One quick internet search finds dozens of recent articles and research studies telling us to give. They describe actual health benefits of giving our time and financial resources to others. It’s also what many of us were taught from a young age:
It’s better to give than to receive.
I love hair cut days. An hour of relaxing, a scalp and hand massage, that hot water while someone else shampoos my hair (I’m always cold). Can you envision that too? (If your salon doesn’t do all these things, contact me. I’ll hook you up!)
Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls;
all Your breakers and Your billows have swept over me.
Psalm 42:7 HCSB
Cody ran down the hall and stopped in the doorway, “I have SEIZURES!”
A mom five feet away gasped and grabbed her toddler to her chest in horror.
Cody took off into the room while I stood frozen in the doorway. Stunned at the other mom’s behavior.
Ashamed of my son’s seizures.
I awoke to the song “Overwhelmed” by Big Daddy Weave this morning. Playing in my head, not on the radio.
I turned the computer on to type a few short sentences here and called up the song online. On Sunday when Cody had his third seizure, I had listened to it once but I didn’t actually watch the video.
Today is Thursday** and it appears to be my soundtrack for the day, so I watched the video.
It’s a beautiful song, overwhelming me with emotion and gratitude toward God.
Have you ever had one of those days where you JUST WANT TO HAVE A TEMPER TANTRUM??? Me neither.
Thankfully, today was not one of those days. It went smoothly. Everything I needed to get done went off without a hitch. I didn’t have to wait in the doctor’s office for an hour because she accidentally entered the wrong exam room and so “was committed” to seeing the patient scheduled after us before us. (I love my doctor but I had to fake that I was laughing along with her.)
When I sat down to write today’s post, I found I couldn’t put structure to the journal entry I wrote several years ago. I saw Bible verses and song lyrics and broken thoughts….and fear and chaos and grief. The list spanned twelve days, but, as I’m thinking back on it now, it seemed like months…long, terrifying, foggy months.
“I never have to write a paper again! Woo-hoo.” I randomly thought this one day while driving, shortly before Cody’s diagnosis. Then I wondered, “Why did I think that? I finished grad school seven years ago; of course, I am done writing papers.”
Have you ever found yourself thinking, “I don’t want to do that or be that!”? I have a friend who said she would never be a pastor, never get married, never have kids. Guess what? Check, check, check. But what if that thing you are refusing to do is the exact thing that you are supposed to do? A small part of you heard God whisper it in the back of your head and your human heart is responding by saying, “Uh-uh, I’m not gonna do it!” Mine was “write a book.” “Uh-uh, I am never writing AGAIN!” A few weeks later, the idea returned, a little louder, and this time I realized it was not a random thought.
I learned that I stress shop. I learned the hard way by stress shopping and then realizing what I did. Cody went ten months from a febrile seizure and a middle of the night ER visit until his second seizure. Then he went four months from the second seizure to a third one and an epilepsy diagnosis. At that point, we decided not to start daily medication for seizures that occurred only a few times a year.
Ten days later Cody had another seizure. And my brain was in a fog all day as if the electrical storm had been in my head too. I sat in my bathrobe and listened to the same song – all morning. I replayed and replayed and replayed it. When my brain wouldn’t work and I couldn’t do anything else, I tried to praise. I thought, “I can sing.” Loudly. Off key. Crying.
Starting a new blog is weird. It’s more than a little odd to think I may be the only person reading what I’m writing. But maybe that’s exactly the point. To go back into my story and, quite frankly, discover it. Remember it. To put pieces together that I missed in the moment. Because in the moment I was too stunned, too scared, too angry to see all the beautiful, amazing moving parts that God was putting into place.
Margaret Feinberg writes about having a word of the year, a word that will speak to you all year long. I was just reading the introduction to a book about mindfulness and read, “The English translation of mindfulness . . . means ‘bare attention’ or ‘remembering.’” And I realized that’s my word for the year:
A few months before Cody was diagnosed with epilepsy, a friend told me about a book called One Thousand Gifts. The author decided to try to record 1000 gifts from God in her daily life. After reading the book, I started my own gratitude journal, keeping track of the gifts that God had given me the day before.
I have recorded at least one thing to be grateful for every day since then even when I didn’t feel like there were any. While I have recorded considerably more than 1000 gifts, it hasn’t always been easy to do. Only now as I pull it out again do I even realize there is a subtitle:
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