daily java: gripe

Daily Java: 

My heart is in anguish within me;
    the terrors of death have fallen on me.
Fear and trembling have beset me;
    horror has overwhelmed me.
I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest.
I would flee far away
    and stay in the desert;
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
    far from the tempest and storm.” (Psalm 55:5-8)

This post is a gripe and has no answer. Yet I feel I have to write something. And this blog is my release.

Yesterday marks the fifth or sixth time to fall. I am now in the situation that my right arm is seriously hurt and I find I have a broken collarbone. I have hit my head three times seriously, twice on the back and once of the front (yesterday). I have fallen in public three times making it rather humiliating. and I am at the point that I can barely move. I am faced with Easter services as the only musician in our church and the peripheral neuropathy in my hands is so bad I do not know if I am going to be able to play. My church is scared for me and have gotten to harping on me to carry around a walker and all kinds of other stuff.

I am in constant pain from all this and the side-effects of the chemo. I fear they will get tired of all this and begin to move away from me. I am totally discouraged. I am in a good work that I could do something with but can do nothing. I have approached this whole thing with as positive an attitude as I can but am coming to a point of being tired and wanting nothing but to sleep.

Today I would welcome death. I know where I am going and there is no pain. But of course Ella needs me. However, today, she almost fell at her doctor's office and I could do nothing but watch while everybody else helped her. i walk slowly and carefully and have found myself, for the first time in my life, afraid. I am afraid of falling. At my height, it is a long way to the ground and I just do not know how to fall. So I walk carefully and slowly and Ella says I have added 15 years to my apparent age just looking at me walking.

God does not send bad things, but he does allow them. And is the strong man watching the bully beat up a smaller man without interfering any different that the bully himself? I know You and I have discussed this in the past, but it is a very real thing in my life right now. There is no week that goes by without at least four or five things bad happening to me. And these are not small things. I have hit both shoulders numerous times with painful results. I have hit my head causing painful contusions three times. I have damaged my right knee and my right hip pretty badly.

Add to this the cancer and the drastic weight loss and inability to eat and the chemo-therapy, the peripheral neuropathy - all the other junk.

I don't know, but I feel I am at the end. I know that God is not always fair. But he is supposed to be always good. I saw good things coming from this when I came and was full of buoyant hope in the knowledge that I was supposed to do something great here so the devil was going to do his best to stop me. But now? I cannot stop, but I feel I have trouble going on. My life is a shambles.

I know there is no answer. But something has to give. It hurts my fingers even to type this letter.

I will have to admit, if it were not for the relationship I have with my wife, I do not know what I would do. However, even tat is showing strain. She is afraid and was from the beginning. She doesn't know what to do and many of her encouragements turn out to be the wrong direction or the like. She does what she can yet she is so limited too. So we are stuck. Every trip to the VA is 100 miles round trip. I just hope my resources hold up. and that Ella and I hold up.

daily java

Daily Java:

I long for the years gone by when God took care of me,
when he lit up the way before me and I walked safely through the darkness.
When I was in my prime, God’s friendship was felt in my home.
The Almighty was still with me, and my children were around me.
(Job 29:2-5)

And now my life seeps away. Depression haunts my days.
At night my bones are filled with pain, which gnaws at me relentlessly.
With a strong hand, God grabs my shirt. He grips me by the collar of my coat.
He has thrown me into the mud. I’m nothing more than dust and ashes.
(Job 29:26-29)

The past couple of days have been rough ones for me. every once in a while, my mind goes into a guilt and a blaming spiral that, when once began, cannot stop. I begin to revisit failures and shortcomings. I come back to places in which I hurt someone or in which I, or we, have been hurt.

A lot of times these days come in the first day of a fast. It is as if my mind is trying desperately to derail the fast, to ruin the good that comes from it. It usually goes away. But yesterday it came full force and I am not fasting. I don’t know why.

But it hurts, nonetheless.

When I look back over my life like that, it seems worthless. There seems to be little of any good coming out of it. I am a failed preacher living in HUD housing, living off a paltry retirement check. I cannot get a job and we are so poor that I can barely at times breathe.

