thoughts from here and now

I have a friend I grew up with who has been diagnosed with ALS.

'Okay.' you say, as you wonder where I am going with this. It's been so long since I've posted anything, you wonder what has brought me out of hiding to post this now.

You see my friend lost her father to the same disease while we were still very young. While her family of seven children still had need of a father in their lives. I remember him well as he was the janitor at my school and whenever we went as a class to another area of the school he would single me out of the line to tug at my long hair and say 'hi Susie.' I don't know why that made me feel special but it did. It still makes me smile.

A few years ago that same family lost one of the brothers, also a friend of mine, to a brain tumor. He lived well beyond the years that the doctors had given him. Long enough to repent of the lifestyle that he had chosen in the 'lost years' between, between the death of his father and the diagnosis that changed his life, and eventually ended it. I had a dream about him on the night that he left this earth to be reunited with both his earthly father and his heavenly One. In my dream I was talking to his mother and asking where Brian was because I had heard great news that he had been healed. She pointed over to another area of the place that we were in, which I realized later was the church that I had grown up in. There he was chatting away to some others, full of excitement and joy. Then I woke up. I knew he had gone to be with the Lord, healed in a sense much more profoundly than the healing that he would have found here in his body. Healed in his spirit. A phone call in the morning from a mutual friend confirmed this.

Can you imagine being the mom in this family? I can't. How does a woman hold up under these burdens? To first loose her husband, then a son, and now the potential loss of a daughter. It's unimaginable, isn't it.

It makes my burdens seem light in comparison.

I know when I think about how she has managed that I have to come back to the presence of God in her life, and in the lives of her children. I know that I even envy that, when I look from here where I am, into the life that she bears. I envy the community of family that she had, and still has. The community that was modeled by herself and her husband before he passed, and that I see now in my friends life and marriage, being modeled to her children, and to me.

I have a hope to one day have that kind of community. First with God and a husband, and with children and grandchildren. It seems so impossible to me; not for lack of trying. I wonder why God has held it back from me and I wonder what kind of suffering I am willing to take on to find it.

I'm having an emotional day as I contemplate my own losses and know that I have not suffered nearly as much as others. In the absence of a 'community' to share that with, I come here to say what's on my heart.

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Margery Williams The Velveteen Rabbit

Zoe Celeste

Misty took some great shots of my grand-daughter Zoe.

Revelation Song

the Recovery of Love

Elizabeth O'Connor

We can create the climate and nurture the trust in which a deep giving of ourselves can happen. Much more than the confession of our light or our darkness is involved. What is involved is the recovery of love, itself, the communion that is the deepest need of every life, the unlocking of that infinite capacity that each one has to be a friend and to have a friend. If the pilgrim journey is a journey toward freedom, then the liberating work is the freeing of love in me and the freeing of love in you.

Seeing the Sacred

All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.

More at Inward/Outward

NACR for today Brokenness Part 2

If I give all I possess to the poor
and surrender my body to the flames,
but have not love, I gain nothing.
I Corinthians 13:3

We need to experience loving relationships in order to
heal and grow.  In loving relationships we experience the
safety that allows us to face the truth.  In loving
relationships we experience the support we need to
begin to change. And in loving relationships we learn
that we are lovable and valuable.

Because we have been wounded in relationships, our
instinct is often to run from relationships. We
don't want to be hurt again. This leaves an
enormous void in our souls. And it is this
void which we desperately try to fill with addictions
and compulsions of various kinds. This text focuses
on two manifestations of religious addiction
(compulsive altruism and religiously motivated
self-abuse) and sums up the result: I gain nothing.
The same could be said of all of our addictions. "I
deliver my body to be burned" and "I gain nothing"
are an accurate description not
only of a particular kind of religious addiction
but also of chemical addiction, work addiction,
sexual addiction and relationship addiction, as
well as many self-abusive compulsions.

We gain nothing for all the time and effort
we spend on trying to numb the pain. It does not
achieve the desired result. The void remains.


Although loving fellowship may be frightening for
us, it is the path to recovery.  The vulnerabilities
of intimacy may remind us of earlier times of terror
in life, but there is no way to recover in isolation.
The net result of compulsions and addictions is "I gain
nothing." But the net result of recovery is very
different. There is something to be gained by all
the hard work that recovery requires. Recovery builds
in us a capacity to receive love and a capacity to
give love to others. And that is a real gain.

May God grant you the courage you need today
to pursue loving fellowship.

Lord, you see my guarded heart.
You see the fears that make me run from love.
What I fear is what I want most.
I want to love and to be loved.
Give me courage to open my heart to love today.
Amen.

Brokenness. (part one)

I'm broken.

There's just no way around it.

There are some hurts that I carry. They've affected me and those around me. I'm sorry for that. So now I have two choices; I continue to carry them, trying to hide their negative effects, or I find healing for them.

I've been trying to do the latter. Finding healing seems the better choice but certainly not the easiest.

I do know this. I am no longer going to apologize for being broken. I have learned that I will not find healing in isolation. It is only through interaction and loving, supportive relationships with others that I will find my way through.

I have a friend from the past who will probably at some point email me and question whether I want to share so much that is personal. "It hurts others or my kids or my ministry", whatever it is there is always a reason why I am encouraged to continue hiding the pain. The thing is that I've done that for so long, and it's really not working for me. I'm wearing a mask that says everything is okay. It's not authentic, it's not real.....it's not honest. And the fact is that I am not alone in that pain. It's a common denominator between us.

I think Satan would like us to believe that our brokenness is 'bad'. That others cannot stand to look at it, that God himself judges us for it. That because of it others will not want to come into relationship with us.

I think Satan would love to isolate us from God and from others....

Henri Nouwen today

Not Breaking the Bruised Reeds

Some of us tend to do away with things that are slightly damaged. Instead of repairing them we say: "Well, I don't have time to fix it, I might as well throw it in the garbage can and buy a new one." Often we also treat people this way. We say: "Well, he has a problem with drinking; well, she is quite depressed; well, they have mismanaged their business...we'd better not take the risk of working with them." When we dismiss people out of hand because of their apparent woundedness, we stunt their lives by ignoring their gifts, which are often buried in their wounds.

We all are bruised reeds, whether our bruises are visible or not. The compassionate life is the life in which we believe that strength is hidden in weakness and that true community is a fellowship of the weak.

Happy St. Patricks Day.

For the Irish among us.