Category Archives: Necessary Losses
Humor and Hope
Only when we have experienced humanity in its range and complexity is our humor at its deepest and truest. Redemptive humor is more than the ability to enjoy the isolated humorous situation. It is an attitude toward all of life. Not only is humor a gift of the later years; it is indispensable to hope and healing during that time. Humor recognizes that limitations and failures are not final and unredeemable tragedies. Like a ray of sunshine piercing a dark and overcast sky, humor suggests God’s abiding presence and brightens our human prospects. Humor recognizes the tragedy of the human condition, the finitude which in one way imprisons us. But by laughing at this condition, we declare that it is not final. It can be overcome. Humor is a gentle reminder of the reality of redemption……..Humor is social because the joke is finally on all of us……We are laughing not simply at our own condition but at the shared human condition…………………..A mixture of good and evil is inevitable in this life. Our successes are mixed with failures, our joys contain sadness, love can coexist with hate, health is marred by illness, and possessions are threatened by loss. Excerpt from Winter Grace by Kathleen Fischer.
The rest are my reflections:
Often midlife is the crisis time of recognizing that we have used up as much time as we are likely to have left. So often, it is a time of admitting we have not achieved all we had expected and that there not only may be too little time left, but we may also have to recognize that we do not have all the attributes or resources needed to accomplish our dreams.
There are four roads out of mid-life. 1: Become obsessed and abandon everything and everyone that doesn’t contribute to your goals. 2: Become disillusioned, cynical and angry at life. 3: Choose an addiction to dull the pain. 4: Or adjust our goals to fit a more realistic assessment of our chances to reach them.
Only when we have survived enough of life’s contradictions and made some adjustments to our assumptions can we laugh in the middle of the mix. By then we know that the only thing permanent in this life is change. Often there is a greater freedom to live by our own values and priorities, rather than for an image that pleases others. Hope becomes open ended. We gain a wider perspective for all our limited hopes. And as our lives narrow, we can begin to find true joy in the small things. Happily there are many more small things than large.
Sometimes, as we age we find fulfillment in passing on our hopes and dreams to the next generation, who may be able to take the next step in working toward them. But often, we find more than enough meaning in simple kindness or creating pockets of beauty to be shared with others. Either way, the focus becomes others, instead of our “self.”
Your turn’s over.
Love Makes Us Vulnerable
Love makes us vulnerable. But it’s a love that enables us to feel another’s pain, not a love that enables anyone’s destructive behavior. Suffering because we love is what Jesus did for us and he showed us there is a resurrection not only from suffering, but from death itself. If we aren’t willing to suffer because of loving, we end up alone without love. That’s the definition of hell.
It May Be Easier to Die for Someone, than Live for Them
What a week! My husband’s supposedly simple medical procedure with a one night stay ended up in a panic, two operations, and six days in the hospital so far.
I had an interesting, but guilty, thought today after spending 24 hours around the clock for five days in one room with my husband of almost 59 years.
……It may be easier to die for someone, than to live for them…………..
Nurse Norman, I am not. Quiet, I am not. Inclined to wait for introverts to answer Doctors and nurses’ questions, I am not. Able to wiggle and struggle up from a low couch and a deep sleep quickly and cheerfully, I am not. Used to impatient orders, no longer disguised as polite requests, I am not. Patient and acquiescent when very tired and told to do things I consider silly, I am not. Anyway, you get the picture. Thanking God that our children have come to the rescue of a reasonably happy marriage under serious stress!
I really do understand the why of my husband’s side of this, since I have been on the other side of this equation. But understanding and dealing graciously with someone you love’s responses to stress at the same time as trying to deal with your own, is a new challenge for us. Somehow in the past, it seemed to work out so that we got to take turns. Now simultaneous health issues of old age are becoming more frequent and that’s a whole new ball game. We’ve done so well in the past at keeping our sense of humor, that during one ER visit, the nurse said, “You do realize this is an emergency?” We laughed and said, “Yes, but we do this so often now, we’ve learned to use humor to get us through our crises.”
Five days of coming through a totally new life threatening experience and still not understanding why it happened, plus realizing the doctors didn’t know either, is not only frustrating, it’s scary. And one doctor wanting to send us home having to cope with unfamiliar and unappealing procedures that don’t seem important to him, because they are no longer life threatening, doesn’t really make the stress less.
Happily, Julian is on the mend. Our children living in the area were with us when this experience became traumatic and now the out of state ones have come in town for the weekend. So, I am home unpacking, running wash, thawing a roast, freezing some of the vegetable soup I made the day before we left for the surgery, organizing, and venting on face book, while our children take turns being there at the hospital with their exhausted and frustrated dad. Hopefully he will be coming home tomorrow and I will be able to welcome him with a peaceful spirit, a cheerful heart, and a rested body.
