Rethinking priorities

This has been a week that has forced me to rethink life's priorities. My husband came home last week with the flu and graciously shared. This week as he was getting better I was getting worse. I am grateful we were not both sick at the same time. For a time, what became most important in my life was simply continuing to breathe and to drink. I didn't really care whether I ate or not. It's funny how such an experience always reminds me that many things in life that seem important don't matter all that much when you are forced back upon life's elemental basics. Of course I would consider love one of those basics, and I have been blessed by my husband's love and care as I've recuperated.

Ironically, I've struggled this week to complete my sermon for tomorrow, which is based on the Apostle Paul's assertion that we Christians can boast in our sufferings because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. While as suffering goes, this has been small compared to the sufferings of others, surviving the experience required me to endure. I'm not sure how much it has enhanced my character, but I'm grateful for God's help in all of this. In that help is my hope, which is the sermon in a nutshell now that I think about it. The sermon is done, by the grace of God as always, but more so this time as I've not been thinking all that clearly. Hopefully tomorrow will go well for the sake of those coming to worship. I've learned to rely on God for leading worship and God has never failed me. I don't expect tomorrow to be any different.

Grace and Peace,
Donna Sue

A Death in the Family

I just received a message from our daughter-in-law. They are taking their boxer, Max, to the vet today to be put down. He developed cancer recently and has gone downhill rapidly. He woke up in pain this morning, and they don't want him to suffer anymore. They got the dog when our son was in medical school in Houston after a break in and shooting in the complex where they were living at the time. Since then Max has loved and protected his family with all his big heart. I'd never been around a boxer before, and I was impressed with how gentle and patient he was with our grandkids. He would walk carefully and stop in mid-stride when they crawled underneath. More recently he has put up with the attention of our little granddaughter, who has alternately tugged on him and dropped food to him from her high chair. She's not yet 2 and will not understand where her big friend has gone. I suspect this will be harder for her 5 year old brother as it will be his first experience of death and loss. I pray God will give me the right words when he wants to talk about it. We're going down for his birthday party this weekend. I think I'll tell him that I know that God is love, and I know that the God who created Max loved him as much as his family did. I may also tell him if he asks that Max has gone to a place where he will never be in pain again. Sounds like heaven to me.

Grace and Peace,
Donna Sue

Apocalypse

I make my husband a little crazy by reading in bed for a few minutes each night before turning off my bedside light. Lately I've been reading Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris and savoring her essays on the difficult words in the vocabulary of faith. Last night I read her thoughts on one of the most difficult faith words for me--apocalypse. Like me Norris says she has a hard time with those whose approach to evangelism is to beat people verbally over the head with accusations of sinfulness and threats of hell-fire and damnation. I like Norris' reminder that the apocalyptic writings in the Bible were written to those who were marginalized by the larger culture in which they lived and who had little or no stake in the status quo. I especially like her argument that apocalyptic literature is about hope, the hope that "despite considerable evidence to the contrary, in the end it is good that will prevail." Thus the God who is promised at the end of the apocalyptic book of Revelation is one who will come to wipe all our tears away. What a beautiful and hopeful image!

As I struggle to write about another trip to Cuba with a group from our church in a way that will reach the hearts and minds of those who have not had the opportunity to visit with the Christians in that country, I find myself returning again and again to the hope and joy I experienced in the churches and in the lives of the individuals we met there. As Kathleen Norris so wisely writes, we humans seem to show our real strength best when we are faced with disaster--when our perpetual delusion of self-sufficiency is shattered, at least momentarily. That is when we can begin to see "what is possible in the new life we build from the ashes of the old." The Cuban Christians have learned to live faithfully in a society that has experienced radical changes in my lifetime and in a place where everyday life is difficult. And yet these faithful Christians joyfully demonstrate the kind of hope Norris writes about. Like the writers in the Bible who proclaimed hope in the midst of calamity, the Cuban Christians live out God's possibilities in the midst of incredibly difficult circumstances. I pray I will find the words to convey the hope that they have and the reason for that hope to those here who are in need of such promise, which on any given day is most of us.

Grace and Peace,
Donna Sue