Choose Joy

The Crawford family has been spending a little extra time at the bottom of the barrel lately.  Michelle’s mom died shortly followed by her grandmother.   For some reason that still totally escapes us her step-father turned on her and spent over a hundred thousand dollars trying to (in his words) destroy us.  Her MS got worse and for a while earlier this year she was using a wheel chair.  She still gets scary bad pain in her legs.  My career of 28 years ended.  Michelle left her job in April.  We’re in the middle of moving out of the town we’ve lived in since 1989 and going to Oklahoma where we’re both starting new jobs.  Michelle got diagnosed with Cancer in February.  Shane got diagnosed with cancer in June (and Shane’s is nasty bad).

Shane came home from the hospital yesterday and I had a chance to take my head out of him reacting badly to chemotherapy, the possibility of him going septic, and the pain they couldn’t control.  My head instantly jumped back to Michelle’s PET scan on July 10 to figure out more of her cancer diagnosis puzzle.  My job in Oklahoma, which has spent the last couple of weeks buried in the WAY back of my mind has come forward far enough for me to realize that school starts in a week and a half and I’m WAY behind where I planned to be on multiple projects.   I’ve missed deadlines in my efforts with the software used by the social workers.  I haven’t checked out the infrastructure and software build for my class.  I’m behind on the disc golf course I was going to have built before school started on July 18^th.  I’m behind in prepping for my first sessions teaching computer programming.  Sheesh, I don’t even know when my classes will be held or who my students are.

Michelle and I went to a little 50s diner for breakfast and were talking about our situation.  At one point I reminded her that Joy isn’t a normal state in life, it’s a choice.  Mandy had a friend who was dying and her friend used to say “I choose joy” as a guiding force in her life.

It’s smart. 

Michelle and I decided to go to work at a ministry which focuses on helping at-risk kids.    Many of our kids have been through the kind of scenarios that scary movies are made of.  Many arrive with a chip on their shoulder.  Many arrive totally bewildered and hurt.  We take them from where they are when they arrive and teach them how to deal with this thing called life.

One of the big things the kids, and all of us, need to understand is that there are things we can control and there are things we can’t.  When dealing with the things we can’t control we still have a choice.  We can choose how we let them affect us emotionally.

I’m at a place where part of me wants to withdraw and just find a way to make it all go away.  When I consider the pressing issues in my life right now, control is so far away that I realize I can’t even offer myself the illusion of control.

And then it occurs to me that this just isn’t true.  I can’t control Michelle’s health.  I can’t control Shane’s fight with the liver cancer, the colon cancer, and the mess that is flowing through his blood stream to all the other regions of his body.  I can't control the hate coming from Michelle's step-father and there is an endless list of less important things that I also can’t control but I still get to control my choices.

I've thought it over and I choose Joy.  To that end, this will be my last "dark" post for a while.  That doesn't mean I won't have any more tears, heck, I know someone who crys when strangers win big on game shows (and I'm not naming any names, but her initials are Michelle Crawford).  The fact is that most of what is hard and sad for me right now is the result of an incomplete picture from what is probably the wrong perspective.

I bet I will look back on all this in 500 years and smile.

(and Kudos to my little daughter’s friend Sarah who is already looking back)