Big Bertha and Other Blessings

(2014)

It all started several months ago with a dream about being in a small boat with Michael and Lauri and seeking shelter in a cove after a huge storm made the seas to wild.  After the storm died down I knew it was time to leave the cove but there was a huge wall of water blocking us from leaving the cove and getting back to the ocean. As I moved the boat towards the wall of water I didn't know how we were going to make it past the wall I just new we needed to so I pressed forward.  Then I woke up.

This may be just a crazy dream but to me it definitely had meaning and there are probably multiple analogies you could pull from this dream.  At the time the dream represented how we kind of hunkered down after Mikes accident and lived a simplified life in the hospital and that now that things weren't so crazy it was time to get back to a more normal life.  The problem in both the dream and in real life is that there is a giant obstacle in the way of this transition and just like in the dream I don't know how to get past this obstacle but I have decided to move forward.

The first thing this dream lead me to do was to buy a house.  I don't think many people know that it was a crazy dream about a boat that got me thinking about buying a house. I realized that living on a third floor condo was not going to be very conducive to having a fiance in a wheelchair.  Although at the time it wasn't very plausible from him to visit me anyways because we had no way to transport him, if things were going to change we would need a place to be.  So after much prayer and thought and promptings and a few tears I found a perfect home in Lehi.  It is all one story with not a lot of stairs leading up to it, it is halfway between my work and where Mike stays, it's close to my brother and his family, and it has great walking paths all around it.  Mike's aunt Julie and uncle Grant's family even made us a moveable wheelchair ramp for Mike for Christmas.  Mike was able to come check it out before we closed on it and he loved it.

So now I had a house, which was great, but Mike couldn't get to it without extreme difficulty and getting lots of people involved.  If fact after his first visit we hadn't been able to get him back to the house.  This needed to change but how..... I contemplated our dilemma many times over and over no solution seemed plausible or even remotely doable but I soon settled on a solution well actually I felt very inspired about the solution.  We needed to buy Mike a wheelchair van.  There were many problems with this solution, I will list them out for you.

1. Mike is so large he doesn't fit in a conventional wheelchair van.
2. We could not afford a wheelchair van they are very expensive.
3.  Where on earth do you find a giant wheelchair van/bus that could hold Mike?
4.  Could I drive it (well I know I could drive it, would I want to drive it was the problem)?
5.  Was it even possible to load Mike in a van without a lot of help?
6.  Would Medicare even let Mike have a van?

Of all these problems the greatest problem was the money for a wheelchair van .  I didn't know how this was going to be possible but I decided not to let that stop me.  If the Lord wanted Mike to have transportation he would have transportation.  I started looking, I paid attention to vans to see what would or would not work for Mike, I told everyone that I was looking for a van and to keep their eyes open for one, I started searching KSL for used wheelchair vans, I got input from other van owners, and I strategized about how we could come up with enough money to buy one.  This process didn't yield a van but it did help me know more of what I was looking for.  We needed a van that had rear entry wheelchair lift instead of the standard side entry, It needed the roof to be heightened, and it needed to be full sized van not a minivan.

Then all at once everything changed Mike got some unexpected money from the insurance company that Lauri had been fighting to get for 4 years and was told she would never get it.  We had completely given up on the money and were not expecting to see a dime of it.  Then one day Lauri was informed the they were giving Mike $10,000 of that money, not a lot but better than nothing.  Soon after this I found a van on KSL that had a rear entry wheelchair lift, heightened roof, and was a full sized van for only $9,000.  I took a test drive and also tested transporting Mike in it and it all worked better than expected.  We had just enough money to buy the van, pay for taxes, and pay the licence/registration coisodence? It all happened so fast we didn't even realize what a miracle/blessing it was until later.

So here she is, we call her Big Bertha

Now Michael comes to my house almost every weekend and we can go out and visit people or have adventures.  What a blessing in our lives and we are thankful everyday for these wonderful gifts. We haven't made it past the huge wall of water to get back to the ocean of life yet but this has been a giant step forward. We are still moving toward through the wall not knowing for sure how to get past it but knowing that the Lord is mindful and is helping us get there one step at a time. We don't have to know how it's going to happen we just need to know that it will happen.


Some of our Big Bertha outings

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