So...this year's been rough for everybody. I think we can all agree there. To me, it was like three years' worth of events got crammed into one. I want to take a quick look back just before 2021 begins.
Remember how in the Old Testament God's people balked at going into the Promised Land because of the giants? You know the story, the whole assembly of the people wept in despair and whined that they should never have left Egypt because God "had brought them out there to die." God rejected that entire generation; and because of Moses' disobedience, even he wasn't allowed into the Promised Land. However, when it was time for Joshua to lead them into the Promised Land, the Lord says something very interesting. He reminds them that He took care of them in the wilderness; their shoes did not wear out, and they didn't go hungry.
They were wandering in the wilderness as punishment, yes, but God has a different perspective. He was taking care of every little detail, even when they weren't seeking after Him. Earlier this year, as I came across that story in the Bible, it stuck out to me. I want to notice all the ways God takes care of me, even when I don't think I'm where I need to be.
So let's begin in January. A new year is always scary for me. Other people see it as a time of a fresh start or a new beginning. I can't fool myself into thinking that. It's just daunting. I have no delusions about becoming perfect in the coming year. I know I'm just going to mess up and bungle things, just like the year before. Yeah, I'm going to learn new things and grow, and that's all well and good, but...it's not gonna be pretty.
Right. Maybe I'm a bit of a freak for feeling that way every new year, but it is true. So.
Ahem, January. 2020, here we go.
In February, we started hearing that COVID-19 had reached the U.S. I wasn't worried. I wash my hands all the time, all year round. I don't go to work if I'm sick, and I stay home until I've been fever-free for 24 hours. Whatever. A little common sense, and we'll all be fine.
But people panicked and started impulse buying. I am exceedingly grateful that my roomies and I bought toilet paper in bulk from Sam's just before the shortage! Thank goodness we were able to hold out until people were more reasonable.
Halfway through February, something else happened. My grandmother who lived with my parents had a stroke. She was hospitalized two days later.
My Grandmommy, who has always been a spunky lady with a sunny disposition suddenly was unable to speak. She tried, but it was like she couldn't remember how to form the words, or else her mouth wouldn't move the right way to make them. It was heartbreaking.
But she's one tough lady. She's had a long life, and it wasn't a very easy one. She was 99 years old. With some speech therapy she regained her speech again, but it was clear she needed constant care. We entrusted her to a very nice facility, and we went to visit her as she recovered.
Meanwhile in February, one of my back teeth started acting crazily. I have had sensitive teeth for years, but this was different. All at once it couldn't handle heat or cold...or any amount of pressure. I couldn't chew on it without horrifying pain. Every doctor's office was closed, along with pretty much everything else as our economy came to a grinding halt. The pain steadily worsened, unlike anything I've ever felt. Tooth pain has to be in the top five worst possible pains. There are so many nerve endings in your mouth, and you can't use massage to ease it. Whether I was using that tooth or not made no difference; the pain constantly radiated into my other muscles. There was referred pain down my arm and into my back and neck. I took pain medicine with absolute punctuality. I called my dentist. He told me it sounded like I needed an emergency root canal. I had to wait for the day of my appointment.
I couldn't eat or sleep through the excruciating pain. All the pain medicine it was safe to take could only dull the pain enough for me to function at low capacity. Which is to say, the two hours where the medicine was at its full strength barely touched it. Then for the next two hours before I could take anything else, I was in constant debilitating pain.
The pain and lack of sleep pushed me to the limits of my sanity. I couldn't think clearly, I couldn't do anything. I just laid in bed and wept helplessly.
That night when everything was at its worst, my brother came to my house in the wee hours of the morning and took care of me. (My mother couldn't come because she was quarantined, or else she'd have been there!) My brother rubbed my back, held my hand, and kept ice on my jaw until I finally fell asleep. He made himself a pallet on my floor, and he set himself alarms to make sure I got my medicine on time. He was there like an anchor in a storm, holding me steady, comforting me, tethering me to reality.
I had that emergency root canal, and never was there a more willing patient! They numbed me down so that at last I felt no more pain. Then they dug up all the nerve tissue that had died. A few months later I had a crown installed. Thank the Lord above for good dentists!!
In March and April, even our church shut down temporarily. I was still able to go to work every day, but without church, a huge part of my spiritual and social life was missing. I and my roommates were restless and uneasy. Everything to do with Easter was cancelled, which was unheard of. But thankfully, one of the young single men in our church set up a virtual Bible Study on Zoom, and all of us pounced upon it eagerly. It was an enormous blessing in the months to come.
My mental timeline gets pretty scrambled at this point, so the rest of this may be way out of order. But that's okay.
I actually got to go to the beach with my two roommates before one of them moved out. It was a lovely time, and now I get why people love the beach so much. It was delightful, but in my heart I'm still a mountains girl. The beach is marvelous, but I'll always love the majesty and privacy and wild beauty of forests on the mountainsides best.
A new friend of ours moved in, and it's been great getting to know her. I highly recommend living with roommates if you have ones as mature and as generous as mine!
The first week of July I got a dreadful surprise. My bladder was refusing to work properly.
I'll be as discreet as possible. I just woke up one day and my bladder refused to void. I've had this happen off and on for the past two years, without any sort of pattern. Eventually it would function again, and things would go back to normal. Not this time. My bladder swelled and swelled, but nothing could make it empty.
I tried everything. Absolutely nothing could give me relief. I was in horrifying, miserable discomfort before I finally agreed to go to the emergency room. I had to wait all alone in that cold waiting room for hours before I could be seen. I just remember praying and praying, rocking back and forth, doing my utmost to be patient. I had brought a blanket with me from home, and I clutched it to my chest, letting its softness and warmth comfort me.
