Baby Charms--Just When I Need It Most

I just had to share these photos of our dear little granddaughter--Ellie Rose!

 

Just when Grandma needed a lift--Rose sent a batch of photos of "Doodlebug," as she calls her.

She was two months old that day.

 

I like pictures with the mama included!!!

And if this one doesn't just give you your smile for the day! 

 

Besides that little punkin, my sister Iva sent a photo of baby ducklings they have on their little homestead. And I appreciate each one!

"Be Still" Road--and Childhood Memories

Last week as Jonathan and I meandered from Rapid City to Custer, having traveled over to Rapid City  for the weekend before a medical appointment on Monday, we came upon this little road that looked like one of the mountain roads in Colorado.

 

"Be Still Road," the sign read.

"Oh, Jonathan!" I gasped, "please turn around and let's go down that road!"

I just had to see what that road was like.  

Well, it was like this in a few spots--carpeted with purple bergamot, as Hannah would later identify for us.

We spent a few still moments along this road, just breathing in deep gulps of beauty together--sunny meadows, slender aspen, and bright sunflowers with purple bergamot and asters. 

I hoped the grass did not contain chiggers as it does at our place. Surely up here in the Black Hills there aren't many chiggers. At least I hoped not. 

I wanted to be still for a bit, but I could not. I just kept oohing and ahhing and gulping in the wild, summer beauty. 

Being still, though, does not necessarily mean being totally quiet--or merely hanging out with an empty mind. 

Being still can include the recognition of beauty--in quietness or excitement. 

It can include worship,

gratitude,

enjoyment of wild splendor under a wide, blue, South Dakota sky. 

This photo does not do justice to the carpet of purple bergamot. I did not walk far in any little excursion from the vehicle. I had little energy, and moving felt stiff and a bit painful.

But if one had eyes for beauty, it was there. In Rapid City or Custer area, we drove around, looking for beauty. I even asked to stop at this yard sale where a unique mail truck was delivering mail. I found an enamel canner there for just $2 and remembered how when I was a little girl and our family lived in Custer, Dad used to go to garage sales nearly every weekend in Rapid City. 

Dad used to run a tourist business three or four of the summers we lived in South Dakota from 1974 to 1978. He made carved redwood name signs like these above that are still being made in Hill City, near Rapid City. And he would scour the weekend yard sales not only for needs for his family but for supplies for his old fashioned photo business, purchasing everything from antique glasses rims, to fringed jackets to a wagon wheel, lantern, and long gun.

I have fond memories of helping Dad run his tourist shops. And then we passed a sign in Custer that said Wesleyan Church, five blocks. My family attended that Wesleyan church for about three years when I was young. I asked Jonathan to run by that, and here it was. 

Only now it is no longer a church. I crawled carefully out of the Honda and walked a few yards inside hoping to speak to someone.  The inside has been turned into apartments and a small laundromat with signs in Spanish only. The doors were open, and I went inside, calling, "Hello?" with no answer.

I didn't know what to make of it, with the sanctuary and Sunday School rooms all being turned into apartments or rooms and a lobby...

But the building was just as I remembered it--steep roof and all built into the hill. I felt sad--a thriving church now non-existent, a bicycle parked in front of the sanctuary door, and dozens of bicycles behind it.

We had to go on our way, thankful that although some church buildings are no longer being used for worship, God's church is still growing and thriving.

At one point, we saw a stream near the road, and I asked for some time to sit and dabble my feet.

It was wonderful--not as ice cold as the mountains streams in Colorado, just thoroughly comfortable and cool. 

Jonathan caught a funny picture of me splashing cool water all over my poor hot head, roughing up and thoroughly wetting my poor, short, gray hair,

as for a few short moments, 

I just was still.

Still under the warm blue sky of the Black Hills in South Dakota.  

Thunder in the Morning--and am I Just Half a Person Now?

 This morning I woke up in my own bed to the rumbling of thunder and unusual morning darkness. Usually I don't allow something like thunder in the morning to become a premonition, but this morning I was having a hard time overcoming that. 

