On May 23, 2024, my husband, Jim Gallagher, entered the E.R. he worked in for 15 years, this time as a patient. Within days he was fighting for his life as an infection that began in his foot raged throughout his body, and on June 4th, his leg was amputated below the knee in order to save his life. This is an ongoing log of our journey.
It’s true! This is the week we list our home for sale.
This important step toward a future that is right-sized for the Gallaghers feels surreal and semi-impossible. It’s time to pull the trigger and open wide the Gallagher doors! Time first, however, to do the million little things left to fix and tidy and stage our home.
This post is more of a placemarker for this giant step instead of an unpacking of the work, hopes, dreams and emotions of preparing this home for its next owners. It is also a plea for your prayers for what feels Too Big to accomplish!
And yet, as I write that, I think of the many friends who have already helped us get to this week, lending us their muscles and courage and laughter and wisdom along the way:
…hauling things to the dump
…and also to charity
…cleaning my filthy attic stairs
…cleaning 20 years of grime off the doors
…painting wall after wall
…installing flooring
…helping with staging
…finishing the lattice and skirting on our home
…lending time and muscle and expertise to help me paint cabinets and doors
…mowing and trimming and pulling weeds
…fixing what’s broken
…helping sort through the basement
…praying
…lending their courage
…making us laugh
…crying with us
…sharing wisdom
…and holding us close.
There is beauty in the muddle of the middle, not just in crossing the finish line.
So pray us across this finish line! And join us in praying for the next owners of this beautiful home. May these rooms be filled with laughter and love and mayhem and delight for a new family whose lives will be shaped by this home on the hill. May they find love and shelter here. May the echo of the grace of Christ wrap them in comfort.
As I type this I’m staring at our fireplace, built by Jim and rocked by Kathy. While Jim was faithfully pounding nails between hospital shifts as he finished this huge home, I was parenting a preschooler in a small travel trailer out back near the well house. We wrapped one basement room in the cavernous space in black plastic to keep the heat of the wood stove from spreading through the whole, empty home, and in the evening we often took our meals, made on the trailer stove, to that basement room. Yesterday I noted that the screws are still on the rafters there, where I made a makeshift chandelier out of canning jars, candles, and the copper from scraps of electrical wire.
Eventually I burned the dinner on the stove in the trailer, and to escape the smoke smell we began sleeping there in the basement on a mattress on the floor, with four-year-old Molly in her own room (a pup tent) behind us.
The grace of Christ was there in that unfinished, black-plastic-lined, drafty room, where we stayed longer than we intended. We had Thanksgiving there. We entertained there. We hosted my parents there, and the McBrides and Lundays, and Andrew’s friends from Corban, and the Detweiler family. We watched movies there. We cuddled Molly there during those three weeks when the flu wouldn’t let go. We opened our advent box there that Christmas.
On the evenings when there were no guest sharing our plastic-lined basement room, by the light of the candles and that bare ceiling bulb, I carved our future fireplace mantel, decorating it with the White Oak leaves that cover our hillside. We optimistically decided 2004 would be the year our house was finished and officially established, and carved that date on the mantel. “HOME”, it said. And these two words:
“Sola gratia.” Grace alone.
Grace moved into our cold, concrete basement. It filled our smoky trailer—even that horrible month when we discovered we had lice. Grace walked in the front door shaped like Rich Brown, who strode energetically from his car saying “What can I do?” before he even entered the house. Grace softened our spirits when I stood on the chair and lit my candles, or rocked my preschooler, or discovered which weeds were really poison oak.
Grace was the magic that held us together on the days when I cried and wanted to just walk away from this giant project. Grace moved to the main floor with us when we moved our beds from the basement into to this cavernous space, and when our four-year-old, who had never experienced carpet in her memory, rolled around joyfully on her newly-carpeted, bare floor.
Grace warmed the table Jim built from our trees—the same table friends helped us haul outside recently so we could have our floors refinished--and grace flowed from and to the guests who dined at that table.
Grace drifted up the drafty stairs before the attic was insulated, and hovered over Andrew when he sweated in his attic “bedroom” the summer he lived there, and grace hovered over Benny, who lived in that basement room on a cot, and Amber there in the small guest room.
Grace reached back and soothed us across the years after yelling matches or bad news or the tears that flowed when I looked out at these 16 acres and grieved over all we did not have the strength to do. Grace glowed when Lisa and I slept out by the fireplace on that New Years’ Eve after Duane died. Grace echoed in notes from Grandma’s piano when the clan gathered and sang together, and grace rang out in the shape of laughter as Molly and I grew sillier the older we got. Grace sheltered Jim’s Dad, who showed up on my couch one day and stayed for 9 years, and eventually grace settled him into his own, new room on our second floor, where he spent hunting season gazing out the south window with his rifle across his lap.
Through everything, grace. Not from us; from the heart of our good Father, who always stands by to forgive, to strengthen, to whisper hope and crown us with laughter.
Grace alone. “Sola gratia.”
May grace lead us home once again...
One step at a time.
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