Sometimes I step back and take a look at the way things are, the way I am, the things that are happening to my husband, and I don’t recognize us. We had a couple of days recently that were so grim and ugly, I kept asking the Lord, what happened? how did I get like this? what in the world is going on here? and other possibly-not-productive questions.

I hesitate to come to this blog and write about negative things, but I’ve never tried to pretend that I have it all together here so I guess I won’t start now. I want to make my husband Michael feel like caring for him is the biggest blessing in my life. And deep down, I know there are hidden blessings to all difficult things the Lord allows which we entrust to Him. But the blessings in this case are hidden deeply. Buried down toward the core of the earth, I think. I’ve had a hard time finding them sometimes, even though I know they’re there. I feel tired, and old, and selfish.

Our youngest daughter Sara was looking through an old scrapbook over the weekend and when she was done I decided to page through as well. I came across this picture and stared at it for a while.

In case you don’t recognize her, I almost didn’t either. It’s me, almost exactly 33 years ago, when I was 23 years old. It was early June of 1981 and some dear friends threw a surprise wedding shower/going away party for me. I showed up at a friend’s house thinking I was invited there for something else, and was so moved that they did this for me.

I noticed my Birkenstocks — they were my first pair. Navy blue suede and I wore them every day. I noticed that my jeans were pressed. All I have to say about that is hahahaha.

And I noticed of course that I was laughing. Hard. I can’t remember when I last had a good laugh like that, or had a merry heart.

I was so happy in this picture. I had met Michael only one time and was engaged to marry him in just a couple of weeks. If you’re new to this little blog and don’t know the story of how we were engaged before we ever met, you can read a short poetic version of what happened here.

I had given notice at my good job in Anaheim, California, and was getting ready to pack my things and move to Northeastern Minnesota with my two little girls, who were then four, and two and a half years old. I looked forward to the future with such gladness. I knew I was marrying someone special, and these three decades have done nothing but confirm that over and over and over. Michael is one of the most kind, forgiving, generous people I’ve ever known. In a world of rampant narcissism, selfies, self-promotion and entitlement, he stands out in the most beautiful ways. (He’s not perfect–I’m not saying that. Even now this disease has changed things in his personality that are so sad.)

I’m not the same person I was all those years ago either. But I keep reminding myself that I have the same God. He hasn’t changed, His love for us hasn’t changed, and He is not daunted by what has happened with us. I’ve said this until I sound like a broken record — how grateful I am that His mercies are new every morning.

“…even to your old age I am He,
    and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
    I will carry and will save.”

Isaiah 46:4

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I feel like I need to be carried, yes. And saved, day in and day out. I give thanks today that the Lord says He will carry me and save me.

Are you thankful that the Lord is carrying and saving you too?

1. It’s raining today after a few days of beautiful sunshine. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. when Schnauzer Edith did her little dance at our bedroom door, telling me she needed to go outside. I got up and fed Edith and Mildred, put their anti-bark collars on them, put their don’t-run-away collars on them, let them outside, and then had to yell-whisper at Edith to actually go down the deck steps into the yard. She’s so prissy she would prefer not to get her feet wet. “Get out there!” I whispered loudly, and gestured toward the yard with as much authority as I could while wearing an old plaid nightgown and sporting a nice case of bedhead.

2.  My grandson Mr. McBoy is coming over this morning to visit with his Grandpa Michael while I go grocery shopping. Some things always on our list: Kombucha, Babybel cheese, and golden delicious apples.

3.  Sara planted our deck flower boxes last week, and I asked her to do something different. I wanted to try putting one color of different kinds of flowers in each of the three boxes, and we both love how it turned out. You can click to enlarge these if you like.

3.  I’m reading this book and am expecting God to speak to me from its pages.

4.  While Mr. McBoy is here today I expect we will have a fun time playing with this toy.

5.  This summer I will be hosting our annual women’s Bible study in my home, and there will be twelve of us. We’ve been doing this over a decade now, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a time when so many of us have been in some kind of very serious life situation. Here’s what we’ll be studying for nine weeks.

