It’s NonProfit!! go to Amazon
It’s time to get your fingers ready to click on the picture above and go to Amazon.com and order Learning How to Sing a New Song – Learning How Volume 4. While you’re at it, go ahead and order my other titles, and once you read remember to leave a review! Descriptions are here, or you can just browse Amazon. As always, it’s all nonprofit, and your order qualifies for Prime and Super Saver shipping. And since it’s so early, you’ll get your books in time for gift-giving purposes! [3 hours later] I just uploaded Kindle versions of Learning How to Sing and my Memoirs! They both have an active Table of Contents and are priced at $8 if you like instant gratification. The print copy is $10. Although at least Vol 4. Song is in the match book program so if you buy the print copy you get a $2.99 deal on the Kindle version. And my friends, you do NOT need to own a Kindle to enjoy these digital versions. Just download the app!! I love it. It totally helps my eyes, which are about to fall out right now. But I was getting impatient with all the Kindle conversion stuff so I just started pressing buttons after dispensing with the pictures for the most part. The important part is that the books are on Kindle. I’m only 2 years behind schedule with my Memoirs. :). I’d link to the Kindle versions but there’s a 12 hour conversion time before it’s “live” on Amazon so I’m just going to have to trust that it will happen because I need to go to bed STAT. Hey, I’m doing what I can over here.
I was just talking to Mommy a couple days ago about writing, and I said, If I hadn’t gotten sick, I would have never known that I could write. Well, I guess I’ve always been able to write papers in school etc. but didn’t really have anything worth writing about that people other than an English professor might want to read. But one of the funny things about this is that my grammar declined and colloquialism ramped up dramatically once I got sick. And I write like I speak, so there’s a whole lot of “voice” happening.
A week or so after she came home from the hospital, Mommy and I went to go see Mrs. Ridgely. I put a print-out of our book on the table in front of her. You DIDN’T, she gasped. Oh….but I DID, I shot back.
This is one of those times that writing was the only thing that would make me feel better. So I was up early, clutching my travel cup of coffee (a sealed mug is the only way I can carry stuff upstairs), and I went to my people to fix my arm enough so I could keep on typing. (Me to Trainer D: I said RUB it, NOT BREAK IT!!) That Monday during Stretchy Time Coach R asked me about my weekend. I thought for a moment, trying to remember what happened.
Me: I wrote a book!
Coach R: (long pause) …Okay, so first of all…who responds to “how was your weekend” with an answer like that?….
I don’t know why he’s so surprised. I totally did this to him a couple months ago, except you won’t see his book until 2016 since I’m busy celebrating Mrs. Ridgely right now. Sometime in August during Ladder Time I casually mentioned, Oh, yeah – we’re writing a book.
Coach R immediately bought in. That’s why we get along so swimmingly – he lets me have my own way most of the time, except when I might hurt myself, e.g. when he caught me “running” at the maximum incline. When I emailed Trainer D saying we were writing a book however, he immediately messaged me saying, Are you serious?
YES, of COURSE I’m serious, D!!!
Honestly. That’s how I roll. You should know that by now.
Trainer D and I get along swimmingly, too, but the tenor of our interaction is *cough* different *cough*.
I finished Coach R’s book and happily placed a copy in his hands. It doesn’t sink in until you hold it in your hands, I think. It’s a vague idea until you can see it and read it yourself and can tell that it’s a marketable text. I also gave Mrs. Ridgely a pre-publication copy of Coach R’s book because it’s a great example of the co-author process. I wanted her to know I would write the book and she would have as much room to take it in any direction she wanted, but if she didn’t have a lot of energy to spare and liked it as-is, it could be released as a finished work.
Hilariously, Mrs. Ridgely loves Coach R’s book. I am so grateful – apparently it really ministered to her and she learned a lot more about my day to day experience as a result. I emailed Coach R triumphantly to inform him that the CRFC (Coach R Fan Club) just got bigger.
Happily, Mrs. Ridgely loves our book, too. It happened so fast I didn’t realize it, but it’s what I would have said to her if stamina weren’t an issue and we could just sit around for hours and talk. It’s about what happened to her, what happened to me, how it’s been an arduous road, but it makes so much sense and how the path has been strewn with marks of indelible grace. And it’s about how we prepare for life, and prepare for death.
This is the first chapter. Soli Deo gloria.
