Every book I’ve written has come with a battle. When I’m trying to finish a novel, weird things happen. I don’t want to say I’m getting used to it, but I’m getting used to it. I’m just glad it was me and not one of the boys this time. On my last book, John shot himself in the foot in a hunting accident and ended up in the ER. That was traumatic.

I’m down to the wire on Farming Grace and trying to wrap up a final round of edits. Two weeks ago, I took a break from my computer to work on an old park bench. Scott and I were removing the aging wood when a board flew up and hit me in the mouth. The blow stunned me. I thought it broke my tooth. Thank goodness my incisor is fine, but both my top and bottom lips were split open. I toyed with the idea of going to urgent care for a couple of stitches but decided against it. We are between insurances right now. I bled in the shape of a heart, which comforted me because it reminded me of Jesus’ love. The Lord knows I love heart-shaped things.

No smiling for a week to let my lips heal up showed me how seldom people smile without me smiling first. It was an eye-opening experience. I thought everyone smiled. They don’t. For a few days, my mouth was so sore, I only ate soup and didn’t feel like working on my Farming Grace edits. Going to town was depressing. Nobody smiled because I wasn’t smiling. Well, one little old lady smiled at me and I grimaced back at her and went home.

But I was determined to finish the bench that took my grin. I’m happy to say our new bench chair turned out great and sitting in it feels like a bigger victory because my blood was involved. Here is what the bench looked like before (it’s not the same bench, but close, we will redo this one too), and the finished product below.

Have you noticed that suffering makes life sweeter?

Think about it.

Anything you had to sacrifice for makes it more special. Overcoming greater odds leads to greater satisfaction in the end. Two of my novels I’ve finished typing with one hand.

While completing my second book, Far Side of the Sea I impaled my hand on a piece of bamboo while working in the yard. It went completely through my palm and took three trips to urgent care to remove all the bamboo embedded in my flesh. The process took several months and plenty of pain. So I typed my last round of edits with one hand to finish that story.

I’m back to one handing it again on book number five. With my lips newly healed, I took a break from editing to work in the yard. I like to do that. It clears my head and gives me some exercise so I don’t spend all day sitting and writing in the house. At this point, editing.

While weeding around our kids’ old wooden play structure, I reached my hand under the playhouse to get a better grip on a big weed. I felt something not good and jerked my hand out. I thought I’d jammed my finger into a nail or something. I know better than to work without gloves, but I didn’t want to take the time to go find gloves. I just wanted to do some yard work fast and return to my computer to edit some more. But within a few short minutes, I knew something strange had happened to my hand.

When I looked at it, I could see two little pearly puss pockets beginning to form on my birdie finger. I never use my birdie finger for communication purposes but I flipped myself off trying to figure out what I’d done to my finger.

Maybe I’d gotten some weird thorn in my flesh because my hand was on fire. I went into the house and cut the wound open with a knife and ran cold water from the sink on it while it bled. I couldn’t believe how much that little wound hurt. Normally, I would never cut my hand like that but the pain was intense.

Then I bandaged it up and tried to get back to weeding. My hand hurt so bad I gave up and returned to the house. I sat down and did some half-hearted editing, typing with one hand while cradling my injured hand in my lap.

When Scott came into the house, I took the bandage off and showed him my finger. “I might have to go to urgent care,” I said. “I think I got some weird kind of a thorn in my flesh. I tried to cut it out but my hand still burns like crazy.”

“First your lip, now your hand,” Scott said, giving me that look he always gives me, like how do you manage to do these strange things to yourself?

“I know,” I said, feeling discouraged. “Urgent care without insurance will probably cost a hundred bucks or more.”

“For a thorn?” Scott asked.

I felt like a big baby. We’d driven into town to see our daughter Lacy, a brand new nurse, to ask her if my mouth would be okay without stitches the week before. “I’ll just glue my lip with that bandage glue I sometimes use from Walgreens,” I had told Lacy.

