I probably should have started with this before my last post, because I’ve gotten some concerned responses. I am still here for every single moment ordained for me!
That being said, God has also been working in my life to prepare me for my Heavenly home. If I could write a letter to each one of you I would. So many of you are my prayer warriors and faithfully encourage me through the highs and the lows of my story. Since I can’t reach out to each of you individually, I’m going to be using my blog to write some letters to my people, so that each person will have the chance to hear my heart, and easy access to it. So please don’t despair when you see me posting the things I’m carrying in my heart. Know they are meant to be treasured by you, where you can return to them again and again.
To my ride-or-die friends who have walked with me through valley and mountain—
I know how deeply your beautiful hearts are wrestling with what you are being asked to do — to love so fiercely in friendship, and then hand me back to Jesus. To surrender our journey just as it felt like it was only beginning. How does one even begin to do that?
We have shared life together for about as long as the disciples sat at Jesus’ feet. Imagine how they must have felt, thinking their journey had only just begun — how desperate they must have been at the thought of losing their closest friend.
But as the disciples learned — and as you will too — God never asks us to walk alone. His Spirit of grace, His face in your friends, His voice in your heart, will comfort and guide you.
Yes, there will be tears. But there will never be a loss of hope or joy. The planting of you in my life is coming to bloom. We have loved deeply and served one another through many seasons, each with its own beautiful purpose.
Though I may slip away from this celebration a little early, it is only to join an even grander, more glorious one.
I ask that you continue in what we have learned together through this suffering: to show up, to love the brokenhearted, to carry hope into weary places. There are so many hurting hearts all around who need the same friendship, encouragement, and relentless pointing to Jesus that you have given me.
Our story doesn’t end here.
Go. Love fiercely. Serve joyfully. Laugh and grow richly, with hearts full of gratitude for the gift of friendship we are blessed to share.
The past few days have been a hard-fought fight with pain. Not super proud of it, but I’ve found myself begging for mercy; that Jesus would just take me home and free me from this. These prayers then make me feel sad, and I start thinking what that would really look like for me and my people.
My mind wanders to the verse that talks about the blessings given to those who are obedient to God. “May you see your children’s children (psalm 128).” So if I don’t get to see my grandchildren, does that mean God is a liar? Or should I just skip over the verses like this?
It’s tempting to see scripture through the lens of my own emotions and experiences, but I am learning to look at God’s promises through the lens of the Gospel instead, and the Gospel tells me he keeps his promises. If I don’t get to experience these promises here on earth then I must believe these promises are pointing me to my true home, Heaven, where these promises will be fulfilled.
Matthew 19:28 tells me that for every promise I miss out on here on earth, I will receive a hundred times that along with eternal life. His heart is not dishonest, but generous in all that he promises and gives. Yes, I still grieve over the things and people I will miss out on here, but I believe God wrote my story, and is telling his Story through mine, and that is important enough that it is worth the losses experienced in the telling of it.
God tells me that the sadness and suffering I experience here on earth are nothing compared to the glory that awaits me in Heaven, and that his love is better than the best of what this world has to offer me. When my most cherished things in this life are taken from me, more space is created in my heart for him to give me far more than I could ever imagine, for all of eternity. And that, my friends, is worth my fight.
My church recently invited me to be a guest on their podcast, called Talking Points. I’m including a link if you’d like to listen to it, and you can also find many of their other podcasts on meaningful and important topics. If you give it a listen, let me know your thoughts!
This week in my reel of photo memories this one popped up…
Immediately the words to Ellie Holcomb‘s song, “Just As Good” started echoing in my mind, where they lingered for the rest of the day. “Oh every ebeneezer points to where my help comes from.”
Who would have thought these painful slices would become my stones of remembrance?
The many scars my body carries tell a story of God’s divine assistance and mercy. Times when I have been wounded, but He has allowed healing. Some scars run deeper than others. Some are still in the process of healing, but all of them come with a story of challenge that was met with grace and healing.
At times I feel embarrassed by my wounds, but reality is that these and other marks paint a connect-the-dots picture of my hard-fought story—right on my own skin. They are reminders that I have lived a life not of safety, but of the opposite. I’ve pushed myself, and I’ve been pushed, sometimes too far, and I would not have it any other way.
When I see my scars, I remember the difficult challenges, and the opening of my hands to surrender to an attitude of trust. I see the reminders of accidents and falls where I couldn’t hold myself up, but I was still held. I see evidence of a plot line that included my defeat, but instead is a story of survival.
I am drawn to the lyrics of the song Scars by I Am They. “So I’m thankful for the scars ‘Cause without them I wouldn’t know Your heart, And I know they’ll always tell of who You are, so forever I am thankful for the scars.”
It takes some hard-fought determination to be able to see these red and white squiggles carved into my flesh as accomplishments, but that is what has gently happened as the number of my scars has ticked up with each passing year.
I can choose to let my scars only remind me of the pain, or I can let them remind me of the scarred hands that payed my ransom.
Tracing my finger over these raised little lines I’m struck by immense truths. A stunning canvas of struggle, embodied suspense. In every imperfection, strength that can be found; the echoes of hardship that shapes my heart and mind to know and trust a good Father who is writing a good story for me.
Please leave me a comment, it lets me know you’re listening!
Here is a graphic about my illness to give you an idea of the things it has, does, and will affect.
Inability to verbally communicate.
I have been a spectator to this with my friend who has ALS, and it is hard. Talk about a massive loss of control. Imagine the amount of having to slow down and let your actions speak louder than your words, or in this case instead of your words.
