Posted on

Hard Truth

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…

Last week I began to realize how crazy life was getting. I had an idea to look for some of my posts written over the past year and a half, and rework/update them. I ran the first one last week and had a pretty good reception, so let’s try another one.

As with last week, the procedure was for Jean to go through the posts and identify one that she felt was an “evergreen” topic. It originally bore a title that indicated it was about loneliness – but it really wasn’t. Hopefully this title is better. It originally ran February 9th of 2020.

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

Something that I have been trying to track down for a while now is the source of the intense loneliness that I am experiencing. Over this week and next, I want to look at some of the sources and resources that I have identified. Note that some of these sources will be common to all caregivers, while others may only apply to men. I don’t know – we’ll see.

My first thought was that the sense of being alone was related to Janet’s inability (or at times unwillingness) to say, “I love you.” This is certainly a common enough complaint. I have read many dozens of heartbreaking posts on Facebook with the same refrain: If only I could hear my husband/wife/child/mother/father tell me that they love me just one more time, but now they are apathetic and distant – or conversely they are angry and abusive.

Unfortunately there is a lot of bad advice being handed out in response to these posts – often by people who, though presumably well-intentioned, are in fact far more interested in maintaining the façade of normality than they are in solving any problems. Typical of this sort of response was one I read the other day that asserted, “HD or no HD, no one has the right to treat you that way!” This statement has so much wrong with it that it’s hard for one to decide where to start. The main issue for me, is that the speaker clearly has no idea how devastating a disease HD is for the patient. Instead, they seem almost totally fixated on their pain, their problems, and their rights.

If that is your view, let me clue you in, Buttercup, HD isn’t a head cold that you can get through by “toughing it out.” It is also not a choice like drinking or abuse. And your loved one is certainly not faking it or trying to selfishly manipulate you. Rather, you and the afflicted are living in a nightmare reality where any sense of “normal” is at best wishful thinking, and at worst a cruel hoax. If you haven’t grasped this fundamental truth, you need to do so now because there are no easy ways out. There are, in the end, only two options: you can choose to stay and be called a saint, or choose to leave and be called a selfish jerk – or something worse. In either case, the label will be correct. There are no other alternatives.

Then there are those who will say, “Oh, but what about the children? You have to protect the children!” That is undoubtedly true, but there is a hard truth to be recognized here as well. Children learn from what they observe. If they see Mommy or Daddy knowingly and mindfully sacrificing themselves out of love for a spouse or another loved one, the children will learn the depth of commitment and the holiness of sacrifice.

If, however, they witness Mommy or Daddy abandoning a loved one when the stuff starts to seriously hit the fan, they will learn that there are limits to the love of Mommy or Daddy. And let’s not forget that we are talking about an inherited disease. They will also learn that if I develop this disease, Mommy or Daddy will have no qualms about abandoning me too.

But even if they don’t inherit the gene, the problem of “limited love” still exists. The children can and do start obsessing about what else could cause them to be abandoned. What if I’m gay, or start drinking, or use drugs, or marry someone they don’t like, or fail at school, or start practicing a different religion, or wear too much makeup, or … ?

For her amazing first album “Jagged Little Pill,” Alanis Morissette wrote an autobiographical song named Perfect. This song is pertinent to our current conversation, because the last line has the parent affirming:

We’ll love you just the way you are,
If you’re perfect.

Yes, by all means, let’s “protect” the children – but from what? There is no demonstrable benefit to shielding even small children from harsh realities and hard truth. In fact, children are amazingly resilient when it comes to dealing with adversity as long as they know that they are safe. To see what I mean, think about the kids who are suffering from juvenile HD – like an amazing 13-year-old girl I knew about in Michigan who didn’t live to see 16. Her strength and courage was truly humbling. And then there are the siblings who, like that girl’s two big sisters and little brother, take it upon themselves to be best friends, advocates, playmates, and defenders for their sick sister, even though they know full well the inevitable outcome.

