Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Ever had a stressful week?

Well, it has been a rough week since I last posted.  I think my family and I have come through it ok...but it's been rough, and we're still recovering.  So first, I kinda want to purge.  There's great value in "getting it all out there" in order to help yourself see where you're going and for keeping proper perspective concerning where you've been.  Maybe in writing it all down, I can help myself a little more...and maybe help you as well.

So I last posted last Monday.  Tuesday morning we get up and Caleb (my 3 year old) seems a little off.  It gets bad enough that I take him to the pediatrician. She tells me he has an ear infection, pink eye in both eyes, a cold and a rising fever.  So she gets him prescription eye drops, an antibiotic, and tells us to alternate between Children's Tylenol and Children's Ibuprofen. Over the next couple days he start's feeling much better, but his fever got up to 104.6 at one point. By Friday he's feeling much better, but Meghan is starting to feel sick.

Friday afternoon the weather starts getting bad: freezing rain, slushy snow, etc.  On my way home from work I hit a slick spot and skid into a guard rail.  Air bags deploy and everything.  I was fine...just dazed.  But the car is totaled.  You can see the slushy goodness I slid in in the picture. The police officer took me home.  That night, as a major storm is raging outside, we lost power around 10:00 PM.

The next morning the power's still out, which means the heat's out.  The house was about 50 degrees when we woke up.  Meghan feels miserable at this point. She's getting sicker, now she's stuck in a cold house and by the way, she's pregnant. We look outside and there's 30" of snow on the ground from the overnight blizzard.  It was one of the worst storms for one day snow totals in the Quincy's history. I spend the day shoveling while the family spends the day huddled on the couch under blankets.  I am so stinkin' sore from shoveling that snow.

It starts getting dark Saturday night and it's supposed to be much colder than the night before...like close to single digits.  Meghan is feeling worse.  She's now throwing up. Caleb has been trapped inside one room trying to keep warm all day and is going nuts....cause he's 3.  I'm extremely sore and irrationally angry at the snow for being so heavy, cold and plentiful.  We start arguing with each other over what to do for the cold night ahead.  It gets a bit heated.  We're not really mad at each other, we're mad at the situation...but yelling at the situation doesn't make you feel better.

So, we decide to get in the car and drive just to be somewhere warm.  This was trading one stress for another.  We were warm, but the roads we so covered in piles of snow and mush that we were tense the whole time trying to avoid snowplows and getting stuck. We have had no dinner and at this point we don't know what to do for the night.

We work hard to get into a gas station that hasn't been plowed out yet, just to find out they are out of gas. So we get out and go to another station and after almost getting stuck in their parking lot (the car beside us did get stuck), we finally get some gas. Suddenly we get a text:  an offer to stay with a friend in the next town over.  There's no where open to eat, so we give up looking and decide to take our friend up on her offer. She and her husband were really kind and accommodating to us. It was a real blessing to be somewhere warm.

We get Caleb settled and then headed back to the house to grab a couple things and get the animals ready for the cold night ahead.  We could already see our breath throughout our house, so I know it was going to get real cold later. When we got back the next morning, the house was at 35 degrees.  But the animals made it through night fine. The power finally came back on around 9 AM Sunday morning. It took 4 and a half hours to warm the house back up.

To top everything off, when Meghan was finally able to get to the doctor Monday morning, they weren't very helpful.  She has a virus of some sort and because she's pregnant the doctor basically said "suck it up and tough it out."  There's nothing she's allowed to take. So other than Meghan still being on the mend, and us still needing to figure out where we'll get money for a car, things are getting back to normal.

I'm confident there will be many things I can pull from this past week as I reflect on it over the next few days.    Right now the main thing that sticks out in my mind is trust. Trust in God. We have gone through a lot of stresses and frustrations in the last week.  If I could have written my week out, it would not have gone this way.  But, in the end, do we still have everything we need? God provided food, heat, doctors, police, snow blowers and shovels when it was all really needed.  If was a hard week, but in the end, what have I really lost? Only a little sleep and an old car that wasn't worth much.

Many people have suffered far worse for far longer. I think there is value in keeping your "suffering" in perspective. As long as God has plans for me and my family, he will be providing for us in this life.  He doesn't promise it will always be easy, or  that we will always have everything we want.  But he know's better than we do what we need. If our trust in Him is to grow, our trust must not waiver, for better or for worse.

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