Recovery, early prayer

Speaking strictly electronically, I was able to recover some of the most important personal items lost when my computer crashed. Those I recovered from a file I had saved on a flash drive I keep in my desk at home. Among those flies were the images I have gathered as I used them on the blog posts. Also, the blog posts for part of 2018 were on that drive. I will have to recreate only a few weeks of the blog history to have it complete in my personal files. I can do that from the web postings themselves. I was very pleased to see every one of those files. I saved them to the Mac I have at home. From there I will keep an updated copy moving forward. Plus, I have the cloud backup when needed. Meanwhile, at work, I had a vague memory of creating a file on our server to back-up my work-related desktop files. I had searched the folders I thought I would have used to house those files but had not discovered the files I was looking for. Multiple searches using names I might have used to title the file were fruitless. No luck with any names I used for those searches. But I woke up last night and realized I just had to choose a word that would be unique to the documents I had personally created. It took three tries, but I found the file. The word that succeeded, “Thaxton”. Mama’s maiden name. I do not remember naming the backup how it was titled o the server. I guess I did not want it to be overly obvious when I stored it on the server, but it did indeed have a complete set of desktop files I needed. Praise the Lord!


In the area of physical recovery, I am progressing toward health, but I certainly have not arrived. It took only a few minutes outside yesterday evening for me to start coughing badly. Fortunately, the cough settles down when I do. But the cough persists. It is not as bad as it once was, and it is a productive cough for the most part. Not the deep, dry cough I normally have when I get a respiratory infection. That is both good and bad. The good is that the cough I now have is not the loud, disruptive cough that gives Mama a headache. The bad is that I do not know for sure how to treat this illness. Elderberry seems to help only a little. Herbs have not been very effective. Antibiotics are not at all effective. Rest seems to be the best remedy – along with maintaining the homeopathic treatments. I do final sleep when I go to bed, but just lying down causes the drainage to reposition itself in my sinuses along with the gagging and coughing that brings. Somehow all that finds some sort of equilibrium as I sleep. It seems a long, slow road to recovery. But there are signs of progress toward recovery. In her recovery Victoria is struggling more than I am. But she shares her bedroom with her dogs and spends her working hours around sick people (at the pharmacy) so, a slow recovery may be what we should expect for her.


Mama wakes enough each morning for me to pray briefly with her. We have had a tradition of me kissing her goodbye every morning on my way out of the house headed to work, but a couple months ago she asked me to spend a moment praying with her before I leave the house. I have always been careful to never miss that morning kiss, but also to not disturb her enough to cause her to lose any sleep. So, with this new routine, I never take long to pray for fear of waking her to the point of her not getting back to sleep, but it is nice to get those few early moments together before I go out on my own. I believe there is power in those few moments of prayer with the one person in the world who knows me well and yet loves me deeply. Mama and I pray together at other times, but those morning moments have become something special; especially to Mama. I highly recommend it for those of you who have not taken the opportunity to start your day as we have begun to do.


Marriage is an every-single-day way to live. Live it together from the moment you get out of bed.