6.  Our stinker Schnauzer Millie has a plastic cone on her head to prevent her from doing damage to the stitches she has in her upper eyelid. She had surgery last week to remove a skin tag which was scraping her cornea. Also, she had a mass growing in her lower gums near her back teeth and this had to be removed. The biopsy revealed that it’s a “benign cancer” called an epulis, and while it’s not terribly invasive or dangerous, it could grow back in a year or two. We’ll be doing gum checks around here now. The cone has humbled and quieted our little bad seed of a dog. I wonder if they make them for humans?

7.  Our daughter Carolyn and her husband Jeremy are expecting their fifth child this fall — such happy news! I look forward to meeting and smelling my new granddaughter, and have been frequently looking at her ultrasound profile, which of course is stunning.

8.  Next week will be the one year anniversary of my knee replacement surgery. What a life changer that was! It took away all the horrible grinding pain of standing and walking, and brought in its place intense stiffness and restricted bending. I wasn’t exactly expecting this, but the pain relief is such a blessing I’m gratefully living with the limitation.

9.  I’ve been listening to a set of CDs every day that remind me of my mother, who was a professional organist. Yesterday morning when this song came on, Michael and I sat at the breakfast table and gazed at the blue of Lake Superior while taking in this yearning song. It will open in a new window and you can finish listening to it as you read, if you like. 🙂

10.  A sure sign of summer is when I take our heavy black and cream toile comforter off the bed, wash it and put it away for a few months. I did that yesterday and brought out our lighter weight black and cream toile quilt and put that on our big bed.

11.  I have my hair highlighted twice a year. It’s pretty short (as you can see from any photos on this blog) so aside from those two visits to the salon, it’s pretty low maintenance. I noticed about two-three years ago that my natural color was getting a bit gray, especially around the temples. And there was about 20% gray elsewhere. I have always planned to stop highlighting my hair when it’s fully gray. Well. I have an appointment to have the highlights done next week, and because I don’t/can’t leave the house very much anymore, it has been several months since it’s been done. I also don’t look in the mirror much these days, so imagine my surprise when I finally looked at my roots the other day and saw that in six months’ time my hair has turned almost 100% iron gray. Sara said what I was thinking when she jokingly said to Michael, “Dad, you’ve turned Mom’s hair totally gray!”

12.  The Parkinson’s Disease that dictates so much of what we do each day is slowly advancing. I’ve learned that most people with PD who have a dementia component (which Michael does) have Lewy Body Dementia rather than Alzheimer’s. Michael has all the hallmarks of PD with LBD, and it is CRUEL. I remind him and my own self frequently that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even Parkinson’s.

13.  The seventh season of “Foyle’s War” has been released on Netflix, so I’ve been enjoying that in between the almost daily games of Michael’s dear Minnesota Twins. Do you have any movies or series you could recommend?

14.  We saw on the news yesterday that there’s still ice on Lake Superior, in June. An iceberg the size of a small car still floats somewhere near Wisconsin, and a few seagulls and two bald eagles have been sitting on it, somberly posing for boating photographers.

15.  I believe I’ll make tacos for dinner tonight. Home-fried corn tortillas, red and juicy chopped tomatoes, a little lime juice squeezed into the sour cream we spoon over the lean beef, all sounds good to me. If I were ambitious I’d make some pico de gallo too. Have you ever made it? It’s good on everything, and there’s a simple recipe here.

16.  They say daydreaming isn’t healthy, but I do it anyway. I’ve been dreaming of a remote cottage in the Highlands of Scotland, of a small crackling fire at my feet and a thick, transporting book in my hands. I’ve been dreaming of naps and slow walks near the shores of lonely lochs, of bagpipes and no clocks and no illness and no appointments and no hurt feelings and no tears, and of family wholeness and joy. I know that day is coming. I’m not sure if it will be on this earth, but I know it will be here someday.

What are your Saturday Sixteen? Or your Saturday three or seven or one?

A scatterer of joy or pain. Is it really as easy as just choosing one over the other?

In another life I would have said yes. Now I need supernatural help from Heaven to choose rightly. Maybe that’s the way it’s always been (that I’ve received supernatural help), but now I’m more aware.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this, if you would be kind enough to share….

This is my kind of policeman.

