Weary Traveler

Sixteen days ago we set out for a two week road trip to see two of our nephews graduate and to see other friends and family as well. Mu husband thought this was too big of a trip for me, being only a few weeks after a very major surgery. But I was sure it would be fine. Yes, the riding in the car would be a little difficult, but other than that I would only be hanging out at family and friend's homes, what could be so hard about that? 

Well, as it turns out, a lot! I am completely exhausted! Both physically and emotionally. No matter how much rest I get I am just physically worn out, and I lost count of the number of emotional breakdowns I have had in the past couple of weeks. I am missing the comfort of home, and of routine, in my recuperation. The littlest things that I took for granted have become so difficult while on the road. Showers are the biggest. It is such a struggle to gather all my stuff together and have to take care of myself in strange bathrooms. I had three breakdowns just trying to take today's shower. Just resting is hard because I feel so guilty closing myself up in our bedroom away from our hosts and family that even when I do try to rest, I don't find any. And now I sit here awake at 5:22 am, after less than two hours of sleep. I just can't seem to get back to sleep after having been awakened by some kind of alarm going off for about 40 minutes a couple of hours ago. 

In just a few hours we leave for our 20+ hour drive home and I am not up to it. But there is no choice. My husband has to be back to work on Tuesday. It is times like this that I have to remember to go to the Lord and find my rest. 

While I look forward to getting home and continuing my recovery in the comfort of home, I know that saying goodbye will be so difficult. I hate goodbyes. Always have. In a few hours we will say goodbye again to my Great Uncle Danny and Great Aunt Barbara, not sure when or if we will get back to visit again, which makes it even harder. But again, I will remind myself to turn to the comfort of the Lord to see me through. 

God bless you today as you travel through life, and I pray you will look to Him for rest from whatever burdens you are carrying. 

Blessings,

Colleen

What do I mean when I say, "I'm trusting God"?

So, a few days ago I had surgery. It was, in some ways, an elective surgery, but it was one of necessity for health issues. It was something I had put off for over 20 years for many reasons. But as usual in my life, all the reasons were fear. 

Fear is something I live with every single day of my life. Fear has dictated a lot of decisions in my life. When I was little my grandmother used to say to me, "I don't know why you are afraid. When it's your time it's your time and there's nothing you can do to change that, so why worry about it?" Still, fear continued to haunt me. 

So, I had put this surgery off for all these years because of fear. Fear of not surviving the surgery. Fear of the outcome. Fear of the pain of recovery. Fear I would not like the results.

Finally my family asked me to face my fears and look into the surgery for health reasons. Of course I would do it for them. I decided that I needed to put my trust in God, which is where it should be anyway, and go forward with the surgery. 

I boldly proclaimed that I was trusting Him with all the details! I prayed and told God I would trust Him with the results. And so on Tuesday, April 16, 2013 I finally faced my fears, put myself in God's hands and had the surgery. 

When I first woke up I was a little concerned about the results, things didn't look the way I wanted them to, but I reminded myself that I had said I would trust God and so I would. 

The recovery has been much easier than I had feared. The pain is very manageable with the meds they gave me. I am not nearly as helpless as I feared I would be. 

However, two days after my surgery when I finally saw the results I was devastated! My worst fears in this area had been realized and I was very, very unhappy with the physical results. I spent the rest of Thursday in a state of sadness and depression. How could God have done this to me? I had trusted Him! I had put myself in His hands and asked Him to take care of every detail. I had told Him I would trust Him with the outcome. How could He have allowed a bad outcome?! 

That is when my struggle with the above question began to form. What did I mean when I said I was trusting God for the outcome? Did I really only mean that I was trusting Him to give me the outcome I was looking for? Sadly my answer was, Yes, that is what had I meant.

There were many unknowns with this surgery. There were no guarantees of the outcome, or of whether I would be happy with it. And once it was done, there was no turning back. Whatever the outcome, I would have to live with it. And so, for the days before surgery, I prayed and gave it to God. I told Him I would just trust Him to give me the right outcome. And I meant it, or at least I thought I did. But in reality, what I meant was that I was trusting Him to give me the outcome I wanted.  

In every way my surgery is considered a success. First of all is the obvious, I survived the surgery! This was not really a risky surgery, but there are always risks with any surgery and that is always the biggest fear for me. The surgeon is happy with the outcome. The reasons I needed to have the surgery have been taken care of and the medical part of it is a success. The only thing so far is the physical outcome. I really won't know the physical outcome for awhile, but so far it is NOT what I wanted. In fact, it is everything I didn't want. 

