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Starting Recovery

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

After being the sole caregiver for someone, recovering from their death includes one key aspect: Learning to shift your mental focus back from you and them, to recognizing a new “us” which includes a different person. Often when you are in the throes of caregiving, your loved one’s needs can be so pronounced and overwhelming that you are totally focused on them – with ideally a few slivers of time set aside for self-care to help you survive.

But when that phase of life ended for me, I found that I needed to shift back to a more appropriate pattern of sharing, to where I think about life in terms of this new “us.” After years or even decades of dedicated caring, that change can be hard and the resulting relationship can feel almost unnatural at first – or at least it is for me.

But I am learning that with a lot of support and love and prayer, I can begin to see the way ahead. Yes friends, you read that right. I really did use the present tense a couple of times there.

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Things are happening fast in my life. As I write this it is 4 am Thursday morning and I have been awake for about an hour with ideas running through my head that I need to get down on paper. I am reminded of a poster I saw once that described a writer as:

“…a specialized type of alchemist that can transmute caffeine into words.”

Ain’t it the truth.

When Janet died, the post I wrote as a tribute and announcement said that the journey we are on together isn’t over. While my caregiving duties are done (for now at least – but you never really know, do you?) there was still the whole question of, “What does recovery look like?”

There are obviously many parts of that question, and one that I talked about in the recent past was Preparing for Reentry…. Carrying on with that thought, I need to remember that while it is impossible for me to get back to who I was, and how things were “before” – I still need to figure out how to go about assembling a new normal for my life.

In the final analysis, life does move on. Moreover, life was an ongoing string of catastrophes and miracles before “it” happened and there is little reason to assume that life will be any different now. The unfortunate truth is that life doesn’t come with a ration card for bad things, so that once you get your card punched, you can be assured that nothing else bad will ever happen to you. In the end, the truth remains that pain and joy are the two sides of a coin, and both sides of the coin are the same size.

Well this week, I read something that partially answered some questions, and partially gave me a bunch of new questions to ask – learning is like that. The article in question was primarily about the differences in the rates at which women remarry after the loss of a spouse, versus the rates at which men remarry in the same circumstances. While I obviously can’t speak to the veracity of the conclusions that the female author made about the reaction of women, I can say that when talking about men she “hit the nail right on the head.”

The one thing that was obvious from the outset was that widowers remarry at a rate about twice that of widows. While part of this discrepancy can be attributed to the well-documented fact that men die earlier than women do, even that statistic is changing as more and more women are dying early like their male peers. The author, therefore, attributes this significantly different rate to the fact that men and women experience the loss of a spouse in fundamentally different ways. The basic issue, she asserted, was that women experience the loss in a relational way. In other words, they miss the intimacy, the friendship, the sharing – in short, all the various aspects of a marital relationship.

By contrast, while men do miss the relationship – I know I sure do – their primary experience is different. My experience was, in the words of the author, one of an amputation. Boy, did that point resonate with me! For a very long time, even before Janet died, I had felt that way but didn’t know how to verbalize it. I felt as though I woke up one morning and part of me had been cut off and was missing.

Since Janet died, I have desperately needed someone to fill that void. But let me quickly add that the result was not simply an exercise to find a “warm body” to fill a social niche in my home, or empty spot in my bed. Human beings are not anonymous interchangeable parts. However, this point isn’t an introduction into a discussion of the “number of fish in the sea.” Rather, as with all matters in life, the lady and I need to remember that in addition to us, there is another party involved in the process – The One who created us, and Who, by the way, knows our needs much better than we do.

I have had relationships where I found the “right one” on my own and they were unmitigated trainwrecks – though God has been able to do some wonderful stuff with the resulting bits of wreckage. Then there was the relationship which God put together and it lasted 35 years. Although it wasn’t perfect, and I have been writing for a year and a half about the problems we had to face over the last three and a half decades, it was a good relationship that has prepared me magnificently for whatever God decides comes next.

