We are trying to work around Patty’s fall off the back porch step the other day, and it ain’t easy. She can’t walk because her foot hurts, so she’s using the computer chair as a wheelchair. It’s sort of like having a snow plow in your living room.
I have to go here and there and everywhere today. And I’ll take her car, which we just got back after three weeks at the garage. Squirrels had gnawed the wires, and there was a “rodent nest” under the hood. Maybe if we actually use the car, they’ll leave it alone.
I can’t imagine how I’ll write a Newswithviews column today, so probably I won’t.
Getting her up the stairs is a job.
One gets disheartened, sometimes. We had, I guess, half an hour of peace between getting the car back and Patty falling off the step.
Please pray for us. We need it.
Always praying.
I would say “take it one step at a time,” but I know taking even one step is difficult for Patty right now. (Lame attempt at humor — oops, “lame” is a bad word to use, too. Oh, well.)
I’m praying for a speedy recovery for Patty. May God help you both.
We all need to, at times, to really take stock of the events that take place in our lives.
Everyone has family problems. Sickness, pain, and tribulations at times. Please remember, Patty’s foot will soon heal and mend, and those slight problems and inconveniences it has caused will soon be forgotten. As the scripture says, it came to pass, not it came to stay.
Squirrels gnawed the wires of your car, was that really a big problem, at least you had a car to get back, and I am sure it works just fine now.
For the last two weeks of my wife’s life, she didn’t have the strength to walk to the bathroom, and I almost didn’t have the strength to help her. So, we also used her big desk chair. But that was like using a shopping cart with a bad wheel that never went the direction we wanted to go. But we found, that my small desk chair worked great. During her last two days of life, she didn’t need the chair, she didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. My wife wasn’t going to recover, thank God, Patty will.
If you can’t write your column today, or even any time this week, that’s Ok. There will always be tomorrow or the next day. What does tomorrow hold for you? Only God knows. It could get worse, but I believe things will improve for you and Patty.
I understand, at least a bit of some of your trials and problems you are going through, as do most of your readers. Yes, it’s really true, one does get disheartened sometimes. I still can’t watch my wife’s blogs, too painful. You and Patty are in our prayers each morning. Remember Job, his hard trials probably lasted a year or so. But joy comes in the morning. Nevertheless, even though God blessed the latter end of Job, the pain, the loss of his children before his relief, were things he would always remember until his last breath. David, when his own men talked of stoning him, he encouraged himself in the LORD his God. Don’t forget God has not forgotten you.
Thank you, Mike.
I do know we could have problems much, much worse than the ones we have. That we don’t have those worse problems is cause for thankfulness.
It could be worse.
It was for thousands of people here this week. I didn’t know about this until this morning. Tropical Storm Megi caused severe flooding and landslides in the city of Baybay on Leyte, an island directly north of us. We had a lot of rain here and a bit of flooding, but no deaths or landslides. The death toll from landslides and flooding caused by that storm has risen to 67. That tropical storm is the strongest to hit this archipelago nation this year. The storm has displaced more than 42,000 people.
And sometimes we think we are having a rough time with life. For some of those people, the only things they have left, are what they were wearing when the floods washed away everything else.
I’ve always been uncomfortable — even resistant — to the idea that we should disregard our own suffering because other people are suffering worse. It seems to make our happiness contingent on other people’s misery. I’m not talking about minor inconvenience on our part, but real and serious suffering. The objective should be acknowledging our suffering, offering it as our share in the Cross, and being thankful for the good things we’ve had as well as those we still have. (E.g., “I can’t do X any more, but at least I can still do Y, and I’ve discovered that I can do Z instead of X.”) Meanwhile, our own suffering, regardless of other people’s suffering, is real. Every pain of the moment is the worst pain because it’s immediate and we don’t know how it will end. If it makes us compassionate about other people’s suffering now that we’re suffering too, that’s good. But if we gain our own comfort from the fact that other people are suffering worse than we are, that’s always struck me as taking satisfaction from their suffering. It bothers me. But maybe I’m just quirky that way.
Of course, as a Catholic I know that we can offer our suffering in union with Christ’s suffering as a prayer, so that our pain may help other people survive their pain (see Colossians 1:24, “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in Christ’s sufferings, for the sake of his body, the church”) — so in that sense we may be glad our suffering can help. But the trouble is that suffering hurts. And knowing that our pain may be useful doesn’t stop the pain from hurting. And in some ways, mental suffering is worse than physical suffering, because it attacks the instrument we use to handle the suffering. But….
But I’m blathering. I’m sorry you and Patty are in such pain, Lee. I do pray for you (plural) and others who are in pain. I offer many of my own pains for you. And I’m grateful to you for helping many of us through our own pain. God bless you.
Thanks, Phoebe. You hate to complain of a sprained ankle when somebody else you know has cancer; but the last bad sprain I had was so painful, I fainted right there on the basketball court.
