stuff happens - from nowhere

I have a story to share that was sent to me by my friend Dave Longeuay. I don't think this needs an intro. Here you go.

Dave Longeuay: Three years ago I went totally blind in one eye. It came out of nowhere, and developed in just a few days. After seeing three doctors, the Retinologist gave me an injection right in the eyeball. Yeah! It was as brutal as it sounds, especially since it was massively inflamed inside. I was finally diagnosed with UV eitis, which is chronic inflammation of the Uvea, the core of the eye.

For the next two years I was mostly blinded in the left eye by the rare disease. I was averaging 25 drops a day of prednisolone (steroids) to try and battle it. Finally the doctor at UCLA medical center, (World renowned for eye care.) told me to start taking Methotrexate, a chemo drug to prevent the eye from flaring up. It worked, but who wants to take a nasty drug like that for life with the life threatening side effects it has on its list?

When I confronted God about this (quite unhappily at that) He quoted scripture to me. Imagine that! God quoting scripture to me. A verse many of us have read and dreaded. (Hey, I'm just being honest. There are a few scriptures I wish I could delete. But the logical side of me knows that every single verse is there for a reason.)

God quoted, "My grace is sufficient for you." That's all He had to say on the matter and that's all I needed to hear from Him. "Okay," I said.

My take away from this ongoing life-long disease after having eye surgery last summer? It's not that I was going in any major bad direction before, but God has clearly rerouted my whole direction in life. I was heading one way and he has rerouted me elsewhere. While I'm not happy to revolve my life around my eye these days, I am happy He has allowed (Not caused) this disease to strike me for His purpose. Sorry to sound cliche on this but, I'm happy to "go with His flow". I'm also grateful that I have most of my vision back after years of treatments and surgery, but the residue damage is permanent until I get my new body, or until He decides to heal me in His timetable.

The irony: My career is videography. It takes a sharp eye to focus a camera in all types of corporate situations all day, and later edit with split frame precision, and have to color correct every shot for maximum quality. Many of these videos are viewed by military Generals, Homeland security and top government officials, so they have to look great. The miracle: My good eye does all the work! It completely takes over what the damaged eye lacks. Praise God!

I don't think I have anything I can add to that.

Have you ever had anything bad happen to you? What did you do to overcome it?

those oh-no moments, and what we think about after

Sorry I've missed a few days, we've had an unfortunate turn of events in our family - my son went on a trip to visit a friend, and on the drive there, he hit an elk. He's surprisingly fine, the car is injured, the elk is dead. During the weekend I drove up to get him and he's home now, and he'll go back to get his car when it's out of the shop. There's a lot of damage to the car, but it's fixable.
And this brings me to my topic of the month. It's those split-second oh-no moments - many times they are life altering. I don't know if anyone reading this has ever hit a large animal before, but I talked at length to my son about it, and it was terrifying. After the impact he managed to stay on the road, and the angle he hit it had it hit the windshield, breaking it, but not going completely through the windshield - if it had, the weight of it would have crushed him. He also managed to keep control of the car and get to a stop without going off the road and into the deep, steep ditch. This was at night, in the middle of nowhere. He said he stopped the car and his first thought was that he wasn't dead.
I've had one of those "I could have died" experiences, and I think I can say that most people who have something happen like that have a different perspective on their life after that.
I can't speak for my son - but I can speak for myself. For me it was a surgery that was supposed to be simple, but the surgeon made a "mistake" and I had to have an immediate corrective surgery or I would have died. That is, if having 2 complete anasthetics so soon didn't kill me, which I found out at the time, there is a significant risk.
My thoughts at the time were that if I died, I had no regrets, and I was okay to go on to heaven and leave all this behind. Well, I'm still here (waving). But I can say that I do have a changed perspective on what really is important in life.
Here is my thought of the day - I'd like to hear from you if you've had an incident that when it was over, you had a change of perspective, and how it changed.
I like to think that when something like that happens, we come out having learned something. Please, I'd love you to share how you felt, and what you learned.