Eight Years

Eight Years.

Wow.  Eight years ago I started this blog.  Eight years.

I started it shortly after our family had sold and gave away most of our earthly possessions and moved across country for my husband to attend Seminary.  Pharmacist turned Missionary. That can happen when the Lord Jesus changes your life! Jesus changed ours so much that we could not imagine doing anything but serving him fully for the rest of our lives.  Still cannot.   Only everything has ended up looking so differently from what we thought when we left the life we had started in Grand Forks.

We now are small town transplants to big city life.  What we thought would be a few temporary school years in Dallas, has become our home.  My girls and Daniel remember nothing else and my big boys remember, but know nothing but this life now.  We never imagined this would become our permanent residence.  Brent may not have ever come!  He is not a city man.  But I marvel at how God knew.  He knew that our move across country was not the first of many (like we thought!) but the first of three.  One to a tiny two bedroom apartment on Dallas Seminary Campus.  The second to a tiny rental house in the suburbs of Dallas after finding our we would have our 5th child (we were not allowed to stay in student housing with 5 kids).  And the third being to a house we would purchase here in the suburbs of Big D.  Here we plan to stay (for many reasons that I hope to write about in the coming weeks/months) unless of course the Lord calls us somewhere else.  We are limited in destinations though, as the baby of our family is dependent on the medical care we receive here.  

I have not written on here for almost a year.  Some sites that were showing up as having accessed my humble little blog scared me off for awhile.  I have since changed the address and found out that it was all probably harmless.  It just spooked me enough to not want to share.  In the past months, I have been encouraged by a handful of people to start writing out our story.  In bits and pieces and some huge chunks, I already have here on this blog and also on Daniel's caring bridge site.  At first, I thought of starting a new blog, but decided to stay with my original.  I could not think of a better title.

Consider It All Joy.

Eight years ago I had no idea what those words would mean in my life.

At the time we were facing a major neurosurgery for our baby girl Abby shortly after moving to Dallas.  She was 10 days old when we left North Dakota and moved to the seminary campus.  She was 8 weeks when we found out she would need this surgery done.  We were jobless, because Brent's pharmacy license for Texas got hung up on a desk for 7 months (he did not start working until late January that first year).  We quickly became broke as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas charged us $2720/month to have insurance stating they considered Abby's condition "pre-existing" as she was born in North Dakota.  They were the only insurance that would pick us up and only because legally they had to.  And they ended up not covering $25,000.00 of her surgery.

Being jobless, having huge bills to pay, having normal life to pay for, moving across country and not really knowing anyone, facing a huge neurosurgery for our baby girl, those were the conditions under which I started this blog and titled it:

Consider It All Joy

It comes from James 1:2-4

"Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.  And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

Consider It All Joy.

I wonder if I would have chosen those words to title my blog if I would have had any idea what that would mean in the coming years.  The suffering that was to ensue.  If I would have known that our current situation would pale in comparison to what was to come.  The horrors I would see.  The hours, days, months I would spend in the walls of a hospital.  The number of times I would hold a blue, lifeless baby boy.

I thought that we faced financial challenges when I started this blog.  At that time we still had retirement, some savings.  I wonder if I would have chosen those words if I would have realized that every earthly thing was going to be taken except for the clothes on our backs, the little furniture we possessed and the old cars we drove.

I wonder if I would have chosen those words if I had known that we wouldn't just face medical challenges, but that we would live with a terminal, hideously horrific disease that would daily threaten the life of our youngest child.

I wonder if I would have chosen those words if I would have known our whole dream and vision for what we would do in the future would be no more.

Consider It All Joy.

I did not know.  I could not have known.  I would not have wanted to know.  But God knew.  And as I have trusted Him, He has not failed me.  Not once.

As I said at the beginning, I started this little blog when Brent started seminary.  Lord willing, he will graduate this May!  I am so proud of his perseverance.   I cannot wait for him to wear that cap and gown.  I am definitely going to need some waterproof mascara that day.  We could have never known or imagined what this seminary journey would like, but in it I have learned of the faithfulness of God in all circumstance.  This is what I hope to record, if for nothing else for my children to know, to have a written record of the story of God's faithfulness in our lives.

Consider It All Joy.