I have learned over the years our maladies don’t define us, but they are a part of us. We can or sometimes have to, rise above them sometimes just to live, especially the serious ones like the cancers and chronic illnesses or the death of a partner or the loss of a job. The not so serious ones, like snoring, can be mildly unsettling, unless it’s your dog who is doing the snoring then it’s kind of therapeutic, especially when her jowls are flapping. Then it makes you smile as you listen to it. Like rain, only not as nice.
WE ALL HAVE ISSUES
We walk around and pass people in the mall and just about every one of them has something going and yet, here they are, in the mall, looking for that Christmas or Hanukkah present they need to get their aunt or someone, even though they just came from chemotherapy or hydrotherapy or physical therapy and they are eyeballing each trash can to see if this is going to be the one they throw up in because their stomach is so nauseated. My wife didn’t have many of those days. Mostly, she was in a hospital room, too sick from the prep work needed for stem cell replacement for her cancer. But it doesn’t have to be the Big C. It could be the loss of a job; the issue with the spouse or child; the job.
Resilient we are
We humans are a resilient animal. We would like to think we are the highest on the food chain and we can enjoy the arts and govern ourselves and raise families and when faced with some of these things we roll up our sleeves and do battle with it. I think we are pretty good at this, at least our thinking is good. We get distracted pretty quickly and tend to wander.
Take our moon missions.
We did it, we got there, in about nine years from the challenge of the president to do the hard thing to actually getting people there and back. Then, after Apollo 17, we stopped, went a different way and never went back. How come we don’t have condos there yet? We should have condos on the moon by now.
WE ARE NOT A SIZE TWO
By now, we should have beaten this obesity thing we got going. No one wears those dresses those models wear sauntering down the catwalk. The average size in this country for women is not a size 1. Men-we do not have that six-pack stomach as shown on TV with the Calvin underwear package. We wear the whitey-tightys or the boxers our father left us after he died. They are simply more comfortable when we drive that truck cross country and they double as swim trunks.
Why do dogs have us figured out?
Dogs-why do dogs have us so figured out and still want to hang with us?
Let us not forget our dear friend, Robert Burnes and what he said about ‘planning’ and ‘life’ and how man works:
The best laid schemes of Mice and Men
oft go awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy.
Maybe we just need to listen to the beasts and see what they have to say about it. Then, strip to our boxers and swim with our brothers and sisters in the cold oceans. Or, I just need to remember what my heavenly Dad says about me.
He adores me.
For some reason, God does not want me, not yet. God wants us, for whatever reason, to be here, in this moment, at this venue, in this life and for some reason, it’s a perfect plan. Somehow, the death of my partner, after twenty-seven days short of thirty-eight years, and months in the hospital surviving the killing of her immune system, then raised with hope this stuff might work, only to pass away six months later-somehow all that was part of a perfect plan.
THE UNSEEN HAND MOVED
My wife’s mission was done. God did not want her to stay one second longer than she needed to as part of the whole big picture. In her death-trailing the life she led, sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes, you can see the unseen hand move.
Something drew them in
Nurses would come hang out in her room and talk with her. Not even about God. They just wanted to be near her, in her room. Something drew them in.
Doctors found themselves laughing when they came to talk to her and see her. Not that she was making jokes, but it was her smile. She was always smiling, even when her esophagus was rotting out.
Friends would come, feeling weird going in and feeling calm leaving.
What draws us in?
Students (she was a teacher) she gave rides to school when they were in grade school or high school decades prior, made their way to her funeral and introduced themselves to me as that person. They hadn’t seen her since. What draw is that?
Supervisors who routinely berated her, found themselves crying to me, apologizing for their actions and because of her kindness, they wanted to know how she could be so nice to them, finding she believed in God and the healing of Jesus, and admitted her life lived brought them to Christ.
A school teacher, a mother of three and a grandmother to ten, a simple and kind woman with many flaws and many strengths having a funeral where 800 people showed up.
I will be lucky to keep the guy who turns on the lights to the mortuary.
Dad wants me to be where I am because in me, He lives and through me—with Christ in me—He touches others and lives change. He gives us the kindness of dogs and whales to remind us, I think, He is here, with us. We need to see stuff, and looking in to the eyes of a dog, well, there is no greater look of love than that. Imagine the look of the God of the Universe for his adopted kid.
Every step we take, every breath, every word, Dad knew about before we were born and smiles thinking about us.
Enjoy the ride
www.markjwilliams.com
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In