What happened a little later was somewhat like thunder in my morning, all over again, only in a different way.  

Yesterday Hannah took me all the way back to Rapid City for two appointments with two surgeons. The wound vac was taken off with only the wound drain left behind--and heavy black stitches. The surgeons were pleased with how everything looked. 

It was nice that they thought it looked good. They are not one's husband. 

One's husband does not have a surgeon's eyes, and neither do I. I looked in the mirror last night, and then I had to stop looking.  

 

Just ugliness and scar where one of what Song of Solomon calls twin fawns used to be. 

I was just half a person now.  The words hit me with heavy weight.  

Black stitches, raw edges pulled together. A wound drain hanging down my side, flopping with every step until I remember to pin it to a skirt belt loop. Little blood blisters in several spots, a reaction to either the surgical tape or the tension. Purple and yellow bruises covering much of the front and back of the arm that had been poked twice to insert a huge needle in my arm veins during surgery. 

To say nothing of my short, gray hair and thin body with large blue veins sticking out all over.   

 

One fawn is now gone. Only an ugly scar remains. 

And I am just half a person now.

I sit in my recliner, clinging to my Bible. 

"Do not answer a fool according to his folly," I read. And isn't the devil just the biggest fool around? He isn't even half a person himself and then he wants to taunt us that we are only half a person now. 

He doesn't deserve to be answered according to his folly.  

 

"I am worth more than that," I said to myself, over and over. 

A body part does not define my personhood or my worth. 

It does not make me who I am.

For one of the few times in my life, I stood up for myself. I am not accepting the devil's lies--

lies of that half pint ignoramus.  

 

I read some of the last pages of this book this evening that my new daughter-in-law's mother had sent to me, Hidden Treasures in Secret Places. Brenda Kelly knows the author personally, which always seems to give a book more value.

"We have been scarred," wrote the author, who had suffered through nine months of ovarian cancer battle with a total hysterectomy. She, too, knew what scars were. But then she finished the sentence. 
"We have been scarred and made to look a little more like Jesus," [emphasis mine]. 

 

I underlined that sentence. 

No, I am not half a person. I just carry scars that make me look a little more like Jesus. 

People didn't like to look at Him, either, as He hung on that cross--raw stripes oozing, scars about to form all over. 

"Lord," Patty Fischer wrote in her book, "You have Creator's rights on my body. You formed every miraculous part. What You take away is Your business."

It still hurts, both figuratively and literally.

But if a scar, accepted with a submission to the Creator of what had first been there, makes us look more like Jesus, that is the thought to dwell on.  

 

Sparrows Sing, and a God-thing

 I hadn't dreamed of not wanting to leave the hospital, but it happened. I was so weak and in so much pain when I was discharged, that I only wanted to continue lying in that comfortable bed and not move. At least I could maneuver it with buttons and sit myself up, but the bed in the RV we'd be staying in for a few days in Rapid City was just a bed. And the RV recliner wouldn't recline, no matter how much Jonathan had tried to figure out why not. I didn't know what I was going to do--other than depend on Jonathan to pull me up every time I needed to get up.

At least, once I got sat up in that hospital bed, with Jonathan's help pulling my good arm, (the one that hadn't had three lymph nodes dug out besides the mastectomy) and got myself dressed, I started feeling better. The worst pain happened when I was trying to get up from lying down. I had no idea how many chest muscles you use for that. For 59 years, I had always taken that for granted.

We were waiting on transport in a wheelchair because Jonathan had determined it was too far for me to walk to the exit and the vehicle, but the wheel chair was not a normal, soft one. Every bump jerked as the stiff little wheels hit door jambs and tile grout and every imaginable crack or bump in the floor--also things we take for granted as we hike carefree over them when we are in good health.  

As we headed back to the RV that we'd stayed in two nights earlier at Bible Christian Church, I asked Jonathan to take me down some pretty streets, and he remembered there was a greenhouse down a nearby street. Pink and purple petunias were overflowing from the window and hood of this motley old antique car.