Over the past few months my voice has begun to weaken. At times it’s raspy, or sounds like I’m hoarse or getting sick. With this new development my speech therapist started the process for me to get an AAC device as an alternative means of communication. Control Bionics and my speech therapist have been wonderful to work with. They were very efficient at getting me set up with a device that will meet my current needs, as well as my needs as my condition continues to change.
At first, life with my AAC was about getting familiar with it and practicing navigating between the pages and words and phrases to best communicate. My device has sensors on the front that either detect my eye movements, or a slight muscle movement of my hand, and it selects the letters or phrases I want to say. It’s amazing we have this kind of technology, and I’m humbly grateful to be able to use it. I even had the opportunity to bank my own voice so that when it speaks for me you will still hear my voice. This part is expensive, but we are looking for solutions!
This past week my voice has taken a turn. One morning I woke up and barely had a voice at all. Some of it returned, but I now sound like a quiet, scratchy record with the occasional skip where nothing comes out at all. Truthfully it’s been a little unnerving seeing how fast I could be plunged into silence.
Hardly anyone can hear me anymore, and the effort and breath it takes to make my voice loud enough to project across a room is exhausting and frustrating. I wasn’t expecting this part to be so hard, but it’s hitting me right in a tender spot I didn’t know I had. I feel panicked to not be able to explain myself, threatened by the thought of not being able to call out and get my kids’ or caregivers’ attention. And if you see me singing along in church I’ve fooled you. I’m lip-syncing.
Another practice in total surrender; in cupping my hands around what’s left and holding out all I have to offer. A chance to do more listening than talking. Another practice in giving up what was and adjusting to what is, and believing that regardless of the journey or the outcome, I am held.
When I met with my counselor recently she said, “If you were given the space and peace I think you would succumb to your illness very quickly, but out of sheer stubbornness you continue to exceed all of our expectations.” She’s not wrong. As far as the stubbornness scale goes I’m way up there near the top, and I do have quite a number of things I want to feel like are going to be ok in my absence. I realize that may sound arrogant, and some of it probably is, but I also think most of us if we accepted that our time is limited have things we want to settle before we leave this world.
I think there are pros and cons to this stubbornness to cling to life. As a culture we really look at death in a strange light considering it is something that happens to all of us eventually. We measure the length of a person’s life and state that they were taken too soon, or they died much too young, but what if it was exactly the right time? What if your story hangs heavy on the thread of /this/season, /this/ loss?
We seem to live in a mutually accepted denial of the fact that we and those we love have an expiration date. This has a tendency to rob us of a joy and peace we can experience in the face of anticipated loss. We can all probably find a little purpose by leaning in and loving like crazy and then graciously walking our loved ones Home with our presence, our honesty, and our understanding.
I met Sandy when we both signed up for the Women’s Bible Study at University Baptist Church. We ended up in the same small group that met to discuss what we had read and watched. Being an introvert, and still fairly new to UBC, I gave myself over to the very extroverted woman who had an answer for each of the questions, and I did a lot of “soaking in” during that time.
By September 14, 2022, Sandy and I somehow talked enough to become Facebook friends, and from there she discovered that I was collecting nail polish to paint nails for women experiencing homelessness in town.
Sandy wanted to help, and generously donated to my small little mission.
From there my busted up short term memory doesn’t quite fill in all the blanks correctly, but I do know that Sandy started showing up for me again and again. In ways others hadn’t, and in quantities others wouldn’t.
There was nothing that she would not do for me; sit and patiently teach me all of the wise bits about marriage she has learned over the years, vacuum and mop my floors, pray and read scripture over me from a hospital bed, let me vent about a horrible day that didn’t really stack up to her hard day. Remind me in kindness when I need to reframe my thinking, or go back and ask someone’s forgiveness, and hours and hours of holding my hand and praying over me.
Sandy disciples many different women, and I was always aware how much that filled her plate, but it took me awhile to realize what she was doing was disciplining me too. Guiding me in love. Teaching me in wisdom. Loving me with grace.
For years I have prayed for Godly women in my life who will mentor and guide me, and I think I had all but given up on that ever happening by the time I met Sandy. Yet she walked right in and took the job. None of my mess mattered to her. My life expectancy didn’t matter to her. She was simply there for as many days as God would allow us to have together.
We have gotten to serve together, laugh together, pray together, and have hours upon hours of conversations about every topic under the sun, including the hardest ones that no one much wants to talk about. I can only pray that I will have the opportunity to be someone’s “Mama Sandy” some day, because what she has given me has been something I’ve needed more than half my life, and came at the most impeccable of times. As I tell Sandy, “Our hearts have been friends for a very long time.”
At the end of each year as I spend some time reflecting on the year before, inevitably a new word saturated in meaning is impressed upon my heart for the coming year. That word remains the theme of my photo album, and the compass to how I hope to lead my family to grow throughout the year.
This past year our word was Shalom. Many of you may already know that Shalom means peace. I was longing for peace at the beginning of this year, but it went even further to define our year as not just an absence of war, but an overall sense of fullness and completeness in mind, body, and estate. To make full restitution; RESTORE! This brought to mind one of my favorite verses, Joel 2:25. “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
Every time I passed the 6 letters framed upon our front door I prayed for peace both within our home, and outside of its doors. I prayed that God’s peace would bring a sense of completeness to our home; to our relationships, our walks with God, and our friendships with others.
As 2024 drew to a close and I started seeking and praying for our word of this new year I began seeing it on repeat, the word chosen for this year. This year’s word is JOY. I anticipate we will be blessed with an abundance of joy, and we will also see it woven in and out of many of our daily experiences. Perhaps we will learn better how to give joy, and we will become accustomed to receiving joy even in circumstances we might not think to look!
As we wind down our time in Shalom, though still activity seeking where we can give and take peace, I excitedly welcome this 2025 season of all things Joy!
Choosing Hope 