No Shortcut

Dear Sufferer,

I have been meaning to write you this letter for a while. There is no shortcut to what the Lord will teach you through your chronic disease, but I thought it might help to know some of the things I have learned through my chronic migraines. One of the first things I realized when I found out migraines were going to be uninvited guests in my life, was that there is a reason God gives us limits. Before migraines I could push myself and my body would keep on going, but my mind would not. I would get tired to the point I couldn't think straight and, because of my mother's mental illness, think that I was becoming like her. Scary. In God's mercy He gave me a physical limitation so that wouldn't happen. I'm sure you have already realized that God has given you your limitation for a reason and, whether you have discerned that or not, I would encourage you to look for the mercy behind it.

Another thing I had not been good at before migraines is listening to my body. There are times when God wants me to push through the pain, treat it as best I can, then ignore it and go about my business. But there are also times God makes it clear that I am to lie down and rest. On those days, when I try to walk around, my head throbs until I lie down. It does not take a lot of spiritual insight to figure that one out. Tracy was only four when my migraines started, preschoolers can be pretty understanding about mommy not feeling good. Tracy used to bring me his softest teddy bear to use as a pillow thinking it would help my head feel better. It didn't help my head, but it sure made my heart feel better.

The third thing is learn about your disease. That is much easier now than it was 30 years ago when my headaches started. No one knows how your body works better than you. The first five years of migraines, I saw my family doctor who tried me on a number of pain killers which increased my nausea and didn't decrease my pain. Between that, I used a Tylenol/Mountain Dew/ice pack combo which could bring my pain level down from an 8 to a 7 or even 6, but I would have asked for a referral to a neurologist in those first few years instead of suffering if I had known that was the specialist I needed to see. To this day, I can't stand the taste of Mountain Dew. I have also tried chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, various supplements, Botox and seeing a specialist in Seattle. Acupuncture helped for a few weeks, the rest of them didn't help at all. Be willing to try new things, but don't let a health practitioner tell you something is helping when it's not. And don't feel you need to follow every suggestion your friends and family throw out. Just because it worked for __________ doesn't mean it will for you. Frankly, I find it a little insulting when someone offers a simple suggestion, as if I would have endured headaches for decades because it never occurred me to go for a walk or some other cure they heard about. I don't say that, of course, but I try to keep that in mind when I suggest remedies for non-migraine health issues.

The best thing about suffering is that it helps link me with others in pain and with Christ. The Bible teaches there is an intrinsic value in suffering that I don't fully understand. But I do know that the day after a migraine so severe I was kind of going into shock, cold, clammy skin, shaking, I watched "The Passion", and when it depicted Jesus's hands shaking as he stood up to be flogged some more, I knew some tiny part of what that felt like. And it was the darkness of depression years ago that helps me identify with Christ's cry of being forsaken. Anything that makes me identify with Jesus is a good thing, however uncomfortable it feels. I know God is using your illness to mold you into Christ-likeness, and that is easier when the clay doesn't fear or fight the process. I hope this is an encouragement but, like I said, there is no shortcut.

Connie

What We Really Need is Soul Control

     Every time there is a mass shooting, there is public outcry to do something, anything, to make them stop . Many cry out for gun control, as if another law will make guns magically disappear. If this were true, the cities with the strictest gun control would be safest against armed criminals when, in fact, just the opposite is true. See Obama's Illinois, for example. It is like believing the Oklahoma City bomber could have been deterred by a "No Parking" sign. Those willing to break laws about murder will not worry about whether their weapon is legal. The problem is, whether it is a bomb, gun or steering wheel, it is not what is in the hand that makes a killer, it is what is in the heart and mind. There are no laws that can change what a person thinks and believes. We can legislate the penalty for taking human life, but we cannot force anyone to value it.
     We especially can't do that when the same legal system allows babies in the womb to be dismembered alive. A few weeks ago our local newspaper had a front page article about Whitefish, Montana welcoming a clinic that provides abortion. It was the same provider who shut her clinic in Kalispell after the trauma of an act of vandalism. Immediately below that article was one about a school shooting in Kentucky. Some chastised the editor, I thought it was brilliant. As a religious man and a conservative, I think he placed it there because the two articles are related. One leads to the other. If unborn human life has no value, what difference should a few years make. As tragic and horrible as it is to shoot children in their school, it is not as violent as vivisecting the most innocent humans in the one place where they should be most safe--the womb. Maybe the sociopaths among us are not the aberrant thinkers we paint them to be. They just carry society's accepted disrespect for God and the people He created to its natural conclusion. Maybe they see clearly what the enlightened pretend they do not, that the birth canal does not change human worth. Either life has value or it does not.
     We need to find ways to make schools, churches and public gathering places safer, but gun control only makes those places safer for criminals. The only way to change anyone's heart and mind is through the transforming power of Christ. What we really need is soul control.
    

