Faithfully Facing Her Giants

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and welcome back to the latest installment of our ongoing story of healing and recovery. Our week has held triumph and tears, encouragement and exasperation. We’ve done our best to keep active with walks both outside and with our frequent three mile walks at the Mall of America. We’ve also been faithful in more structured homework which, as you may have guessed it, yielded at times much appreciated triumph and encouragement while also producing its share of tears and exasperation. Joy has made great strides from where we began, but as I’ve shared before, it can be challenging cognitively and emotionally to be working on things like your vowel sounds and/or knowing your shapes or having to relearn what solid or striped mean when you are 69.

Joy has been so faithful and so courageous, fighting through those tears of exasperation and continuing to improve, but that improvement, while identifiable is oh so painfully slow. One of the things that stands out to me, and I share this as a specific prayer request, is the challenge Joy has processing auditory versus visual inputs. If the aphasia app asks Joy to, “touch the large solid blue star before you touch the small green striped circle,” it will take Joy listening to that phrase a dozen or more times before she may tentatively point toward the solid blue star.

But, not only does her brain not readily interpret what shape she is being directed to, it may not even process correctly what she just heard. For example, Joy may have listened to the sentence above and I will she her start to mouth, “square, square,” and I’ll say, “Honey, it did not mention square, let’s listen to it again.” So what was revealing to me this past week is the level of complexity Joy is fighting with in her recovery from her brain injury. Hearing does not guarantee, “hearing.” If Joy’s brain interprets the audible word star as square, is it that she does not know what shape is being asked for or has she heard the wrong word altogether? We’ve spent a lot of time this past week reviewing the various shapes, what solid means, what striped means, large versus small and then shared the tears over the Herculean effort it takes for Joy to process even those basic concepts.

In our reading through the Bible this week, one of the days included the story of David and Goliath and I just couldn’t help but see Joy’s courage in facing the giants of her recovery from traumatic injury and the courage with which David faced Goliath. One of the things that stands out so clearly in the story is David’s confidence in God more than his confidence in his own ability. He trusted God would use his ability, but it would be God’s miraculous intervention that would cause him to succeed and he so trusted God’s ability to provide for him, he bet his life on it.

From the earliest times of Joy’s being able to communicate after the accident, she has displayed a confidence in God and a desire that God would use her in whatever way he could. She has recounted the sensation that she was truly dying, going down into a dark pit, but heard God tell her he had a purpose for her. At first, even before words would come, she knew in her mind she wanted to communicate with God and was able to have a confidence that he understood her muddled thoughts even without the language to communicate them. Family and friends would come to mind and she would “pray” for them in her thoughts living out the reality of Romans 8:26-27, “And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.” From fighting the giants of brain bleeds, multiple fractures, paralysis, partial blindness, diplopia, apraxia, aphasia, and more, Joy has displayed the same courage David did as he ran toward the heavily shielded and well armed giant Goliath with a stone in his sling and a prayer in his heart.

Words cannot express the appreciation and gratitude we feel for all we have, knowing things could have been so very different and so much worse. But as shared above, challenges still remain, challenges Joy faces each day with courage even when there are exasperated tears. I am so very fortunate and privileged to share this journey with her, she inspires me each day and I hope and pray that her courage can inspire you as well. Please know of our continued prayers for you and for your courage as you face your own giants which we all must confront in one form or another each day. Thank you once again and until next time we wish you God’s continued grace and mercy in the days ahead.