Someone made a comment about the last blog – they had been wanting to print it out for an update for the church community, but it seemed to end in the middle.

They didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it seemed to me that if that was the feeling the reader was left with, I have accurately communicated some of where we are at right now.

The last few weeks have probably been the hardest of the entire last year.

We have no normal that we can continue with.  We don’t have a home that we can live in while we wait this out.  Our vocation requires that we be present with our hearts; that we be engaged and whole.  Getting paid for our work requires that we not only DO the work, but that we also communicate passionately and effectively about what we are doing.

I expected there to be setbacks.  I expected there to be hard days and weeks, but I expected that overall, we would be able to find a way.  I hoped that, eventually, the added strain of this continued nomadic life would come to an end.  And now, a year and a half after Beatrix’s death, I feel a bit like I have been clotheslined – knocked over just as we were back on our feet and gaining some momentum.

Now, I won’t leave you there this time…  At the moment, we’re not sure what our options will be month to  month.  I know my eye is getting better; I have another treatment in Lethbridge the first week of February, and probably more sometime after that.  (As long as it continues to improve, they won’t do surgery, although that hasn’t been ruled out yet.)  We have some ideas about what we might do (and where we might live) for March, but at this point it’s just ideas.  March is suddenly too far away to plan for.

We’re very thankful that a YWAM base we used to work with suggested they could use us this month.  And a good friend is going to come stay for a couple weeks – so we have somewhere to live, people to support us, and something useful to do for this month, and that’s about as far ahead as we know for sure right now.

Have you ever seen Demotivators?  They help me to smile a bit when things just get too ridiculous.

I’m trying to see our current situation like the picture above, but this Demotivator seems more appropriate at the moment:

I woke up a couple weeks ago, and my vision was a little blurry.  What with travel and holidays, it took a little bit to get in to see our doctor – he sent me on to the optometrist, who send me on to the ophthalmologist.  It turns out, I had a bleed (stroke!)  in my eye.

Apparently it is quite an anomaly, and they are testing for all sorts of possible underlying causes.  In the meantime,  he is optimistic that I will be able to recover full vision.  But… I have to return to the ophthalmologist once a month to get a needle in my eye until it is resolved (something like 2-6 months).

You may already be able to see the blip in this.  When I told the doctor that we were planning to leave the country at the end of the month, he said, “Absolutely not.”  He then proceeded to explain that he didn’t think it wise for us to leave the country for quite a while.

I’m totally floored.  I felt really good – a couple months closing up in Rwanda, and then moving on to our next project with YWAM Nanaimo (which is what this next blog was supposed to be about, but I’ll have to postpone that to another time).  It felt like we were able to close this season and begin a new one.

I am very thankful for the way everything has been streamlined – various professionals communicating effectively with each other and explaining well along the way.  AND!!  I don’t feel like I have to use Google to figure out what is really going on, because I am being cared for by a doctor who knows more than I do.  (Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for all the help the internet has given me over the years, but…  I feel much more confident being in the hands of a competent professional.)  I am thankful to have a doctor who is trying to find out the underlying cause instead of just treating symptoms.  I am also thankful that this didn’t happen several months ago in the US, or while we were in Rwanda.

I have had a few days to pick myself up, remind myself of all the things in the previous paragraph, but I’m still having a trouble figuring out how to do some of the things we need to do.  It feels like, just as we were ready to move towards stability, we have been derailed.