There are lotions and potions, medical diagnoses and hundreds of articles and books written on feeling good and being happy. Yet, too many of us are feeling loaded down, bent over and depressed due to life's heavy demands on us. Thoughts keep screaming at us how we have been maltreated, snubbed and gotten a bad rap! How can you be happy with all this hanging over your head? After all, it's true!

Just today I called a friend to see how she was doing after a long ordeal with doctors, hospital mistakes and lots pf pain. You see, Marlene had not one, or two, but three brain aneurysms. Soon after the procedure for the first one she was sent home with much pain and discomfort. To make a very long story short, her doctor refused to check into the cause of the persistent pain, instead telling her that "it was all in her head" and that she would have to live with it.

It was only after much research and sheer determination that Marlene found a team of doctors in another local hospital who had pioneered an alternate, less invasive procedure to "loop" the other two aneurysms. They agreed to work on her, and in the process it was discovered that she had contracted the dreaded "hospital infection" which had progressed to such a degree that by then it was too late to merely treat it with drugs. The whole left side of her cranium had to be removed and the membrane carefully rolled up inside in order to carefully remove it. Subsequently the cranium was supported for months from within by "spanners" to keep it from caving in, and eventually balloons were inserted weekly for another six months or so to expand the shrunken ligaments in preparation for the reconstruction of the left side of the head.

Marlene was not a happy camper! During her ordeal her husband had left her, she was in constant pain, and depression plagued her constantly. Just as the end seemed to be in sight and a date was to be finalized for the plastic surgery, it was discovered that once again the same infection had recurred. Furthermore, she now had an inoperable brain tumor! M.R.I. or brainscans were impossible because of the metal loops and spanners inside the head!

Five more months of terror and exhaustion later, the doctor in question finally acknowledged that the "tumor" was actually an object carelessly left behind by them during one of their procedures. Marlene was suddenly bombarded with advice from family, friends and strangers to sue the hospitals in question and/or the doctors. After all, she had rights and deserved proper compensation for all her distress that now spanned over three years! In her bitterness she had been contemplating it for a while.

During her ordeal Marlene had started looking into the Word of God, reading it, believing it and ... relying on it. She had come to realize that the more she thought about the negatives the more depressed she felt. She did not want to sue, primarily as she did not want to prolong the agony of having to endure all the bitter mental anguish again and again during a trial. Today she declared to me jubulantly that for the first time in this long battle she was now able to laugh. I can laugh again, she reported excitedly, because I made a decision in my heart to forgive everyone for their mistakes. The minute she had made that decision, it felt as if a five-hundred-pound weight had been lifted off her back. She was not the same person I had been trying to encourage for a long time. It was not the old Marlene that had come back. No, this was a Marlene who was totally empowered in the knowledge that forgiveness, according to the Word of God, has indeed set her free! This was a gal who can now laugh at her ordeal and truthfully say that without it she would not have got the Wisdom, faith and power through that faith to overcome.

Marlene is now living one precious day at a time, looking only at the wonderful and good things in her life, being thankful for them, and trusting God to lead her further. She is not out of her danger zone yet. She still has to undergo the operation to remove the "debris" in her head and then still the reconstruction of her skull. But now she is in total peace, trusting, hopeful and convicted - not by mere human intellect - that she is an overcomer.