In sickness and in health...

 

Webster & Wikipedia have definitions of Marriage & commitment.  However, if they were accurate definitions, it would be a picture of my man leaning on Jesus!!! 

 

Imagine your life going the way you had planned.  You had a ceremony where you said, “in sickness & in health, til death do us part.”  However, you had always known health & so there wasn’t a reason to be concerned about sickness or death.  However, after a year of marriage, you lost your first child to a miscarriage.  Then, after being married for two and a half years, your wife became ill, but no diagnosis could cover the symptoms.  In the meantime, you started the adoption process and began searching for your little one in S. Korea.  “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27.

Then, after three years of marriage, you are diagnosed with cancer.  When you wake from the surgery where the cancer was discovered and your wife tells you that you have cancer, you say, “Cool, that means I get to be a cancer survivor!”  Huh?  Most people curl up in a ball and cry, but not you!  Your attitude is one of complete trust in the Lord (Prov. 3:5-6) and how that encourages your wife!!  To that point, you were declared cancer FREE three months later!!!  You were told that you had to be cancer free for so many years before you could complete the adoption process. 

Then, a year and a half later, your wife’s sickness got so bad that you actually passed an ambulance with its lights on, rushing to the hospital to get your wife in to the ER.  It’s there that she was diagnosed with epilepsy!  When she returned home from the hospital, her vehicle for work was picked up and she’s not heard from her company since then…most of her dear friends fell off the face of the earth and to this day, can’t be reached, despite many attempts.  However, you are still there!  Seventeen years later!!!  In a lot more sickness, than health!

She had brain surgery to remove the part of her brain that was seizing, to only learn that both halves of her brain are seizing and so they can’t surgically remove part of her brain.  As well, the docs said they can’t find the point of origin of her seizures and so again, they can’t do much more surgically.  Thus, you had a bald wife for many months with staples in her head that can still set off metal detectors at the airport!

 

In the meantime, you learned that a child could not be adopted until your wife had gone without seizures for a certain number of years.  Yet, you celebrate a few hours of your wife not having a seizure, so years?  Really?  Then, you and your wife had a baby on the way!  So exciting!  However, a few days after your baby was home, she became non-responsive and had to be rushed in to the hospital where she lived for the next week due to “wacky labs,” but no real diagnosis!

Once your daughter was back home, you learned that when she cried, your wife couldn’t hold her because the cry triggered her seizures and holding a baby while having a seizure isn’t a good plan.  So, the community stepped up and helped out for a bit.  However, you still weren’t able to return to work full time because your wife still needed you.  At the very least, four times every single year, your wife had to be hospitalized.  Are you catching on to the sickness portion of this?

So, now we’ll jump ahead a few more years, and the news did a story on a sweet little girl in Colorado with seizures and medical marijuana.  Your wife was President of D-FY-IT (Drug Free Youth In Texas) in high school and was in pharmaceutical sales, so she’s not touching a “drug.”  As a kid, you also learned to, “just say no,” and so you are saying it, too!!  Everyone keeps asking if you’ve thought about it, but it’s a drug.  So, “No!”  However, here you are a couple years later and your wife is being hospitalized again, having a seizure every 18 minutes.  The docs come to you and say there is nothing left to do, they are just going to keep her alive.  You tell your wife this and she says that she knows where she’s going if she dies ( “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16) and you have a child and puppies at home that would love a Mom.  You have a wife that would love to be a Mom.  So, you sign all of the waivers that you understand your risks and you take her home.

The following Sunday, despite how exhausted your wife is from having so many seizures, you lead her spiritually and get her to church.  When you get her seated, your Pastor sees your leadership & love and stops the service, has you share what has been going on in your family, your wife sees you cry for the first time ever, and then the Pastor offers prayer for your family from the entire body!!  At the end of the service, a lady gave you a sheet of paper with her name, phone #, and “MD in Colorado” written on it.  You want your wife to live and so you call the doc.  You then plan to move to Colorado, sign a lease, etc., so that your wife can take Medical marijuana!  However, after hundreds of seizures and only CBD, not marijuana, your wife is improving.  So, you come back to Texas.  Your wife doesn’t sit still very well and so she begins a battle with the state & federal government to get CBD legalized.  Since she can’t drive or remember most things, you take her to each and every conversation with elected officials throughout the state.

Did we mention at the beginning that your job is commission based and so if you’re not working, you’re not making money.  There isn’t a family leave program.  So, each and every time that your wife is hospitalized or needs a ride somewhere because she hasn’t driven since 2008, you can’t make money.  Thus, “….for richer or poorer,” comes in to play, too!!!  Are you tired yet?

Now, let’s fast forward a couple more years.  Since starting the CBD, your wife is able to start coming off of the toxic pharmaceuticals.  She is almost completely off of one and only has 5 mg left of another.  The other is super duper toxic and so she can only reduce it by 10% every three weeks.  The smallest you can get the pill is 10mg and you’ve broken it in half to be at 5mg.  So, it can’t get smaller & you can’t find a compounding pharmacy that can help.  So, for your wife to get her dose lowered, she starts skipping days of taking the pill.  It has worked just fine throughout the previous two year journey of getting off of pharmaceuticals.  However, it’s a very strong medicine and her body decides to completely deplete her of sodium & she starts seizing for three hours until the docs are able to get her intubated and in a coma.  This lasts for an entire month.  Yes, that’s an entire month of you sitting in a hospital room with your wife in a coma and you are unable to work.  Remember that whole richer or poorer, sickness and health, til death do us part speech you gave over fourteen years ago?  Yep, you are sticking to it!!!!  Wow!  She’s never really known a man to do that!!

We can now fast forward to 2020.  The world went crazy!!!  All of your sweet friends who would take your wife to the store so that you could work are now asking to stay home to not get sick.  So, the responsibility is back on your shoulders.  You have a nine year old who needs to be kept busy and a wife who just wants to feel normal.  Since she’s in her 40s, started driving when she was 15, but now hasn’t driven in 12 years and isn’t able to just run to the grocery store when she needs something, but has to interrupt you, you are definitely feeling the burden.  The world is going crazy in March because they are locked in their homes for a few days.  Then, it extends through the summer and people are going even more crazy.  Yet your wife has been “locked in the house” for twelve years.  If they want to get out & go for a drive and not infect someone they can, your wife can’t just get in the car & drive…So, you want to just take her places, but you need to be working.  You still sacrifice your time, but that also means your income.

Recall that your work is commission based and your first year in the business, prior to your wife’s diagnosis, you received an award that no rookie has ever won before because you care so much about others and taking care of their families the way you take care of yours.  So, if you can just work, you can care for your family and not sit in the “poorer” category.  However, you don’t define marriage by being richer or healthy, you define it by unconditional love for a wife that is living!

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.  So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.  This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.  Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband. Ephesians 5:25-33

So, as his wife, I request that you reach out to Webster and Wikipedia and ask them to correct their definition of marriage and commitment!!