Thankful Thursday #2: A Grateful, Still Recovering, Heart at Home

Although I am still recovering from that German germ that came home with me from Garmisch and not the best things have happened this week, there is still much for which to be grateful. For example:

• Not only have I blogged this week about robberies, but two people I care about have experienced car break-ins -- in two hemispheres at almost exactly the same time. Go figure! Padre Julio Skyped me from Colombia with the information that his car had just been broken into for the second time in three months; his laptop and a computer that belongs to his school was taken as well. Then, just a little while later, I heard that the car window of my son Shane here in California had been smashed and his i-pod stolen, but $40 in cash that had been stashed away was ignored. (I think both should stop keeping electronics in their car, and I am now going to start taking our tom-tom into the house when we get home even though I live in a small and, I think, trustworthy community. I am thankful, though, that neither person was hurt, and, the robbery was to their car and not to their house. Electronics can be replaced. Of course, I am grateful for all the folks who said that they would pray for Padre Julio. Shane is having a bit of a bad year, too, but since it is darkest before the dawn, I think he will have a very rosy 2010. (Oh, yes, I have an incurable case of optimism.)

• Speaking of incurable cases, I was very, very grateful that the German medicine that I bought as I was leaving Germany worked like magic at the end of last week (before I ran out and crashed into 38 hours of nearly non-stop sleeping over the weekend), allowing me to attend the semi-formal dinner that the head of my organization threw for a very high ranking (national name recognition, but I won't name-drop here) government official held with our six senior managers. I happened to be the manager who ended up sitting across from him and had a very enjoyable dinner conversation, which I would not have been able to manage without that medicine. At the end of the evening, as everyone was shaking hands good-bye, he startled me a bit by hugging me instead of shaking my hand. (No, I was not the only woman there, but I was the only person -- male or female -- that he hugged. Dunno why.) I just said a quick prayer, "Lord, the nation needs him; please don't let me infect him." It has been almost a week, and I have not heard of any dire consequences from his brief meeting with me. Whew! Thank you, Lord!

• Earlier this week, my daughter Lizzie found Princesse, one of her two cats, flattened on the floor where a bed had fallen on her. (she and her husband are moving into a new place.) She was devastated. When she was a freshman in college, Lizzie had acquired Princesse from the US Embassy in Tunis (hence, the French name, as well as a sheaf of vet papers in French that the San Diego vet, who just happened to know French, got a kick out of reading). Princesse was slated to be turned out into the street by the new ambassador at that time, and the former deputy chief of mission, who had returned to the USA where I met her, took upon herself the task of finding homes for all the cats she had befriended while assigned to Tunis. I offered to take Princesse, but when our landlord said, "no cats," Princesse ended up in San Diego with Lizzie, Noelle, and Blaine. Lizzie had Princesse all through college and graduate school to her PhD completion, a real blessing as a source of calm during a long period of stress. Then Princesse accompanied Lizzie to New York, where Lizzie spent two years as a visiting professor at a university in New York. Now, Lizzie, Blaine, Princesse, and second cat Woody, were settling into a new home as Lizzie began a new job as a tenure-track professor at a university in South Carolina. That's when the bed fell. Lizzie and Blaine rushed Princesse to an emergency care facility in nearby Georgia, where the cat had surgery for a fractured jaw. She seems to have some brain damage -- or so Lizzie, whose specialty is brain pathology, thinks, but she is making progress. Three days ago, she began drinking water (still needs a food tube). Two days ago, she started using the litter pan by herself. Yesterday, she started wandering around the room and finding the litter pan by herself through sniffing. Today, Lizzie wrote, "She looked at me! She looked at me! And she knew me!" Yes, one must be grateful for small things, and when trauma happens, we are reminded of how important the small things are. We are praying for brave little Princesse, and we are grateful for every little bit of progress. It is exciting watching her recover, and we are grateful that she is not in pain and not on pain medication.