“You will not glue your lip. Don’t talk. Don’t smile. It’s deep but clean, it should heal up just fine,” Lacy said. “Keep icing your mouth.”

Now I had this weird thorn in my finger. At this point, my finger didn’t look that bad. I’d done more damage cutting it open then the small punctures that produced the two pearly drops of puss I’d washed off in the sink.

I took two Motrin PM and went to bed with a bandage on my finger that night. My hand hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep for hours. I developed chills and then sweated. When I did finally sleep, I had bad dreams.

The next morning my finger looked worse. Am I developing blood poisoning from poking my hand? A red boil was spreading from the wound and my hand hurt so darn bad. Again I mentioned urgent care to Scott. “For a thorn?” he asked again.

I went and got a needle, fired it on the stove, and shoved it into the boil moving up my finger. My hand already hurt so bad I didn’t feel the pin I shoved around to open the boil and held it under cold water. After this, I called my own private nurse, Lacy. “Soak your hand in warm salt water,” my daughter said.

So I did that off and on for several more days and slept fitfully at night because my hand throbbed and burned and I kept having nightmares. The strange red boil inched slowly up my finger. My allergies were also out of control so I thought maybe that was why I felt so crummy. By Good Friday, I decided I needed some miraculous healing or I was going to urgent care no matter how small a thorn was there. Something was in my finger causing all that pain.

During our Good Friday service, I raised my injured hand during the melancholy but hopeful worship songs. You are my healer, I told the Lord. You are my insurance right now. Please heal my hand. I don’t know why it hurts so bad.

No healing happened that I could feel, but while our pastor was reading the Gospel about the crucifixion, something struck me like never before. Pontius Pilat did not want to crucify Jesus. He wanted to release him to the crowd, but the crowd wouldn’t have it. They kept yelling, “Crucify him!” So Pilat released the other criminal and ordered Jesus to be flogged with a lead-tip whip before having him crucified. Why did Pilat order the flogging when he didn’t even want to kill Jesus in the first place? Why did he have him flogged?

I’d never thought about his before. Why the whipping that created Jesus’ terrible wounds? Why did Pilat order the flogging when he was sympathetic to Jesus? Was this to ensure that by Christ’s wounds we would be healed as the Old Testament proclaimed?

I thought about Jesus’ bloody wounds that must have hurt him so bad and the tears ran down my face. My hand still ached that night in church.

When we got home, I tried not to think about my hand. I thought about Jesus’ wounds instead. I went to bed telling myself I would bite the bullet and go to urgent care in the morning. Or by your wounds, you can heal me, Lord, I whispered. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

But the next morning when I woke up, the first thing I realized was my hand didn’t hurt. And my finger looked better. Still ugly but better. The skin was starting to peel off the wound, which was weird. It looked like skin that peeled off a bad sunburn. I bandaged up my hand and got down to editing with one hand on Saturday. Off and on my finger ached, a bone-deep pain, but not nearly as bad as before.

On Sunday, at our Easter party, I asked my Aunt Marolyn, an emergency room nurse for many years, what she thought about my finger. “Something venomous bit you,” she said.

My mom immediately announced, “Rattlesnake.” At first, I said, “No, I didn’t see a snake. I didn’t hear a snake. I don’t think it was a snake. Maybe a spider got me.”

“I’ve been bitten three times and never saw or heard the snakes that struck me,” said my mom. “Did you have two little pearl drops on the bite?”

Oh my gosh, I did see the pearls! Now my skin was sluffing off. At least it only hurt periodically now and not nearly as bad. And the little red boil was no longer inching up my finger. There’d been a big change since Good Friday in my pain level.

The good news is I will have some antibodies for a rattlesnake bite if I ever get struck again. And I can tell you when I finally hold my memoir Farming Grace in my hand, publishing this story will be that much sweeter because the battle is real but Jesus always wins.

Do you like my new logo? I had it done in the middle of soaking my hand in salt water this past week. I’m hoping to put it on some farmer’s market bags to go with the books this summer. Excited to share my story with you.