Still, I don’t need to depend on a secular psychological paper to understand these feelings. Consider the creation story given in Genesis. God creates everything from light to insects, and after each act of creation, pronounces His latest work “Good.” But surprisingly, in the midst of all that goodness, there is one thing that He says is not good:

“It is not good for man to be alone…”

Gen 2:18

In response, God created a woman so that he would no longer be alone. Though there are obvious exceptions, from that day to this, men tend to look for a woman to fill in the gaps in their lives, and to be their partner and companion.

But to me, the really interesting thing is that even if you don’t accept the idea that Genesis is a true accounting of creation and consider it to be just another example of the ancients cobbling together a myth to explain the world around them, the point still works because you have to explain why that line is in the story. You have to ask yourself, “What was it that the ancients were seeing that they felt compelled to explain?”

The point is that regardless of whether God was explaining what He was doing, or the ancients were trying to explain a world they didn’t understand, men have been experiencing the sensation of incompleteness and longing that I am now experiencing, for untold millennia – an idea that I find strangely comforting. But is it really so strange?

When you are starting the recovery process, it is comforting to look at the mess you are in and see that what you are going through is survivable. I can’t tell you how many notes and comments I have gotten in the past year or so that basically said, “What you are going through is terrible, but seeing you make your way through the mess gives me hope that I can make it through too.”

One of the interesting side effects of the writing I do is that it gets me into the habit of being more open than some would say is “smart.” But perhaps, honesty is better than being smart – or at least smart in the sense that the naysayers mean. From here our conversation could go many different directions, so perhaps it is better to just let it lie, and see where things go next week.

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for guys who are feeling incomplete…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the perfection of Your design and plan. But today I want to bless You especially for the perfection that You are bringing to my imperfect life. Thank You for the miraculous completion that You bring to the broken, empty parts of me. Amen.”

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Flashbacks

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

The settling in process continues. For example, as I was writing this post the mail arrived with an envelope containing two copies of Janet’s death certificates. I guess it’s really official now.

So it’s official…

I had a chance to go on a little local radio station this week to talk about caregiving and grief. The host and I talked for about half an hour, and he was wanting to go longer, but our time slot was up. So before we stopped, he asked me on the air if I would be willing to come back and continue the conversation. I agreed, so I will be doing it again, same 8:30 am time slot, on the 9th of April. Also I will be getting an audio recording of the radio conversation that I will be publishing as soon as I can.

Frannie also had a visitor this week ‒ her boyfriend from Houston flew up to visit. He is flying back down to Houston Sunday afternoon.

I had a doctor’s appointment Thursday to get hooked up with a new PCP (Primary Care Physician) after our move up here. My blood pressure is high (which I knew about) but he restarted me on meds for that. He also did an EKG and some blood work. My heart is good and my blood sugar is fine – to tell the truth, I had been a bit concerned about that.

The really interesting thing, though, is that when I mentioned that Janet had died of Huntington’s Disease, my new doctor told me he had been involved in treating members of three separate families in Mineral Wells (pop. 16,788) that had members with Huntington’s! You just never know…

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About a year ago when I first wrote about the connection between PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and caregiving, it was sort of a new idea, but now the connection is well established. This week I had another encounter with one of the hallmarks of PTSD: the flashback.

Flashbacks are when something occurs that puts the person back into a past situation emotionally. For example, in the past I have been triggered by fire alarms that sounded too much like a klaxon, and was put back into the mental state of trying to find my alert EC135 to run to, when there are, of course, remarkably few planes of any sort in downtown Waltham, Massachusetts. This week I got triggered again, but this time by a dream about being a caregiver.

In some ways, the exact circumstance of the dream is a little sketchy, but I remember that Janet was upset about something (I don’t remember what) and was yelling about it. And as had happened so often in real life, the more I tried to explain things, the angrier she got. I eventually awoke with a start, and I remember being stuck for a time in the same old conundrum of how to explain whatever the problem was in such a way that she would understand and calm down. After a few minutes of my mind and heart racing, trying to come up with a solution, I calmed down myself and realized that there was nothing to figure out and no crisis in need of a solution. But boy, it sure felt like there was a crisis…

But that is one of a flashback’s defining symptoms: your mind and body respond to the situation as though it were happening again. My mind was racing; my heart rate was up and I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears; my breaths were shallow and rapid; and I was sweating like mad.

