A Long Silence Explained

It's been almost a month I realize since I last posted anything on my blog. Part of the reason has been dealing with some family health issues of my mom who lives with us and my mother-in-law who lives in the area in Kansas City. My mother-in-law had hip replacement surgery about 3 weeks ago, about the same time that my mom began experiencing painful inflammation and swelling in her joints. A trip to the doctor for her brought the recommendation of some physical and occupational therapy and prescriptions for pain relievers and anti-inflammatory medications but no real relief.

After our oldest son, a doctor, saw her during Christmas, he helped get the ball rolling for some lab work that wound up being done in the ER of a local hospital on New Year's Eve. She was admitted and additional tests were run and other specialists consulted. Yesterday (New Years' Day) she was diagnosed with rheumatoid athritis and was begun on a regimen of steroids. Thankfully, she was already feeling somewhat better today. She's slated to be released to come home tomorrow. I hate to get her out in the cold to bring her home (the official morning low here today was 5 below zero), but I'm glad that she'll be back under our roof.

My mother-in-law is doing well with the hip replacement but has had some other complications along the way. She's been doing rehab at one of the local care centers and should be released on Wednesday.

On a brighter note and as a further explanation of my lack of posting, I managed yesterday to finally finish the initial draft of the church history I've been working on for many months in preparation for celebrating our 150th anniversary in April. My plans are to finish the revisions and editing this month and have it ready to go to the printer by February 1st. That will be a challenge as I will be gone a week to Guatemala for a leadership training event and two days to Dallas for a joint meeting with the leaders of the BGCT, BGCM, and BGAV. I also have to decide about which pictures to select and how many to include in the history book.

Hopefully I'll be able to post a bit more frequently in the coming days. As I've been working through my notes from the church minutes as well as information from our church's newsletter, I've been tempted to share some of the reflections here that I write for our church. Some of them at least I think are thought-provoking and prayerfully they're also inspirational. I'll probably be posting some of those in the interim while I'm finishing up the history project.

Thanks to those of you who still manage to check in periodically on my blog, even when I've been pretty lax about writing.