Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Rachelle Gardner at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Soul Train
- Live Out Your Dream And Discard The Box
- Tears In A Bottle
- From The Young Mom I Once Was, To You
- I Can’t Help Falling
- What A Difference Ten Years Makes
- The Next Best Thing To Robert Redford
- The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
- Where Have All The Years Gone
- Fun With Kiki Cullen
- Stuck On Mom
- Ten Years Later, Our Girls From Northern Ireland Remembered
- The Thrift of Grief
- Job Security
- The Party’s Over
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Repetitive Stress Ministries
I know. Most people suffer sports injuries while actually doing…sports.
Not me. I learned my lesson on that years ago. In a flurry of binge-exercising sixteen years ago, I purchased a chintzy stair-stepper and went to town. OK, maybe not town, exactly. More like the operating room, but then, you’d probably already figured that out about me, right?
My orthopedic man fixed one of my knees (and I’ve managed to ignore the other one ever since) but I’ll tell you what: that was a very painful surgery from which to recover, complicated by the fact that I had a previously scheduled 5 for the price of 5 twelve-hour operation a mere six weeks later. Since then, my friends, I’ve sworn off surgery in a big way—except, of course, for brain surgery. But come on! Who counts that?
In order to swear off surgery, I’ve had to swear off exercise-induced injury. The beauty of lifting free weights eludes me, since the herniated disks (or is it discs? I don’t know…) in my neck cry out for mercy when I attempt so much as the hoisting of a gallon of 2% into the shopping cart. I cannot tolerate the pounding of pavement or any other surface less shock absorbant than shag carpet.
Mercifully, I no longer own any shag carpet.
I am able and sometimes go through spurts of using our treadmill, on which I’ve never injured myself, but I digress. Excercise, for me, is almost always a digression.
My topic today is not really sports injuries. It’s repetitive stress injuries, a subject with which I have far more intimate and ongoing familiarity. And more specifically, it’s what I have come to call repetitive stress ministries.
A repetitive stress ministry is one you can’t bear to give up, even though every joint and ganglion cyst you possess rebels against your heart. The ministry I don’t want to abandon is called Mercy and Truth in Kansas City. Cathy Gordon, the ministry’s founder, is an RN who has made medical missions her life. Besides setting up clinics in locations around the world, she runs several here in town. She even operates a birthing clinic, with the bulk of the mothers living below the poverty level.
A few years ago, I decided I couldn’t bear for these new moms—many of whom do not have heated homes—to leave the birthing clinic without a handmade afghan for their babies. And for a while, I cranked those puppies out, too—keeping up with the growing number of births with some efficiency. Then, well—repetitive stress set in and I had to have my dumb finger operated on.
Since then, I’ve barely crocheted. In fact, I haven’t crocheted.
Around the time I had surgery, though, a young woman who belongs to the same national writers group I do—American Christian Fiction Writers—contacted me. We’d never met, but she read my profile on the group’s website and saw that I loved to make blankies for babies. She asked if she could help.
Could she? Today I received an enormous carton of crocheted afghans plus a whole slew of darling hats for the babies at Mercy and Truth. A gift from Kathleen Morphy and her friend Karen, who enclosed a handwritten card for each new mother.
Maybe the hugest blessing to me is this: Kathleen has terrible tendonitis. She is a writer, and can hardly type because of the pain. In her daily life, she helps her mother take care of her dad, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Yet out of the goodness of her heart, she also stepped in to help me—a complete stranger.
Kathleen, I want to thank you here and now for joining with me in this Repetitive Stress Ministry. You’ve shown some sweet babies and their moms a lot of love.
May God completely heal you and grant you the grace to do all He’s planned for your life. And a blessed, merry Christmas to you.
Oh, how I enjoy coming here to catch up on what I’ve missed! Sure do relate to those stress injuries:-) And bless Kathleen’s heart—so sweet and giving of her.
Warmest Christmas blessings,
VickiPosted by Vicki on 12/11/06 at 12:10 PMThere is a verse that talks about “praying for workers for the harvest.” That’s a good prayer, and one that is sometimes answered before we even know it.
Lord, thank you for those who give to see lives touched for YOU.
Posted by Tricia Goyer on 12/11/06 at 12:57 PM
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