My posts here have slowed down, but that's only because my life hasn't. I had some high and low and hilarious moments over the past two weeks. Just after my last post, I received an email from REHAB that my insurance had overlooked a $47,000 payment to them for my treatment during April of last year. I spent the next week emailing them and my insurance and reading over diagnosis reports from my five month hospital stay. Honestly, it was a little traumatic. I've come so far, and it's great to celebrate that, but I don't like being jerked back into details retellings of the painful and dependent position I was in a year ago. It certainly didn't help that this came up the day before my German tax meetings where I also had to go through months of medical bills and receipts and explain my payments and reimbursements to a tax consultant. It was pretty stressful. This week also marked the end of the post-season for the Blazers which was emotionally rough.[...]

A few years ago I read the book Radical by David Platt; it was incredible. I just started reading Crazy Love, and I know I'm late on that train, but it's pretty great so far. These books are super encouraging to me as one of those crazy people who packed up and moved across the globe "because God told me to." [...]

When I was an early teen, the Matrix sequels were a big deal. So much so, Ron Luce's crew did a Matrix theme for Acquire the Fire the first year I went. I've never seen the second two Matrix movies, so I'm not sure how much came from those, but the whole "red pill/blue pill" thing was a big deal in the first movie and they made it into the "red door/blue door" at AtF. For those of you who might not remember the Matrix, the main characters discovered they lived in a world that just made them batteries to power someone else's world. People who discovered this could choose to take a blue pill to forget everything and life a copper-top life of ignorance or they could take the red pill and leave the matrix to forever fight against the abuse of humans as fuel. Or something like that; I honestly don't remember much, and it was a super complicated film.[...]

Things are constantly changing inside my body, and there are nerves growing millimeters a day with results that I can't see yet. I haven't posted here for a while because I was preparing for spring break then enjoying my first week of break, and I felt like I had no updates to offer here. [...]

Just like Queen, I want it now, too.

Sunday night at family group, we talked about prayer, and one of the adults asked me if the group could pray over me before we finished for the night. I will never turn down prayer. As he presented the idea to the group, he said, "I'm not sure what healing looks like." That struck me pretty powerfully because that's been something I've wrestled with over the past year. Someone asked what I'd like them to pray for specifically, and I responded, "I want it all." I clarified that while I do want everything physical restored, I'm also not sure what healing looks like, but I know it's more than physical. When I say I want it all, I mean physical, emotional, and spiritual healing of things that were broken even before my accident last January. [...]

It's amazing the way people rally around individuals in crisis. I saw it when I woke up from surgery over a year ago, and the city of Portland is witnessing it now after Wesley Matthews ruptured his Achilles tendon. Several days after, he posted a really honest reflection on his facebook that I really resonate with. He wrote "none of it felt real, and to be honest, it still doesn't." Sometimes I feel that way over a year later. I still have mornings where I wake up and expect to be able to move my legs normally. It hasn't happened yet. They're still stiff and spasing on me. I still have to set an extra alarm to take the muscle relaxants an hour before I get out of bed.[...]

Get ready for a long post. Maybe skip a few paragraphs if you're in a rush. Like after the indented material perhaps. It's been a while since I've had a Demon Hunter inspired post, and I was just preparing my lesson for next Monday comparing Demon Hunter lyrics to the Psalms, so I thought I'd reflect a little here on some of their songs and how they relate to my holistic recovery process. I was on the fan site where the band posts some background on the inspiration or meaning of each song. This is the content for the song "Incision" off their album Storm the Gates of Hell: [...]

Last week I was thinking how I didn't seem to have any new developments to share here, and I was a little disheartened. I want to tell you all what great progress I'm making, but sometimes I go long stretches with no visible progress. And that's okay. Monday, a friend came over to have tea, and she shared an anecdote about a someone who was practicing lifting a weight with a single finger every day for weeks and couldn't ever get more than a dozen or so reps until one day he suddenly was able to get over thirty. We talked about how this fit with my recovery as I still have to faithfully go through the motions of my therapies and daily routine consistently hoping for more but occasionally stuck in a run of no improvements. [...]

Yesterday, one of my coworkers commented, "I know it's tough to be at work on your birthday," as he added a gift to another sitting on my desk. [...]

We started a new semester at BFA on Monday, so today I was teaching a new group of juniors about biblical manuscripts and translations. One student asked me why we would choose to translate the Bible into so many languages when the Muslims believed it was sinful to translate the Koran because it risked skewing and misinterpreting the words of Allah. My response was that we are so excited to share the Gospel - the Good News - that we want to reach everyone with it and learning ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew might be a stumbling block to them. It's such a human response to want to share good news. As Christians, we are desperate to share the good news that Yahweh made a way to restore relationship with us that we have broken through our selfishness. We are so excited to share that message, that we will translate it into every language we can - we're still in the process.[...]