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Puppy Dogs and Unicorns

This post describes, in part, the effects of a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. Any negative behavior on the part of my wife should be attributed to that condition. Any negative behavior on the part of myself should be attributed to my need for God’s ongoing grace.

The big news this week is that I got a call from Houston Hospice that Janet is stronger and so no longer qualifies for their services! While that is good news, there appears to be a little confusion. I was called by Jan’s hospice nurse Friday morning and was told at that time that Jan no longer qualified. Then Friday afternoon the same nurse came by the house and not only failed to mention her status change (which the nurse told me on the phone she would) but went on to tell Janet that she was going to get evaluated for PT under hospice next week – what?

Beyond that, there is a new symptom that I don’t think I have mentioned. She has suddenly started needing to know exactly where I am every minute. For instance, if I go to get her something at the store she will call me once while I’m on my way, at least once while I am there, and again as I’m on my way home. Not sure what that is about, but it’s not worth stressing over.

I remember the very first time I saw Janet. It was at a restaurant called “Friendly’s” that was across from Symphony Hall in Boston. As I explained previously, we met through a newspaper ad that I ran, so I didn’t know what she looked like. Unfortunately, I have to admit that the first thing that ran through my mind when I saw her was, “Man, she’s short.” But she packed a lot into a small package. From Friendly’s, we walked to a Thai restaurant that was around the corner, to have dinner. There I learned that she had just recently left teaching due to layoffs. She had also traveled internationally, visiting England, Scotland, and France – and liked trying new things like Thai food. Before saying goodnight, I remember thinking, “Yeah, this one is special. I’ll be calling this one back. Definitely.”

The first thing I need to say this week, is that the title above is a bit of a red herring as this post has absolutely nothing to do with either puppy dogs or unicorns. Rather, the title is a bit of dark humor that I will explain later. In fact, one of the things that I enjoy most about writing is being able to draw connections between seemingly disparate things, and in so doing, expose larger patterns in the world. However, making the connections that I have in mind this week won’t require much imagination at all.

Lately there has been a lot of conversation about being a “warrior” – I even wrote about it myself a few weeks ago. The problem is that there are two sides to everything, and being a warrior is no exception. There are the strong, heroic images of warriors in armor battered and bruised, but victorious! We love seeing those kinds of pictures where we can imagine ourselves or a loved one in the heroic role.

But another side also exists that is not so pleasant to consider. In addition to the prize that goes to the victor, there is also the price that the warrior has to pay in order to gain the victory. In the real world, all-out battle can sometimes extract a heavy toll in the form of a physical injury or disability, while at other times the injury is emotional or psychological in nature.

Yes, being an HD caregiver can be dangerous.

“Wait, what? Caregivers? I thought you were
talking about military veterans!”

What I’m talking about is a condition called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, and to be honest, up until a few years ago PTSD was for the most part only considered in terms of either the military or first-responders like the police, firefighters and EMTs. However, recent research is showing that anyone can feel the effects of PTSD, from little children to grandparents, and one of the top sources of PTSD in the civilian population is being a caregiver for someone with a long-term debilitating illness like HD.

Unfortunately, this condition is something I know about. I was diagnosed with it about 4 years ago as a result of my military service and something else that I will talk about later. In terms of the military, I was in the United State Air Force and my last duty assignment was in the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, where I was Radio Maintenance, or RM, flying on what was called the Airborne Command Post. One of our EC135s was in the air 24/7/365 for more than 5 decades. At the same time, we had crews standing by on ground alert, but we all had the same mission: Wait for WWIII to start, and if it did, fight it regardless of cost. To be clear, I in no way regret my service. It was the dedication of military men and women on both sides of the “Iron Curtain” that kept WWIII from ever happening. Since you are here reading this, it’s clear that our mission was a success. But for me personally, there was a cost: an inability to sleep, a trashed marriage, depression, emotional and social isolation, accentuated startle response, and flashbacks when fire alarms went off unexpectedly.

The thing that saved me was when God brought Janet into my life. She helped me see beyond the old pain and start healing by making it safe for me. She was also one of the few people I have met who fully understood what I was doing in SAC. She used to call me her hero for helping to protect her. Unfortunately, Janet is now dying of HD, and the stress is slowly bringing back the old symptoms – and a few new ones to boot. Recently, a fellow wrote on one of the HD support forums about the changes that his wife had started going through. I told him that, “…being a caregiver feels at times like you are literally living in a war zone.” Some days it takes an act of God for me to get to work and stay connected to the world around me.

