Oh, make no mistake. I had the best of intentions.

I was going to write a nice New Year's post to make up for the fact that I didn't get back here since my big Holiday Whiplash on the 23rd. Yep, I was was going to come home from the hospital on New Year's Eve and have it all ready to post at the stroke of midnight.

Funny thing about those New Years. Just because they're new doesn't always mean a fresh start or a happier set of circumstances. And for me, 2010 is the perfect illustration of that fact.

Instead of getting to come home with my 20" incision and starting down the difficult but promising road to recovery, I got the news I'd feared for a long time: there's infection in and around the new hip implant, probably one that's been there a long time undetected, and ignoring it is not an option. Dr. Keeney presented the options, prayed with us, and allowed me to come home for a few days to regroup, huddle and pray with the family, and take care of details that will soon be out of my reach.

No firm decisions have been made yet, but here is the likely scenario. Late next week I will go back into surgery and have the entire apparatus that was just put in taken out again, along with the bone grafts, screws, bands, etc. Those will be replaced with a temporary prosthesis, sort of a spacer, or a "spare tire" if you will, one that will not bear weight and will allow for little to no movement. I will stay in my bed or a nearby chair for six to eight weeks while being treated aggressively with a powerful antibiotic cocktail, on which I've already started. At the end of that time, I'll go to surgery again for another permanent hip replacement.

(Did I say permanent? Well, I thought that a couple of times before!)

Then I will begin another stint of physical therapy for several months, regaining strength and mobility and seeing how close we can get to normal walking.

So...you can see that the first half of my 2010 won't look anything like I expected. God must have been gently smiling on me as I had it all planned, knowing that none of it was going to happen. I wish I could describe my own reaction as gentle smiles, but in truth I've run the gamut from despair to anger to resignation. My tears, now yellow from the new antibiotic, have fallen in several cycles since New Year's Eve. My knight-in-shining-armor husband and my dear children and my best friend will attest to the wild swings as I came to grips with the wiping out of my list of 2010 resolutions. And as I listened to fireworks and heard revelers outside my hospital window, I wondered how it could still all go on while I adjusted to the reality of what amounts, for me, to a rather Old New Year.

But God.

My Father is still on His throne and holds my future in His strong hands. Why He has planned for these next months to be spent in stillness I can only guess, but I know it did not escape His attention or His kind intention. I would much rather be running my kids to piano lessons and shopping for groceries and preparing for a houseful of guests and sitting with my beloved HOPE moms and sharing spiritual and practical lessons with them. To me, those things seem so much more productive! But for some reasons, reasons totally mysterious to me, He has chosen stillness for me instead and I must listen and watch for His purposes.

The morning after receiving my New Year's News, a sweet friend was led to send me words I needed to hear. It's a poem published in the priceless Streams in the Desert, and the word "daughter" was originally "children." For me, though, the intimacy of being His daughter is something I needed to feel and I treasure it. I'm sure I'll reread this many times in the next months when I'm tempted to wallow in my inability to do anything other than be still and know...

Labels: Devotional, Health