Finally, what is all this talk about rights anyway? If someone was injured in a car wreck, would you go running up to them and demand to know who gave them the right to bleed all over the street? Well, maybe if you are in a Monty Python skit, but no rational person would behave in that way. When you are cut, bleeding is not a voluntary act. However, expectations change when someone’s brain is dying. Suddenly the sufferer becomes responsible for all of their symptoms, and they are held accountable in ways that no other injured person is ever expected to be.

So if that comment is typical of the bad advice out there, what constitutes good advice? Well, first and above all, learn as much as you can about the disease that you are fighting so you can always maintain a realistic view of what is happening and what is possible.

But the most important thing we can do to handle apparent rejection and/or anger from a loved one is to remember that regardless of how bad or random things feel, there is someone in control: God. Of course people will put forward objections to what is for them a very hard truth. For example, there are the people who claim to be atheists because they couldn’t worship any God who would create HD. As much as I would love to address this view, there are so many fundamental errors in that one statement that addressing them in even a cursory way would take us far beyond the scope of this post. Still if you want to discuss it, send me a comment and we can talk. Alternately, C.S. Lewis wrote an exceptional book on this general topic called The Problem of Pain. As it so happens, I have 10 copies of this book on hand and I will ship a copy free of charge to the first 10 mailing addresses that are left in a comment to me.

A far more manageable point is illustrated in this hypothetical conversation:

“If God truly loves my husband/wife/etc./etc./etc., why isn’t He doing more to help them?”

“Well actually He is, and when you think about it, it’s really miraculous what He is getting done.”

“Oh yeah? What is God doing for them that is so miraculous?”

“You. He is doing you.”

Do you think your relationship with your loved one is an accident or random chance? It is not. As caregivers we need to learn to recognize the ongoing miracle that is our life and relationship with the one for whom we are caring. As an example of what I’m talking about, consider my case with Janet. When Janet first started experiencing physical symptoms, we were living in Knox County, Ohio. Despite going to multiple doctors, she was getting a variety of different diagnoses as to the cause of her troubles.

Then “coincidentally” I lost my job and the only one I could find was in western Pennsylvania. But when the doctor there looked at Janet, he realized that there was something neurological going on and gave us a referral to a neurologist.

The neurologist who “coincidentally” we were referred to was basically a bulldog in a white lab coat. I have no idea how many things Dr Brian Cotugno of Washington, PA (bless him) tested Janet for, but his gut told him there was something wrong and he was determined that he was not going to quit until he found out what it was. And he did. But, a new problem arose: at the time Janet got her diagnosis, the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) did not have a Center of Excellence (COE) in western Pennsylvania. In fact, the nearest one was 4 hours away at the OSU Medical Center in the state we had just moved from!

Then “coincidentally,” less than a week later, the company I worked for got a contract at Wright-Patterson AFB and decided to move me to Dayton, Ohio to service it – 45 minutes from OSU. While going to OSU, Janet was under the care of Dr Sandra Kostyk, a wonderful doctor who taught me my first fancy medical term: Perseveration.

Then when Ohio winters started getting too bad for Janet and we started contemplating a move south, I was able to find a job in Houston, Texas, which “coincidentally” has a COE at the UT Medical Center (where we are now seeing Dr Erin Furr-Stimming). And the management company that owned the apartment complex we lived in also “coincidentally” owned a complex in Pearland (just south of Houston) which significantly lowered the cost of the move by allowing all our deposits to be transferred. Not only that, but now I am working for a company whose CEO “coincidentally” had a brother who died of HD and so understands at a very personal level what I am going through.

And these are only the major “coincidences” in our lives. Now I suppose that all those things could have just lined up in the right way by accident, but at some point it requires less faith to simply believe that God is in control.

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when you have lost so much that you feel no good options are left…

“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 always being present in our lives. But today I want to bless You especially for the ways that You support and reassure me when I feel like I have lost so much – or perhaps everything. The problem is that I can’t see things from Your perspective. Teach me to believe without seeing and show me how to guide others along this same path. Amen.”

