Singing on the Lawn

Hey, do you know a caregiver in your life who is struggling with something and you don't really know what to say?

Well, guess what? I do. So get them this book. It's called A Minute for Caregivers. When every day feels like Monday.

They're one minute chapters. And I'd love for you to put that in the hands of somebody who is struggling as they care for a chronically impaired loved one. And it could be somebody dealing with an aging parent or special needs child. Somebody that has an alcoholic or an addict in their family. Somebody who has a loved one who has had a traumatic experience, mental illness.

There's so many different kinds of impairments. There's always a caregiver. How do you help a caregiver?

How do you help somebody who helps somebody? That's where I come in. That's where this book comes in. And that's what I think you're going to find will be incredibly meaningful to them. And if you're going through that right now, they get a copy for you.

Friends don't let friends care give alone. I speak fluent caregiver for decades of this. This will help. I promise you it'll pull you back away from the cliff a little bit, point you to safety, give you something solid to stand on so that you or that caregiver you know can be a little healthier as they take care of somebody who is not healthy. Caregivers make better caregivers. It's called a minute for caregivers when every day feels like Monday wherever books are sold. And for more information, go to PeterRosenberger.com.

And this is the program for you as a family caregiver. How are you doing? How are you holding up? What's going on with you? That's the question we ask.

I'd like an answer. How are you doing? I ask that because I want you to take a moment to answer from your own heart from what's going on with you. I know a lot of people ask you about your loved one. I get that.

I know that. But how many are asking about you? And what's your response to that? Is it, well, I'm doing okay. We're doing fine. Or she had a bad night or he had a bad night.

No, no. Don't speak in third person singular or first person plural. Speak in first person singular and say how you are doing. Now you may not be able to do that with just everybody.

But this is a controlled environment with just caregiver to caregiver here. So with me, you can't answer even though I can't necessarily hear you through the wonder of radio. But you can start practicing saying it. And if you met me in person, that's the question.

I would ask you. And I would like to hear from you. It's healthy for you to speak in your own voice. And we lose that sometimes as caregivers. So as we start off this new year, it's okay to have that reminder that we have permission to speak in our own voice. Why is that important? Well, how is it healthy for us to speak in plural or third person singular?

When we do that, we're not really talking about what's going on with us. And God's very interested in that. Have you noticed that in scripture? Look at the psalms. How many of the psalms are written in first person singular? Where David or other psalm writers are crying out on behalf of what's going on in their own heart. Sometimes they do it collectively throughout scripture where there are prayers for the people by the people. Collective prayers. But the vast majority of prayers in the Bible are in first person singular. The vast majority of conversations of someone pouring out their heart is in first person singular.

You know, my soul is cast down within me kind of thing. And we see all that. Well, why is that important? Because we're having an honest conversation about what's really going on with us.

We're having 80 something surgeries and yada yada yada like I've done. It's not there. But what is there are plenty of passages where you find an individual expressing grief, sorrow, frustration, rage, resentment. All those kinds of things that are dealt with in the human heart. And God allows that to be on display in scripture. So that he may speak to this. Do you ever notice that? That's the whole point of it is to deal honestly with these things. He knows they're there.

Do we admit it? Everybody came in and they were shaking hands and everything else. And he wanted to create a more reverent atmosphere. So he asked me to play. And the first Sunday I did this, I got up and I started playing this.

Let me go over to your caregiver keyboard. But here's what I played. Now these are really nice chords. You know, and they're high dollar chords. What am I playing?

What am I saying? Beautiful harmony. But no melody. Because I was used to Gracie singing the melody.

And I had to go back and train myself to play the melody. Which is very difficult to do when you're used to playing it for a singer. See, I've heard Gracie sing for a lifetime. So she's always in my head vocally. I can hear her singing.

Well, she wasn't singing. And I'm up there in front of hundreds of people trying to figure out what I'm playing. And I've got to go back and play the melody of this song. And so I had to do that live on the moment there playing this. Now I've played this little chorus and the hymn for a lifetime. But I got so used to Gracie singing the melody I could just play around her. And I had to plunk out that melody. And it's okay to improvise.

