Jordan,

 

 Today we will all gather together in that crazy ritual known as the “baby shower” where friends and family come together, bringing gifts, playing silly games, we will eat good food as we celebrate and help you prepare for the birth of your first born child.

 There will be a gift there from us, but I wanted to give you something different also, so I write these words for you from my heart.

  Soon you will experience that wonderful moment, the one like nothing else you have ever experienced, nor will there ever be anything to top it, whereby they place that tiny child into your hands, where you gaze upon him for the first time, where you marvel at his perfection, his beauty and where your heart will be filled with a love unlike anything you have ever known. In fact, on that moment you will utterly lose your heart and the person that has been Jordan will in many ways cease to exist and you will become Mom. This losing of you is not a bad thing, in fact it is a wonderful miraculous thing!

 Being Mom has shaped me, changed me, taught me in so many different ways, and it is the thing of which I am most proud in my life, it has been my calling, my purpose and I am forever grateful to God that He called me to be Mom as He is now calling you to be Mom.

 Cherish the moments, hold them close to your heart, and write them down, for these moments pass all too soon. The tiredness, the worry, the frustrations can block out these moments if you are not careful.  When standing by a crib at 2:00 AM, holding a fussy child when all your body wants and craves is a few moments of sleep it is difficult to cherish the moment, the smell of the child, the feel of him against your chest, the grace of the moment where you have been given this blessing of life can easily be overshadowed by the tiredness that motherhood brings. You will fail in achieving this sometimes, the frustration and the tiredness will win, that’s okay, it’s not an easy thing to do, but endeavor to live in the moment, rejoice in the moment, and have faith in the moment for in truth all we have is the right here, right now and each moment is a precious thing.

 Try to hold fast to the wonder of it all, for one day, and you will not know it when this day comes, you will hold them in that way for the last time. One day you will change the last diaper, you will prepare the last bottle, you will struggle with the car seat for the last time, you will dress them for the last time, and you will wipe their nose for the last time (although I confess you will feel the need to do it for them even when they are adults!) The moments are fleeting Jordan; you won’t easily see this yourself, for it is more easily seen from the perspective of those of us who have done these things for the last time. Cherish the moments!

   There will be so many wonderful firsts to celebrate…..his first smile, the first time he rolls over, the first time he crawls, his first steps, his first words, the delight he takes as he sees new things, touches new things, smells and tastes new things, the wonder of it all as you are graced with the task of showing him this big and beautiful world! There will be wonderful Christmas memories, Halloween costumes, birthday parties and sporting events and wonder upon wonder as you watch this child grow!

  And there will be the hard firsts. That first time you drop him off at a daycare or school, where he is with people who are not family, not you…..and that first day when he cries as you drop him off and you must walk away, the first time he is sick, the first time he is hurt by someone, the first time he faces a bully, the first time his heart is broken, the first time he makes a bad mistake, the first time he loses faith in himself, the first time he doubts he can do something, the first time he tastes defeat, …….the hard things of life will hurt, they will break your heart, but cover these things in your prayers from the moment you first hold him, God is faithful, He is shaping a man and He has blessed you to carry all these things in your heart.

Pray Jordan, pray every single day, whisper a thousand prayers, whisper them as he sleeps, as you hold him in your arms, as you watch him crawl and take his first steps……pray, pray, always pray, cover him with a hundred thousand prayers, enough to cover him all the days of his life, for there will be things you cannot protect him from, he will go places that you will not go, he will face moments that you will be unable to step in front of him, nor should you. These are the most difficult times to be a Mom; these are the times when your heart feels as if it will surely die. I have no idea how Mom’s do it without a sure faith in God. Cling to the cross and pray, for God is faithful and God will walk with him all the days of his life and in all the places where you cannot follow. God is with him, and remember always that God loves this child even more than you do! Yet another marvelous truth to rejoice in!

 You will struggle with that last one. How can it be possible that anyone could love this child more than you? You who would lay down life and limb, you would give all your tomorrows to ensure life for this child, you who would willingly endure any hardship, any struggle, take on all the pain, all the sorrow to ensure peace and happiness for the child can find it difficult to truly understand that God loves even more and His love is a pure and perfect one, that will ever seek that which is best for the child. Find rest in that sure knowledge. Whatever comes, God has it all, and He will see you through it.

  So live these years slow, cherish the moments, practice living a life of gratitude and wonder for this beautiful life that God is placing into your hands, this wonderful calling that God is calling you to…….the calling of Mom. Pray, pray and pray some more, pray the prayers on your knees, the prayers on your face, the tired whispered prayers as your head hits the pillow, the joyful prayers as you live out the moments of wonder and beauty…..pray…..pray….pray!  God will guide you, strengthen you, shape you, hold you and use you, in this glorious work He is doing as He brings forth into the world a new little boy child!

