house, uninvited, and then proceeded to explain to me that she felt led to come, lay hands on and pray for me, and then deliver a message from God. Because I love her, and we have an established relationship as peers and we respect and admire each other, I let her in. She prayed. I sat and waited for it to be over, because I have learned over the course of a decade that the earth rarely moves and the heavens rarely open for me, and the experiences I have had have led to a prevailing message from God that He's not willing or interested in healing me, at least not yet. (For what it's worth, I am also a believer, so that hasn't been the blocking issue).

To be clear, at the time, we were primarily concerned about fibromyalgia, because it was the predominant problem that was having the greatest effect on my body, my mind and my relationships. I was also in a depressive cycle from being in what should have been a minor fender bender in November, but wound up totaling our new car, and our finances in the process. I felt very cut off from God, and I felt that I couldn't participate in the music portion of our worship services because I refused to sing words that I didn't feel or believe or agree with, it's just hypocritical to me.

The message was that I needed to “Return to gratitude. Count my blessings and worship Him for those.” That struck a nerve. So we had tea and a visit, and she went home. The next day was a blur of preparations and hosting a dinner party with some friends, something I expected to “pay for” out of the fibro account pretty heavily the next day.

Well, I woke up that next day and the pain was gone. The lead suit full of wet sand was just not there anymore. Which was huge, and overwhelming, and freaky and VERY unexpected.

I was healthy for two years. Almost to the day. After 8 months of stable health, I went back to work for the first time in 10 years. My eldest daughter had become engaged at Christmas, and we needed extra money to pay for the wedding. I worked for four months without many problems other than the typical shared office space petri dish effect that was common for late winter/early spring in the Pacific NorthWest. (Which means I caught a sinus infection and developed an allergy to yet another antibiotic, leaving me with only tetracycline as an option for the foreseeable future until my miracle working allergist desensitizes me). And then chaos.

At the end of April, my Dad died suddenly. I became the spearhead for rushing to Winnipeg to settle his estate and have a memorial service and closing up the house and selling stuff and sorting stuff etc. I had help, but I'm the oldest, and most of it just fell on me. I accepted it. I'm glad I was able to do it.

When I finally came home in July, we had two months to wait for the check from the estate to arrive, and we bought our first home with a portion of the money. We bought some new furniture with a portion of the money. We paid off some debts with some more, and then we literally wasted the rest of it.

In October, we received word that my Aunt was dying. She had leukemia, had gone through a stem cell transplant, which failed while I was in Winnipeg, and it was a matter of days or weeks before she was going to be gone completely due to internal bleeding and renal failure. So we burned rubber from Washington State to Central California and back in four days. I literally had just enough time to see her once briefly in the evening, and another slightly longer 20 minute semi-private visit in the morning to say goodbye, and then we got out before the other relatives got too far up in my grill.

I'd lost the job I had when Dad died, so I started looking again in November, because we still had this wedding to pay for coming up the following August (this past). I found one with a CPA firm for heavy P/T through tax season. At the end of that, I started working for a friend's irrigation company as an office manager, I had the company books and cell phone and calendar and I just ran the office side of things from home. Got to work on wedding stuff when the phones were slow too. Sweet deal.

Until towards the end of June, when I developed sharp pains in my lower right side. So we went to the doctor, who thought it was appendicitis, and they sent us to the ER. Turned out to be ovarian cysts. They sent me home with pain meds and instructions to rest. Nobody heard me when I said I had six weeks to sew my daughter's wedding gown and two bridesmaid dresses and there’s no TIME for me to kick back, get high on oxycodone and cease to function for the two to six WEEKS this was going to take to go away. It was more like four weeks, but I pushed it (because I had to!) by working from 10-2 and sewing from 2-8.

So the wedding was in August, and it was wonderful. It says something that the one day in the last 365 that I was least stressed was the day my daughter got married. The next day, I ate a sample at a store that wasn't labeled correctly, and wound up using my epi pen and leaving in an ambulance, being treated in the ER for anaphylactic shock, and sent home with prescriptions for Benadryl and steroids. I needed the steroids for three weeks just to keep my airway open, and now I'm tapering off of them.

Apparently the epi pen and the steroids kinda flatlined a lot of my endocrine system, and the withdrawal from tapering off of it has brought the fibro back with a vengeance. The whole episode in the store has brought back my PTSD, all of my anxiety issues are back, I'm back in therapy twice a week. I've gained 45 lbs since August from the steroids, because of which I've developed severe sleep apnea so I'm now on a CPAP machine. And I am FREAKING OUT.

Here's what I know: if I had still been sick when my Dad died, we would have been saving money to try to pay for the wedding, which would have had a different scope in the first place. If I had been sick when the check cleared, we probably would have still bought the house, and maybe even the furniture, but at least $10K would have been stuck in a special account specific for the wedding. If any of the return to the fibro was due to the stress from working, then surely the stress of Dad's death and my Aunt's death should have brought it on long before we blew the rest of that money. But BECAUSE I WAS HEALED, I went back to work, to pay for that wedding. And as a result, I was unable to enjoy the process of launching my lovely daughter into a new life as a wife. She moved out without me. I was too sick to do anything, and I'm now so immune-compromised, I haven't even seen her for almost three weeks because she's sick with a cold. I haven't been to their apartment. She's had very limited support from me to adjust to her new life.

Here's what else I know: I had an old friend die suddenly on Nov 3rd. I didn't find out about it until last Wed, through FaceBook. I was devastated. And after a very broken night's sleep, I gave up and got up at 7, which is highly unusual for me. At 7:30 am, my friend texted me to see if I was up for a visit. The same friend who came and knocked on my door two and a half years ago and prayed to have the fibro go away and for the depression to lift. She had no idea what I was going through that day, she just sat down that morning like she always does for her quiet time with God, and asked what they were going to do today, and she says He told her that she was coming to my house. So she came.

So He's watching. He IS paying attention. He's even meeting me in some of my most devastated places, but it's like He is allowing all the joy to be sucked out of my life over things I can't control.

But I am STRUGGLING. This is HARD, and it HURTS, and I thought it was GONE. So I'm wrestling with the notion that maybe the committee in my head has been right all along about how the promises of God aren't for me. That healing isn't for me. That I'm really not good enough to be loved properly, because I’m too damaged. And I am revisiting stuff in the stupid panic attacks and therapy sessions that I had processed and laid to rest. I had some closure. I've done EMDR. I've done timeline perspective therapy. I've had SERIOUS work done, and it's all back. And if this is the new normal, I don't know what to do about that. Because it seems cruel to give me two years to taste what my life COULD BE LIKE if it wasn't for all this crap. And if that was God, and THIS is God, then I don't get it.