Like right here. But my audience needed to know what I was playing. Much better when people know what you're playing. I had to play the melody. And as a caregiver, how many times have we lost our melody?

How many times have we accompanied someone else? Even if that person's not there with us. We're still playing the accompaniment. So nobody knows what we're saying. From our own heart. We're not making music from our own heart.

And see when I play the melody, I'm playing something and I'm saying something. And that's the healthy thing for us to do as caregivers. To learn to speak from our own heart. Whether it's in our music or whether it's in the way we communicate with others or the way we communicate with ourselves or with God. And that's part of that loss of identity that a lot of caregivers deal with.

In fact, if I may be so bold, I would suggest to you that all of us at some point as caregivers go through that loss of identity. Where we just lose ourselves in someone else's story. And we're reticent to speak from our own hearts for a variety of reasons. I mean, it could be from guilt.

I mean, why would I want to talk about my stuff when the person I'm caring for is going through something far worse? You know, but I liken that to me getting my foot treated when there was an injury to my foot. Well, why should I say something about my foot being injured when my wife doesn't have any feet? Well, because these are the only feet she can count on. And so I need to take good care of them.

Well, guess what? Your loved one counts on you. On being a whole person.

A healthy person. And so we've got to take care of us. And part of that is we've got to say what's wrong. We've got to say how we're feeling. We've got to say all these things that are going on inside us.

We've got to get them out and deal with them. And it's not that we're guided by our feelings. That's not the point of it. The point of it is we learn to express what's going on. We don't want to be bottled up with resentment, with fear, with guilt, with obligation, all of those things that keep us from being healthier. And so that loss of identity. There's three I's that every caregiver deals with. We lose our independence.

I think we can all agree on that. We become isolated, which is crippling. And then we lose our identity. But go back to that little hymn. What does it say? Jesus loves me.

This I know. For the Bible tells me so. If you notice, it doesn't say us. It doesn't say we, our, his, hers. It says me.

It's very personal. And we serve a God that is a very personal God who knows us individually. Who sees us individually. Yes, we are a group of believers.

We are a people. But he knows us individually. You see that with Jesus when he's talking about Nathaniel being under the fig tree.

You know, I saw you there. And he talked about with Peter and all of his disciples. And he knew them individually.

And then God, throughout all of the Old Testament, would see individuals. In fact, if you look at the story back in Genesis with Hagar, Abraham had pushed her away. Basically, Hagar was prepared to go die in the wilderness with her son. And she left him aside from him and went away so she didn't have to see him die. She was so distraught. And the angel of the Lord appeared and assured her it's going to be okay.

Sent her back to Abraham. And that's the only time, by the way, that God's name, Elre, was used. The God who sees. And he sees you. He sees me. And let's respond accordingly, knowing that Jesus loves me.

This I know. And that is hope for the caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberg and we'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio. This is Peter Rosenberger and I'm so glad that you are with the program today. And if you want to know more about what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're doing it, PeterRosenberger.com.

PeterRosenberger.com. There are a lot of things that I put out there for you, including a caregiver 911 tab. If you just are kind of at your wits end and you don't know where to start, just click on that little flashing button right there. It says caregiver 911. And I put a video out there, a podcast that I think may be helpful to listen to right off the bat and just pointing you to safety of where we can just start and have a conversation.

Maybe you're brand new to this as a caregiver and you're thinking, you know, what do you even do? Well, that's okay. We've all been there and we're all here because we're not all there. Sorry, that was just too easy. It was funny.

I don't care who you are. That's funny right there. Hey, it's been snowing across the fruited plains. We, of course, in Montana have plenty of snow, but I've noticed a lot of folks back east, my family down in South Carolina and some others had snow.