 You are going to be a wonderful Mom Jordan Ortega!

 

  Your Auntie Donna

 

 

 

Save Now!

 

  I was chatting with a friend this morning, someone who like me loves someone with PTSD. Our conversation led me to think about how often I have desired for the Lord to save now, to not wait, to not tarry even one more minute, how often we all do this, we who follow Christ.

  We may be fully and completely convinced of His sure ability to save, we may have complete faith in Him, and yet we desperately want Him to come RIGHT NOW, to remove this pain RIGHT NOW, to save RIGHT NOW! It is terribly difficult to walk through pain and sorrow, to watch the ones you love so very much suffer. It is, and remains the most awful thing I have ever felt. I would rather suffer my personal sorrows one hundred thousand times over; than to watch the ones I love most suffer theirs.

  As my friend and I chatted, I begin to think about the day the Lord rode into Jerusalem on a young donkey.  The crowds were so exuberant. They had seen Him heal the sick, seen the blind given sight, seen the lame get up and walk, seen the demon possessed set free, and even seen the dead walk out of their tombs! The people were convinced, they needed no more proof. This was their long awaited Messiah! The kingdom of God was at hand! Their King was entering the gates of the city, seated on a donkey, as so many kings before Him had ridden in. Hosanna! Hosanna! Save now!

  I thought about those people, the ones who had stood at the gates, waving their palm branches and throwing down their cloaks and crying “Hosanna! Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord!” Hosanna! The word means “save now” or “Please save! I believe they were convinced that He was the One and they were convinced that things were going to change now! Their King had come…….,Yet  how devastated they must have been and how utterly confused when the very next day, they watched Him stumble through the streets carrying a cross, His back beaten bloody, Him so weak that another had to be pulled from the crowd to carry His cross…….save now! Save now! Seems such a foolish cry at this point, for He does not even attempt to save Himself.

 And yet all this had to come to pass, it had to go down in the bloody and tragic way that it did. He had to die in order to pay the price for sin, and He had to die in order to rise alive, and defeat death. But at the time, they certainly couldn’t see it. How downcast and afraid they must have been. How disappointed.

 And yet, if we look back upon that day, as we do today, and we see the majesty of it all, how God did so very much more than what they asked Him to do on that day so long ago, when the King of glory rode into Jerusalem on the back of a young donkey. They wanted an earthly king, they wanted an end to the Roman oppression, they wanted their bodies healed, their bellies to be full, but He was busy bringing eternal life to His people, He was busy crushing the head of the serpent and buying passage to glory for a multitude of souls. He was busy with the work of defeating sin and death once and for all. They just couldn’t see it.

 

  I too have tasted their disappointment. I have cried out with all that is within me, SAVE NOW! I was convinced without a shred of doubt that He was able to save, that He was my only hope, my faith in Him was sure……but He tarried. He did not come on my timetable, He did not save immediately. I too was devastated.  I too cried out for the pain to stop, for the healing to come, and I too wept at the foot of the cross thinking that all that I so longed for, was not coming.

  And yet as I look back, over some six years of the most intense struggles of my life, I see His hand at work. I see how He was doing so much more than what I had asked and longed for. He was saving, and He was building, and He was working. He still is! While I pleaded for the salvation of my loved ones, for their pain to stop, for their healing to come, He was bringing about a change in me, and a change in them, and the salvation and restoration of many, and He was using all that pain, all that hurt, to reach others, and to change lives.

  Hard times will come. Sometimes I wish that the positive movement, the name it and claim it people were right, that just having enough faith will see you heaped with monetary blessing and worldly happiness and that there will never be a single day of pain, or sickness, or mental anguish. But they are wrong. Hard times will come. Trusting God is not easy when they do come. Watching someone you love dealing with a depth of pain almost beyond comprehension is not easy. Laying them down on the altar of God is not easy. Believing that He has it all in His hands and that He intends good for you and yours is not easy. The hard times HURT. Losing people hurts, seeing them make grievous mistakes hurts, making grievous mistakes yourself hurts, being utterly helpless while everything around you is crumbling into pieces hurts.

  But God is faithful. If you can just hold on to that, cling to it with everything in you, and pray like you never prayed before. You will see, like the people who shouted Hosanna, and saw their King crucified, their hopes crushed, and yet lived to see Him rise from the dead, and start His church, and they turned the world upside down, He will turn your world upside down too! He will be victorious in your life, He will and has heard your prayers, He hears your cries of SAVE NOW LORD, but He is working, He is working to do so much more than you could imagine.