Patty fell on Monday. On Tuesday she could only get around on the wheeled computer chair. Yesterday she was able to shuffle about a bit. I hope today it’ll be a bit more.
And we both miss Peep.
I wish I could talk with my Aunt Betty, a teaching nun; but she went off to her reward years ago… and I’m the oldest living member of my family. Ugh.
Excellent encouragement, eldermike, and I couldn’t do better, but I am adding my prayers with all those who are praying for you two. The Scripture tells us that when two or more pray in agreement, the prayers have power. We have to add our faith to those prayers, too. Let us agree, these needs will be met.
Thanks, Erlene.
Praying for Patty to feel better.
Phoebe, I was not implying that we should disregard our own suffering because other people are suffering worse, not at all! Because of the grief I have gone through, the loss of very dear loved ones, I now understand a great deal more, and have a much greater empathy for those who also experience great loss. And knowing the suffering others go through, we should be so grateful to God, who has blessed us and kept us from danger or harm. Those kinds of things also help remind us, that nothing about today or tomorrow is sure, and disaster could befall us in an instant. Only God is sure, a Rock unmovable.
It also seems to me, that peoples and nations that experience a lot of great calamities, like floods, deaths, storms, and such, have a greater capacity to endure those kinds of misfortunes, for they have experienced those kinds of tragedies for much of their lives, so it’s just normal. Someone else’s suffering, and what has caused them pain, may not be as horrible for someone else. We should always acknowledge others’ pain, even if we do not fully understand the depths of hurt and grief they may be going through. For what others feel will never be exactly what you may or may not feel, or understand the full brunt or effects of the events in their lives.
That being said, Brother Lee, and Patty, if you have misunderstood anything I have said regarding this, I am sorry, and I am not downplaying or disregarding any of the trials you have gone through the last few months. Again, you are in our prayers each morning, as is Phoebe. I do have a question for Phoebe, how is everything going, do you still need prayer for those needs? Or has God taken care of them?
No, Mike, you didn’t offend me.
Thing is, who among us does not need prayer–and every day?
Mike, I didn’t mean to attribute such an implication to you. I was just saying that I’m uncomfortable with comparisons of suffering because of the way some people use them — like my grandmother always telling us kids that we should clean our plates because children in Europe were starving. (We always wondered how our stuffing ourselves beyond repletion would fill those children’s stomachs.) And the old saying, “I complained because I had no shoes, and then I met a man who had no feet” — well, that didn’t put any shoes on my feet or keep my bare feet from getting bruised and cut, did it? I guess I’m just a born skeptic.
Sometimes after I’d told my War Story in class — about the time there was a contract on my head in the Philippines — students would come to me with their troubles and say, “I know this is nothing like what you went through, but….” and I’d have to reassure them that the intensity of someone else’s suffering doesn’t really matter to the person who’s suffering right now. It’s all suffering, and we need to work with whatever pain there is to see how to handle it. One former student, a veteran of Desert Storm, sent me a note after our course saying “I was in such bad shape after what I went through that I didn’t think I could get out of bed any more. But your story gave me courage.” Suffering is suffering. Present pains hurt worse than past pains (or someone else’s pains) because they hurt NOW and we don’t know how we’ll come through.
But you’re right, and I think I mentioned this as well, that if our suffering teaches us compassion for other people’s suffering, it actually serves a purpose. In fact, in God’s Providence, everything works to a purpose. Nothing is ever wasted.
One of the things I learned from my experience during the Vietnam War (I was in one of the squadrons that did the evacuations at the end) and when I was trapped with the contract on my head afterward was that sometimes what seems like the greatest calamity of our lives turns out to be one of the best things that ever happened to us. While I was sitting in that cinderblock room in the Philippines waiting to die, I asked myself “What am I dying for?” And trying to answer that question as an atheist started me on a six-year journey to Christianity. But that’s a story for another time — and part of the story I used to tell my students.
Oh, in case you’re wondering why I always told my students the story…. In one of my earliest Shakespeare courses, students were (as usual) wondering what a story like “Hamlet” had to do with “real life” — “Things like that don’t really happen,” they insisted. And without thinking, I said, “Let me tell you a story,” and told them what had happened to me. The story then became a tradition. If I didn’t say anything at the beginning of a class after that, someone was bound to ask, “Are you going to tell your war story?” And I’d have to assure them that yes, I’d tell it, and I’d give them advance notice so they could bring a friend and maybe some popcorn. And the questions and problems that students brought to me afterward led to a number of students turning to Christianity. Nothing is ever wasted. Everything works to a purpose.
But I’ve gone on too long. Apologies. Never ask a veteran to tell a war story. The difficulty lies in getting her to shut up.
Speaking only for myself… Phoebe, I needed that.
Still praying Lee