A friend of mine listens to this program. She, her daughter, her granddaughter wanted her to go out and build a snowman. Well, she only had a dusting, so she drew a snowman in the dusting of snow on her deck. But a lot of people are talking about snow and I know back where I'm from, and when we lived in Nashville, we would get big snow every couple of years or so. You know, I'm talking about six to eight inches of snow. One time we got it a little bit more than that. In the 35 years we lived there, we had that a couple of times. Now, where Gracie's family is originally from up in East Tennessee, they would get socked with it if they're in the hills, or as they say, way up in the hills. But where I grew up in South Carolina, snow was a weird novelty. Every so often we'd get it and it would freak everybody out.

You notice that people have to run to the grocery store and get toilet paper, bread, milk, eggs, and evidently people are just making a lot of French toast and going to the bathroom a lot during the snow, I guess. I don't know what that's all about, but I remember one time we've been coming out here to Montana for years. Gracie's parents bought this place back in the 80s and we started coming out here in the 90s for Christmas and spending Christmas out here with the boys and it was always great. At the time we had DirecTV and the way DirecTV worked back then, I think it probably still does now, I don't know if we don't have it, but they would use various cities' network affiliate for that station. For example, if you wanted to watch ABC, they would have various network affiliates from a city back east that would be the channel they would have and of course you could watch it on ABC West and then it would be from Seattle or someplace like that. Well, in this particular case at that time, the ABC affiliate that we would watch out here was WKRN Channel 2 Nashville. Now, this was DirecTV on cruise ships and everything else, so this was going out all over the place so you could watch Nashville news, local news, here in Montana or wherever you happen to be getting DirecTV at the time.

Alright, I'm setting this up because I'm going somewhere with this, so stay with me. One evening during the time we were visiting out here, we hadn't moved out here yet, I turned on the news that evening and I was going to watch what's going on in Nashville and I see familiar faces doing the news from Nashville. You had Bob Buhler who I've met, he's interviewed me a time or two, I see Anne Holt at the time she was there, Davis Nolan did the weather and I've followed him throughout his whole career, I met him early in his career. Seen all the familiar faces catching up on the news in Nashville, you know, it feels like I'm at home watching people I know and so forth and they are talking about the extreme winter weather that's coming to Music City, USA. Now, extreme winter weather was a bit relative, there was going to be an inch to maybe two inches of snow coming and the lead off story on the six o'clock news was this winter storm coming to Nashville, maybe two inches of snow, we'll have to shut down the rhinestone mines and everything else. And we're watching this and it's almost embarrassing and then somebody went to one of the local grocery stores, to Kroger, and they put the television camera in the cart and pushed the cart around the store. There at Kroger, and we've got to see the carts perspective of the milk and the bread and the eggs and the toilet paper flying off the shelves as people run for their lives for winter snowmageddon that's coming.

It's kind of embarrassing. The next morning I wake up and we're going to go out snowmobiling with the older man that used to groom the snowmobile trails in the National Forest behind us and he was in his late 70s at the time. He's since passed away. He died at 96. He was a great guy.

His name was Bill. And he comes up on a snowmobile and he's going to take Gracie and me and the boys out and we're going to follow him along and learn the trails. It's about 10 degrees outside and there's two feet of snow here at the house. Here comes Bill up on a snowmobile and he looked at me and said, I was watching the news last night. It looks like you guys are going to get some weather in Nashville. I thought, that's kind of embarrassing.

As if Hee Haw wasn't bad enough. Snow is relative, but since everybody's having a lot of snow, I wanted to share with you a little posting from my Substack page. I do this every week as part of my series for my book, A Minute for Caregivers When Every Day Feels Like Monday, and I post one of these one minute little blurbs on my Substack page. You can go out and sign up for it. They're free posting every Monday.

I put them out as a preview for subscribers on the Friday before. But this one is called, Don't Pass the Snow Plow. Don't Pass the Snow Plow. Grabbing my coat to head out into the falling snow following a meeting.

It's that little caregiver support group meeting that I do every week. I heard a friend call out, Don't Pass the Snow Plow. I usually choose a safer road in heavy snow, but Gracie's wheelchair had a broken crossbar and there was a welder who could get it done that day.

