CHALLENGE and GOAL

Before I found the second tumor, I had been a very active person playing tennis maybe three times a week, being treasurer of the St. Andrews United Methodist Women and treasurer for the church cookbooks, singing in our church choir and busy drawing floor plans for Jack's and my new house. We finished the house, moved in July 4, 1982 and Jack and I were doing our own house and yard work. But, now, everything was different. My world had turned up-side-down, and I was on the bottom side.

My first challenge was to get well and get to feeling good again.
And my ultimate goal was to return to the useful, meaningful, normal life I had had before. I wanted, so badly to be able to play tennis again. So badly to be able to lead a normal life! I surely didn't want to have to be dependent on others for the rest of my life, for my family's sake and certainly for mine.
I hadn't realized the ''parts of me not working right” would not be working right for such a long time. I remember asking my daughter, Eleanor, in my special way of talking, how long she thought it would take me to get back to normal. (1 was thinking in terms of months.) She kind of shrugged her shouldered meaning she didn't know, but thinking it would be an awfully long time. She could tell.

The challenge and my goal were the only things that mattered in my life now. I, not being able to think very well, thought of little else. GET WELL! GET BACK TO NORMAL! It was my one and only motivation and was of paramount importance to me. My family and friends had encouragingly told me they were sure I could do it, so I, wanting to believe them and wanting to live up to their expectations of me, believed I could...... not realizing that there was still that 15% chance of my speech and/or motor problem to be permanent.

Julie, my second daughter, provided my second big challenge when she bought me a stand to hold material for counted cross stitching to get me started learning to use my left hand. In my limited mental capacity, not only was I having trouble thinking, but definitely having trouble counting. But I tried hard and stuck with it, and soon I had that wonderful feeling of achievement, of productivity, of victory over mastering something.

It's so good, so important to have challenges for the handicapped so they can feel the pleasure of accomplishment, of progressing, of moving forward, instead of the boredom that sets in. But be careful not to make a challenge unreachable. Most of the time the handicapped person's life has been changed so completely and everything they had known and loved doing before is gone. But don't GIVE UP! You'd be surprised at what you and the Lord together might accomplish. Encouragement, too, is so necessary.
Make it sincere, no matter how small the progress.