Healing is on the way!!!!

hallelujah! praise God !!! the doctor has finally determined that i have h. pylori, a bacterial infection in my stomach. it turns out i never had malaria, ever and that i have been misdiagnosed by another clinic 3 times!!! craziness. i'm so relieved and hoping to be feeling better quickly. i can't tell you how freaked out i've become about this in the past month. despite that what i was doing during october, was in some ways the best month yet, i have felt so blah, that it has been wearing me down emotionally. the doctor thinks i may be suffering from a bit of anxiety, which is causing other problems as well. which makes a lot of sense. i would wake up in the middle of the night and open my bible to psalm 41 and pray "the lord will sustain him on his sickbed and restore him from his bed of illness." (thanks immensley to the beccaccio family for that verse!). at one point i really wondered if i was going to die in Kenya. i know that sounds funny and extreme now, but i just kept thinking, oh my goodness, how can i still have malaria. it is going to kill me. (when the last lab guy took my blood he said, "i bet you don't have malaria." i asked why and he said, "you'd already be dead if you had it for this long." yeah, that was super comforting :) of course he was right though.) i spent a lot of time praying to God and pleading that i didn't want to die before i saw my family again, but i also reached the point where i thought, you know if this is God's plan, then i have to be fine with that. Popo, julius, rodgers, and a few other people on the team have been graciously praying for me the past few weeks. i stayed home all day yesterday and popo, eric, and gabby came to visit me and even brought black currant fanta, my fave. tara decorated my room with all kinds of fun get well signs and we even spent one evening singing "my favorite things" and "the sun will come out tomorrow." but it's not really as bad as it sounds. honestly, physically i haven't felt as bad as i have emotionally and mostly i've been trying to carry on as normal. i think being sick has really helped me rely on God much more. and showed me that i truly am powerless without God and that i have all sorts of pride issues that i need to deal with. please pray that i will recover quickly and be rejuvenated. Gabby called today and said that she had malaria. i told her to go get a second opinion...i'd say she definitely doesn't have it. pray for her too please.

i was so happy to go see the kids at BOLM today. they were all sad that we couldn't come last week, and it was great being back.