Category: Uncategorized

                                    Never Not a Teacher

                     The Bottom Line

                                  Prayer for a Miracle

One of my favorite pastimes as a grandmother of three beautiful children is reading books to them.  The stories teach us important life lessons through the characters, and the time we spend hugging and laughing is comforting.  Books are a sure way to get an always-on-the-move child to sit still for a minute and let a love-hungry Nana get some sugar.  Reading also bridges the gap for grandparents as we think of the stories our own parents read to us, along with the stories we have lived and the memories we have made.  We develop a firm appreciation for the importance of all stories, but particularly our own stories, and we realize the tremendous responsibility we have in sharing these stories – not only with our grandchildren, but with all who will listen.  There are messages to be heard, and blessings to be realized. 

 

Fast forward and pause here and there throughout life and visit points of rich history that running has played in my life.  I ran in elementary, middle and high school for periods of time.  My first husband began running and often placed in his age group in his heyday.  I continued running intermittently as our children were growing up, but I left the organized running events to others while our children were very young. In fact, my parents and my ex-husband often ran races together.  One of my favorite photographs is of my mother accepting an age division award and everyone thinking that the baby was hers.  She needed the t-shirt that said, “Assuming I was a normal grandmother was your first mistake.”  My mother was young and more fit than I was at that time in my life!  Two of our three children ran high school cross country and track, and our son excelled in the sport so much that he went on to run for the University of South Carolina.  He fell in love with a member of the team, and they married.  At a recent alumni race for all the members of this team, their two year old son was positioned with some of their friends at the finish line to run across with his parents – my son and his very pregnant wife (which means that technically, my granddaughter finished her first 5K before she was born)! 

 

When Mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, the doctors told her to continue an active exercise regimen to improve her memory and her health as the disease progressed.  Though she wasn’t able to run much longer, she walked to a quick finish in the Sunshine Festival 5K on St. Simons year after year, and on the last year she finished it, Dad looked at me and said, “I’d hate to walk against her.”  Her steadfast commitment to health and to remaining active throughout her life inspired me.  Then I saw a friend from Pike County cross the finish line, too.  Right then, I made the Sunshine Festival 5K a goal.  Surprisingly enough, I told myself that I would run it, and I didn’t know where that promise came from or if I could even keep it.  What kind of trouble had I promised myself?  At that time, I was finishing a doctoral degree with zero time for exercise or anything else except a dissertation, and was significantly overweight.  Generally, mothers try to lose baby weight between births of children, and while I had managed to do that over two decades ago, what I hadn’t lost was weight gained between a Specialist’s degree and a Doctoral degree – and I didn’t have an active bone left anywhere in my body. 

 

Five days before the race was when I first discovered the injury.  Anyone driving past would have sworn that if I hadn’t been human, I’d have been a limping dog with a raw gunshot wound to the left buttock.  I denied it, but the pain won at 1/3 of a mile, and I was in tears.  With four days to go, the pain tears became tears of anger as I made it ¼ of a mile and succumbed.  Three days prior to race day, and Sunday at that, I sat in church with my eyes brimming with tears.  I couldn’t talk to anyone.  I couldn’t fix the problem.  I couldn’t face not running, because it meant so much to me to run this particular race.  I considered a chiropractor, but I prayed instead.  “Lord,” I said, “I can’t fix this, but you can.  This race is important to me.  I feel close to my mother there, and I wanted to feel like she was running right there with me.  The heartbreak that you know I feel in not being able to run is worse than the physical pain.  Please, Lord, you alone can work a miracle, and I need one if I am going to be able to run this race.  It means so much to me. Please heal me, and allow me to run the race on Tuesday.” 

 

This morning, one day prior to race day, I knew that a lengthy run would be a bad idea, even in the absence of pain.  Despite the weekly mileage that I needed in preparation for the race, the rest before the race day is also an important component for any chance of a successful run tomorrow.  I had to know, though.  I had to know if the pain was still a threat to my race event or whether the Lord had heard the prayers and taken my pain.  I set my mileage tracker and stretched.  I picked some music and adjusted my earbuds.  It was time to find out, and I would know immediately.  I looked down the street to the west, took a deep breath, and started a slow jog and then increased to a medium pace.  I continued increasing my pace and realized that the miracle for which I had prayed had been granted, and I burst into tears of joy and thankfulness as I ran one mile, then stopped, confident that tomorrow will bring more of God’s good grace – and my mother’s presence by my side as I run.   Tomorrow, I will be fulfilling a promise that I made to myself a few years ago to commit myself to a healthier lifestyle and run the race that my mother loved running.  Tomorrow, I hope to know for sure not only that my mother is watching over me, but that she is also cheering.

