Steady On [10'TU]

I settle in to type, attempting to be normal while my forearm still aches from the healing injury. As I mentioned earlier, some 6 weeks ago I ruptured the tendon connecting my right bicep to my forearm. Five weeks ago today I underwent surgery to reattach the tendon. For two more weeks I cannot pick up anything larger than a ballpoint pen.

The prohibition makes sense and is enforced by pain. I am unable to lift a coffee cup normally without pain, and do not try. Doctor's orders.

The pain is mostly the muscles recovering from atrophy, or so I imagine. I know the wound point heals slowly and needs the care of inaction. Yet I must try to touch my shoulder (very hard) and extend my arm fully while moving it from side to side (not so hard.)

This is ten minute Tuesday but I am stopping now. The pain settles in the side of my upper arm when I try to type. About a 6 and not worth it.

God is good. I am overjoyed at the goodness of life. Steady on.

Thanks Be To God

It is a difficult thing to be forced into slowness. Slowness is hard of itself, a discipline not easily embraced. Perhaps it is always forced on us.

After surgery September 23rd I was unable to type normally until the retaining cast came off October 15th. This is my first real foray into typing and it is ok. Still unable to use mouse in right hand. Left hand agility improves of necessity.

Healing is slow and painful. Things wrong must be set right and it always takes time, which takes patience. Patience, after all, is long suffering.

Who can think slow and act slowly? Yes, I know adverb is required and yet language changes, even makes a norm of transgressions. Grammarians would explain why adjectives forced into adverbs' clothing feels better sometimes. No doubt goes with our move from writ to spoken verbiage.

Speaking of, attempting to speak into text rather than typing has been that into which I have dabbled. (Avoiding the ending of sentences with prepositions is another dying practice, up with which I have learned to put, even enjoy.)

My arm hurts, I am almost done. There is so much to say, for life is rich and wonderful and infinitely layered.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gifts.

What is the Gospel?

What is the Gospel? Some say ragamuffin – good news for the down and out. Some say Creed, words ringing true to all that is. Many don’t know what the gospel is, a strange word seldom used in normal ways of life.

Gospel means simply “Good News” and for nearly 2,000 years references the story of Christ as we receive it in the New Testament books named after his followers.

What is the Gospel? My needy soul reaches up to God and hopes the Gospel is for the down and out, for those who have received the grace to know how lost they are and how much this world and every single one of us needs a Savior. But of course I also hope it is true, that it can be understood and accessed by normal processes of reason and curiosity and understanding. If the Gospel is true then it can weather the withering storms of centuries of doubt and attack. And so it has.

I hear myself say the Gospel is the Incarnation writ large, or perhaps most accurately the gospel IS the Incarnation. This feels closer to Creed than ragamuffin, but I want to linger here. The Incarnation tells us God is with us. There is no greater Good News. When we hear God is with us we know he did not just select the best and the brightest, the wisest and most erudite. No, he came to be with this world just as it is, full of sadness, darkness, death and loss, disappointment, addiction, broken hearts.

The Gospel is for everyone because the Incarnation is for the whole world: past, present, future. When God touches the world nothing remains as it was. When Joy Davidman Lewis surrendered her life to Christ, she used the expression “God came in” to describe the Wonder of what happened. This can happen in our individual lives because it happened in Bethlehem. If there’s a God, the one whom Christ reveals, this God doesn’t wait for us to seek him out. He seeks us out.

This is the Gospel, the Good News: God has come into the world and we need never be alone again.

Without Typing

I wonder if I can speak a poem, dictate a rhyme, write a verse without writing, only speaking. It is not my custom, this talking while electronic machine turns spoken word into type. For 2 weeks I have been unable to type or write. Hopefully by the weekend I will be able to type again, though my arm which endured surgery will take a while to be fully restored.

I am thankful for limits for I know they teach us. And yet this limit has been very hard. We get used to what we get used to, and the long arm of habit orders our life whether we like it or not. For most of history there was no typing as we know it now. I really don't know how to do this thing so I will stop.

[100WW] Left Hand Edition

On the 13th I injured my right arm when I strained overmuch lifting an appliance out of a trailer into a dumpster. There is a tendon coming from the bicep muscle, traveling through the elbow and attaching to a bone in the forearm. This tendon detached over 95% from the bone, rendering me virtually incapable of twisting my arm to the right. The doctor says roughly forty five percent of twist strength relies upon that tendon.

On Monday, the surgeon reattached it and I am slowly recovering, very thankful. Pain is managed with heavy pain killer and 800 mg Ibuprofen.

A Timeless Prayer from Solzhenitsyn

 (A prayer of faith for days like these and all the rest as well! Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate in literature in 1970 suffered imprisonment and other oppression in his native Russia on the "path through hopelessness".)

How easy it is for me to live with you, Lord!
How easy it is for me to believe in You!

When my mind is distraught
and my reason fails,
when the cleverest people do not see further
than this evening and do not know
what must be done tomorrow -
You grant me the clear confidence,
that You exist, and that You will take care
that not all the ways of goodness are stopped.

At the height of earthly fame I gaze
with wonder at that path
through hopelessness -
to this point, from which even I have been able to convey
to men some reflection of the light which comes from You.

And you will enable me to go on doing
as much as needs to be done.
And in so far as I do not manage it-
that means that You have allotted the task to others.

Of Words and Wonder -- an October Musing

Ever notice how the most valuable things in life, the most sacred and meaningful, are the hardest to talk about? It is almost like you are afraid that if you talk about it you will destroy it. The moment is too precious to ruin with words. The smile, the priceless hug, the return home of a long-lost child, a God encounter, a wedding, simple heart-songs, a gentle -- or passionate -- kiss. And how easily we do destroy things with words. Can't simple enjoyment and simple observation just be stored in memory and savored in the moment? No, we have to talk about it or type about it or take a picture or a video. Life is nothing if we don't apply technology or analysis, we think, but in the process we nearly destroy it.

Don't believe me? How many photos or video-hours sit on hard drives, never to be seen again. So often in the process of recording the moment for the future, the present joy is trudged upon, sullied, un-savored.

The ancients had it better. Even sports had it better before instant re-something. Life is most real when it is lived and left alone. The journey is not to be re-lived somehow; all efforts to do so are artificial, cheapening the real thing. Modern obsession with having has applied to time so that we morsel the moment to death, blanching taste and depleting value.

Such with a son and son going together across the street after long estrangement. No way to describe it or analyze it, unless I am the best poet. They do have that right, the best poets, a right earned through long and silent observation, tortuous struggle with life and meaning and words. They can convey precious moments in words ripe with treasured life. The rest of us are far better to enjoy, savor, and live with life real before our eyes, seeing enough to know there must be something Good behind, underneath and above all this wonder. 

Leave off the video, the photo, the words – it's time for simple rocking-chair rest, quiet sunsets filling the eyes and heart, words with family and friends, a game of kick-the-can if you wish; it's time for all that to be loved and enjoyed as so much more than the pseudo-gift of technology which promises more but leaves us more empty.

So I try to say in words what we all know in our bones. Analysis can help but often kills. Screens entrench inaction and fill the mind with...something. The vast bulk of photos has its allure in the suggestion that life is captured on paper; or worse, on a flickering screen. Life is something else – lived in the moment, lived on behalf of others, knowing only now really exists, investing in people not images, basking in the joys of life as they come, un-preserved, real, painful and poignant, but never really captured.

Did I just type all that for the internet? Technology is a mix of good with bad, that's for sure but I'm shutting this thing down and talking a nap. That's what the next moment is for. And it is good, I know it!