About Face

She walked to the building at a brisk pace because she was wearing shorts and it was colder than she had expected. She was always wearing shorts, it was like her uniform as a personal trainer. Today they were shiny gray shorts, paired with her warm yellow Colorado sweatshirt and a bright pink headband to keep her wet hair out of her eyes.

She was looking forward to seeing the team of volleyball players do their stuff on the court and she hoped that she had not missed any of the game. Being late was something she was working on in her new years resolution but she was not holding herself hostage to that resolution because she knew that meant certain failure. She smiled to herself amused at her own shortcomings and looked up to see a lady smiling back at her.

Something about the lady caught her attention. The lady was tall, like she was one of the moms of the volleyball players, and attractive, but something about her was odd. She did not want to make the lady aware she was staring so she smiled and looked back down but not before she became aware of what it was that was odd about her. One half of her face did not move..like it was completely frozen.

Melissa wondered what it was that caused the lady to have such a problem. But as she continued to walk a catchy beat came on her IPOD and she soon forgot about the lady, that is until later in the afternoon when the same lady approached her as she sat on the side of the court while she was working on her computer. Again Melissa noticed the frozen half of her face and felt bad for the lady.

The ironic thing was that Melissa spent most of her career helping men and women achieve as close to a perfect body as possible. She had realized over the course of this career that she fell in love with each of her clients inner beauties long before they achieved the goals they had set for their outer beauty. No matter what their weight, or what their idiosyncrasies, she had learned how to focus on the inner roadblocks that had kept each of them from achieving their goals. What she had also learned was that their weight or their looks, though important, did not matter to her personally in her ability to accept, embrace and learn from each of them and their uniqueness. Definitely, she got fired up when she saw heavy people at an all you can eat buffet, or when she saw someone doing dead-lifts with bad form, but she had learned how to buffer her enthusiasm with compassion, to compliment that of her client and to leave the rest of the world alone unless they asked for her help.

The lady sat down on the wood court floor in front of her. Melissa smiled and said hello. “I hope you don't mind but I really wanted to talk to you,” the lady said. “I saw you and God gave me this message that you could help me.”

Immediately Melissa felt skeptical. Whenever people started “talking” about God, Melissa “heard” hypocritical. She felt like religion should be LIVED not SPOKEN. Some of the MOST judgmental people she had met, who discriminated and hated their fellow man, did so in the name of religion. She stayed silent and just smiled. She thought it was a little odd that this lady had sat down to talk to a total stranger, but odd things were happening to her all the time these days.

As the lady talked Melissa listened... not commenting. Apparently the woman had suffered from cancer and had survived surgery that removed a large portion of her face in order to remove the cancer. The surrounding nerves had been affected. The lady said that doctors could not do plastic surgery on her face because the bone structure was too weak from the chemo. Melissa felt a bit cynical when she heard this. OF COURSE they can't help her, she thought, someone who really NEEDS the plastic surgery, instead of the “beautiful people” who keep paying money to fix what is not broken. She felt annoyed at doctors and the medical profession as she listened.

Her biggest gripe was that this profession seemed thrive on peoples diseases. The more the public can be convinced that it is sick, the more money the public will spend money on the “cure”. It was a big racket in her opinion. It was disgusting. She knew some people were genuinely sick, and needed help, but most of the advertising she saw on TV was trying to convince people that they had some illness and needed some medication to make everything right again. Selling fear to the public can be very profitable. Melissa thought about what her dad had taught her about marketing, how never to buy anything the moment someone is trying to sell it to you, because you need a cooling off period so you can think logically about your purchase. The same requirement should be enforced about buying into a disease, she thought.

The lady continued to tell Melissa how she had lived well past the time that she was supposed to have died, and that she even had started working out. She told Melissa she used to be a runner and had loved exercising and she felt like that was how she had such a strong immune system. “Wow, I am impressed” Melissa said. “You must feel really good about yourself.”

“Well that’s the thing” the lady said, “I needed to talk to you because now I do not feel good about myself. “
“I went back to the hospital to prove them all wrong because I am feeling so good and so well, and God even told me I was healed.” “I went with my husband because they had an experimental treatment that they said was highly variable that they wanted me to try but that it would destroy my immune system and my quality of life.” “ When my husband asked them how it was going to HELP me be stronger, they said that it would not do anything for me because my case was hopeless, but that I could help another person for the future if I allowed myself to be a guinea pig with the new treatment.”

“OH MY” Melissa was horrified. “The doctors TOLD you that you have no hope?

“Yes” said the lady with a very sad voice. “I had felt so optimistic, but they showed me tumors on the film and I have them all over my lungs now.”

Melissa could feel her OWN face getting hot, hot with anger, hot with passion. She started talking and the words came tumbling out, they were impossible to stop.

“Well I am glad God told you to talk to me because I need to tell you that GOD does not think you are hopeless,” Melissa said.

The lady did not look up. “If God wanted me to stay alive, then why am I so sick doctors cannot heal me?” she asked. Melissa looked at her. The side of her face that had not been affected by surgery was a beautiful face, full of life, full of intelligence, full of all the qualities of a mother. “You do not look sick to me,” Melissa said.

“I don't feel sick either” said the woman. “But I SAW the xrays of the tumors, I MADE them show me. I wanted to prove I was healed and they proved me wrong.”

“First of all, you do not have to PROVE anything to anyone” Melissa said. “ If you believe in God, do you remember the story when the devil was trying to get Jesus to throw himself off the cliff to prove that he was God's son so that God would save him? Well did Jesus listen to that old devil? Did he have to PROVE he was God's son? NO he told the devil to go back to hell where he belonged. And that is exactly what you can tell those doctors who are trying to make you believe you should give up hope.”

