MOVING ON, OR TRYING TO

"'I AM the Alpha and the Omega,' says the Lord God Almighty, who is, who was, and who is to come." (Rev. 1:8 TEV)

If God is almighty, all-powerful, then we can trust Him. I can trust Him.

I have let myself stare too long at the years I may yet have to live. Knowing that during those years I will become increasingly old (don't we all?) and increasingly weak and incapable of doing things and enjoying life. I may become sick and frail, unable to drive or care for myself or my home. It is a future none of us want to face, let alone live through.

Jesus' brother James wrote, "Remember this: whoever turns a sinner back from his wrong ways will save that sinner's soul from death, and cause a great number of sins to be forgiven." (5:20 TEV)

To change my own feelings of grief which are leading me down the ways of despair, I must change my attitude, my beliefs about sickness, arthritis, old age, and aging, and know that I don't inherit weakness, pain, and disability, but strength, health, and the ability to do and act. Yes, my mother was weak, in pain, and--thanks to considerable incompetence on the part of some (don't get me started on that story)--disabled in the last few weeks of her life, but before that she lived for 98 full years, dying only a few days short of her 99th birthday. She was strong, healthy, and able to do most things for herself. She went up and downstairs at will, dressed and undressed herself with little help from me, made her own bed, set the table, fed herself, and cleared the table and helped me with the dishes, read the newspapers and magazines, watched TV and enjoyed playing with our cats, wrote letters and signed checks, walked around the house and around the yard, clipped bushes and pulled weeds, sat on the front porch in the good weather, and talked about old times and current events.

"Whoso keepeth the commandment shall feel no evil thing: and a wise man's heart discerneth both time and judgment." (Eccl. 8:5 KJV)

I must avoid thinking about the consequences of aging and other evil things, or acting like "an old lady" as my mother warned me. My spirit is ageless, eternal. Nana in her nineties always said that she still felt like a girl of eight in her mind even though her body had aged. I didn't understand what she meant back then, but I do now. I am whole, strong, and free. My body heals, reaching always for strength and health, no matter how injured or sick I may become.

Nana always said, "The less you do, the less you can do; the more you do, the more you can do."

James was right. "Remember this."

GIFTS AND TALENTS

"We have," St. Paul says, "different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully." (Romans 12: 6-8)

For years I looked at this list and said, that's nice, but I have none of those gifts, and went on.

The other day it occurred to me that in fact I have ALL of these gifts. And so do you! So do all of us.

Do you not have the gift of showing mercy? To your children when they mess up? Your spouse when they disappoint you? Your pets? To your friends? To other people's children? To stray animals? To strangers? Do you not sometimes yield the way to someone whose car cuts you off in traffic or someone who cuts in line in front of you in the supermarket? That's showing mercy to them, but Paul is asking you to do it cheerfully, gracefully, with a smile. If you have to, remember the times you may have done the same, or the times someone did it and you suddenly recognized the person as an old friend and how your attitude changed, or imagine they have a sick child they are trying to rush home to.

Do you not have the gift of leadership? At home? At work? Almost everyone has someone looking up to them or depending on them. Even homeless people may have someone they are bringing food to or showing the way to a soup kitchen or a shelter. Paul is just telling you to work hard at it. Don't do a half-hearted job of parenting or supervising others at work.

Do you not have the gift of contributing to the needs of others? Your family? Your neighbors? Your church? Charities helping people or animals, local or far away? Do so generously.

Do you not have the gift of encouraging? Of course you do. We all can encourage others as we go through life, whether they are family members, the new employee where we work, the tired clerk or waitress, the frightened stranger who is lost, the sad-faced customer, everyone we come in contact with.

Do you not have the gift of teaching? Of course you do. You don't need to be a professional teacher to teach. You teach your children, your friends or strangers when you tell them about a new shortcut to town, your employees at work, and anyone you tell about Jesus.

Do you not have the gift of serving? Of course you do. We all serve one another in one way or another. Whether it is in housework or yardwork at home or the services we perform on the job, we need to do it cheerfully and diligently.

"Ah," you say, "but what can you do with prophesying? I am not a prophet." Not in the Biblical sense of a prophet, perhaps, but we all have the ability to look at a neighbor's kid and we've all heard ourselves say something like, "that kid's going to wind up in jail or worse if he doesn't straighten out." Or even, "that gal's going to end up in a ditch if she keeps driving like that on icy roads." We prophesy how our own kids are going to turn out, how things on the job are going to work out, how things in our country or the world are going to succeed or fail. You may be in charge of planning for a group, a business, a school, a church, or a government. We have the gift of forecasting the future based on our knowledge and experience. Paul is asking you to use it in proportion to your faith in God. Take Him into account in your planning.

We all have all the gifts we need. Let the Holy Spirit guide you in their use. We may be the only Gospel our neighbors ever read.

CHOICES

We always have the choice to serve God where we are, or to run and serve Him elsewhere--or not.

If we allow ourselves to be guided by God's love, we may choose to stand and fight. But sometimes circumstances overwhelm us, and like any great general we have to learn when to sound retreat. To sacrifice is not always to lose.

Sometimes we must sacrifice one thing in order to obtain something better. The good general surveys the ground and looks for a better place to defend or attack from, and so a retreat may actually be an advance in disguise.