But what is PTSD actually and what are the major symptoms? To answer that questions, you remember seeing this list online anywhere? This is PTSD symptoms in a nutshell.

For a more formal evaluation, I have also found an excellent website by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, or the ADAA. This link is to the section specifically on PTSD. In addition to the quality of information, the other thing I like about this site is that it (like this blog) has a menu that allows you to select the language in which to display the contents, from Afrikaans to Zulu.

To help you gain insight into either your own condition or the condition of a loved one, there is an online evaluation you can take. Unlike other online tests I have seen, the result of filling out the form isn’t an answer, but rather an opportunity to print out your answers with a recommendation to see a doctor and share the results. In other words, you are pushed to get evaluated by a doctor, which is the responsible thing to do.

Unfortunately, that simple step can be the hardest. A friend from the UK recently told me that the waiting list for obtaining psychiatric therapy with the NHS was 2 years and even when you do get to see a doctor, according to my friend, “…they just want you to pop pills, it’s cheaper.” However, while pills may help you through a crisis, they are not a long-term solution, and what we need is a solution not for the next few hours or even the next month or so. We need a solution for the rest of our lives because the trauma that causes our PTSD doesn’t get better or go away. Like all our experiences, the trauma becomes part of who we are.

So if we can’t depend on “the system” to take care of us and our PTSD, what can we do? The option we have left is self-care, which obviously starts with awareness. Of all the posts I have read on the HD, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s support groups I have yet to see even one that talks about PTSD and identifies it correctly. As caregivers we need to educate ourselves on this condition and be sharing with one another what we have learned. We need to be talking about it and sharing our stories of success and failure. We need to own what is going on inside our heads because if we don’t, it will own us.

The other thing we need to do is set reasonable expectations. There will be days when we are doing well, and there will be days when the old dragon will unexpectedly awaken, and we will have to respond – like a couple months ago when my sister was getting ready to welcome her 18th grandbaby, a boy. The other source of trauma that I didn’t mention earlier was that my second wife and I lost our first child, a boy, when he was three days old. In short, when I heard that my niece had gone into labor, my mind went into a tailspin and all I could hear was the beeping of the fetal monitor and the doctor saying over and over again, “The baby’s in trouble… heart rate is dropping… heart rate is dropping… heart rate is dropping…”

Physically, I was sitting at my desk at work, but mentally and emotionally I was in that delivery room 40 years ago. I was totally blindsided by something that I thought I had resolved decades ago. But the fact of the matter is that no one can ever say I used to have PTSD. The dragon may be asleep or quiet for a time, but it is never gone. No matter how “resolved” you think things are, there will be times when it will stretch out its serpentine neck and try to push you to the limit. We need to always be ready to counter those attacks using the same weapons of grace and faith that got us through the original trauma – especially if you don’t think it was grace that got you through originally.

So for me, reading the forums and answering questions is hard, and writing this blog can be very hard – but I soldier on because I know that each obstacle surmounted strengthens my faith, makes my vision clearer, and enlarges my heart. In fact, that is where the title of this post came from. The other day I was talking with someone about this post and I cried out at one point, “God, why can’t I just once write about puppy dogs and unicorns?” Giving this post that title is basically my military sense of humor kicking in to say to PTSD: you may always be part of me, but you are not me, screw you. (I’m no John Howard, but it works for me…)

In Christ, Amen ☩

A prayer for when your past comes calling unbidden…

“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 ways that you make all things new. But today I want to bless you especially for this thorn in my flesh. Thank you for using my past to make me stronger. Sometimes it hurts so much that I would rather hide away, but you have shown me again and again that when I am at my weakest, you are at your strongest. Thank you for not letting my life be ruled by random chance. Thank you for giving me the experience, skill and wisdom that will make me useful to you. Show me how to reach out to others despite my wounds. Amen”

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Letting Go…

This post describes, in part, the effects of a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. Any negative behavior on the part of my wife should be attributed to that condition. Any negative behavior on the part of myself should be attributed to my need for God’s ongoing grace.

Resuming where we left off last week…

A few weeks ago, Janet and I made the final arrangements to have her admitted to home hospice. It’s clear that Janet has been talking to Frannie because she now understands what “hospice” really means: Mom is dying soon. The three of us spent a lot of time last night hugging and crying. This is a very hard time and “letting go” is becoming very real.

