Drawn into the Den

First of all I just want to say that my heart has been completely overwhelmed by the love that all of you have shown to me.  Seriously, the support and love and pledges of prayer have been UHmazing and I am just so incredibly thankful for each one of you.  I have never before seen such a tangible outpouring of the love of the body of Christ as I have in the last week.  Thank you!!!

The last few days have had their ups and downs, as I'm sure they have for each of you.  It really doesn't matter what it is we are going through exactly, we all seem to come to the same place of need for our sweet Savior.  So I want to share with you a bit about my few days and what the Lord showed me just in case it might also be a word for some of you too.  

Wednesday I posted in the morning about some stuff going on around here that I had been putting off posting.  A couple of hours later, I received a call from my surgeons nurse saying that they were going to have to cancel my CT scan of my pulmonary  artery because the insurance company had denied the need for it.  Basically they say that I've had enough tests to prove I need the surgery and this isn't necessary. However, this is the only test that will show exactly WHERE my surgeon will need to cut.  That's kinda important don't ya think?  The pulmonary artery is basically like a "T" and the blockage could be anywhere along that and my surgeon says there's no way that he will operate without that test.

(The lavender one is the pulmonary artery.  I like pictures)

My nurse, Robyn, is the bomb and went to bat for me with the insurance company and got them to agree to send it to another insurance doctor for review and she says she is hopeful that they will approve it by Monday or Tuesday and then they will try to sneak the test in Wednesday of Thursday before my appointment with my surgeon on Friday. So there IS a chance that this hiccup won't affect anything as far as the timing of the actual surgery.  Please pray for that okay?  Robyn said that this is a money game for the insurance company.  They know I need the test but they are putting it off as long as they can because of the end of the year or something.

Quite honestly, here's some real Jo: I was super upset.  I was all tripping out because I mean how can they do that!?  How can they put off a needed test just because of money!?!

Later that day, I had some people in my life treat me very strangely considering the circumstances and it threw me, too.  Like hey, really? Right now? Shouldn't you be like uber nice?

Nothing got worked out that day.  I can't even say that I was floating down a stream of easy flowing grace.  There's a song by Rend that goes "I wanna float with You, the currents driving me, but I'll paddle hard too....I've counted up the cost and You are worth it."  Wednesday felt like a paddle upstream day. 

But Wednesday was also one of the sweetest days ever.  While singing a song about the faithfulness of God in my living room with our church family, my sweet friend's water broke and she went into labor.  Five hours later, a perfect little beauty was born.  What a beautiful thanksgiving gift to all of us!

Wednesday night, after sending my friend off to the hospital, I sat around talking with some close friends about the difficulties of the day and shared with them the struggle in my heart.  These couple of teensy difficulties seemed to be hanging on to me and I couldn't seem to shake them. But it was so obvious as we discussed everything that the choice was before me: 

choose to focus on the couple of difficulties 

OR 

choose to focus on the inpouring of love from all of my sweet friends through messages and emails and texts and focus on the beautiful new life that was about to be born in time for me to be able to hold her! (If she had been born in two weeks like she was supposed to I would not have been  able to hold her...Jesus is so sweet).  To be honest, I made the right choice. But it was apart from the warm fuzzy feelings.  And I felt like I was making the choice about every two minutes.  I'm lame I know. 

But Jesus was so sweet to me as I read Daniel 6 the next morning.  I've always loved the story of Daniel and the lions den, but it hit me differently this time (dontcha love how His word can do that?).  As I was reading this time, it was crazy cool to me how Daniel kept doing the things that he knew he had been called to do and he got in trouble for it but the Lord took care of his details!  He showed up and was Daniels deliverer.  And the deliverance was complete.  The mouths of the lions were shut by that angel.  

And The Lord just said to my heart, I am going to do that for you too.  No lion will touch you to harm you.  I will deliver you.

But something crazy stood out to me this time.  Daniel was assured of deliverance, he even had the king on his side and waiting up for him and fasting!  

But he had to GO into the den of lions.  

He had to let the door be sealed behind him.  

And he had to go ALONE.

What a crazy thought right?  We are assured of deliverance but so often we want that to mean we don't have to walk through the trial.  Isaiah gives us the beautiful imagery of walking through the fire and not being burned, of walking through the floods but not being overtaken by them.  Maybe I'm the only crazy one, but I think in my mind I get excited about the deliverance promised and forget about the fact that He never said I wouldn't have to walk THROUGH it.  But like here with Daniel, although he WILL be delivered, he WILL be given a greater revelation of the character and power of God, he WILL walk through and be okay, he still has to walk in and allow himself to be shut in.  Alone.  I feel a little like that right now.  I have ToNS of support and I am so so thankful for that. Seriously, each message or call or text means that world to me.  But I have to walk into that operating room alone.  

