I think it’s been over a week since my last post.  Life has been crazy with a multitude of adjustments.  My daughter did not have to have surgery on her arm, but she did have to have a new cast, which induced lots of tears pouring and steam pouring out of ears — and that’s just with me!  The new-cast-process ended with another x-ray and a nurse practitioner shouting out to us as they were herding us out that “the bones might have shifted a bit but I think they’re okay.”

I literally had a sleepless night, worrying that the bones had in fact shifted too far apart and that she’d later need surgery.  My husband and I were both basket cases, and our daughter was in some serious pain after getting the new cast (with no pain medication offered, I might add).  So I scheduled an appointment with the orthopedic clinic at Children’s Medical Center Legacy for a second opinion.  It’s the same practice…different clinic.  Seriously, if you live in the DFW area and need an orthopedic clinic, go to Children’s Medical Center Legacy.  The facilities are brighter and cleaner, but more importantly, the staff treats its patients like people rather than like cattle being herded down the prairie.  I have to extend kudos to the wonderful doctors and nurse practitioners and cast technicians at the Plano location.  It turns out that her bones did, in fact, shift, and she wasn’t imagining things when she cried out that she felt the bones moving in her arm.  But the shift was in a good direction, not a bad one.

Now our lives are settling back into a routine.  We’ve made lots of accommodations, and I’ve been in the thick of everything as I serve as my daughter’s hand, writing down things that she can’t.  We are doing her spelling words and language arts on the computer now so that she can type them.  Why didn’t I think of this before?  It’s so much easier!

That is the beauty of homeschooling.  I am praying every day that the Lord will preserve our freedoms in this regard.  I know my daughter is thriving with one-on-one attention.  I also know that not every mom or dad out there is “cut out” to homeschool.  It takes discipline.  It takes a parent willing to view education as a lifetime endeavor.  It takes someone willing to sacrifice time and money.  Every year, $8000 of our money goes to someone else’s kid because we choose not to enroll our child in public school.  That is a huge sacrifice when you think about it — but it is so very worth it!

We are studying the Great Depression.  The parallels between then and now are eerie.  I am not running around saying we’re going to tank like we did back then, but I do see that the pendulum has swung in the big government direction once again.  America elected FDR because they wanted change.  And he brought it.  He tried lots of different experiments, things that had not been done before.  Some were successful and some were not, but at least he tried.  Many in America, however, were disillusioned because they hung their very existence on FDR’s ability to wave a magic wand and save them.  But it took time to get out of the hole.  The main thing America needed, though, was a leader to step up and tell them it would be okay.  FDR did that…he convinced Americans that nothing REAL had changed.  They were the same people.  They had the same vast natural resources.  The same intelligence and ingenuity…

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

Isn’t that so applicable today?  Sometimes I wish we didn’t have the internet and access to news 24/7.  Lately I haven’t even been watching it because all I see every day is expert after expert predicting more gloom and doom.  I see people waiting in job fair lines, and my heart aches, and before I know it, I grow fearful that someone I know and love will be hit with unemployment.

But you know what?  That’s okay.  We can house more people in our home if we ever needed to.  We are planting a garden this spring.  But most of all, I remember that Jesus warned us not to get too attached to things of this world.  They ARE passing away.  What is money, anyway?  Truly it has no intrinsic value above that which we place on it.  It is a tool that we use to purchase the supplies we need to live on.

I’ve been reading Epicenter,  by Joel Rosenberg.  It’s a non-fiction book that focuses on events in the Middle East and how they are seemingly lining up with prophesies in Ezekiel.  Very curious things.  Jesus told us to be ever watchful…yet he himself did not know when God would send him back.

In light of the recent story about Americans losing their religion, I hope — for their sakes — that He keeps his hand on the hold button awhile longer.  My heart aches for those who are standing in the unemployment lines with no faith in the One who could save them, if they’d only let him in their hearts…because our current president is NOT their savior or mine.  Only Jesus is.