Surprised By Joy

When I was trying to decide what to title this post, "Surprised by Joy" is the first thing that came to mind. This phrase is familiar to me because it is the title of a C.S. Lewis book which is essentially an account of the factors that brought Lewis to a mature, adult Christian faith. From Lewis's perspective, the "joy" he had so long sought had been discovered in the least likely place within the least likely circumstances. So what could be a more perfect title than that as we come to this part of the story, right??

Josh went on to have his third knee surgery. We figured we knew what to expect this time around, but boy were we surprised...and not by joy! By lots and lots of pain. This recovery was exponentially worse than the other two, and we still don't really know why. If the door was cracked even a tiny bit for him to go back to football, that last surgery slammed it shut and then dead-bolt locked it for good measure.

This surgery was in the first weeks of summer and just a few weeks before his 16th birthday....and it was his right knee...which means he couldn't get his drivers license on his birthday. Bummer.

Here's where the timeline gets kind of fuzzy to me, but let's just get to the main idea: Josh started playing the guitar to entertain himself while he was laid up for months on end. He started to get better, and as he got better, he got more interested in music. As he got more interested in music, he recruited his friends to come over and before long he had a little band and they practiced at our house.

Here's a sidebar story:
When Todd started medical school, Josh was 6 weeks old. We found a duplex that was two bedroom, one bathroom and was 900 square feet. It was perfect for our little family. Eighteen months later, Luke was born. Seventeen months later, Anna Kate was born. Now we have three kids ages three and under and yet we stayed in that little duplex. For five years. The point of telling you all this is that we tried to get out of there as often as we could to stretch our legs a little bit. One night we went for a walk around our neighborhood, Todd pushing the boys in a side-by-side double stroller and me carrying Anna Kate in a Snugli. We passed a house that I thought was cute and charming and I made him stop to look at it. I told him I wanted to live there someday. Well, that's where we have lived for the past ten years.

When we bought the house, the kids were 5, 6 and 8. The house is choppy and crooked and quirky, but it was old and had character and that's all I ever wanted. One interesting feature was that it had a detached garage (which can be a little inconvenient at times) with a small room downstairs and a larger room upstairs. There was no water connected to these rooms but they were finished out with hardwood floors and had central heat and air. Cute and interesting, but we had no idea what we would do with those random rooms. 

Are you seeing where I'm going with this? We had no idea what to do with those random rooms because we had no idea our sporty son would not play sports but have a band instead. Thank goodness God knows these things. Can you imagine a more perfect scenario than having a garage band in a detached garage. The key word there is detached. :) Todd and I don't even have a master bathroom, but we do have a "band room", and that turned out to be exactly what we needed after all.

So here is where the band era begins. Once Josh had cut all ties to all sports, he immersed himself in music, and it wasn't long before we all began to be Surprised by Joy.