Unfinished.......

They're working on it.......:-)

"Is Stu home yet?" 
My favorite question :-(
The answer is so simple----but so complicated.

No.

I struggle with all the elements that go into that "no."

And the questions that come next (I would ask them myself)
"Do you know when he'll be able to come home?"  or "How come?"

One of the things I love about our church is the fellowship time afterwards-----sometimes as I talk things over with my friends there, I get some insight about what's happening in this situation.  It happened today as I answered these questions in a group of ladies who have been following the saga since it started.   I ticked off the complications:  The remodel is progressing, but we battle weather and schedules----almost all the work is volunteer, so weekends tend to be when work can be accomplished;  Stu himself is far from recovered, and requires major care, but until the bathroom, flooring, roofing and addition walls are finished, I can't really start the process of interviewing caregivers.  I need to give them a time when they will start-----but I can't predict when the work will be finished!  All the equipment needed also has to come through SDA, and who can tell how long that will take?   There's more, but I think you get the drift.

As I described all the factors that are conspiring to keep Stu at Laurel Hill, it struck me that they are like cords of difficulty, binding him to an unhappy circumstance.  If you have read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", you will remember the scene where the witch has the great Lion Aslan lashed to the stone table, after shaving his mane (a picture of humiliation), and then kills him.  He is left on the stone table, hopelessly lashed to it, and Susan and Lucy watch from the shadows, devastated by the tragedy.  They want to unbind him, but they don't have the power.  They feel utterly helpless and broken-hearted.   But God sends unlikely liberators, doesn't he?   Mice!  Mice nibble away at the cords and free Aslan.   And then Aslan comes back to life!

I think that sometimes we are lashed to our circumstances with cords we don't know how to sever.  And I think it's easy to look at the difficulty we're facing and despair.  But God has ways of liberating us that are so simple and unexpected, it makes me laugh out loud with delight.  I am learning to expect it of him!   So, as bewildering as the current state of affairs seems, with more loose ends than finished,  I trust that God knows exactly what He's doing-------he is knitting together things I don't even know about.  I think gratefully of the long string of miracles that has bound this chapter of our life together, and I take heart.  God's knitting is more enduring than those dark cords that trouble us!

As always, I will keep you posted!

Until then, join me in keeping the faith, friends!

Sue