Posted on

Being Your Loved One’s Advocate

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…

As I am writing this, life is moving really fast and getting everything done is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge. Then I had an idea to look for some of my posts written over the past year and a half, and rework/update them. I ran the idea by Jean – and she loved it – so we are going to give it a try.

The procedure is for Jean to go through the posts and identify various ones that she feels are “evergreen” topics. This is the first one. It’s about one of a caregiver’s biggest tasks – being an advocate for their ill loved one. It originally ran January 19th of 2020.

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

Last Sunday, I spent a chunk of the afternoon on Messenger talking with my sister — nothing unusual there. What we talked about was the post that went live on the blog that morning. The point of the conversation was the prayer.

I humbly ask that You would bestow on me the privilege of being an advocate for them in the world.

Margie was curious about whether I intended it to be purely personal, or would it apply to all my readers. I think that part of the matter might have been my usage of the word “advocate,” which I realize, in retrospect, is a word that is typically used to communicate very specific and formalized responsibilities. Derived from a Latin root that is essentially a translation of the Greek word παράκλητος (paráklētos) the word refers to someone who is called, or summoned, to stand beside you for support – often in a legal sense. For Christians, the most well-known use of this word is when Jesus used it to describe the coming Holy Spirit.
But I want to step back for a moment and think about it from a slightly different perspective. For my starting point, I’ll take a famous quote from the Shakespearean play Twelfth Night:

“Some are born great, some become great, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

It struck me that if you replace the words “great” and “greatness” with “advocates” and “advocacy,” the result is a pretty good description of the core of what it means to be an advocate.

“Some are born advocates, …” Most of us have known people who seemingly from the time they were born, realized that their place in the world was to stand by others and speak for them. We typically think of these folks in terms of being social workers, lawyers, or perhaps members of the clergy. But I would assert that there is another side of advocacy. Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes actions, even strong actions, are required to “stand by” another.

Consequently, advocates are sometimes seen wearing flak jackets under desert brown or blue uniforms. Sometimes, to do their work, advocates have to don green flight suits and prepare to fight a war that is unthinkable, with the goal that it remains unthinkable. Sometimes advocates rush to be the first to respond to a tragedy so they can perhaps snatch some remnant of life from the jaws of death. Advocacy is not just about supportive words…

“…some become advocates, …” Here, we need to consider the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan. We have no idea what was going on inside the Samaritan’s head when he saw the man beaten by thieves and left for dead. Clearly, he could have crossed over to the other side of the road, like the religious men who had come by before him had done, and just kept going.

Instead though, Jesus says that he “took pity on” the man who had been attacked by robbers and so, in that moment, chose to become his advocate. A choice, by the way, that cost him time and money, no doubt disrupted the day he had planned for himself, and could even have put him in added danger as the robbers might have still been in the neighborhood. Moreover, he happily took on the responsibility to see the job through to the end by making arrangements for settling any subsequent debts when he returned: more time, more money, more inconvenience.

“…and some have advocacy thrust upon them.” I want to look at this last situation in a bit more detail because it should feel familiar to anyone who is a caregiver to someone with a chronic disease. I don’t know about you, but nobody ever asked me if I wanted this job. Nobody ever said, “Your wife is going to get this horrible disease. Oh, and by the way, you get to watch her die a little more every day. So, if you could help out, that would be grea‑a‑a‑a‑t.”

The job that gets handed to a caregiver is massive, uncomfortable, long, and so dirty that even Mike Rowe would think twice about taking it on. And it’s certainly not fair that we have to do these kinds of jobs alone or with too little support from families and friends – or even adequate training for what we need to do. Oh, and then there’s the guilt! I have never met a caregiver whose normal mental state wasn’t feeling guilty.

I would assume that we are in agreement that the life of a caregiver largely stinks. So what do we do? The truth is, the sun will come up tomorrow and we will have to do something.

