Tag: challenges

Sufficient Grace

I sat on the floor, the exhaustion depressing like a physical weight on my heart and shoulders alike.

Chase curled close, sniffing and crying, “Mom, I’m ready to make it right. I’m so sorry for getting angry. I promise to never, ever do it again.”

My heart screamed but my eyes were blessedly calm despite the pressure of overwhelmed tears. “It’s okay, sweet boy. I forgave you even before you asked. Hey…look at me…look at my eyes. Do you know how much I love you?”

He nods, sniffs, and runs away, heart light once again. The anger leaves as quickly as it comes.

No matter what happens, he needs to understand grace at my hands. If I fail all else, please God, let me be your hands to him.

But oh, my hands…how they hurt. Before the peace comes, there’s often scratching and biting. For, in this outside-the-box life, this is emotion to Chase. And the primary thing is to keep him and everyone else in his direct vicinity safe. So sometimes that means taking one for the team; for the family…literally.

As I sat on the floor, I wanted to let loose ugly, deep tears, but there are some things that seem too heavy and weary.

“God. I’m tired of the struggle. I can’t do this. I mean, I did it, and I’ll do it again, but years and years of this? I can’t, I can’t, I. CAN’T…”

And then, in the desperate stillness, I -who rarely ever “hear”- I heard. Oh, I heard as clearly as if someone stood in the cloudy room with me:

“My grace is sufficient for you.”

That was it. No answers, no fixes, but one thing that transcends the hurt that’s been and all the hurts that are yet to come.

Even as I prayed to be grace to Chase, my Abba became the grace answer to me.

The road is not easy, but I know I will have what I need.

Moment by moment.

“…I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.” 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 (NLT)

Note: This picture story was published with Chase’s knowledge and permission and he even volunteered to take the picture. He is not proud or hurt, but understands that we share wisely to encourage others they are not alone. Please know that we do not take this particular challenge lightly, and that Chase’s case is lovingly monitored by social workers, neuro-psychologists, neurologists, neuro-oncologists, neurosurgeons, and behavior therapists. I hope this bit of raw openness on survivor challenges encourages you that you are not alone in your struggle. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me privately at ellieewoldt@gmail.com. Blessings.

Attempting To Learn

The traumatized brain is an outside-the-box thing.

The paper he brought home from school was too small and structured a practice space (so thankful for the kitchen chalkboard wall!) and he wouldn’t get even one single of the ten words right on the spelling test several days after I took this picture, but he practiced and he TRIED.

After a long day in the classroom, he was willing to come home and re-bend his brain to the shape of letters, re-work his hand muscles to hold the chalk, re-will his short-term-reticent brain to remember these new words that need to mean something to him.

These small tasks that I can do in my sleep cost Chase’s brain space dearly. These sleep action for me are coaxed into Chase’s ability only with years of practice and rounds of expert therapy teams. Even the ability to curve a letter (like the first in his own name) is a fixed and practiced thing, refined  in the fires of frustration, tears, and intense determination.

Sometimes this life isn’t about traditional success, but rather extraordinary effort – an incredible victory in and of itself. This moment; it isn’t about the memorized words or the score on his test, but about him pushing through “I can’t” to “I will” and “I did”. In an outside-the-box existence, sometimes the attempt is greater than the accomplishment.

This boy… he changes how I see life.

~MbM~

Walking Through The Door That’s Been Opened

“On my way to ER. Stopped at cross street for her ambulance…”

The sound of my father’s heart breaking through the text was almost palpable. 

Back in the middle of the day, before my mom’s heart started beating like it wanted to come out of her chest, I glanced at the clock on the dust-marked dashboard of the van and saw I was late…again.

Chase had been able to go back to school a few days after the eye surgery. However, there could be no recess, no gym, and I had to come to the school and do his eye drops every day as the duration of the week required medicine to be administered every four hours.

As I headed into the left turn and the familiar road across town to his school, I felt the grumble rising in my heart. I’d had to stop what I was doing and negotiate a stubborn four-year-old into the van at his lunch time just to go cajole the bald, six-year-old patient into letting me do eye drops…again. 

And then I started thinking about how most days, the hardest part of having a child like Chase post-treatment isn’t the threat of relapse. It’s the day-to-day giving of my time in extraordinary amounts. That would make a good blog post… I thought; Ten Things I Wish You Understood About Life With A Special Child…yes. It’d be trending-ly epic.

I know the dislike of sacrifice sounds a little crazy because as parents, as lovers of Jesus, and as human beings, we are constantly called to lay ourselves out for those around us in extraordinary and unusual ways, but wow, I fight it when it comes to Chase at times and I know it often boils down to secret, shameful, comparison. I look at other families around me and what they’re doing with their four kids or their six-year-olds and I suddenly chafe at my life and my “normal”.

I continued to fight and struggle through the day, mentally laying an inordinate amount of blame on the mid-day eye drops that had seriously taken less than 30 minutes of my time. But of course, I didn’t feel like being serious or literal. I felt like being sorry for myself and how hard things are when life gets interrupted by the constant call of the unusual.

Somehow, the day passed. After hearing about school, administering snacks, shepherding homework, completing another round of eye drops, and having a video conference for the book trailer, I called Bob to tell him my day had gone off the rails and dinner would be super late (again). And just as we were about to head out the door and pick up dollar tacos with friends, the text came from my dad.

The doctors use the words “atrial fibrillation” and then hyphenate it to “A-Fib” and it sounds like a medical drama show, but it really just means that the heart is at war with the body and nobody is quite sure why it starts, but my mom, she lay white as a sheet with her heart rate up at 200, feeling like something wanted to burst out of her chest and finally, when her arms and legs went numb, the ambulance came. In our vapor-short lives, things can change just as fast as a call to emergency response.

And suddenly the eye drops and dollar tacos and all of it disappeared and our kids ended up at another friend’s house so Bob and I could both go to the ER. 

We were given the directions to the room, and as I turned the corner onto the A unit, my own heart nearly exploded out of my chest as I stood in front of the room I had not seen since I irrevocably followed the Lurie transport team out the door with my Chase on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012. The first cancer day.

Feeling physically faint as I had to pass the memory, we entered the sliding glass doors to my mom’s ER bay where my dad, his eyes filled with worry and love, was light-heartedly explaining to the humorless nurse how “You see, when I come into the room, Leslie’s heart goes all aflutter…haha…ha…” My whole life, this has been how he chooses hope and I love him for it.

By the end of the evening, the medicines had done their job, the color was back in her cheeks, and they talked about her “normal sinus rhythms” and used the neon green lines on the monitor as an example of her ability to go sleep in her own bed that night. And she hugged me very close and said “I’m so very glad you came.” 

I carried those words and the joy-feelings of fellowship and prayer around her ER bed with me into the next day of crazy and eye drops and general life and it made me think: My mother’s heart is at war with her body and my life is still getting interrupted by little bodies on the regular, and I may yet write that post about living with special children, but I felt fulfilled despite the piles of undone things standing out in every corner of the house. And it was in this week of eye drops and hospital visits and dollar tacos that never came to be, I realized (again) that what I want for my life and what I need for my life are almost never the same things.

I want stability and normal and quiet days where my average moments could litter a home and garden magazine with their poetic beauty. God knows I need eye drops, special children, ER trips, and facing my hardest memories to keep me real and draw me closer to Him. Sometimes, you just have to walk through the door that’s been opened for you…

Moment by moment.

[Photo credit: Pexels]
[Photo credit: Pexels]

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