Did this make you smile today?

Yesterday I had two hours to myself, the first time in a while. Michael’s home health aide Paul came from 3:30 to 5:30, and after turning off the cauliflower soup I had just simmered on the stove, I kissed Michael goodbye, thanked Paul, and set off.

I drove straight to Hawk’s Ridge, which is a high stretch of road in our city that overlooks Lake Superior and gives one a view all the way to the south shore of Wisconsin. I love to visit Hawk’s Ridge in the fall because the tree colors are brilliant against the deep blue of our Lake. Even though the trees are barely budding because our spring is so late, the view was still magnificent. I never get tired of it.

I opened the sun roof in the car, cracked the windows, reclined the seat a bit, and just breathed. Blessed solitude. It was a lovely warmish day after an unbelievably long and cold winter. I took a book to read but never opened it. I just sat and gazed at the blue of our massive, weather-controlling Great Lake, and then closed my eyes as the sun warmed my skin. I could easily have dozed.

After an hour of this precious quiet and beauty I drove to a grocery store to get milk, peanuts in the shell, cottage cheese, bananas, and dense, crusty bread, the latter to go with the Pioneer Woman’s Cauliflower Soup I had started earlier in the day.

When I returned home at 5:15 I carried in the groceries and was so happy to see that Paul had helped Michael shower and my husband was resting peacefully in his recliner watching “Bonanza.” I turned on the burner under the soup again and prepared the roux to add at the last to thicken it up. Soup, salad and bread — I could practically live on that meal. The recipe was a hit with all eaters, and I will make it again — have you made it yet? Scrumptious.

I made enough to serve for dinner tonight too. I think soup and anything saucy always tastes better the second day, and then I get the treat of waking up in the morning and knowing dinner is already made.

A few days ago Michael asked me to take him out for lunch at our favorite Mexican restaurant. I was hesitant, since getting down the basement stairs and into the garage can be treacherous for him, but he seemed strong and I didn’t want to disappoint him. We sit in the house a lot. Parkinson’s Disease is isolating like that. I used the gait belt on him and had no trouble getting him slowly downstairs and into the car. Going into the restaurant went pretty well too. After our good meal we drove through the nearby Dairy Queen to get him a soft serve cone dipped in chocolate. I could tell he was so happy to be outside and driving around in such beautiful, gentle spring weather. By the time we got home he was very tired, and getting him upstairs was not without mishap. He lost his balance and fell against the garage wall near the door, but since I had a hold of the belt he wasn’t badly hurt. It’s still stressful to fall though, and I could tell by the pounding of his heart that he was shaken up. We labored a long time to get upstairs, and when I had him safely reclining in his living room chair I cleaned up the small scrape on his forearm. In seconds he was sound asleep.

We have some options that I’m considering. Should we build a ramp in our front yard so we can use the wheelchair to get him outside that way? Should we have an estimate on one of those indoor seat lifts that carries a person up and down the stairs? Personally, I’d love a people shute similar to the ones they use at banks to get one’s deposit slips from the drive up station to the smiling teller behind the window.

This weekend we’ll be staying in, maybe watching the shipping traffic on the Lake we’re so close to, maybe turning on an episode or two of “All Creatures Great and Small.” I might tackle some paperwork and I also have big plans to clean the filters in my vacuum. 🙂 I hope to get some serious reading in.

What are you doing this weekend? If you’re reading a good book right now, will you share which one it is?

Happy spring to you,

I have always wished that I had learned to hide God’s Word in my heart at a younger age. I didn’t begin serious Bible study until 1998, and even though I’ve continued ever since and have memorized a few verses along the way, I’m sometimes shocked and sickened at the lack of fruit in my life. While doing dishes yesterday morning and feeling at the end of my rope thread, I wondered what I would be had I not half-heartedly tried to follow Jesus these many years. An ax-murderer? A ruthless commodities broker who climbed all over people to get to the top? A line cook at Taco Bell? An eccentric, hump-backed, bitter old woman who lived in the woods with her cockatiels? Yes, yes, and yes, probably.

