I was sick with a cold type mess last week, and my legs put up a fight when Hunter and I went for a walk this past Thursday. I was disappointed in Beatrice and Virgil fighting my progress, but it turns out they were trying to communicate another mess on a microscopic level to me. I found out through a serious of other painful and obnoxious symptoms that I had yet another raging bladder infection. Ever the fan of natural remedies, I chowed down on raw garlic and upped my water intake immediately.
I’m going to be fully honest here, I’m frustrated with the fact that every few months I have to pay about fifteen bucks and a weekend with burning pain, increased spasms, and frequent light incontinence to recover from what might have been prevented if I had full reimbursement from my insurance to pay for all my prescribed preventative care. I’ll try to be as transparent as possible here, but there’s a pressure to spend my meager salary very intentionally because it’s all supplied by the generosity of others. I do have a way to get my employer to reimburse for certain expenses that are beyond my income and for tax reasons can claim back uncovered medical expenses, but that still all comes out of an account supplied by funds donated to me. I can choose between the tangible results from investing about $300 a month into my physical therapy and cutting the personal cost of about $300 in preventative care to closer to $50 each month. Would I love to pay for both? Absolutely, but that’s not my reality.
Sometimes I have to make tough choices on my medical care in the short term because I’m thinking about staying on the field as a missionary long term. It’s complex.
Fortunately, I love my job, and I had the absolute joy of several amazing interactions with students this week that confirmed I’m blessed beyond belief with the most incredible career. I had a handful of messages from recent alum that were uplifting in reminding me I’m making a positive impact in my ministry, but one of the most exciting was a grad from a couple years ago emailing me to ask why God had to create people. She’d visited my class a couple weeks ago and started this conversation, and I was so overjoyed that she wasn’t going to settle for simple answers and needed to know more. Another alum messaged me this week asking, “What do you know about Melchizedek?” which totally made my day because talking about the theological implications of a prophet/priest/king who falls into the eternal line of the non-levitical priesthood just warms my nerdy heart. Thursday after school, a current student sat in my house sipping tea and sharing how excited she was about the growth in her relationship with God over the past month. I was so excited to listen to her heart and share with her part of my story as we talked about how we have so much time to grow in our understanding of beautiful things in the Bible.
I am so humbled that students come to me with questions. A new student met with me on Friday and peppered dozens of questions about reading the Bible and understanding theology through our meeting about his quarter project in my class. I really value the opportunity to teach my students well and to continue conversations with them outside my class as they learn to love God and other people better.
Just a warning, I’m going to get real here for a second, so if you’re less interested in the emotional side of my recovery, you can stop reading at this point in the entry.
In this beautiful opportunity to teach all my students well, I work hard to show my peers and supervisors that I’m doing my job well too. I care first and foremost about representing Jesus well and teaching truth of the forgiveness, restoration, and joy available through understanding my content well. However, I have this self imposed burden of making sure I don’t look like a slacker on staff because I’m only a part timer. I had a really positive conversation with a coworker in the staff room this week where he generously told me that he’d never for a second thought of me as giving less than other staff members and had never heard any whispers or rumors of other people thinking I was getting unnecessarily excused from things. All this was after I admitted making a show of only missing things absolutely necessary by my disability and how hard it was for me to ask for the accommodation of less time on campus when I wanted to increase my work load and contribute more fully. I don’t know if that will ever get easier for me to ask for less work so that I can continue to do well what I am capable of. I’m still on a trajectory of improvement that allows me to do more and more, but I also want to be realistic with my limitations and not shame myself for reaching max capacity in my ministry and workload.
I want to be sustainable in my service.
Sometimes that means skipping the expensive preventative care, and sometimes that means being honest with the pain of these semi-annual infections, and asking for you to partner with me in paying for more frequent preventative care. Particularly as I look ahead to the various opportunities in how I might spend my totalization as a year of professional and personal development and want to take care of my health and sustainable finances, I’m asking any of you who are able to commit to supporting me monthly to join my team by clicking here.
Those of you who can’t support me financially, I’m still incredibly thankful for your prayers and encouragement. I hope all of you reading will pray with me for my Savior to take my brokenness aside and make it something beautiful (as some of you may have caught the allusion to a song in the title).