Again I was reminded of what it felt like to be in a seemingly hopeless situation. Of course the situation wasn’t really hopeless – and not just because the situation was at its root a dream and so of questionable reality. But even when the situation that the dream was flashing back to was occurring in real life, it wasn’t hopeless. That was a lesson that I had to learn back then and is apparently one I needed a “refresher course” on, or perhaps a bit of continuing ed.

Which brought up for me an interesting thought: Perhaps learning from flashbacks is possible. I know that’s a curious, counter-intuitive thought, but stick with me here.

Flashbacks are by definition reliving a past experience that was stressful and even dangerous, but doing so in an environment that is often totally safe. For example, in this most recent case, I didn’t really have to worry about anything bad happening to me. After all, I was lying safe and alone in my bed. No monsters hiding in the closets, and no boogeymen (boogeypersons?) hiding under the bed. So if you think about it, what better way is there to work through fear and trauma than to replay it in a totally safe environment? This realization can be huge – especially if (like me) you are one of those people who always thinks of the thing that they should have said on the way home. Similarly, it is so easy to imagine later what I should have done when this or that happened to me.

Unfortunately, I find that too often I don’t want to actually resolve a situation, not really. Often my sights are set much shorter like merely avoiding the consequences, or figuring out how to hide the problem so I don’t have to think about it. Eventually however, the heartache, whatever it is, will come out – often at a time when I am least capable of dealing with it. For example, there are the WWII vets who have suppressed trauma related to their service for 70 years or more. Now they are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other conditions, and memories that they thought were stuffed down so far that they would never again see the light of day, are popping back up to the surface, multiplying the trauma they are experiencing.

So given these consequences, why would we not choose to really deal with a situation and have it be done with? After I toyed with that question long enough, I finally understood that the logical answer I was looking for didn’t exist. Logically, there is no reason to put off handling problems. One of the first lessons I learned as a little kid was to stand up and deal with the past and face the future – but why is doing that so hard?

As I have thought about it this week I have become convinced that it is not just about human cussedness – though that undoubtedly plays a large part. Sometimes we are told that “stuffing it” is the proper solution. We are told that big boys (or girls) don’t cry and no one wants to hear our troubles anyway. Sometimes it’s the feeling that is so prevalent in culture today, that if it hurts, it’s bad.

For caregivers, the problem can be procrastination born of emotional, spiritual or physical overload. I know that I always found it way too easy to say, “I’ll think about that tomorrow…” Then at some point, there is so much stuff put on hold that either “tomorrow” can’t hold any more or suddenly (as was my case) you aren’t a caregiver anymore, and the pile of things that you have been putting off comes crashing down on you like a high-country avalanche. The result is that now I am not only grieving, but also trying to deal with all the stuff that I kept putting off.

Still, looking to the future, my continuing prayer is that as I experience flashbacks, that God gives me the grace to learn from them what there is to learn, and not simply recoil in fear so the lesson has to be repeated again in the future. And as far as the flashback I had this week, well I’m still working on that one. So though, here at least, I will never be perfect, I can keep moving forward.

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for when your past is coming back to haunt you…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the perfection with which You work together the intricacies of creation. But today I want to bless You especially for the wondrous and, at times, mysterious ways in which You weave together my life. I have seen Your glory shining is my mornings and Your majesty filling my nights. Amen.”

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Preparing for Reentry…

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

Not much news this week on the home front – our futon arrived three days early and Frannie and I got it set up in three or four hours. Now if we have any visitors (?) they will at least have a place to sit. To tell the truth, I would have rather bought something used, but none of the Goodwill stores in the area accept furniture.

