What's a Kitchen Renovation got to do with Illness and Loss?
A Peek Behind the Scenes
Something Special and Exciting is Coming!
Despite daily challenges with my autoimmune disease these last few months there is a special project I’ve been plugging away at since the new year, with a liked-minded Canadian organization. It is still underway, so, for now it is a SECRET!
As soon as I am able to announce more I will. I’m excited about what the future will bring!
If you are a praying type of person I’d appreciate prayer for the process of project.
Embrace Life, Embrace Hope is an Award Winner!
I’m thrilled, honored, and very humbled that “Embrace Life, Embrace Hope” has been getting noticed by people and groups who judge what is between it’s covers.
Here’s the latest on my book:
1) It was selected by Canada’s The World Guild as one of 3 finalists in the “Christian Living and Spiritual Formation” category.
2) It was selected by USA’s Illumination Awards and won a Bronze Medal in the “Christian Living” category.
I imagine I’m not the only who feels like sharing our story, whether in person or in writing, is a vulnerable step. We don’t know how the reader or listener will respond! Consequently, before we even share, we can cast doubt the worth of our words and and end up wondering if our story will make a difference in people’s lives.
The fact that there were judges from each organization, evaluating books, from cover to cover, writing evaluations to decide who’s work should receive any kind of recognition warms my heart and affirms what I consider a calling to share my specific story through the writing of Embrace Life, Embrace Hope.
A big THANK YOU to all you who have read and supported my work and journey so far.
This couldn’t have been accomplished without each one of you!
A Peek Behind the Scenes
Life has been quieter than normal for the last few months, as I’ve been taking some extra soul care time to attend to my health.
Thankfully these last few weeks have brought much good rest and energy into my life again. Consequently, my writing and painting have been put on pause as I continue to reset daily commitments, goals, and efforts.
This has given my husband and I time to do start a long overdue room-renovation that has been put on hold for the last few years as I wrote, published, and launched my book.
Every few years we try to do upgrade or repair a part of our home – indoors or outdoors to accommodate our changing lifestyle and keep good care of the house. This year the kitchen that is getting a face-lift.
We are giving our ~53-year-old kitchen a much-needed facelift!
This great plan of ours includes: painting walls, removing old countertops, changing baseboards, building an extra storage areas, and installing a new bay window over our sink and a new deep sink and faucet. Since the house is older we are keeping the hardwood cupboards considering how sturdy they are and giving them a fresh coat of paint, but most of the other things needed replacement.
This means that I had to go through each and every cupboard – donate what I don’t use and re-organize what I’ve kept. It’s been my experience that many older homes don’t have good amounts of storage and shelving that the newer homes seem to have, so I took the opportunity to downsize, simplify, and organize what was left.
This included the fun job of alphabetizing my spices, replacing all plastic containers with glass jars, and converting the junk drawer into a handy tea drawer. We’re using one whole side of the kitchen to set up a coffee/tea station for when we have social times with friends and family. The other side of the kitchen will remain being the main-work area where we cook and bake daily.
The only thing we are left with is to decide to replace or keep our kitchen table and convert it into a taller country-looking island. I’m leaning towards the country-looking island which means a creative refurb of the wooden table we use since it is around this table where we create many of our family time memories.
By now you may be wondering what this reno has to do with illness and losses in life.
Please keep reading…
Analogies Come From the Strangest Places
As we prepared for this kitchen project, analogies kept popping into my head about how our kitchen renovation showed parallels to a journey of recovering from overwhelming circumstances like cancer, chronic illnesses, or other unwanted experiences that bring great loss and life change.
Since the reflections and ah-ha’s just kept coming I decided to keep a list of what came to mind and was surprised at what the list showed me, so, I decided to include them in my May blog to share with you.
Faith and Trust:
I moved from knowing where all the utensils and bowls were located to forgetting and then becoming frustrated in the hunt to find them!
It seems that when an unexpected life experience happens what we mostly rail against the unwanted changes that it brings. These often frustrate, inconvenience us, shatter dreams, and downright hurt.
Our heart desires what our heart desires.
The result is that we can move to a place of longing for the past and become blind to what the future may hold.