One of the things that I have learned over the years is that grieving is a complicated business. In 1969 a woman named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with what she called the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance). While her work has come under some criticism in more recent years, it doesn’t take a genius to see that degenerative conditions like HD, complicate things by requiring you to basically start the process over every morning, because every morning there is a little more of your loved one “missing”.

For me, grief has become an open sore that is constantly getting picked raw. Thus even on good days, I have noticed that I tend to have a very “thin skin”. It’s as though all my capacity to deal with the world is used up by the normal flow of the day. Consequently, even small problems can leave my emotional reserves “overdrawn” and throw me into a tailspin. I imagine that this is what the next few months are going to be like, until Janet actually passes – and probably afterwards too.

But that’s not the whole story. The fact is, no story is over until God has His say. I just finished a piece that I wrote for the church newsletter that consisted of some thoughts brought up by the classic Eagles song, Hotel California. Besides ending with The Greatest Guitar Duet in Rock-and-Roll History, its words tell a story that haunted me for a long time. The thing was, I lived in California for several years, but they weren’t good years. In fact, they pretty much stunk. During my time in SoCal, I made a lot of mistakes and went through a lot of changes that left me feeling empty inside. I got to thinking that since California was the problem, all I had to do was get back to who I was before I moved to California. Then things would be good again. Then my life would be back on track – as the song said:

“…I had to find a passage back to the place I was before…”

Unfortunately there was one small problem with that approach:

“…’Relax’ said the night man, We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!”

In other words, the hope of getting back to who I was when I left the hills of southern Missouri, was ultimately a false one. No matter how hard I tried, I could never leave behind me California and all the pain it represented. Eventually, though, I learned that the line I took as hopeless, really wasn’t. The point I was missing was that while its true that every experience permanently changes who I am (which is actually the point of the song), it’s also true that God uses the “stuff” I go through to help form me into what He wants me to be – and that includes something as tragic as the looming death of my beautiful Janet.

With that realization, I began to grasp the utter pointlessness of looking at past mistakes and life events from the standpoint of, “If only…”. The hard truth is that there is absolutely nothing that I can do to turn back the clock and undo my mistakes. As lawyers like to say, you can’t unring a bell, and as I know from my own experience, you can’t unmake mistakes. But just because I can’t do it, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. As a believer, all of those failures in my past are opportunities for God to step in with His redemption and grace. There is nothing that is so broken that God can’t fix it. Divorces, deaths, relationships, you name it – God can, and does, redeem it all.

In Latin, there is a motto that I have come to love: semper prorsum. It literally means: “always forward”.

I started out this blog a couple months ago by talking about a wedding in our family. As we now come to the end of the first phase of this blog – the “historical” part of this story, I can see a parallel between marrying someone and losing them to illness – which if you think about it shouldn’t be too surprising.

For example, we tend to think about both things in terms of events – weddings and funerals – when in reality they are processes that can start months or even years before the culminating event. For example, you don’t become united with a spouse all at once, rather you start drawing together the moment you first meet. In the case of Janet and I, that first meeting took place in a Friendly’s restaurant around the corner from Symphony Hall in Boston. Likewise, when you are losing a spouse or loved one to a terminal illness, the letting go doesn’t occur at the graveside. For us it started when we got the diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease sitting in Dr Cotugno’s office in Washington PA.

Another similarity is that, for both of these processes, the fact of what is going to ultimately happen starts as an intellectual concept that seems at first rather unreal despite our recognition that it will occur – someday. Then somewhere along the way, something happens that turns the ephemeral someday into the reality of today. For me, our wedding became “real” the first time I looked at Janet as we were doing something mundane like washing the dishes and I said to myself, “Yeah, I’m going to spend the rest of my life with that beautiful woman. I done good.” For our family, the point of grasping the full import of our impending loss came when we admitted Janet into home hospice and I said to myself, “Oh God, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with this beautiful woman.”

One of the things that grief can do is turn your head around and keep you pointlessly fixated on the past. If only we had argued less, if only I had taken her dancing more, if only I had spent less time working away from home.

If only…

If only…

If only…

But you don’t find hope dwelling in the past because hope is about the future. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t visualize tomorrow at all. When I tried to think about the future, all I saw was an endless string of dull, gray todays. Now I can sort of see to Christmas, which is good because we hear at Christmas one of God’s most beautiful names: Emmanuel – “God With Us”. This name assures us that God doesn’t stand back and view us in a detached way from some far-off heaven. Rather, God is committed to walking with His people as they walk through whatever dark valley that they must traverse.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol*, behold, You are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Your hand will led me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
And the light around me will be night,”
Even the darkness is not dark to you,
And the night is as bright as day.

