It's taken the usual morning and into afternoon to get a grip on pain, but the time has been spent as well as I hope in God possible--a phone call from an elderly friend whose son not much younger than I, had a golf ball-size tumor removed a week ago tomorrow. Benign is the word from test results just in! Praise God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth and all creatures therein!
Then a greeting from an eldest sister who is on a cruise with her husband, wishing me well in recovery and Happy Thanksgiving. Very kind; they were in port for a couple hours with internet service. I returned a greeting and thanks, and also that this morning I thought of her and our other sister, next elder one, and that 46 years ago today we were all together, as they were in my late morning wedding at the Methodist Church in which we were brought up those many years ago.
This morning I had prayed another forgiveness of the ex-spouse, and thought briefly--enforced briefly--of the ten years of marriage and of the infidelity and other life the spouse was living for all of it. Forgiveness was given immediately all those years ago, yet I did factor that had the spouse not left after the accident, or had I heeded reality checks along the way, there'd not have been an accident had I heeded some situations, or had I not had to exert so much after the spouse left and divorced, I'd likely not needed the back surgery in which the mistakes were made, causing this Adhesive Arachnoiditis and life of suffering and increasingly so.
However, of course I stopped those realities and replaced with the realities of the greatest treasures of my earthly existence in the form of three beautiful, accomplished, and beloved children--now all adults with significant others and two with families of their own. They each are past age 33, the age in which my life was drastically altered, painfully so, and for that I am extra grateful to God. They had various other sufferings to endure from early ages, their childhoods hindered and difficult in contending with a single parent with chronic pain and limited resources.
I do hope in God that they will realize, perhaps after we are all passed from this temporal earth, just how much I love and treasure them and thank God for them; they were the precious jewels God gave me for the best portions of the temporal.
But not to dwell on all that past, other than in my current effort in acceptance of this highest level of pain consistently, to date, and of a thankfully greater understanding, on my part, as to what these three beloved persons, now adults, experienced. To their credit and the glory of God, they succeeded in trooping through those years, through college, through their adult lives thus far. None of it is easy for anyone--simply living in the temporal world, everyone with their own sufferings of various types, their challenges, and much hard work.
Thus this day commemorating Christ the King is extra meaningful to me as a human, a parent, a child of God, a victim soul of Jesus, a consecrated Catholic hermit, a friend to those who can cope with the effects of what I can somewhat explain of Adhesive Arachnoiditis, and also to express their prayer needs, for I do sometimes think that the Lord answers my prayers in an added blessing of ways unknown and unseen.
Some others, mostly the handful of Catholic friends who remain in contact over the years, think so, also. Somehow the Lord is very linked to those of us who suffer and who offer ourselves fully to Christ our King. We remain more on the cross with Him than anywhere other. We scan the daily news for bits of details and persons and entire situations for which we pray. Our lives become a prayer of pain, the pain praying as much or more than words or thoughts in our minds or feelings in our hearts.
And the more I consider what I wrote last evening of the intrinsic qualities of love and pain being bound as if one, or at least interchangeable in some aspects and references, we embrace the cross as love, and we suffer pain as love. We come to love to suffer and suffer to love. We find Christ the King in our pain.
We do not glorify pain, of course; we glorify Christ the King, our Savior, our Lord of Lords! Yet He is to Whom we cling in our suffering, constantly in some of our cases, and we accept that others may not possibly be able to understand that need, that essential aspect of our lives--to cling to Jesus on the cross, for we cannot manage without Him, without what others might find extreme clasping, extreme focus, extreme love of Christ, the Son of God to Whom we go, and the Holy Spirit, likewise, to Whom we grasp in the desperation of such suffering, of pain that has become love, and love that is pain.
There is glory in such love, glory in Christ our King, victory through and of and from His salvific suffering and redeeming all of us humans--those who seek Him in whatever degrees of seeking and even clutching, clinging--and those who have gotten busy in other things, who have minds elsewhere, who have grown distant or not ever really been that close. Those of us who suffer enough to love so much and need Him in every breath to hold us tight--we include in our pain and love, all others.
That is the least we can do and be and pray. And to be praise of His glory, to be living, suffering praise of God through sickness and health, through good times and bad; and in Christ, not even death will we part.
God bless Christ the King present within us!
No comments:
Post a Comment