I’d like to brag on my wife for just a moment:
We announced this morning that we had decided to postpone our PraiseShare fundraiser for a day out of respect for those who lost loved ones in Oklahoma on Monday. A lot of our volunteers – who had already planned to be here to answer phones for the fundraiser – had stayed and were praying together in our “phone zone.”
Shortly after we made the announcement, Carrie Parsons, our morning show co-host, read DJ’s post (below) on the air.
This is what she wrote:
“It is easy to get frustrated in this life. Circumstances can leave us feeling helpless. I’ve felt that way over the past several days — a sick child, falling behind at work, a big vacation coming up, etc. But, events like those in Moore, have a way of immediately correcting my perspective. My child is here, and on the mend. I’m watching her peacefully sleep right now. There are parents in Moore who can’t do that this morning. I’m so blessed. God forgive me when I allow ‘stuff’ to block me from seeing that.”
There was not a dry eye in the “phone zone.” And we’ve been getting calls and emails asking for the text of DJ’s comments since then.
Because I work in the media, I get most of the spotlight in our family. Many people who know me through me work “know of” DJ, but they don’t know her.
They don’t know that she’s a career writer and editor who was the vice president of communications for a trade association in Washington, DC, for nearly a decade before my career (once, again) dragged her half-way across the country, forcing her to change jobs (once, again).
They don’t know that she has edited some of the textbooks that were used to teach your children, or that she was a newspaper reporter who became the editor of the paper she worked for at a relatively young age, or that she graduated with honors with a journalism / public relations degree, or that she continues to work full time as a marketing and public relations professional WHILE she takes care of her “two children” … Caroline and me.
They don’t know that she has devoted the past seven years of her life to raising one of the most precocious, stubborn, head-strong, little girls God ever created. And that she deals with our little angel as if she was a little angel even when she’s being anything but.
They don’t know that she has spent more than 18 years married to a man who – because of his physical disabilities – can’t always do the things he wants to and should do to help her. They don’t know that she has held my hand through surgeries and treatments and therapies that have caused intense pain for me, and intense stress for her, because she was powerless to take away the pain.
If you know this amazing lady that is my wife, you know that everything I’ve written here, and more, is true. I have no idea why God has chosen to bless me with DJ. And I will never be able to express my gratitude to Him or to her for the blessing that she is to my life and to Caroline’s life.
And I just wanted you to know that, too.
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