Forward With Trepidation

22 Sep Forward With Trepidation

It’s the middle of the night as I’m writing this. I’m a sleeper, meaning I like my sleep. But tonight it evades me. Maybe it doesn’t evade me as much as my stomach’s rumblings keep me from slumber.

Most reading this know of my challenges with gastroparesis. Even though I have gained most of the weight back that I lost through 2010 and generally look and sound like I used to, the disorder remains an issue. I’ve learned to adapt and my threshold for nausea has become higher.

I experience an episode or two, or three, daily, but they are usually low intensity. Every once in a while, it flares a bit more, but rarely does it keep me awake. Like I said, I like my sleep, and I find that my body does too!

Tonight, there’s no telling the why’s or what for’s that rumble my tummy. I suspect it’s nerves. Around 4:00 pm or so Pacific time, Colleen and I will be in Mountain time, in Provo, Utah. We will attend this weekend’s Parent Conference at Heritage School, where our youngest son, Jonathan, has been living since May 2.

We are very much looking forward to the weekend. We haven’t seen Jonathan, other than on our computer screen for our biweekly family therapy session on Skype video, since the first Parent Conference we attended in mid-May. We miss him something fierce, and did not realize how true this would be for us, given the chaos we lived with for so long.

Feel free to click “Jonathan” in the category list if you’re unfamiliar with our story.

While we are excited to see and be with him, we also know that he is where he is for some serious reasons. There have been no humungous changes for him since he has been there, but the therapist is helping us to shelve our expectations of monumental change in exchange for the reality of incremental change. And there have been some good, small steps he is taking, for which we could not be more proud of his courage and tenacity in the face of probably some of the hardest days of his young life.

We celebrate that, but this isn’t a vacation trip. It’s a work trip actually. Colleen and I will continue to be educated in the intricacies of parenting in the face of our challenges with Jonathan. And we’ll do more family therapy. And we’ll measure out how much trust we find ourselves able to extend based on how our interactions go and how Jonathan chooses to handle them. We may even get to take him off campus if things go well enough.

Last I wrote, Colleen was still facing challenges with tapering off the prednisone. She still faces them. Last week was very difficult, but a corner was turned on Friday that has sustained until now. We’re grateful for that. It’s probable/possible that her lupus challenges this Summer are related to the stress we’ve endured with relocating Jonathan and getting him the help he needs.

We are glad she is feeling much better and more able to do this trip, not that she had ANY sense of NOT doing the trip, no matter how bad the last couple weeks were at times. I may have had doubts about whether or not she could or would be able to do the trip, but not her. Never wavered. Not once. The worse the pain was, the more determined she was that she was doing this trip. That’s my Colleen!

All this to say, we have no idea how the weekend will go. We move forward with some trepidation. Oh, hear me clearly. Our excitement to see him and be with him has not waned. I can hardly. wait. to. see him. And our hope is not faded; it’s in Jesus, Who gives us the ability to move through things like gastroparesis and lupus and whatever else to do what must be done.

This has all been such a lesson to me how true it is that no matter what we face on this earth, it doesn’t have to dim our eternal hope, trust, faith. Forward with trepidation. It’s OK to just be OK.

We’ll see you from Utah!