Gathering

There was a time, not so many years ago, when the six of us gathered often. No place cards were necessary. Seated at the head of the table I reached out my left hand and touched Barbara. I had to reach quickly, though, since she popped up and down all dinner long, serving us. My right hand would fall upon Charles, generally at a modest velocity. Julia and Pamela, always good friends as well as sisters, sat across from one another. Sam enjoyed his perch at the far end of the table. Sometimes he had to repeat himself several times to be heard, but he learned great patience and persistence. We learned to listen to him for some of the funniest quips at any given meal.
It had taken more than a decade since Julia's birth for all the members of the family to arrive and lay claim to their special spot. Now, as each of the children has grown into adults, they are moving on to other tables in other places all over the world. Soon, however, we will gather all six of us plus Viggo and baby Daniel. I cannot help but wonder when the next such gathering might occur. The distances we must travel, the complexity of the calendars we must reconcile, and the number of us to be included, all continue to grow. Even so, I know that we will strive to gather from time to time. The wonderful knowledge of our membership in this family always seems greatest when we are gathered around the table. The store of memories we share will grow and grow. We will recount our new adventures as well. They grow ever more astounding. Educations and careers unfolding. Places visited. New friends and loved ones added to the circle.

Of course the day will come, when we can no longer gather together in this life. How sweet it will be then, when we gather in the next life with God in our midst.

Six Weeks Later

Forty two days ago I paid several people about $40,000 to drug me, cut my leg wide open, and saw the ends of my femur and tibia off. They installed some replacement bearing surfaces and sewed me shut. The medical establishment always makes it very clear that such a procedure will involve "some discomfort". It appears that the term "some discomfort" is specifically crafted to avoid giving one the slightest idea of just how bad the pain will really be. I suppose it is necessary to play down such things. I was already quite fearful going into the surgery. Imagine if the doctor had said: "You may writhe, cry, and wish for death while we try to find the right amount of narcotics that will ease your pain without causing your respiration to cease. However, don't think about it much, because fear will greatly amplify your suffering." I'm guessing we don't really want to know that. There are times when the truth is best left alone.

Now six weeks later, I am able to rise from a chair, I can step in and out of a bath tub, I can get in and out of a car. I can walk. I sometimes sleep for six or seven hours before the aching in my knee wakes me. It is true that it still requires about 350 milligrams of oxycodone each day to feed the drug habit that enabled me to endure the pain. 1 milligram of oxycodone is considered equivalent to one milligram of morphine. However, I would have to crush my sustained release capsules and snort them if I wanted to equal the rush from a strong dose of heroin.

The combination of the pain and the drugs addled my mind to the point where reading and writing became laborius. I now feel the haze slowly dissipating. I may be able to express myself well again before too long.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that not all my posts can be as thoughtful as I would like. Sometimes I just need to record the basics.

Simultaneous with the ordeal of surgery and recovery has been my adjustment to retirement. My concious experience of retirement generally causes me to smile and feel a flush of pleasure when I realize that I seldom need to set my alarm. I suspect that there are greater struggles going on in the unconcious! One clue is my sudden fear that Barbara will find me so incredibly dull that she will dump me and search for Mr. Right. She assures me that she loves me and plans no such change. But the fear creeps in here and there. Another clue was a very vivid dream I had of returning to work. Great crowds of people I knew where very serious and hard at work. They smiled briefly and graciously at me, but clearly had no time to spend with a "non contributor". My hopes were lifted when it was announced that the new corporate dress code would require all employees to wear blue jeans. Surely I would fit in again! Alas, the corporate jeans were stiff and dark blue. They were tailored as a cross between carpenter's jeans and dockers. Sadly, I was still on the outside looking in.

Frankly, my struggle is one that is long overdue. There seldom was anything about my job performance that made me particularly lovable or admired. I have long known that the greatest thing I can do for others is to love them as they are. To listen to them. To serve them. To care about their struggles. Now I must leave the job performance factor out all together. I would have done well to abandon the quest to earn love with my work output long ago.

May God richly bless you all. May you know that you are indeed greatly loved, despite your best efforts to earn it.

Make One Good Choice, Repeat as Necessary

You will choose. Hardly a moment goes by that does not require a choice. Perhaps you will choose passivity. Perhaps you will choose to wait. Nonetheless you will have made a choice. Very quickly you will make another. Because I have chosen to love you, I am eager to see you choose well. The more I care about you, the more I will hope for good choices.

As each of us makes choices, lives are impacted. The impact may be small. The impact may be vast. A good choice should create a good impact. I think that is the best we can hope for. We hope to make choices that bring about good.

We must turn to God for help in assessing our choices. We seldom see the whole impact of our choices. Besides, the impact comes after the choice. We are driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror if we base our next choice on the impact we think the last choice made. We can ask God for the help we need in looking forward to determine what the consequences of our next choice will be.

