A Little at a Time

Well, the Lord keeps providing- a little at a time, but it is enough.

Last night, our neighbor's car broke down, so he gave Todd some money to drive him to work today, which put gas in our Blazer so that when my friend Jeanette called, I had enough gas to get to her place, because she wanted me to help with some cleaning. She gave me twenty dollars today, so I was able to get some bread and other things we needed. Then Jeanette's mom asked if we could haul some furniture to the dump for her tomorrow, so we will be able to use the money she pays us for that to get some more cat food. Two weeks ago I had no idea how we would get through to the end of the month, but now the end is in sight, we are going to make it, and we did not go without anything we needed. Thank the Lord for seeing us through.

I am sad that the feral cat we were feeding has not been around for five days. I want to go to the SPCA and see if he is there. Maybe they will give him to us if he is.

Yesterday Graham came in the house crying his eyes out and he was holding a puppy. He said that our neighbors had the puppies outside in the cold and their mother could not even get to them, and they were crying.

I took the poor little thing from him and it was shivering so bad. I told him to go get the other one and we turned up the heat a bit. It took fifteen minutes for the poor little things to stop shivering.

Graham thought Ishould call animal control because he thought the puppies were being neglected. I looked at the pups and they were nice and fat, so I knew they were not being neglected. I told him to wait until their owner came home and I would talk to the man.

When the man got home he said he did not know the puppies were outside when he left that morning, and he thanked us for keeping them warm and for feeding them while he was away. Graham felt much better. It was nice having puppies visit for a few hours. They were sooo adorable.

My mother is getting divorced. This comes as quite a shock to me because my mother does not believe in divorce- but her husband does. It has me very worried about Mom because she does not have enough money to live on without Harry. I don't know what she is going to do. I wish I could afford to help her out, but I can't, so I have to pray for her.

She married Harry out of a sense of gratitude because he helped her with my grandfather, and she could not have cared for Grandpa on her own those last couple years. Grandpa could not be left alone, even for short periods of time, and besides going stir crazy from being bound to the house, Mom was so tired because Grandpa would stay up all hours. He was getting to be too much for her to lift when he needed help getting out of a chair or out of bed, and keeping up with his incontinence was a nightmare.

Harry is a good guy. He treated my mother like a queen, but she said that made her feel smothered. The one big thing that she could not live with is the fact that Harry is racist. He hid it from her before they got married, but it came out afterward. Mom hates racism. I think she tried to enlighten Harry, but she realized that she could not change him and gave up.

Mom has written four novels. One of them is a murder/mystery/romance novel, and the others are a fantasy trilogy that could be bigger than Harry Potter if you ask me. They are the kind of thing young adults and adults would both like, and they are like nothing else out there. She has spent years writing them. I hope she can get them published and that they will generate some income for her.

I also need to pray for my friend Anrdea (not her real name). Andrea and I went to high school together. We reconnected on Facebook when it came time for our 20 year reunion. We are both living in California now, but we are about two hours apart, so we have not actually seen each other. We have communicated through email, and then we started calling each other every week to do a Bible study together over the phone. She has been a big source of encouragement to me. The book we are studying is called Breaking Free and it was written by Beth Moore.

Andrea has a ten-year-old son who is autistic. Now there are different degrees of autism, from the little I know on the subject. Her son is more than mildly autistic. He is non-verbal, and she said that he bigger he is getting violent.

Now, like I said, I don't know much about autism, except that it is a devastating condition, but I remember reading a short story about a boy with autism and when he got to be about the age of Andrea's son, his mother ended up having to put him in a group home because she was no longer able to take care of him. I think the mother in that story was a single mother, and so it would have been very hard for her to handle on her own. Andrea has her husband to help, but the stress a condition like this must put on a marriage must be tremendous.

I also have a friend who adopted a boy with autism. He also had cerebral palsy. She spent the first couple of years trying to snap him out of the autism. She thought with proper diet and care he could recover from it. When that did not work out she started taking him to see specialists. They flew all over the country looking for a medical treatment that would cure the autism, and while some kids do have miraculous improvement on certain treatment, her son did not. There were complications from the cerebral palsy too that made things more difficult, and eventually she ended up placing the boy with another family who had the resources to take care of him.

I also remeber a movie I saw about the mother of an autistic boy. The movie was based on a true story. The mother was devoted to her son, but she was forced to put him in a home when he got too big for her to handle and he could hurt people.

I want to tell Andrea, to sort of give her permission to put her son in a home where there are people who are trained to care for him. She needs a serious break. And she wanted to have more children, but did not do it because she knew she needed to devote her time to her son. She is at the age now where she could still have another child, but if she waits much longer she will be too old to get pregnant. She has certainly done her job in caring for her son all these years. I know she loves him though, and I don't want to come off as callous. I know she loves him as much as any parent loves a child, but when they get too big for you to be able to handle, the safety of you, the child, and others needs to be taken into consideration. From what I understand, autistic children are less attached to their parents than their parents are to them. I am sure that depends on the degree of autism. I guess I should pray for understanding before I try to give her any advice though.

So I have a lot of things to be thankful for. Jehovah keeps providing what we need when we need it. And I have a lot more things to add to my prayers.

If you have any prayer requests, please post them. Thank you for reading.