I’ve learned in my own journey that pining for our old normal can keep me stuck because in many cases the previous normal never really returns.
When many of us get stuck, we can focus our attention on negatives that the change brings along with the change it requires of us and this can entrench us more deeply into being stuck.
In this stuck place we can easily lose faith and trust in God’s promises of a good future.
We must fight to look up and forward to recognize the opportunities that God may be showing us.
Grieving the Changes and Losses while Celebrating the Promises:
Even though I wanted a new and improved kitchen I’ve had moments of missing the old colours and ways of working in the kitchen.
I was surprised to learn that even small changes can be hard. If we ignore the emotions associated with them they don’t really go away – they can jump up and catch us off-guard.
We must not ignore the feelings of any loss that accompanies a journey of change – especially if it brings sadness. Instead we must attend to them, express them, share them so we feel heard and understood and not so alone in our journey.
At the same time we need to draw closer to God seeking comfort and encouragement while looking for the good He is showing all around us. God is a good God and He has unique ways that can bring us hope and joy.
We need to grieve but also celebrate what we can’t quite see yet.
Sadness, praise, and joy can coexist, but it often needs to find hope along the way.
Examine our Perceptions and Anticipate the Future:
Frustration is a common emotion with any kind of change. It can make us feel annoyed, impatient, and even act out of character. It’s important to listen to our inner dialogue and watch for when we are acting out of character because of our circumstances.
When we face a journey filled with messy emotions, pain, suffering, and grief it is helpful to have a practice that can help maneuver through it.
The one thing I have learned is to practice is:
observe my behaviour;
listen for my inner dialogue;
pray for wisdom as I reflect;
identify the emotions – give them a label;
check to see if my perception is really accurate (or not);
acknowledge the challenges in the journey while also recognizing I’m doing my best in these circumstances;
ask for help, do some self-coaching, deep breathing, and either take time or make the necessary adjustments (I call this “my reset”);
apologize quickly when necessary.
Finding helpful ways to help reset ourselves is an important self-management tool to have in our back pocket.
The power of praise and worship music helps me reset quickly, because it can lift my spirits and my eyes off the mess and onto a hope-filled future, often reminding me of God’s promises being fulfilled in the future and through his people around me in the present.
What helps you reset?
Embrace Life by Looking Forward with Anticipation:
Embracing the life we have, today, can bring us into a place of living in the present and help us step into embracing a hope-filled future.
It’s so easy to see the messiness all around us.
Earlier this week, we emptied every single cupboard onto to spread-out bedsheets on our living room floor (we have a 14x16 -foot kitchen filled with upper and lower cupboards on both sides). We needed to empty them all out so the workers could bring in the very long-cupboard counters and they needed more space to maneuver through one specific door to the kitchen.
Needless to say, everything was in turmoil and in disarray and I started to get overwhelmed by having to sort through everything a second time and put it away again. Yet, when I was able to take my eyes off the mess and overwhelm of having to move everything twice, I was able to remind myself of our dream-filled vision of the upgraded kitchen and realized that this is part of the transition the mess is just the beginning of a new journey and a new way of living.
How do we look forward with anticipation?
Choose Gratitude:
Sometimes when we are dealing with big life challenges it can feel like we are taking one step forward and two steps backward.
When we focus only on the steps, we can become discouraged, especially when there are delays and setbacks because in every life journey they can and will happen.
Cultivating the skill of gratitude helps. Not just when things go wrong but when things go right too. As we train our brain to look for good, we see more good. I think our brain is naturally wired to see the dangerous parts of life so it can keep us safe, but when all we see is danger our outlook is to see it everywhere.
With a Little Help from our Friends
When our kitchen renovation was in the early stages, we knew we needed extra help – some from friends and some from professionals. It’s often the same for difficult life journeys.
None of us are meant to do life alone – sometimes we need scaffolding - a little help from our friends. Often the help is temporary because as we heal, we become stronger and more independent. But it isn’t a sign of weakness to ask for help. It actually requires courage and vulnerability. When we do ask for help, we are often blessed by the response allowing others to show us how much they care.