So even though I’m dismayed by what hardship and illness has brought to our home, I’m going to keep trying in my very flawed way to follow after my Savior. I keep thanking Him that He’s willing to work with people like me and telling Him to not give up on me. In my right mind I know that I don’t need to weep out these prayers because His love and nature is such that He won’t give up on me, but sometimes I can’t help peering through the cloudy filter of exhaustion and sadness, and I have to believe it’s all right.

Years ago I wanted a way to help my grandchildren hide God’s Word in their hearts, and I remembered that when my three daughters were growing up, we had a cassette tape we listened to in the car called G.T. and the Halo Express. I found a site online to purchase CDs with all the old stories and Bible verses set to songs, and I bought every one of them. Then I began casually playing them in the car when I had the kids with me and on the bedroom CD player when they would spend the night. They loved the stories, and learned quickly to sing the songs, and within about a year or so the oldest grandchildren had effortlessly memorized over 50 scriptures. You can hear an example of Colossians 3:23-24 here.

I also decided to make little cards with the verses on them, held together by a ring, and when we took car trips they looked at the verses in print as they heard them on the CDs and hid them in their hearts by singing them. You can click to enlarge these pictures if you like.

I’ve heard that stress can do a number on your memory (cortisol, anyone?), and I already know that menopause pokes a few holes in it as well. Even so, I decided to pull out the ring of memory verses yesterday and see if any of them will come back to me if I try to sing them to myself with the melodies from G.T. This one above was instant recall. (Granted, I know this one by heart without any music, but the song was easily accessed in this troubled brain of mine, and for that I was grateful.)

And this one is still there:

And this one…I really need to meditate on and sing this one:

And these:

Yes. A million times yes.

So it’s back to the basics for me.

“I have hidden Your word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.” Psalm 119:11

I know some of you are praying for us. Thank you.

I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, as Michael’s cares have increased. He’s not usually able to walk without assistance, so I use a gait belt to help him get around — from our bed to the dining room table, from the dining room table to his recliner in the living room, from the living room to the bathroom, etc. I have to be careful even leaving the room he’s in, because he forgets that he’s having trouble walking, and sometimes gets up and stumbles. He fell a couple of days ago, but I was right there with him and was able to grab the belt and keep him from falling hard; I just sort of lowered his butt to the ground and we both ended up giggling about it a bit. It could have been a lot worse, I realize.

But I do have a lot of time to think, and I’m endeavoring to keep my mind from traveling down the rough roads of selfishness and despair, so on a good day, I think on a scripture or two. Here’s what’s on my mind today, the blessed words of Jesus Himself from Matthew 11:28-30:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  (ESV)

And the same verses from The Message:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Edith, pictured above, sure seems to be able to live out the commands of Christ. She’s living freely and lightly — she has always been a Hallelujah Hound.

Me, I’m still learning about this. I think the key to this passage has to do with the words “gentle and lowly in heart.”

Have a blessed day, dear friends….

This is the beautiful song by Audrey Assad that is wounding and healing my heart right now. I want to hear it over and over again. I want its truth worked into my life, deeply and forever.

“I Shall Not Want”

From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God

From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

And I shall not want, I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness I shall not want

From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

And I shall not want, I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness I shall not want

No, I shall not want, I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness I shall not want

When I taste Your goodness I shall not want

by Audrey Assad

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What do you think?

I’ve been working for a long time on a post about Michael and how he’s doing, and I tried again today to finish it, but I just can’t yet. I am never at a loss for words, but when reducing to black and white the account of what is happening to the precious mind and body of my husband, I can’t seem to do it. So I’ll just wait until the time seems right.

For now I will share this link with you, so you can see a photo montage my daughter Sharon recently surprised me with. A couple of months ago she took some beautiful pictures of eight of our grandchildren with Michael, of three of our daughters (herself included) with him, and she put them all together with one of my favorite songs about being a Christian and wondering about the suffering God allows.

Be sure you have a few minutes to settle in, and turn your speakers up. The song is “Somewhere Down the Road” by Amy Grant.

I think the pictures convey what a deeply-loved man my husband is. Why God blessed me with the honor of being Michael’s wife, I’ll never know. But I thank Him…

Please click here.

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God’s peace to you all,

“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”

~~Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

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