Jonathan went inside and bought exactly 4 Colorado peaches and a cucumber and a sun-ripened, greenhouse-raised tomato that actually would not give me an instant mouth ulcer like store ones do, while I sat and admired the petunias made into trees nearby. As long as I wasn't moving, I was surprised to not be in much pain at all, for which I was intensely grateful.

 

Once I had been safely delivered to the RV, I decided to sit a while in the warm, but not hot sunshine at the picnic table while Jonathan ran a few errands. A sparrow was twittering nearby on one side, and then another one or two answered from the other side of the parking lot. 

I sat there, leaning on a pillow on the table, my head down, hands up reaching for the warm sun and drinking in the beauty of the summer day and the songs of God's sparrows, sent, it seemed just for me.  I hadn't had such warm, blissful moments in a long time. At home, I can't sit outside because of chiggers--all summer long. It's been a HUGE disappointment here, having the scourge of chiggers all over our property literally all summer long until first frost. And inside I am often cold with the mini splits keeping the house cool enough for the hotblooded in our family. 

 

Anyway, I got through that afternoon and evening, and the next day I was doing okay for a while, so Jonathan decided to finish his shopping for Building Hope Enterprise projects at Menards. That is when the "God-thing" happened, as he called it. 

While there, he was just getting ready to check out when he remembered that he needed a copper wire to finish an electrical repair at the police station back in Mission where he's doing a repair or remodel job. So back to the electrical section he went where there is a list posted of remnants of wires, etc, and he was searching that list to see if possibly he could find the wire at a cheaper price. That is when someone came by and said, "There's nothing there." 

Jonathan didn't pay any attention, but the man persisted. "They're out. There's nothing there."

Finally Jonathan looked up and here it was someone we knew who was teasing him but then started just unloading as he discovered Jonathan to be a man with a listening ear. Going through some deep waters now, the man was beating himself up for years of rejecting God in the past, and not sure how to proceed with certain problems in his life right now, much as he himself was trying to serve God.  

 

Jonathan listened and tried to encourage the man the best he could. They must have talked about 30 minutes, Jonathan said, and then Jonathan prayed with him. He told me later, "It was a God thing." Turning around at the checkout was not what he had planned to do, and after visiting with the brow-beaten man in the electrical aisle, Jonathan decided he really didn't need that copper wire that bad after all. He just went back to check out, knowing that God had a special reason for him being back in that electrical aisle that day.  

 

I remembered out loud to Jonathan the verse we had listened to from Psalm 103 that morning, how God does not reward us according to our iniquity. He is such a good, kind, and merciful God that He actually doesn't give us what we deserve! I wish someone could remind the man of that--he needed to stop beating himself up. Of course, there are consequences to years of rejecting God, but we have to focus on God's mercy, not His judgment. 

I've been watching how God is using Jonathan more and more as we walk through this valley of the shadows of cancer and pain and uncertainty. He just keeps faithfully pursuing the calling he felt God laid on his heart--that of providing jobs and mentoring to men on the reservations. Only a couple days earlier, on Jonathan's last day of work before taking me to Rapid City, he'd decided that instead of taking a worker to work, he would instead help the young man, husband and father, to fix his own vehicle tire. Jonathan took time to show him how to squeeze the tire with a ratchet strap to get it to pop back on the rim correctly, and then he took him to purchase a lug nut to replace the broken one. Now the man could move ahead with finishing getting his own vehicle fixed so that other people wouldn't have to pick him up. And there he is in a selfie with Jonathan!

Sometimes just a simple repair is the difference between a man's ability and his downfall. Few men on the reservation have had a father figure at all, much less one who took time to teach life skills. Teaching a man skills is a God-thing, too, if you ask me.  

 

Distractions in a Room Full of Pain

After the surgery, any move meant pain and nausea. Extremely weak and now nauseated coming out of anesthesia, I was admitted to the hospital. 