* ”…make my bed in Sheol…” is a euphemism for dying.
Hence, the line means, “Even if I am dead, behold, You are there.”

In Christ, Amen ☩

A prayer for when you are viewing life in the rear-view mirror…

“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 timeless love. But today I want to bless you especially for being by my side throughout the troubles of life. Please give me the faith to not reflexively obsess about past sins that I have confessed and You have long-since forgotten. Teach me to always “face front” as that is the only way that I can see where you are taking me. Amen”

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Which Way is Up?

This post describes, in part, the effects of a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. Any negative behavior on the part of my wife should be attributed to that condition. Any negative behavior on the part of myself should be attributed to my need for God’s ongoing grace.

Resuming where we left off last week…

Even though Janet and I read together all the information on the web about HD, in the beginning I have to admit that I didn’t really grasp the significance of the disease. For several years, it really wasn’t too bad – in hindsight at least. At the time, of course, I was confused and had no idea how to deal with what was happening. Neither could I imagine what was coming.

Then one day all semblance of a normal marriage relationship went out the window as she got angry and started yelling that I was trying to drag her “down to hell” by sleeping in the same bed with her. Although it had been years since we had been “intimate”, she was suddenly concerned that I was divorced.

To make matters worse, she has began to experience something called perseveration. This symptom causes her mind would get stuck on an idea and she can’t let it go. One time she asked me if I had paid the rent 7 or 8 times over the course of an hour. Each time I answered that I had, and she accepted the answer – but only for 5 minutes or so and then she’d ask again.

But even as she got sicker and sicker, I tried to maintain the relationship with Janet as an anchor, a reference point of stability. One of the interesting dynamics in our marriage was that, as a math teacher, she was always very organized and believed in taking life one, carefully planned, step at a time. For myself, on the other hand, my personal motto has always been: “Just get started, inspiration will come!” Together, we had always made the differences work, but if she was no longer the smart, capable, organized and rational half of our team, what was left? And who was I?

As I write this, I am realizing how appropriate the image of an anchor truly is. Unfortunately, the anchor that I have counted on for so long is losing its hold on reality, and I feel adrift and rudderless. At times, I feel as though I don’t even understand my own mind, feelings or needs. Even as Janet’s anger becomes violent producing bruises on my chest and arms, I instinctively tell myself that despite what the doctors say, she really is OK – she HAS to be OK – so I must be the crazy one. Is this part of the grieving: resisting letting go of what was?

I know that it certainly ties into my fear of being alone. Looking back, I realize now how much of my life has been driven by that fundamental fear – and yet here I am again, facing a future of TV dinners and cold beds. In popular culture, there is the image of the crazy “cat lady” who lives as a recluse, alone with her 90 cats.

I wonder what the male equivalent (who doesn’t like cats) would be?

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Irrespective of whether you are on the path of grief yourself, or are witnessing someone else’s struggles, there is one thing that you need to grasp up front. It’s very easy to underestimate the power and range of grief. For example, it is possible to grieve for many things: a lost loved one, a lost career, lost youth, and so on. Likewise, grief is not simply feeling “sad” over the loss of someone or something, grief is no mere emotion. True grief shakes the mourner’s world to its very core because it calls into question their most basic assumptions about themselves and the world in which they live. Ironically, love can have the same effect, but whereas love calls us to reevaluate ourselves in relationship to others, grief highlights our isolation.

The next important point is that the opposite of “grief” is not “faith”. If the mourner is a Christian, one of the hurdles that they may have to get over is the idea that their pain means there is something wrong with them spiritually. They may think, “If I just had more faith, then I wouldn’t be feeling this way.” In response, they may go out and read books and inspirational tracts in an effort to force themselves to be more “faithful”. Unfortunately, such self-powered efforts almost fail because they are based on the faulty assumption that faith is something that I can generate on my own – all I have to do is grit my teeth hard enough.

The truth, however, is that faith is not human-generated. As Paul points out concerning faith in his letter to the Ephesians, “…it is not of ourselves; it is the gift of God…”. The bigger problem, though, is that the whole premise is flawed because grief is not even about a lack of faith. To see this, consider the story of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, and the one bible verse that every Sunday School kid learns by heart: “Jesus wept.” Regardless of how you interpret Jesus’ tears, Jesus could not (by definition) be faithless. His grief was a very real, very authentic part of His humanity, and so is ours.