So now the question is, what will I do with my disappointment? With my devastation? I keep reminding myself that I am trusting God with it, but really I'm walking around unhappy and miserable, regretting my choice. So, that means I am not trusting God with it at all! I keep trying to figure out why God allowed this result. Possibly because He knows that in the end other things will change and I will be happy with the outcome. But that is really only me trying to make the results fit into my version of what I wanted. 

In the end I have to do what I said I would do. Trust Him with the outcome, even though it isn't what I wanted! And to do that means I can't regret my choice, I can't walk around unhappy and sullen. I can't sit around hoping that once everything is healed it will be better, before I choose to be happy. I need to make the decision to be happy with the results, whether I like them or not, because that is what I signed up for when I told God I would trust Him with the results!! 

As I walk through this journey of discovery about trust, I realize that it's not my first time around this mountain. In many other areas of my life, at many other times in my life, I have had this same struggle. I have told God I was trusting Him but then I was disappointed when I didn't get the results I wanted. Sometimes that disappointment has led to frustration, even anger, sometimes to unhappiness, sometimes to downright depression. As God has shown me now, each of those times I had not put my trust in God to accept HIS outcome, I had put my trust in God to make the outcome be what I wanted it to be, and that is not trusting God at all. That is trusting that MY outcome is the best and God is the magic genie that will ensure my outcome happens.That leads to superstition, which is the subject of another post that God has been working on with me. 

But this one is about trusting God, really trusting God. Trusting that He is true to His word. His word says He will always work things out for my good, that even when things don't look good, they are good. The real point of trusting is that when things don't look the way we want, we trust they look the way God wants. And we trust that is good. Even though it doesn't look like it. 

What's funny to me is that this is exactly the opposite of what church has taught me faith is. For years as I've struggled with this walk of faith and trust, I have known that really trusting God is knowing that He will do what is best but it might not look the way I want it to. When I talk about that people tell me that I am lacking faith. They have told me that faith means believing God will give me what I want! But God keeps teaching me the exact opposite! 

As Christians we often quote this scripture. We say we believe it. We boldly proclaim it! But what do we really mean when we say it? I always think I mean exactly what I say. When I say I trust God to work it all out for the best, I honestly think that is what I mean. But what I really mean is I trust God to work things out the way I think is best! And that is not what His word promises.

Faith is knowing God will do what is best for me. But what I think is best and what God knows is best, are not always compatible viewpoints. This is because God knows the end from the beginning, He knows me inside and out. There are many reasons why God's best does not always look the way we think it should, but trusting Him means trusting that He knows all those reasons and has chosen the best outcome. 

So, today I must choose to be happy with the results. Not because they are what I wanted, but because they are what God wanted. And in the end, that is what this walk of faith is really about. Trusting that what God wants is more important than I what I want and that His way really is better than mine. 

Be Blessed, 

Colleen

Life On The Farm, and On The Mend

Well, after my last post I had to have a hysterectomy and repair surgery. I was told that recovery would take 6-8 weeks but I'm not really sure what I heard when they said that because I really thought it would be a couple of weeks of recovery with a couple of weeks of taking it easy and then BAM, I'd be back to my old self, only better! Well, I could not have been more wrong. When they said 6-8 weeks, they meant 6-8 weeks! I realize now that I didn't take the surgery seriously enough, and if I could do it over again, which I hope not to ever have to do, I would take it much easier than I did. I would take advantage of laying down more and I would insist on much better pain management. A lot happened with this surgery, and I don't really feel up to going into that now, but I may later so that anyone who reads it may avoid the nightmare that I went through with pain management issues. The good news is they left my ovaries, the bad news is that I seem to have been thrown into menopause anyway! Major hot flashes since the surgery. But enough about that for now.


Because of that I have not been able to unpack or decorate our new farmhouse at all and it gets more irritating every day that goes by. We have added assorted rabbits, two more roosters and a baby chick to our menagerie. I know, two more roosters? Why? Well, it wasn't exactly on purpose.

Daniel and Charlie during their morning routine.

First came "Charlie" the rooster. He came from a neighbors flock that practically lives here, his mother attacked and tried to kill him. He escaped and came running to our son, Daniel who happened to be sitting in the backyard at the time. Daniel gave him some grass and he adopted Daniel as his Dad. He would follow him everywhere he went and when Daniel came inside he would run around the sliding glass doors and cry and peck at the window. We got him a cage and would bring him in at night and put him back out during the day. Because of what happened he is an outcast to all the neighboring flocks so he lived on his own in the front half of our backyard. Our kids are very protective of him and chased away any of the other chickens that tried to come into that area so they stay away from that part now. It was so much fun to watch him develop his routine. The way he followed us around whenever we went outside. The way that he would come to the door at bedtime to let us know it was time to put him inside. At first we thought he was a chick, but as time went by we realized we had another rooster. Oh well.


