A year ago, I started my career at Corban University. It was the beginning of some of the best months of my life...and yet the beginning of one of the hardest lessons of my life, too.
See, while I was at Corban, I forgot in Whom my security lay. I began building my foundations on things of the world, leading up to what I've come to call the "Pillar Theory." The pillars I constructed my life on were my health and looks, my friendships, my tendency to excessively fangirl, being in control of my health and the belief that those I loved would always be there.
The first of my pillars tilted dangerously in October of 2015. Some of my high school friends began making questionable decisions that tore me apart. Still, I suspected nothing. No knowledge that the next year would be the most tumultuous of my relatively short life.
Over Christmas break, the next pillar began its slow descent. I'd been, to my knowledge, healthy as a horse all year. I'd even been losing weight, instead of gaining the dreaded Freshman 15. But those last few weeks of December, I could barely stay awake during the day and sleep was slow in coming at night. My family and I tried passing it off as something as simple as exhaustion from finals week at first, but as time went on and I didn't get better, my parents became increasingly concerned.
January 4, 2016, the day I was supposed to return to Corban, was also the day my life changed forever. My mom hauled me into the doctor - amid much kicking and screaming - and within an hour I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, on the verge of kidney failure and a coma, laying on a bed in the emergency room and vaguely wondering what had happened to my well-ordered life.
Just like that, my health and beauty pillar toppled to the ground with a mighty crash. I'd always prided myself on being the healthiest person in my family, now I was straddled with what had the potential to be a very serious health condition. With how high my blood sugar was, this obviously had been going on for a while. And as it turned out, those forty pounds I'd shed were the result of being unable to take in nutrients properly, thus resulting in my body living off of stored fat. Put less prettily, my body was essentially eating itself.
It was a humbling experience, to say the least. But having to give myself insulin injections, leaving Corban for the spring term, and gaining every one of those forty pounds back was proving to be the least of my trials.
From the month of February to the end of April, my friendship pillar, which had only been tilting before, started crumbling. Being away from my Corban friends, dealing with the struggles of my friends back home, and wondering how I could find a balance between the two, tore my mind in two. By May, however, I realized that finding my security in myself and others was a bad idea. I was beginning to catch on to what God was doing in my life, but it hadn't quite hit me yet.
May itself was positively blissful in comparison. It being my birthday month, I'm moderately certain this was God's gift to me. I felt as though I could put the year behind me and move on. And yet...I felt as though I wasn't being stretched enough.
I asked God if He would test my faith this summer. And though I do not regret asking this, I had no idea what it would mean at the time. A domino effect began with my remaining pillars, which then began to fall in quick succession.
June 19, 2016. The fangirl pillar fell.
See, I am what you would call a huge Trekkie. And I happen to have a favorite character. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my Trekkie's heart beats for Pavel Chekov, and it beats hard. As such, it almost involuntarily started beating for Anton Yelchin.
Please, don't start thinking this is a case of idolatry. The closest I have ever gotten to hero worship of another human being was thinking that they were just as immortal as the films they star in. That belief came crashing down along with my fangirl pillar in June.
And, sitting up in my room on Father's Day, sobbing my heart out over the death of a man I'd never even met, I started to get what God was doing in my life. Three things I thought would never fail to leave me satisfied, three things I thought would never leave me gutted and bleeding on the floor, had more or less inadvertently done just that. My health had deceived me. My friends were flawed human beings who made mistakes. And the characters we fangirls love, but more importantly, the people who play them, are just as mortal as the rest of us.
Surely, there was nothing else God could teach me. Surely I had no more pillars to stand on.
I was wrong. Two weeks later I found myself laying in an MRI tube to examine a strange lump on the back of my head. Unbeknownst to myself, I'd begun constructing another pillar as my diabetes came even keel: the illusion of having control over my health. The knowledge that whatever this was lay completely beyond my control crashed over me in a wave. Since then, I've found that it is definitely benign and of no great urgency, for which I praise God.
I thought for sure we were done. But the month of August hit, and it hit closest to home.
One day my dad's left side went numb. The next thing I knew, we were in the hospital again and words were being thrown around, "TIA," "stroke," "capillaries," and though I knew that compared to what could have happened, my father was extremely fortunate, it suddenly occurred to me that my dad wasn't always going to be around, and neither was my mom, or my siblings. Everything felt more temporary, more fragile.
I was preparing a week ago today to go back to school when we received devastating news: my uncle had been killed in an accident at his shop. In one fell swoop, my assurance that my life and that of those around me would never end came crashing to the ground. Another pillar was fallen.
So here I stand. The ground underneath me is very shaky at the moment. I haven't a leg left to stand on. Whenever the slightest possibility of bad news arrives, I resist the urge to turn and flee in the opposite direction.
Yet through it all, I find my one security in the One who allowed this into my life for a reason: Jesus. He is the Firm Foundation, and nothing in my life, no tempest or turmoil, no trial or temptation, can ever pluck me from His hand. This is all my hope and stay. My pillars lie in ruins around me, yet still I stand in Him.
As it should be.
