If you didn’t know, I don’t like blood or needles cause it usually includes blood and pain. Growing up and even now I get queezy when I think about it. I know it’s all mental but half of the time if I see and or think about it, I’ll get light headed. I have gotten better over the years with seeing it and getting vaccines, tattoos or piercings but because this is something that might make me light headed, I know what to do if I feel like I’m going to pass out…lay down no matter where I am.
One day during ministry, a group of us was sorting through a pile of wood. A lot of the wood was termite infested, so we made a burn pile and a pile to still use for projects. Some of the wood had nails in it and as I was pulling the wood out, the nail scrapped my leg and instantly started to bleed. I tried to ignore it, but other people noticed when the blood started to run down my leg.
So I went to the house and Rosita (my ministry host who was a nurse) put some stuff on it to keep it from getting infected. As she was cleaning it, I got light headed and communicated to her that I feel like I might faint, but she didn’t understand at first. As I laid on the kitchen floor, I explained in a couple different ways and she finally understood that I don’t like blood. Then she asked me to remember when the first time I reacted this way to blood. I reflected back and realized that I had a traumatic experience when I was a child learning to ride a bike. My training wheels weren’t working correctly and I fell off my bike and landed on a glass bottle. I had to go to the hospital and get stitches on my knee. This experience was the start of me fearing blood and pain.
When I told Rosita this, we moved out of the kitchen into the next room where I continued to lay on the ground and she told me that I don’t need to fear blood anymore. That fear is not in God and that He doesn’t want me to fear this anymore. I can be set free of this, so she started to pray for me and ask the Lord to heal me of this. She prayed for me in Spanish as I prayed in English for healing. Our God is a good God and He doesn’t want us to live with fear. What I learned in this experience is that I don’t have to live with something that me is what I have known my all life. Our God is a God who heals; so why not seek healing by simply asking and praying for it. This is something that I want to continue getting better at; to pray for radical prayers cause I have faith in our Creator.
Update: Made it to Guatemala safely. Next blog post coming soon on what Guatemala will be like.
