Forty-Nine

This is not an easy thing to share, but I just know entirely too many people who get truly knocked for a loop at the age of 49.  Some don't survive, and I believe many get swept away trying to hold on to an illusion, so I'm sharing this in retrospect.  Hang on to G-d, He really does have a plan!

When I got married the last time, I was running out of months that hadn't already been used for a wedding or a divorce.  The marriage took place in March, on my oldest daughter's birthday and the day before mine.  I was truly hopeful in this marriage, as I really had heard G-d tell me, He would bless me in this.  I presumptuously assumed the blessing would be that of a supernatural partnership.  We were married, I think about 4 hours, before it started to go bad, really bad, really quickly.  To the point, I just wanted to get out of my own car at a stop light and run all the way back to the mission.  Now, fast forward to nearly five years later.

I was approaching my 49th birthday and I decided to do some serious research about 7 sevens and the year of Jubilee, which is the 50th.  Since my husband was 50 when we married, I sure didn't want to throw my year of Jubilee away, like he had.  I wanted to get this straight and not miss an opportunity that would probably only happen once in my lifetime.  I really didn't envision a 100th birthday and I didn't even want to think about being married that long.

Technically, our fiftieth year begins the day after our 49th birthday.  Our birthdays are the year completed, so I was ready to embrace the age of 49 and begin my 50th year the next day.  I knew in 2007, exactly what I wanted for that momentous milestone.  For my fifth anniversary and 49th birthday, I wanted a futon in my own address; I wanted a divorce.  That's not what I got.  Instead of a divorce, I received a horse.  Now looking back, perhaps I missed the intention of the gift.  Perhaps the horse was the provision to "hit the road . . ."  At any rate, the first day of this gift; the same man I wanted to divorce, I trusted to saddle the horse.  So, I then found myself falling off of a slipped saddle and under the horse.  The horse was very good in the situation and tried to move to not be over me, but my foot was caught in the stirrup, so in moving, she stepped on my leg and broke it.  So far, just one week in, this head start on Jubilee seemed far less than ideal!

The garden did great that year, but the relationship continued to sour, until the only time we even spoke was when we had guests.  Oh, I continued on with meal preparation, laundry, housework, and farming the small starter homestead, but ideas of divorce and freedom were never far from my thoughts.  Then the most horrendous ordeal I've faced since becoming a bereaved parent, happened.  My husband became deathly ill, to the point the doctor said call the family.

Here's where I should probably mention that I don't believe in hospitals and pharmaceuticals, but he does.  He'd been telling me one thing earlier that week, but telling his family a whole different version of what was happening to him, healthwise.  Since we barely spoke anyway, and didn't share a bedroom, I really didn't know how sick he was until I overheard a conversation with his brother.  The burden to actually make the phone call for medical assistance, of course, fell on me.  Needless to say, when everyone gathered in the ICU waiting room, there were no pleasantries exchanged.

Between doing chores twice a day and sitting vigil at his hospital bed night and day, because that's what folks do here, I asked YHWH if He would please give us another chance to make some good memories.  Well, after a night of reading the Psalms aloud in his room, he recovered enough to have a debilitating surgery which left him disabled.   Through his time in recovery, I decided to look up the word "Jubilee" in the original Hebrew to see what I was missing.  It was also through this time, Adonai brought back to my remembrance that I had told Him I wanted to be a woman after His own heart, just months before I met this husband.

As it turns out, Jubilee, or 'yovel' as it is transliterated, means liberty.  Again, I misapplied it and thought this meant I would soon be free of my past hurts and disappointments, but instead I heard in my spirit, with this severe disability, there would be no divorce.   So, here I decide to take a more positive perspective.  I'd try being Miss Optimistic, thinking we might just have us a reconciliation and move on together in life.  I think I've mentioned how "rose colored glasses" in the natural cloud spiritual discernment . . .  I knew I would have to gain victory over my disappointment in the fact that there would be no divorce.

He left the hospital with c-diff, and MRSA, two surgery sites and an amputation.  Even typing it brings back an overwhelming heaviness, but YHWH truly got me through it.  Life just kept moving, day in and day out, seemingly unchanging.  I did chores, prepared meals, dressed his wounds, and wondered . . . Forty-nine turned into fifty, and the idea of liberty and jubilee just stopped even being an idea.

In the course of his recovery, two deer seasons came and went, and I dressed those for Daddy.  It was in the second December, at 50 years of age, I began writing Simply Abundant and the door opened for me to have a radio show on a local station.  Simply Abundant was truly fun, in that it was a long forgotten desire of my heart to snuggle in one winter and write a book.  I began writing the first week in December, after dressing the biggest deer Daddy ever shot, and finished it up the first week of March.

The wound dressing and bandage changes went on for 18 months to the day.  I didn't know that, but he kept track.  By then he insisted upon riding along to places I was going, so I figured I might as well try to make the best of this bad situation.  On the way to the radio station, I finally got the nerve up to tell him that I'd asked G-d to give us the chance to make some happy memories.  He said that sounded good, but . . . "He appreciated all I'd done and didn't think anyone else would have done all that for him, but he just didn't have a desire for me, but he saw no need to get a divorce.  He'd just do his thing and I could do mine . . ."

I wish I could say, the first thing that came to my mind was a G-dly thought, but the G-dly thought didn't come until after I repented for the thoughts I did have.  I got those thoughts out of my mind, unfortunately, by them flying out my mouth.  In all that I didn't cuss him out, as swearing is so impersonal; but I had plenty to repent of.  It was after that repentance, I heard in the still small voice, "you asked to know My heart."  That revelation nearly stopped my heart, when I thought of all the things YHWH has done for humanity, yet His Word is so discounted and so frequently He is blamed.  I saw myself, having received so much, but refusing the real plan He had for me, by trying to hang on to an illusion.

It changed everything in me.  I thanked YHWH for the opportunity to make good memories, we just didn't make them together.  I am free from expectations, I have moved on in so many things I would have never imagined.  Doors have flung open, since I accepted the freedom from trying to make something happen that simply wasn't going to be.  I discovered the effort I was putting into making captivity bearable and the expense I invested in endurance was based on a social standard, not G-d's.  YHWH, in Messiah, truly did set this captive free.
G-d's definition of love and liberty are so different from what we've been programmed to believe.

. . . And while I was still yet 50, with no debt; He brought me to this much larger place, and established me.