Life is a Combination of the Old and the New. We Must be Open to Welcoming Both.
There are times when we can get so frustrated with what we are facing we throw up our hands and tell ourselves – everything is over, it’ll never be good again. Yet that isn’t completely true.
As my kitchen changes before my eyes – I can see the older cabinets and am glad I kept them because the quality is still there bringing strength, sturdiness, and resilience from years of careful use. The cabinets bring a foundational strength to accommodate the activities we have in our kitchen, and able to adjust to additions and changes in use.
Tough journeys are much the same. We change because of what has happened to us, but the foundational parts of who we are still are there – the parts of us that persevered, hoped, had faith, found courage and determination, opened up to being vulnerable.
Undoubtedly when tough life crises arrive much in us changes - our outlook, our focus, our purposes, etc. and it often causes a reframing of our identity, purpose, and ideas of who we are and who we are meant to be.
Just about everything in my kitchen has been rearranged, and as I look around me I notice how everything looks and feels different. It will take me a few tries before I remember where the “new” home is for my wooden spoons or baking trays.
I might even go looking in the old spot only to realize that they’ve moved – until I remember I’m in a new kitchen.
Adjustment to anything new takes time – but adjustments do eventually come.
We must Remember to Trust the Transition Process:
There may be areas where we are still going to need new adjustments and have to make more changes. We may fall, fail and forget, or even long for what was, and may even become fearful and unsure of what it is we are doing because it feels different than before.
All of the changes leave with me a unique mix of the old and the creation of space for the new opportunities to add their new touches. It will be a unique environment where I can enjoy being and find peace, joy, love and welcome.
When I went through my counselling internship my supervisor kept reminding me “trust the process” and I think this advice kept resurfacing in my own journey with cancer and an autoimmune disease.
When bad things happen in life there is often a process of healing, reflection, and resetting required.
Bit by bit I learned adjust, grow, and find new opportunities to live life in new ways.
In summary:
Although, to some readers, it may be silly to compare a kitchen renovation to a tough life story, like yours or mine where I faced cancer or an autoimmune disease because we know they far from fair or equal comparisons to a kitchen renovation.
However, the process of going through a renovation continued to remind me of some of the lessons I learned that helped me build an inner resilience to keep on trying to accept my circumstances of stage III oral cancer, surgery and the recent diagnosis of an autoimmune disease that can be exhausting, crippling, and painful.
I’ll take the insight where and when it comes to me! I often need reminders to continue to practice living with resilience and to never forget some of the basics that I needed to overcome a life-change because I realize that as we age we’ll be presented with more change and losses to deal with.
I learned to grieve my own losses, embrace the unwanted limitations, and welcome the hope of a better future because I believe deeply that this is not the end of my story, it is just the beginning of something new.
Most importantly I get to participate in the writing the rest of that story with God who is the original author of my story and yours.
It is an invitation into which God invites each and every one of us.
I hope that you, dear reader and friend, will find the same.
The 10 Key things I learned:
Change means the previous normal never fully returns - expecting it can keep us stuck.
What grows from loss can bring a richer and more meaningful life if we are open to it.
The future can be an opportunity filled with anticipation when we choose optimism.
The mess is not the end, just the beginning
Gratitude is a way of being - our brain sometimes needs our intentional help to find good.
Delays and setbacks can and will happen.
Sometimes we need scaffolding - a little help from our friends.
When things change it can sometimes feel like someone has thrown out the baby with the bath water and we feel the instability of the unknown future. If we look closely, we can see that the best, strongest parts are still there, and they can become the foundation to hold what is new.
Trust the process
Join God in rewriting the story.
Praying for you, dear readers, this day.
Fern
p.s. We still must paint the cupboards, have tiling installed, and install the new window, so I’ll post another photo next month after it’s all done!
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Absolutely true: "Sadness, praise, and joy can coexist, but it often needs to find hope along the way." Such a great read!
Fern, you have packed so much rich truth and practical common sense into each paragraph. I could sit with this all day ... it's amazing how much wisdom is birthed from the dailyness of our lives. I look forward to keeping up with your writing in the days ahead.
Bless you!