I am sick. I am not talking about the kind of sick that you are able to get over. My sickness is chronic. Though I take medicine twice daily, I will never be healed. Then again, I don’t know that I want to be. The construction of my mind is terribly important to who I am. Though some people would call my condition Bipolar Disorder, I would call it me.
Apart from the intermittent mania and depression, my condition manifests most strongly around major life events. For those who don’t know the present circumstances of our lives, my wife Emily is pregnant with our fourth and fifth children. To give some additional context, our oldest twin son Jeff is aged 2.5 years. We are filled with life these days. My mania or depression manifests around different things on different days and often not at all. Today, I thought about death.
I woke up this morning thinking about Frances. I lost my grandmother just last month. Frances was a beautiful strong woman. When she died, my grandmother gifted me her glasses. Through the glasses, I look back and into the future. I miss her.
To get the kids out of Emily’s hair for a little bit this afternoon, I took the twins down to the park. For over an hour, the kids played and played. When I came to the playground revelation that my kids will not live forever, I started to get depressed. No one wants anyone they love to die. I started to cry. No one else could see me. I began to pray for some sort of sign of hope. When the kids ran to the basketball court, I got it. The sun blasted through the trees and the kids ran toward it. In the beauty of the moment, I realized that God is always calling us to go deeper into the light of love and the light of love is eternal. If we always run to the light of love, we will never taste death. Phillip even turned around and said, “Coming daddy?” In their running, the boys were the theologians today.
Amen.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In