Seeing Beauty in Hard Places, part 3

Long hours on the road this summer were brightened by a vase of flowers from our garden!

By the way, Elsa and I trained our way into more driving over the past two months than we had been able to do in the previous decade combined! This is another part of our major "rehab" from years of chronic illness. 

Garden flowers also brightened up our hotel room for part of Dad's month at Mayo.

And the first tomatoes from our garden came along to ripen in the window.

Sunsets and a couple of ponds were another bit of beauty we looked for each day.

Did you notice my “garden” in the photo behind the orange juice*? Probably not. It’s all in one’s perspective!

That little patch of wildflowers between a highway and a hotel parking lot was a bright spot in an otherwise ugly setting. Especially compared to our lush flowerbeds back home with rarely the sound of a vehicle on our gravel roads and fresh air blowing across the prairies… that month in an airless hotel room on the edge of a city was not a restful or healing place.

And yet God turned it into a time of healing the nervous system at deeper levels, just because it was so far from peaceful or natural. What mattered was that He had called me to these new challenges, and He was there to meet my needs. By wiring in the truth through brain rewiring (neuroplasticity) methods, my nervous system learned that even there, I was safe with Him!

*The orange juice itself was a brain rewiring win after more than a decade without! I enjoyed it most days at the hotel as well as training with some more "firsts" of a bagel, corn flakes, conventional ice-cream, and a waffle cone! Plus walking up to 3 miles at a time on the paths and sidewalks of our community.