“But I saw the tumors with my own eyes” the lady said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean”, Melissa said. “What you see can be so convincing”. Melissa then shared her own story about how once when she was rollerblading she had fallen and hit her elbow on the concrete so that the bone had pierced through her skin and was hanging out at a weird angle. She was CONVINCED that her arm was broken. But when she talked on the phone to a spiritual friend, her friend told her the arm was NOT broken and that she also did not have to experience any pain. The friend said that pain is not a law of matter. She explained that when an apple falls from an apple tree, it is a law of nature that makes the apple drop to the ground. She said there IS NO law of nature that says man, or an apple falls to the ground there has to be an experience pain with a fall. When Melissa heard this, and it made sense to her, the pain immediately disappeared. And when she got an X ray, the bone was not broken after all, it was just dislocated. The doctors also said Melissa would never have complete range of motion of her arm again, and yet, doing her own physical therapy on the arm, Melissa had a perfect fully functional arm within two months of the accident, and never even stopped working as a trainer during that time.

The lady listened intently. Melissa continued to talk. “Remember that story in the bible about the man that God was telling to pick up a snake and it turned into a staff?”

“Yeah, that man was Moses” the lady said.

“Yeah Moses,” Melissa said. “Well, that man only saw a snake, it looked like a snake, acted like a snake, and he believed it was a snake. It was very convincing as a snake. But God told him it was a staff, and he LISTENED to GOD. And it turned into a staff and it did not hurt him.” “There are all kinds of stories in the bible about people who appear to defy laws of nature. But they were not really defying laws of nature, but rather it is that they understood God. If you have even a moment of pure understanding, it can heal you. It does not matter what appears to be the problem, nothing is impossible with God and God is only good. He only has good in store for you.”

Melissa thought about her own experience, one she did not share with the lady. She had fallen in love with a man who was married but he had not told her he was married. He had waited for many months before he told her, had even asked her to marry him and looked for houses with her. When he finally told her he was married she was devastated. She could not believe he would lie to someone he loved.

It would have been easy to be very vengeful and angry at this man for deceiving her for so long. In fact most of her family and friends hated him. But she did not hate him at all. Hate was a poison. She refused to allow the poison to tarnish the love she had felt.

She knew that the lies were like his “snake”, something he HAD seen and accepted as REAL about himself that was just not true any more and it was a part of his past. As soon as he became aware of this mistake, it was rendered powerless over him, and he could grow as a person. He had picked up that “snake” when he had told her the truth on his own, after much anguish and worry. She loved this man so much she wanted him to be whole and she wanted to forgive and forget. She admired him for doing the hard thing and telling her about his lie.

It was amazing as well what he had done for her during the years she had known him, his intelligence and humor and vitality had given her a new sense of purpose and she would always love him for many things but mostly that. She let him go but kept with her the parts of him that had improved her as a person and those parts could never be torn from her consciousness. He was gone from her physical eyes and from her physical ears because they had agreed to break up so he could honor his prior commitments and promises and so he could be a strong example to his kids. It was the hardest thing she had ever done to free him from his promises to her. She even regretted it many times and cried many nights. But she knew that it had taught her that every person has challenges to overcome and that does not make them hopeless or useless to others, in fact that makes them more valuable when they succeed.

She realized that her own challenge was to realize she needed to be responsible for her own destiny, and that she needed to go after her own personal goals and should not allow a material picture of the failed relationship to tempt her into believing all was lost. When she told her leadership coach about this man she had fallen in love with, he had told her that HE wanted to call and talk to him as well, that is how supportive the leadership coach thought he sounded. She smiled to herself. It was funny how much she built up the man she had loved to everyone, but in her mind it was no exaggeration. She wanted everyone to love him as much as she did.

She realized also that she had a challenge to see her own life differently and to try to forgive those nearer to her as easily as she had forgiven the man she had loved. Her leadership coach had advised her to think of three things that made her feel good and happy besides being with this man, and she had decided it was spending time with her kids, helping other people, and writing and working out.

She turned to the lady again and asked her if she had any kids besides the one who played volleyball. “Yes I have kids and I really, really want to be here to finish raising them” the lady said.

Melissa looked her in the eyes and said, “and those kids are your purpose for being here and you are not done here because you are still living your purpose.” “You have already proven that you are stronger and more resilient than what any doctor can determine for you and you must not give up now.” “No matter what the picture is that is presented to you about X Rays with tumors, you must not accept it for yourself.”

The lady looked unconvinced.

Melissa explained how she thought to the lady. “I look at the human body like it is a Polaroid photo. A photo is a two dimensional projection of you. It looks like you, it has all of your appearances but it is just two dimensional. The REAL you is spiritual and MULTIDIMENSIONAL and is expressed by all the ways someone would describe you if they could not use any words referring to your appearance but rather had to use your qualities. That is who you are. They could cut off the arm on your Polaroid photo or draw on your face with a marker, but it would have no effect on the real you and would mean nothing. Every time you think tumor, think photo, think meaningless.”

“God is all knowing and all good, and he only sees the REAL you, not the photo that people are drawing all over. That is the only you that YOU have to see either. When you understand this you will express that healing that has already happened in your body. “

“YES” said the lady, “God did tell me I was healed.”

“Well”, Melissa said, “I won't tell you what to do about the doctors, that is up to you, but I will tell you that you do not have to accept any prediction of bad because it just is not true. These dire predictions are just going to cause you fear but fear is just F alse E vidence A ppearing R eal.”

“You can turn it around, you can present the other half of your face, do an about face, only acknowledge the good. “

Both smiled, both felt lifted. Facing a mistake, having a brave face, saving face, doing an about FACE, it was their destiny. Melissa watched the lady walk away and began to type a new story on her computer...