A number of years ago, I went to a seminar where the leader called up to the front someone from the audience and held out two ice cream cones: one vanilla, and one chocolate. He then instructed the person to choose one. The participant got the ice cream they picked and returned to their seat happy. The leader now repeated the exercise with a different volunteer, but this time only held up the one remaining ice cream cone, repeating the same instruction: “Choose one.” The result was a spirited conversation (read: “argument”) about the nature of choosing.

The point of the exercise was to illustrate how people have no problem choosing if they see alternatives, as when they can choose between vanilla and chocolate. However, problems arise when only one flavor is available. We don’t see that as a choice. Rather we devalue it as simply being all that’s left. Consequently, we derive no joy from what we do have – after all, who gets excited about making do with the leftovers? Moreover, we can begin to feel pretty resentful and angry toward those enjoying what we don’t have, or who we imagine are enjoying what we don’t have. I can remember nights driving home from work obsessing about the smiling people in the cars around me and resenting the happy homes that I imagined they were returning to.

In the movie The Passion of the Christ there is a powerful moment when Jesus, beaten and abused, embraces His cross with quivering hands as though it is the most precious possession He has in the world – which of course, it was. At that point, there were no options left available to Him. There was no choice: to “go to the cross” or …
All that was left was the cross, and as an example to us, Jesus chose it, embraced it, and created from it the best possible Good News.

I hope that you see where I’m going with this unfortunately autobiographical tale. As caregivers, we can easily become trapped in a sense of hopelessness that leads us to feel angry and resentful of those around us who are living “normal” lives. That anger and resentment, in turn, bears fruit in the form of a bitterness that convinces us that, in reality, we are the real victims of this disease, not the person dying. And this victimhood is the final link in a vicious loop that feeds on itself, solves nothing, and makes everyone involved in the situation more miserable by making us even more angry and more resentful.

The only way to break out of this death spiral – I call it that because it will kill you – is to choose the situations in our lives in which there are no options (in Biblical terms, “our cross”). When in this way we not only take up our cross, but truly embrace it, we discover that a joyously new and miraculous possibility emerges: the possibility of regaining just a tiny bit of that perfect Eden experience where life wasn’t supposed to be governed by choices between good and evil, right and wrong, or even vanilla and chocolate. We begin to realize the possibility of living our life of service immersed in and infused with the love of God. We can discover that in the midst of this broken, fallen world, God can create for us a holy place where truly, it is all good.

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when you’re out of options…

“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 bounty of Your love. But today, I especially want to bless You for making my gift of standing up for others into a way for me to experience a foretaste of Heaven. Please give me eyes to see my own calling, and the strength to complete what You have set before me. Amen.”

Posted on

Make Peace with Your Past,
Looking to the Future

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…

For those of you who missed the announcements online, there has been a major shift in my life. Easter Sunday afternoon at a Red Lobster in Mesquite, Texas, Jean Barnes (the beautiful lady I mentioned last week) and I became engaged to be married. This relationship is truly amazing.

This weekend she drove to Mineral Wells to see our town (she loves it) and to see what Frannie and I have already so she knows what she doesn’t need to move here from Mesquite. Tip: if you live in the Dallas area, a big garage sale will be announced in the near future!

As I write this (very early Saturday morning) Jean and Frannie are having a “girl’s sleep-over” at the Super 8 hotel down the street. I insisted that she have a hotel room. Despite what many of my peers seem to think, getting old doesn’t miraculously make wrong things right.

Finally, it is becoming increasingly apparent that this relationship is healing for everyone involved – even Frannie. And maybe that is one of the biggest takeaways from Jean’s and my experience of recovery. Just as no one goes through the trauma of loss alone, no one heals alone either.

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

When starting the process of picking up the pieces of a shattered life and all its contingent aspects, we are often advised to learn to make peace with our past. The goal is to lessen the amount of emotional baggage we carry with us into future endeavors. That is, in theory at least, the point of the process. But in a practical sense, it can be difficult understanding what it actually means to “make peace with our past.”

