And it’s in our best interest to listen…

Summer is zooming by in a blur!
It’s been a memorable month personally, but not much new on the writing front.

In the past month:
I’ve been diagnosed with focal seizure epilepsy, with the point of origin being the temporal lobe (temporal lobe epilepsy). I’ve started treatment with the antiseizure med, Keppra, and I see the neurologist on the 25th for further planning.

We took a family vacation to Minnesota with my son and his family. A week and a half of kids and grandkids–oh, my! What a gift! A highlight of the year sandwiched between difficult times. 

While there, my sweet mama ended up in the hospital for a fall (she was released the same night), and my dad for complications from a gastrectomy due to stomach cancer years ago. He wasn’t so fortunate and had to spend several days in the hospital. 

So…the day after he was released, we left for home.

The day after we arrived home, I took my husband to the emergency room for severe abdominal pain–the result of a perforated intestine, which resulted in emergency surgery and a four-day hospital stay. 

“If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.” -Woody Allen

Yet, the blessings throughout blow me away. Had my epilepsy not been discovered, I would have kept losing memory and other functions housed by the temporal lobe. Had my husband’s perferation happened the day prior when we were on the road, driving home from vacation, or while miles out into the ocean fishing as had been scheduled this week, the outcome would have been very different.

There’s nothing like difficult times to cause one to re-evaluate priorities and shift them accordingly. These difficulties have driven home (well, all of this and the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown) the fact that we cannot do everything and do it well. That for every “yes” we give, we’re saying “no” to something else. What we say “yes” to drives the direction of our lives. I’ve chosen to let go of (say “no” to) some of my entrepreneurial plans I mentioned at the beginning of the year and say “yes” to the things that matter most — God, family, and writing books. These are the things I’m choosing to do well rather than strive to do everything, but nothing well. The trade-off is worth it!

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