"Room 608 is ready for her," someone said. And away we went, Jonathan now by my side. The Beckers had spent those hours of surgery with him in the hospital cafe, and had ordered breakfast for the three, not letting him pay. It helped him as he waited on news from the surgeon. We had been told there was an update screen in the waiting area where people could check on the status of a patient, sort of like the update screens at an airport, I supposed. 

"Pre-op."

"In surgery"

"In recovery." Or whatever they say, who knows? 

Now I was "post-op," I was quite sure. Had I been a bit stronger and lived nearby, they may have sent me home. As it was, since insurance would cover it, I accepted admittance to the hospital. I don't think I could have gone home, I was too weak and in too much pain. 

Pain meds helped. The Beckers stopped in at my new room just to say hi and bye, as nurses were bustling to take care of me, and later my angel friend, Linda, who also has cancer but just received good news and can get off her chemo med now, stopped by with a friend. 

 

Outside my window, as Jonathan sat near it trying to patch a few business phone calls, texts, or invoices into his sitting time, a very noisy helicopter landed on the hospital roof nearby where aides arrived with a stretcher and took a patient in. Jonathan was eager for the distraction, taking photos and a video to send our children. The helicopter came again, not long later, with another patient or two, and that night, it roared by my window two or three times. We were on just the right floor to observe it from my window. 

It was literally all I could manage to get myself up every few hours to use the bathroom. I had no idea that it takes chest muscles to get up from bed. For 59 years, I've taken it for granted. 

I was only allowed pain med at the prescribed times, and so during the last hour and a half, it was a blessing to have Brent and Nicki Woodard arrive and visit for an hour. We had a most interesting visit, distracting me from the pain until almost time to get ibuprofen again-a huge white pill that I just barely managed to get down. 

 

Meanwhile, Jonathan and I were getting photos Danny was sending on his way out of Mexico.  He, Tim, Carrie and other cousins had traveled down to roof this building (above) and prepare for the next week's VBS. 

 

Other cousins--Ezra, Ernest Barth, David and Candace, were along as well. Danny said one mealtime they ate cactus leaf!

The view from the roof they did showed the mission tabernacle in the distance, the building where my brother Fain and Regina were married on New Years Day about 32 years ago. I was the bridesmaid, dressed in light green along with three other bridesmaids in pink, yellow, and light blue. I loved the pastel rainbow colors. And that mission is still going. 

Rafters were welded to rebar sticking out of the concrete, and the crew welded purlins to the rafters. Nearly every day it rained, and the crew would have to sweep rain water off the top floor until the roof was on.

The guys also poured sidewalk from the front of the tabernacle to the dining hall/dorm stairs--until the cement ran out. They mixed it with a mixer behind the big building and hauled it down in wheel barrows.

 

Danny said the young people climbed the mountain above the place where they worked, and the trees were such that they could climb all the way to the top and stick their heads out!  

And here was Ernest, my nephew, doing just that! Danny also wrote that the trees "were also crawling with ants the whole way up, and they bit!"

In the middle of that first and probably worst day of pain, I felt blessed to have all the news coming in from Danny as our children caught their flights out of Mexico and flew back to the US, having a layover in Dallas, to arrive in Denver late Friday night. The children were sticking around in Colorado over the weekend. 

Christmas in July at Rapid City Hospital

Usually it is I who takes the quirky pictures to post on my blog, but this time it was Jonathan! He just couldn't resist getting a picture of this scene for all our posterity to enjoy--"Christmas in the hospital!" he crowed. It was July 17.

 

I was slightly unimpressed, getting through just one more step that the medical system deems necessary for pre-surgery. But at least the silly red socks kept my feet warm, and the green compression leg wraps were supposed to help keep blood from clotting in my legs during or after the surgery. 

I should be thankful for that, and I was. 

As for me, I was so unnerved and scared about what I was facing that I was already nauseated even before the anesthesia, hoping desperately that it wasn't the same sickness Jonathan had several days earlier, which we are almost certain was food poisoning. 

