Happy New Year 2021!
It is normally hard for me to wish away a year. You may be thinking I am leading up to a spiel about COVID, but not so. All my life I knew my path was to be a wife and mom. Thankfully, I have been blessed to do that. I have also been blessed to get a nursing degree (thanks Mom and Dad) that has helped me more than we would have even expected in my role as a parent. You see, starting about a decade ago, three of our four children became very ill. It has taken scores of doctors, specialists, emergency rooms visits, specialty hospitals, alternative medical professionals, hundreds of trials medications and suppositions, and thousands of tears to get to the point where we are just as of this month. We have, we hope, just hurdled another milestone. Many of you may have seen our daughter’s picture in one of our previous newsletter. Molly. Miss Molly is what seems to be her tag name for all who come across her. It just seems to fit. Molly has been sick since the second grade. She is now a junior in high-school. As I write this, while beaming with pride and welling with tears, she is recovering from a surgery she had at The Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. Yes, that Mayo Clinic. The word renowned hospital. The hospital that has treated Prime Ministers and Sheiks and Dignitaries to the peons like you and I. The long and the short of it: Molly has a form of untreatable/curable chronic pain and was just given a new diagnosis to which she underwent a ground breaking surgery in which she became the 10th child-recipient to receive it world-wide. Scared, a gift, momentous, life-changing, and so many other words could be used to describe what she and we, as parents, felt going into this surgery. Now, as we have witnessed her recovery and have been able to hug our daughter for the first time in years, my words are more of an emotions: thankful, joy, the validation that God put us in the right place, in the right hands, all these years. Molly just went out for a mile run with a few of her cross country buddies. Most of her friends didn’t even know that she suffered from her ailments until she was out of school for 2 months and came back with 2 – 4 inch incisions on either side of her torso. She has always just soldiered on; knowing this is her cross to bear. I have challenged my Sunday School class to find someone to look up to this year. Someone to admire not for the wealth that someone has or the songs they sing nor the star athlete that they watch. Instead I would would say those individuals like the Molly’s of the world e who do not make a fanfare of themselves but instead make it about others. Molly ran cross country to try to make her body stronger and was always last on the team to come in. If you have ever been to a race, coming in last is very humbling; everyone knows you are last. Molly used to be one the fastest out there when she was healthy. She knows the difference. Yet, Molly did not say a word to why she was last nor ever gave an excuse. What you did see was Molly cheering on every team mate at every race who ran past her and would be at each start and finish line for all the other runners. Let us face this year looking to what we have, not what we don’t have. I would like for each person reading this to remember that we can not all do great things but more so to do small things with great love (do you know this famous quote I paraphrased a bit) then help someone else to do the same and so on and so forth. Can you imagine, in the end, the expanse of so many doing good in this world and how much further reaching it would be compared to looking to just a handful doing a few great things?
We wish everyone the very best of 2021!