Weeping Women

   When our "Weeping Women", prayer time for prodigals, met last Monday and I prayed that the absence of the prodigal loved ones would not ruin Christmas for the rest of the family, I did not know I was praying for me. We had a wonderful plan worked out. Tracy would ride with his friend, Brodie, to Butte, we would drive to Missoula Saturday, drop off gifts and visit family, then pick Tracy up in Butte and drive home. It was a good plan, but the difference between our plans and God's is that His always happen and ours do not.
   The excited texts from Tracy making arrangements ended Wednesday night. When we heard nothing Thursday, I thought maybe Brodie's probation officer hadn't yet approved his leaving Friday instead of Saturday. When I went to bed Friday, still having heard nothing, I hoped it was a phone problem, like the last time. But on Saturday, knowing we were supposed to meet in Butte, and he still hadn't called, I knew he was drinking. We visited a few hours in Missoula and went home alone and disappointed. With Tracy. With God. What good were all those prayers for protection against the temptations of the season if he was going to drink anyway?
     My Mom has been dead for four years and the Ghost of those Christmases Past, overshadowed by her mental illness, have nearly disappeared. But perhaps now I will have a new ghost, this year, when Tracy chose to spend Christmas with the alcohol that's trying to kill him instead of the family that loves him. I knew that he would have his own ghosts of loss and pain to deal with, but in Billings he had more support and safeguards to help with that than he ever did here--sober housing, friends, AA, and our plan to get him home for the holidays. I know God provided several ways for him to escape the temptation, but I also know from my own experience that it is easy to look under, over, and around those ways of escape.
     So God did not answer my prayers for a sober Christmas for Tracy the way I wanted Him to, but He did answer the one about not letting it ruin Christmas. We had Christmas Eve fondue at Britten's house, Christmas brunch at Will's, dinner at mine. My granddaughter provided the entertainment all three venues. God answered my confusion Saturday with the message, "I am here". And my anger and disappointment Sunday with "Am I not God?" and later, "Am I not enough?" He is. And he answered my prayer that He show me His love with Sunday's guest sermon, "The Wonder of God's Love".  As I was listening to the message, the Holy Spirit sent me His own, "If Tracy came home, even now, after all the pain he has caused, would you welcome him?" My unspoken answer--Yes. He responded, "Now you understand my love." But I know I do not, my love is but a grain of sand compared to His. If God did not follow my plan, it is because He is working His bigger, better version. Because I do not just want Tracy with his family for Christmas, I want him with God's family forever. And that prayer is worth the wait, and the weeping.

What Hope Knows

    I would like to share the encouragement that God gave me this week through my prayer time for my prodigal. Not only do we all have prodigals in our lives, we all ARE prodigals. We are born prodigals. As God found us, he will find our wandering loved ones. We still need to pray, but we should pray in hope.      

 What Hope Knows

My loved one is not:

Prouder than Nebuchadnezzar

More stubborn than Jonah

More spiritually blind than Saul

Farther from God than the Prodigal

A murderer like Moses and David

And God is not:

Feeble

Passive

Confused

Indifferent

Worried

So I should not:

Worry

Despair

Demand answers

Doubt God

Use sinful distractions

Because I can:

Pray

Let others pray

Trust

Hope

Remember God’s faithfulness

And then God will:

Quiet me

Encourage me

Grow me

Speak to me

Amaze me

12/12/17 

You Know You've Gone to the Dogs

You know you've gone to the dogs when:

