Happy Sunday Morning Friends. If I haven’t ever told YOU specifically, I love you and am grateful you are in my life in whatever capacity you are.

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here in Houston, and I am filled with serenity and joy. I have the music and the coffee; Patrick and I are occasionally trading news stories and other interesting tidbits as we read on the couch. It’s always incredulous to me (realized only in those individual moments, of course) that it’s possible to be filled with peace and contentment despite living pretty much in constant pain. I used to think it was inconceivable – I mean come on, seriously people? You claim to have a “peace that passes all understanding” while simultaneously dealing with the unfathomable? Nuh-uh.

I used to believe that those churchy people who claimed this status must be living only perfectly charmed lives. I was so wrong.

I never fathomed I’d be someone living with metastatic breast cancer. Losing my breasts, my hair, my health, and a great deal of the time, my dignity and self-reliance. No way. Not me. Heartbreakingly, in my FB Metastatic Breast Cancer Group, beautiful souls with whom I’ve interacted sometimes shockingly only a few days earlier, die every single week – not just “statistics,” but Real Women – who had a million reasons to live. And yet… with stage 4, nearly a full year past diagnosis, I’m in remission from that certain death sentence (per June PET scan results, anyway), currently defying those very grim statistics, living in peace (well, a lot of the time anyway), and am truly happy. And I wonder, why? And sometimes I experience survivor’s guilt; and always I experience gratitude that I am still alive.

Ms. “I Can Do it Myself” is continually rediscovering that
the only way to live,
the only way to live,
the only way to live,
is to completely surrender to whatever is happening to me.

Daily I pray for God’s will in my life, to have the peace that passes all understanding and to be able to give whatever “self” I have left to Him. Everyday I pray to walk in reckless love, act in reckless love, react in reckless love – with all I have – with all my neighbors, those I know and those I don’t.

Every. Single. Day.
I fail, sometimes spectacularly in some aspects; and yet I am STILL HERE on this planet for the reasons only He knows, to give, to surrender more and more – my health, my relationships, my career, all my plans, my goals, my entire life… everything I have.
And only after I do that, comes the Peace.

With much love, Julie

‘Cause even in the madness
There is peace
Drowning out the voices all around me
Through all of this chaos
You are writing a symphony
~ “Symphony” by Switch