Nearing the One Year Mark

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. It’s been a bitterly cold week in Minnesota with multiple days hitting windchills of -35 below zero. 🥶 Fortunately, we were planning to spend much of the week, besides our mall walks, at home continuing our consolidating, purging, and overall downsizing.

Joy continues to work hard on her reading and comprehension exercises. The pace of gains has slowed to a crawl, which is very frustrating and sad for her at times, but I am able to point out real changes I see, that truly are gains, they are just not as dramatic as many have been to date.

We continue to process and reflect with mourning, thankfulness, and gratitude as we approach the one-year anniversary of the accident in just six days. It’s been a very special time for us together contrasting the, “what could have been,” with the “what is.” Again, thankfulness and gratitude, while still grieving and honoring the permanent losses, has been rich and cathartic for us both.

Joy has been working on a blog entry she hopes to post on the anniversary next Thursday and we’ll have our weekly update Friday, so we decided that this week would be a, “less is more,” entry. It’s been a while since I’ve quoted Henri Nouwen, but I recently shared a quote with Joy that we both agreed is very fitting, “for such a time as this.” We hope it will challenge and encourage you as much as it did us. Nouwen writes:

“Whenever, contrary to the world’s vindictiveness, we love our enemy, we exhibit something of the perfect love of God, whose will is to bring all human beings together as children of one Father. Whenever we forgive instead of getting angry at one another, bless instead of cursing one another, tend one another’s wounds instead of rubbing salt into them, hearten instead of discouraging one another, give hope instead of driving one another to despair, hug instead of harassing one another, welcome instead of cold-shouldering one another, thank instead of criticizing one another, praise instead of maligning one another…in short, whenever we opt for and not against one another, we make God’s unconditional love visible; we are diminishing violence and giving birth to a new community.”

While I know I fail to show such love and compassion more often than I care to admit, I pray that Nouwen’s words can motivate us all toward opportunities of showing unconditional love at a time when our country and world need it more than ever.

Please know that we pray daily for you, our family, friends, and followers, for your health, safety, daily needs and provision, blessing and protection. And, we continue to covet your prayers for Joy’s now slow but ongoing recovery for sight to the right side, and healing of her aphasia, apraxia, and cognitive deficits. Thank you all once again, for sharing this incredible journey with us.