A video recap: "Three Great Awakenings"

It's been about 18 months since I last blogged about Nathan's progress and my musings on his progress, but I thought I'd provide a link here to the four-minute video I made recently that recaps "my take" on Nathan's story. You can find it on the Web by clicking on the link below:

http://digitalstorytellingasia.com/wp/2009/11/26/three-great-awakenings/

There is no audio for the first couple frames (that "set the stage"), so wait patiently for the audio to start. :) And you may want to pause it to allow the whole video to "buffer" so that it plays continuously without pausing to buffer itself.

I hope you find it as encouraging to review Nathan's story as did I! "The unfailing love of the LORD never ends! By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day....Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion according to the greatness of his unfailing love. For he does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow." (Lamentations 3:22-23, 32-33, New Living Translation)

Home!

It was one month ago today that Nathan had surgery at Oregon Health and Science University. They operated on his legs and jaws simultaneously. He still walks with a bit of a limp and he'll need more oral surgery. (He won't get replacement teeth implants until October or November.) But he has a long break before his next surgery (on July 17), so we've taken the opportunity to head home to the Philippines--for the first time since the accident.

We landed in Manila yesterday. As we drove home from the airport, I asked Nathan how it felt to be home. "Rapturous," he said with a grin.

I share Nathan's sense of excitement and relief. I am thrilled to be back under the same roof with Hannah and Stacey. I am, at the same time, sobered by the thought of what might have been. I told Nathan as we rode home from the airport, "I'm sure glad to be bringing you home in a taxi...instead of a hearse." (God has been so gracious to our family in sparing Nathan. I'm once again reminded of the words of Psalm 56:13 (in the New Living Translation): "You have rescued me from death... So now I can walk in your presence, O God, in your life-giving light.")

I've been thinking recently about what it means to be home. Some weeks ago, I got email from Hannah saying that she'd spent a couple days as the houseguest of a friend in Baguio City (where we lived for seven wonderful years). Our friend suggested we move back to Baguio. "Why don't you come home?" she asked. I was touched by her choice of words. "Just where is our home? " I asked myself.

"Home," it is said, "is where the heart is." But I concluded that home is where we have a place in the heart of another, a place in the heart of someone who loves us.

About that time, I read Psalm 90:1 (in the NLT): "Lord, through all the generations, you have been our home!" What a wonderful thought!

It may be confusing to try to identify just where our earthly home is. Is it Manila? Portland? Baguio? (I even have several places in Austria that I called "home" for a while! And I've hung photos of Oregon in our house in Manila to try to feel at home in two places at once!) But our truest home is in the heart of God. That is not just a place where we are always welcome; it's a place that we will never ever leave!

A wonderful discovery

Nathan has, for some weeks, been walking with a cane (that's great progress!)...but he walks with a limp because he can't lift his left foot. He can lift the leg but his foot hangs limp; the nerve in his left leg was damaged in the accident last October. The doctors have been telling us that that nerve might, over time, regenerate....but that it might never recover. Time will tell, they said; any recovery would take months.

Just day before yesterday, Nathan made a wonderful discovery. He found that he can now move his left foot from side to side. He can't yet lift it, but that lateral movement seems to suggest that he will eventually regain the ability to lift his foot, and to walk (or even run!) without a limp.

I couldn't put more fitting words in Nathan's mouth than the words of Psalm 103:

"Praise the Lord, I tell myself;
with my whole heart, I will praise His holy name.
Praise the Lord, I tell myself,
and never forget the good things he does for me.
He forgives all my sins
and heals all my diseases.
He ransoms me from death
and surrounds me with love and tender mercies.
He fills my life with good things.
My youth is renewed like the eagle's!"

Perseverance and hope

Nathan's surgery went well, but we didn't make quite as much headway as we had hoped. The orthopedic surgeon removed the screws from Nathan's right ankle, but the bone in his left leg has not healed enough to allow for the removal of the external fixator. And the oral and maxillo-facial surgeon was not able to install the implants in Nathan's upper jaw as he discovered that there is not enough bone left. So he took a piece of bone from the back of the jaw and grafted it to the front. We have to wait a couple months for the leg and jaw to heal before Nathan will be ready for the dental implants.

