An updated introduction + note about my BEFORE I GO project + NotMine.Org

CW: Death. Jesus. Faith. More Jesus.

Sadly, I am far from alone in many pieces of my* story. So many of us are—or will become—the patient or the caregiver. One single truth remains for us all. Because we are human, we all live in a body that will die. How we approach death is uniquely individualized and emotionally tangled. Of course it is impossible for any one human to know how another human being feels, let alone understand the complexity of how anyone else deals with death on an internal level. Dealing with mortality is even more convoluted when your body is the one breaking and you’ve never slowed down to sort things out on your insides. Pro tip: Maybe try to sort these things out to the best of your ability before adding on the complication of attempting to reason your way through physical death, while dying. Zero stars. Do not recommend.

I don’t know anything apart from my story, and Jesus. And yes, I love Jesus and know Him and yet. And yet, I am dying. The Bible tells me Jesus defeated death, and here I am having to face it. This seems slightly unfair. How many of us reside in similar spaces? How many of us reside in the ”And yet”? We may not understand one another, but we have asked similar questions. Because we are all human beings, built with the same parts on the same assembly line. We are all built by God and have the capacity for His Spirit to rest here, within us. This is why we all ask similar questions, but from every different angle known to man. Because deep calls unto deep. (Psalm 42:7) Our depths are the same.

Maybe you’re not a Jesus person, and you’ve simply loved us through the years and are curious about how we’ve changed and how we’ve stayed the same and how we’ve grown our roots and what our seedling has become. You will find that here, hopefully. Maybe you’re a heart and soul best friend, or family member who prayed for us with every single breath at every opportunity. You may have added us to lists of prayer in your place of worship. We truly cannot repay the gift you have given us by doing so. Thank you. Eternally. Maybe you’re simply a friend who prayed for us a couple of times. Thank you.

Maybe you don’t pray, except for that one time, but you still hold us in your heart. Thank you. Maybe you were raised a little religious or a lot religious and definitely now are very ex-whatever it may be, and you have still arrived here to read this sentence out of love. Thank you. Maybe we are friends because you have held my digital hand through difficult times and provided smiles and beneficial distraction when I needed laughter as my medicine more than I needed treatments. Thank you.

Maybe you don’t know how to talk about these topics with your loved ones, or once loved ones, or not quite right now loved ones and need a way to open the subject of wills and healthcare power of attorney. Here I am, send me. Or as Suzanne Collins said it more modernly, I volunteer as tribute. Here are the links. Here you go, send me first into the unsure space, and then maybe you will have a way to speak the difficult conversations a bit easier.

Maybe these are subjects you cannot even sit beside on a park bench, or you immediately divert your eyes from in the store, or maybe you need a little recharge of your empathy batteries. I hope my BEFORE I GO project will help you.
If my BEFORE I GO project can simply help more of us to make plans for and responsibly approach the topic of death with ourselves, I will be glad to have helped in some way.

Or, maybe my BEFORE I GO project will simply be a recounting of this decade of illness. To myself, for myself. As many of my audio journals say “Dear future me, From past you. One of us knows the other and the other one of us is me.” Thanks future me, for holding past you so dearly, that you will return here to these words to feel the touch of the past. Maybe this BEFORE I GO project really gets to turn into a BEFORE and there’s much more planned for me and Jonathan here BEFORE I GO. To misquote Brian Regan “All good. All favorites.” And probably only 5 people will get that reference. But seriously, if you’ve read this far, thanks ya as I say aloud.

Hey y’all. You need to know I have invited Jesus to meet us in these spaces. Whether you believe Him or not, believe that I know He is here. For although this website is what we have termed a domain, isn’t Jesus king of all lands, king of all domains? Including this land. Including this domain. For ALL DOMAINS are HIS. This sacred domain that was given to Him over a lifetime ago in the selecting of my name. Over a decade ago in the selecting of my nickname, which became my name and the name of this domain. For Hay is what those who love me most or held me closest have always called me. The Lord God called me by name. Kept me here to encourage you with this domain. This altar is His and was His and always has been His and is for Him and is by Him and is because of Him. Because of Jesus, I am. I am here to type these words now. I am here to share with you. I am here to encourage you, by the will of the Lord God Almighty. For I was loved first and foremost by the Spirit of God, and by Jesus Christ God’s resurrected son and by the Father who created my original design in Eve herself. For this space is declared and set forth as a sacred domain, and this website will be a space/place/land that shines so brightly you will be reminded of how the darkness has already lost every time you visit. In Jesus name. The darkness will FEAR this domain and FEAR all the good produced from the seeds that are planted here. This space will always be a reflection of Him and His Light. This cannot be denied, for this story I have experienced, this life I have lived, this testimony I have been given goes before me. For His Glory.

