His Mercies are New Every Morning

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Two weeks ago. Coming to the end of my old, worn down, gross make-up and sample size face cream and wondering, "When will Clinique have Bonus Time? I am out of moisturizer! Out of eye cream! Using dried out eyeliner and bacteria infested lipsticks from college! And I'm broke! I'm on stage looking like a pasty ghost."

Last weekend my girlfriend casually tells me, "Hey, I placed a call to Boots Make-Up and SkinCare. They want to endorse you for the up coming tour and give you their complete line of skin care and make-up... it'll be at the house when we get back from our trip this weekend. I didn't believe her. So I prodded. Moisturizer? "Yep!" Eye cream? "Yep!" Eye liner? "Yep!"
"And Jenny, like, they are sending me one of every thing they have right now."
I went to Target. I crunched the numbers. That's about $500 of free product right there. More than I possibly could have needed or would have ever thought to ask for.
His mercies are new every morning.
(even if they come in a tube of lipstick)

Enjoying my favorite Albuquerque cafe, The Flying Star, while my parents love on Annie.
Good parents make great grandparents. A perfect cappuccino; homemade tiramisu; free Wi-Fi; more e-mails, blog comments, and text messages of encouragement and love than I have ever received flooding the screen in front of me; and a table that looks out onto the Sandia Mountains makes a very tired girl really, really happy.
His mercies are new every morning.

Playing in the ocean for the first time with my beautiful baby girl.
His mercies are new every morning.

Getting fun pictures and special letters from fans. In this case, "Your Biggest Fans: Jeremy, Tawny, Mackenzie and Mallory. The ones from Quincy, Illinois." And realizing that the smiles on these girls faces are memories they are storing away in their bank of beautiful life moments, and I get to stand in the middle of that and be a part of it for just a second... and how amazing is that?
His mercies are new every morning.
The Dr.'s office said we would have to pay a $2,000 deductible before we could start surgery on Friday morning. We had about $500 in emergency cash. I had 24 hours to find $1,500. I called the hospital to see if there was a payment plan we could use. There is, she said: after you meet your deductible.
No deductible, no surgery.
We went to bed without the money. I had no plan. The plan was just to show up and see what would happen.
We got there at 6:00 a.m. and the girl who processed us through the system glanced over the papers and said, "I don't think you owe a deductible. It doesn't look like it. I'm not sure. It looks like what you will owe today is $950, but you don't have to pay it all at once if you don't want. How much could you put down today?"
Ryan and I looked at each other. Do we smile? Laugh? Cry? Point out that, no, in fact we do owe a deductible and spent quite a bit of time on the phone with your billing bully yesterday who informed us that we could not come in the morning without the money?
We were shocked.
She was clearly not looking at the right paperwork. And she had obviously not been to the meeting where they said, "No deductible, no surgery." And the lady who talked to me on the phone the day before almost certainly does not like this girl, I know, because she was NOT following protocol. She let us breeze through, with, yes... only a $500 payment.
I gave Ryan the "RUN!" look. Run before the billing bully comes or the young girl realizes her mistake or before the IRS shows up at the hospital to take the surgery money for the taxes we owe :) RUN!
We will get the bill for the deductible... but that morning the girl read the papers wrong. Or the papers were wrong. Or something happened and all of a sudden we had the gift of time. And when you have the gift of time, you have a moment to figure out your next move. Your next step.
Someone at Ryan's home church, First Baptist Weatherford, heard the story of our terrible week and handed his mom an envelope on Sunday morning.
It had 15 $100 bills in it.
That makes $2,000.
His mercies are new every morning.