Moving Beyond Fear to Gratitude

By Nancy H. Mitchell

Moving Beyond Fear to Gratitude takes the reader on a journey with a quiet, strong, humble man who trusted in the Lord throughout all his trials—including corticolbasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and debilitating brain disease—and his anxious wife who, as his caregiver, learned to lean on the Lord and to see that gratitude adds a sense of peace to the circumstances of life. Through her four years of journaling, Nancy paints a picture of CBD’s effects on both sufferer and caregiver. This book is intended, in part, to help families and caregivers recognize CBD symptoms. It’s primary purpose, however, is to show how the hard-earned knowledge Nancy gained through caring for her husband, coupled with his strong positive attitude and faith, helped her to better accept God’s sovereign control over life’s circumstances and deepened her faith beyond anything she could have possibly conceived. It’s her prayer that what she has shared in this book will help you to find that same acceptance and deeper faith in the midst of your own trial. Nancy reminds us that everyone is going through some type of trial. What matters is what we do with that trial to glorify God and to acknowledge that all that we are and have, we are and have by His grace and only by His grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781973689959

Nancy H. Mitchell

Nancy Mitchell is a first-time writer who has served as a youth and adult Sunday School teacher and choir member and who has maintained an encouragement card ministry for over twenty-five years. She is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and is a retired director of corporate training and senior human resources manager in the banking industry. She finds her greatest joy in being a mother to Becky and grandmother to Kaytlynn and Kameron, along with helping others and offering encouragement to the sick and disheartened.

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Copyright © 2020 Nancy H. Mitchell.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-8996-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-8997-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-8995-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020907058

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/22/2020

In Proverbs 31, we read about the characteristics of a godly woman, a woman I always aspired to be. When I was a young woman praying for a godly husband, I prayed for a man who:

46559.png Walks with God and possesses a relational faith with Jesus. He seeks to be like Jesus, patterns his life after the teachings and example of Jesus and is willing to make any sacrifice for his family and the glory of God.

46559.png Is committed to Jesus’ ministry and willingly goes beyond his comfort zone in his service to Jesus.

46559.png Takes care of his family with faithfulness, trustworthiness and integrity being his most important characteristics.

46559.png Carries the light of Jesus, which illuminates the world around him, in his heart.

This book is lovingly dedicated to Becky, Josh, Kaytlynn and Kameron, and in memory of Donald Mitchell, the godly man I married.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1   Our Story

Chapter 1     Life on the Farm

Chapter 2     Bus Stop Romance

Chapter 3     Mourning into Joy

Chapter 4     Life with Don

Chapter 5     My Quiet Rock

Chapter 6     A Man of Character

How to Have a Healthy Marriage

Part 2   The Enemy (CBD) Attacks

Chapter 7     Life Changes

Chapter 8     You Don’t Deserve This

Chapter 9     Paralysis

Chapter 10   Devastating Diagnosis

Chapter 11   CBD Symptoms

Chapter 12   The Lord is my Shepherd

When the Enemy Attacks

Part 3   Gratitude Prevails

Chapter 13   Peace and Patience

Chapter 14   Where Are You, Lord?

Chapter 15   Bearing One Another’s Burdens

Chapter 16   I Can Do Everything Through Him

Chapter 17   The Dreaded Day Arrives

Chapter 18   Dying a Little Bit Each Day

Chapter 19   If Walls Could Talk

Chapter 20   Taking Care of My Best Friend

Chapter 21   Still Able to Pray

Chapter 22   How Did This Happen?

Chapter 23   A Fellow Traveler

Chapter 24   Growing in My Faith

Chapter 25   Becoming God’s Hands and Feet

Chapter 26   Kiss from the King

Chapter 27   From Laughter to Tears

Chapter 28   Prayer for My Readers

Gratitude Became My Guiding Light

Part 4   The Race is Done

Chapter 29   Going Home

Bible Verses Don Leaned On

Extending God’s Love and Grace to Each Other

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

This book was not written by a professional writer nor by an expert in a medical field. It was written by a woman who detests writing, yet who felt led by God to share her and her husband’s story despite knowing that demonic opposition would attend that God-directed process.