• I am grateful, oh, very much so, more than words can convey, that this week -- Yippee!! Praise the Lord! -- I found (i.e. re-established contact with) a work-study college student in Jordan who calls me "Mom." An Iraqi with no local family, she needed someone to talk to every time the bombs fell on the university where her father worked or EIDs exploded along Airport Road where her family lived. Typically, she would not be able to reach them when these things happened, and she would come to my office and say, "Mom, may I come in and cry for a while?" I would shut the door, and she would have some peace. Some times she wanted to talk; other times she just wanted company while she sat in silence; yet other times she really did want to cry and to be held. I kept a prayer rug for her in my office so that during prayer hours (she is Sunni) she would have a private place to pray. I met her real mother once when she came to Jordan for some medical care. She seemed to approve of me and told me how happy and relieved she was that her daughter had someone in loco parentis in Amman. I lost contact with my "daughter" about a year after I left Jordan, and when I returned last July, my efforts at tracking her down were futile. I was concerned, but I knww that God has always watched out for her. I am a very poor second to Him when it comes to ensuring her safety, health, and happiness. Nonetheless, I was delighted this week when I found her, through a mutual friend, on Facebook! We are now back in touch! Life is sweet!

For what are you thankful this wonderful Thursday?

More information about the Thankful Thursday meme can be found at the website of Grace Alone.

Thankful Thursday #13

Working with Wajeeha to bring the story of her planned journey to help her people in Pakistan to the attention of readers, I realized just what I am perhaps most grateful for in my life as a whole: the opportunity to help others.

1. They say that charity begins at home, and home is where I have had a great and rewarding opportunity to help others. First, Blaine came into our house; his father had disappeared back into Mexico when he was two years old and his mother threw him out of their house in the barrio when he was 14 because he refused to help her with her drug business. Then, my friend, Zina, called me from Moscow and informed me that she was sending her daughter, Ksenya, to live with us; this was right around the raspad (dissolution of the Soviet Union) and opportunities for someone with a mixture of Armenian, Tatar and Jewish blood in Mosocw were limited. And, our last live-at-home addition, Shura, was sent to me from Siberia by his parents in Siberia in a desperate attempt to save his life, which, with the clear help of God, we and those helping us did. Today Blaine is working as the head of the IT department for a university in South Carolina, Ksenya is working on becoming a Hollywood star (and has had her own show at one of the LA clubs), and Shura, having spent 15 years living and working in the USA, has returned to Russia to take care of his aging parents and continue his art work. What a gift God gave us with these three additional children!

2. Although both my birth children and the three children who were given to me are now in their 30s, I don't lack for additional mothering opportunities. Two twenty-something Iraqis living in Jordan, Shem and Leyla, who had been my work study students at the university there where I was the dean, latched onto me as their in loco parentis mother, their own families in Iraq being unreachable because of the war; they remain in frequent contact with me, and I visit them whenever I go to Jordan. They seem like my own children, coming to me when they need advice, cheering up, or support of any type. Then there is also Maha in Bahrain, who instantly adopted me as "Mom, when a clerk in a store where she was looking at makeup told her that she looked fine without it but her mother (me) really needed it. (Now there's a comment to which one does not know how to react!) She is about the same age as my younger children and has called me "Mom" ever since that incident. Ironically, over time I have served in that capacity as she has experienced some very difficult moments and has needed emotional support for extremely trying life events (the arrest and torture of her brother) which ultimately and surprisingly turned out okay, thanks to many prayers; she also came to visit me in California just the way any of my other children would. Finally, there is Yahyah, a Jordanian about the same age as my middle children, whose mother worried about him living in the USA until I promised her to be his "American mother" -- a promise that all three of us (he, she, and I) have taken very seriously, and he has become a real member of my family, going on outings with us, attending family gatherings, attending Mass and Bible Studies with me, and celebrating birthdays (his, too) and other occasions with us. Being a part of these young adults' lives have taught me so much more about their cultures and the ways in which the youth of these lands think than any number of college courses could possibly have made clear. A rich gift, indeed!

