The bad thing about it was that I became a human "doing" and didn't even realize that it was okay to just be a human "being"!  God had to reveal that to me.  To this day He still continues to deal with me about that concept.

There was a period in my life where I had a lot of things going on.  I was working my way through cancer, chemo, a mastectomy, and no hair.  I facilitated drug and alcohol abuse classes.  The only person who knew about my cancer was my boss.

I had a nice wig which hid physical evidence of my trials.  I didn't want to let anyone see that, for once in my life, I couldn't be that human "doing" anymore.  What I needed so badly, and wasn't able to do, was to just be able to be a human "being".  I wish that I would have shared that with the people in the class. It would have helped them and me, too.

One day, about four years ago, I walked in the kitchen of my old farm house, just flopped down at the table with my face in my hands, and began to weep like I had never wept before.  As I wept I felt the Holy Spirit telling me to lift up my face and look out the window.

I tried, but couldn't see through my tears and the window was so old that I couldn't see through it clearly even on a good day. So I looked and looked.

The only thing that I could see outside the window was the only surviving weeping willow tree out of six that I had planted over eight years before that. That remaining tree was pathetic. It was not even twelve feet tall. It had just a few willows on the top of it, but they were not weeping at all.

That was when God started speaking to my spirit, and He said:
"One day that tree will quit using all of its might to strive to get to the top. One day the weight of all its leaves will make it weep. Only then will that tree become the beautiful weeping willow tree that I planned for it to be, and so goes the same for you."

"When you quit striving to grow yourself in your own might and when the weight of this old world makes you weep, only then is when the willows I have put inside of you will shower down all around you. It will only be then that you will become the beautiful person that I planned for you to be!"