Have you ever felt God leading you to do something that was out of your comfort zone, that you felt totally unqualified to do, or that you were not the right person to do it? That has certainly been true for me. For example, years ago when I heard the Holy Spirit encouraging me to teach adult Sunday School, I felt there were many people in class who were more qualified than I—who had greater knowledge and understood the Bible much better than I did. But co-workers had told me for years that I had a talent for teaching and training. I knew God had given me that talent, so I would have been dishonoring Him if I hadn’t obeyed that call. Now here I am again in that unfamiliar territory. But I know God has led me to share our story to further His kingdom and to give Him praise, glory, and honor.

At the age of twelve, I gave my heart to Christ and followed in obedience with baptism. While I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I now understand that at that moment God planted within me the Holy Spirit who would walk with me throughout the new life given to me on the cross by the blood of Jesus Christ. It was demo day for the old self and the beginning of construction of the new self—a self that would require continued renovation along the way.

I became a strong believer in Christ and read my Bible daily. Through the years, I taught Sunday School, sang in the church choir, delivered taped sermons to the shut-ins of the church, and to help support the youth ministry, I helped make thousands of chocolate-covered peanut butter Easter eggs and chaperoned youth events. While my prayer life wasn’t as faithful as my devotional time, I still communicated with God on a daily basis. Yet I was guilty of spending only hurried moments with Him, not realizing that the Father desires a relationship with us that requires a commitment of time and focus.

We all have something we would prefer to keep to ourselves. For me it was my battle with anxiety and worry. I didn’t want friends—and especially my church family—to know that I didn’t have it together as much as I was sometimes given credit for. Despite having what I believed was a close relationship with God, I often suffered with anxiety and worry. I knew that what we constantly think about will soon come out in our responses to difficult circumstances, yet I still allowed the enemy control of my mind. Through my and Don’s journey with his illness, however, I finally realized the truth that if we react to difficult circumstances by turning to God, He can use our pain to allow others to see His image in us. I learned that pain must not be wasted but used instead to glorify God, as I pray this book will do.

Other than taking notes during Sunday sermons, I’d never been consistent in journaling. During this trial, however, journaling became a therapeutic way for me to release my frustrations and fear. As a result, my daughter soon recognized the days I hadn’t journaled and would encourage me to start journaling again. Journaling helped me sort out my feelings such that I eventually began including more entries of gratitude, gratitude that—as God soon led me to see—would become one of my greatest anchors and, later, the theme for this book. My journal entries, raw as they are, make up a large portion of Moving Beyond Fear to Gratitude.

I’ve never wanted to be a burden to anyone, and I’ve always tried to be a super daughter, super wife, super mom, super employee, and super GiGi to my two grandchildren. Yet I can’t begin to count the times I heard during our ordeal, If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of Don. As difficult as it was, I soon had to allow caring friends to minister to me. If you’re a caregiver reading this book, you’ll know being a caregiver is on-the-job training. I definitely learned as I went along, made a lot of mistakes, and at times even thought the disease might kill us both. I just didn’t know which of us it was going to take first. But I was blessed with the help of family, friends, and the wonderful caregivers who ministered to Don at two care centers near the end of his disease.

Encouragement is a major theme in the Bible and is the very fuel that God uses to energize a soul and get it back on its feet. Jesus was an encourager, and all of us need encouragement to walk the faith. Throughout this book, you will read about the many encouragers God placed on this journey with us, and we gave God the praise and glory for the many ways He showed His love to us through others. As you read this book, and as you may be traveling on your own difficult journey, I pray God will put encouragers in your path even as he gives you the wisdom and words to encourage others.