Not surprisingly, forgiveness plays a huge role – in terms of both receiving and granting forgiveness. Unresolved wrong can be an anchor that holds you back from moving on in life. But forgiveness can also be tricky. Just for starters, we all know “wonderful” people who deliberately withhold forgiveness so they can use the past wrong as a weapon against us. And then there’s the question of how do you forgive someone who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any culpability in the matter – let alone show any contrition?

Note here that contrition is not the same thing as feeling sorry for something. For example, I can feel sorry that I stepped on your toe, and I can feel sorry that someone was killed in an automobile accident. The difference in the two scenarios is a question of responsibility. I am responsible for stepping on your toe, and if I accept that responsibility, being sorry in that case is an expression of true contrition.

In the second situation, I have no responsibility so there is no need for contrition and “I’m sorry” becomes a statement about regret, which in some cases can spur us into action to correct a problem.

In addition, we should look at that last point of people not showing contrition when it is due, from the other way around. How are we to faithfully respond to people who try to make us feel contrite and apologize for doing something nice for them? Sometimes people can use forgiveness as a tool of manipulation in that way too. Maybe there is a maxim to be found there: Don’t ever apologize or let yourself be manipulated into seeking forgiveness for doing something right. Of course if you use words that are unnecessarily hurtful, that is another matter, you can and should apologize for that.

However, even that last point is complicated by the fact that today people often find a simple dispassionate recitation of a fact – like 1+1=2 – offensive and hurtful. Emerson once said,

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

A point to which I would quickly add:

“…and the ultimate act of subversion against Society’s one-size-fits-all standards.”

Forgiveness is also an active process. In Alcoholics Anonymous, Step 9 in the 12-Step Program is, “Make Amends.” This step means to actively go and diligently search out things that you have done to wrong others.

Forgiveness is a complicated, messy business, which is perhaps why there have been so many books written about it. But we can’t let the complications prevent us from tackling the problem. And also please know that giving and receiving forgiveness are equally important. In many churches, we even pray that every Sunday using the words:

…forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

In this prayer asking God for forgiveness, we see that it is inextricably linked to our willingness to forgive our fellows.

Another aspect of making peace with my past can sometimes be a matter of recognizing that there was a lesson to be learned and I need to understand and internalize that lesson.

When I was in the Air Force going through my basic technical training for radio maintenance, I turned 18 – which, at the time, was a big deal because in Mississippi, 18 was the legal drinking age. Consequently, I decided to celebrate my new-found maturity by “tying one on.” We can bypass all the (very) messy details and cut to the chase: things did not go well. I ended up that night sitting in the barracks shower with water pouring down over me while I hugged a big gray GI trash can vomiting up everything I had eaten since I was weaned from mother’s milk.

And then there was the next morning! Even after I sobered up, the “fun” continued because merely looking at food made me violently ill.

Obviously, there were many lessons that I could have learned from that experience – like the dangers of mixing sloe gin (a plum-flavored liqueur) and coke. Or the dangers of listening to a “buddy” who tells you sloe gin and coke is a good drink…

But the important lesson that I needed to learn was that getting drunk was not nearly as much fun as it looked like on television. Consequently, I never again got drunk and, in fact, became one of the guys who helped hapless fellow airmen get home after getting so drunk that in some cases they couldn’t even remember their own name.

More recently, the very act of caregiving has been all about “learning the lesson” – learning some skill like how to change the sheets on a bed while it is occupied, or learning not to take it personally when in the midst of a dementia-induced fog, your spouse yells at you how much she hates you.

And sometimes, learning the lesson turns a bad past into a future direction for life – even if just for a bit.

And lastly, a big part of learning to make peace with your past is to, quite simply, let the past be the past. Too often I tend to disrupt my own recovery by continually dragging past issues into the present – long after the issues have been resolved, lessons learned and forgiveness sought and received.

Why do I do that? Well, there can be a lot of reasons but many of them boil down to the simple fact that sometimes I have trouble letting go of some secret public or private pain because I feel unsure about the future and where my life is heading. In those sorts of situations many of us will cling to negative things in our past as though they were cherished security blankets and not the filthy rags that they sometimes are.