3. Not only have children been sent to me; so have animals, cats in particular. Donnie and I have rescued nearly 50 cats, about half of them in the US and another half in Jordan. For most of those cats we found homes after taming them or cared for them as feral animals until they died. Some still live with us: Murjan, Intrepid, and Simone. Anyone who has ever had a pet knows what comfort and friendship they bring to a relationship, relationships for which I am and always will be grateful.

4. It would appear that God put me in my current job for a reason. Although I initially and in the beginning tried to squirm out of the assignment, I have grown to love it and to be grateful to God for the opportunity to help so many people who work for me. In addition to run-of-the-mill mentoring that comes with any leadership experience, there are three clear examples that I have shared on this blog before that indicate to me that there is a reason for my being here. One was the case of Tareq who experienced a medical miracle and brought our division together through prayer for him. There was also the employee who was slated to be fired until I went to a meeting and found an extra manager there; our personnel office intended to him but I fortunately recognized divine intervention for what it was. The third instance was a time when I was sitting in a far-off land on a business trip, reading in my hotel room, and heard the words, "Bring him to me," along with seeing a vision of one of my employees, far below me on the hierarchical ladder; I did what I was told, and some benefit seemed to ensue from that, at least to the employee. More important, to me, than the situations of these three people about whom I have blogged earlier, is the case of an employee that had worked for me 13 years earlier as a manager but after I had left (my current job is a higher level position in the same organization that I worked at in the 1980s), he had fallen apart, given in to alcoholism, would come to work with long, dirty hair, disheveled, unwashed clothes, and the smell of alcohol on his breath. His current supervisor was preparing to fire him when one of his friends came to see me and explained the situation. We both knew that since this empoloyee's wife had died four years earlier, he would be alone at home with his bottles, and, given that he has diabetes, would be in very bad shape very quickly. I asked his supervisor to transfer him to me, and I told him that I would only take him if he cleaned up his act. He arrived in suit, tie, and freshly trimmed hair. I gave him a management position, but he soon fell off the bandwagon again and passed out at work. Even though both he and I knew that he was suffering from a hangover, I treated the situation as if it were not alcohol-related and insisted that he go to the hospital for discovery of the reason for his loss of consciousness, and I sent his supervisor with him to make sure he got there. All of us were surprised when the hospital discovered that he was in the early stages of lung cancer. They admitted him, operated right away, and got out all the cancer that might otherwise not have been discovered until too late. He has been fine ever since, and he has not come to work inebriated again, either. A few days ago, the same friend who asked me to take on this employee, dropped by my office. He, too, now works for me. He mentioned how wonderful it was to see his friend living a productive work life and a happy home life. "Bez tebya," he said, "on umer by." (Without you, he would have died.) Of course, he also had in mind the close call with cancer. That is a special gift indeed -- to have the opportunity to save a life. Now, I thank God every day that He put me in this job that I did not want.

5. Leaders, to help their employees, sometimes have to take immense risks. I have told senior managers whom I have trained to work with difficult "overlords" that if one is to do the right thing (as opposed to doing things right), in other words, to take the moral, compassionate, supportive approach as opposed to the approach of appeasing one's own supervisor(s), then one has to be willing to lose one's own job. Doing the right thing is more important than keeping one's job if keeping the job means doing the wrong thing. My job in Jordan challenged me strongly in this regard. To protect employees from an abusive boss, I would draw his anger away from them and often that meant it landed on me. Finally, one day, I was fired. Later my boss mentioned to my administrative assistant that I had been doing the right thing and he had made a mistake in firing me, that it was simply an emotional reaction that he had been unable to control. The third most important thing about my losing the job is that the senior managers understood at last what I meant, and more of them became morally braver. The second most important thing about losing the job was that it forced me into taking the job that God seemed to be pushing me into, and the fact that I immediately had another job, a good one, did not fail to impress those senior managers whom I had been trying to teach the importance of risk-taking on behalf of employees. The very most important thing about my losing the job, however, is that it brought me back to California in time to be present to help my children when my little granddaughter, Nikolina, was born with life-threatening OEIS Complex and they had to spend months with her at Stanford University Hospital. Donnie and I were here to babysit my grandson, to offer moral support, and when the little girl came home to watch her occasionally so my children could get some breathing room. God has my eternal thanks for pushing me into a position where I not only have had so many opportunities to help others but also to help my own family (And I try always now to be just a little more obedient!)


