The Choice for Joy and Faith

Pheww, I finally have a few minutes to sit down and write. It has been pretty busy around here. And when I say "busy", I don't mean that in the "pleasantly occupied" sense of the word. I mean, life threw so many bazaar circumstances our way all at the same time, it felt like a giant seagull flew over us and crapped a big one on the last 4 days of our lives. Ugh. Again. BUT, God works in mysterious ways, and through the "crap", we have seen his provisions in a pretty remarkable way. So, Join me in reminiscing on this peculiar past week, won't you?

So I have already told you that we lost our health insurance. Totally out of the blue. No letter, no phone call, nothing. The only reason I found out was because I went to fill my prescription at target and they had a hard time getting me insurance to go through. They called the company and were told that we were dropped as of June 30th. I wanted to cry, right there in the target store. I had to pay $50 out of pocket for my measly little bottle of zoloft, that would have normally cost me around $6. Thankfully it wasn't something crazy expensive like Abilify- Did you know they charge $500+ for a bottle of that stuff without insurance...as far as I am concerned, if you are going to buy something in a bottle that small, it had better be filled with liquid gold...or diamonds. So anyway, I canceled my psych appointment that I had been waiting to go to for weeks on end, since there was no way we could afford to pay out of pocket, and tried to keep myself calm and collected, literally refusing/willing myself to not have an all out panic attack because we had essentially just been royally screwed over big time.

Then, last Saturday, we were caught off guard by a storm of epic proportions. It was incredible. The rain came down in sheets and the hail was baseball sized. We watched as trees fell in our neighbors yard and narrowly missed our beloved SUV by a mere few feet. We really felt like we had lucked out, not noticing any real significant damage to our property right away. Ha! We shouldn't have been so hasty to proclaim our good fortune...the next day, we realized while trying to make eggs for breakfast, that our stove/oven had been shorted out by lightning. Ugh. We had a $500 deductible and our stove was ancient, so there was no way insurance would help us out. In other words, we were oh so out of luck.

In an attempt to distract us from our heavy stress load, we decided that a nice trip over to the in-laws (hi mama c) was necessary, since we had to bring our newly purchased camper up there anyways to store it. Upon hooking up the camper, we noticed a big hole in the roof where a tree branch must have punctured it. We looked inside the camper and were startled by what we saw. Water had seeped into the the camper, damaging the floor, the ceiling, the insulation, filling the light fixtures with several inches of water....REALLY? C'mon! Didn't we have enough on our plate???

Oh but wait. There's more......

Things apparently don't happen to us in threes; our magic number is 4. Lovely. Anyways, we decided that we would still go ahead and take the camper to the folks farm, which was a good idea because we had a great time and it was nice to just relax for a change. We parked the camper, assessed the damage some more and then went and helped them build a deck (really, truly, that was Alex's idea of relaxing). We finally left at around 10:30pm after being there for hours. Turning out of the driveway, we immediately started talking about what we were going to do about the camper, stove and insurance. We weren't but two blocks down the road when out of nowhere a  suicidal deer jumps out in front of as, clearly deciding that our beloved SUV was the best option to bring about his quick demise. 50mph folks. Didn't even brake. Thank god we are all ok! But alas, our truck was not. It narrowly missed being hit by a monstrosity of a tree 2 days before, so evidently, it's wreckage was inevitable. To add insult to injury, our poor 3 year old was absolutely terrified. She was convinced that the deer was trying to eat us.

Isn't life wonderful? ;)

Actually, it is.

To be completely cliche, I am a firm believer that one has to have the bad times to really appreciate the good times. And the last 3 years sure have not been fun. But I'll tell ya what. This past week has felt like a piece of cake in comparison to my breakdown. It really has put things in perspective. Life could be so much worse. It has been so much worse. At least now we are together, we are safe, we are healing. We are beginning to pick up the shards of our glass shattered life and are really truly seeing how blessed we are....despite the setbacks.

Frankly, this past week has felt like a test, one that I sincerely hope that I have passed. I am learning that my joy does not come from my life circumstances. I have to choose joy. I have to choose to have faith. Feelings frequently lie, I have learned that the hard way with ppd. I am now actively choosing to live in joy and faith, not just passively waiting for the feelings of them to come.

So, this week has stunk. BUT, this too shall pass, and I'm not gonna go through this stink and come away with nothing. Ooooh noooo, if I have to go through it, I sure as heck am going to take all I can get out of it and run!