Sometimes I am tormented by thoughts and memories of things that I had done in the past, while other past moments – even grievous mistakes – are viewed with detachment. So, what makes the difference? Well for me, many times the view that I have of a given event depends on the scope of what the event says about me.

Some events simply point to things that I have done wrong, and those tend to be easier to move beyond. But others, the ones that really cause problems, are the ones that I believe reflect on, or even define, who I am. For instance in High School there were (lots of) things that I messed up. But there were a few others that, though small and even laughable, for me delivered the message loud and clear that I was awkward and unlovable. Which, in turn, led to a life that was defined by long periods of inner, silent desperation. I used to say that I would give up working and retire when they, “…pried the mouse out of my cold dead fingers!” Which is sort of the geek version of dying with your boots on.

Of course, thank God, that is all now changing and past emptiness and fear is being replaced by feelings of hope and eagerness for the future. And with that renewed optimism for the future, I am slowly discovering a new purpose for living that goes beyond writing software for the rest of my life.

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when your past is a burden…

“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 being the Light of the World. But today I want to bless You especially for the light that You bring into my life, and the joy that I find even when it took me far too long to stop talking and to listen to You. Thank you for the future and opportunities that lay ahead – both those that I can see, and the ones that are invisible. Amen.”

Posted on

Temper, temper…

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…

My dad used to say that it was a miracle that he didn’t end up either in prison or on death row. He was born in a sod hut on the plains of Nebraska in 1916 or 1917. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Grandin, Missouri. But things didn’t go well for him there. His father ran out on the family (which consisted of my dad, his older sister Hattie, and their mother) when he was just a toddler. When Dad was about five, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he was given to a family to raise but was soon handed over to an old woman named Becky Moore. She was in her later 70s, and was extremely abusive, physically.

He lived with her until he was about 16. He survived by learning to be quick on his feet to dodge chunks of cordwood that she would chuck at him – her favorite way of expressing her “displeasure” with something Dad had done. He also learned the value of “lighting out” ‒ getting out of the house for a few days to live in a lean-to he’d built for himself on an island in the middle of the nearby Little Black River.

Shortly after Dad turned 16, a recruiter for the Army came through town, offering what Army recruiters have offered since time immemorial: good pay, adventure, and a chance to see the world. That all sounded good, so Dad went in to talk to him but discovered that at age 16 he was too young. However, a week or so later, something made Becky Moore even more angry than she usually was, and which put Dad in fear for his life, and he knew he had to light out for good.

He tracked the recruiter down at his office in Poplar Bluff, Missouri and pleaded his case, hoping that the Army could make an exception. Looking back, Dad could see that the recruiter recognized him from their previous meeting in Grandin, because when Dad finished his story, all the recruiter said was:

“So how old are you today?”

To which Dad answered, “Eighteen, sir.”

“Well, in that case, son, it looks like you’re in the Army. Hold up your right hand and repeat after me…”

Though the Army obviously produced challenges and plenty of heat of its own – like two wars – it was very good for my dad. He used to say that in a very real sense, the Army was his mother and father because it taught him to say “sir” and “ma’am,” and how to keep his nose clean. So, he grew up to be a kind and gentle man, a dauntless friend and a fearsome enemy. He never swore because he said that using profanity was a sign of a lack of education.

William Lawrence Porter ‒ Dad

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

I have written about my dad before, but I bring him up again because the comparison between him and his sister Hattie is particularly telling – and significant when talking about caregiving, grieving, and recovery.

You see, after their mother died, Hattie had some hard times too. Being five or six years older than my dad, she was taken in by a well-to-do family there in town and grew up never needing anything. But the outcome was very different. She grew up mean and argumentative, with a demanding nature where everything had to be her way. As a child, I remember Aunt Hattie as being someone who didn’t know how to play – and her language would occasionally leave drunken sailors blushing with envy. Even when she wasn’t angry, she sounded like she was snapping at you, biting off her words. In the end, her temper pretty much defined her. One thing Dad used to say her that was always assured to irritate her was, “Now sister: Temper, temper…”

However, the word “temper” has more than one meaning. In addition to being a noun that names something (typically negative) that someone has, it can also be a verb. Tempering is something that you can do to something, typically a ferrous metal such as iron or steel. (For cooks: Yes, I know you can temper chocolate too, but that’s an analogy for another day.)