My story is NOT MINE. See, sometime after I registered this domain, but before I became sick I also registered another, different domain name. A whisper of a dream that was solidly certain and correct appearing before us as only the best God promises in my life have whispered forth. Over the years I mourned the loss of this other domain, thinking it had expired along with most everything else in my life, apart from my being. Earlier in this very same year, 2022, I was wanting to move forward with sharing my story BEFORE I GO, when Jonathan and I discovered a single surprise domain name had remained registered to us after all this time. A deed for an internet plot of land we registered and gave to Him way back when. Even better, after registering this domain back in 2012 I had clicked (at some point I do not remember) a button that auto-generated a wordpress placeholder blog page. So as Jonathan and I went onto the autogenerated page, here in the now of 2022, we were greeted by a message that exclaimed “Hello World!” which made us chuckle because that was exactly what this site had been intended for. Not for us. Not at all. But it wasn’t until I noticed the autogenerated first blog post timestamp that the entirety of my breath was taken. This site had been one clicked into existence on September 6, 2012.

Exactly 20 days BEFORE I fell sick.

BEFORE I became sick. BEFORE I BECAME SICK with a trip to the emergency room that would slice our lives into a BEFORE and an AFTER, God had already declared the journey I was taking was NOT MINE. And He had planted a flag, right there in the ground of this new domain-land, marking the very spot in time. Check the timestamp sometime. All for His GLORY.

Exactly 20 days before I became sick for a full decade of failure and survival, I had autogenerated a website, on a domain that I intended to give fully to God, all for HIS GLORY. As a space to declare my life, my story, my husband’s life, his story, to declare that ALL THESE stories are:
NOT MINE. For Jesus himself spoke these words at different times.
|||| Not my will, but yours, Father. |||| Not my teaching, but it comes from above. ||||
See Jonathan and I had committed to praying that the Lord’s will replace our will for our lives, that we may better glorify HIM.

We prayed specifically for HIS WILL, NOT MINE.
We knew this life was the Father’s. NOT MINE. Not Jonathan’s. Just as your story is your story, it is not mine. So too is my story, Not mine. For Jonathan and me, we had given our stories to the Lord long before we autogenerated that site.

So, what am I saying? Here are the facts:
On September 6, 2012, I acted upon a declaration of faith we had promised to God for years prior, by registering the domain name NotMine.Org with the intention of watching where God took us. We knew registering NotMine.Org was His plan based on a certainty that was unexplicable apart from Jesus. Which is why I grieved the supposed loss of this domain several times over the past decade. I even tried to register it again once. But it was taken. (By me. BY THE LORD. duhhhh derp moment. haha) Upon the purchasing of this domain name, we autogenerated a placeholder site without knowing, and the date was marked right there on the site from this action. It was September 6, 2012. I was a Pharmacy Manager and Jonathan was working as a strength coach for the University of Alabama. He was at the bottom of the ladder and had been working his way up in a field we knew God had prepared for him. We were seemingly healthy, able-bodied youngins. I had just turned 25 and he 26. We had been married for 1 year and 11 months. We had just used all of our savings to purchase our first home. This was the same home where I was soon to spend the first 186 days of my illness on bedrest. But when we clicked a button that autogenerated a placeholder site declaring our lives were HIS, we didn’t know anything about the illness awaiting us in 20 short days.