We had arrived at 6 in the morning, only moments ahead of Mark and Kristal Becker, interim SIM president, who had driven all the way from Cincinnati to come and support us this weekend as well as attend the 1-year memorial for Beth Montour. They prayed with us after we got checked in, me between Jonathan and Kristal, all our arms around someone on either side. At the Pre-Op waiting area, a black lady who checked in ahead of me, turned around and said, "I saw you guys praying together, and I'm agreeing with whatever you prayed--in Jesus' name!" 

 

The day before, I'd had an appointment at nuclear medicine area of the hospital, where I had to be injected with some sort of radioactive substance that was supposed to travel to my lymph nodes to light them up blue for the surgeon, who planned to take at least three for testing. I got through that dreaded procedure and felt better to be on the other side of it. 

We had hoped to drive Needles Highway, just for distraction, but as we started up the mountain, it was so foggy we just turned around. Making the best of things, Jonathan took us out to El Sombrero for a very nice supper (despite that I froze in that frosty temperature inside). And after that, I asked if we could just drive through a pretty section of town to admire the homes and flowers and lovely yards.

There are always risks with any surgeries, and the surgeons had been very forthright about them. I did not know but what this would be the last time I would see anything but bleak walls of a hospital room.  

We drove by wrap-around porches, English-type house smothered with ivy, and a riot of clematis climbing a yard arch, to say nothing of various flower boxes and beds complete with everything from Shasta daisies to day lilies.

 

 

Now, however, I was about to be wheeled to the surgery room. Two blue-coated guys came in, looking sober, even grim. They introduced themselves, one being a second anesthesiologist. It seems two anesthesiologists are necessary for my procedure, and I said I was pleased to meet them, whether it was true or not. The nurse I'd had earlier came in as well, cheerful and chatty. Unless it was another nurse. I went through so many nurses, doctors, and nurses aids in my stay at the hospital that it was just crazy. Anyway, this chatty nurse was obviously trying to distract me from any worries, and down the hall we went--but not more than a few feet before I had the bright idea that Jonathan needed to take a picture of the group of us. And it had to be before we went through the double doors ahead, because Jonathan would be left behind. 

"For my blog!" I explained. 

And wouldn't you know it! Those guys did not  just slow down so Jonathan could rush ahead for a picture, they stopped. And they didn't just stop, they literally backed up, and don't you just love the smiles we got on their faces!!!

When I saw this photo later, I was almost in heaven. Those unsmiling faces that had come in to get me, probably not exactly glad about another lady facing this kind of surgery, had lit up for our picture!

"I have seven children and eight siblings and other people I blog for," I explained as we squeezed through one double door after another, zooming around corners and down this hall and that.  

And then we were in the room, and I saw that long, narrow table that I had to lie on, looking like a gurney. They cranked up  my bed and told me to move over to it, and I did, trying to adjust my open-to-the-back hospital gown as I did so. I said something about how when I had my port surgery, they wouldn't let me move over on my own. I had to be pulled over on a sheet!

At least this time, I had the dignity of being allowed to move over myself.  

"We will take good care of you," the nurses and anesthesiologists promised, all over again. 

I lay there whispering secret prayers to my Jesus, Who alone knew exactly how afraid I had been. And yet, now in the moment, all I could say was, "Jesus, I'm trusting You!"  

And as I watched the buzz around me, I wondered if there was anything I could say about Jesus.  

"After all this is over," the chatty nurse asked cheerfully, in an obvious effort to distract my worries, "where would you take a trip?"

I wasn't thinking about a trip.  I was thinking about Jesus. And I opened my mouth and said so. 

I just said, simply "I was actually just lying here telling Jesus that I'm trusting Him."

There was a sort of agreeable gulp and gasp of approval, and the anesthesiologist was telling me to take big, deep breaths. 

And I was out. 

