Purpose and perspective in the context of living for the Lord in this late and evil hour.

So much I want to express. It’s not about how much you do or how much you give, or even how much you know.

We are seperate, as blood bought redeemed. Set apart from the lost and unbelieving, positionally and with regard to God’s plans. We are meant to be different as new creations in Christ Jesus. He grows us and prunes us based on long term plans He has for us that we know nothing of. In it for the long game, as they say, eternity, in fact. It’s a word we know but a concept we can only vaguely fathom. He has a purpose for each one of us and everything He created.

What is the purpose of a bee, a flower, a kitten? They are living creatures, but they do not think, and don’t have to wonder what God wants them to do with the life He gave them.

Sometimes I have to wonder if we haven’t presumed expectations on the part of God, that don’t exist. Is there any aspect of our existence, the role of which corresponds to that of the non-human portion of creation?

By that, I mean, are we possibly more driven or obsessed with finding God’s purpose (gifts, calling) than God requires? For humans, is there value in just “being” in the passive sense like that flower or that kitten? Surely there has to be.

If we truly believe in the sanctity of life, and as there are those born without capability to provide for themselves, who are as  dependant on others as a newborn, and those who by injury, that no longer can do many things, and yet they are every bit as valuable, created in God’s image and loved by Him, then why is it that “finding our purpose” is upheld as practically paramount to being in God’s will? Why isn’t “just being” enough on it’s own? Maybe we have to learn that it actually is enough, before “purpose” (calling gifting) is even relevent. Maybe ” just being” is one more of those things others already have learned to do and appreciate, while I just haven’t yet.

Maybe this is not something that has occured to many people to even wonder about.  And in a way, that brings me to the crux of what I’m going on about.

A great many of people who have gotten to know me throughout my life, have made statements to me along the lines of “you’re different”. Well, I have always felt that difference, and it generally felt like a handicap of sorts. In my younger years, I chalked up that feeling to the normal awkwardness and  insecurities of childhood development, of adolescense, and the path-finding task of early adulthood in my 20’s.

As I’ve had more and more interactions with people throughout my life, and had conversations, heard ither’s perspectives I had to concede to the fact I see things different, and that my mind apparently functions very differently than most. But had no explanation of why, and in just what ways.

I’m pretty hard on myself, so as I continued to struggle at doing things that seem to come natural to most people at each stage along the way, my 30’s, 40’s, 50’s I remained puzzled by how hard it was doing anything and everything I tried to do.

All along the way, the only way I knew to compensate was just try harder and keep trying harder, always with a sense of falling further and further behind in what I felt I ought to have accomplished at any given juncture in my life; as a Mom, as a Christian, as a wife, as a member of the body and of society at large. Fortunately God gave me a heaping measure of stubbornness and tenacity, because many times the only thing keeping me going was sheer refusal to quit. Keeping at something long past when any “sane person” would have let it go. I feel like there’s a lot about me that is both a blessing and a curse like that. I feel things too deep, but even though things hurt more, I also have a capacity of experiencing deeper joy than the average person.

After both our boys launched out into their own lives, there was a brief period when I had a little time to recover my physical stamina, and enough life pressure let up that I finally had space for attending to my own self care needs. I had achieved some equilibrium, was exercising, finally lost weight I’d been trying to get off for years. If I were to provide the specifics of every battle fought and every hill climbed from 1995 to present most people would probably either not believe me, or chalk it up to a negative mindset and me making too big a deal out of my experiences, and tell me I need to stop being so sensitive, or other dismissive responses. I know this, because I live this. Because I can be very open, and nearly as often, I later regret doing so. You learn to be more and more discretionary about what you share and with whom you share it. And that is unfortunate, really, because I believe whatever trials we go through, and losses or wounds we suffer, are redeemed when we can comfort or encourage someone else later as they traverse that same or a similar trial.

I was taking care of my mom  for about 20 months until she passed couple of years back. Traveling every couple of weeks back and forth the 350 miles, often by train.

I do what has to be done, and then the fallout of pouring out more of my inner resources than I could really afford, always arrives in a delayed manner, in the form of exacerbating my narcolepsy and cataplexy symptoms, fatigue blood pressure, inflammation and mental health.

Kind of like an older model computer can do most of the same things a newer one can, but it is going to take much longer to process each task, and all the while the backlog continues to grow.That’s the best illustration I’ve come up with. To go further with that metaphor, I have a similar mental  filing system. Lack of restorative  sleep ( that’s when the brain does it’s defragmenting and filing and transferring things to longterm memory), multiplied stress, all of it taxes the hard drive. Files, memory, sense of time, things get stored haphazardly in the short term and sometimes fail to transfer into longterm memory at all.  That’s not just because of my age. It’s been that way for me all my life.

It has been a common experience even back to my teens, that someone I have spent a lot of time with, would bring up something I said or did and it doesn’t ring a single bell. Just no memory of it to the extent I truly think they made it up. Only to, 24 hours later have that intact memory pop up fully intact with entire context. The other day, my cousin brought me some things from Mom’s house (she and her husband bought it). One of the itemscwas a large painting of Jesus with lots of children around Him in a nature setting by a stream. Utterly unfamiliar, cute, but why are you giving this to me?

“Because you painted it and I thought you might like it back”.

As we sat on the porch and caught up on each other’s lives for a bit, that painting was propped against a bench across from me. I kept seeing it, and gradually I could remember having painted it back in ’95 while I was pregnant with our first son and I had started a small business doing murals and other art. I understand more about why that is, and how it can happen, but this is insight the only Lord recently provided.

