Please pray for this family who are caregiving both mother and father. With permission, here is their recent prayer request. So beautiful to see how God’s grace operates in the hardest of situations. I hope you are encouraged. I know that I was especially as I was reminded of the nearness of God’s grace in caring for my own Papa.
Dear Friends and Family,
Tomorrow, December 14, marks one year since Mom (Leona) suffered her stroke. Months ago, anticipating this date, I had envisioned writing you all about how much progress we had made. Now it seems that I have had to reexamine my definition of the word “progress.”
Over the last twelve months we have faced many challenges together with Mom: weeks in rehab, a life-changing surgery, additional hospital stays and months in a nursing home. We finally were able to welcome her to live in our home in August, and were all adjusting to our “new normal” together.
Then, in late November, a partial bowel obstruction put her in the hospital once again. We subsequently checked her into a rehab home where she would have access to some much needed intensive physical therapy. Only one week later, early on the morning of December 10th, she fell out of her bed and landed on her paralyzed right side, striking her head.
She was sent immediately to the hospital for an examination and x-rays. Though she was initially responsive, by the time she reached the hospital she was unconscious, having suffered a subdural hematoma. She was very near death. Emergency surgery relieved the building pressure on her brain and saved her life.
Though she pulled through the surgery in far better health than the doctors expected, she is profoundly disabled. She is awake and opens her left eye if you touch her (her right eye is swollen shut from pooled blood). She exhibits some reaction to pain stimulus, but she is not otherwise responsive. She is currently on a ventilator.
The current situation is grim. X-rays show that she also broke her hip. She will need surgery to repair it, but that cannot be done until her brain recovers further from the trauma. At this point, we really do not know what that recovery will look like. It is possible that the Lord will give her back to us in a state not unlike what she was in less than a week ago. But it will be a long steep climb out of a very deep and dark pit, a challenge even greater than any she has faced this past year.
It is also possible that the Lord will take her home sometime soon. We often feel that that would be the best solution. One day in His heavenly courts, we know will make even her best and brightest days on this sin-sickened planet pale by comparison.
And this makes us realize that we have, in truth, made progress. We are all one year closer to going home. When we started on this odyssey one year ago, we thought it a sad journey. So much work, so much training and retraining, feedings and laundry, it seemed similar to raising a child. But an eighty-year-old “child” has no future, we thought. Then it dawned on us, we are not working to fit Mom for a future life on earth, we are participating in just one stage of God’s work to fit her for her future life in heaven. And, too, God is working on us through it all toward the very same purpose. Though we still are sad, and we see the difficulties ahead, we know that God has His plan and will accomplish His purpose in us. And that is the only progress that really matters.
Please pray for Mom. Pray that God would have mercy. And we will trust that He will grant that mercy according to His infinite wisdom in the way that will bring Him all the glory. Pray also for Dad. He has had the double burden of Mom’s infirmities as well as his own. He is just now emerging from the “valley of the shadow of chemotherapy” after his first treatment as a follow up to lung cancer surgery. It has not been an easy road. Pray also for us, for our kids, for Lynn’s brother and his family, and for Mom’s brother and sister-in-law, as we all suffer in sadness together with Mom and Dad through these trying times.
Walking not by sight but by faith,
Nick and Lynn
