January Second Blank

Rom. 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

January Second

Today, my insomniac husband slept while my insomniac son wanted to come to the house and do his laundry. I prepared to get ready for my day of Physical Therapy. Now my sessions are getting more interesting with learning new things that I can do. I walked up a step last week and tested the use of a cane, instead of the walker or wheelchair. I passed with flying colors if I do say so myself.

Today I showed my son my ability to walk from one end of the room and back using just my cane! I used to think the cane made people look at me and judge me but now since my vanity has been shelved, I walk with my head held high using my cane. Not walking for three months makes you appreciate every step you’re allowed!

I love hearing the excitement in my son's voice when he says, ‘Wow mom, that’s awesome!’ Or ‘This is great, look how far you’ve come!’ I never realized how much I loved the praise but it does motivate me to keep going on and do one more thing different each day! Thank you, son! Now I somewhat understand why God loves us to praise Him, it motivates Him to do one more thing different for us each and every day.! 

Today, I made two laps around the PT gym. It’s not a big place but the laps were enough to cause me to break a sweat because I had done other exercises also, like the step up, step down exercise. I don’t think you realize how for granted you take a simple step! Whether it is a step to walking, a step leading into or out of the house, or a lazy walk to the kitchen! Appreciate every step because one day when it is abruptly taken away from you, you’re not always given a chance to regain what was lost. 

An open path leads to steps you’d might otherwise miss. Keep your eyes open for God’s mysterious ways. He has a tendency to use the weak and broken, not the pomp and arrogant. Be humble, friends.

May God bless the journey He has planned for me this year. May I be motivated to keep my chin up when it gets trying, and I remember to love when I see so much hate. 

The path I'll soon walk again!

Year's End

2 Cor. 4:16 “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”

The Year's End

I look at the calendar and see December 27, my son’s 22 birthday, and I have to wonder where all of the other the months this year went. I feel like I feathered through the pages of the calendar and landed here in December with no fill in for the in between. You know, you’re given a life-altering diagnosis and something in your life is supposed to change right? You make or complete a bucket list, family surrounds you and supports you, you strive to live every last second of the years of your life you have left.

That didn’t happen to me. I altered my daily eating habits, I changed my physical activities to include walks and stationary bike rides and I do more cleaning, more writing, but that’s about it. The outside world exists only when I force myself to go out and place myself in this seemingly mechanical robotic world we live in.

One day I’m sitting in the doctor’s office being poked and prodded, the calendar saying January 25th, then I’m sitting under an eclipsed sun and it says August 21st, then I blink and now it is the 27th of December.

I’m sure all of you have had a significant year where you took scenic trips, relished family memories, ate delicious toxic food and wonder where all the weight came from that you’ve added. Me, I’m wondering where in the world I hid forty pounds that I lost. My mother in law just said to me on Christmas, that she didn’t know I had forty pounds to lose because I always looked great. I guess looking great and actually BEING great are two different things. Shrinking from a size seven to a size three is forty pounds. Now I have no clothes that fit, again.

While I may have lost weight I feel like I’ve aged ten years. It’s kind of weird and nothing I do can change that portion of my year. I did have a nice Christmas and that meant a lot to me. The enormous amount of food did overwhelm me but I stayed focused on my macaroni salad. Macaroni salad, you ask? Well yes. Back home our Christmas’ always had my great-grandmother’s secret family recipe for macaroni salad and potato salad, and my mother always had pork, sauerkraut, and kielbasa simmering in the slow cooker. 

When my German great-grandparents (my dad’s grandparents) came here to America not too long ago, they brought with them recipes to hand down to the family. My mother actually made the recipes the best and my aunt’s always envied how she made it just like their grandmother! They tried to duplicate the recipe to no avail. I was always by my mothers’ side when she made the salads so I basically knew what she did that made it so special. She says my niece has acquired the ability to reproduce her salad but sometimes misses an ingredient but the similar taste is still there. 

I don’t make her potato salad because I don’t really like potatoes but the macaroni salad I made last year for my son and hubby was back-home delicious so much so, it took me back home for a moment when savoring every bite. When I thought about facing Christmas day surrounded by food and family I mentioned that if I could make my mother’s macaroni salad, I would have that one cheat to eat, relishing the taste and my surroundings would melt into the background. My husband, loving the salad, had no problem with my request!

I have never shared my salad with this family and his brother makes some good tasty food himself. I felt the two pounds of macaroni was too much so I saved me a small bowl for home and took the rest thinking it would go untouched because of all of the food my bro-in-law made. Amid the turkey, ham, dressing, cranberry sauce, string bean casserole and a host of other stuff sat my macaroni salad. 

Holding my plate in my hand I loaded up on macaroni salad and two deviled eggs that my hubby made. No one knew that they were organic eggs. I went and sat at the table surrounded by family and ate, after prayers of course. This family actually prays before meals, something I never knew in my life before coming to Nebraska. 

After the forks began scraping the plates I could hear the low murmur of ‘mmmm’s’ circling the table. I thought they were agreeing with how good my bro-in-law’s food was but then it came out, “This macaroni salad is delicious!” 

I think I blushed, “My macaroni salad?” 

Out of ten people there, only one didn’t like the salad and that was because he had eaten a pepperoncini thinking it was a banana pepper and his dinner was ruined by the taste, otherwise, the macaroni salad was a big hit. I had an almost empty bowl to take home with us by the time we left. There was a request to bring it to the Easter dinner and his brother said I could bring that dish again next year! 