I dropped it off earlier that morning and it was ready and she needed it because if she doesn't have her wheelchair, she can't take her legs off and be able to get around. So I needed to get over there and get it. I was heading that way, but the snow had gotten pretty heavy since then. There was already snow on the ground and I'm used to that. But this friend yelled out, Don't Pass the Snow Plow. So I get towards Norris Hill and I took my friend's advice and drove behind this snow plow that was heading back over the hill. They go back and forth a lot to keep it plowed.

So I got behind this guy. Not too close because you don't want it to throw salt and rocks and everything else at you in the sand. But I was able to move slowly, but securely, even down the steep grade on the hill's other side. I got the wheelchair and was able to get back over the freshly plowed hill and made it back safely.

No problems at all. But I thought about that with the snow plow. Don't Pass the Snow Plow.

And the journey struck me as an excellent picture for us as caregivers. The ones who can help us often move slower than we'd like. Because this snow plow guy, I mean, he wasn't flying across this hill, I promise you. He was going at a decent speed.

I mean, it's kind of weird out here in Montana versus Tennessee. I knew I was in a different place when I first moved out here. And I had a guy, I was driving 50 miles an hour down the road and I couldn't really see the road very well. I had to look at the markers there to make sure I was on the road, wind was blowing and so forth. And I was going what I thought was pretty good speed at a guy in a fully loaded glass truck, not gas, glass truck with windows and everything on it, passed me.

And I'm doing almost 50. And I thought, man, and then I remember a school bus passed me with kids on it. And they were looking at me like I was just, you know, what's wrong with this guy? So I knew I was in a different world out here when it came to driving in the snow and I've learned how to do it pretty well out here. But this snow plow guy, he was clipping along, but certainly not going too fast.

And other people were going around. I noticed that because there's two lanes you go over and I thought, well, let them do it. I'm going to stay behind the snow plow. The ones who can help us, that can plow that road in front of us, whether it be medical providers, lawyers, pastors, counselors, whatever, it may feel like they're listening to elevator music while we're cranking up Led Zeppelin in our vehicle. But whether it's a counselor or financial advisor or, you know, doctor, nurse, whatever, the safest place for us as caregivers is often behind the professionals doing their job, however slowly we may feel that they're moving. Do you have difficulty staying behind them and letting them plow the road so that we can get there safer?

May not be on the timeframe we would like, but we get there safer. Is that something you've struggled with? I certainly haven't. I have shown a ample amount of impatience over the years. And that's why I put this quote from this lady, Barbara Johnson, at the end, a writer, and she said, Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears. What a descriptive phrase for us as caregivers. Can we idle our motor even though we feel like stripping our gears? We're just, we're racing.

I mean, have you ever found yourself getting caught up? Oh, we got it. We got it. We got it.

We got it. I got to get over there. I had to get over this very gnarly hill in the snow.

Gracie needed her wheelchair. It had to be done, but it's going to have to be done safely. I did not have the bandwidth or the margin for error to wind up in the ditch, which is very easy to do out here. And I'll talk about that one on the next episode of A Minute for Caregivers. But I wanted to share that with you and you can go out and see that for yourself. Read it, share it with somebody you think might find it meaningful. But since we're dealing with snow and it's winter in this country and I thought, well, we'll take a listen to good advice from local folks here in Montana who said, don't pass the snow plow.

Don't pass the snow plow. It's a good word for us as caregivers and it helps us get to where we're going to be in a healthy manner. My Substack page has all kinds of stuff out there. Audio, video, print, articles that I write, different things, interviews, full interviews of things that I do feature here on this program, but I'll put the whole interview out there. Go to my website and you'll see at PeterRosenberger.com, you'll see a link to Peter's Substack page. And please take advantage of it.

I try to put as many things out there as possible that will be easy to digest and read and share and things that will help you today. I'm not interested in things that will help us six years from now. I'm interested in something that's going to help us right now, not even six hours from now, right now. And don't pass the snow plow is a good piece of advice for right now. Slow down, let the professionals plow the road for us and we're going to get there a little safer.

Maybe not at the exact time we want to get there, but we'll be there safer. And that's healthy and healthy caregivers make better caregivers. This is Peter Rosenberger. We'll be right back.

