Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
-Proverbs 3:5
It's been quite a long time since I've posted here. I think blogs in general are becoming a thing of the past. Maybe not. I'm going to take this opportunity to share events in my life where I could recognize God's hands. My wife has a condition called Moya Moya disease. To put it briefly it's a condition that causes her carotid arteries to grow closed. That may be an oversimplification but the important thing to understand is that it hinders blood flow to the brain. In 2016 she had a mild stroke on the left side of her brain. It wasn't major and she recovered from it rather quickly. However, in 2019 it was much worse. In August of that year she began to complain about terrible migraines. I wasn't terribly concerned at first because with her condition that's not unusual. As time passed she started showing signs that it might be a big more than a migraine. At the time I'm sorry to say we did not have a home church. Knowing that she needed prayer I went to prayerrequest.com and posted the prayer request. I said basically that we did not have health insurance and I feared her condition was getting worse. Someone responded saying that he prayed the Holy Spirit would guide us to a teaching hospital.
When it became unmistakable that this wasn't a simple migraine I took her to the ER. The confirmed that she had in fact had a stroke, this time on her right side. They kept her for 3 days and sent her home with some cholesterol medication and Asprin. To be honest they weren't very helpful. We went home and her parents came up from the Atlanta area to check on her. When it was clear that she was in no condition to be left home alone while I was at work her mom offered to take her back with them for a couple of weeks for her to recover.
When she was at their house she began to get worse. The strokes were not finished. Her parents called me to tell me that her condition was getting worse and that they were taking her to Grady hospital because not only did they have one of the best neurology departments in the country, but also they were.... a teaching hospital. As soon as I heard her dad use those words I knew that that was the hospital she was meant to be at. I knew she was guided there by God, and I knew she, for the moment, would be ok.
She was there for many months. She then went to rehab for a couple of weeks where she did quite well and eventually went home with her parents where she continued to improve.
I of course was not content to be here while my wife was 6 hours away in the Atlanta area, so every weekend I drove all the way down there to spend the weekend with her, both when she was in the hospital and when she was at their house. This put quite a bit of wear on my vehicle, but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was I was up here and she was down there.
Around January of 2020 I went down for our anniversary. We went out to celebrate and got in my vehicle to head back it felt like I had hit something backing up. I thought for sure I had backed in to someone else's car. I got out and looked and there was nothing there. I got back in and but it in reverse and it wouldn't move. My transmission had broke. It would go forward but not reverse. I took her home and drove myself back home a day early because I didn't want to be stuck down there if the transmission were to break completely.
I had to learn how to drive a vehicle, and how to park a vehicle, with no reverse. I learned that in my own driveway if I pointed the nose towards the north-west I could put it in neutral and roll back into my driveway. In order to do that I had to drive around the block.
What was supposed to be 2 weeks to recover turned into a year, but she was finally well enough to come home again and be left alone while I was at work.
One day as I was making the trip around the block I noticed something I had never noticed in my 9 previous years of living in this neighborhood. Back in the neighborhood there is a church. It's actually inside the neighborhood. It's back behind some trees. I had seen the metal building before but from behind the trees it looked like a storage building, but that day the trees were just out of the way enough for me to notice the steeple. I can't explain it, but when I say I noticed that there was a church IN the neighborhood, it was more than just noticing. It was as if God himself pointed at it and said, "Look. Over there is your church". I came home and told my wife and she was eager to visit.
We visited and quickly fell in love with it. Not long after we started attending regularly I was asked to be a church councilman which is similar to a deacon. I accepted. We had found a home church.
So in summery, I trusted God with my wife's health. He guided her to a the hospital she was suppose to be at and on the road to recovery. He used the wear and tear I was putting on my vehicle due to her stroke to make sure I would notice that church. His hand was on the situation from start to finish in a way that was recognizable. He used what was a hard and scary time to show Himself and to bring us closer to him. It's hard to hear his voice and trust him when hard times come up, but He proved himself trustworthy in this situation.