In The Purpose Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren says, Your greatest life messages and your most effective ministry will come out of your deepest hurts.¹ This book is truly a result of the hurt I experienced in this journey and the ministry that I felt led by God to share with others. It’s difficult to hear doctors say there is nothing that can be done to slow the disease that will take your husband’s life in six to seven years. I’ve learned first-hand in walking this difficult path, however, that even when circumstances don’t change for the better, I can change for the better by developing a spirit of gratitude—a gratitude that, as Thomas Merton wrote, is the heart of the Christian life. Throughout this book I share how gratitude and, more importantly, God’s grace received only through the Savior, Jesus Christ, are the means to healing during difficult trials.

Moving Beyond Fear to Gratitude is about how a quiet, strong, humble man persevered in his love for the Lord throughout his life, including through a cruel illness, and about how a woman learned to lean on the Lord by doing things for her husband that any wife would pray she would never have to do. During this trial, I came to truly understand the words of Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-17, Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. The hard-won knowledge I gained through caring for Don—coupled with his positive attitude and strong faith—helped me to better accept God’s sovereign control over life’s circumstances and deepened my faith beyond anything I could have possibly conceived.

My prayer in writing this book is threefold: that you or your loved ones faced with this or another rare form of dementia will find some answers or help in managing a horrible, debilitating disease; that our grandchildren, Kaytlynn and Kameron, will learn what a godly man and example for them their PaPa was; and most importantly, that the story of our faith walk through the dark valley of Don’s illness will encourage you in whatever trial or circumstances you face to seek the strength and the grace that come only from a close relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

While I did much research on Corticolbasal Degeneration (CBD) during Don’s illness and learned a great deal, I am not an expert, and no part of this book should be mistaken for medical advice. Please view it only as the perspective and experience of a woman who had extraordinary love for her husband and who relied on the extraordinary grace of God.

PART ONE

Our Story

For this reason, a man will leave his father and

mother and be united to his wife,

and the two will become one flesh.

—Ephesians 5:31

Father God, thank you for the gift of a godly

man—the man I needed in my life

more than I knew at the time I prayed for him.

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CHAPTER 1

Life on the Farm

As a boy growing up on a dairy farm in Floyd, Virginia, morning came early at four-thirty for Don Mitchell. While some people might think it does, milk doesn’t just come out of a carton. To ensure that milk ends up in that carton in the store, life on a dairy farm means repeating each day what you did the day before—milk, water, and feed the cattle before going to school.

In the winter, when temperatures dropped into the teens or below zero, getting milk to the carton became an even more challenging task. As the baby of the family, Don was a little more fortunate than his brothers and sisters because his dad had purchased a milking machine by the time Don was old enough (five or six) to help. To use the milking machine you had to carefully hold the cow’s tail, wash and sanitize the teats to avoid cross contamination, make the cow comfortable, then hook the suction cups to the cow’s udder, where the milk would run through tubes into a bucket. After the grade C milk was collected, the milk cans were taken to the road on a tractor for collection by Carnation. If the power went out, it meant milking by hand, which required more patience because the cows were no longer used to that. You only needed to be kicked once to learn that a cow’s hoof is hard and that you would wear the bruise to school for many days.

Don learned early in life that healthy, happy cows will give more milk. If you show them love and care, they will show it back. The same was true of sheep in the spring when they had to be held down and sheared so the wool could be sold. I believe growing up around farm animals was one of the things responsible for Don’s inner gentleness. Words had little meaning to the cows he milked or the sheep he sheared, but they did respond to the warmth and care he projected when he worked with them.

Some of the farm animals quickly learned to respond to Don’s shrill whistle, which required that the mouth and tongue be properly positioned with the teeth to make the loudest sound possible. While it was maybe not a very lady-like desire, I really wanted to learn the whistle. Don tried many times, but he was unsuccessful in teaching me the whistle technique. At local ball games, however, everyone knew where that whistle was coming from—to the annoyance of some, no doubt.

Many young people today are in to stylish trends. When they tire of a garment, it’s passed along to Goodwill. For kids growing up on a farm in the sixties, though, giving to Goodwill meant demoting tattered school clothes to farm wear. When they became stained with manure, detergent would remove the odor, leaving the fashionable, new design ready for another day’s trip to the barn.

