there is always more patience to have.

            This morning I find myself listening to More than Anything by Natalie Grant and it’s been on repeat all morning. This post has been a long time coming, in the season I am currently in, I see God working on me in patience. Before I tell this story let me say this, do not pity me, do not say you understand just to make me feel better. That is not the point of this posting…Okay so here is the story...

            As some of you may know both of my grandparents are both very sick, my grandfather has stage four prostate cancer that has moved into his bones and my grandmother has Alzheimer’s type Dementia, dealing with both at once can be very difficult and all I want to do is scream and yell; but that will not help at all. Lately my role with helping them is making them breakfast which seems very easy but I’m scrambling around in the morning trying to get toast done, helping my grandma get dressed getting her blood sugar taken, take one of her pills before breakfast and then my grandpa who is literally the slowest person on the planet (not really but it sure feels like that.). So, imagine me scrambling around trying to get everything ready for them and this past week, it somehow got a little easier because so many times I must remember to be patient with them. In the moments where I am just still, I hear God whispering “it’s okay Micaela, patience will come, it will get easier. I promise you.”  A verse that I found that really puts this in perceptive for me is Proverbs 15:18 “A hot-tempered person stirs up conflict,
    but the one who is patient calms a quarrel.” Now none of you know my grandpa like I do, and boy does this verse pin it right on the nose. Just like the first part of that verse, if I am not patient like the second part of the verse, what will happen is we would argue, honestly probably about something that is so meaningless.

            A few things I’ve learned about from having a grandma with dementia, don’t say do you remember because they don’t remember. Don’t ask do you want this, you will just have to do it for them meaning if you have food on the table you’ll have to put it on the plate and tell them to eat it. Side note: one thing I do ask my grandma is, do you want cottage cheese? Simply because I know she LOVES cottage cheese, like if she could have it all day, every day she’d probably eat it! Also, shout out to my grandma because she passed her love of cottage cheese down to me, you rock gram! One thing you can do is tell them how much you LOVE them! I make a point each day to tell my grandma how much I love her to which she responds “I love you.”

            As I watch dementia eat away my grandma’s memory, as it takes the woman who I knew and who she is away from us forever, all I can do is I thank Jesus for every single day that I get to spend with her. So, as a twenty-year-old, I love using snapchat and I love seeing the filters and showing them to my grandma and doing funny pictures with her because these are the memories I will have forever, long after she passes away. As much as it hurts me to see my grandma this way, I know in this specific season, me just being there, spending time with her, telling her I love her and how much she means to me, the crazy number of pictures that I take with her. At the end of the day I know that I will have NO regrets when something does happen. She means the world to me, her smile is precious, some days are harder than others but we keep on moving forward. Let me also say this, spending money DOES NOT buy you memories! But spending time does…Just a thought for those of you who think that I am weird or crazy for what I do with my grandparents.

            Now my grandpa, oh what a spit fire! He is 84 years old and oh man he’s hysterical, he’s also softened up over the last year. For example, just last night he held my grandmas hand, which if you know him- Buck Harper doesn’t do that but he does it more and more. You see I let him decide what they want for breakfast, I’ll make them anything they want and in the instances, he takes longer to answer, I really must be patient and breathe.

            So, in finishing this up, let me remind you, be patient, tell your loved ones just how much you love them and how much you truly care about them. Not because you should but because you sincerely want to.

xo