Music Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger. Glad that you are with us. PeterRosenberger.com If you want to find out more about what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're doing it, it's all there.

And I'd love for you to go out and take a look. You can sign up for our e-letter. Here's what we do on our e-letter. Every month, we don't do this every week, we don't do this every day. You know, I'm so glad the election is over because I was getting so many emails from politicians who just, I mean texts and emails, 50 a day kind of thing.

It's ridiculous. We don't do that. We do one a month. Probably should do more, but unless I have something special on a podcast, I want people to take a listen to this.

But that's it. And we do a newsletter that goes out with the patient of the month that we treat through Standing with Hope. And that's the prosthetic limb ministry that we do, that Gracie founded. And then we have a song of the month that we feature.

This month, it's You Must Believe in Spring. It's a wonderful song that Gracie sang that you will absolutely love. It is so beautiful. And my piano professor at Belmont, all those years ago, played this for her. He accompanied her. He actually accompanied her when she auditioned for the School of Music there back in the spring of 83. This was before her wreck. And then he came down and played at our wedding several years later.

And we've just been great friends ever since. And then he got in the studio and he picked this song out for Gracie. He said, Gracie, I think you need to record this. Only a few people recorded it. I think Barbara Streisand recorded it, Tony Bennett, and Bill Evans. And my piano professor is a big, huge fan of Bill Evans. And he heard the song. Not a very well-known song. A very difficult song. And it's called You Must Believe in Spring.

And I love this. Gracie's got a great jazz voice. And so that's the song that we're featuring this month. We'll have one every month we do that. We just say, hey, here's the song.

And then Gracie's got some new songs coming out later on this year. We have a blog post that she's been writing that we feature. One that I do and one that she does. And I've been helping her with this. These are conversations she's had with me for years about dealing with chronic pain.

And she's been posting this. And this is all out at the website. And you can take a look at that, but you get that in a little nice form in the e-letter.

So you can sign up for that. I hope you will. We try to put as many things out there we think will be helpful and meaningful. So I hope you'll take advantage of that at PeterRosenberger.com. And the piece that she has for her blog post this month, Snows and Scars, I think you'll find incredibly meaningful. And then we'll have some more things put out there over the next few months that are coming that I think you're going to find deeply moving.

And so please take advantage of that at PeterRosenberger.com. I do a support group for caregivers every week. I've led that.

I started it. And we have a great group that meets every Thursday. And it is just a real meaningful time with this group. And we've gone through some difficult things together as a group.

And there are some that are going through some heavy heartaches right now. And I mentioned to the group this week about a guy named Cleland McAfee. Do you know who that is? Cleland McAfee was a Presbyterian minister. And around the turn of the 20th century, back in 1900 and some change, he and his brother lived in a smaller town.

And Cleland ended up becoming the moderator of the General Assembly for the Presbyterian Church. And he was quite an interesting man. But his brother had two young daughters. And they both died within the same week of diphtheria. One of them was like 9, the other was 11 or 10 and 12 or something.

They were very young and very close to their age. And it was just devastating to the whole community there. And it was just heartbreaking. And Reverend McAfee had to speak. He had to preach that Sunday. You know, what are you going to say?

How do you respond to that? And he was so overcome with grief. And he went to write and he wrote a song out. He wrote a text out.

Beautiful text. And he wrote the music as well for his brother and his family. And he taught it to the choir of the church. And then the choir went out. He was going to preach on Sunday, but the choir went out on Saturday night and stood on the lawn of his brother's home.

And they sang this song. And the text is, there is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God, a place where sin cannot molest. How many of you all know that sin molest? Raise your hand if you know that.

There are a lot of raised hands, aren't there? Sin molest. When he wrote this text, there is a place where sin cannot molest near to the heart of God. And the refrain is, oh Jesus, blessed Redeemer, sent from the heart of God, hold us who wait before thee near to the heart of God. And then the second verse, there is a place of comfort sweet near to the heart of God, a place where we, our Savior, meet near to the heart of God. Oh Jesus, blessed Redeemer, sent from the heart of God, hold us who wait before thee near to the heart of God. The third verse, there is a place of full release near to the heart of God, a place where all is joy and peace near to the heart of God.

