9:00 p.m.
End of a long day, a stream of consciousness reflection.
Day began at 1 a.m. with Sandy unlocking the front door and coming in. She came home from the hospital in a taxi. At these times I wish I could still drive.
We slept, a little later than normal. She had a doctor’s appointment.
Peritonitis had occurred, not that unusual for starting PD.
She’s been on the end stage renal diet (what a bad name) for seven weeks, and is finding the cardboard-styrofoam-library paste menu hard to choke down.
Sandy’s taken in stride so many challenges, it rattles me to watch her struggle.
I concocted a simple sauce made of margarine, sugar free red raspberry jam, sugar free cranberry juice, and water. Reduced that by about half. We poured it over roast pork and barley Mary Fran brought earlier in the week.
A highlight of the day came when Sandy enjoyed the sauce.
Flavor! Flavor! the name of the game.
Some patients actually starve because they just can’t take the restricted diet.
I’m resolved to find some tasty alternatives on the net and in various cookbooks, as well as trying my hand at some things.
Tonight we had phone calls that assured us that we do not stand alone.
But I admit I feel kind of blue.
Letting go of feelings
This morning I felt high reading Sölle’s book The Silent Cry. She defines mysticism as “direct experience with God,” the chief value of my childhood faith, and looks to some on the left wing of the reformation, the Anabaptists, as models.
Their spiritual writings in the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality (for me, not including Menno Simons) literally light my fire.
Sölle writes:
- “[I]n praising the source of all good, the ego that is possessed by goals and that craves dominance vanishes. It has stepped out of itself. It has scuttled itself.”
- “That we may live without Eigenschaft [what is one's own: characteristic features, idiosyncracies, and singularity, as well as love of self and egoism]…is an expression of the most profound freedom we can attain. We become free when, no longer wed (ledig) to fears and constraints, we are in God’s presence “without a why or a wherefore.”
I re-member (am joined again to) exalted feelings as I think about this.
In Philippians 3, using accountant language of profit and loss, Paul writes about leaving behind all things, bad and good, for the sake of Christ: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8).
He goes on to say that he longs to share in Christ’s sufferings that he may also share in Christ’s resurrection (vv. 10-11).
A year or so ago, I discovered this:
For [God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.
Phil 1:29 (NRSV)
My gut response was being pissed off. No thanks! I thought.
I read some prayer of someone asking God to make it really hard, agonizing, for them. They could take it!
Not me! I thought. I know suffering from the inside. I’ll use my Get out of jail FREE card any time I can.
What I am learning, I hope, is to become less enslaved to such feelings.
Some days are diamonds,
some days are stone.
Some days the cold wind
won’t leave you alone.
That’s how it is. So what?
In good times, in bad times, feeling fine, feeling lousy, feeling nuthin’—may I praise thee, God. May I praise thee!
Photo by Msry Fran