Chapter 1: She Was Right: A New Song
“I was a drug addict, an alcoholic, and I was very well known on 14th Street…”
Mrs. Ridgely and I had been invited to speak at the IFI Women’s Conference in April 2015. Mrs. D made it easy on us by making it a question and answer format. I was thrilled to be asked and emailed Mrs. Ridgely a few months before when Mrs. D told me she was going to be my partner.
Oh, Ning, you’ve done this before, but I haven’t! Mrs. Ridgely told me she was nervous.
I laughed inwardly but tried to reassure her as I emailed her back. Seriously, Mrs. Ridgely, I learned that this kind of life was possible because of YOU.
Mrs. D didn’t know this when she asked us both to participate at the conference, but Mrs. Ridgely and I go way back. She got a liver transplant when I was a freshman at Georgetown University in 1998. Her hospital room was just a short walk up the hill from my dorm so we started spending a lot of time together. She prayed me through my undergraduate course (COL ‘02), my early working life, and getting an MBA (MSB ‘09).
But while I was busy getting my degrees and cutting my teeth in the working world what I was really learning was what it looked like to live victoriously even if you’re sick. I didn’t learn this because Mrs. Ridgely sat me down one day and told me about her experience. It’s because I sat by her bedside as she was in and out of the hospital and watched.
Many of my friends who are slightly younger than me were too young to be told about the kind of life Mrs. Ridgely lived on the street before she became a Christian. So when she made her opening statement, especially the part about, …I was very well known on 14th street… I kind of just stared at her and knew that she had just managed to get the full attention of everyone in the room. I was deeply impressed that she had found a way to be frank and keep it real so graciously.
After her introductory remarks the rest of the conversation (about being sick and the impact of cataclysmic illness on your beliefs about God) flowed freely. I wanted to just sit back and listen to her, it was so interesting, but I had a mic, too, so I did my share of talking. But I seem to remember saying a lot of, Hey, Mrs. R – Do you remember the time…..
And then we’d laugh.
And then we’d remember there were a lot of other people there. And that we were supposed to be saying things for their benefit, not just chatting like the old friends we are.
We were both so glad to have the opportunity to talk about this in public. Thank you, Mrs. D!!
That was in April. I’m writing this in October. Two weeks ago we got word that Mrs. Ridgely has cancer. It’s bad. She has so much going on, and so many organs are compromised at this point, that the doctors are focusing on making her comfortable.
I talked to Mr. Ridgely, aka Charlie, when they first got the “unofficial” news – he told me on the phone and I was just like, So…I’m gonna pretend like I didn’t hear that because I find all of this deeply upsetting so I’m going to be in denial for a while. I’m going to hang up the phone now – call Daddy later, okay? Thanks – bye!
Mr. Ridgely played along because he’s nice like that. But we both knew that my denial strategy could not last.
It lasted 2 days. Then they got the official biopsy results and then Mommy, Daddy and I trekked our way over to the hospital to see them both.
I consoled myself while I was still in denial by deciding to write this book. I told Mrs. Ridgely via a garbled voicemail that we were writing a book, and when we arrived at the hospital she handed me a piece of paper with some thoughts written on it.
I had said nothing more than, We’re writing a book. It’s going to be called Learning How to Sing a New Song. All she heard was the word, “song,” and she was off and running. It took me a while to work up the courage to actually read what she wrote but when I did I decided that we should change the title to Throwdown: Carol Ridgely.
Man alive. This cancer has given her a fresh dose of life perspective and apparently she’s ready to throw it down. I’m going to follow suit.
Sheesh. What have I gotten myself into? I don’t know that I’m ready for this.
But I’m doing it anyway.
It is impossible to ignore the leading of the Lord in our lives – how our paths intersected when I was young, how an unlikely friendship influenced how I view illness and God, how I got sick myself and learned that this path is not for the fainthearted, and how God’s grace is truly astounding in the midst of suffering.
Back in 2003 my Daddy had cancer. It broke my heart. And one day I was crying my eyes out in the Ladies’ Room at Church. I’m talking ugly cry. It was bad. Mrs. Ridgely found me and was extremely distressed to see me so grieved.
That week a card arrived in our mailbox. She wrote,
If our lives were always sunny we’d never know that He can deliver you, or give you love, peace, and joy in the midst of pure pain.
Mrs. Ridgely told me that over 12 years ago. A lot has happened since then.
I got sick.
And I learned first-hand that she was right.