And it was just an extraordinary picture of his brother and his family inside the home, filled with grief. And that church, beautiful church community and the choir came and sang on his lawn. And my question, I guess, to you and myself is, are we singing on the lawns of other people who are going through such heart-wrenching grief? We don't know what to say sometimes.

We don't know what to do. But are we, in a sense, singing on their lawns? Can we do that for one another?

That we just minister to one another? There's so much vitriol. I look at this thing going on in California with the fires and everybody is trying to point the blame. There's an old saying, I think John F. Kennedy said this, that victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

In other words, when there's a victory, everybody wants to claim credit, but when there's defeat, everybody wants to deny anything to do with it. And you're seeing that in California. They're trying to place blame and there's rage and anger and all that kind of stuff, but at the core of all this, we must not forget that the people in North Carolina are still struggling and living in tents, people in California who've lost everything. Can we sing on the lawn? Even if it's a burnt lawn, even if it's a flooded lawn that's filled with mud, can we sing on the lawn and comfort them? We'll help rebuild. That will happen.

People will pay the price for their incompetence. All those things will happen in time, but in the meantime, people are grieving. And I look at us as fellow caregivers. We're grieving. So many of us are just dealing with heartbreaking circumstances. Gracie and I are getting ready to go to Denver next week.

She's going to be there for two months facing surgery 87 and 88. You know, I could use some lawn singing. Gracie could use some lawn singing. I could use a little lawn singing. Life's hard.

