New year new lessons

It is the new year and usually I get excited thinking about what the new year will bring. I am excited for 2015, as I will watch my oldest graduate high school in a few months! This year is different though for other reasons. Last year at this time I had no idea that in a few months in one weekend my health would be tipped upside down. A swollen hand one weekend in April turned into a 6 month journey to find out what was wrong and how to treat it. It totally caught me off guard. Now I am in the phase of learning how to live with being on constant medications and learning new ways of doing things since my body doesn't always want to cooperate. Confession, I am a bit of a control freak....my kids may say more than a bit. I like a plan, I like to make big plans...hence the 8 kids. I am a weird creature as I love things that terrify me, such as storms and disasters. If i didn't follow the path of having a large family I would have finished my degree in emergency management and worked with FEMA. I only had one semester to go! Now though I am starting a new season of life on different levels and really its terrifying and excited...but mostly terrifying.. I have spent that last 17 years building my family and the last 10 years deeply involved in the adoption world. Now this will be the first time I start to enjoy the family and even start to watch them become their own people. As a planner I have often thought about what I would do when the family building/adoption time ended. Some of plans involved things like getting back into storm spotting and volunteering with an organization, getting ready to start my career as a teacher (which is what I ended up finishing college with), going out and doing mission/ministry work with Randy and the kids. I imagined that with some more time I would get into fitness (though this was ALWAYS a long shot..) or even taking up something new! So here I am looking at the future but realizing I have no idea what my future will look like. Some people with rheumatoid arthritis do great and the medications allow them to do all sorts of things, others end up living a pretty depressing life of pain, exhaustion and multiple surgeries...oh did I mention I research everything constantly so I have read every website and blog that talks about RA? One thing I know is that God knows what he has planned for me. I also know that I am weak in walking in the faith of this knowledge. My fear is that I will become someone who doesn't leave the couch and is wasting the life God has blessed me with because I can't figure out how to live with this disease, but my hope is that I can find new ways to discover new things and enjoy old things. Luckily I have some time to think about the future as I am currently still homeschooling 8 children!  One humbling thing I am learning is that I have never really let go and given it all to God, every time I think I am letting God lead, He shows me an area that I am clinging to and I have to learn to let go. So here is to the future, whatever it may hold. This year will be a year of learning to trusting in God's plan for me and stop trying to control and guess the next steps...