Friends For The Journey

6/4/07
We are in Ohio visiting my parents. On Friday night, at my mom’s encouragement, my brother, sister and I had some conversation around our parent’s aging and eventual death, and what to do with their farm after they are gone. I noticed that I got very quiet and slightly depressed during the conversation, but I could not figure out why.

The next morning, I woke up even more depressed and weary of life. I found myself thinking of the passage in Ecclesiastes that says “vanity, vanity, all if vanity.” I have felt that way a lot lately, almost wishing that I could just go to sleep and wake up in the next life. I am sure some of it has to do with the emotions surrounding Debbie’s fight with cancer.

Saturday morning this feeling of weary discouragement was so intense that I could not interact socially. I went to my room and asked Debbie to join me and help me process what was going on in me internally.

I told her how I was feeling and after prayer, she felt that it was somehow connected with my maternal grandmother. The only memory that came to me (and it had come to me often over the years – a sure sign of trauma) was sitting at my grandmother’s table at breakfast, at age 12 or 13, feeling shocked, disappointed and appalled as I listened to her bad-mouthing my cousin and accuse of him of imaginary crimes. My grandmother was senile at that point and suffered from paranoid delusions, and expressed a lot of bad things about the ones she loved. Evidently, this had traumatized me and caused me to adopt a false belief that life ends up in tragedy and that old age was something to be dreaded.

As I began to re-process this memory, I realized that I had been frequently saying recently that “Time is my enemy” …and that I had been running through life, looking back over my shoulder as if old age were pursuing me. I often got ahead of God in timing and pushed myself and others to accomplish my purpose “before the time was up.”

My grandmother had had a lot of pain in her life: her mother died when my grandmother was 10, and her oldest child (my aunt) died in childhood. Jesus came into my memory and put his arms around my grandmother and explained to me that she had made choices to depart from reality at key points in her life in order to avoid the pain. He encouraged me to surrender her to him and that he would care for her but that I did not need to fear old age, as long as I followed him and stayed in his reality. Time is not my enemy – there will be time to do everything that God has appointed for me to do.

I surrendered the memory to God, and corrected my faulty belief system and immediately felt the heaviness lift off of me and felt God’s peace return.

The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

One more hindrance has been removed from my life. I wonder how many I have yet to go before I can run without hindrances under the full power of God?

HEB 12:1 Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.