An Update with Results:

I stepped to the start line with a feeling of certainty that Mom was beside us in spirit.  As the gun went off and we started the race, I felt no pain whatsoever.  Each half mile was filled with memories of those places:  running past where Mom used to watch me play softball in Mallery Park, running where we rode bikes down the streets of our old neighborhood, passing the home where we lived on Martin Street, running past the house where I fell off the roof and broke my arm, running the street I walked each morning and afternoon to and from the school bus, and running past the Dairy Queen (which used to be the Tastee Freeze) where we ate more than our fair share of ice cream.  I heard Mom’s voice in my head, encouraging me the entire way.  She was saying all the things I imagined that she would say – “Come on, Kimmie.  You can do it.”  “Keep the pace.  Don’t give too much too soon.”  “Great Job – you’re almost there.”  At mile 3, my brother passed me, and I had nothing left to give to try to stay with him the final tenth of a mile (or beat him, which I would have preferred to do).  He broke 28 minutes.  I finished just over the 28 minute mark – which meant that in my older running phase of life, this was a PR for the middle age years for both of us.  There were blessings for both Ken and me in this race.  

The one thing I hadn’t received yet was any communication from Mom that was unexpected or distinctly prophetic. Then, it came in a most unexpected way.  When Ken took his dog, Feivel, for a walk, Mom’s dog didn’t like being left out.  I couldn’t find a leash anywhere, so I got one of Dad’s neckties, and off Mullie and I went, ambling slowly over to the ball park.  One of the current pastimes in many cities across the nation is hiding painted rocks with messages for people to find.  As we approached a large oak tree, I caught a glimpse of a bright blue color peeking out of a crevice in the bottom.  When I retrieved the rock, I knew it was a message from her.  An anchor.  One symbol with a myriad of messages for me that can be applied in almost all areas of my life.  My prayers were answered on July 4th in the form of miracles.  They do still happen!

Works Cited

Graham, B. (1975). Angels: God’s Secret Agents.  Dallas:  Word Publishing.

Seuss, T. (1971). The Lorax.  New York: Random House.
 

                  Honoring a Hero of the Greatest Generation

                                                  The Dawn of a New and Glorious Day

A little over a year ago, in the aftermath of my mother’s death, my dad channeled his grief into photographic creativity by taking early morning walks on the beaches of St. Simons Island, Georgia.  During these walks, he captured glorious sunrises and often challenged my brother and me to caption them.  The images always arrived between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., just as our high school students were arriving in our classes.  We’d eagerly text back hurried first-impression expressions such as, “New Horizons,” “Ominous Threat,” or “Meandering Waterways,” as each picture suggested.  As the school year wore on and Dad’s grieving entered new stages, the photos became less frequent, but certainly no less impressive.  His days started with an eye seeking beauty in a dark place of his life, preserving and sharing the images, and ours began with powerful reminders of our roots on the Georgia coast – even as both my brother and I were living in central Georgia. 

I fell in love with A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold in 2008 when I attended a teacher workshop that was held at the Jones Ecological Center in south Georgia.  Nightly reading assignments were anything but dreaded; in fact, they became the highlight of my day as I pored over the magnificent analogies and imagery that Leopold described.  Here was an author who could take complex concepts and simplify them so that even the most novice naturalist could grasp a solid understanding of his ideas.  His observations about nature and his warnings reminded me of Chief Seattle’s message to future generations about the importance of nature conservation and the priority it deserves.  Not surprisingly, Dad’s morning pictures often inspired me to return to the wisdom-rich text for insights and caption-worthy phrases.  Caption searches led to re-readings of the dog-eared text, and two excerpts stood out as I reflected upon several weeks’ worth of photos: 

“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.  The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years.  It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.  It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise” (Leopold, 279).

“To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs…..but all conservation of wilderness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish” (Leopold, 107-8).

I’ve heard it said that grief begins before a loss.  My brother and I lost our mother, and Dad lost his wife long before she drew her last breath.  Parkinson’s Disease battled her spirit and won the long-fought war of Mom’s earthly life.  Her death, our grief, was unavoidable.  Not all loss and grief is inevitable, though.  My hope is that the raw wilderness that Leopold describes will not be lost or grieved in my lifetime – or in that of my grandchildren’s, and that we seek and seize opportunities to cure the diseases of political and economic empires that threaten to diminish the rich meaning of the human enterprise.  The captioned “Ominous Threat” we sense can still become a “Heeded Warning,” a “Miraculous Hope,” and the “Dawn of a New and Glorious Day.” 

References

Leopold, A. (1966). A Sand County Almanac. New York:  Random House. 

My greatest joys of the holidays were my children’s love of the arts. Here, Aidan is loving his new finger puppets! Another highlight was following my daughter’s blog through Germany as the Young Harris College Chamber Choir performed in Munich, Germany and hearing her sing O Holy Night at the St. Simons Island First Baptist Church on Christmas Eve.