Perseverance, and hope, are the name of the game, it seems. Romans 15:5 and 13 (in the NIV) serves to remind us that "...God...gives perseverance and encouragement..." and that He is "the God of hope."

Hoping in the Lord

A friend reminded me the other day that it's been a long while since I blogged. Nathan is making good progress in physical therapy (he's walking with a cane now!), but his progress in therapy is limited by the fact that the fixator is still in place on his left leg.

And he's got a long ways to go when it comes to his reconstructing his jaw and teeth. He had two root canals this past week, and hopefully, we can push through with surgery on his jaws this coming week. The surgery on his jaws is to be synchronized with the removal of the fixator on his left leg and the removal of two screws from his right ankle. We'll see if all that can be arranged this coming week. We are a bit weary.

I was reminded, as I typed the word "weary," that that is the precisely the word Isaiah 40:29-31 uses to describe the condition that the Lord wants to help us with:

"He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary;
they will walk and not be faint."

"The LORD will go before you..."

Six years ago, when we as a family were anxious about moving from our much-loved home in Baguio City to the heat and congestion of Metro Manila, Hannah and I were encouraged by Isaiah 52:12: "The LORD will go before you..." I have, over and over, been reminded of that passage as we have moved through the saga of Nathan's accident. It applied, not only to Nathan's transfer from the Salzburg hospital to rehab in Klosterneuburg, but equally to our move to Portland. The most remarkable part of our transfer to Portland was not the Lord's provision of housing (we are staying in my parents' home), but the way the Lord matched us with expert medical specialists.

As we were making plans to leave Klosterneuburg for Portland, I happened to receive email from Jan Naas, Hannah's roommate of 25 years ago (when Hannah was studying in Portland and we were dating). Jan has been working at Portland's highly-regarded Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) for more than 30 years. I told Jan that Nathan would be needing the care of an oral and maxillo-facial surgeon and a orthopedic surgeon as well as rehab. Jan immediately contacted her doctor friends and, even before we had left Austria, helped me arrange appointments with the head of OHSU's residency program in oral and maxillo-facial surgery, and with one of only two orthopedic surgeons in Portland who specialize in trauma cases. Both doctors are professors at OHSU. Within 24 hours of our arrival in Portland, Nathan was seeing those distinguished young doctors who squeezed him into their appointment calendars at the request of colleagues who are Jan's friends. That was remarkable.

But that the the LORD had "gone before" us was highlighted in a small but poignant way on our arrival at the lobby of the OHSU Physician's Pavilion. There, taped to a wheelchair at the front door, was a sign "Reserved for Nathan Haskell." Not only had Jan helped arrange appointments with some particularly expert doctors, but she had thought of everything--from reserving a wheelchair, to showing us around, and even treating us to Starbucks and to lunch. Her kindness in those "little things" served to remind me that we never drop off God's "radar."

Nathan is making progress every day. We will, later this morning, see the prosthodontist who is working with Nathan's oral and maxillo-facial surgeon to reconstruct his jaw and teeth. Nathan is less and less dependent on his crutches, and the orthopedic surgeon has begun removing the stainless steel pins from the external fixator that reinforces the bones in his left leg, now that the bone is growing steadily. We don't know if the nerve in that lower leg and foot will come back or not; time will tell. But it is enough to know, for now, that the LORD is going before us.

Perhaps Isaiah was echoing Moses' words as he urged God's people to move on into territory that was new to them, and daunting: "The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." (Deuteronomy 31:8, NIV)

On patience and "the magnificent future God has planned for us"

I just ran across J.B. Phillips' paraphrase of the passage (Romans 8:18-25) I quoted in my previous blog. The Apostle Paul's thoughts on endurance, hope, and patience:

"In my opinion, whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God's purpose it has been so limited - yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!

It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that at the present time all created life groans in a sort of universal travail. And it is plain, too, that we who have a foretaste of the Spirit are in a state of painful tension, while we wait for that redemption of our bodies which will mean that at last we have realized our full sonship in him. We were saved by this hope, but in our moments of impatience let us remember that hope always means waiting for something that we haven't yet got. But if we hope for something we cannot see, then we must settle down to wait for it in patience."