On September 26, 2012, I called in sick to work and had my aunt drive me to the emergency room for headache and GI symptoms. I never returned to work full time, part time, or even PRN again. One year later I would attempt to work two shifts to not lose my job, one month apart, and I still had to leave the final shift early, and knew this was not possible to sustain the extreme lengths it had taken to survive and safely and responsibly work those two shifts. I was fired from my job when I refused to work another day, due to being too sick to ensure the level of care a PharmD position deserves, and also being unable to complete the mountains of required paperwork demanded by everywhere all the time as a very sick person. So now my husband made the bottom of the salaries that a starting assistant strength coach can make, and we’ve got huge medical expenses and have lost my income and we have $200,000 in student loan debt, a brand new mortgage, zeroed out savings and now, sudden illness, unknown disease, a new rescue puppy, and… the promise this story was NOT MINE and a placeholder site on the domain NotMine.Org, purchased due to a promise in faith, a reminder that we now needed on the hourly, and would soon need with every heartbeat.

So fast forward through the entire past decade y’all have experienced with us. The exact same decade I am bound to share about here—a full decade later—this second domain site still remains in our possession to this day. For now we are leaving it as is, as the placeholder site to blatantly show the Lord’s faithfulness. BECAUSE I AM STILL HERE. THIS STORY IS NOT MINE. THIS LIFE IS NOT MINE. THIS TEACHING IS NOT MINE. NotMine.Org remains as a placeholder in this new land. A reminder of HIS WILL, NOT MINE keeping me alive in UNEXPLAINABLE ways through unimaginable obstacles that I certainly would never have survived had we not declared BEFORE the illness, that this life was the Lord’s. That I live for Him. That we must all view our lives as both uniquely ours and NOT ours at the same time. I’ve taken to calling this life my GodPath. GodPath’s are unique to you. That is what is yours. Your God Path. But also, your LIFE is Not yours. More on this at some point, by God’s grace.

This past September 6, 2022, exactly 10 years to the date after the autogenerated placeholder site’s creation, I posted the Biblical verses that had brought us into this particular promised land by Jesus Himself speaking “not mine.” We are leaving the site as is now. Like a museum, but for free, accessible anywhere across the globe. So that any person may visit to see for themselves the STORY that happened in between and how it is Not Mine, and how my life has never been mine.

NotMine.Org. Bookmark it. Visit this page and that page any time you need to remember the Lord CONNECTS HIS CIRCLES. That is what is meant by the phrase the “Lord’s Faithfulness.” The only reason a Lord’s circle for me will remain disconnected in my life is because I get in the way and claim my life is mine. That’s the deal. NotMine.Org is one of many tangible pieces of evidence of the Lord’s receipts throughout our story. After all, my domain, this very site you are reading right now, HayFarris.com’s tagline says “God Loves Receipts.”
May you visit NotMine.org to be reminded of the receipts God wants to produce in *your* life.

If you knew me before my illness and read any of my posts pre-2015, you know I’ve already given this space named HayFarris.com to Him for years and years and years. I am just so so thankful to BE here to see this beautiful bookend, and I know with certainty, this is just the BEFORE. I have no idea where the Lord will take me next. Let us come together now, and celebrate the life of Jesus Christ. In bold confidence. Assurance that this space is holy, and Jesus is welcome in this place. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.(2 Corinthians 3:17). Let’s share this story ALL FOR HIS GLORY. That people may be encouraged and we may see the stories like this He has in place all across the world.

PS – And how could I explain NOT MINE and omit this God given HOPE video clip from August 15, 2022. You can watch with your very own eyes or hear with your ears just how powerful God is and how greatly He will provide what you ask. And just think, this video clip happened BEFORE the 10 year anniversary post of NOT MINE. So everything is connected by the most mind blossoming web. And there’s TEN YEARS of this God story to revisit.
Y’all. God’s just getting started over here. You might wanna share this. You might be hesitant, but hopefully we all practice purposefully asking God to guide our clicks and put God above it all. Whether you share or not, please do BUCKLE UP for this rocket ship. We may get there before Elon ever does at this rate. (Tehehe.) And remember: There’s always HOPE if we ask our Father.⚡️ ❤️

*Of course this star says Not mine, right, lololol *cheesey grin*

• ← Chapter 1.2 — 🪣 — Holes in my bucket
• Chapter 3 – ❤️- A Brief Spoiler →