More information about one of the Thankful Thursday memes can be found at the website of Women Taking a Stand. This meme host is shared with other blogs so you will need to check to see which one is hosting any given month.

Link up with Greg's and Daryl's Thankful Thursday at Greg's General Store.

What a Wondeful Day It Was!

Yesterday was the most amazing day. Seriously! No tongue-in-cheek intended here.

First thing in the morning, Lemony dropped Nathaniel at school and picked me up in her rental car. (Shane's and her car broke down while Nikolina was hospitalized at Stanford--transmission needs to be replaced.) I could not drive because our battery was not working; Donnie had had to call AAA from the hospital parking lot the day before when the car would not start, and the battery had to be ordered.

While I was waiting for her, I remembered the financial issue that had been hanging around for a few days, jumped online, and discovered a deus ex machina resolution to my financial problem. An amazing solution -- but I am getting so spoiled by God pulling my family out of the muck all the time that I was not even surprised. First, earlier in the week, in order to overcome the sizable deficit caused by my not canceling an automatic payment when I chose to send in a paper check through the mail (thus paying twice and unable to get the money back in any kind of timely fashion), I had made arrangements to use savings and max out the credit cards with advances. That earlier morning, however, when I got up and checked the bank balance before going to the bank for the advances, I found that all the rest of the automatic payments for the month had been sent in and cashed, bringing the negative balance to a level beyond my capacity to make up in the manner I had planned. (I have no idea how the earlier release date got on those checks. I must have made a typo on the automatic payment date for them, but that seems strange. Possible, but truly odd and unlikely.) So, I was left with an impossible situation. What a crazy answer to a prayer for help! But God knows best, so I figured that since I could not catch up the account, anyway, I would not even try, especially since the amount I was able to round up would bring the negative balance to exactly $-666, and I did not like that number. I would just wait and see what would happen. Well, what happened was a bit extraordinary. First, the bank paid everything. Not maxing out the credit cards turned out to be important because we needed to put the car battery on them, as well as some other things that came up associated with Shane's emergency and other unexpected "activities" of this week. (Had my plan to fix matters myself worked, we would really have been stranded.) Then, yesterday, I saw that on Wednesday some per diem I was owed had come in, but for twice (!) the amount I expected. I was then back in the black by a few cents, and of course everything was much better Thursday morning, which was pay day.

This is why I never worry or even think again about any problem after turning it over to God: because God fixes things so well! (Well, there was that one time that I did worry, and God made it very clear to me that I should not do that; I never have again, at least so far.) My experiences in this vein have, I suppose, turned me into a little kid, always expecting the parent to rush the rescue. Actually, I never ask to escape the bad. I don't even worry about bad things happening; they happen, and that is inescapable life, free will, bad genes, evil-doers, and all that. But I do expect to be rescued. I also know that something good will come from the bad stuff, and I am curious enough to want to see what it is. I do bring the bad stuff to God's attention because I think it never hurts to ask, but generally I only ask once because somehow I am pretty certain, given the complications of our lives, that God must have us on a weekly checklist: "clean up this week's Mahlou mess."

So, Thursday morning started out easy! Little did any of us know what was to come!

After being picked up, I watched Nikolina while Lemony went to visit Shane in the hospital. Shane's appendix, it turned out was not about to rupture as the doctors thought Tuesday evening. It had already ruptured several days earlier, but apparently the concern over Nikolina's spinal surgery and the trips back and forth from Stanford kept him ignoring the pain. Only after Nikolina was home did he realize that something was wrong. Very wrong, as it turns out. He was full of gangrene. The appendix has been removed and his insides scrubbed. He is on mega doses of antibiotics, to which he seems to be responding well. The doctor has maintained a partially open incision because with Shane having a fever that comes and goes, the doctor is not certain that he got all the infection out. So, we wait. Until Monday, we are told. At least, Shane is now allowed visitors (initially restricted), and both we and Lemony have visited although yesterday Lemony's visits were abbreviated and between my babysitting duties and Donnie's trying to get a battery for an older car and wire money to Blaine (whose car had also broken down) -- once again glad that we had not gone ahead and maxed out the credit cards, we were not able to visit at all. But all of that was but a hint of things to come.

