WOW!

Felt good to sleep late this morning.  Getting up at 6:30 now for work has been easier than I thought it would be after months and months of unemployment and rolling out of bed whenever I got bored of sleeping.  LOL  The breeze outside is cool and the sky is cloudy hinting at rain but I have found that regardless of what the weather is when I step outside the RV each morning my first inclination is to say Wow.  That word covers it all in terms of gratitude.  Wow, to think that I have a job that I really love and am good at again.  Wow, to think that after 11 years of being single I have a husband who is the best man on the planet, Wow to think that I live in this place of such beauty and opportunity and don’t have to travel to get to it.  Wow, to think that my son Chris and Juliet are just a few minutes away and that we have decided to have a meal together every Sunday and start a new family tradition, Wow that my health is great (well except for the extra pounds I need to shed), my blood sugar numbers have not been above 200 in weeks, and Wow, for the first time in a long time I am totally at peace with my life.  Wouldn’t trade what I have for any amount of money or fame.  I am feeling immensely blessed and loved and productive and secure and well….Happy.  That elusive word that we all chase and want to be.  Now, there have been a few unpleasant Wows along the way.  Juliet’s miscarriage was a really bad wow that ripped out my heart. Still, watching the strength and faith of this young couple and the love they have for each other  brought back a good Wow.  Wow, they are amazing examples of what a strong faith can do, what  God can do.  And I know that someday I will be watching my grandkids play and think, Wow, I can’t remember a time they weren’t here.

 I’ve learned a few things in the last few months.  2012 was  dubbed the Year of Change  in my mind.  Good and bad.  And turns out, even the bad was good or I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.  From my marriage in February, to my Job loss in June, my house sell in July, my introduction into the world of RV living in August and the months that followed where my self esteem took a major hit as I tried to find a job.  Those were the major moments.

I learned that less is more and more is less.  As I struggled for years to keep all the balls in the air financially, living in a house that was way too much for me, watching my paycheck go to credit card debt and other “stupid” choices month after month and wondering if I would ever get on top of it, a house filled with things that had no meaning  other than the fact that I had carted them around for 35 years.  Had I not been laid off my job, I’d still be trapped in that money pit, that vicious cycle of get a check, pay it to creditors and try to enjoy the little bit that I had leftover.  And then the domino fell that started the chain reaction that has led me to the point in my life where WOW has become my favorite word.  Suddenly, I was out of debt because my house sold and I was able to pay off and close forever those credit cards that had so weighed me down and robbed me of my joy.  Suddenly, I had a reason to go through the years and years of things and clutter and be forced to examine all the stuff and weed out the things that were just that…stuff.  What remained and got packed away in storage tubs to make the move from the big house to the small RV were quilts and my Bibles and photo albums and things passed down from my grandmother to my mom and then to me.  What remained was one set of dishes, not 4 and one set of pots and pans and what was donated and sold and thrown away were things that I had bought to make me happy, not realizing that the money “charged” would bring me much more unhappiness than the momentary pleasure of the purchase.  Now the things I do have and the things I do buy are carefully thought out because I don’t have a lot of room to clutter.  And that’s ok with me. There is great satisfaction in being able to clean the entire house in 10 minutes.  Yesterday, I was walking Quincy and noticing the weekend rv’rs setting up their space at the RV park.  And it dawned on me that these people look forward to a weekend or a few days off so they can load up and come here and set up their RV and escape their day to day routine.  Living in an RV for a couple of days, and taking walks among the beautiful Texas countryside or drives to some quaint little town are their escape.  And my reality and I thought “Wow!, I am on vacation every day…I have no reason to want to go anywhere to escape.   This is the life!  Watching the sunsets, the flowers popping up everywhere I look, thelonghorn cows grazing 20 feet from my window..

For me I no longer have the “I owe, I owe, its off to work I go” mentality but instead I’m off to work and feeling pretty great about it.  They say Hospice is a calling.  And I believe it is.  The bitterness over the years spent in Oklahoma working only to be set aside and the I’ll never go back to Hospice attitude has changed.  It wasn’t “hospice” that I was bitter about.  But hospice that had become more of a business than a calling. Now as I walk through the doors of my new job and we gather each morning to have a devotional and prayer before we start our day “helping people” I feel an immense satisfaction of knowing that God has me back where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to be doing.  Like what you do, do what you like.  Everything else, the salary, the perks, the co-workers and friends you make at your job are the icing on the cake. 

I have a deeper understanding of the struggles that I had never really thought much about before. I had always had a job and taken that fact for granted.  Then I didn’t have a job and couldn’t find a job and suddenly I began to question my own abilities and my own values.  And I started to see other “unemployed” people in a different light.  Oh, I still mutter “get a job” occasionally when at a stop light and someone is on the corner begging.  Or see a homeless person digging through a trash can.  But I understand now that sometimes life hands you circumstances beyond your control and sometimes as much as you want to change things, sometimes its beyond your capability.  The private healthcare I had always had and took for granted was a huge eye opener as I had to accept help from the “government” and become part of that “47%” group of people relying on it. Without the “Medicaid” I would not have been able to afford my insulin and other medications that keep me alive.  Without the unemployment check each week (though I feel as if that was not a hand out but something I had worked for ) we would have struggled to make ends meet even without debt.  Now I don’t judge when I see someone using food stamps at the grocery because it could’ve been me had things not fallen into place as they did. Its not my place to know their story of what brought them to that point.  And while I know there are many many many people abusing the system, it is not on my conscious to live with and someday be accountable for.  That donation I gave may end up funding a CEO’s vacation or it might end up putting a meal into a child’s belly for the day…….and while I hope the latter, if everyone were cynical about where the money went then no one would give and those in need would fall through the cracks. 

I have experienced times in my life where I wanted something so badly I thought I would just fall over and die if I didn’t get it to go my way. There have been days when I thought the desires of my heart would never be a reality. All those years of being single and longing to have love in my life, someone to share my life with…I had pretty much given up…But God would say “hold on, hold on for one more day” and I would and eventually those days weeks and months turned into years and though I never lost hope, I was at times overcome with sadness thinking that it was not in God’s plan for me to be loved and to love again.  And then one day, there was Joe. And all the years of waiting were worth it because I finally had what I so desired.  I guess my point is to never give up on your dreams, your desires.  And when the heartbreak comes…a failed marriage, a broken relationship, a job loss, the death of a loved one know that you will be changed forever, but that you will come out on the other side.  My son Chris wrote a blog and called it Joy comes in the Mourning about the miscarriage.  To that I add Morning always follows mourning.  It may not seem like it at the time, but if you can hold on for one more day, the morning will dawn and the sun will come out and joy will return.  And with any luck, you will be able to look back and see the wisdom in the circumstance.  That person might not have been the right one for you but you failed to see that because you were trying so hard to avoid the inevitable pain that change would bring.   Sometimes you cling tightly to what is because you are afraid to let go and see what will be.  Sometimes you struggle so hard to make something work because you want it to so badly that you fail to see that some things just cannot be fixed.  Not by you anyway.

A couple of nights ago, as buckets of rain pounded down and the water rushed along the ditches and the road and the Rv sounded like we were under attack, I found myself enjoying the storm as much as I love the flowers and birds of spring.  The lightening flashes, the thunder and the rocking of the RV as the winds and rain pelted down.  Yes there is beauty even in the storms.