22 Years, 22 Days, and home

The old saying is that the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. What do you do when you can't walk?

Today marks MG's 22nd day in the hospital. Three weeks ago today MG left the house to go to the airport - her last memory until earlier this week when she came out of the fog of blissful, medically-induced forgetfulness to find herself lying in a hospital bed in a trauma unit of UAB, with her family gathered around cheering that she woke up.
You can imagine her confusion - not only in her strange surroundings, but that people were cheering the fact that she simply woke up, something that - as far as she knew - she'd been doing every day for the last 50 years.
But of course, she hadn't been doing that every day for previous two weeks.
Even now, three weeks after "the accident,'' she said, "All I know is I've been in the hospital for a week with a sore throat."
We tell her the sore throat is from two weeks on a ventilator. We explain the two new huge scars on her body are from four surgeries. She understands, intellectually, why her pelvis hurts and her left leg feels so lifeless and why she has so much difficulty doing the simplest of things (if she can even do them at all), but cognitively it's all a mystery to her.

In those first few days when they'd taken MG off the ventilator but she was still so doped up on pain killers, the nurses would try to get her to wake up to talk to them, to make sure she could follow simple commands. They'd ask her where she was, if she knew why she was here, and so forth.
I'd ask, "Do you know what next Saturday is?"
Last year, the first time in 21 years, it was MG who forgot our anniversary. Usually, unfortunately, that's been my mistake. Days run together for me. My standard "excuse" is always that "I have trouble with numbers and can't remember if we got married on May 12th at 10 a.m., or May 10th at 12!" Of course, that doesn't explain why I didn't come in on May 10th ready to celebrate the big day, but then I really wasn't fooling MG anyway.
So it was a big deal to me that she forgot. MG never forgets - birthdays, anniversaries, the day that a family member or friend died or the anniversary of a funeral or the first day of school or work for a friend's child.
I loved that, for once, she forgot.
She had every reason to forget this year. After all, she'd lost two weeks of her life.
But every time I'd ask, "Do you know what next Saturday is?" she'd give me this sly little, crooked little smile and say, "22 years."
Or I'd ask, "When's our anniversary?" And she'd roll her eyes as if I'd asked her the color of the sky or how many fingers she had on each hand. Then she'd whisper in that ventilator-injured voice, "May 12 at 10 a.m."

I know people do this. I know it happens far more than it should. But I never imagined celebrating our anniversary by waking up in a hospital room, waiting to go home.
I would never have imagined how close we came to not making it to No. 22.
I always figured with all the traveling I do, if something like this ever happened to either of us it would be me, the one who drives all the time.
And I can't begin to tell you how much I wish it had been me.
But it wasn't.
God only knows why.

We've done a lot of talking about 'why,' this week. MG wants to make sure that this event doesn't just become something we hurry and try to get past and forget. She believes God is at work in this, that God is working to teach her as well as continuing her (big theological word here) "sanctification." She is already looking to see where God is working (recognizing, of course, that God is working everywhere, constantly).
Me? I'm always hesitant to try to interpret God. I'm always worried that what I might see as "God's purpose in this" could cause me to miss what He is really doing. Again I go back to Job and recognize that even when God came to directly answer Job, God's answer was essentially "who are you, that you would think you could even begin to understand  Me and My ways?"
That's not to say one way is right and one is wrong. It's just to say MG and I often approach things differently. We process things differently, even as we look to see what could/might happen because of what we've gone through.
But as Saint Augustine said, "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself." To extrapolate that a little, I'm afraid that if I decide what God's purpose was in this, or how His will is being accomplished, then it might really just be my purpose and my will that I'm seeing and not His.
Still, I know MG will come out of this stronger in her faith, more determined to be available to God, and that both of us will be changed through this.
A little more 'sanctification' if you will.
I want to end with a song (but, no, I'm not going to sing).
A friend of mine who reads my blog asked me about the title, "Homesick for Eden." He said he understood "Eden," but what did I mean by "homesick?"
There are so many poems and lines and songs and stories that have resonated in my life; expressions by other people that I read or hear, and think, "I could have written that. I know exactly what he/she means."
The words of this song, written by someone named Claire Cloninger and Paul Smith (who recorded it) back in the late 1980s, I believe, do that. The words of this song have always resonated deeply within me. It's a song that has a lot of meaning for my family for a lot of reasons, that has seen me through a lot of difficult times, and seems appropriate to end with on this day.
I know it by heart.

A garden so green, where water ran clean
And the animals roamed without names
Love was a girl who walked through the world
Where passion was pure as a flame.
In the back of our minds is a time before time
And a sad irreversible fact:
We can't seem to think why we left there,
And we can't seem to find our way back.
All of us are homesick for Eden,
We yearn to return to a land we've never known.
Deep is the need to go back to the garden
A burning so strong for a place we belong
A place that we know is home.

Have you ever just cried for no reason why
Like a child that's been left on it's own?
You can't quite explain the confusion or pain
So you live with the heartache alone.
In the back of your mind is a place and a time
And an image of what should have been.
And you know that you'll never be happy
Until you find your way back there again.
All of us are homesick for Eden
We yearn to return to a land we've never known.
Deep is the need to go back to the garden
A burning so strong for a place we belong
A place that we know is home.

We were made to live in his perfect love;
We were meant to walk in his grace.
And we'll never feel we are home again
Until we see him face to face.

Deep is our need to go back to the garden,
A burning so strong for a place we belong;
To rest at his feet in fellowship sweet
A place that we know is home.

Things like this remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we weren't meant to have these things happen to us, that we were meant for something better. Until we get there, however, this is what we have.
I'm so thankful to still have MG to walk through this fallen world with.
Just as I'm thankful for so many of you, who walked these last three weeks with me.
There is still much to be done.
But if any of you ever need a prayer offered on your behalff, I can tell you where to find me.
On my knees, praying.
Sometimes we say "praying is all I can do," when the truth is, praying is the first thing we should do.