Kids today also get excited about summer trips to the beach, Busch Gardens, Kings Dominion, or Disney World. As a dairy farm kid, Don’s summers consisted of feeding the animals, repairing pasture fences, maintaining the farm equipment, chopping corn, working in the garden, mowing/baling hay, and lifting and storing the bales in the barn. Planting and harvesting required long days in the field, particularly when cutting and storing silage in the silos. Still, nothing smells better than a field of freshly-mowed silage.

Not only did the days start at sunrise but they also ended after sunset. After the crops were harvested, the pregnant cows had to be checked on for calving. There were no days off. It was understood that you would be in church on Sunday mornings and that Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving were significant celebrations. Aside from those days, however, holidays and weekends didn’t exist. Whether he was milking a cow, out on the tractor plowing a field, planting crops, or baling hay, working on the farm gave Don a lot of time for thinking and reflecting on what he wanted to do with his life—and he knew it didn’t include the farm.

Like Don, I knew what I wanted to do with my life didn’t include working on a farm; nevertheless, being raised on a tobacco farm was one of the greatest gifts my parents could have given me. There were no vacations, and fun activities consisted of digging for night crawlers and going fishing after dark, wading in the river, seeing who could collect the most fireflies in a jar, or sliding on our bottoms down a large, red clay hill. Just this activity alone should have had the laundry product producers standing in line for a bid on a commercial. The life lessons of patience, teamwork, commitment, and gratitude that my siblings and I learned from growing up on a farm—lessons that so many young people would benefit from today—also carried over into adulthood and our careers.

Even though most children’s values are taught by parents, Don agreed that many of his personal values were direct reflections of life on the farm. He knew he had to take care of the animals before he could take care of himself, which taught him responsibility and dependability. Working hard and long hours at an early age taught Don excellent work ethics. Learning to drive for Don meant driving a tractor at a time when his feet could not reach the clutch or brake—he had to stand on the brake to actually stop the tractor.

Don also learned patience on the dairy farm. Farming is not a nine-to-five job. A farmer may be up at three checking on a cow ready to calve then have to patiently work with the cow to get her to nurse. While learning to care for the livestock, Don also developed respect for his three siblings, who had similar responsibilities. So he learned at an early age what it meant to be selfless and that more can be accomplished with a team effort.

Despite his many responsibilities on the farm, Don was an excellent student. He was as dedicated to his school work and school activities as he was to his responsibilities on the farm. He was in Beta Club his junior and senior years of high school and was elected president his senior year. One of the main objectives of Beta Club was to promote ideals of academic achievement, character, leadership, and service, ideals clearly reflected in Don’s life. Don also participated in Future Farmers of America, played basketball, sang in the Glee Club, and was chosen to be a homecoming escort and a Boys State delegate. All of these activities helped shape Don into the strong, caring, responsible man he would later become.

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CHAPTER 2

Bus Stop Romance

Don planned on going to Virginia Tech after graduating from high school. The military draft, however, brought war to the American home front. According to an article posted on the Michigan in the World website, during the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. The system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces to have more of a choice as to which division in the military they would serve.²

Don was one of those young men. Much to his parents’ disappointment, particularly his mother’s, Don put his dream of going to Virginia Tech on hold. He held a fairly low draft number and wanted to choose his preferred branch of military service. After graduating high school he enlisted in the air force in February of 1967.

Don received his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and continued his training at Lowry Technical Training Center at Lowry AFB in Colorado, where it was no surprise that Don was soon recognized by his commanding officer for his outstanding record of his assigned duties. In his commendation, Don’s lieutenant colonel said, Your enthusiasm and determination have been excellent and you have shown yourself as a very valued team member. You have set an outstanding example for your fellow airmen by your excellent conduct as well as your positive attitude and dedication to the mission.

Don served a year at Phu Cat AFB in Vietnam (which was used as a base for Agent Orange spraying) and a year at Bitburg AFB, Germany, as a weapons specialist. Don received an honorable discharge from the air force in December 1970. After his discharge, Don began studies at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke and graduated in June 1973 with an associate of applied science degree in data processing technology. Later, he would attend Radford University.

While Don