Life is brutal. Life is filled with very difficult things, and I think the lesson I learned from this is that the invitation is, are we willing to go onto other people's lawns and sing of the great love and restoration of God, of His mercy, even when things look so bleak, particularly when things look so bleak. Maybe you could benefit today from somebody singing on your lawn. I don't sing very well, but I'd like to play this for you outside your window, and hopefully it'll bring you as much comfort as it does for me. This is Cleland McAfee's Near to the Heart of God. There is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. We'll be back after a little bit of lawn singing. this is Peter and this is Gracie singing with my piano professor John Orne and I told you I mean what a voice and we got to get this girl through this next phase get her back singing again she's got some new songs that are gonna be we're gonna be laying down here when she gets out of this and I can't wait for her to sing because I love that voice and John's piano playing is just so well the industry word is tasty I mean he it's just that that only comes from somebody who spent a lifetime with the instrument and learning music and so anyway if you want to hear that song it's the featured song we have that we sent out from our e-letter but you can go and download it it's available on wherever you can download music you must believe in spring Gracie Rosenberger featuring John Orne who I have just nothing but great admiration for as my piano professor and just as a wonderful friend as I mentioned the last block we're getting ready to go to Denver for another multi-month stay with Gracie for another round of surgeries how did we get here why are we doing this this is our third multi-month stay in Denver in the last four years this is where the specialty team is that's working on her a lot of Gracie's path was established back in 1983 when she had this terrible terrible wreck and when they took her to the hospital the they tried to save her legs now that's admirable and that's what they did back then nobody wanted a 17 year old girl to wake up with her legs gone and they wanted to save her legs prosthetics were not as great back then as they are now and so amputating that leg seemed like an anathema and that nobody wanted to do it and I understand it and that was the way it was nowadays they would have probably amputated her right leg immediately and probably her left one most of the surgery she's had in her life are related to saving her legs and repairing the damage of saving her legs which is why we're going to Denver next week what happened was when they prepared him she ended up having a terrible walking gate that eroded her orthopedically over the years it's amazing she was able to have what she's had children and Gracie eventually learned how to snow ski as a double amputee but she eventually had to give up her legs of course and she bounced back from that pretty well but the damage to her hips and her back had been done and so they fused her back in 2002 and the way they did it then was they kind of pitched her forward a little bit and by pitching her forward she started leaning forward and over time it just she just kept going further and further over until she was almost bent over and her back flattened out and it created what they call flat back syndrome as you know that's the name and her pain levels were through the roof and we couldn't really do much about it I mean you could only throw so many drugs at this and we knew 14 years ago or so roughly that we were going to have to go down this path but we didn't have the right team in place it's a very very complex surgery one of the biggest surgeries you can do and we talked about it with some folks at Vanderbilt but it wasn't the right time it wasn't the right team we ended up moving out to Montana because we felt like that the humidity was so much lower here and helped with her arthritis and it does but her back just was so bent over and she could hardly function so we ended up getting to a neurosurgeon in Denver who knew exactly what to do in the team and this is a teaching hospital at the University of Colorado and they very aggressive team and they know what they're doing and I and I there's not many people that are going to do this kind of surgery I mean with nobody in the state of Montana no hospital was prepared for this surgery you have to go to a university hospital like this a major major University Hospital where you have kind of the the brain trust there and Gracie was the first double amputee they've done it on they did it on a somebody was paralyzed but never done on a double amputee and so it came with its own set of challenges we had a few complications from it they had to go back and redo some of it and here we are but we also knew that part two of this was you had to fix her back get the curvature back at her in her spine and then the other part was he had to fix her hip flexors she's been bent over so long that they've contracted she's been bent over for decades and they've contracted so tight that no amount of physical therapy is going to stretch them out and so what they're going to do is they're going to take the left one which is the worst one and they're going to cut it and move it down lower on her pelvic bone and reattach it so that it'll ease that tension and then three weeks later they have to let her recover for three weeks they're going to cut the other one and the thought is that she'll be able to stand up straight and along with this now new curvature in her back which will be compromised if we don't get this done this will be the last step in repairing some things with Gracie we don't know for sure it's going to work we think it will and it has for other people and many other people but Gracie is a very unusual patient and so there is the hope we love her orthopedic surgeon was a neurosurgeon that fixed her back but this is orthopedic surgeon is going to do this and we have great expectation that she'll be able to live a much more productive life her prosthetist for many years feels like she will he's going to come out to Denver and evaluate her after this is done make sure her legs are properly aligned and so forth so this is what we've got going on and it's going to be painful she knows it will be she's a bit anxious as you can imagine this will be surgery number 87 and number 88 for her that I can count in her lifetime that's a lot isn't it we would ask for your prayers your understanding we'd ask for you to stand out of the lawn and sing for us and I wanted to close out the program today with a song from Gracie CD that is titled my life is in your hands as Kurt Franklin did it and it wrote the song and it sums up so much of Gracie's life and I remember the first time she's saying this and and we knew it was going to define her for a very long time I remember she was at Duke Children's Hospital singing this song Jeff Foxworthy asked her to come over and do this for their event and she was in rehearsal with the band Jeff rushed up to her after rehearsal and just was big tears this is Gracie I was crying I'm not talking tears I had snot you know he was just it just moved him so much in the audience leapt to their feet when she sang it later on that night and I think it's a good song to end the program with today her life is in his hands so is mine so is yours and that is hope for the caregiver this is Peter Rosenberger PeterRosenberger.com this is Gracie and like King David who at Ziklag strengthened himself of the Lord this is what it looks like for Gracie to do that and by the way today is her birthday happy birthday Gracie you don't have to worry don't you be afraid joy comes in the morning troubles they don't last always for there's a friend named Jesus who will wipe your tears away and if your heart is breaking just lift your hands and say whoa I know that I can make it I know that I can stand no matter what they come my way my life is in your hands cause with Jesus I can take it with him I know I can't stand no matter what they come my way my life is in your hand yeah so when your tests and trials they seem to get you down and all your friends and loved ones are nowhere to be found name Jesus will wipe your tears away and if your heart is breaking just lift your hands and say I know that I can make it oh I know that I can stand no matter what they come my way my life is in your hands cause with Jesus I can take it oh with him I know I can stand no matter what may come my way my life is in your hand I know that I can make it I know that I can stand no matter what may come my way my life is in your hand cause with Jesus I can take it oh with him I know I can stand no matter what may come my way my life is in your hand my life is in your hand my life my life is in your hand my life is in your hand