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You know when your body somehow holds out until you have a break to get sick? Yeah, my body nailed it. I decided to take two weeks off to give my head a chance to get used to working in July, but the day I finished work my body decided to pick up a nasty bug. I spent the whole week sick, but I still managed to get through a couple of books. I returned The Penelopiad to a friend and had some thoughts on how we are so quick to skip over historical minor characters, but what a world opens up when we think of them as real people. Then I listened to my friend Amanda’s recommendations again and ended up in the wild adventure of Yellowface. I have a lot of feelings about this one, but I’m going to save those for another time.

One of the frustrations of being sick this week is that I wasn’t able to have a perfect start to my habit tracker I planned to show my physio in a couple of weeks. I was really looking forward to having demonstrable proof that I’m making progress. Instead I have demonstrable proof that I’m really bad at tracking things and that I didn’t get as much standing time as I hoped while I was wiped out with this sickness. Honestly, I had a few frustrations this week, and not all of them belong publicly on the internet, but instead of giving you a shiny bow on my week to look at, I’m feeling a bit convicted by Dave’s sermon on Psalm 13. He mentioned that sometimes we hide from God by praising God.

I can write here with absolute conviction that God is good and at work in my life right now, and it would be one hundred percent true. But I also spent the last week doing some heavy edits on the first three chapters of my memoir which are titled “On Pain,” “On Depression,” and “On Dying,” so there was some heavy reflection time with God through the week. I think there are some great funny stories embedded in those pages, but I also am doing the hard work of dealing with some of the trauma life has handed me and how God has helped me navigate it. Just because God is helping me navigate it doesn’t mean it’s all been roses and daisies. There’s a lot of great fertiliser for those flowers that I’m still wading through. I have countless confirmations that I’m where I’m supposed to be, and I am so grateful for this incredible job that I love and all the coworkers, friends, and whānau who support and develop me here.

This week may not have a neat and tidy nugget to share, but I am actually excited about the progress on my memoir revisions. I had a lovely chat with a couple people at church today about it. One of them was a test reader and was sharing with someone else she thought they would enjoy reading my story. We talked a bit about the value of hearing people’s stories and how valuable that can be in pointing people to Jesus. I may not feel like this week’s post has any “umph” to it, but there’s actually still value in sharing where I’m at right now. It wasn’t a bad week (being sick was just a bad part), but there wasn’t any massive revelation from God of something new and exciting. This was just an opportunity to live faithfully during the winter break and still honour God with my choices.