In other news, Frannie dropped the bomb on me in passing, that her boyfriend Leroy is coming up for a visit – no word on whether he is packing a ring…

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The term “reentry” of course comes from the American space program and refers to the process of coming home from space and reentering the earth’s atmosphere. As it turns out, actually being in space is not that difficult. Likewise, getting to space is not inherently very hard. Put enough thrust under anything and it ends up in space – even a red Tesla sports car. No, the really tricky bit is getting home in one piece – you’ll note that Elon isn’t trying to get his car back.

As a kid growing up in Missouri, I remember watching Walter Cronkite using a plastic model of the capsule to explain for the 900th time about a feared malfunction with the heat shield of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 Mercury space capsule, and how they hoped to minimize the risk of it falling off by not jettisoning the retrorocket pack. Their hope was that its retaining straps might help hold the shield in place.

I also remember interviews with Glenn afterwards in which he related the consternation he felt during reentry as he watched flaming chunks of metal hurtling past the windows of his capsule and wondered, “Was that the retropack burning up, or was it my heat shield breaking off?” As we discovered later with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the heat of reentry is so intense that if it had been his heat shield he wouldn’t have had time to even finish that thought.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about reentry as well. Not reentering the atmosphere from the vacuum of space, but reentering public life from the vacuum of caregiving. Though to be honest, I haven’t actually gotten as far as “reentry.” Right now I’m all about the “Preparing for…” phase of the process, and the first thing I noticed was that, with the exception of the airplane-like Space Shuttle, everyone who has ever gone into space has come home sitting backwards.

Which, if you think about it, is an interesting metaphor for life in general, and life post-caregiving in particular. As humans we seem to prefer to back into the future. For me, that posture is often more comforting because it means that I can be reassured by the sight of all the things that I’ve survived – which can be preferable to having to consider all the challenges and hills that there are still ahead of me. The unfortunate side effect, though, is that it makes it kind of hard to see where I am going. So, yeah, I guess that is one thing that I need to be working on.

In conjunction with that exploration, I have noticed something interesting about myself. I often say that if I ever created for myself a personal motto, it would probably be something along the lines of:

Just get started,

inspiration will come…

However, probably from the effect of living with Janet for 35 years I have become much more of a planner – though, from time to time, I still tend to start moving before I have a clear idea of where I’m off to. And while going through life “facing front” allows me to see opportunities and to be prepared for them as much as possible, it also allows me to see innumerable challenges fraught with all manner of potential problems.

For example, being out in the world means having to deal with people you don’t know and perhaps could be even someday, eventually, possibly, maybe, (gasp) dating. I have been out of the loop for so long that I don’t remember all the rules, and the ones I do remember are probably offensive to somebody now. All I know is that the last time I had to figure out “the rules” was Junior High – and that was a pain that I am not looking forward to repeating.

My best friend: “Hey Mike, I talked to Rebecca 4th period and she says she likes you.”

Me: “Hey, that’s great!”

Best friend: “Yes but, she also said that she doesn’t like you, like you…”

Me: “AAARRRGGGHHH!”

And add to that looming dread, the fact that while I can (with enough editing) come up with some pretty good written words, I am fundamentally not super comfortable speaking with people live or in online chats. So I am often left wondering, if we can send people to the moon, why can’t we figure out a way to edit the words coming out of our mouths? Like the time I called Janet by one of my ex-wives names in the middle of an argument. My, but that escalated fast…

But beyond any potential re-living of the bad old days of my youth, this last point brings up another topic. The world has changed a lot in the past couple years. Coming out of the bunker where I was caring for Janet I am finding a world that I at times don’t really like, or even recognize. So I begin asking myself questions like:

  1. How do I fit in?
  2. Can I fit in?
  3. Should I fit in?

With the third question being in many ways the most important. To begin with, the level of fear in society is unbelievable – and to me personally, intolerable.