• You congratulate yourself on how well you cleaned the house and there are still 3 squeaky toys, 2 bones and a rope on the floor.
• You set aside plastic bags that will be good for poop scooping. Hotel laundry bags are my favorite.
• You examine chew toys like a parent buying their child's first band instrument. Is it strong enough to survive my "children"? even if it gets left outside? How annoying is the sound it makes? 
• You have a heated dog bed. In our case, our bed, heated by the dogs sleeping under it.
• No matter how often you vacuum the carpet, the dust cup is always full.
• You keep an old towel near the back door for paw wiping. 
• You can no longer get down on the floor for any reason, including unconsciousness, without playing with the dogs.
• You are willing to risk the dogs ruining your furniture while you are gone rather than leave them outside in the mud.
• Your balance exercise is stepping around and over the dogs.
• Your visual acuity test is spotting a black dog asleep on the floor in the dark. 
• You answer the door by saying "Just a minute. Down! Quiet! Get Back!", then open it a crack so the dogs won't get out . . . but by now your visitor doesn't want in.

Over-Blessed

     On days like this, sitting outside of yet another nice hotel soaking up the sun, I realize that I have had more than my share of blessings. Embarrassingly so. Although, to some, being away from home would be a burden, rather than a blessing, because they do not like to travel. Others might blunt the blessing by focusing on finding fault with the facilities instead of enjoying the experience, because it is their nature. I have never understood people who can lay by a pool for hours doing nothing, but here I sit, drinking in the afternoon sun as if I'd nothing better to do, trying to store up enough of its goodness to get me through the cloudy winter. Even when it is sunny at home, there are a dozen tasks that pull me back inside the house. Or I enjoy the sun, but through the windshield, as I run half a dozen errands. Instead I sit here in the sun, enjoying Grand Junction, and the busy world goes on without me.
     I would feel guilty for this lavish gift of leisure if it was not something given to me by God. Nothing in my growing up gave me any hope that there would be such moments in my life. My childhood fantasies only traveled as far as truck stop hotels. Staying at the kind of places we do for Reed's work never entered my mind. If only I sought the Son of God as desperately as the sun He created, clung to Him as tenaciously, stored up His goodness and considered it time well spent, what a conduit of blessing I could be. Because God blesses us so that we can bless others, and I who have been over-blessed should not feel guilty, just generous.

A Miracle or a Nap

     Recently I had a series of daily migraines. I have good meds that take them away so this is not as bad as it sounds, but taking Zomig too often can make my body resistant to it, as well as taking too much of any med is hard on any body. So recently I asked our pastor if he would pray for migraine relief. Sure enough the migraines slowed way down--after I got shingles. I should have reread my post on Odd Answers to Prayer because God has used this method several times before. When my daughter was about to get married, long before I had dependable Zomig to stop them, I was having daily migraines. I could fake being okay, but in order to really enjoy the wedding I wanted to be migraine free, so I asked the Lord for a reprieve. He gave me the stomach flu. Because of that, I needed to rest for two days and those restful days kept me from having a migraine on her wedding day. I wanted a miraculous respite, God gave me a nap.
    My Guatemala experience was even more memorable. Toward the end of our time there I got, not Montezuma's revenge, but the revenge of whatever Mayan ruled Guatemala. This involved using a large quantity of Guatemalan toilet paper. So I was dreading the nearly 20 hours of sitting involved in flying home. I prayed that I would not notice the discomfort. At the Guatemala City airport, I bent down to pick up my briefcase and tweaked my back. Prayer answered. I did not notice the other discomfort. I decided I really should have put more thought into the wording of that prayer.
     So after this incident of trading migraines for shingles, I had about decided never to ask for prayer for my headaches again. God was obviously not going to waste a miracle on me and I was rather resentful about it. Then I remembered something profoundly simple--God loves me. God loves me more than I love me and He would not cause me to suffer if there was a kinder, better way to answer my prayer. He answers as He does because I do not need a miracle, I need a nap. Miraculously removing a couple migraines would not teach me to listen to my body when it tells me to slow down. I would need miracles day after day. One thing I have noticed that about God is that He tends to use ordinary people and things to answer our prayers. He does not need to perform miracles when the things He has already put in place work just fine.
     I was really embarrassed when I realized how long it took me to figure out Jesus loves me. I should have asked a preschooler. God will do what is best for me no matter how my prayer is worded. It is not about how I ask or who I ask to pray, it is, like everything in life, about God. His plan. His way. For my good--whether it seems like it or not. The fact that the God who made the universe loves me and hears my prayers is miracle enough.