Then we found two baby chicks at the feed store so we bought a Rhode Island Red and a Plymouth Barred Rock. Unfortunately the Red died after a few weeks, but the Barred Rock is thriving and growing and is very close to Charlie. In the beginning Charlie was not very happy and felt more than a little displaced by the new arrivals, but with the death of the Red, he began to grow closer to the other chick. They even got to the point of sharing a cage.


A few weeks ago a friend called and asked if we could take in their rooster. It seems that they bought a bunch of baby chicks and one turned out to be a rooster, which they are not allowed to have and a neighbor was complaining and they were desperate to find a new home, so we brought home Topol. He's a Russian Spangled Orloff, and we are musical lovers, hence the name. We watched them closely and he and Charlie seem to be living peacefully enough together. It is very funny now to watch the three of them follow each other around the yard.


The only one not very pleased with the situation is Elvis, our cockatiel who lives on the back porch and who's cage has become their favorite roosting place. At first she, yes she, I'll explain in a minute, at first she put up quite a fuss, but now she has resigned herself to the fact that the three of them jump on her cage at night and settle in for a good night's rest.


We had a cockatiel named Clyde that we got from a friend when his mother attacked him and tried to kill him. He was hand raised and had a huge bald spot in the back of his head from where his mother had attacked him. Clyde loved my husband more than any of us and loved to snuggle up on the back of Kevin's neck and play in his hair. Well one morning the kids came running into our bedroom waking us up with a chorus of, "Clyde laid an egg, Clyde laid an egg!" My husband and I looked at each other through bleary eyes and asked, what could be in the cage that looks like an egg? Kevin got up and went into the other room to investigate while I stayed in bed wondering what in the world could have gotten into the cage that looked like and egg! What could have gotten in the cage at all? Could the kids have maybe put something in the cage? When my husband returned to fall back into bed I asked him, "Well, what is in the cage that looks like an egg?" He said, "An egg." hmmm, okay so Clyde became Cleo and went on to lay many eggs in her time. My mother loved Cleo so much that for her birthday the next year we bought her a cockatiel of her own whom she promptly named Elvis since she loved Elvis Presley so much. He lived with her for 5 years until she passed away, then he came to live with us. We were hoping for some baby cockatiels with Elvis and Cleo. Cleo was in the process of laying so we had high hopes for some babies! Soon we were being deluged with eggs! Tons of them! More than we had ever had before, surely there would be babies soon! But then we began to suspect that perhaps Cleo wasn't the only bird in that cage laying eggs. Well, actually the kids suspected, I was still sure that Elvis was a male since he had lived with my mom for 4 years without laying a single egg. Surely he wasn't laying now. Surprise! One day we found Elvis with an egg stuck to him, err her. Sometimes when birds lay too many eggs they lose calcium and can become egg bound. Luckily for us we had gone through this with Cleo before and luckily in both cases the eggs became attached outside the bird. If they become bound inside, the bird usually dies from it. The only thing I could figure was that Elvis moved in with Cleo, saw her lay an egg and said, "Oh is that all there is to it? I can do that!" And then she did. lol I tried to change Elvis' name to Priscilla but Elvis just stuck and so Elvis she remains. Cleo passed last year after 9 years with us.

We have yet to name our flock of 4 Rhode Island Red hens and 1 Rhode Island Red rooster who have to be kept secluded because their beaks have been cropped so they have to be kept in their own area away from the other chickens. I expect that we will always have to keep them separated for their own safety. It seems that now we will have to have at least 3 different coop areas for the 3 roosters. Although we also hope to get some arachonas so that means perhaps 4 different coop areas. I guess we'll see how well Charlie and Topol get along as Charlie grows.

The goats, who remain unamed also, continue to neglect the weeds in the backyard in favor of the various fruit trees which they are destroying! I am about to fire them! We had been watering the back area to make the weeds more desirable to them but the only part of the weeds they would actually eat was the dead part. And they only eat the weeds if we pull them out of the ground and feed it to them!! I don't need finicky goats! At that point they're just a disposal system. When the weeds got almost waist high I made them stop watering! My hope was that the rabbits would take care of the weeds but I have been unable to build a run for them so for now they live in the front area with the chicken and two roosters and are pampered. This whole farm thing is just not starting out the way I thought. lol


One frustration of this long recovery has been that I have been unable to build my chicken coop that I have been dreaming of, and that my garden never got planted. So many plans, so little achieved.


Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I will be up to writing more frequently, but the recovery continues to be a roller coaster ride so time will tell.


Be blessed!