Ever wonder what the outcome might have been if we had been just a moment earlier or perhaps later at a given moment in time? When you just missed the ice cream truck as a kid or perhaps as an adult, a former lover narrowly escapes your intrusion on his moment of indiscretion? What about that moment of sickness that you managed to hide from the critical eye of a relative or that time you arrived at the grocery store only to find one box of your favorite cereal left on the shelf instead of two? Perhaps I didn’t get the message or the Divine nudge . . . or maybe I just ignored it and I am the better for it in the end. Such my rationalization goes.
Then there’s the time when the message never seems to come at all. You get the first part of some saucy news but never the rest of the story and you are left hanging in disbelief, doubt, dread, or worse. Is my severely disabled brother going to be o.k. or not? Will someone paleeeeese return my phone calls? When will I find out the results of a biopsy procedure for crying out loud? I want answers NOW!!! Perhaps the Lord ordains that a little more time is needed so I simply have to slog out the wait. Such is one of the hardest tasks in a life still structured by time, not yet unstructured by eternity. As believers in Jesus Christ, we’re still here in our constraints of time and space. The waiting we must do is necessary yet really hard sometimes.
The weeks when prayers seem to go unanswered, no direction comes after hours spent pleading on our knees, events come forth in puzzling sequences that confound the issues at hand, you never really figure out what the heck was going on or the purpose of it all in the end. Such are the mysteries of living a life in the slow lane and especially of a person battling chronic illness day after day after day. It’s really hard to believe that what you see is all that you might get out of your broken life. Alas we always hope for something more than we have don’t we?
I just didn’t get the message that there would come a point at which things would not get better for me. Blessings abound around me but my health has not improved; it has deteriorated. Every few months has brought serious new problems that threaten to choke the life out of me. My wiggle room has gotten smaller. Forget rebounding to a prior level of functioning. It just isn’t happening for me right now. So yes, I am really down in the dumps tonight. I have been up all night for the second night in a row with a daytime of sleeping to follow. The unseasonably warm and sunny day out there in the Midwest will be enjoyed by folks other than myself as the tic attacks wreak havoc on my sleep/wake cycles once again. Wasn’t I getting better a year ago around this time? Didn’t I have the best spring last year of the prior 8 years? What has happened?
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
Jesus is for the Wounded 
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