Or again, people used to say, “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” Today, unfortunately, you seem to only have one chance – period. If in your entire life you have ever said anything that is troublesome to anyone, you are just done. There is no acceptance of misunderstandings and no tolerance for differing opinions, and even if you apologize for something that you acknowledge you were wrong about, there is certainly no forgiveness. Sometimes it all gets me thinking that perhaps sitting on my front porch and yelling at people who walk on my lawn wouldn’t be such a bad life. But do I really want to end up like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino?

This point ties in with another challenge I have been considering. As I grow older, I have noticed a tendency to become more introverted – a not uncommon situation. Recently, I was listening to a radio program that was discussing retirement, and they mentioned that introversion was a real problem in that context as well. The counselor leading the discussion said that too many people decide to simply withdraw from everything, and sit on their front porch in a rocking chair and watch the world go by. But as I have written before, that can kill you.

So with all these challenges in front of me, what am I to do? Well, I could turn back around, try to convince myself that the things I saw when facing the other direction weren’t real, and resume sliding into the future backwards. But for me it boils down to a rather old-fashioned word that people today like to ignore or redefine – Integrity. And as far as I can see there is only one thing that I can do with integrity, and that is to continue becoming who God made me to be. Who I am as a created being is what ultimately gives my existence meaning. As an engineer, I like to tell people that raw data is meaningless. The thing that gives it meaning – and therefore value – is its context. The proper context for my life is The One who created it.

Admittedly, figuring out who that person is can be a big challenge, but then only the big challenges are really worth tackling. It is only by learning who I essentially am that I can learn to let go of the temporary and accept what comes next. For example, the relationship that Janet and I had was the best that I could ever conceive. But that, in a way, is part of the problem: It’s the best that a human mind could conceive – I think I’d kind of like to find out the best that the mind which created the cosmos in all its amazing complexity and diversity could conceive. Now that could be interesting!

So the preparations continue…

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for when you are going through life sitting backwards…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the future that You have prepared for those who love You. But today I want to bless You especially for our ‘swivel seats.’ So often I feel afraid of the future, but You are eternally forgiving and patient. At any moment I can turn around in my seat and face ahead towards the future, fearlessly. Thank you. Amen.”

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Living your purpose, on purpose

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

We are finally getting settled in.

We have a clothes washer and dryer, and a refrigerator, though not without the odd trial. For example, our washer and dryer were supposed to be delivered between 6 and 8 pm. The folks from Lowes finally showed up about 9:30 pm. Then when they plugged it in, the dryer didn’t work – the lights wouldn’t even turn on. The “installers” told me that the outlet was probably dead, so the next day I had an electrician come out to check the 240v outlet. When he found out that it was “hot,” he checked the electrical connections in the back of the dryer pro bono. This is what he found.

Well done, Lowes, well done! Actually, I’m just glad nobody got electrocuted. The connection that is hanging free is one of the two powered leads and the cover that went over this terminal strip is a piece of galvanized steel.

All I need now is a bed to sleep on. Maybe next week…

An exciting piece of news is that I am going to be on the radio March 19th to talk about caregiving. The way it came about is that I always listen to a local radio station (KATX) on my way in to work. Every day they have a couple of interview segments where they talk to someone in the community about some matter of importance. So the idea occurred to me that maybe there are people in the area who are dealing with neurological conditions, who might benefit from my experience, so I called the station to talk with someone about my idea.

Now to give you an idea of how small this station is, they don’t have a receptionist to field calls. Instead, whoever is on the air right then answers the phone. Consequently, when I called, the fellow who picked up the phone was the very guy that I needed to talk to. We talked during a record and a pre-recorded news program, and he agreed that it was a great idea. So he is going to interview me on the air.

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One of my favorite books (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) posits in its opening pages that our lives are, for the most part, spent trying to answer the Big Three Questions:

  1. Where do we come from when we’re born?
  2. Where do we go when we die?
  3. Why do we spend so much time in between wearing digital watches?

Beneath the obvious comedic intent of the last question, there is a rather profound idea in play that, put more simply, questions the point of our lives:

“Why am I here? Does my existence have any meaning?”