Years ago, there were times when I seriously questioned the wisdom of an impractical klutz like me having five children. But boy, am I celebrating it now.
Psalm of Fifty-Eight Years Together
All these years of tenderness and love,
of fears and frustration and laughter,
there has been you.
Your love has always been my strength,
because I knew you would go with me
any where I went.
Now, in this new heart breaking time,
fearing the ocean of loneliness
that lies ahead,
I struggle to let go, to set you free,
to not make it harder to accept
whatever comes.
Grace comes at night when I turn to God,
who has been with us always through both
the pain and joy.
Then I know we’ll be together once more
with tenderness, and laughter, and love
at home with God.
We See Through the Glass Darkly: We Need One Another
Human beings, even in the same families, are born with unbelievably different ways of being in the world. It seems like God really complicated life on earth by making us this diverse. Yet, the mystics of all the world’s religions insist that the spiritual reality is that we are all one.
And even the Apostle Paul tells Christians, that we, the person next to us in the pew, and presumably the Christians worshiping God across the street and around the corner, are the Body of Christ. Every single one of us is an indispensable part that needs all the other parts to function as Jesus Christ’s visible presence in the world today. When the smallest, least important part is ignored or neglected, the whole body suffers.
Some years ago, when reflecting on this scripture while preparing a sermon for a group of Directors of Christian Education from diverse denominations, a very disturbing image suddenly filled my mind. I saw a person with their arms flailing in different directions, their head twisting side to side, and their out of sync legs struggling to stumble forward even a little with each step.
I felt like I had been hit in the stomach as I grasped the reality that this is the Body of Christ now. I literally cried aloud, “God, what can I do?” And immediately into my mind came the answer, “Admit what you can’t do.”
Well, that took me several decades.
But I have finally realized that neither I, nor any of us, can discern God’s will unless we recognize with Paul that we see through the glass darkly. No matter what our natural gifts or spiritual ministries are, we need to be humble enough to consider other visions, so we don’t block what the Spirit is saying to the Body of Christ at any particular moment in time. Our vision may be valid, but just not in God’s timing for a particular part of His motley crew of Christians.
And like Paul, I have finally come to see that the most important gift really is love. That no matter how wonderful our own gifts are, unless we do the work of God with hearts open to all, with gentleness, sensitivity, patience and above all, humility, we become a noisy clanging cymbal that cripples the Body of Christ and blocks our broken hurting world from hearing the love of God expressed in Jesus.
The Broken Body
Reflecting on the Body,
you the hand, I the foot,
Christ the head, perhaps the heart,
all at times the hidden part,
I let the Scriptures
flood my mind with images,
with suddenly one image,
a moving picture
so harshly real
I gasp aloud.
A person staggers
stumbles forward,
arms flailing, head jerking
back and forth in spasms,
body parts all pulling
different ways.
This then, reality,
Christ’s earthly body now.
God, forgive us.
The prayer of my heart:
“Jesus, I want so much to use the gifts God gave me and the gifts of your Spirit to bring your love to our broken world and hurting people. Give me both the courage to let God use me and the humility to accept God’s timing. But most of all teach me how to love humbly, so that I do not become a clanging gong or clashing cymbals blocking others from knowing your love.”
Grieving Life’s Diverse Losses
Today I am realizing that when our children or couples we love divorce, there’s a mourning period involved. Particularly with friends that we only knew when they were married. We have to mourn and let go of those we have loved in relationship. It has nothing to do with thinking they should or shouldn’t divorce. It just involves coming to grips with the differences.
With a child we knew and loved long before they married or divorced, we at least have something to look back to, but not with the spouse that we only knew as a unit with our child. They simply aren’t the same person now that we have only known. There really is a necessary time of mourning, particularly if we truly came to love them as part of that unit. And mourning involves the stages of grief…..denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I think recognizing this can help us not bog down hopelessly at any point in the process. I am also beginning to reflect on the possibility that we have to go through a similar process when either people we love or we ourselves change because of aging or illness.
I realize now that I need to cut myself some slack and take time to reflect on the effects of this recent period in my life that includes my own losses of abilities and joys through age and illness, my husband experiencing losses from these also, one of our adult children and a spouse that I loved deeply as a couple for many years now being divorced, and friends that I have loved and only known as a couple divorcing.
The last year and a half have simply been overwhelming and I have been bogged down in emotional denial of some of these things and in anger over others.
Hopefully, recognizing this and my need for grace will help me move through to the peace of acceptance.
