Despite All These Things

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, we sincerely thank you for your ongoing interest, support, and prayers. Despite what is hopefully a minor new health issue for Joy (seeing doctor next week), she has continued her knitting, crocheting, and sewing of her multiple projects for Bundles of Love. We continue to be so thankful that Joy connected with this organization that allows her to use her many skills while stretching her to remember and learn anew, aspects of her craft that she holds so dear. We’ve also had time with family and friends and taken a couple of day trips in the past week.

One day, as we were working on Joy’s “homework,” it dawned on me that it has been a while since I have provided any kind of reference point for Joy’s ongoing challenges with right sided blindness, aphasia, and knowledge memory lost in the accident. So, I thought it might be helpful to understand more of where Joy is at, to help in supporting your prayers for her. Here is a sample from one of the exercises in Joy’s aphasia app. Each exercise includes 25 of the following types of statements which are spoken and accompanied by six pictures from which to make a selection. Joy can replay each statement as many times as she needs to accomplish the task. Examples are:

• Before you touch the blue toothbrush, touch the yellow star and the red circle.

• After you touch the orange bicycle, touch the yellow thread and the red bird.

• Before you touch the orange striped star, touch the yellow solid circle.

• First touch the guitar, then touch the notebook, next touch the mask.

• Touch the small orange solid triangle before you touch the large red striped star.

• If the thread is green, touch the toothbrush. If not, touch the notebook.

Since we began using the app last summer, Joy has certainly made progress. At first, she could not even recognize most of the words, no matter how many times she listened to the statements. One of the hardest things for me to watch initially was her inability to recognize the words for or the pictures of a spool of thread, given her obvious skill and love for sewing.

Today Joy recognizes the pictures of thread, but still none, I mean none, of the statements above are “easy” for her. Auditory processing is still very challenging and requires every bit of concentration she can muster. Any of the statements above will probably be repeated multiple times before Joy tentatively reaches out to touch the named items and thankfully more and more her selections are correct, but not perfect.

So if I could, I invite you to think about how automatically the images in these statements come to your mind, even if you had heard them rather than read them and then, consider Joy’s reality of struggling even to process the word triangle, let alone striped or solid. Despite the recognized and acknowledged gains made in the app, most sessions end with Joy in a very somber mood, not depressed, but painfully aware of how much was lost in the accident. Her master's degree trained mind struggling to differentiate a yellow striped triangle from a bicycle.

We are so thankful for the support and prayers you have offered in the days, weeks, and months since the accident, but as you can see, we still need your continued intercession for more complete healing of the aphasia and further restoration of Joy’s cognitive processing skills.

But despite the challenges of our sober reality, we are nonetheless truly thankful for the wonderful life we have as we often reflect on “how much worse it could have been." This mixed reality of our lives fits well with and is echoed by the verses we want to share with you this week from Roman’s 8:35-39 which reads:

Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”) No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

As we seek your ongoing prayers for Joy’s continued healing, please know that we hold you up in prayer daily, thanking God for each and every one of you and for the tremendous encouragement you are to us in our lives day to day.🙏🏻