I love to slip out of bed when my husband and girls are still sleeping. Tucked under warm covers with their precious heads cradled in soft pillows, I watch their bodies rise and fall with sweet gift of breath. I see their faces relaxed in perfect peace. I quietly sneak out to a mostly dark living room and settle in my nest chair with a steaming cup of coffee. My chunky throw is wrapped around my legs, and my dear Twixie pup is snuggled beside me. I watch the night become day as light slowly rises in the east and in perfect quiet I pray.
I pray for my Dan, lover of my heart, my mind and my broken body. He cherishes me like Christ does the church. He is the man who says, “Whatever is happening to you is happening to me.” When I returned home from my Maryland trip last week we sat on our bed looking at the calendar trying to make sense of the days to come purely from a logistics stand point. At first it seemed it was truly impossible for him to come to Maryland this week with me. He wept. He said, “You know you’ve reached rock bottom and are a failure as a man when you cannot be there when your wife goes into major surgery.” Many times before we’ve made Dan staying here with the girls the priority. He needs to work. The girls need continuity and the comfort of one parent being present with them. Now, more than ever, it is difficult to leave Danica. The situation with her neck is precarious, and she fell and fractured her wrist and elbow last Saturday. There is something about this particular operation, the bigness of it and my own anxiety, that makes Dan want to be there more than usual. We’ve made a plan. Dan will drive me to Maryland Tuesday and be there forty-eight hours to make sure I come out of surgery okay, and then he will rush home to Ohio. Yesterday, I was sitting here in my usual place of morning ritual, and he brought me a #pentopaper card. He knows I’ve been doubting the value of fighting any more. He reminded me of my own vows. “If I do nothing else but love Dan, Delaney and Danica well it will be ENOUGH.” He reminded me of the deepest parts of myself, my love for others and my good God that transcend this brokenness.
Father God, If there was no other evidence of Grace in this life, the abiding love of my husband Dan would have me completely convinced. You see how he is hurting. You know the shame he feels when we once again have to beg others for provision, as if any family, even a wealthy family, could have carried such a heavy financial weight for this long. Encourage his heart by each gift of support. Help him to find joy in the love we continue to receive. Help him to know his wife and children, those who are giving and especially You do not see him as inadequate in this regard. Please give him strength in the days and weeks to come. He is a servant leader in our home. Help him know the groceries and the laundry, the cleaning and the yard work and the care he provides the girls and I are not small things. They are a living sacrifice. Protect his body from illness. Please give him mental and emotional strength to move through the drive to Maryland, the long waiting during my surgery, the seeing me in such a wounded and pain filled state, the hard drive home alone and the many days here working and loving on our girls while I am away. Help him know for sure You love him and have plans for a future and a hope. Amen.
Dave Matthew’s “Steady as We Go” is one of the love songs on our life playlist we slow dance to in hard times. It is exactly the way my Dan loves me.
I’m pushing over the next forty-eight hours to do all the things a momma does before she leaves her family for two weeks compounded by the fact I will be in great pain and recovering when I return. We have exactly six weeks between my Wednesday, October 19th surgery at Doctors Community Hopital in Lanham Maryland and Danica’s Wednesday, November 30th surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore Maryland.
We are grateful for your great love for us. It is God making a way. Many of you have asked how you can specifically help in other ways. There are needs. After my surgery I will form a private facebook page where we can post how and when we need help and you can respond in kind.
YOU keep us waiting.
You, the God of all time,
Want us to wait
For the right time in which to discover
Who we are, where we are to go,
Who will be with us, and what we must do.
So thank you … for the waiting time. –John Bell, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers
Friday marked 37 days since I pulled my car over and talked in detail with the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon about Danica’s broken hardware and cervical instability. We picked a “tentative” surgery date of October 12th. I broke up with Cincinnati Children’s. And then it was quiet. We know all too well how difficult it is to get the OR for such a long period of time with all the right people scheduled, especially two head neurosurgeons who have different clinic and surgery days. Because the doctor is brand new to Hopkins he had to order special equipment, something in particular for Danica’s difficult operation, as well as the instrumentation for her new fusion. I guess it makes sense you don’t take a position at one of the best hospitals in the world and then waltz in and use whatever stuff they have. I keep saying something breezy like, “God’s got it on His calendar!” But we’ve been getting antsy, and I’m wanting to orchestrate the hundred things that can only be planned after we have a firm date. You can imagine my “beautiful mind” notebook, right?
My dear friend Kris Camealy has written a new Advent devotional titled Come Lord Jesus: The Weight of Waiting. I began reading an advanced copy the same week we made the decision about the surgeon and hospital for Danica’s surgery. Oh how I needed the disciplined walk through holy anticipation of God’s good plan of salvation through the birth of Jesus Christ. Every day of the Advent journey is deeply rooted in Scripture. I’ve gone back to read the passages again and again. I began to realize. God is not asking me to do nothing in the wait. He is asking me to prepare my heart and mind. He is asking me to humble myself and sit in hopeful and trusting expectation. He is asking me to believe He will work His purpose perfectly in the fullness of time…His time and not mine. If a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day then a month can definitely feel like two thousand years! He is asking me to believe He is there in the silence. (I will be posting about Come Lord Jesus again when it officially releases on October 16th and doing a giveaway!)