  I eagerly await the end of our story, for we have not reached it yet, but I am excited to see what He will do. I see Him moving! I see His hand in so very many things, I have seen people, so many people, blessed by the things that have come out of our struggles, and I can only see a little bit of what He is doing, and He isn’t done yet. It’s gonna be awesome for He is an awesome God.

  So if its hard right now, if it feels like it’s never going to let up, if you, like me are watching things crumble and are helpless to stop it, pray, pray and believe, and in your unbelief ask Him to help you. Fall on your face before Him when you cannot go another step, and then get up and get out there and tell others about Him, share your struggles, share your triumphs, ask for prayer, and pray, pray, pray. The King is coming! He saves! He is faithful!

  Folks who know me personally know that the last few years have been a struggle for many reasons. A son sent to war, a family struggling because a son is at war, family members lost to suicide and a son returning from war and all the struggles that come in trying to return all the way home.

  Having never been to war, I can only speak from my experience as a Caregiver and parent to someone who has but one thing is certain about coming home from war, it involves far more than stepping onto that aircraft that flies you home. Bringing the physical body home is easy, bringing the whole person home can be a struggle.

  During these years I have learned a lot, I have grown, and I have met a great many wonderful people. Today I would like to speak of one person and honor her memory.

  While attempting, with everything I had in me to assist my veteran in navigating the cold stiff oceans of molasses that can be the VA Healthcare System, I had reached a point of near despair. We just were not getting anywhere, nobody was listening and if they did listen it seemed they often heard something other than what we were attempting to say, until one day the phone rang and on the other end of the line was a lady named Julie Ferguson. She introduced herself as the OIF/OEF Case Worker at the Albuquerque VA that we had been frantically fighting our way through.

  I liked her immediately.  She came off warm and caring and so enthusiastic. You could not help but believe in her sincerity. I liked her even more when we went up to meet her the next day. She began working hard for my veteran right away, and she kept us informed always of what she was doing. Within a short time she had established a bridge for us to stand on while we waited for that far in the future appointment. Along with these things she offered other avenues of help. When she learned we had dropped out of training our veteran’s service dog, for financial reasons she jumped right into that and begin reaching out to our trainer and to Wounded Warriors to try and procure funding to complete the training. She was like a worker bee, flying about from place to place, searching under every rock for the way to get past the obstacles. She was relentless.

 She and I talked a lot on the phone. We felt at ease with each other, and even talked about getting together outside of work and establishing a friendship. I often doubted the VA, doubted the system, and doubted the doctors…..but I never once doubted her. Her sincerity and desire to help were a rock you could stand on. I remember when the bridge she worked so hard to build for us began to crumble, and I was so upset, so at the end of my ability to cope with it all, I was talking on the phone with her, I was crying and I said “Julie, I don’t doubt you for a second, but there is only so much you can do, I feel I need to come down and protest, need to call Channel 7 news, need to do anything and everything I can to make this stop!”………and she got quiet for a moment and then she said.” Donna, let me work on this, if I cannot fix this I will go to Channel 7 with you.” And I believe she would have. As it turned out she was able to fix our crumbling bridge and make it secure enough to walk across.

  On another occasion just before she passed away, we were talking. She was saying how much she loved her job, how much she truly desired to make a difference for her veterans. I was telling her things from my side and some of the experiences these young men had gone through who have fought for us, the things they have done, their courage and sacrifice and she asked me “Donna, what can I do to get to know their side better? I have ordered every book I can on PTSD and TBI and I try to stay informed, but how can I understand their side better.”  I told her about some war memoirs I have read and she was so excited, and wrote down the names so she could order them and read them. She was going to order House to House and Outlaw Platoon!  She truly wanted to understand as best she could what war is like, what the veterans who come to her for help have been through. The things they carry. My respect for her went even higher.

 Because of the struggles we had faced in getting the care needed for my veteran both I and he were somewhat disillusioned and distrusting. Julie would always encourage us. She wrangled an appointment with a doctor that she wanted for my veteran, telling us how she really trusted this doctor and really believed in her. She would tell me how she longed to move time forward so we could just get to the appointment and meet the doctor and be at peace about the care our veteran would receive.

  The day of our appointment arrived. The appointment the day before with another provider had not gone well, so we were not expecting this one to either. I had emailed Julie two or three times and she had not responded, which was very unusual. I assumed that she was ill or perhaps on vacation and since I arrived to the VA ahead of my veteran and with plenty of time I decided to go up to her office to see if she was in.

  Her door was shut, so I assumed she was out of office and turned to walk away when a lady asked me quietly, “who are you looking for?”, and I told her “Julie”. Her face fell and her voice quivered as she said “I am sorry to inform you that Julie passed away on Sunday”. I cannot even put into words the feelings that coursed through me, sorrow, and loss, even guilt that all our conversations had been mostly about me and my veteran and our struggles and that I hadn’t gotten to know her better.

