The Broken Boned Boy
We’ve got a tweenage hero in our house. Lifa was hand-chosen for our family by his Maker Himself. I no longer look down to smile at my sweet, baby boy. There’s a handsome young man who stands eye to eye with me. I don’t know how that happened.
I’ve always told Lifa that one of his super powers is resiliency. He’s maneuvered cultures, families, lifestyles, and all sorts of major changes that most adults couldn’t handle. He’s come out stronger every single time. This kid shines in hospitality and thoughtfulness toward others. He loves his family, God, audiobooks, family dinners, and is most happy when he’s surrounded by friends on a sports field.
I will never forget Lifa’s first rugby game. We had just moved to Cape Town, and he signed up to play rugby in his new school. None of us had any idea how the game worked. He made the A-team! I was nervous about releasing my gentle boy to run barefoot on a field full of other barefoot boys in tiny white shorts. The strategy as far as I could tell: knock each other down and jump into muddy piles of boy. I was sure gentle Lifa would break.
Nope. He crushed them. I could not believe it. A TACKLING MACHINE. That sweet baby boy came off the field smiling and saying, “That felt good!” And so it began. We are rugby parents.
This Saturday was Lifa’s last rugby tournament of the season. He was hand-chosen to play up on the Under 13 team rather than his Under 12 team. I had to stay home with the baby because Benjamin gifted me with the flu for my birthday this year. Chris was giddy the first time he called from the rugby field. Lifa had played amazingly, and I would have been so proud. He has scored two tries! (America, think touchdowns.) TWO! And he had won the game for his team in the very last second!
Chris was overflowing as a proud dad, so he called again to give me the play by play. Lifa had been the hero of the match! He ran the ball from end to end for both tries! The details kept flowing. It was so exciting!
The next time Chris called, he told me Lifa had given the second game his best but pulled himself out. He couldn’t run. The hero-dive he did to score the winning try in the previous game left him hurting. They iced his foot, and he limped into the house a little later.
We celebrated his victory and kept him iced and elevated all day. The next day he felt worse and had been up through the night with pain. Chris and I did what any parent in our situation would do: We felt sick because we have two sons without birth certificates or medical aid, and we weren’t sure how to maneuver the medical system without them in this foreign country.
We parked Lifa on the couch with pain medicine and had a parental pow-wow to try to figure our lives out. Suddenly, we felt very far away from home, safety and security. We had a sick baby and mom, and an injured rugby star. (We have now shared our germs with Dad.)
We spent more time than we should have thinking about what we couldn’t do and didn’t have. When we exhausted ourselves from that, we poured more coffee and started to think about what we do have. People! We know great people.
I called a doctor friend who knows our family circumstances. He gave us great medical advice on how/when to approach medical care for Lifa. We heeded his advice, made an action plan, and Chris headed off to the pharmacy he’d already spent most of the week in lines at. He was gone soooo long.
He called me on the way home with a joy that is unusual after 1 1/2 hours in a pharmacy. He explained that he had run into another friend who stopped everything when she heard about Lifa. She pulled her family out of line (major weekend pharmacy sacrifice!) and, as Chris put it, “solved all our problems”. She spoke with her doctor right then and there, explained our circumstances, sent me an infograph about how to access all of Lifa’s medical rights in South Africa, put me in contact with her doctor, and dropped crutches off at our house! Hours later, another friend dropped off a boot for Lifa. We saved thousands of Rands (hundreds of dollars) from our friends.
The verdict is in: the foot is broken! Right where the foot and third toe meet. If he keeps his weight off of it, we’re hoping he’ll only be out of commission for four weeks. Otherwise, the doctor warned the bone could snap in half, and surgery is in his future!
It’s been a down and out kind of week - all the sick people and the broken-boned boy. But you know what we’re thinking about? We’ve got people. We’ve got amazingly supportive friends in Cape Town and an army of supporters around the world who make it possible for us to pay out of pocket medical expenses. We have a brave, tackling boy who gave it his all on the field. Lifa has dealt with a lifetime of fearfulness. It’s understandable, but it has handicapped him. Now he is physically handicapped, but free as a bird! We are so proud that he was not afraid to put it all out there with the bigger boys. He’s found his feet - even if he had to break one in the process!
We’ve got people. We’ve got a brave boy. God hear us and sees us.
You too. Let’s think about what we do have this week instead of what we don’t.
Perfect example of thinking of what you can do instead of what you can’t!