Pushing through the Crazy

We have started something new in the Stratton house over the last many weeks. When Brylee came home from the hospital I bought a dry erase board to put on our fridge. I used it to record Brylee's daily eating schedule, what the measurements for her supplements were, and care taking instructions should someone other than me be taking care of her. Well I have the hang of all that now and don’t have to have it written in from of me to remember, but hokey as it may sound I wanted to use that board for something more than a grocery list. When I bought it, in many ways, it was a blaring daily reminder to me of the fact that things in our life would never be the way they had been. That is not a bad thing, I know, it just means different. So I turned that board into our board of daily thankful’s. We have three slots that we try to fill each day between Mark, myself, and Adaline. It is one of those things I know that if the average Joe Blow on the street heard we were doing would probably say, "Oh how nice, they are keeping a good attitude. Remembering all the good things in life. Bully for them." Unfortunately I must confess that is not what it is at all.

Now don’t get me wrong, Adaline's thankfuls are pretty simple things like family and friends, and there are days that mine and Mark's will follow suit. But this project, if you will, has come out of a sort of twisted game I have learned to play with myself. You see over the last year and especially the last many months the Lord has guarded protected and provided for our family in insurmountable ways. I have seen him take something that made no sense at all and use it in an unrelated and mighty way. It has been a year since Maddox's accident and who would have thought a year ago that a situation so seemingly devastating to out family would have lead us to the specific specialist we would need for Brylee. Or that facing the probable brain damage in Maddox (Miraculously his brain was protected), would have prepared us for a daughter born with a stroke.

Our family is SO richly blessed. And to be candid and frank it comes fairly easy for us to thank the Lord for our home, healing when it comes, new clothes, a baby born with a physically healthy little body. We think of those things and they regularly cross our mind and are brought to our attention of reminders of things to be thankful for. It is even often easy to remember to thank him for the more mundane things, like food, gas, shoes, and all the simple seemingly insignificant things. Where the thankfulness gets hard, where the rubber meets the road is when I know that if I take Brylee to do more than one maybe two things in a day, even if they are 30 minutes a piece, it will take days for her to eat and sleep normally and well again. It is hard on the days when Maddox decides that both mud caked, and i do mean caked, dogs need to come in the house that i have just worked desperately hard to clean. Here is where my game comes into play.

We have been so incredibly blessed the last many months by Brylee and her new little life. She is a true joy and we all, siblings included, are in love with her. She is healthy, has the sweetest personality, and looks sweet in anything. I have loved watching the Lord add a new element of completion and refinement to our family through her. Let me repeat we are SO RICHLY BLESSED. And yet it has been so easy to have moments where I get dragged down into the pits of discouragement. Thing are challenging with Brylee, and it has been a huge learning curve. The Lord is ever so faithfully directing us each step of the way, but our whole life has changed. She can not handle life the way our first two babies could. Most days just eating is a struggle for her. We have to limit her time outside the house because the stimulation causes her to go into overload. This in turn means I have to adjust to being more of a homebody, and I like that, but as those of you that know me are aware, is very abnormal. There are decisions to be made about Dr's, therapists, and specialists, and it is hard not to let my mind be riddled with worry and concern.

So I came up with a way to keep my mind and heart in the right perspective when I feel myself getting dragged down. I ask myself what is the thankful? It is such a simple question with profound implications. It means taking those things that I am least thankful for, the things that I often disdain and digging around until I find some joy at the bottom. It is Mark telling me that the reason to be thankful for awful Mondays with three children screaming at me, is because Mondays cause us to love Fridays. It is being thankful that my freezer door got stuck on a box of waffles, because Maddox put them away himself. It is being thankful that the kids and I went to Target tired, a little dirty, and too late, because I was going to meet a random woman in the parking lot who was kind and encouraging, instead of glaring at me like everyone else.

I think for me it can be so easy to miss those tiny seemingly insignificant little blessings, when those are so often what carry us from day to day. There really is joy in the darkness. That doesn’t mean happy, but simply that the Lord has so much more in store for our life and legacy than what we see in front of our faces. It has become almost a habit for me to find the thankful in frustrating situations. So much so that on the days and I am wanting to have maybe the teeniest of pity parties (and don’t lie to yourself, everyone has those days), I can’t because I know there is something that is or will be a blessing.

Please do not hear me say that we have it all figured out and are always thankful and happy with a smile on our faces. We have had plenty of bad attitudes, more than I care to admit over the life of our family. But for us that simple little board on our refrigerator is a simple reminder of our Lord's sustaining presence. A way to remember his promise at the end of Deuteronomy 31:6 where it promises, "He will never leave you or forsake you." How powerful is that? To know and remember that our awesome creator king loves us enough to never, and I mean never forsake those that love him. That for me is reason enough to love and keep on daily pushing through the crazy.