Allowing batters to walk in baseball counts in the statistics against a pitcher, but an effective baseball manager sometimes orders his pitcher to deliberately walk one batter so that he will be facing a weaker hitter, and any decent pitcher will often ignore his "strikes to balls ratio" statistic and deliberately throw a ball rather than a strike, hoping to get the batter to "chase after it" and strike himself out.

If we choose to stand firm on our ground and "fight the good fight," perhaps even to our death, whether that death is a result of our fighting or simply the natural end of our physical life, we must believe that we are where God wants us to be, doing what God wants us to do. Only then can we draw on His strength.

To give up one's life may not involve the sacrifice of our physical bodies, as in a war or other violent confrontation. It may be simply giving up our own dreams and hopes and yielding to the needs of someone else. That someone may be an elderly parent, or a child, a husband, or a wife suffering sickness or disabilities. Or it may be someone else entirely, someone who was even formerly a stranger, but who is now our friend or beloved. People give up their lives to care for animals, as well, or for the greater good of a number of people they will never even meet, but who they hope will benefit from their research or their labor.

If we choose to run away entirely from a situation, we may discover that we have taken our problems with us or encounter a completely new set of problems previously undreamed of. And yet, we may still choose to serve God in our new life.

Sometimes we may find that we cannot physically run from a place, whether that is a hospital bed or a jail cell, but we can still choose to serve God or not in our place. The mind and the spirit are free even if the body is not.

The same is true if we retreat or move on to something we hope will be better. The choice is always ours. We are always free to choose to serve God. Or not.

Brother Lawrence in The Practice of the Presence of God says "If we do what we can on our parts, we shall soon see that change wrought in us which we aspire after." Easier said than done. You have to live moment by moment--"in the now"--if you are to consciously choose anything other than your habitual response. It requires patience and self-control--both of which I find in short supply! But when I do change my thoughts, things change as well. "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2) And conversely, I've found it to be true that we can be renewed by the transforming of our minds.

BEYOND FORGIVENESS
Alexandra Stoddard has a good one today in her Grace Notes: "Don't fight back. It's better to go for a long walk than raise your blood pressure. You are in control of how you respond to the behavior of others, not how well or badly others behave." Reminds me of the song, "The Gambler"--"You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run." But what happens if you can't walk or run away?

Doctors are taught to handle difficult patients by pausing and acknowledging their own anger, listening to the negativity, and then empathizing with the person, which doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but rather offering understanding, compassion, and sympathy. We can do the same.

I think for me one of life's hardest lessons has been to know when to stand and fight and when "to accept whatever is," surrender, and get on with my life. I'm still learning.

HELPING OTHERS
Before we can help others, we first have to SEE the need. If my neighbor falls in his house, I can't know he needs help. We would know nothing about Haiti's earthquake if the media didn't show us.

Secondly, we have to UNDERSTAND the need. If my neighbor manages to hobble out of his house and stands by the road waving his hand, I may think he's just saying hello. An earthquake is obvious, but the problems caused by desertification in Africa or deforestation in South America may not be.

Thirdly, we have to KNOW what to do and BE ABLE to do it. I can call 911 for my neighbor, but how to help people in the Philippines threatened by a volcano may be beyond my ability to do more than pray for them.

But if we CAN do something, it becomes our human responsibility to DO it whether it is for our neighbor or someone halfway across the planet.

APPLESAUCE
We've all heard the saying, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." The truth is that rarely does anyone hand them to us. We pick up most of those lemons ourselves, reaching for what we think are golden apples.

As children, all of us have dreams and preconceptions of what life will be like. Sooner or later in life, our dreams are shattered. We find out that the apples are not golden and that no one will hand them to us on a sterling silver platter, but that we must go out and gather our own apples off the ground.

On top of that they are rarely pretty like the ones in the produce aisle, but are small and hard and warty, and that the worms and squirrels have gotten there first.

We have to remember the old saying that the worms and squirrels always choose the sweetest apples, even as we pare and core those apples and cut away the worm holes and squirrel-chewed parts.

But if we do that and add sugar from our own store of happiness and a bit of spice out of our own creativity, whether cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves--each of us has his own ideas, talents, and strengths--and if we stand patiently at the hot stove and stir, we can make wonderful applesauce. We can share that applesauce with others or use it to make cakes or just eat it plain and fresh, cold or warm, with a sprinkle of freshly ground nutmeg.

Or we can spend life chewing on wormy apples.

The choice is ours.

Choose happiness!

DECISIONS
The world spins--the Earth on its axis, the galaxy on its, perhaps the whole physical universe is spinning, too, as it expands. I'm not an astronomer, but I know that everything is in motion. I had a friend once--he's been dead many years now, funny how the years speed by--but as we talked of "shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings," he said, "You seem to be interested in everything that moves." And I answered, "And everything moves." We laughed. It was nearly true.

I've lost many of my early interests. Time does that to you. Not having children does that to you. The future folds in upon itself. And our decisions narrow the choices we have tomorrow, or even this afternoon.

We should make no decision carelessly. We all know that, but we do it all the time. And often pay the price. Sometimes it's worth it. Sometimes not. And other times we study a decision to death and still make the wrong choice. It happens to everyone sooner or later.

And some of the most critical decisions seem to the be easiest--to take a shortcut that ends up being a longcut, to park the car here rather than there, to take the elevator rather than the stairs or vice versa, to step out the back door without boots in January not realizing the porch is covered with ice--and we end up paying for the rest of our lives. A single moment can change your whole life. We learn that over and over again, and it seems that we never learn it at all.