Settling In

Human beings are creatures of habit. We tend to develop daily routines of people, locations, and responsibilities. We fill our schedules with things that we need and want to do and we do these things day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. We stay busy with habitual routines that are often so unaltered that not only does one week look eactly like another, years take the shape of previous years, with little deviation. We find comfort in the orderliness, predictablility, and control of our routines. Its the unaltered repetition of it all that tends to make life safe and secure. We settle in to such comfortable routines that we can act, react, and respond almost without thought or planning.

It all works very well until something, totally outside of the routine, explodes into your life that is so serious and so significant that it can not be avoided, ignored, or absorbed into the routine. Such is Nicole's accident. Since May 19, it has completely repaced our routine. We have done little else but care for Nicole. Not only are we convinced that this has been right to do, in our love for Nicole, we could not have done anything else. Yet at the same time, we are aware that there are other things that God has called us to as well. These things are good and right to do and they have not gone away. So we are now in that moment when need and responsibilty intersect (well, actually they seem to collide). We cannot continue to suspend all elements of our routine and we want and need to continue to care for Nicole. We will let nothing stand in the way of our participation in her full recovery, yet there are other things that we are committed to do. Right now, it seems impossible to merge the two routines in the way that allows us settle in and daily do what we have been called to do. It seems so overwhelming, that we find ourselves unable to look at the whole thing at once. We can only cope when we are concentrating on a piece at a time.

Yesterday was a day of settling in. We all began working on the routine that will structure our lives for the months to come. For Nikki that meant getting used to scheduling her medication and learning how to get comfortable in her wheelchair and navigate it where she needs to go. For us it meant wrapping our minds around all that Nikki will need while she is with us, positioning these things so they are available to her, and understanding where she will need our direct assistance. She was visited for the first time by her home-care nurse and will soon get her first visit from the physical therapist. It was all this settling in at home that put the issue of routine on the table. How can we do all that we are being called to do at this moment in our lives? How do we add the huge and significant responsibility of care for Nicole to so many other seemingly non-negotiable things in our lives? How long can we ignore emails and cancel appointments? How do we fulfill business and ministry commitments and love and serve Nicole in her suffering? We are so thankful that we can care for Nikki in this painful moment, but how do we arrive at a routine and what does settling in look like?

No one is ever warned or prepared for the security and predictability of the old routine to be shattered, but when it is, you either give way to worry and fear, or you begin to rest in a deeper security. Suffering pushes you to find something more reliable to put your trust in than a comfortable routine and your ability to pull it off. Suffering reminds all of us of how little we actually control and how easily we are able to be overwhelmed. Suffering calls us out of the confines of our little self-sufficient worlds and forces us to depend on God and others. In this way, as completely unsettling as suffering is, it is productive, because when we are living in humble dependency upon God and others, we have reconnected with what we were designed to be. No longer able to do it on our own, we reach out and we reach up, and in so doing become more authentically human. This is a good thing, the problem is the process is both painful and overhwleming.