For the “lucky” few who manage to make it through life with no major upsets, the question of meaning may be successfully avoided for years, perhaps an entire lifetime, though an interesting discussion might be had as to whether such a life constitutes a great blessing or a rather curious curse.

In any case, however, for caregivers and patients there is no need for such analysis as the thoughts questioning the meaning of our existence are disturbingly common. I imagine Janet lying in her bed and wondering about the meaning of her life. She worked so hard for so many educational and political causes that are falling apart in 2021. Thankfully, she didn’t live long enough to see men pretending to be women eviscerating women’s sports.

The way I tried to address the issue was to collect and surround her with letters and mementos that spoke to her accomplishments – which she really appreciated. She had me read one letter and the acknowledgements it contained to her over and over again.

And for my part, I often had feelings that mirrored hers. For instance, it wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but occasionally the question would come up, “Did I really work hard for all of those years building a professional career just to end up changing my wife’s diapers?” There were many times when I would feel underappreciated and underutilized. And then, one day there were no more diapers to be changed, so what now? What is the purpose that I am to live for now?

One problem people can have with finding their purpose post-loss during grieving is that many didn’t know (or recognize) what their purpose was to begin with! Last Sunday in church, the minister talked a lot about our purpose in life and that each of us does have a divinely-designated purpose which sometimes remains constant throughout life and sometimes changes as the circumstances around us change.

In years past, it was common for people to think in terms of having a “calling” to certain professions like being a member of the clergy, a lawyer, doctor, or teacher. Unhappily for society, with many people today, such labels may tell us about what a person does, but very little about who they are. A concept that we seem to have lost is that someone’s character (who they are), should inform our judgments about whether we should believe or trust what they say and do. Too often the question simply boils down to, “Do they agree with me?”

But all this got me thinking, if I really do have such a purpose, it follows then that everything that happens to me is either preparing me for the work ahead, or is an opportunity for me to practice my calling now. With even a cursory consideration of nature it is plain to see that nothing is lost or wasted. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that the same should be true of the experiences I have. They are all good for something – even if it is only to teach me: “Don’t do that again!” (See for example, Rom 8:28)

So how am I to go about identifying or renewing a sense of purpose in the midst of all the emotional clutter that at times obscures my sight and clouds my vision with grief?

The first part of the answer is to stay awake and aware of what is going on around me. One of the ways that I learn what to do is to notice what needs to be done, and then to take that as a personal mandate to get involved. For example, I know a woman who makes little felt dogs to raise awareness and to raise money for research towards the cure of a degenerative disease. Or, there are people I know who take on praying for people who are in need of support. Or maybe even volunteering to talk on the radio about caring for a loved one with a degenerative neurological condition works. No act is too small if it fills a real need.

The next thing I can say is, don’t forget to consider what you find fulfillment in doing. When working in your calling or purpose, the experience is unmistakable. The professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell expressed this point simply as, “Follow your bliss.” But you need to understand his usage of language. “Bliss” is not just being happy, very happy, or even mind-bogglingly, extreme, over-the-top happy. Bliss is the experience of knowing that you are in the right place, doing the right thing at exactly the right time. Sometimes people talk about being “in the zone” where they lose track of time and everything outside of that one task – that can be one expression of it.

Finally, there is the goal to practice your purpose or calling (as I mention in the title) on purpose and with intentionality. For me, this point means God shouldn’t have to hit me upside the head every single time to get me to understand. At some point the goal should be to pursue what is right consciously and deliberately, without the need for a spiritual carrot or stick.

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for when you are feeling purposeless…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for Your plans and concerns for the cosmos and all its inhabitants. But today I want to bless You especially for the plans which You formulated for me and for my blessing. Too often I need to be compelled and driven to do what is right – and even what is right for me. Teach me how to trust You and follow in Your ways. Teach me how to go about living your purpose. I ask all these things, trusting in Your long-suffering loving-kindness. Amen.”