But, like Daniel, I am NOT alone.  My God is walking beside me, wooing me, drawing me into deeper fellowship.  Like a pair of lovers left alone to stare deeply into each other's heart's, it does not matter what the surroundings are.  The face and heart before them is enough to drown out everything else.  The den of lions can become my rendezvous point with the lover of my soul!  

And I am not in a den full of lions, but I am facing more snarling "teeth" than I ever have before.  Not that I mean to complain.  I truly do recognize that this isn't the biggest deal in the world.  Like I said in my last post, I DONT have cancer.  I DONT have something terminal.  But each thing we face is OUR thing that we face and it is meant to draw us into a place where we can gaze into the face of one that loves us so much He died for us.  God doesn't belittle our circumstances, He just wants us to hand them to Him regardless of the size. What are you facing today?  A broken family? A broken heart. A broken fellowship with an adoring Savior who is ready to welcome you in? Apathy at work? In your personal relationships? Whatever it is, big or small, your "deal" can be your lions den, the place where you are drawn away from all you know and instead of being trampled or devoured you can find yourself wrapped in the embrace of the God of the universe.

I guess Jesus is teaching me to stop being so afraid of the lions and the closed in den, to learn anticipate the nearness of the God of the impossible, to let go of what I understand and instead rest in Him.  Any body else feeling that?

Your Word is a lamp to my feet

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  How cool is it that we have an entire nationally recognized holiday set aside to give thanks!?!  I mean, I get it that not everyone is giving thanks to Jesus, but still, we are giving thanks to Jesus and its a wide open opportunity to practice what so many of the Psalms exhort us to do: "Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever..."  That is some good stuff!

Being thankful this year actually comes a bit easier for me than it ever has before.  I feel a bit like a cheater actually.  I think when the heat turns up in life, its a little easier to focus in on what really matters and how much of the good stuff there really is going on.  Sometimes in the busy-ness of the every day, we miss the "little" things that are really the HUGE things!

Last month when I posted, I alluded to God's sweet faithfulness in the midst of troubling times, how He brings the sweetest revelations of Himself and His awesomeness in the midst of the pain.  I will begin this post by saying this:

1.  This post will be long and full of personal stuff, so if you're busy or bored I am totally not offended if you stop reading here.

2. This post will elaborate on the sweetness that He is currently bringing to me as I wade through some medical issues.

It's been hard to want to talk about the things that have gone on in the last six months or so because I haven't known what was wrong exactly and I don't like to bother people or complain.  And as we have found more details they all seem so unreal that I think I have been waiting for it to all make sense more before I try to explain what is going on.  I still don't think it all makes sense, but here we go.

This past spring, I began to notice that my right leg, arm, and side of my face had less feeling.  Not all the way numb, but like when you get a cavity filled at the dentist and its not all the way "awake" yet.  Along with severe headaches, a few other symptoms, and the fact that my biological mom died of complications of MS, we began praying.  Over the summer, my heart rates began acting weird.  I was born with a defective valve, but it has for the most part not affected my life too much.  I can't run (like really I CANT) but I can ride bikes.  I can lead an active life, I just literally am no good past 8:00pm, stuff like that.  But over the summer things began to change.  In September,  Jesus gave us insurance (thats a crazy cool story, just saying) and I went in for a check up.  My primary took one look at me and sent me to a neurologist and a cardiologist.  The neurologist sent me for an MRI and they found that I do NOT have MS!  Woop WOOP!  That was such an answer to prayer because MS is really really awful and there is no cure.  However, while they were in there, they DID find that I have a 1 inch in diameter tumor on the back of my skull.  Whoa.  That was sort of nutty.  They sent me for a CT Scan to help determine what in the world it is.  They still don't know for sure, but they THINK that it is benign and that it is slow growing.  SO yay for no cancer, cause cancer stinks for sure.  However, benign tumors can cause a lot of local damage and it looks to be doing so (it may be the reason that my vision has taken a dive in the last six months because it is placing pressure on my occipital lobe and it may even be the cause of my constant fevers that I have been battling for about three years) so the neurosurgeon said lets get that puppy out of there!  It's on the back of my skull so the scarring won't even be a real issue and although they will have to remove most of the bone in that area, they can reconstruct it and after a few months I should be back to normal.  The only thing he wanted was the okay from my cardiologist to put me on the operating table because my numbers weren't cool.

So we had our first appointment with my new cardiologist November 4th with the hope of getting cleared quickly so I could get this thing out of my head.  He took a look at my numbers and sent me that Friday for a few tests.  The following tuesday, November 12, he met with us to discuss the results and told us some crazy news that threw everything else out the door.

