Five days from now will mark two years since my dad's stroke as well as my 22nd birthday. It's probably been at least four months since I last visited him. Sad thing is that he is only 45 minutes away. He lives in a nursing home. It's been a while since someone asked me how he was doing and I guess I have just forced myself to not really think about him. He wasn't a bad father, we just were never close. He worked nights. Doctors said he would stay the same as he was that first Christmas but I didn't want to believe it. He cannot move his right side of his body, has speech and language problems, and memory problems."These [memory]problems can include shortened retention spans, difficulty in learning new information and problems in conceptualizing and generalizing."-National Stroke Association website. [Not sure why but felt like having an explantion of the memory problems would be good.] He is pretty much the same by the way. Which means I can't really have a conversation with him. He won't understand that I will be going to 11 countries in 11 months nor will he remember for long when I finally tell him. Only difference is that he seems to actually like it a little better at nursing home. Doesn't talk about death as much. Is it terrible that I have wondered if it would be better if he died instead of surviving? Mainly for my mom's sake. Not that I expect her to go look for another man or anything but just so she wouldn't worry about things like how much she earning each month so that she can save as much as possible instead of paying something of my dad's. I don't know if he knows what is going on. I do know he gets frustrated when trying to tell us something. Being able to get one word out but not be able to explain. We usally can't connect the dots or it it is something that he saw on tv that we no idea about. Is it bad that when my mom asked "what if something happens to him?:" I said I may not come back and would continue ministry wherever I am at? The thing is that I don't know how I am going to react if I do get news that something happened to him or anyone else.
One of my good friends of 7 years who is not a christian told me other night that he was glad [or maybe it was proud] that I was going on this because he saw it as, christians are supposed to do missions and this is the ultimate mission. Yeah, that was paraphased. I am bad with remembering the exact of things. My other good friend of about the same amount of time has told me at one point in the last month that this was her dream for me, that this trip is SO me. It's awesome to recieve support like that. Not to get sacrisatic remarks or whatever shrugs.
Anyway, I have had two people each buy 5 of the 500 threads of hope bracelets I have. I haven't really been trying to sell yet either. 🙂 I have some people that said they might take a bundle and try selling them at their churches which would be amazing.