 

God was worthy of being trusted. The surgeon, who, along with the plastic surgeon who expected to have to patch me up later, had been concerned that I was so thin she wouldn't be able to sew me up after the mastectomy. She was expecting to possibly leave an open wound (under bandage, of course,) but had let me know I might be spending the next 6 days waiting for skin margins to heal enough that the plastic surgeon could then do a second surgery with skin grafts. Instead, she kept getting "clear" preliminary reports back from the skin samples and lymph nodes she was sending to the pathologist. Because she did not have to keep cutting skin away, she was actually able to sew me up!

"No way!" the plastic surgeon gasped, as my surgeon face-timed him for final advice and input (all while I was dead out, of course, but she told me later). He could not believe she had been able to do it.

Granted, it had been a stretch, pun intended. But two and a half hours and several layers of skin sutures later, I was waking up in the recovery room. 

Surgeon, anesthesiologists, and nurses had witnessed a miracle with the lady who was trusting Jesus! 

"Blood loss was minimal," Dr. Ashlea Semmens told me later. She was very pleased with how everything had turned out. With my history of low blood pressure, that was a good thing.    

God and the surgeon and nurses had indeed taken good care of me.   

 

When We Are Facing a Dread Too Big for Us

 You're supposed to be brave, of course. 

But what if you're not?

What if, while you wait on an unwanted event in your life, helpless surges of adrenaline keep soaring through your body like the big hawk soaring overhead today as I hung bedding on the lines outside?

What if you wish you could squawk super loud like the guinea hen did a moment later? I thought something must be happening to it. 

The dog! The dog must be about to murder it!

I rushed across this bridge only to discover a whole flock of hens appear from around the corner of the barn and come running toward me. 
They thought I had their favorite food--the garbage pail!

And then I realized it must have been the hawk. 

That's why the guinea was shrieking a warning.

The hawk had been swooping around directly over the house, garden, and clothesline, and then it went toward the barn and the hen saw it and warned everything in sight and hearing. 

Now the goats were also coming across the bridge to see if I might have brought a big pot of whey that I sometimes bring after making goat cheese. 

Sorry none today, Heidi and Bell!

I spent the afternoon hours doing what I most love to do--printing off a true story to share with a nearby Sunday School teacher who needs fresh stories and then finding free clipart pictures to visualize it.

I spent hours making copies of both story and pictures.

And I looked and looked at the pictures my nephew Ezra sent from Mexico--our son Tim cutting concrete blocks and getting covered in concrete dust--so like his father on that trip to Florida where his dad was doing the concrete cutting for the Hispanic church near Ft. Myers. 

It is a comfort to know that our children are busy in the Lord's work even as their mom heads into surgery. 

Oh, my Father, keep each of our children and all our loved ones in Your tender care,

and no matter what Gethsemanes we go through, may Your angels come to strengthen us as they did Your Son on that awful night in Gethsemane. 

What dread He must have endured during those hours that he wrestled in prayer

while His disciples slept!

My older sister Dorcas is so amazing with her simple trust in the Lord.

I'm wishing for a little more of that same trust today!

Jonathan Almost Electrocuted

When Cherry Todd Electric Company showed up at one of the mission properties after Jonathan called them to come check out an electrical outage, they did a double-take. 

"With the burnt mess inside this box," they let him know, "it should have been arcing and sparking."

"It's a wonder you didn't get zapped!" they said in awe when they found out Jonathan had investigated the problem and figured it needed to be seen by Cherry Todd rather than him trying to fix it.

Above is a photo the resident sent Jonathan of the electric box. 

"God kept me safe," Jonathan told me when he got home. He should have been electrocuted when he was looking inside that box.

Shocked at least, killed at worst.  

God has more for Jonathan to do.  

And He has a plan for each of our lives--including mine. Maybe the next few weeks will be fraught with pain and discomfort. 
"There will be pain and discomfort," the plastic surgeon told me last week, and I nodded. Sometimes there are things you cannot escape.

There are cups you have to drink. 

But when Jesus drank Golgotha's cup after staring at it for three hours in Gethsemane, there was a purpose. 

He fulfilled that purpose until "it was finished."

And then there was no more pain.

It was only glory.