  We went to our appointment apprehensive. We left hopeful. First impressions seem to indicate that this doctor is everything that July said she was.

  Julie Ferguson made a difference in our lives. I am pretty certain that she made a difference in the lives of others also. She was not expecting to die. She had plans, big plans, and she was constantly working on how she could better serve her veterans. Her life is a lesson to us all and there are several things that she taught me in our brief friendship.

• Never lose hope.
• Never stop working.
• If you don’t understand someone’s perspective work to understand. Invest the time to understand.
• Be a light in the darkness.
• Love big.
• Network to make things better.
• Live like today is your last day. It very well might be.

 

Julie gave us a piece of her heart; I expect she gave a piece out to everyone who came to her for help. I think she had discovered the secret that when one gives out a piece of their heart to others, although it might hurt to so invest yourself, you find that your heart does not diminish, instead it grows larger.

 Julie left us, on Sunday the 4^th of October, we will miss her greatly, but before she left she turned the lights on. Where we had struggled through a maze of darkness she switched on a light, plowed through obstacles and opened the door to hope.

 You were right Julie. She is a great doctor and I think we are going to be okay now. You get a huge piece of that, we would not have made it had you not been there switching on the lights.

Go with God Julie Ferguson.  I cannot thank you, so instead I will endeavor to love big, to never lose hope and to be the kind of person who works to turn the lights on for others.

 

Rest in Peace

Julie Ferguson

OIF/OEF/OND Nurse Case Manager

New Mexico VA Health Care System

 

I do not have a photo of Julie so I felt the next best thing would be a photo of Florence Nightingale “The Lady With the Lantern”

 

    One of the most popular shows of all time is the series The Walking Dead, which portrays the lives of a small group of people, thrown together by a terrible tragedy whereby the vast majority of the population have turned into zombies and where everyone carries the virus within them that upon physical death they too will become the walking dead.

   I often wonder why we are so drawn to shows like this, where the world civilizations crumble and a handful of people survive? I wonder if its because deep down humanity knows that we are all carrying the virus. We are the walking dead. The Bible tells us in many places that without Christ we are dead in our sins and trespasses. Christ is the Lifegiver, Christ is the Redeemer, Christ is the cure for our walking dead virus. There is no other cure. There are things that we do to alleviate our suffering, Band-Aids that we place upon the gaping wounds of our souls. They work for a time. We search for money, we search for love, we search for gratification, we search for medical assistance, for age defyers, for distractions...... we pursue the spiritual.....we pursue happiness.....we pursue pleasure.....we search and we search, grasping up our various Band-Aids and placing them on our patchwork souls......but in the end to no avail. We are dead and we are powerless to change that.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

For all have sinned and fall short of God's glory.

 During Jesus' time here on earth there was a young man who wanted to follow him, and the young man told the Lord "just let me bury my father and I will come and follow You." But Jesus said to him, "Follow Me, and allow the dead to bury their own dead." What did he mean by this?  He was referring to the people of the world, the people without Him. All who do not have Christ are dead.....the walking dead.

 Jesus Christ is the only source, the only hope of peace and life. There is no other. Everything else that we use to attempt to fill the empty spaces of our souls is superficial and non lasting. There is no pill to make us better, there is no purchase that satisfies, there is no person who fills the hole, no pleasure, no distraction.

 King Solomon stated perfectly the results of the life without Christ " I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. ¹And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.  I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity    and a striving after wind.

 I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.

 May you hear the voice of Jesus and come out of your tomb and live.

Words spoken fade upon the wind,

If lucky perhaps one or two will be remembered,

Or perhaps people will just say “she spoke often of this or that”

Without really remembering the words.

 

All those conversations,

All those attempts to get your message out,

Lost and forgotten for the most part,

Words spoken fade upon the wind.

 

Written words hold more hope,

They can capture your thoughts

And hold them for a time

Until said time and elements degrade them into dust.

 

I look back on my childhood,

Wishing I could go back

I would take notes this time

I would capture his words on paper.

 

I remember now how he tried so hard to impart his thoughts

Tried to put them into me, make them mine

He prayed for them to stick

But now, all I have is “he spoke often of this or that”.

 

The exact words are lost to me

Words spoken fade upon the wind

I wish I had paid more attention

Wish I had grasped the importance of it all.

 

So now I write words down,

In hopes that one day they will be read

That one day they will be cherished

That one day they will be understood.

 

Words spoken fade on the wind,

Words written crumble to dust over time,

But the Word of the Lord stands forever.

And that is enough for me.