All too often, I try to make one big choice. However, I would rather make many good choices and keep doing so, rather than try to change the world with one big choice. When I ask God for guidance, the answer is often quite specific and seemingly very limited: forgive him, be patient with her, be generous with them. The choice may be to forgive a simple small slight. I may need to patiently overlook a tiny flaw. My generosity may consist of a small contribution. But the power of each choice has much more to do with how well I hear and obey God than it does with what a big show I make of supposedly wanting to serve him.

I must make one good choice, then repeat as necessary. May God give me the strength to hear and obey the very next bit of guidance that he gives me. May God give me the humility to care more about obeying him than I do about getting recognition for what I have done. May God forgive me for seeking to make a big splash that attracts the world's attention, when he is calling me to make a small ripple that pleases him. May God grant me the joy of growing more like him and caring less about my self.

Perfect Love Casts Out All Fear

I believe it. If I know how perfectly I am loved, it casts out fear. Sadly, I can be a slow learner. Fortunately, God is patient. I've been through some pretty rough sessions of physchological and physical pain. Psychological as in anxiety, depression, fear. Physical as in cuts, bruises, broken bones. It seems that all pain is a mixture of mind and body.

Can I escape all further pain in my life by completely embracing God's perfect love for me? It does not seem possible from where I stand. What does seem possible is that a greater and greater knowledge of his love gives me greater and greater respite from pain. As a practical matter, therefore, I would be wise to pursue a greater knowledge of God. Not just so that I might escape pain, although that would be an adequate reason. I can also create less pain for others as I understand who God is and conform my mind to his.

I cannot compare my own pain or fear to yours. I can pray that you would know greater and greater freedom from pain as you draw closer to God. I cannot compare my own knowledge of God to yours. God is infinite, I am finite. My own knowledge is supsect and subject to further refinement. Nonetheless, I can pray that you would know God more and more. This is not a contest between you and I. This is a race we all must run. May God bless you with the ability to run it well. May God bless me as well. Let us rejoice that we are running without distracting ourselves by trying to decide who is running faster or farther.

The knee pain is still fierce enough to prompt me to continue the narcotics. But I am experiencing healing and comfort. What a joy to feel myself getting better. What a great opportunity for me to learn a bit more compassion. Thank you, Lord.

A New Morning

A fresh start. A new day. It is amazing how much difference one night of sleep can make. Perhaps it was just time in God's plan for me to feel better. Perhaps new supplications were fired off to God by friends and family. Whatever, the reason, I woke up feeling great this morning. My sleep was the usual concatenation of approx 2 hour naps with a bit of medication, food, or reading in between each nap. Nonetheless, I awoke feeling as though the world was new and I have been given another shot at using my time to glorify God and serve others instead of dwelling on my pain.

Pain and Fear

I've dealt with fear most of my life. Chronic fear is called anxiety. The best diagnosis so far for my decades long struggle with anxiety (and sometimes, depression), has been Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Fear exacerbates "real pain" and can even make pain appear in the absence of any organic cause (i.e. the "it's all in your head kind of pain").

Having total knee replacement supplied plenty of the "real pain" sort of pain. I knew going into the surgery that my pain would be difficult to manage with opiates because I have been using that strongest class of pain medication to daily just to cope with the chronic arthritis pain. Since I had the arthroscopic surgery on March 2 that did not go well, I had been using even more of the opiates.

Tomorrow will be the second week anniversary of my surgery. I spent four days in the hospital right after the surgery and went back for another four or five days after my recovery at home proved too painful and difficult. Here is a description I wrote for a friend:

Stabilizing the pain meant going to ever higher levels of narcotics. A 5 milligram oxycodone tablet would be typical of what you are given following minor surgery such as having your wisdom teeth removed. You might be prescribe one or two tablets every four hours as needed for pain. So you would max out at about 12 tablets/day. That is how much I was taking just before my June 11 surgery.
By the time I was released from the hospital the first time, I was taking the equivalent of 32 tablets each day. However, I never really got control of the pain and became increasingly dysfunctional during my few days at home because the pain made it very difficult to do my physical therapy exercises and to pass the time by reading, etc. I just couldn't concentrate..

Finally the night of Father's day, I barely slept at all. I tossed, turned, moaned, and the minutes ticked by very slowly. I struggled all day Monday, until I found myself writhing in pain and crying out during an afternoon trip to get my blood thinning medication checked. The blood lab nurse insisted that we get me to a doctor right away. It took a couple of hours and a lot of pain, but eventually I was settled into a hospital bed and full of morphine on Monday night, June 18. The doctor adjusted my oral medications until I was able to use them and not use the morphine pump at all. However, now my daily dose is the equivalent of 72 of those 5mg oxycodone tablets each day.

