Let me say this much before someone tries to get me institutionalized: this death I'm talking about is not in the immediate or near future. I want to give life a chance to get better. Admittedly the past couple of days have been rough for seemingly no good reason. I think it CAN get better...but I don't see how it does.
You know the old cycle about hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times? I feel like we're on that last part of the cycle. It's going to get ugly, and what's on the other side of that ugly could well be unrecognizable. And by then, it might well be too late for me, even if I survive it.
Little meaningless pleasures like sunrises don't give me the will to live.
You should try disability.
A very good friend to me, and a friend of
@Quix (RIP), marysecretary, set me straight in my dark hour. She'd found so much grace in her disability over the decades as she continued to faithfully pray for her healing A healing that never came by the way - She died on the operating table, receiving the kidney that would have finally changed her life. But she would tell you that it didn't matter in the end.
At the time my very own wheelchair was sitting before me - I'd had others, rented for events and the like - but this one was my very own. There was a finality to it... More inescapable than yours. That chair predicted a life that I strenuously objected to... That chair was the very cusp of the failure that I had failed to remedy. My life was crashing down around me... My business and marriage destroyed, my children witness to my failure that it turned out, I was not man enough to conquer.
That was the setting and circumstance. marysecretary offered me no pity. She kindly recognized my plight as I saw it, but offered that my self-pity was nothing but distraction - A distraction from the faith I had proven. I was so much more than my legs she said. Look to the future with everything on the table - Every bounty Yah has said he has in store, and in that future lay your bets.
And she was right. For all the trouble of that time, it would have been easy to suck a bullet. And don't think I didn't think of that. But since then I witnessed a miracle in myself. I got up out of that cursed chair one day. And I began to walk it off. Bonafide miracle. Nothing but net.
What a time that was for me. All the pain of it... All the trials. How many times did I fall down? Uncountable. But each time, there was my dead father's voice in my ear, bidding me to get back up. Many times as I walked those hard steps I had a cool breeze at my back, just when I needed it most.
Oh the unbridled joy on the Fourth of July the following year, hotter than blue blazes, Sweat pouring off of me like rain, when finally, finally I topped Lone Pine mountain, a wee hill near my house that I used to run up with two 5 gallon pails of gravel on my back... Never so hard as that day. How beautiful a moment, coming up over the top of that trail to look over the valley. A year later I was up on top of the Columbia range - Real mountains - Overlooking the valley from the other direction. A year later I was hunting deep timber - back where I belong.
Had I been foolish enough to end it all those few years back, I'd have missed out on such an incredible journey. I'd have missed that beautiful day when I once again slung a hooch back up in the sticks, hunkered down by a campfire. I'd have missed three women that had an impact on me since my divorce. I'd have missed most of the companionship with my dog Chewy, who was with me nearly every step of the way. I'd have missed my 5 grandchildren.
Now, you can't tell me Yah don't have a sense of humor... Because here I am again, with my legs so bad that I can barely walk down the driveway and back. The back surgery is over with - justifying nearly 20 years of pain - Those years when many said I was faking it - which I would have missed too. And I have it to do all over again sommore. My life's work has become nothing other than getting up again, again.
But I look to the days coming with relish. I know this road. I have been on it before. And the distraction marysecretary told me about is still there, if I would choose to give it strength. But I will not. If I never get better than the POS I am right now, He already gave me nearly two decades of beautiful life, full of confirmation that He was there, walking beside me.
And as for sunrise... See it from the top of a mountain on a clear mountain day, rivers of clouds snaking beneath you in the valleys, with air so cold it hurts to breath. Be there and call that a 'little meaningless pleasure'. Yah willing, I'd be standing there with you to see that, even one more time.