For myself, the basic problem at this stage of our journey, was that I needed Janet to be healthy more than I needed me to be healthy. After more than 30 years together, I only recognized myself as part of that relationship, that marriage. I was scared witless that when she died, I would in some way disappear too. I felt alone and disconnected. Even in church, I often felt like the odd man out because the people who were paying attention and saw my pain often just sat with their hands folded hoping I wouldn’t look at them. Rare was the week where I didn’t break down in tears during the worship service.

Please don’t get me wrong, the people in the church I attend are not bad, heartless people. Like all the folks sitting in all the pews of all the churches in all the world, they are imperfect people saved by grace. They just didn’t know what to do, so out of fear for doing the wrong thing, they did nothing. Which, ironically, is the only thing worse than doing the wrong thing.

Still, sometimes I did get the support I needed. One Sunday was particularly hard and as usual I was crying quietly, when suddenly I felt arms wrap around my shoulders. The lady sitting behind me had seen my upset and reached over the back of the pew, put her arms around me and just held me for about 5 minutes until the tears stopped. She never tried to cheer me up or verbally reassure me. In fact, she never spoke at all: words weren’t needed.

Thinking back on that incident and others, I’ve come to realize what people that are grieving really need. Hint: it’s not the stuff you read if you try Googling, “How to comfort the grieving”. The problem with the advice that you get from sites written by psychological experts is that they concentrate on giving you lists of things to say and not to say. However, the result is that if you follow that advice you end up sounding like a “psychological expert” and not yourself.

When someone is grieving openly in church or elsewhere, they are expressing an openness that is seldom seen in other situations. They have given up all pretext of maintaining composure or proper public decorum and their inner emotional state is on display for the whole world to see. What they need, more than anything, is for the people with whom they interact to show the same level of openness. Or to put it another way, they are crying from their heart, so they need you to be reaching out to them from your heart. (Please read this paragraph again.)

One of the most wonderful examples of this type of expression was my oldest daughter when she was a toddler. If she saw someone crying in church, she would go and climb up on the pew next to them, take their hand and cry with them. At that age, she didn’t understand why the person was crying, but she didn’t need to. Many times that simple act opened up the person so they could start talking about their pain – the first step in healing.

The real name for this type of expression is “authenticity”. Speaking from personal experience, I can assure you that people who are grieving have enough on their plate that we don’t have the energy to try and figure out right and wrong. Thankfully, being authentic isn’t that complicated, just look into your heart and say or do what you find that God has put there.

And don’t sweat saying the wrong thing. I would rather hear one statement that didn’t come out “quite right” but was said from the heart, than a 1000 psychologist-approved platitudes that you don’t mean.

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for when you aren’t sure what is real or true…

“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 who You are. But today I especially want to bless You for being real. Sometimes the world seems so full of inauthentic people and situations that I feel like I’m lost in a carnival fun-house. So, thank you for the people in my life who are willing to reach out and feed my soul from the bounty that you provide. And when I am unsure and don’t know which way to turn, please remind me that I can always depend on you. Amen”

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How We Got Here…

This post describes, in part, the effects of a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. Any negative behavior on the part of my wife should be attributed to that condition. Any negative behavior on the part of myself should be attributed to my need for God’s ongoing grace.

My wife Janet and I were married in 1985, and for many years, things were good – which for me was a welcome change of pace. Before I met Jan, I was married and divorced two other times. Someday I may talk about those experiences, but for now we’ll start in 1985 when things were going right. While it was true that we had to move for work more than I would have liked, on the whole, life was good.

Our Wedding Day
Before you knew it, we were well on our way to our “happily ever after”. I had a good job in Ohio, we owned a house, and had two kids (one boy and one girl), a dog and two cats. Then one sunny morning in September 2011, things changed. As a result of 911, my job went away and the only work I could find was in Lexington, Kentucky. This is important because we decided in order to keep the kids in school, I would take an apartment in Kentucky and drive home on weekends. Consequently, I didn’t recognize the changes in Janet for a long time.

All I saw at first was small stuff. Her temper got shorter and she started forgetting things, but the temper wasn’t that bad and we were both getting older. Who doesn’t have “senior moments”? Unknown to me, our son was catching the brunt of the problems. During the week when I wasn’t there, the arguments were getting increasingly irrational, and she would at times be incredibly demanding, insisting that things be done in exactly one way. Plus if Janet asked you a question twice and you didn’t answer it both times using the exact same words, you were, “…changing your story…” and obviously lying.

