I'm a big fan of Jesus. (That should be obvious by now.) There's this story recorded in the Gospel of Mark about Jesus healing a paralyzed man. It blew my mind away when I read it recently. [...]

Yesterday in many liturgical services across the globe, Christians celebrated the day Jesus was first brought into the temple. When the chaplain spoke about it at my church yesterday, he focused on the encounter Jesus had with Simeon. This old dude was tight with the Holy Spirit, and Simeon was led to the temple that day to encounter the Messiah. It was no accident that he reached out for the holy child, and he knew in that moment that it was a blessed encounter.[...]

Many people have heard the story of my sixteenth birthday when I had the audacity to invite my entire high school student body (of 150 students) to my house for a birthday party that accidentally coincided with the Super Bowl. I just rolled with it after that right up until I moved to Germany and broke my back. The first birthday I celebrated here, I was in the REHAB facility and had an amazing response from people around the globe who prayed for five specific prayer requests I presented through a Facebook event. I did the same thing last year, and I'm inviting you to "Better than a Super Birthday Bowl III" this year to celebrate my Savior and pray over five new requests. [...]

I have a lot of feelings. They are complex, and not all interrelated. The past week has been emotionally and physically demanding. I’m exhausted from it all. I’ve thought a lot about what I want to share on the second anniversary of my accident. In preparation, I’ve read and reread thoughts from several other people with SCIs reflecting on their own various anniversaries. People like Darla Greven, Steve Staint, and Ryan Atkins give me a lot of great perspective, and younger women like Cassidy Almquist and Emma Carey who are a couple years ahead on the SCI journey but a couple years younger than I am also are helpful in my processing. Emma has recovered significantly more than I have, but her thoughts about how she is more than her accident resonate with me deeply. She writes, “When something as major as this happens in your life, it’s hard to not let it define you and become your whole identity. People see me as either ‘the skydive accident girl’ or 'the girl who learnt to walk again’ but I am both and neither of those things at the same time.” I understand because I’m more than ‘the girl who broke her back’ or ‘the teacher in a wheelchair.’ They are facts that can be used to describe part of who I am, but I’m so much more than that.[...]

"The saying is trustworthy, for 'if we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless he remains faithful' for he cannot deny himself." (2 Timothy 2:11-13)[...]

Stories compel me to do strange things. When I read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s disturbingly descriptive novel in college, I went on a heat fast. The book follows the protagonist through a single day in a Siberian internment camp during the winter. It’s cold. You feel cold when you read the book even if you’re sitting in a sauna, basking on a beach, anywhere you might be. The characters complete their routines with remarkable efficiency despite the cold. There are vivid descriptions of events and the laborer’s senses are simultaneously dulled and sharpened by the winter chill. Dulled because you start to loose feeling in the cold, but sharpened because there’s an intense focus brought on by the need to complete daily tasks in order to survive. [...]

I don't have the same New Year miracle like I did last year, but in some ways, I think this New Year's day was even better than last when I wiggled my toe for the first time. I spent the evening with some friends and laughed a lot as we ate raclette and waited for a reasonable time to go in to the cold Blumenplatz and watch drunk Germans set off dangerous fireworks. I'll be honest, this year was much more terrifying than the previous two as there were considerably more of the large rockets were dropped and shot across the ground. Fortunately, we all survived the show and escaped burn free. [...]

I've got a long way to go in my recovery, but I've come an incredible distance. I had a beautiful reminder of that last night as I celebrated Second Christmas with my former neighbors who used to visit me in REHAB. When I first moved to Germany, I met this couple but was unable to communicate with them directly because they don't speak any English. Gundi was reflecting with her daughter about how when she and her husband first visited me in REHAB all those months ago, they were so excited by a little wiggle in my knees and my whopping two word Swiss German vocabulary. By the next visit, I'd picked up a handful of words and could just barely lift my legs in the seated position. The third time they visited, they had to explain to Sandra (who usually translated between us) some of the Swiss German phrases I was using; they also witnessed with delight as I stood and took timid steps with the modified walker. [...]

I've started this post three times already, but I'm not really sure what to focus on since so much has happened in the last week. Wednesday I successfully finished classes with my precious students, and they have scattered to different corners of the globe for the next three weeks. (I'm still a little jealous of the one spending the break in Colorado Springs.) Thursday I went out to dinner with the rest of the Bible department to enjoy time with my great coworkers. Friday I spent time with my physio again working to loosen my ankles. Anja moved the feet and instructed me to think about the motion and try to help. I'm still a long way away from moving my ankles on my own, but it was months of practice before I had any real control over the flexing in my butt.[...]

Once upon a time, my mom asked me, "Guess what?" I responded, "It's almost Christmas." I'm pretty sure this began in July. Now, whenever I'm asked that question, my response usually is, "It's almost Christmas." We're so close to Christmas break at BFA, my students are using that phrase liberally in their conversations. "It's almost Christmas - can we have a party in class?" "Why do we still have homework? It's almost Christmas."[...]