We are in recovery now, but whew… Stephen and I know how to bring in the new year NOT on the right foot.
It started with New Year’s Day. I still don’t remember the accident itself, but the story I’m told is that I fell flat on my face. Stephen and I were in Seattle visiting his sister and her family. We took our little nephews out to ride their scooters and lined up to have a race down a hill. Stephen was on the back of one scooter, I was on the other. We took off, who knows who was in the lead, then as we started going faster down the hill, my nephew got scared and decided to slam on the breaks. With this, I went flying off the back and smashed face first into the pavement. For the next 24 hours, all I remember is laying in bed, feeling my face, it hurting, going to the bathroom, seeing THIS in the mirror, and calling out to Stephen, “WHAT happened? Why does my face look like this?”
Stephen told me he must have told me the story 50 times as often as the movie “50 First Dates“. Apparently, according to the doctor, I had a mild concussion and hit the part of my head that affects short term memory. In those 24 hours, I struggled to remember the past 2 weeks we spent in Seattle. I looked through my Instagram and photos on Facebook to try to jog my memory, and all I could think was “I know I’m a photographer for my job, but I’m so glad I took these pictures to document my own life.” Slowly with time, as I looked through the photos and listened to the stories Stephen told me of the things we did while in Seattle, the memories came back. I still don’t remember the accident itself, which the doctor said, I just might never, but it’s funny the things I DID remember in the midst of my medicated cloudiness.
What I do remember in my recovery is grabbing Stephen’s arm next me to me in bed and shouting my Social Security Number. In my foggy brain, there was something comforting in knowing, if I could I remember my Social Security Number, my memory would eventually be ok. The other thing I could remember to say in the midst of my fogginess was “I am healed by the stripes of Jesus!” Probably because I’ve heard my mom say it a million times in the midst of her own health battles with cancer. Though I couldn’t remember my life for that brief moment of time, I COULD remember how big God was, and it was these moments in life when He promises to always be with us and protect us. I knew it in that moment of literally falling on my face in life that God would prove my faith was not for nothing. And I sit here today with my memory recovered, and my lip back to normal size and scabs healed, I learned the reality of how God is my ultimate Healer, my Protector, my Heavenly Father who pulled me off the pavement and saved me that day, the same way my earthly father pulled me out of the waves I got tossed in when I was a little girl and rescued me from getting further hurt.
Then Stephen and I come back from Seattle, and a few days ago, as I sit in the office, I hear a huge crash in our bathroom. I immediately ran across the house to discover my poor husband now flat on his face, his arm dripping in blood. Getting into the shower, he slipped and fell and slammed his head and back and elbow on the hard tile floor. For a frozen moment of time, I stood there frozen, not believing what I was seeing. First I fall, now my husband too… in a matter of a month? We were NOT off to a good start in this new year. It only had to get better from there.
As I played nurse to Stephen, changing his bandages, dressing him, opening things, making food, feeding him pain meds, stroking his hair, massaging his back, I couldn’t help but think how, like the line in our video above we filmed a month before, we were definitely learning early on in marriage, “True love is not about waiting for storms to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
This was our rainy moment.
Yet, like Peter in the bible caught in the midst of the storm, we had a choice to doubt and let our faith sink, or we had a choice to keep our eyes on Jesus and keep walking toward Him. We are choosing the latter. Despite these crazy falls, it’s the tough times when you learn what true love is all about. You learn how deep your love for each other is. You learn how, despite your fat lip that looks like it had too much Botox, that your husband still thinks you are the most beautiful girl in the world in his eyes. You learn, that your vows are more than just words, but actions in the not so better times of “for worse.”
Speaking of vows, have you seen the trailer for this movie yet, “The Vow“? It looks like another “The Notebook“ tear jerker. But I have a feeling, I’m going to cry my eyes out for even more reasons now having had a glimpse of what Rachel McAdams goes through in this new movie. Sooooo can’t wait to see this on Valentine’s Day! I cry every time just watching the trailer.