Living Our "Newer" Normal

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. Thank you as always for your interest, prayers, and ongoing support. We safely returned from our San Diego trip last weekend and consider our getaway both a blessing and a success. Since we had already flown on the MedFlight from Florida just days after Joy’s cranioplasty surgery, I felt fairly certain that the pressure changes in flight would not be a problem, but until we actually flew again, I wasn’t sure. So we are both so very thankful Joy was comfortable on the flight, was strong and engaged in our outings, and showed a gracious spirit to all we met.

Joy reflected on her interactions with others on the trip after we got home. She observed, “Before the accident I was more concerned about what was happening to me, but now I’m so much more aware of wanting to know how others are doing. God has really changed me that way.” Now make no mistake, Joy was tremendously compassionate, kind, and caring before the accident, but some of her inhibitions would cause her to be more reserved, especially in new or different surroundings. Since the accident, I have to say, the inhibitions are gone and Joy is quick to greet, compliment, and graciously show interest in those we meet. While I say it in almost every post, I can’t help but express how very proud I am of her.

At the same time, when we do revisit a location, event, or activity of the past, I have to say, despite being immensely grateful for the healing Joy has experienced, it is still often, if not always, bittersweet. As I’ve said many times before, Joy could be dead, paralyzed, bedridden, mute, deaf, or completely blind. She is not. We have so much more than we ever thought possible after the accident. However, there is no denying the amount of losses Joy has experienced through the permanent brain damage she has suffered. Remaining partial blindness on the right side, ongoing struggles with aphasia, cognitive challenges which hamper understanding certain environments and conversations, and loss of an immense amount of factual knowledge, among other things, all create a new normal, or at this point maybe I should call it a, “newer normal,” that at times can bring us both to tears as we hold the grief and loss in one hand and our thankfulness in the other.

As often happens when I find myself in these “between” places, God seemed to speak and this time used the words of an early 20th century French Jesuit priest, scientist, philosopher, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to prove his sufficiency even in this “different” place than where my own expectations would have me. And so, I will leave you to meditate on these words and I pray that they will bless, comfort, and encourage you as they did me…

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances

acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.”

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin