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 am suffering and in pain. Rescue me, O God, by your saving power. (Psalm 69:29).

I have been in pain for rte past several days. It doesn’t seem to matter how much of my drug supply I take, I am still in pain. Today, I even went so far as to take double my morphine. It dulled it somewhat, but it has not gone away.

The cancer I have is in a place that is hard to control. It is in the esophagus where it meets the stomach. You can feel it in front of your stomach and touch it with your hand.

Sundays when I play my guitar, the guitar lies on it and it hurts.  It just seems to hurt all the time. And it takes my mind from what I want to be thinking about and puts its on the cancer.

It makes me tired in general, and when I finally get enough medicine to take it away a little, it makes me feel drugged and sleepy.

But the pain has surprised me. I read about people in pain and never knew what it would be like in a lifestyle situation. It is hard to overcome. It is constant and always present. You find yourself holding that part of your body with you hand, even though it does no good.

I determined at the beginning that I have the cancer, the cancer does not have me, but it has been harder than I thought.

I pray to God for strength and power, but I do not seem to have any right now. I have been asleep all morning from the morphine and I do not like that.

The hyper weight loss has bothered me a lot. I cannot seem to be able to eat. And the result of the weight loss is strong. When I lie on my side in the bed, I can feel the strong and sharp points  of my ribs and the hard bone of my pelvis. My skin hangs from my bones. I look truly wasted when undressed.

Dressed, of course, I look all right. But clothes do hide a multitude of sins.

And there is the nagging hunger. I thought for a while that it was all my cancer that was hurting. But I have figured that it may be hunger pangs. I am starving and cannot seem to eat. I fear that I will be come anorexic and not be able to eat again as a normal person.

The hair falling out I can deal with. It is, after all, only hair and I will grow back. I have had a burr before and can again with no real problem.

I just do not like being helpless in the face of all this. But I am. And whether I like it or not, it really does not matter, God has allowed me to go through this, and so I do. I just hope I make a better witness at the end than now.

daily java

Daily Java: 

At least I can take comfort in this: Despite the pain, I have not denied the words of the Holy One. (Job 6:10)

Now there was a real man. So many things had happened to Job and his wife that it is hard to believe. Yet he kept his faith.

Mrs Job didn’t know what to do. All she could see was her life lying in shambles and the man she loved in pain. And all for no apparent reason.

When the first round of tragedies happened – the loss of his children and all of his property and wealth – he said the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Then the second round hit. He lost his health and his wife saw a broken man sitting at the town dump scraping his sore with a piece of pottery. Yet still he said: Despite the pain, I have not denied the words of the Holy One.

Her response? Curse God and die. You would be better of than you are now for sure.

But Job said no. He did not deserve these things, that he knew that for sure.  And he told the Lord that in no uncertain terms. Yet they continued to come. And what is more, the Lord never told him why. He never told him that when it came down to it, it was just a bet between the Lord and satan over whether or not Job would deny God under duress.

But he didn’t, even though he was unaware of the bet. He remained strong and faithful even when stupid things were happening to him.

There was no real purpose to what happened to Job. At least not to Job’s perspective. In fact rarely is there a good purpose to tragedy. And God doesn’t send tragedy. He allows it to happen, which is different, and he uses it to his glory and to our own glory, too.

Furthermore there is sometimes no reason for these things happening. If Job had been bad, like his “friends” claimed him to secretly be, then you could understand it. But he was a godly man, one who worshiped God unabashedly.

The point of the Book of Job is that when things happen to the child of God that seem to have no good reason to happen, the child of God stays firm and strong.

I worship a mighty God. He could take away my cancer with the wave of his hand. He could heal Ella’s thrombocydepenia (blood platelet disease) in a minute. But he hasn’t. Instead he lets us suffer.

And I do not like it, not one bit. He never says I have to. I have to accept it because, Quite frankly, what can I do about it? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. I cannot change it.

But I worship God even when the hits keep on coming. And I serve him even when I believe – and rightly – that life is not fair.

Change us, O Lord. Heal us. At least heal this wonderful woman who has spent her life in simple worship to you. She is too good to suffer like this. But I praise his name anyway. He is my God.

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)

The problem is, I have. I have seen people who came to the end of a life of long and faithful service and have nothing, barely able to even get some place to live. I am one of them.

I do not understand why God has abandoned me, nor do I understand why he has left us in this situation. And I do not understand how it is that, when I have given my life to him in his service, he has put us in this financial situation. If it were not for government housing, I would be begging a place to live. We barely have enough. On top of it all, Ella is crippled and in constant pain, exacerbated by her falling at least once a month, and sometimes more, always hurting herself more in the process.

Now I will have to admit that we have plenty of food. The freezer is full of good things. And I know that is because we are hospitable. He told us that when we share, he will bless us.

But financially is where we have our problems. We have always been generous with our money, yet we are broke. I took early retirement, but the extra we will pay for our housing cuts into that, so we have not gained that much.

I also know that the people of the Bible were not always blessed financially. Hebrews 11 talks about that. But the problem is, why will God on the one hand talk about how the world will see the child of God as being so blessed and on the other hand leave that same child with nothing.

I recognize that God is not fair. He is loving and good, just and merciful. But he is not fair. He will allow one of his children to be homeless. He will not always give them even what they need. As the book of Job points out, he will allow them to be severely damaged without it even seeming to bother him.

“My faithful servant who has served me all my life?” God says of Job to the devil. “Sure. Kill him in all but actual body. Hurt him, maim him, kill his children, damage his health, impoverish him, let his friends turn on him, baffle his wife to the point of madness. Sure. Whatever you want.”

Is that really a God of love?

Now I recognize that probably Job is a epic poem, a parable, maybe based on a real life situation.  But it is in the Bible for us to look at and learn from. What do we learn from the book of Job. We learn three things, he wrote in his normal overly analytical way.

One is that sometimes there is no good reason for something happening. Job’s problems were nothing more than a bet between God and the devil.

Second is that we do not understand sometimes why things are happening and God doesn’t tell us.

Third is that God will not keep bad things from happening to his people, nor will he necessarily send good things, no matter what the rest of the Bible says.

If this book is meant to teach (Romans 15:4 – Such things were written in the Scriptures long ago to teach us. And the Scriptures give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises to be fulfilled.) then what it teaches has to be true. It doesn’t teach what we want, but what it teaches is true.

The only problem is that it teaches things I do not really want to know, aspects of God I would rather be without. It shows more of an uncaring God than anywhere else in the Bible, a God who will allow and even encourage the harming of his children for no good purpose. And one who will not tell his children why nor even really answer their questions. In fact, he is a God who will even tell his child to shut up crying out in pain.

Hard picture. But I have seen it too much and I am one of those to which it is happening.

However, that line from the movie Robin and Marian keeps coming to mind. The older Robin Hood (played by Sean Connery) is telling the old Maid Marian (played by Audrey Hepburn) about the horrible things he has seen under the leadership of King Richard the Lionhearted (played by Richard Harris). He has been on the Crusades and has seen and done some terrible things in the name of war.

Marian asks him, “Why did you stay? Why didn’t you leave?”

To which he replies, “He is my King. Where else would I go?”

That reminds me of the apostles in John 6 after Jesus talked about figurative cannibalism in service to him (John 6:53-56). Many disciples thought it repellent and left. He turns to the apostles and asks, “Are you also going to leave?” To which they answered, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe, and we know you are the Holy One of God.”

He is my God and I will ever serve him. But I do not have to like everything he does. I may be a sheep, but I am not a blind sheep.

daily java

Daily Java:

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (Romans 8:28)

It is an absolute truth that bad things are going to happen to us. That is a given.

But there is also a choice we can make. We can become bitter and angry over them and let them rule us. Or we can allow God to use them to make us stronger.

The Bible says that the bad things do not come from God. God is a God of love and will not send things to harm us. But on the other hand, he will not always stop them from happening either.

It would be good if God had his hand over us in such a way that bad things didn’t happen. We would be protected.

But they do. they start early and go until we are dead. We can get angry at God and wonder why he doesn’t take better care of his people (the “why do bad things happen to good people” problem). It can make us bitter even.

Or we can accept the fact that things will happen and see what God has in store for us.

Now that sounds simplistic and Quite frankly Pollyanna-like. And sometimes even like that song from Annie: “The Sun will come out tomorrow.” We’re all singing and dancing thinking about all the good things that will happen to us.

And that is for the most part baloney. Nobody likes the bad things that happen and if they say they do, they are weird.

But God can use them to make us stronger. Just like exercise strengthens the body, so difficulty strengthens the faith we have. As Arnold and the other body builders would say, “No pain, no gain.” When bad things happen, we can allow God to use them. And like it or not, they make us stronger.

God does not send any bad thing to us. But he will use whatever happens to us that is bad to make us stronger. We may not enjoy it, but if we will let him, he will make us stronger.

the more you know, the harder it is on you

The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief.
To increase knowledge only increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Ecclesiastes is in my daily Bible reading right now, so I am seeing several things in it that strike me. And this is one.

The more you know, the harder it is on you. I believe that to a large point, the old adage “Ignorance is bliss” is true. The less you know, the less you have to worry about. Simple people tend to be happier.

My wife and I are two examples of this. Ella is by no means unlearned, but she and I have a totally different outlook on life.

I am an accumulator of information. I find it everywhere and it sticks in my mind. What is more, for the most part, I remember a lot of it.

Ella, on the other hand, enjoys receiving new information, but will not go out of her way to get it. She enjoys it (to a point) when I bring up new things, but does not go out to seek it on her own.

It makes for a marked difference in our personalities. Quite frankly, I know too much. And the more I know, the more it weighs on me. The accumulated information does not necessarily help me. She knows what she wants to know and is happy. I have to know more and am not, as a general rule, a happy guy.

And I learn a lot of stuff I don’t need to know because that is the way I am made. Some things I learn, I do not tell her because it would make her unhappy or bothered. But it is a personality quirk of mine that I have to learn them.

Once I do, they sit in there inside the maelstrom that is many times my mind. They may come out at some odd time and people are surprised that I know whatever it is I know, but in general, most of the knowledge I accumulate is useless. It is a shame I do not go to cocktail parties, because the kind of stuff I know would be great there.

Occasionally I will ask her, maybe while we are driving around, what are you thinking about?

Her response will be something like, I was thinking about how pretty those flowers are. Or I was thinking about the song we just heard on the radio.

I am usually thinking about 17 things, all unrelated, all of them twirling around inside my brain competing for attention. And there are times when I would love just to shut them all up, to think about flowers without thinking about conversations from 30 years ago, and something I had read, and the Hebrew word for something and what might happen to the van next, and something I had read and the political situation in America right now and missing my kids and our financial situation and my knee hurting and – on.

I envy her in her ability just to let things go.

a lot of pain just comes in life

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them” (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

I was just reading a western in which the main character had escaped as a boy from an abusive orphans’ home. He made something of himself and came back several years later to the town he had come from to see what it was like.

He met a girl who was a prostitute and found out that she had been one of the girls from the home. Even though he had changed considerably, she recognized him.

He found out from her that all of the girls who had not been sold to older mean s wives became prostitutes. All of the young girls he had known were now prostitutes.

It made him sad to know that, although the young men could escape to do something else, the girls were trapped. The old west, of course, as was American in general, was a culture in which women had little or no voice. So if the headmaster of this school sold his girls to brothels, that was too bad.

I thought about finding people again after a long time. It has been 43 years now since I graduated high school in Texas City. I have only recently found some of those people again.

When I read their stories, when we talk about what has happened since the beginning of our lives, almost each person has had such pain.

A lot of that pain just comes in life. In living there is pain. In growing, in learning, in enduring – all those things bring pain.

Yes, there is joy, but sometimes that joy comes afterwards when one has become able to deal with the pain.

In some ways, it would have been good not to know all this, to keep the pictures of these people in my mind like they were.

There were girls I had a crush on who had so many bad things happen, yet have come into a good life now. There are guys I knew who died in the Vietnam conflict or got in trouble with the law or just flopped along in life. Some are happy now, some are not.

But we all stand at about the same place as we did in high school, only on the other end. All of us probably have no more than 20-30 years left in this life.

I know that in my life, I made so many mistakes that sometimes I would give an arm to change them. But I can’t. All I can do is go on from here.

All any of us can do is go on from here. Whether our lives have been good or bad, happy or sad, doesn’t really matter now. We can live in the memories or the regrets.

But the rest of our lives, that short time left until we go to meet out Maker, that is what counts.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but I was thinking about it.

the problem of pain

My wife just fell down and hurt herself again. She has a big cut on her leg where she hit the edge of the pavement.

There is no reason for it and it makes me angry.

Someone said that there is a reason for everything, that God has a purpose for everything happening.

In the literal Hebrew, that is called Baloney.

Sometimes thing happen for no good reason. The only real reason they happen is because sin came into the world and with it came pain.

There is no good reason that Ella is in pain from her leg injury, anymore than there was for any one of the other injuries caused by her falling.

And it makes me mad that she has to go through this.

God could change it if he wanted. He could make a sovereign move and heal her of her MS and make it easier for her to walk and not be in constant pain from these stupid injuries.

But he doesn’t.

CS Lewis, the guy wrote the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe also wrote a book on the Problem of Pain. How can a loving and merciful God allow pain?

And that is a good question, too. The problem, though, is that the answer is not so easy

Sure, he could take away pain, but to do so, he would have to take away pleasure. We won’t have that until we get to heaven, according to the book of Revelations.

So while we are here, we put up with it, knowing that a better time is coming.

That is not always real comforting when I see my wife with bruises and cuts.

But the funny thing is, she still looks cheerful even when it hurts. I would want to hit someone, but she is cheerful. She is one who looks to the day when all pain is gone, all tears will be wiped away. And she loves her God.

There is no purpose, but God is still good. And he can use whatever happens to you to make something better. Just as he has in Ella.

He will do the same for you, if you will let him into your heart and allow him access. He can make the bad good and the unpleasant pleasant.

After all, he is God and he is in control. And he is good.

started moving today

Started moving today. We will be gone by Saturday, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Of course with that foolishness they call a detour coming out of New Franklin (a barely 2 lane dirt road with solid mud shoulders, dust flying and major traffic shunted that direction since they tore down the viaduct coming into town), the creek could rise.

But I think the Lord is willing.

One thing for sure, the devil is surely active in our lives right now. Several things lead me to think this:

1. The van is giving us trouble. Any time we start to do something good, our car gives us trouble. I wish the Lord would take care of it, because it happens each time we start to do something good. The gearshift lever doesn’t want to go into gear, so each time I have to do a manual override to get it to do so. At least it still works, though.

2. Ella is having a lot of physical troubles and is in pain despite her neurostimulator and all of her pain pills. Any time we begin to do something good, the devil touches her strongly and makes her hurt. I hate it.

God could change any of these things and I do not know why he doesn’t. He knows we are faithful. We have been faithful in spite of a lot. The church has ripped my family to shreds in the past, yet I still love it and will continue to do so. And he knows that.

I guess I stand with the apostle Paul who had a severe physical difficulty (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). God left him alone with this also and told him to deal with it, in so many words.

We have gone through so much in the past five years, to the point of losing any good credit rating we had. We have gone through a lot of pain and heartache. Because of what the church has done to us, my son has left the Lord. My daughter continues, but I figured she would. She loves God and the church too much to quit. There are people who will have to give accounting of what they did to my children through me. I forgive them, but they left some major scars.

Well, of course, they killed Jesus, and he didn’t anything wrong. He brought in change, of course, and they didn’t like that.

Not that I can hold a candle to him. But I stand in good company.

daily java

Daily Java: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. - 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

There is a lot to being comforted by someone. You feel bad, you hurt in some way, and you want to offer comfort. God offers us comfort in that way. We know that he cares for us and, if nothing else, ultimately will take care of us.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do here in this world, and there may be no release from what is wrong. Your comfort comes from the fact that you know God loves you and wants the best for you.

You also know that sometimes bad stuff happens anyway, and it doesn’t matter a fig whether you want it or not.

My wife is ill with multiple sclerosis and there is nothing we can do about it. We have prayed for healing and it has not come. Yet we know God cares for us and will use us anyway.

That was the point in 2 Corinthians 12 when the apostle Paul talked about pain and suffering in a Christian’s life. To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

He knew that God loved him anyway, even when he would not give him what he wanted.

As my wife progresses in her pain and suffering, she become sweeter and more gracious. I do not know why, but she does. When she prays for healing, she hears God say the same thing he said to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you.

She doesn’t like it, nor do I, but it is a fact that she is going to continue to suffer. Unless God smiles on her and decides to release her from her suffering, she will continue and get worse.

I hate it. But I love God. The pain and suffering did not come from God, but from evil in the world. And the only way God could get rid of it would be to get rid of evil, and then we would be like robots. Then we would not praise, but merely fulfill programming.

I like the choice myself. But with the choice comes the downside: the results of the choice, not only in your own life, but in the world in general.

I suppose that is why it is so hard to help a friend who is suffering who is not a Christian, who doesn’t have that internal peace in times of trouble. There is no focal point for them. All they see is the pain.

Thank you, Lord, for the grace in our lives that gives us the ability to see you through all the problems.