Celebrating Our 48 Years of Marriage

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. Yes, this week we celebrated our 48th wedding anniversary. The next day we gathered with our friends (who had flown to Florida the day after the accident) and collectively celebrated anniversaries of 50, 48, and 45 years!

At the end of February 2024 I wasn’t sure Joy was going to survive to see our 47th anniversary and if she did I questioned the kind of life she/we would have. Would she stay paralyzed, partially blind and deaf, bedridden, fed through a tube? Would she even know me, our children, other family and friends? Just writing these words immediately flashes me back to Joy’s bedside in the ICU and the questions that flooded my mind. I just finished re-reading Brennan Manning’s, “Abba’s Child,” and a passage from the book captures so eloquently my experience during those initial hours and days:

“When tragedy makes its unwelcome appearance and we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own agony—when courage flies out the window and the world seems to be a hostile, menacing place—it is the hour of our own Gethsemane. No word, however sincere, offers any comfort or consolation. The night is bad. Our minds are numb, our hearts vacant, our nerves shattered. How will we make it through the night? The God of our lonely journey is silent.

And yet it may happen in these most desperate trials of our human existence that beyond any rational explanation, we may feel a nail-scarred hand clutching ours. We are able, as Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewess who died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943, wrote, to ‘safeguard that little piece of God in ourselves’ and not give way to despair. We make it through the night, and darkness gives way to the light of morning. The tragedy radically alters the direction of our lives, but in our vulnerability and defenselessness we experience the power of Jesus in His present risenness.”

Fortunately, as I have written many times before, although not using these exact words, “in that most desperate trial… beyond any rational explanation… I did feel a nail-scarred hand clutching mine.” The overwhelming sense of God’s grace, mercy, and sufficiency perfused the long days and nights and my bride not only survived, but by all expectations and standards has thrived since that terrible tragedy. She even remembered who I was!

Last year as we came to the celebration of our anniversary Joy had just had her Mohs surgery for squamous cell carcinoma on her scalp, so she was sporting a baseball cap for the day. While continuing in Speech Therapy, we had just completed our first round of outpatient OT and PT orders but would return after a couple of weeks for further therapy that extended to the end of last year. While Joy’s blindness to the upper right remained, her vertical diplopia had resolved which thankfully made reading, knitting, and crocheting much easier and enjoyable. Joy was practicing the alphabet and vowel sounds, still struggling with simple words as she read. And, I was working feverishly to create our blog site and copying all the CaringBridge entries over to be able to launch it by Joy’s birthday at the end of the month.

As we reflect on the past year and the 18 months since the accident, we are so thankful, thankful to God, and to all of you, our family, friends, and followers. We consider a true miracle the resolution of Joy’s vertical diplopia because it is the most difficult to recover from and often requires cumbersome prism glasses for even partial correction. Last year Joy was struggling with the simplest of words, and while language challenges still remain, she is on track to complete her read-through-the-Bible this year.

These past 12 months have seen continued progress, but as I have written, at an ever slowing pace. Last year’s gains came in leaps and bounds, increasingly, our gains now come at a crawl, a snail’s pace. Don’t get me wrong, as I just said, we are so thankful and feel unquestionably blessed, but it is an adjustment that sometimes has to be reset daily to decipher where gains are still possible and where we need to accept something as our new normal, our new reality. And some days are easier to come to grips with that new reality than others. So as we implore you each week, please continue your prayers not only for Joy's physical and cognitive healing, but for emotional endurance and encouragement as well.

One of the things I have always appreciated about the One-Year-Bible format is that the New Testament daily reading for August 20th (our anniversary) includes 1 Corinthians chapter 13. So an anniversary never goes by without our being reminded, among other things, that:

"Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance."

So once again, thank you for the faithfulness and support and may we all reflect on the above verses as we each work to know and be love in the days ahead.