Apparently, my heart was worse than I ever thought.  I basically have a "kink" in my pulmonary artery and because of that I don't get proper blood flow.  To compensate for that, my heart is working harder to try to supply my body with the oxygen it needs.  It is working at pressures that are DOUBLE what they should be.  The extra work is causing my heart to become enlarged.  Although having a "big heart" sounds good, you can actually die of that so my cardiologist flat out told us, "You need open heart surgery to save your life."

  I guess my case is actually very rare and there is no way to balloon it or stint it or do anything less invasive.  The only way to repair this is to do traditional open heart surgery.  Like the kind where they hook you up to a heart/lung machine and stop your heart and all of that.  He said that my numbers are bad and that it is getting worse progressively and it needs to be dealt with quickly.  We left that appointment kind of in a daze.  We were prepared for talk of a pacemaker to regulate my crazy rhythms and instead left knowing that the next year of my life will be completely different than anything we have ever thought of.  I had a transesophagael echocardiogram and a cardiac cath last week.  This Friday I have a CT on my pulmonary artery and all together that should give the surgeon a "road map" to follow when he gets in there.  December 6th I will see him, and the scheduler from his office said that we would most likely be in the operating room within the next 5-7 days after that.  Total recovery time after the surgery is one year.  I guess it takes a while to properly recover when they cut open your chest.  Makes sense.

So that's why I say, this is the easiest year I have ever had being thankful.  I'm a cheater because after all of that, it is SO EASY to see a whole crazy list of things to be thankful for.

*I do NOT have MS.

*I do NOT have cancer.

*I do NOT have a condition that cannot be corrected.

*My heart should return to its normal size after the surgery because they caught it early enough and I am young (well, youngish.  Most people having these surgeries are much older)

*My babies are perfectly healthy and wonderful.

*My husband has had a lot of time off in November and will have a lot of December as well to help take care of the kids and house (I get winded even doing the dishes.  If I vacuum and clean a bathroom, I almost immediately have to go lie down and will sleep for up to 14 hours, so his help has been tremendous)

*I have a sweet church family here in Denver that is praying for me and supporting us in this.

*I have a sweet church family in Texas that has come along side me in prayer and has offered to help (although I don't even know what I need yet, the offer means the world to me.)

*I have talked with my brother and Dad more this month than I have in the last year (things get busy, its not anything bad, just life.  But its nice to hear from them more).

*Knowing how crazy the recovery will be, I am thankful that for the next two weeks I have the ability to shower and braid my own hair and wear a shirt that goes over my head and walk up and down the stairs and play legos on the floor with my kids and breath and cough without pain (they have to break your sternum and usually crack open your rib cage so yeah, even breathing will be fun for a while)

*I have the strength of God's word to uphold me even when I feel like it is all too much and overwhelming. That's not just some lame christianese!   That has been the crazy coolest thing to me!  His word really really is true!  Psalm 119 has really been amazing to me.  Over and over it says how God's word is what revives, strengthens, and upholds us.  And that is so so true!!!!  I am okay.  I am better than okay.  As we speak, I can hardly see the computer screen because my vision is wiggy, my chest feels like a stack of weights is on top of it, and I can't catch my breath even though I am just sitting here....BUT I AM GREAT!!!!!!  Figure that one out apart from the grace of God!  He just keeps giving me His word and it is beautiful.  When we first started getting some of these results, He gave me 2Timothy 4:17-18 and it has been a jewel I have been hanging onto.  He gives me promises every day, literally!

There is so much more I could list, but I don't want to make this longer than it already is.

Not every moment is sunshine and rainbows, but every moment is so full of His grace that I sometimes literally feel like I am floating on it.  Remember how the Lord told me that this winter season would be awfully cold?  Yeah, the frost is setting in, but I can FEEL Him beginning to work.  I can feel the working beginning in me that will bring the fruit that He wants to produce in my life.  Weird I know.  I can't seem to put my thoughts into the words I want, but I just want to say that this will be gnarly!  Gnarly hard, but gnarly amazing too.

So there ya go, my crazy long Thanksgiving post.  Thanks for hanging with me through so many scatterbrained words.  Thanks for reading and caring.  That's another thing I am thankful for.  And if the Lord puts it on your heart to pray for me, please do!  Specifically, that the surgery would go well, that God would provide help during the recovery time, because January and most of February will be rough and christian has to work.  I know God has it under control, but if you want to partner with us in prayer for that, that would be great.  And just all of the stuff that goes along with such a major surgery.  Oh and that my tumor in my head would not grow! And anything else the Lord leads you in to pray for.  Thank you thank you thank you!  This will be an amazing adventure to be on together, don't you think?

p.s. I threw this picture in for funsies.  Aren't these hilarious!?!  Gotta have a little laughter mixed in with these serious posts, right?