Most of the past couple of weeks my memory and ability to read or write has been all messed up by the pain and the medications. It is just the past few days that have gotten better. So I know that you visited a time or two and please believe me when I say that it meant a lot to me. However, my memory of the visits is sketchy. I know that at times I was falling asleep while folks were talking to me.

The nurses became very alarmed a couple of times when my breathing rate slowed to 6 breaths per minute while resting or sleeping. This is considered to be in danger zone and possibly leading to death. However, an oxymeter was used regularly to check my blood oxygen levels. They were always excellent even during very slow breathing. I have also had trouble with episodes of extreme OCD anxiety symptoms. It made life tough on the nurses and very tough on Barbara. I get all panicky and rigid about small thing like how my books, glasses, medicines, etc. are arranged. The episodes are bad and I think they cause other people to feel like they are walking on egg shells around me.
This deal of retiring and having major surgery simultaneously does complicated things. Too often I strayed into thinking such things as " I worked 33 years to get to this!"
or "Shit, I missed my peak. It is all down hill from here on out.". Kind words from a friend really help me battle off those particular lying spirits.

I am sorry I haven't posted much or commented much lately. I have struggled with poor concentration and blurred vision. Plus I suspect my intellectual capacity is severely impaired.

I am gradually getting better. Assuming I continue to recover, I hope to be writing a lot more soon. Mean while, any and all prayers are appreciated.

Anxiety

It has been very difficult for me to concentrate my thoughts enough to write in recent weeks. Retiring after 33 years at HP has been a fairly big distraction all by itself. I have a few fears about my ability to make a successful transition to a new vocation. I even have a bit of recurring anxiety that perhaps I am falling far behind on all my e-mail or missing deadlines for the latest set of assignments. It is sort of a phantom missing limb pain!

But the big Kahuna is my fear around the surgery I have scheduled for tomorrow. It is almost inconcievable that the surgeon will cut a foot long gash in my leg, pull all the tissue out of the way and then use a power saw to remove then ends of my major leg bones.

I am sorry to say that I have been placing too much trust in modern pharmaceuticals to get me through this. Unfortunately, a little over a week ago the surgeon informed me that I have developed a very high tolerance for morphine like drugs. Consequently he may have trouble controlling my pain without stopping my breathing. I figured that there was something pretty remarkable about the fact that I could take 10 or 12 Vicodin-like tablets every day and still go about my business as if it were no more than a handful of tylenol. It has been especially disturbing that even a dozen major pain killers each day were barely enough to take the edge off the knee pain that I have been suffering.

The good news is that there is no doubt left in my mind that this surgery is necessary.

It is also rather nice to realize that it has been years since I have been this anxious. I struggled with anxiety for decades. Even a business trip or an upcoming presentation for work could be enough to trigger anxiety very much like what I am now having in anticipation of major surgery.

I realize now that my trust in opioids was misplaced. We are very blessed to have the medications that spare us from so much of the pain that our ancestors had to endure as a matter of course. Nonetheless, there will be pain, even very serious pain, in this life. Even if our bones are left intact, our hearts may be broken. Therefore, this is a very good time for me to remember that my trust must be in God and his goodness. He allows me to endure a lot of suffering, but his plan for me is perfect and all of this will be used to work good in my life.

May God bless each of you who may read this. May he give you the faith to believe that all things are being worked to a good purpose in your life. May he give me the ability to be an authentic example of how to trust him.

How Important is My Life?

How important is my life?

I want to be clear that the question is rhetorical. I am a bit afraid that a reader or two might decide to tell me how important they think my life is. Regardless of the nature of the assessment, I would struggle mightily with it. I am already struggling. Please do not throw an anchor to this drowning man.

I fervently believe that God commands me to love him and to love my neighbor as I love myself. I cannot believe that a loving, almighty, all knowing God would send me off on a fruitless errand. However, I can all too easily believe that I am failing to obey his commandments as well as I might. I want to love God. I want to love my neighbor. It seems that I have only a few ways to show my love for either.

I realize more and more that listening is important. God's voice seems elusive. I believe the difficulty is all the competing noise and voices in my mind. Hearing humans is straightforward. However, it can be very difficult to care enough about them to listen for what they are really saying rather than listening for what I want to hear or for an opportunity to add my own comments.

Speaking words of encouragement to humans and speaking words of praise to God are another fundamental way to show my love. It is very sad to think how often I have failed to use my ability to speak for the purposes of encouraging or praising. Often I complain, denigrate, or argue. It may be worse still to use the gift of speech to justify my actions or to glorify myself. I am certain that God is calling me to a season of my life where my greatest contribution to others will be my ability to encourage them. I pray that he enables me to speak encouragement.

