Showing all posts in November 2020

My absence on the blog this month has been a mix of not enough time and not the right words.

I feel I should focus on my daddy as November marks 13 years of life without him, but none of my new thoughts seem ready to share.

Facebook memories have cycled through previous writings about him, and this past week I kept returning to a post that I typed two Thanksgivings ago. Maybe they are words someone needs to read (again).

Maybe I’m that someone.

I suppose my Novembers will always be colored with shades of sadness.

Still, there’s a lot to be thankful for.

(Originally written and posted to Facebook on November 23, 2018)

I didn’t post anything on Thanksgiving Day because I didn’t feel I had anything meaningful to say. The day marked 11 years since my daddy died (it was Thanksgiving that year, too) but it seemed insincere to acknowledge it because I didn’t experience any particular feelings of grief or loss. My brothers were not able to make it to mom’s house, so while it was an enjoyable day it didn’t feel very holiday.

I sat in my own home last night and watched the trailer for the upcoming live action movie “The Lion King.” A fragment of grief pierced my heart as James Earl Jones (I could listen to him read the phone book, by the way) voiced in familiar Mufasah wisdom:

“A king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One day the sun will set on my time here…”

The sun set on my daddy’s time more than a decade ago. But our family – his family – still exists.

I have wrestled with and reflected on legacy for almost 2 years. The more I think about it the less I know but I am certain of this: roots matter. They are not just a pathway to our past, buried in the deep underground. They have shaped us into the people we are at this very moment, and they sustain us as we grow and grasp the many good things life brings.

As mom prepared our lunch, she said to me “At least we’re not in a hospital waiting room.”

That’s how we shared the last Thanksgiving daddy was alive. We gathered around a cramped conference room table to eat; daddy lay unconscious in a hospital bed down the hall.

“Yeah, but at least then we were all together,” I said.

“Not all of us,” mom answered, catching me off guard.

“Who was missing?” I asked.

“Abby Kate and Lily,” she said.

Life with my daddy was life without my daughters. If you have both your parents and your children today, celebrate that for the treasure it is.

I don’t know how many more Thanksgivings I will have with my mom in the home where she and daddy raised me but I want to be there – in that little yellow house on Railroad Avenue – for every one God gifts me because y’all, home is a gift.

As 2007 ended, Jeff and I played Scrabble and watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. (We’re clearly the party people you all believe us to be.) I didn’t really want to move into 2008. I had my daddy in 2007 and wanted him there even with the hurt and hard of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Eleven years later. Life goes on.

It can be hard to honor tradition and accept change at the same time, especially when change is not what you want. I was reminded this Thanksgiving we don’t have to choose between the two.

Joy exists in both.

I choose joy.

“Praise the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever.”

(Psalms 106:1)

My daughter Abby Kate broke her arms at the end of summer.  She wrecked her scooter on a sidewalk in our neighborhood while our family was out for a walk. I did not see her fall because she had scooted around a curve ahead of me, her dad, and her sister. I’m glad for that as I suspect it’s one of those slow-motion moments my mind would replay. Her cry for help was haunting.

She was scraped from chin to shins. Worse, the wreck broke the radius in her left arm and caused a buckle fracture in her right arm. I don’t suppose there is ever a good time for this sort of thing to happen, but the timing was especially inconvenient for Abby Kate.

It happened three days before the start of school.

I wrote on this blog back in May about the ways God has placed people in Abby Kate’s life at exactly the right moments, especially at school. For six years He showed us His faithfulness as she moved through her elementary years. If any year was going to douse me with doubt it was this one – middle school.

Now, on top of all the other newness, I had to factor two broken arms.

COVID cancelled the usual ways we would have calmed (my) nerves and set (her) expectations for a new place, including the annual Open House for incoming sixth graders. But it didn’t cancel school altogether and the first day was coming, whether I liked or wanted it.

I would’ve been worried, perhaps even panicked, wondering how Abby Kate would navigate a new place with her arms in casts if not for a note I read on my phone just hours before our trip to the emergency room.

I was laying down for a nap (because that’s my idea of fun) when my phone buzzed, alerting me to a new message. I ignored it and closed my eyes. When I woke and finally checked, I found an answered prayer, one spoken so long ago I had almost forgotten it.

The message was from Jessica, a young lady who had been our babysitter since Abby Kate was in kindergarten. We met through chance encounters at church when Abby Kate was 5 years old. Jessica was in college at the time, studying biology with the intention of becoming a teacher. One night after babysitting, she shared with Jeff and me her hopes to teach middle or high school, and maybe even return to her alma mater, the same school our kids are zoned to attend.

Knowing we were in for a long haul with Abby Kate’s social challenges I replied, “I need God to get you back home before Abby Kate starts East.”

And six years later…

Three days before school…

Four hours before Abby Kate broke her arms…

He did.

This is part of Jessica’s message to me:

“I accepted a long-term sub position today in a pretty good school. I will start tomorrow 7:30am as the sub for 6^th grade science for the first several weeks of school at East! … I wanted to let you know because I’ve never forgot the time I told y’all I was going to be a teacher and you said something along the lines of ‘Well hurry back so the girls can have you at East.’”

I had all but dismissed that prayer, if that’s what you’d even call the words I so casually spoke that evening in our living room. Jessica had settled in a city 90 minutes away. Never in a million years, much less six, would I have expected her to be hired in time to teach Abby Kate at East. But the Bible says my thoughts are not His and neither are my ways.

Thank goodness for that.

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It was not a coincidence Jessica messaged me mere hours before Abby Kate’s scooter spill. God knew what was about to happen and He knew the assurance I would need to get through it. I sat in the ER beside Abby Kate, completely calm.

Middle school was going to be just fine.

I’ve imagined the look on God’s face as Jessica realized her wish to return home to teach. I think about how He must have smiled as she typed the news in that message to me. He could’ve been annoyed that I took a nap (though what’s 30 minutes when it’s been 6 years?!) but I think He was patient as He anticipated my joy.

You may call this sequence of events a coincidence, but I believe with my whole heart that God delights in the details of our lives and orchestrates them in ways we could never imagine.

What are you praying for today? What have you asked Him to do?

I promise you it’s in progress.

God sees you. He hears you.

Keep praying.

Fingers crossed that your answer won’t come with broken bones.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

(Isaiah 55:8-9)

“Keep asking and it will be given to you. Keep searching and you will find. Keep knocking and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them – this is the Law and the Prophets.”

(Matthew 7:7)