Oddly enough, though, I am doing a lot of ministry right now. We are what amounts to the entire hospitality ministry of Firm Foundation Church, I am jail minister, teach a Sunday night class, do most if not all of the writing and editing for the church, prayer ministry on Sunday mornings, occasional preaching. I probably do more than any other member other than the pastor.

But of course, I get paid nothing and have in a couple of months, come to the point of being desperate for enough money to have gas to drive to church.

I believe that because of the hospitality ministry, we have plenty of food. the freezer is full of good things. We have trouble with mile and such but we have plenty to eat.

But that is where it stops. Our furniture is all, with the exception of the bookcases and two lamps, castoffs I have gotten hold of. It is not that they are bad or anything, but none of our furniture was new when we got it.

I had to borrow $20 Thursday for a week. We get paid next Wednesday and we will be better then, but it will not be long before we run out again.

It is so tiresome and I don’t know why. I would feel like God has deserted me – and I have given it thought at times – but Ella comments that I am still able to teach people and to write things that come from God’s heart, so I don’t know.

I do ask why he has decided to hang this old preacher out to dry. After forty years of service, why am I so destitute. And I have seen other preachers like this too. I trusted him to take care of me and he hasn’t. I finally took early retirement since I could find no job whatever, so at least I would have a little, but the $336 a month will not go very far.

We have gotten so tired of this and the Lord has not shown us any relief. Instead Ella continues to fall and hurt herself. And life gets harder. And I have maybe 20-25 years of this left.

daily java

Daily Java:

Once I was young, and now I am old. Yet I have never seen the godly abandoned or their children begging for bread. (Psalm 37:25)

Growing older gives a certain perspective on life. And it is not always one you want.

I do not like looking back over stuff in my life that was not good. We were having dinner tonight and I mentioned that Ella had things happen to her in the name of God that were almost unbelievable. The lady having dinner with us really didn’t know what to say so I went on.

But it is true. And while the Bible is true and truly written, at the same time it is not always totally accurate.

I have seen the godly abandoned. I am godly and I know for a fact that my wife is, yet we have been abandoned. We even spent four days living in our van with our furniture in storage. We washed up in service station washrooms and ate from various places. It was not that we were totally broke, it was just that we did not have enough for a place to stay and no one cared enough to help us.

The church I was pastoring threw us out with just a month to prepare. It was not enough.

We have been and are currently just about destitute. I cannot find a job and the Lord seems to thrown us aside financially. I do more work in some ways for free for the church here than I did in my last pastorate in a church that did not want me. but I get no money for it and if it were not for government housing, we would be in a world of hurt.

When I was young, I truly believed that if I gave my life to the Lord, he would reward me by taking care of me. it was not true.

It is true that we have never lacked for food. and the more we feed others, the more we have people over for meals, the more food we have. Right now, we have a full freezer of stuff.

But we have no money for anything else. I found out Ella was waiting until she got her Social Security check to go to the doctor for something that was causing her pain. If I had known, I would have sold something or something to get it for her.

We drive a car that is sheer luck in many ways and I am grateful for it. But it is old and I will not be able to fix it or get another.

I wear clothes that are worn out or do not fit. I am tired of being this way.

I liked being young better. When I was young, I was stupid and was happier. Now I am older, I know better and I hate it.

Where is the care God should give us? I do not want to be given anything, yet I have been forced into a situation in which I am jobless and living off my wife’s SS check.

I used to believe that verse.

a grammatical gripe

I don’t often gripe as such on this blog, but I have noticed so much bad grammar on the internet. It isn’t just in places like this one – just an ordinary guy’s blog. It is in places like newspaper reporting and such.

Much of it has to do with misspelled words that no one has caught. It seems there is no proofreading anymore. There instead of their, you instead of your, things like that.

I am buy no means a professional grammarian, but I notice misspelled words. It is almost a  disease with me. I always find them.

When I do, it takes away from what is said. Enough of them, and my respect for the veracity and ability of the writer. One of my favorite writers, who admittedly churns out a lot of writing every day does this a lot.

To me this says, I don’t care enough to check my stuff and make sure it is correct. If the grammar is wrong enough, it says that maybe the other stuff is too.

This is a small point, I know. It is also probably overly-picky. It is, however, my own opinion and I am drinking coffee while I am writing it.

So there.