It’s been a doozy of a couple weeks.  On Sunday, April 23rd, I suffered a seizure and was unconscious for over 90 minutes. Jason came home while I was out, but I’d told him that morning I was going to take a nap so he didn’t think anything about it when he saw me laid out in the Red Room with Juliet curled up beside me. He graciously tiptoed around until I regained consciousness awhile later and foggily started to figure it all out. I’d been working on my novel, so the Google Doc recorded the moment the seizure began and I threw both myself and the computer to the floor. I injured my hip I’d broken three years ago but X-rays today confirmed nothing is broken and that is a massive relief!

I guess I should back up a bit….I started having seizures in 2003 and went through a variety of treatments for them until a study at USF found the best treatment that also left me feeling pretty functional. All our kids were little and we were pastoring full time and it was a happy and intensely demanding season. In 2010, at a Pen-Florida Assemblies of God Women’s Conference I was attending with a bunch of our ladies, I was healed in a moment of prayer. Nothing dramatic, just something I intuitively knew, and it was confirmed in our church services the next day when many others were also healed . At my next doctor’s appointment, without me saying anything to him, my neurologist told me I no longer needed to take my seizure medication and laid out a plan to wean me off the medicine. I haven’t needed any since.

Needless to say, last week’s seizure was a shock. It’s been 20 years. 20 years. Feels like a different life sometimes honestly. Same house and husband. Seizure was one room over from the last one. But kids are all grown and gone. Jobs are different but calling is the same.

Last time I wasn’t well I could just let my husband and sister Anna cook dinner and help me change diapers and my church family could keep life going. This time around I was five days away from bringing 50,000 people to town for the Brooksville Blueberry Festival. The insurance company was requiring an adjustment to our policy, the liquor license was held up in Tallahassee and no one would answer the phone (and I couldn’t drive there because I wasn’t allowed behind the wheel and I was the only person authorized to have the conversation) and frankly, my brain wasn’t working and half the time I couldn’t put a full sentence together.

People were trying to help. Our BMS Board tried. They are volunteers and aren’t listed on much of the paperwork. They have full-time jobs and aren’t authorized to do much. Our Event Coordinator, Andrea, tried, but she was also doing all her own responsibilities handling over two hundred volunteers as well as managing her two babies. John Lee, who owns the Festival tried, while he juggled the festival and his restaurants and got all the blueberry products in and got them all ready. Our vendor coordinator Betsy did her best to help while she worked her full time job at her school and managed her 330 vendors and picked up my pieces and started taking calls from people panicking about weather reports.

Mayor Blake Bell did all he could to help. He got involved in helping with the State and City Staff helped with things we normally would have done on our end. Honestly, everyone was so amazing and kind and wonderful and considerate and did everything that made me fall in love with Brooksville so long ago as my forever home.

The seizure medication, instead of making me sleepy, kept me awake, so for days I functioned on three hours a night of sleep. Most nights were spent watching Netflix shows in Spanish subtitles so I could at least shut my mind down if I couldn’t shut my eyes. Let me just say that lack of sleep doesn’t help in the healing process.

Then came Friday and festival setup. Then arose the controversy over a business that didn’t agree with how we set up the festival. I might not have had all my brain function – but I had enough to know I needed to follow State regulation as well as rules of insurance, law enforcement, and my attorney. The three day firestorm that followed, turning what should have been my happy community festival into heartbreaking controversy and calls for my firing, broke my heart. Not the firing part. This isn’t my first Survivor Season. I’ve Outwitted, Outplayed, Outlasted these same opponents before. I’ll outwit, outplay, and outlast them again. What broke my heart is that they robbed the community of the most beautiful win. An event that hundreds of volunteers spent months planning, that generated tens of thousands of dollars for dozens of nonprofits and hundreds of thousands of dollars for small businesses is being overshadowed by our refusal to disregard State law. There were even calls to boycott another business in town because they didn’t break the law. I felt like I was living in upside-down world.

Did I mention my brain wasn’t working very well? Part of it was the post-seizure brain fog, part of it was the medication side effects. It’s gotten a little better as time went on, and that’s when I started to remember what life was like twenty years ago when I was being treated for seizures. I remembered how exhausted I was, how much sleep I required, how little I could remember, how I had to read a sentence three times before I could understand it, how I went for 5 years without being able to read for fun. And I started to panic. I couldn’t go back there.

And I won’t. I am still healed. I don’t know what happened on April 24th. But what God did for me in October of 2010 is still Truth. He is the same God today that He was then. No matter what today brings, God is Good and He is Faithful. I had a day full of meetings on Wednesday starting with our monthly Brooksville Matters meeting on Wednesday at 7:30. Before 7:45 on I’d teared up four times. I’m not a crier, and it’s probably more times than I cried altogether in 2022, but I’m ok with that. They might have been a little because I was tired (though I have been able to sleep more the last few nights) but I also think it’s because I appreciate how much I love my community and the job I get to do in it and the people I get to do it with. I am blessed beyond measure and so grateful He has trusted me for in this time and in this place.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/great-is-thy-faithfulness-feat-cece-winans/1551855429?i=1551855448