That card meant so much to me that I kept it all these years. When I moved to Oregon I cleaned my room and threw out a lot of things. But after I got sick and moved back home to Maryland I found this card – it was too special for me to part with. But as we anticipated speaking together in April I knew Mrs. Ridgely had been having a rough time of it physically and had been in and out of the hospital. So I wanted to encourage her and found this card and mailed it to her. She had no idea I had treasured it for so long. And when she received it she told me she just cried and cried.
She also cried the first time she saw me after I got sick. I’ll tell you more about it in Chapter 3 but for now I’ll just say I had an AVM Rupture and massive stroke when I was 30 and after about 3 months of inpatient hospital life in Oregon I flew home to Maryland. I was at church one day, secluded in a classroom since I absolutely could not handle crowds at that point, and Mrs. Ridgely came to sit next to me.
The tears rolled down her cheeks as she told me she was so sorry she hadn’t been able to fly out to Oregon to be with me when I was living in the hospital. I thought that was so sweet! Even though I was still very loopy at that point (it took a long while for things to settle down mentally) I knew that Mrs. Ridgely had some pressing matters of her own to attend to, and thought it was ridiculous that she should think of flying across the country, but also deeply touching that she had wanted to do so.
When I first got the diagnosis of her cancer I mulled over the title of our book. Was Learning How to Sing a New Song the right thing? All of my books in this series start with Learning How…. but we could take it in any number of directions.
One afternoon I rooted through a box of old cards I had received while in the hospital but that had been largely untouched. I knew there were cards from Mrs. Ridgely in there and went searching for some source material.
I was not disappointed. There was a whole series of cards from her. Since I cannot read normally now I had never read them. But this time I got my reading glasses and pored over the cards hungrily.
When I reached card number three I stopped in my tracks. Here was confirmation. …How to Sing a New Song was the right title. The card was dated July 13, 2011 – a couple of weeks after I was discharged from my last hospital and came home. Essentially, this is where the real work of Recovery began.
Mrs. Ridgely is an authority on long-term illness. You will likely receive lots of support from friends and loved ones when you’re in the acute onset stage of illness because everyone is panicking over the urgency of the situation. Once you make it to the Recovery stage you and your family start transitioning out of survival mode, though, you look around and wonder how the world could possibly keep on turning when yours stopped.
That’s just how it is. People necessarily need to attend to the pressing matters of life as you come to grips with your new circumstances and realize that since you’re still alive you need to gather the shattered pieces of your existence and see what this could possibly look like going forward.
It’s been a humbling and daunting process for me. It was horrifying to realize that I was the only one who would ever know about and remember certain things that happened while I was still drifting in and out of consciousness. The alone-ness was terrifying.
But in the midst of that terrible isolation came the peace and love of God – like a gentle dove that hovered nearby until I felt confident enough in what I knew about God and what I knew about myself to put out my hand and let it rest on my finger.
The timing, circumstances, and severity of my injury were bad. That’s an understatement. The word on the street is that a lot of people were angry about it. But God saved me from a lifetime of anger and bitterness not because He wrote a special message to me in the clouds one day, or fashioned a rainbow into words for my benefit, but because I remembered that Jesus Christ came to heal the broken-hearted, and I fit the bill.
Even though something really bad happened to me, God was trying to tell me through a myriad of circumstances that He loved me, He knew exactly what was happening, and that I could trust Him.
I have trouble talking about many of these circumstances publicly. They are often still too precious for me to canvass. But let me just say that these things – e.g. planting certain people in a time and place so our paths intersect – has happened with truly frightening regularity and specificity that simply cannot be interpreted as coincidence.
One of the circumstances I am ready to talk about is the fact that Mrs. Ridgely and I are friends. She knows how hard it is to be sick for a long time. In that card she sent me after I first got home she wrote,
In case you hit a road that’s not so joyful and kinda gets you down I pray these verses for you:
Psalm 40.1-3
{To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.}
1 I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.
2He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
3And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.
Quote from yesterday: How are your neurotransmitters? Seriously, D – I am so embarrassed for you right now. Who asks that sort of thing? I don’t even know what that means.
Last week my massage was particularly harrowing. I told Gen how it’s hilarious that she lets me talk about what I think is wrong and what hurts, but she gathers all the information she needs by looking at me as I get up from my chair and walk to the room and then she gets down to business when I’m on the table.
Learning How... 