The process for the tempering of steel starts by heating it to several hundred degrees and then quenching it quickly in water or oil. Though many people don’t know it, steel has a crystalline structure and the heating causes the atoms in the metal to become more mobile and redistribute themselves in a chaotic manner. The quenching then cools the metal quickly, essentially locking the metal’s new crystalline structure in place. The result is a metal that is very hard and very strong, but which exhibits a significant downside. Metal in this state is also very brittle and when deformed too much will sometimes shatter. Similarly, steel in this condition can be sharpened to a very fine point, but it won’t hold the edge well, as its brittleness means that it will wear rapidly.

Tempering deals with this limitation by reheating the metal (or more typically some part of the metal) and letting it slowly cool. This part of the process allows the crystalline structure to relax a bit, which weakens it slightly but also makes it more ductile and far less susceptible to catastrophic breakdown.

In addition to iron and all manner of steel, people can also be tempered – and as with the metal it sometimes requires a lot of “heat”.

In the case of my father and his sister, they both went through the “heat” of the initial trials and at first became very hard. But after that initial “heat treatment,” the reactions of the two were very different. My dad saw subsequent trials as things to be overcome, and as opportunities to learn. So over time, he became my dad, hard where he needed to be, but also warm and loving.

Aunt Hattie, however, just saw additional trials as things to be avoided at all costs. Her motto was to always take the easiest road possible. Consequently, she remained hard, and her spirit was brittle and susceptible to shattering. Many of the defining events in her life were places where she had to stop and “pick up the pieces.”

As we go through life as caregivers, care receivers, or those grieving a loss, the same two options are available to us. We can let the heat come when and where it may and welcome it as a force to form us into who we were meant to be, or we can reject it and the change it could have wrought and remain hard, and spiritually and emotionally brittle.

Taking the step to embrace the heat can take courage – in fact, a lot of courage. But where does that sort of courage come from?

The truth is, having the courage to believe in the future is only a risk if the future is random and uncertain. Thankfully, such is not the case. Thankfully, there is Someone with a hand on the wheel who sees not only your future, but the future of everyone who ever was, is now, or ever will be.

What’s more, the owner of that hand cares about you deeply, and in ways that you can’t begin to imagine. So the real question is, how do you begin to trust in that Guide? A very long time ago, a young man got so excited about the possibilities that he wrote a song about it:

“O, taste and see that the LORD is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!”

Ps 34:8

In a sense, this statement is the exact opposite of “blind faith” that many people think is required. Rather, this speaks to a faith that has proven itself over and over again across untold generations. A faith that is not only unafraid of reality checks, but actively invites them.

Our Creator intends far more for us than mere survival. He earnestly desires for us to thrive, where we are as sharp tools in the hands of a skilled craftsman – and for that we sometimes need to go through the flames to be perfected, refined, and tempered.

One last point I want to make is that last week, I left a cryptic note at the end of the last post, that we would have to see how things went “next week.” Well, those of you who follow me on Facebook already know how things went. I have changed my profile to reflect that I am “In a Relationship” with a beautiful Christian lady by the name of Jean Barnes.

My Beautiful Jean…

She lost her husband to HD 15 years ago, and her daughter to the same disease in February. She was the dear friend I mentioned in a post, when I drove into Dallas to attend her daughter’s visitation. After a few subsequent visits and many long text conversations and phone calls, it became obvious to both of us that we needed each other and God was bringing us together.

So, yes, I have tasted, and indeed He is very good…

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when you are going through the fire…

“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 commitment to me as shown by Your willingness to sacrifice so much for me. But today I want to bless You especially for the miraculous ways in which You have brought together the disparate threads of my life and satisfied my innermost needs by answering prayers I didn’t even know enough to pray. Amen.”