The Power of Believing

Finding hope with chronic illness can be a full-time job. How do you pray for a miracle when you’re afraid no one is listening? Take a moment to read this from Maritza Martinez, from the blog, Believing.

Believing is so hard now a days.

We’re caught in so much, so fast that basically even keeping tuned in to ourselves becomes a challenge.  There is so much debris that we can easily lose ourselves to ourselves.

Last night, as sleep eluded me, I lay listening to music, the song “When You Believe” came up.  As Whitney’s powerful and beautiful voice sang, something inside of me shifted and I just wanted to believe more than anything.  Probably because I’m scared out of my mind that my disability will prevent me from going to school this next fall and beginning my Master’s degree.

This past weekend has been challenging because my breathing muscles just caved in a little leaving me helpless and feeling sick as a dog,  I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried bitterly.  People who suffer chronic ailments battle against an invisible enemy that tends to win most of the time.

If you are brave enough to battle it, in some rounds you need to be ready to be knocked down and then kicked in the stomach by this terrible opponent.  Because its fearless.

Getting through “the rain” proves to be more than challenging as we try to get ourselves up and going.

To tell you the truth, sometimes it feels impossible.

The powerful lyrics written by Stephen Schwartz and sung by such an amazing artist proved to be daunting as I remembered Whitney Houston’s life and tragic death.

It’s so easy to lose yourself in your worries about things we aren’t even living yet, but jumping to conclusions about them.  Staying in touch with our inner-self and finding resilience is a miracle in itself. We just have to believe in it.

As I listened, thinking about my life and where it was heading for a moment I grieved for myself.  Thinking that miracles don’t happen; well not for me they don’t.  I’ve lost in a sense my ability to pray because I think nobody will hear me.  As my thoughts went back and forth, I thought about my blog and my ups and downs with faith.

Then, suddenly it slapped me in the face.  Some miracles come along each day and we’re not even aware of them.  Miracles come with each sunrise and nightfall, when we are able to sleep, when we get up in the morning and do the things we normally do, when we find joy in our loved ones company, when we embrace someone we haven’t seen in some time in a warm and loving hug,  and just by looking at an amazing sunrise with all my favorite birds chirping around my garden as life bursts in joy all around me.

It’s all about how we see life, and that’s going to take us through the rain of all the difficulties that each day brings along.

Miracles do happen.

They happened the day my husband received a new liver nineteen years ago when facing an end stage liver disease.  When a compassionate family shared a gift of life. Giving my children the opportunity to have a dad, and a loving husband to grow old with me. He truly believed he was going to get better, his optimism never fading – just hanging in there.  There was a pretty big chance he wasn’t going to make it, but he did.  That proves that we just can’t stop believing.

So you see “mis queridos amigos” believing isn’t about not ever having days when the pain we carry in our souls is sharp and unbearable, but bringing hope into the equation.  Hope will carry us through the rain and deliver us to the path that leads us to making our miracles happen.

Never stop believing.