Lord, I thank you for your faithful love!  I really need it now, at my wits-end, sitting here trying to ignore how badly my hand and arm HURT, whenever I use it and especially when using the mouse, despite the gel support pad.  Not even my Mate knows how constant is the pain and tinglies… keeping me up at night… I don’t even admit it to myself except in brief moments like this, when I am handing over my troubles to you by putting them into words and hoping to let them GO.
 
So I give you my painful body that every year seems to FEEL the abuses of my childhood.  I give you my seemingly hopeless financial situation: either having to work for other people — perhaps even those who have betrayed my trust with this COVID thing — or finding SOME WAY to make money online, or some other way.  No matter what I do, I feel SCREWED, because it uses up TIME and TOLERANCE, working for others — my pain gets worse and I find myself too drained to work on my OWN website and product lines.  IF ONLY I could make THOSE things bring in enough income…!!  But alas, I must SUCK at marketing or something, because I have sold ONE copy of my book this month — and of course given away countless FREE copies of the PDF version, to whomever would be helped by it.  Lord, I am soooooo tired and beaten down, shamed by the short-term filth of a COVID exposure and by the long-term stigma of poverty that I have been in my entire adult life.  It is HARD to not see it as proof of my own worthlessness.  It is HARD to keep my own hand off my own throat, feeling like I need not continue to take up air and space and food and other resources.
 
I walk forward only by YOUR strength and goodness, Lord, doing my best to keep trying, keep working whenever I am able.  I DO have a new book almost ready to publish — Las Profesiones: Occupations in Spanish — introducing my “vocabulary collages” to fill a niche that seems to be needed, a book for Spanish learners on the topic.  All that Amazon offers right now are books for toddlers and young elementary students.  So I will do that, and other “steppingstones” you have given me, Lord.  Although I have to admit, it is HARD to work around this lump in my chest, this human desire to assess my situation and decide that I am not worth the effort.  I want to press the EJECT! button.  Instead, I will face the day, moment by moment.  I truly hope that at the very least, this can reach even ONE person, and serve as an encouragement to them.  Amen.