It's difficult to explain, but I felt at peace, deep inside. I was scared and writhing in pain, but I could feel the Lord's presence with me in a special way. It really was a peace that went beyond understanding. I just felt assurance that He was right there with me, that I wasn't alone.
They had to put a catheter in to drain my bladder. They told me I had 900 milliliters of fluid in my bladder! I didn't even know a bladder could hold that much!
The incident repeated a few days later, and I had to go back to the ER. They sent me home with a catheter in, which was awful, but still not as bad as a constantly full bladder. It was also my time of month, and I had to get tested for COVID-19 because the three of us had been exposed. I felt a little bit like poor Job.
We had to tell everyone what was up with us. We told our small group in church and the young adults group, and immediately, I'm talking seconds later, folks were replying asking us what we needed, offering to get us groceries and organizing meals for us. We felt so loved, so seen. I hate to say it, but sometimes we single folks get a raw deal in church. There aren't usually ministries for our needs, and we're expected to help in every other ministry and service opportunity, "because we have so much time." To see our church body stepping in to take care of us three single gals meant the world to us.
Usually I can look to my family for things like this, but this year that wasn't possible. One of my sisters has a suppressed immune system, and since she lives with my parents, they've been quarantined for most of the year. Still, all of us have united every time we could, and I believe we've grown stronger this year because of it.
Anyway, I had to start seeing a urologist and a gynecologist to try to figure out what was causing all this in my bladder. (Also I was having to self cath every time it happened! Jesus, take the wheel!!) We eventually found out that a massive cyst had been growing inside me, and it was so heavy that it sometimes would...block off the flow. There was a very tense day or two while we waited to find out if it was cancerous or benign, but thank the Lord it was benign!
It was too big to remove laparoscopically, so we had to schedule a full-on surgery with a month recovery time. Welp...okay. October 5th, here we go.
At some point during the summer I was exposed again to COVID-19, so there were two more weeks of quarantine. Thankfully my work compensated me since I was exposed while I was there!
Also during the summer, one of the Young Adults started up a "Quarantine Caroling." He made a list of folks that hadn't been able to be in church, and a group of us would go to visit them on summer evenings to stand in their yard and sing hymns with them. It was a fun time, and I think we were as blessed as the folks were!
Meanwhile, my Grandmommy's nursing home had to be closed to all visitors shortly after COVID reached our state. We couldn't go inside at all. We had to mask up, call to have her wheeled to a window, and then try to talk with her through the window screen. Eventually they refused to open the window for us. They had us on speakerphone and gave her the phone, but she didn't know how to hold it properly. We did our best to communicate. There were good days and bad days. I was always glad that we'd visited her, but it just broke my heart that things had come to this. She got confused a lot, and she wanted to go home. Sometimes she was sad, and we couldn't even hold her hand to comfort her. It was clear to us that she was declining fast.
Then, on the second of September, the Lord called her home. She had made it to her one hundredth birthday that May. She was a tough little lady, but she was ready to meet her Savior. She went peacefully in her sleep.
My Grandmommy left quite a legacy behind her. She always faced life bravely and steadily, no matter what it threw at her. She loved her son, my father, devotedly. For as far back as I can remember, Grandmommy was always there for every family event. Every Christmas, every Easter, every recital, performance, concert, graduation, every celebration, every birthday, every holiday, you name it, she was there. She loved each of us, and she was beloved by all. She lived well; she had so much spunk and vivacity that she kept us all in stitches when she told stories. And she loved Jesus Christ with a simple, childlike faith that never wavered in all her long years.
"A good name is better than riches, and favor rather than silver or gold," Proverbs tells us. My Grandmommy had a good name. She left a righteous heritage behind her. It was sad when she left us, but deep inside I felt joy throbbing in my heart all the rest of that day. I knew she was with Jesus, and that all her suffering was over forever. She'll never be lonely, or weak, or in pain again. She had fought the good fight, she'd finished the course, she'd kept the faith. I'll see her again someday. I know I'll hear that laugh of hers once more, when the Lord calls me home.
When September drew to a close, I needed to be quarantined once more to be ready for my surgery. My parents let me move in with them until I got better. My surgery went well, and there were no complications. Recovery was slow, but steady.
Well, I did have a staph infection flare-up just before my surgery. I had a hellish experience with staph two years ago, so I was calling my doctor's office for antibiotics the day after I realized that it wasn't an innocent whitehead on my chin. Staph before surgery! I just looked in my mirror and thought, "Really? This too?" Thank the Lord the first round of antibiotics worked! And that it didn't cause the surgery to be postponed!
Looking back, I see how God has taken care of me this year, and how much I've grown through this. I trust the Lord more, and I am closer to Him than I was the year before. When you're in that much pain, He is the only thing to fall back on.
One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over this year is that I'm still very insecure about Christ's love for me. Oh, I know He does...I do believe the promises He makes. Well, technically, anyway. It's too big an issue to get into at the end of a blog post, but it's an insecurity that I want to face going into 2021. I've known for a while that it ran deep in me, but I can see now that it affects everything about me. The way I pray, how I pray, my bent toward cynicism, my procrastination, and how prone I am to despair and lethargy. All of it stems from this twisted view of God that has lodged within me since childhood. I know that at the root, it's only plain, ugly unbelief. It's high time I started fighting those battles.
Well, thanks for reading! Don't forget to count your blessings in 2020 before you toss it away in disgust. You might find that what you thought was wandering pointlessly in the wilderness was God's kind provision after all.
Happy New Year!
~Cadenza
