Thanksgiving Reflections

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers - yesterday was Thanksgiving and also the one year, nine month anniversary of the accident. We’re less attentive to marking each month anniversary now, but with yesterday being the holiday, it drew our attention once again. I looked back to my day-after Thanksgiving post from last year and was moved, not only for how far we’ve come since then, but also blessed to be reminded how far we had come on that first Thanksgiving back home. Here’s just a little of that post:

But where do we even begin to express our thankfulness and gratitude to God and all of you who have prayed for us so faithfully. Wednesday marked the 9 month anniversary of the accident and we live daily in awe of God’s grace to us over these last 9 months. We could still be in Florida in a long-term-care facility had God not provided the miracles, and Joy the grit and determination, to claw her way to health and recovery. And, we were also so blessed by all of you and the gracious gifts that allowed us to fly home to Minnesota. But, I remember so vividly as we left Florida, the very real question, could Joy handle the rigors of the Courage Kenny Inpatient Rehabilitation Program we were going to. If she wasn’t up to the required hours of therapy per day, there was only one other option, long-term care with a high cost and uncertain future. But Joy proved not only up to the therapy demands, but excelled. I cannot find words to express how hard Joy worked, which resulted in her ability to not only complete her inpatient treatment, but then allowed us to return home and continue out-patent rehabilitation from there.

As fresh and as raw as the accident itself can feel to me at times, I can lose track of the many months of recovery and rehabilitation and yet it consumed our life. The rigors of Joy’s in-patient therapy at Abbott Courage Kenny and then her outpatient therapy at Courage Kenny Golden Valley. I remember after the first couple weeks at Golden Valley, the scheduler handing me a stack of papers for me to put Joy’s therapy visits on our calendar. The stack contained 74 therapy appointments and when those were done we weren’t yet completed. Last year was consumed with therapy and recovery, this year started with us being consumed with getting our house ready for market, selling it, and moving across town to our new home, settling in, and making new connections.

We’ve been so blessed and so thankful. As we’ve written about many times before, we are especially thankful for connecting with Bundles of Love which has provided Joy with wonderful opportunities to tangibly use her skills and engage her heart and mind. The variety of creations she makes for Bundles and the new relationships it has fostered for her, have been a tremendous encouragement to us. We are also thankful for the new connections we are making while still keeping a strong bond to our existing relationships with a little extra effort.

I often write about the seemingly opposing themes of trials and suffering versus felt grace and mercy, praise and thankfulness. I always appreciate when I find expressions of this juxtaposition that form, at least in my mind, a well-reasoned, rational, albeit faith infused explanation, affirming what Joy and I do our best to honestly communicate. So when I came across the following while re-reading Dan Allender and Tremper Longman’s “The Cry of the Soul,” I looked forward to sharing it. They write:

Suffering may be caused by the hand of an enemy, but God uses sorrow for the sake of redemption. All suffering invites us to struggle with God. And the struggle with God gives us a glimpse of His character, seen in the paradox of the Cross. It is the suffering and resurrection of Christ that transforms the heart.

Part of the mystery of God is His disruptive intrusion to provide us with what we desperately desire, not what we think we require. He does so by the use of paradox: He draws us to darkness and, in the midst of what appears awful, He shows something of His awe-full, bright goodness.

God’s methods are indeed mysterious. He is the eternal artist who orchestrates horizontal circumstances to provoke us to ask hard questions about Him. And, oddly, those questions invite us to know and trust Him with a depth unavailable without asking those questions.

“Part of the mystery of God is His disruptive intrusion to provide us with what we desperately desire, not what we think we require.” I love that - challenging to think about, sometimes hard to discern the difference, but worth taking the time to contemplate and consider.

So, as we leave you this week, we wanted to share just a few verses from our Bible reading that speaks loudly to our current times of conflict, distrust, division, and acrimony. St. Peter summarizes this so well and so clearly in his first epistle. Please join us in seeking prayerfully and faithfully to live within this call to action…

Finally, all of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with each other. Love each other as brothers and sisters. Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude. Don’t repay evil for evil. Don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do, and he will grant you his blessing. 1 Pet 3:8-9