By this time, doctors were getting involved because Janet had also developed a thyroid condition and (due to the thyroid problem) sleep apnea. In addition, the HD also beginning to cause physical symptoms, like her legs wouldn’t stop bouncing. The Ohio doctors guessed a lot about what the problem could be – some said it was RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome), others said that it was something else. To tell the truth, nobody knew what was going on – maybe that’s why it’s called a medical “practice”.

Eventually, I got a permanent job in Pennsylvania. Because our son had graduated high school that fall, he left for college and the remaining three of us moved on to PA. But by then, the physical problems were getting worse to include choking on food and occasionally biting her tongue.

We eventually discovered the truth when we went and saw a neurologist in Pennsylvania. After running dozens of tests and having them all came back negative, he told us that there was one more disease that we should check. He said it was called Huntington’s Disease and that it was a degenerative neurological condition. He said we should go home and look it up online before deciding to take the test. Through our research we discovered that HD has no cure, is 100% fatal and (to top things off) is hereditary so both our kids could be at risk. We also learned that the average lifespan of a patient after diagnosis was about 15 years.

In the end, we decided to go with the test – which came back positive. That diagnosis was 11 years ago.

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My name is Michael Porter, and that was the beginning of Janet and I’s new road together. Along with the medical changes came realizations that nothing was going to be the way we had planned. No golden years growing old together, no travelling to visit the grand kids – nothing. It was like our entire future had been stolen from us in a moment.

A while later, our son became engaged to a beautiful young woman from Texas. When my future daughter-in-law heard that I had done a little preaching in church, she asked if I would be willing to share a short message at their wedding. I said yes, and began considering what I wanted to say. They were getting married on a Saturday, but not just any Saturday. They were getting married the day before Palm Sunday.

As I read the gospel text for Palm Sunday (Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem) I was struck by that situation’s similarity to a wedding party. In both cases, there were revelers galore. Moreover, these party goers were all convinced that they absolutely knew what the outcome was going to be. The joyous crowds on that long-ago day in Jerusalem knew that Roman oppression was soon to be a thing of the past; and on October 20th of 1985 my new wife and I knew that we would be together forever – except we were all wrong.

So this is basically what I shared at our son’s wedding: At times like this we happily make plans and promise the future, but the fact of the matter is that the future is not ours to promise. Reality can intrude on our hopes and dreams in the form of illness, death and disappointment. In 33 AD Jerusalem, reality took the form of Good Friday crushing the hopes of political liberation but opening the way for Easter and a far greater liberation than the mere overthrow of Rome. In the same way, we have the promise of Easter that when our hopes and dreams fail, it is because God is brushing them aside to make room for something better.

After the service, the responses to my message were rather muted to say the least. It was, after all, not your typical marriage sermon. It wasn’t happy and uplifting, there were no hearts and flowers, and the new couple’s “sweet forever” was never mentioned. Our new daughter-in-law summed up the thoughts of many when she described it as, “…sort of a downer…”. However, I got a very different response from many others, specifically long-time married couples. As one old gentleman who had been married to his sweetheart for 55 years said, “About damned time somebody told these youngsters what they really needed to hear!”

Often when we hear the word of God being spoken from a pulpit we feel that the preacher has, through study and prayer, acquired some divine understanding of scripture that they are now sharing with us. While that sort of sermon does from time to time appear, the truth is often messier. Thanks to the Holy Spirit, the words that are spoken are often not the same as the words that were written. So in the end, the preacher often needs to hear the message too. Such was the case for Janet and I. Our wedding hopes were lying in shattered pieces on the floor, we needed to hear that God was making room for something better. We needed to learn a new kind of faith – a faith not that the future we have planned will come to fruition, but a faith based on the proposition that we have no idea what the future will hold, but that it will still be OK. We needed to have faith that something was being prepared, even though we had no idea what it was.

In Christ, Amen ☩

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A prayer for days when you can’t see the way ahead…

“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 many gifts, but too often I only thank you for what I know and understand. The truth is that even when I don’t understand the involvement of your hand in my affairs, I can know that your will is there working for my good. Even when I am blind to the blessings that you are preparing for me, I can know that the preparations continue. So I ask you God not to show me your hand, or reveal your hidden blessings. Rather, I pray for the faith to trust in you even when I can’t even begin to comprehend what you are doing. Amen”