BTHO Insurance

Sometimes challenges are just that-challenging.  Sometimes, you wonder how it could possibly be fair, the storm you're surfing with no ship, light, crew, awareness, or end in sight.  Then more complications are dumped on, while you have little energy to fix them.  

You think you have just enough hope and faith to ride out the tempest, and your lifeboat is destroyed.  

Your husband, who has rescued you, but only onto his rowboat, seeks out a new company for employment, one with less time requirements and less stress, so he can have more energy to captain and help your family afloat.  

All the little things keep swirling, but you press on.  As time marches on, you are so weak that you cannot get your head above water to get to the shore, find a bit of shelter, dry, and rest.  

You feel like you're losing YOU, along with many of the memories of what you know and what makes your life rich and blessed.  You are feeling lonely and like no one understands and everyone is tired of this and having to deal with it.  Yet, the storm keeps raging.  

You have a glimpse of some of the reasons why people decide that they are done fighting storms.  Feeling unable to move in this dark and long tunnel of despair, all the while losing the last remaining ounces of energy does not provide motivation.  Feeling completely alone, without even your own concrete and safe thoughts to buoy you and trying to hold on to faith and hope and do all the things you do to have even a speck of joy in the midst doesn't seem to be working.  

You feel like you can do nothing, you know nothing, you are good to no one, and it's all becoming too hard to do much of anything but drift off to sleep and hide drift out to angry seas.  

But, you can't.  Out comes another tsunami. 

This new job that Stephen has IS much less stressful.  He able to be the Mom I cannot from treading hurricane waters with sharks.  

**********************

We decided to use Cobra insurance for this remainder of year, so it would be basically the same, and we've already met the out-of-pocket deductible.  However, that company made a mistake, and my account had a new bill added, and my scheduled appointments were no longer able to be kept or made.  And now I had to deal with something that is DEFINITELY not my job, in order to keep a bit of hope together.

I prepped for a different battle, gathered my weapons, and went to the hospital.  And, thankfully, I have an army of amazing warriors there.  I have tried, in this battle, to be kind and Christlike and joyful and thankful and to use humor vs. anger, to ease tension and return to the fight, restored.  I greet with smiles, joke with university rivals, celebrate the holidays, pull out all the colors of the rainbow in head coverings, listen to their frustrations, share my story, and fight the battle I know I should.    

And, this huge  challenge ended up no being so time-consuming or damaging. I had all these skilled generals behind my lines, doing the work for me.  In a few hours, peace was restored, I could get my schedule back and add a blood transfusion treatment, which might bring me back from "mostly dead." In all the ways I was drifting out to that darkness.

And two generals on my front lines told me how grateful they were that I had figured this mess out.  They hadn't noticed it or didn't know what or why it was happening.  If I hadn't been there, in my diminished and saddened state, not sure if I had the energy to keep perusing more treatments, feeling lost and confused, and actually upset and frustrated, I might not have been the one to dig us out.  If I had not been seeking the joy and peace of the Lord in this battle and trying to follow in those ways, I would not have these warriors to help in the journey.  That insurance lighting bolt was a jolt of light.  When it was over, I was recharged.  Sometimes, those trials that feel as if there is no reason to keep on, are the very things that remind you that you are not walking alone.  

And, sometimes, instead of focusing on all the frustrations and pity and confusion, these flashes of hardships that shine bursts of outstanding light, call to even a fogged and damaged mind that you are known and blessed and ultimately delivered.