Serving is another way to show love. God assures me that when I serve the lowest of the low, I am in fact serving the king of kings. I find joy in serving. However, I tend to find it easier to serve those that I believe to be most deserving. I pray that God enables me to prefer others without expecting them to meet standards that I set.

Giving, forgiving, and forbearing are all worthy ways to love others. May God grace me with the ability to do each more and more.

How important is my life? The more I love, the more important it is. I thank God for giving that purpose and that significance to my time here on earth.

The City of God

I recommend the following article to you:

In place of God
Culture Replaces Religion
May 3rd 2007 From The Economist print edition
FROM the earliest times, a central role of any big town was sacred or religious. Until the 16th century, the status of a city was in England granted only to towns that had a diocesan cathedral, and to this day the title metropolitan is in some churches given to senior clerics. Cities still tend to have bigger and more splendid churches, mosques and temples than do mere towns and villages.…

The article is excellent within the limitations that the author sets. He contrasts the role of religion, culture, and commerce as influences that draw people to congregate in the world's cities. Cathedrals, opera houses, and skyscrapers or shopping centers are cited as the icons established in major cities to suggest their preeminence in the various pursuits that we humans embrace to fulfill our "spiritual needs".

I found the article fascinating, but shadowed by the haunting emptiness of those worldly pursuits. The cold stone emptiness of great cathedrals. The sensory overload of shopping districts. The impressive, but very limited accomplishments of the arts, enshrined in museums and performed in opera houses or theaters. Even professional sports teams and their enormous venues are seen as the distinguishing traits of a true city.

Religious, commercial and cultural pursuits of the highest order may seem vastly superior to many other attractions of cities such as the carnal lure of the sex trade and sensational spectacles such as the gladiator contests (ancient and modern) or parades, demonstrations, and other mass gatherings. I have indulged in all of those pastimes and more. I was eagerly seeking fulfilment in the highest worldly attainments and the lowest vices that the great gatherings of humans have to offer. I enjoyed little success of a lasting sort.

I thank God that about 23 years ago he revealed the nature of the one truly significant city, the city of God. The citizens of the city of God are all who pursue relationship with God and trust him as the God who became a perfect and innocent man. A man (all man and all God) who willingly gave his life that we might be forgiven our many failings. The citizens of the city of God are those who share in the fellowship of faith in Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Only God knows the exact population and demographics of the city of God. He encourages us to seek one another out, to love each other, and to proclaim our citizenship with the many acts of love and grace that God enables us to bestow on a hurting world.

Our faith in God as our saviour, and our love for one another should not be confused with the tedious, empty observation of religious rites and duties that many substitute for a genuine personal relationship with almighty God. He who created and sustains the universe and our very beings. Our faith and our love must inform all forms of culture or commerce that we pursue as residents of the cities of this world. Our faith and our love should preclude selfish indulgence in sexual immorality and a preoccupation with spectacle whether it be games, mass gatherings, or any other poor substitute for true fellowship.

The city of God is growing and prospering, yet it will not be obvious to those in the world who will carefully monitor all the wrong metrics: wealth, fame, sensual abandon. We will prosper as the genuine joy and the pervasive peace in our lives shine like a beacons to those seeking freedom from the fruitless pursuits of the cities of man.

If you are a member of the city of God, rejoice for your future is assured and you will receive comfort during the trials in this life. If you are clinging to the worthless idols that are worshipped in the cities of men, forfeit them that you may know the grace that can be yours as you submit yourself to the sovereignty of God. God who is love. God who longs to welcome you to his family.

Nuclear Family

Why do we call it a nuclear family? Apparently it has to do with being composed of a small number of fundamental building blocks.
Every human has had a biological mother and father with the exceptions of Adam, Eve, Jesus, and clones. I'm going to leave clones for another time. You probably have heard the same explanations for Adam, Eve, and Jesus as I have.

Whatever it is that makes us human, was designed by God. Once the prototypes were completed, ongoing production was assured. Father and mother have children. Children become fathers and mothers. Generation upon generation. Along the way uncles, aunts, grandfathers, and grandmothers and a host of other relations came into being. When biological moms or dads can't carry on their roles, others pitch in as needed.

Barbara and I have been blessed with a nuclear family that has only been altered each time we conceived another child. We have good reason to think that the alterations are now complete. The members of our family shift their positions on this globe. Our love for one another grows and matures as does each one of us. Our nuclear family remains composed of the same six persons. There will be a day when death may separate us for a season. After that, we hope to be rejoined for all eternity.

Our relationship with God is central to our being. Our relationship to our family is fundamental to our humanity. I thank God for our nuclear family. I thank God for the joy we have known. I thank him for helping us through the sorrows and for strengthening us to deal with difficulties.