I don’t know about you’all, but I’m at a point that when I listen to prophecy related news and updates, lately I  find myself feeling irritable. What’s just as bad, even when I listen to (or read) the more positive watchmen who are convinced we’re on the cusp every day of the any-minute rapture, I can’t tolerate listening to that very well either anymore. I start to almost feel resentful that day after day they say the same thing. How many days can a person maintain heightened expectation like that? Day one, “it could be today!”…day 15, “it could be today!”…but when it’s day 3652?

You eventually have to take an aporoach of, it will happen when it happens.  I probably just need to take a day or two and step back from all three of the endeavors that I juggle these days- Mom, the re-selling to supplement her care costs, and trying to provide important news and other blog content- because it feels like I am not doing justice to any arena.

Maybe it’s my type A expectations, but I am asking God to give me an accurate perspective. I still have so many moments that I just want to crawl back in bed and shut everything out. Not in the way it was when I was living in deep dark depression all the time, (thank God!) But it’s all so much. It’s just exhausting.

I know God has a set itinerary. I know He will do what is best. I know He will walk with me through anything He deems I and my loved ones will face.

But green pastures and still waters sound sooooo appealing right about now. I am weary of having to project and try to tentatively have a flexible plan. It is easier to conceive of a future return to a state of innocence and childlike dependancy on Our Father for every need and unfailing protection, than it is to figure out how to “do life that way” daily in the here and now while still in this present fallen world and body of flesh!

Pressing toward something we can never fully achieve down here holds an element of seeming futility, to our limited sight. It messes with my mind a bit, as has having watched Mom decline, rally, strive, give up, be positive and hopeful one day, defeated the next and exhibit personality changes.

I talked about my nephew’s struggles with executive dysfunction in a recent post. The term “Executive Function” broadly refers to ones ability, essentially, to get things done; to make a plan and execute it, and I have similar struggles with this myself. His is due to the intellectual disability of high functioning autism and some life trauma that stems from not having had that be diagnosed/addressed until his (now) 30’s. Mine, I believe, has to do with frontal lobe changes from sleep disorders that also went undiagnosed and untreated for a long time, as well as my past trauma and longterm depression that came in the wake of both of those factors.

Studies have indicated that emotional traumas may have residual effects that persist beyond the period of severe depression or prolonged fight-or-flight mode.  Repeated and/or prolonged emotional stress even in someone without a PTSD diagnosis,  leads to increased synapse formation and dendritic growth in the basolateral amygdala, and to dendrite retraction in the hippocampus, the end result of which is a constant relative baseline “state of anxiety.” (It becomes your norm, persisting even when no threat is present).

Neurological imaging, (MRI, CAT, PET) show hypoactivity of the frontal lobe under such  conditions which effects  executive function, attention, cognition, memory,  emotional regulation, and somatosensory integration (taking in of info through 5 senses, processing that, and responding accordingly).

For me, that translates to having a hard time getting focused, then reluctance to break focus once achieved, and frustrated irritability when said focus is interrupted by anything. It leads to difficulty regulating my emotions, or dissociating to avoid them. It leads to disorganized “filing” of memories, making it harder to recall them on demand (inefficient/sloppy transfer from short term to longterm). I lost my ability to successfully multitask way as far back as 2000. In the intervening years, I have only made slight recovery in that ability. To put it in terms easily understood, I can’t run many tabs at once without crashing my mental hard drive. My defragmenter doesn’t work well, and I have low RAM with constant pauses for ” buffering” lol.

I have a hard time holding both the big picture plan, and the current step in my mind at one time. So I take ten times longer to do anything than I did before the trauma, depression and cumulative years of un-addressed dysfunctional, unrestorative sleep! (Not to mention any normal age-related declines). I have to stop, zoom out and remind myself the end goal, often, zoom back in, resist the temptation to start over for tiny mistakes that won’t matter to the outcome, etc.

In the area of somatosensory integration, it’s not just the 5 senses, but how they all work together with feedback in real time so as to coordinate my body. I used to be fairly graceful. These days I am much less coordinated or balanced. You witness this when my hand lags, lands to the left or right of the letter I meant to tap on the keyboard, or hovers so close it adds extraneous letters between two I was aiming for that are far apart on the keyboard. It effects my ability to walk while swiveling my head without stumbling. My hearing impairment compounds this because directional cues are off. A sound can seem to be coming from my left, because my left ear impairment is slightly less than the right, wheareas until 3 years ago, the opposite was true.

It all adds up. Sometimes I get discouraged because I feel like I can’t handle/cope/endure/persevere to my own standards and expectations, much less that of others around me who can’t see the challenges I live with. I am thankful I have some people in my life who do know, and see my effort. My husband always reminds me that God sees.

Intellectually I understand that “all you can do is all you can do.”  It’s hard being an “extra mile” kind of person who can’t even get “caught up” and can barely keep my head above water.

But that is why I gotta keep my eyes on Jesus and remind myself that the battle belongs to the Lord.

Do we ever get it right? Not in this life, but better to aim at perfection and land on “fair-to-middlin” than aim at mediocre and hit it every time.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. -Galatians 6:9

He gives some a little to invest, and the question is not necessarily how much increase. He is responsible for the increase. He is looking to see how much we hoard for self. The widow’s mite is more in God’s economy than the rich man’s extravagance that doesn’t cost him much, proportionally speaking.