The year of trusting in God

I've been telling people that 2024 has been, for me, the year of trusting in God.  Of course, that's what every year should be (!), but this year has been different as my capabilities have been so reduced and so unpredictable, and I've had to trust God in that uncertainty.

When I got my concussion back in January I went rapidly downhill over a week or so, to the point where I was only out of bed around 3 hours or so in a day, much of that just sitting in a chair not doing much.  Previously I'd been averaging around 7 1/2 hours in a day and being pretty active within that, both mentally and physically.

Initially I was in survival mode (and not doing very well at all until I started getting help from the concussion service).  I had to drop pretty much all my Just Kai work, although I did manage to organise our annual summer team picnic and, with extensive help from Christine, get out useful Easter recommendations.

In that time when I was doing basically nothing, a friend asked me for copies of the Just Kai business card (which has a summary of our key recommendations on it) so she could give them out to interested people.  That sparked an idea, and I asked on our social media and prayer letter if anyone else would like some.  People, including a number of strangers, asked for a total of more than 400 cards!  That was encouraging to me.  God was continuing the work even when I couldn't.  We've also had a steady trickle of new followers on Facebook and Instagram - a handful clearly bots, but most appearing to be genuine - which has also been encouraging.

But it's been really hard.  I'm a pretty task-focused person, and I do feel like the main 'task' I'm supposed to be doing is Just Kai.  I've really struggled with letting that slide so much.  For months, concussion rehab has taken the vast majority of my time.  That's basically stopped now, but I still have significant fatigue (I'm now out of bed around 6 hours a day) and my cognitive abilities are way down.  The concussion service helped immensely with physical stuff like restoring the ability to bend over or do exercise without nausea, and I no longer have any issues with light sensitivity, but they had much less to offer when it came to mental skills - concentration, figuring things out etc., and I'm still not doing very well on that.

That does mean I'm probably the fittest I've been in my life - when you can't think but can ride your bike, it's very attractive to ride your bike a lot!  I've done a few days of well over 20km, and am way faster than I used to be :-)

But I'm very restricted in my Just Kai work.  I've been keeping the instagram account rolling over, supervising the other team members and doing some recordings for a podcast we're hoping to launch, but that's it.  I have things I want to write up that I have notes for, reports I want to go through (and update our advice as a result of) that I can't face, and I certainly haven't followed up on meeting with my no-longer-very-new MP to talk about why we need a Modern Slavery Act.

There have been encouragements.  Grace is mostly running the podcast project (I'm just spending a bit of time going over notes she prepares, then being interviewed by her) and it's going really well - I think the recordings are really engaging.  We're hoping to start publishing those really soon.  And we have a new team member, Helen, who's been doing an excellent job updating the website.  I'm hoping she'll be able to write up some of the things I have notes for later, too.  It does feel like Just Kai is now a 'real' organisation, rather than something that wouldn't exist without me.

But it's hard.  Again and again I have to trust God that the little I have to give is enough.  After all, He could heal me fully and instantly if He wanted to, but He hasn't - so the capacity I have must be enough for what He needs me to do, even if it isn't enough for what I want to do.  And having that idea in the forefront of my head has been helpful, especially on days when I end up just crossing off most of my 'to do' list, as I have to accept that most of those things are just never going to get done.  It's a hard situation, but it would be so much harder if I didn't have confidence that what I can do really will be enough - and all the ways I've seen God acting in Just Kai have helped to build that confidence.

I don't always manage to trust, though.

 

For a long time I've wanted to have a red-flowered mānuka out the front of our house.  They're surprisingly hard to source.  I've tried growing them from seed, and got literally zero seedlings out of a packet of over 100 seeds (after a long process that included having them spread on damp paper in a plastic bag in the fridge for months).  I've looked to buy seedlings, but have only found people selling them in vast quantities or with exorbitant shipping (although I've only tried online - I haven't made it to an actual garden centre yet).  And earlier in the year I took a bunch of autumn cuttings from two local trees, but none of them seem to have struck, either.

I read that spring cuttings can be more reliable, so two weeks back I went to the same two local trees to take cuttings.  One is on a section that's soon going to be bulldozed for new housing; the other in the front of a nice garden, but with lots of stems/branches well over the fence.

I generally feel that flowers etc. that are well over the fence are fair game for anyone to take, but when I went to that property the owner was clearly home and I felt strongly that I ought to ask their permission.  But I was scared they'd say no if I asked, and I really, really wanted the cutting after all the previous failed attempts.  So I tried to be inconspicuous and to snip off a small segment as quickly as possible instead, whilst feeling hugely nervous about it all.

Whether or not what I did was actually wrong, I certainly felt it was wrong at the time, and did it anyway.  To my mind, that makes it sinful, even if I was 'within my rights' to take it.  And it felt like an act not so much of disobedience as distrust.  I want a red-flowered mānuka because I think having one would be delightful - and I was willing to sin to get it, rather than to trust that, whether or not I got it, God would bring delight into my life.

Doing it this way also meant I turned down the opportunity to potentially have a fun conversation with a fellow gardener - it wasn't like 'no' was the only thing they could have said...

Even though trust has been such a focus of this year, I've clearly still got a ways to go!

I threw a total panic last week about all the things I'm not getting done.  A difficult feature of life at the moment is that I am sometimes unexpectedly completely exhausted for a day or two - meaning all plans need to go out the window.  I'd got a puncture in my bike tyre the day before, and insisted on fixing it myself (basically out of pride - I feel like I ought to be able to do such things, and didn't want to admit I wasn't up to it), failed to do so after about an hour, and ended up crying in frustration and exhausted for hours after - all because I wasn't willing to be realistic about where I was at.  And then was in a huge panic about how I was going to have to drop even more things, having exhausted myself with all that.  Sigh.

The past couple of weeks I've basically dropped all my Just Kai commitments, and am pleased to find myself basically OK with that.  Lots of personal stuff (including writing this up!) has been deferred again and again. I couldn't do everything, so for now I've chosen to dump Just Kai in favour of Christmas present prep and a few other 'home' bits and pieces.  And now those things may also have to be dropped/scaled back, as the son of good friends is very ill in Waitākere hospital.  I spent most of yesterday running an errand in New Lynn then going out to see him, and hope to go out at again on Thursday if not earlier.

 

Lastly, one for my fellow geeks.  The graphs above cover the time from my healing in 2018 through to today - the first a rough measure of how many calories I spend on exercise per day (based on steps + time spent on actual exercise like biking or swimming), the second covers how long I'm up per day.  The big dip towards the right of each is when I got concussion (there's also a brief dip immediately before for when I got Covid).  You can clearly see that my exercise is well in excess of where it was previously, but my 'hours active' is way down.  'Thinking' being so hard has definitely led to me exercising more in compensation - and I'm very much enjoying that, at least :-)