I spend a lot of time these days rearranging furniture and bookshelves. I’ve become the person who loves doing laundry and vacuuming. I find peace and calm in tackling a kitchen cabinet overstuffed with various containers of myriad contents and colors–something that gives me enormous anxiety–and transforming it into a well-organized and uniformly contained collection of stuff that may or may not be necessary to our survival. These activities keep me busy and close to home, but these are also the few, rare moments and things over which I still feel I have some semblance of control.

One fact we became aware of pretty early on in Stan’s ALS diagnosis is that reading all the books and websites, following the social media pages, and even talking to the experts can yield a lot of fear, and consequently, missteps. We immediately changed everything about our lives to prepare for the worst, and the worst (praise God!) has yet to come. There are significant changes in our lives (more to come on that front), but Stan has been blessed with a slow physical progression.

The reality, however, is that God can take two people who have always enjoyed the illusion of control over every aspect of their lives and use something as heinous as ALS to teach us that He is all we need–that trusting His plan is wiser than trusting our own. There are certainly moments when we doubt that fact, or forget it–moments when we panic and turn inward and seek our own counsel and then realize that no matter how much we want to be in charge, we ultimately are not. We have no idea why the typical progression has not been our experience. We have even less an idea when or what symptoms will take ahold next and to what extent.

In a word: We can neither plan a future without ALS nor plan one with it. Looking too far ahead or behind, for too long, is a special kind of torture. In this way, God brings us to the point of surrender each day, to His wisdom, His plan, His timing, His grace. Like running a marathon, ALS is mostly a game of remaining focused on the right things. If we keep our eyes on Him, the mind, heart, and body follow.

We can stumble, even fall, but the God who created our bodies is the One in charge of them, whether we acknowledge it or not. How much better is it to live in harmony with, rather than striving against, such a One as this?

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”

Proverbs 19:21