Namaste!

I’m leaving for Pokhara, Nepal on Saturday. I’ll be blogging about my travels from a new site and would love you to follow what I’m getting up to there, as I probably won’t be updating this blog much.

Something I would ask however, is that if you comment, please don’t refer this blog, my depression, counselling, medication or anything else ‘sensitive’ – my family and extended friends will be following the new blog, and they don’t know anything about my illness/treatment. My family are also not Christians and aren’t too keen on religion, so I won’t be posting about my faith too much, which is going to feel a bit odd, but is kind of how I need to roll to keep things smooth between us. Thank you in advance, for your discretion, it means a great deal to me.

So, here’s the link: http://stethoscopeinsitu.wordpress.com/

Lots of love,

Char

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A year in perspective

This New Year seems a little odd as I’m leaving for Nepal in just under two weeks (Jan 14th!), so am certainly starting the year in a different way to any that have gone before. I’m not usually one for lots of resolutions and reflections on the year, as for me, having been in full time education for nineteen years, the year starts in September, when I move forward academically and get to buy a new set of highlighters. In spite of that, given that I turned 24 a few days ago, this turn of the year does feel a little different.

2011 was certainly a year of challenge and brick walls, more than I could have anticipated. It was also however, in the end, a year of triumph. I beat the challenges. I scaled the walls. I did not give up, although at times, I was so perilously close to doing so. I started 2011 on such rocky ground, unstable on medication that was making me dangerously ill, terrified of starting counselling, and with the odds more than stacked against me academically. I started 2012 on a new medication that I think is working, (despite the first three weeks being pretty awful), with counselling behind me, and the promise of a first doctoring job that I will love come August. 2012 is starting with hope for the future, whereas its predecessor began with nothing more than apparent desolation and a need to dig deep to find a promise of hope.

When I was first starting out on my journey into Christianity, two things that held me back were both a disbelief that God can heal anyone’s wounds, and that He certainly wouldn’t bother touching mine, but also a staunch fear of being healed and changed, of laying down arms and seeking guidance and solace from the road I’d been on. I believed I was too broken to ever even attempt wholeness. I thought I’d be fractured and empty forever. I was certainly not living life to the full. I was half dead.

I’m not saying at all, that now I am completely healed, that I went into last year with seams and came out the other end seamless; but I’m a lot closer to feeling whole than I was. That gaping, aching hole, is starting to fill. God stuck with me through last year and stayed with me as I tossed and turned away from Him. I believe now, that God does heal, with time, as a slow process in many instances, so slow that you doubt it’s even happening. It does happen.

Happy 2012, guys!

I leave for Nepal a week today and am planning on setting up a travel blog that will be completely separate to this blog. Once it’s set up, I’ll post the link up in case anyone wants to follow what’s happening.

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