Going back to what’s been going on with me this last couple of years, the average person would likely have bounced back from those months of caring for a parent, in the 2 years that have now passed since Mom went to be with the Lord. It doesn’t work like that for me.

I don’t think I have even entirely finished experiencing the fallout, but I’m almost there. However that’s not strictly because of what was required in caring for Mom, it is also because there were so many other sustained struggles, things I’ve had to come back from and to overcome, over multiple years, and life does not ever stop piling on. There were also conditions I didn’t know I had.

I lost my ability to write like this for a good-long while. Not saying it’s back now, either, but by God’s grace, I am able to write this today.

I lost most of my capacity to stay on top of the prophetic developments, and it was taking too much of a toll. The October 7th Israel attack hit me particularly hard.

I have been praying for many months, for clarity about a lot of things, and some of that, I could not do while Mom was still living. My questiins go back even to childhood. What contributed to the turn my life took when I was 19? I now have a puzzle piece I didn’t know existed. What underlies the conflicting and difficult relationship I had with my Mom? Why do I find it so hard to do everthing? Why is “peopling” so challenging these days? Not just being one, but interacting and relating and communicating? What does the Lord want of me, and for me in this season as I turned 60 last August? I started asking the Lord to explain myself to me. Why am I like I am? Is there hidden sin I need to confess and repent of? There always is some of that, of course. I continued to ask God what I was missing.

My prayers have been different during this season. Much more of the “groanings that cannot be uttered” variety. Words have been increasingly insufficient.

Words are a very big deal to me. You might say words, and learning, have been my lifelong special interests. But also, writing things out, as well as sometimes talking things out, plays a very big role in how I process stuff, and regulate my emotions.

Right at the end of 2024, the person who had been my best friend since 1970, walked out of my life. Not a bigger deal than other hard things I have faced. Not even close, and yet it was that proverbial last straw moment. I had been somewhat shut down in the shell-shocked way we all get when we have been through intense and protracted trials. But when this happened, I really hit a brick wall. My whole brain and will went on a sit-down strike of their own accord. Never felt so “stuck” in my life. And that’s saying a LOT, considering.

Sharp turn here.

I believe prudence demands  a healthy grain of skepticism of our healthcare system and of all things “psychology” related. But I think they have a role to play, as long as spiritual discernment is kept front and center. There seems to mostly be only the two polar extremes on this issue, within the Christian community. Either they agree mental health issues are real, but the answers must all be found in scripture alone and  “psychological help” is all misguided worldly hogwash with no merit whatsoever, or they believe all so-called mental health issues are just attitude, laziness, sin, excuse-making, etc.

Those in the body who don’t experience depression,  processing difficulties, mood swings, hallucinations, PTSD, or anything like that, and even those who experience mild and or temporary versions, can sometimes add insult to injury, for those with significant challenges and the entire subject of mental health is mostly still a taboo topic, leaving members of the body to suffer in silence. Never being one to give a toss about status quo, my entire nature chafes at how wrong and stupid that fact is! But the fact remains.

Having been burnt myself on too many occasions from the very quarters wherefrom a person generally hopes to find compassion, I won’t be going into specifics either, except to say that the Lord has provided some answers, and I’ll leave it at that.

How that matters going forward, He has yet to inform me. I am as surprised as anyone, to have posted a couple of things yesterday, and this now, and have no particular plans to do so again anytime soon unless the Lord lays things on my heart to be shared. Too much of what I had been doing for a while, had become routine and habit, and screens and keyboards can easily rob us of much more than any value they may add to our  moments and days.

Living in the time we do, families broken, estranged and scattered, the tide of evil rising by the hour, not “connecting”, yet so “connected” electronically but to what, and how real?  I remember the day my husband shocked me by saying he was thinking of getting a Smartphone. The man who, when cellphones first came along, swore he’d buy one only when they started making one with rotary dial.

I hated the thought if it. I didn’t want one. He felt as an older man in a company run by a younger crowd, not having one was becoming a disadvantage. I hated going into restaurants and watching people have zero interaction with those they came in with, each seperately pecking on their phones. He became the same way. I kept my kids from having cell phones until they had drivers licenses. By then, flip phones were starting to become obsolete. I held out several more years clinging to my fliphone, until people started sending texts my phone could not even open, and family holiday plans got missed and that led to misunderstanding,  hurt feelings and stirred up conflict. Pecking every letter 3 and four times, the other party would send 3 more texts before I could respond to the first one. My husband kept telling me I needed to get a “smart phone”.  I finally caved, and yet it has become this “necessary evil” at this point. So easy to just check out, mindlessly scrolling. I do it myself. It’s a temporary escape.

Somebody, I think it might have been Lee Brainard, said he wouldn’t be surprised to see technology in heaven.

Please, NO! Just. Ugh.

I’m still watching. Just a bit mire quietly.  More eager than ever to be snatched out of this place, but still hoping and praying lost loved ones see the truth.  His grace is my hope.

For those out there that feel like you’re holding on by a thread. This is for you. I see you. God sees you. He knows the stuff you contend with, that nobody else understands. He is not asking more of you than you have to give, and He is taking into account, the things you truly cannot help. He also sees your sacrifice. The “widow’s 2 mites” account is in the Bible for a reason. She gave of her poverty. Or maybe you relate to Mary who anointed Jesus’ feet with precious oil. Don’t worry about those who know nothing of the cost of what you offer. Been hurt in church? Jesus was wounded in the house of His friends. Feel judged, abandoned?  He bore reproach outside the camp. A man of sorrows, aquainted with grief.

Press in and hold on just little longer. We’re almost home.