During another difficult waiting season in my life my friend Violet send me these words written by Oswald Chambers:
“God’s silences are His answers…Can God trust you…or are you still asking for a visible answer?…His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous understanding of Himself…You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure…If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes.”
I already see the beautiful things He’s providing in this quiet time of waiting. With no firm surgery date I have been able to just be with Dan and my girls. I was able to celebrate Delaney’s fourteenth birthday doing “normal” mom things like taking her and her friends to try on formal dresses and out to eat. The first month of her freshman year of high school I was not just physically here but fully present. It has made all the difference. Just the simple stability of picking Delaney and Danica up from school every day has created calm in all of us. I was able to schedule new family pictures and actually follow through. I’ve mostly stayed off my computer and phone and snuggled, read books and had long talks with my Dani J. We celebrated Danica’s ninth birthday with her friends this weekend and will have cake and presents as a family tonight. There are barely traces of frantic Monica, because there was nothing I could do but WAIT and live real life in the quiet instead of holding my breath. This is Grace.
I canceled my Friday, October 7th scan and appointment in Charlottesville, Virginia with the vascular neurosurgeon who placed my VP shunt in April. The logistics of flying there are much more expensive and trying to navigate the several hours from there to DC without being able to rent a car and drive myself are just too difficult. My shunt is working beautifully, and I have continued to have complete relief from pressure headaches and symptoms. It rained buckets last week. I’ve been overwhelmed realizing what a true gift my surgery was. I never could have continued to fight for this relief without all of you praying and encouraging and donating. You didn’t give up. Thank you. We suffer gratitude. I will keep on thanking you because there is nothing else I know to do.
I am keeping a long standing appointment in Maryland with my neurosurgeon on Monday, October 10th. I am suffering increasing neck pain and symptoms. There is definitely spinal cord compression. If Danica’s surgery had remained on the 12th I would have needed to cancel my own scan and consult. I’ve wondered if I could even make it through being Danica’s advocate and caregiver during surgery, hospitalization and long recovery in the pain I’m in. Much like my emergency hysterectomy before her last big surgery I see God making a way for me to put on my own oxygen mask first. The plan is for me fly to DC this coming Sunday, the 9th. I will have my upright flexion and extension MRI and see my neurosurgeon on Monday and fly home that evening. I’m secretly praying if I need a one or two level fusion he would keep me and just do it even though I have no idea how my family would function here if that happened or how we would financially do it. I would be a much better mom to Danica in post op mode with more stability and less pain. Will you please pray specifically for this trip? I also have all day chemotherapy tomorrow. The new treatment plan is for me to have a full bag of Rituxin every six weeks indefinitely. Over the past week or so I have begun getting the blisters back on my hands and feet and my eye and legs have been twitching. These are always the first signs infection is ramping back up. Will you please pray this chemo will suppress the fires and be a long term answer, so I can completely avoid plasmapheresis? It is always healing, never being healed.
Before Danica’s big surgery six years ago Dan and I both read Tony Woodlief’s book Somewhere More Holy. (I can’t recommend this book enough.) I pulled it off the shelf to read again, and these words settled in my aching places:
“We have forgotten the God of small things, which is mostly what He has been with us because we ourselves are small, fragile things. We wait impatiently, sometimes hopelessly, for the burning-bush God, or the booming thunderclap God, forgetting that even a righteous man like Job covered before the whirlwind of God’s voice, that holy Moses could bear only a glimpse of God’s backside. We assume that we would hold up well against a visitation by the whirlwind God, and in our narcissistic longing we forget the God of the still, small voice, the suffering-servant God, the God who said of children that His kingdom consists of such as these. ‘Part of the inner world of everyone,’ writes Frederick Buechner, ‘is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained Him away. In such a world, I suspect that God maybe speaks to us most clearly through His silence, His absence, so that we know Him best through our missing Him.’”
I did finally get THE call from the Hopkins neurosurgeon late Friday afternoon. I met a friend for coffee yesterday, and I broke down for the first time. I realized I’ve been holding everything really close in the silence and the waiting. As sure as it was time to be quiet and still, I now need safe places to lament the hard that’s coming.
When I make the call to Baltimore today to officially reschedule everything will change. My body will leave my skin. My brain will leave my head. My heart will leave my chest. I will stop eating and sleeping well. Everything will become fast forward. Nothing will change about my God.
This morning my family left for school and work, and I sat remembering one of my favorite passages about waiting: “‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘Therefore I have hope in Him.’ The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. It is good that he waits silently for the salvation of the Lord.”–Lamentations 3:24-26 I prayed for strength to do each next thing and for complete surrender and dependence on my good God.
You’ll notice a few changes here on my site. I’ve added a specific place for Team Danica posts. If you subscribe at the top you will receive updates in your email. So many of you are asking about next steps and what we need. I don’t have specific answers for you. I plan to mail prayer cards to those of you who’ve faithfully prayed and supported us once we have the true surgery date.