Not long after leaving for the hospital, Lemony returned home with Nathaniel in tow. The school had called about ten minutes after she arrived in Shane's room to ask her to pick up Nathaniel who was being sent home with conjunctivitis. She had to take him to the pediatrician, who is in a city south of us by about 20 miles. Most of her afternoon was spent on that while I got to teach Nikolina pattycake and other baby games that her great-great grandmother taught me. (It's interesting to see how, as a grandmother, I instinctively mimic my grandmother, not my mother nor myself as a mother. Odd!)

Lemony returned just in time for me to give Nathaniel a hug, and then both of them went off to open house at school. Donnie showed up at Lemony's with a working car, and we were just beginning to relax from all the stress and trauma of the past week, beginning with Nikolina's surgery, when all the lights went out. A helicopter that was helping to put out a forest fire several miles away had flown into the power lines and knocked out the electricity and cell phone tower for three towns. Lemony came home, left Nathaniel with us, and went to the hospital to confer with Shane on next steps. Nikolina was not tolerating the 100+ degree weather without air conditioning, and not having a working phone in an emergency was a concern.

Shane and Lemony found a hotel for Lemony and the kids about 30 miles north that had electricity and air conditioning -- and space. Off we went in our two-car caravan. (We did not want Lemony driving alone without a working cell phone.)

What fun! After settling Nikolina and Lemony into the hotel (Nikolina immediately perked up), we picked up some snacks for the next morning for Lemony and kids, gas, and dinner at Denny's. (Once again, I was glad I had not maxed out those credit cards.) After dinner, Nathaniel and I had fun splitting a root beer float: I drank the root beer, he sipped the "fuzzy stuff," and we split the ice cream. Then he proudly carried Lemony's dinner that we had ordered for her as take-out back to her at the hotel. As I left, I turned to say goodnight to him, but he was fast asleep in the bed, shoes and all!

We arrived back home at midnight and went straight to bed but not before offering a prayer of gratitude for once again being spoiled. Fixed finances. Car that works. Shane out of danger. Nikolina home (well, hotel, but better than the hospital). A day spent with family, which is hard for me to get, given a job that has me traveling frequently. And important lessons taught (and, hopefully, learned), such as

(1) Family is more important than work;
(2) Family bonds are built through time spent together, even if it is shared trauma;
(3) People have physical limits -- we should keep those in mind and enjoy our family and friends every day, treating them as though we have limited time with them because we truly do;
(4) There is no problem that God cannot fix better than we can try to mend ourselves:
(5) God will come through for us, just perhaps not always at the time or place or in the manner we anticipate;
(6) Cars, modern conveniences, things -- none of these are more important than relationships with family, friends, God;
(7) It is important to stop and smell the roses -- had not all these things happened this week, I would have been at work from 8-8 and would not even have seen the roses, let alone stopped to smell them; it is important to remember that life is for the enjoying, the valuing, the gee-whizzing, and the thank-you-God'ing, not for burying ourselves so deeply into our work that miss out on the wonder of it all;
(8) It is okay not to be fully mature, to run to God whenever help is needed;
(9) We can trust God without reservations of any sort; we don't have to worry (we simply choose to); and
(10) God likes to spoil us.

Yesterday, Lemony asked me rehtorically, "When is this all going to stop?" Ah, she has missed the point. It may not stop. Life is what it is. It is not important that the bad stuff stop because God will fix it, God will use it to teach us important lessons, and in many cases God will use the bad for ultimate good, often widespread good for many people. In the end, if we let Him, God will spoil us.

God, for sure, spoils me and mine. But you don't see me complaining!! As Nathaniel recently said to me, "Grandma Beth, you spoil me, but that's okay because I love it." Likewise, I say, "God, you spoil me, but that's okay because I love it!