Life Changing

Wow, it's been a while. Quite a bit has happened--is still happening. Let's start with the more mundane.

The girls started school since I last posted. Liz is a junior this year and will be getting her driver's license very soon. She's a pretty good driver, but it still scares me for her to be out there because there is no shortage of idiots and retards driving about with complete disregard for the public safety. Becca started middle school this year--a sixth grader. Man, my wife must be getting old if Becca's in middle school :).

I got a promotion at work about 3 weeks ago--I KNOW...I've only been there for 3 months! It's kind of a convoluted story, but it's basically the job they originally contacted me about in March. Some of the circumstances changed--mostly they removed the requirement to move to Seattle--which allowed me to accept it. So now I'm the Safety and Training Manager. A couple of the guys who now work for me are a little stunned by it, but they are good guys and I don't think it will be a problem. And now I have plenty of work to sink my teeth into, plus I got a very nice raise. SWEET.

Now to the more serious stuff.

Back in the Spring we found out that a friend of ours has kidney cancer--stage 4 (and, apparently, there is no stage 5). She is 60. Her life to this point has been no picnic. I guess it was 20+ years ago that her husband committed suicide leaving her to raise their son. She's been selling real estate for 16 years, which is volatile enough when the market's up. And we all know that it has not been up as of late. This means that her financial situation, which is always in some state of flux (and typically not a good flux) is in the crapper. The real down turn started a few years ago when her son's drinking problem became a drinking and driving problem. His fourth DUI was issued shortly after he drove a friends borrowed car (he had neither car nor driver's license) into the back of a parked police car. Our friend spent everything she had trying to keep him out of jail and he still ended up in prison for a couple of years. There are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of details that I'm leaving out, but I want you to have some idea of what she has faced. And on top of all the other things, she is basically estranged from her family. I think she sees some of them on occasion, but they are not a resource for her now that she's sick and broke. She had to sell her condo a while back and lived with a friend for a while. She finally got back on her feet enough to move into an apartment a few months ago, but that's beyond her resources now as well. It's been a tough go for her, to say the least. None of this is to say that she has no culpability in her situation. Even though she's had some rotten luck, she's also made some bad choices, but most of us have. She's never been able to say no to her son, even when she should have. And now that she's in trouble and he's working, he's still no help. It's very sad and frustrating.

To keep a long story from getting even longer, I'll try to cut to the chase. We were able to help her get some financial help from the church so she at least was able to pay her way out of her lease and pay her health insurance through the end of the year--which is obviously a big deal right now. And we are moving her in with us until, hopefully, she recovers and gets back on her feet. I don't say that to try and glorify what we're doing, but because it provides the context for the rest of what I'm about to write.

Sandi's had a tough time with it all from an emotional standpoint. How can a person whose been through so much now have to face this potential death sentence? Why would God do that to her? Is he so ruthless that he just picks people to punish? Valid questions under the circumstances, I suppose. Our friend thinks she is being punished for something she's done wrong. And it's been overwhelming for her (Sandi) as we've tried to make the adjustments and get everything ready for our friend to move in. There was a good bit of work to do moving stuff around and out of the basement. Plus we've been moving our friend's stuff into a storage unit--at least what of it she won't be bringing here. It's also sad to see your life reduced to a 150 square foot pile of furniture and cloths.

We started the moving process last Saturday and will finish tomorrow. As the day approached I found myself getting angry about having to deal with it. I didn't realize what it was at first. I could obviously tell I was getting crabby and short tempered, but I really had to stop and think about why before I figured it out. Then I had to deal with how I felt about that. It seemed very selfish and that made me feel pretty crappy. But it's really about the disruption, isn't it? We don't want to have our lives disrupted by anything. We have plans and visions of how things are supposed to go--and they're typically very short-sighted--and when something interrupts that we get all pissed off; often not even realizing why. The more I thought about it the more I realized, thankfully, that I wasn't mad at our friend. I just didn't want to be bothered with all the things we had to do to get ready. I don't like that I felt that way, but I had to deal with the fact that I did. It made me sad about me and I hate that too. Once things were finally under way I was glad to be started and actually started to finally feel good about what we were doing. Working has a way of doing that.

Tomorrow's the big day; the final move--then she'll be in and staying with us and we can settle into the time of helping her become part of our family and working to get her on the road to recovery. It's sad and hard an dreadful, but also uplifting and good. We have a ministry to her, whatever the outcome, that's as important as any we've done. If she recovers, we thank God for the miracle of life and help her get on her feet again. If she doesn't (and we have to prepare for that as well) then we thank God for the miracle of life and we figure out how to grieve and continue on.

Pray for her and for us during this emotional time.
Mike