Tag: Seasons

Memorable Weekend, Pre-Radiation

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I’m several days into the pre-radiation routine–strict low-iodine diet (see previous post) and no thyroid medication. I meet with my radiologist this Thursday to hopefully get more information on my dosage of treatment, length of being quarantined and likelihood of multiple treatments. Prayers would be appreciated!

This past weekend was such a blessing. I started all of the pre-radiation methods Friday morning, and made my first 3.5 hour drive to Grand Rapids, Michigan to visit my cousin Melissa at her school. The drive was stunning, the fall colors are in full swing, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to some great music and taking it all in.

Friday night, Melis, her friends and I walked to downtown Grand Rapids to watch the release of hundreds of lanterns over the river. If you have seen the movie Tangled, you have a good idea of what I’m talking about. In any event, it was one of the most stunning sights I have ever seen. Would have been a great date 😉

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The next day, Melissa and I spent the whole day doing fall-festivities that I truly missed the four years I lived in California, and one of the main goals for the day was to make a bunch of food that would follow my low-iodine diet. We went to a local orchard and bought apple cider, apples and pumpkins to carve.

We spent the day cooking–we made pumpkin bread muffins, spicy pumpkin seeds (from out freshly carved pumpkins 🙂 ) and for dinner we made chicken with cinnamon apples. Everything we made turned out very well, and it definitely lifted my spirits. Not to mention we watched The Hunger Games during dinner, which of course was awesome. I was beginning to think I was going to be eating oatmeal, fruits and vegetables every meal for the next several weeks :). Now, however, I have great motivation to make so many things, hopefully in large quantities so that I have left-overs.

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I cannot express how much the changing seasons does my soul well. It brings me so much joy. When I start to feel the weight of what I’m walking through right now, it often only takes looking out the window and breathing in the crisp air to revitalize. There is so much beauty in the world–even in the most unlikely places.

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After returning from such a memorable weekend in Michigan, I was blessed to end Sunday watching football with great company. I mean how much better could the weekend have been?? Well, my roommate’s dad and sister visited last night and we watched Here Comes Honey Boo Boo–that’s how! Weekend complete. 🙂

I’m definitely starting to feel the weight of not being able to take any thyroid medication. I’m uncomfortably tired all-day, everyday. However, I am still keeping active, laughing the usual uncontrollable amount and even exercising when I feel my heart won’t explode ;). It is very clear to me that my strength is not of my own.

Time, Seasons, Change.

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“I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

“I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

“Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

“Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was.”

Donald Miller