If I give them nothing else to remember me by, my old family recipe will linger in their minds and taste buds for years to come. I’m sure my laughter and personality will be sweet reminders also, but I can say what made my year was sharing a meal from back home, bringing my dysfunctional family close to me while sharing with my new family. 

The only person that I talked to from back home on Christmas day was my mother, everyone else has forgotten about me so this year is the year of release for me. I need to release that family and move forward. The delete button cannot be more prevalent and necessary at this juncture in my life. I’ll continue on in my hermetic lifestyle isolating myself and living for me, hubby and my son, and…my macaroni salad once or twice a year! What a nice way to end the year!

The Rains Came

Job 21:18 “They are as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carrieth away.”

The Rains Came…

Throughout April we had a lot of rain. Endless days of clouds, drizzle, cold, and darkness lay over the land. We even had snow late in the season, which is usually rare, but the way the weather has been for the past couple of years, I guess it is the new normal.

Lucky for me, I have a flurry of friends who lift my spirits on a daily basis, except when I’m in a withdrawn mood and have no contact, then I’m left on my own with the elements I’m dealt.

I like to switch things up so my daily exercise routine doesn’t become mundane and boring. I had to make the switch of having my stationary bike being brought from the basement and I placed my Health Rider down there for Adam. Since the rains came and put a damper on my daily walks, my bike has been a blessing. 

I still do my twenty-minute walks when the weather allows but when it doesn’t I hop on my bike. The other day I pulled the mower out thinking I’d do twenty minutes but I wound up out there for an hour. The weight-loss and workout does wonders for my arthritic knees. 

When my M-I-L gave us the bike eight years ago when we moved to Nebraska, it was placed in the basement. Hubby, when blind, used to go down there daily to break up his days that were filled with darkness. I bought a Health Rider at a garage sale for twenty-five bucks and that was my nice piece of equipment for me before arthritis set into my bones.

Doing all the research that I am, exercise is an important part of my healing. I didn’t know how detrimental something as simple as a cold was to me so my walks on the cold, blustery days came to a halt. Inside equipment was going to become a new part of my daily routine in my healing.

Then there’s the sun, another pivotal portion of my healing since it holds non-fabricated vitamin D! I have obtained a supplement also but the sun, that which I can’t control was what I needed. Not only for the warmth and lifter upper elements it carried, but the nutritional value people often take for granted.

The rains came…along with that, days on end of no sun. That alone is enough to drag you into the trenches of a depressed state. March and April were so filled with ominous clouds and winds, my spirit was being put through a whirlwind as if I was in the center of a tornado being sucked through the vortex drinking in all of my energy. 

May has allowed a couple of warm days, some sun with no winds; a couple of days, not a lot. Again, the storms and rains have washed over the fields and this month we’ll see once again (as in April) record low temperatures and a lot of rain.

As in life, storms come and storms go but what normally happens after a storm is the sun comes out in all its brilliance and shines allowing a rainbow to pan across the sky. Since this diagnosis, I’ve seen rainbows in the darkened clouds, swirling in the winds, and vaporized in every breath.

Is that normal? Scientifically people will say you need the sun’s reflection to create a rainbow, but let me ask you this, has anything that has happened in the storms of your life been explained by science? Do we really live so science can define us?

When I was diagnosed I had four doctors (yes four) ask me the questions they ask all victims of this disease. They were looking for the ‘normal’ symptoms, none of which I had. They looked perplexed, scratched their heads with furrowed eyebrows and said, Hmm… interesting. 

Pss. 83:15 “So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.”

Again, when I was not ‘committing’ to their way of doing things, they looked perplexed. Their science was telling them that there is only ONE way to go and this woman is NOT committing to our way of doing things. They threw fear around like putting candy in a child’s bag on Halloween, toss it here, toss it there, these kids love their candy, note: handing them the disease! But the thing was, I didn’t like the candy they offered.

Back in Texas when my son was little, we would take him trick-or-treating. I didn’t believe in having a child beg for candy, but all of his friends were doing it, so being a homeschooled kid, we took him. When he got home he’d go through the candy and pick out what he wanted. He’d pause a few times when there was a small bag with a note attached. The note would have a Bible verse printed. I had never seen this before but then again, I didn’t do the Halloween thing but I thought it was a great idea that this dark holiday had one ray of Light in the evening. 

Do you see where I’m going with this? In the darkness of the dismal diagnosis, I SAW THE LIGHT! Instead of seeing it as a raging storm, I saw it as an offering of Light. This was a time to heal, to change and to grow! No one said a change was easy and quite often it will be one of the most difficult tasks in your life. Change is necessary to grow!  But if you never weather the storms of life and see rainbows, you are committing yourself to stagnation of an over-flowing society based on science. 

God is not science. He does not exist to be proven, He exists to be felt, known and loved. My God is not a God of confusion and perplexity, He is a God of certainty, surety, a solid rock! So when men and women of science ask me to commit to their way of doing things I have to stand firm and declare my faith to be based on Solid Ground, not sinking sand. Let the rains come, let the storms rage, let the winds blow and let the dust move. Me…I’m standing on solid ground. All praise and Glory to Him! 

Isa. 4:6 “And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.”