Pre-Desert Life: My Story

Life before the desert looks sometimes way better than when you were actually living it.

The desert seems even bleaker because you did have something way back when.  It was a place where things made sense, you saw life go from day to day in a rather predictable pattern, and you had a good idea of what the next day would bring.

The desert?  All bets are off when you enter.  All the certainties, all the predictability and all the sense of life goes away.  Really away, not just a temporary cessation.

Eleven years ago, a year before we entered the desert, my husband had an aortic valve replacement.  He recovered really well, and felt healthier than he had in a long time.  

Our lives resumed. 

A year later, the desert called. 

My husband suffered a heart attack, and while on the table, he had a massive stroke.  H was in rehab for eight weeks, and just before the hospital discharged him, the nurse told me I would either have to quit my job or have a homecare nurse come in full time. 

I was teaching at the community college.  I taught writing, Shakespeare, and British literature.  It was challenging, but I loved it.  For my writing classes, grading 4 sets of papers per student, with 3 or more classes with 28 students each got to be wearisome, but I made it work. 

I had no idea that my Shakespeare class that spring would be the last class I would teach at the college. I walked out that last day of class without a clue of the changes that awaited me.  

My husband had his heart attack later that summer.

Our lives changed in a New York minute.

Everything I depended on, including a husband who was able to do so much, was gone.  He had been an instructor at the same college, wrote books on Constitutional law, worked as a software engineer, and loved doing astrophotography.

All gone.  

We applied for medical disability and had no trouble receiving it. Praise God, we were financially able to carry on, thanks to my husband's savvy with investments over the course of his career.   

Life became medical appointments, recovery and trying to get back to normal.

I just assumed he'd recover as well as he did from the first surgery, and we would go back to normal again. 

Wrong. 

The desert isn't like that.  You just don't leave the desert and just go back to Egypt.  Another life awaits you and have no idea what it will be like. You are truly in a new normal, and it will shift from day to day, as you try to figure out what's happening. Once you think you've arrived at normal, life shifts again.

We finally left the home we'd been in for fourteen years, up in the mountains.  Our children were very concerned about how far away we were from all medical care.  Living in the mountains takes good health and stamina, especially with all the driving we did and winters where the snow could be as much as four feet deep.

The house we moved into was a blessing, for it had a lovely view of the mountains, but it wasn't the same.  We missed that house, but it more than that.  We missed our old lives. 

After seven years of being unemployed, my daughter encouraged me to apply as an educational aide at our grandchildren's school.  I applied and then I was asked to be a full time teacher.

By then my husband had resumed teaching (online), writing and being engaged with legal actions that violated the 2nd Amendment.  He kindly cooked dinner, and had a nice cup of tea awaiting me when I got home.  

But caretaking students, parents and a principal was exhausting, and along with grading endless amounts of work, coupled with the caretaking of my husband, proved too much.  I left my job after a year and a half.

When a person has a stroke, it is a challenge to recover from, and a person battles with fatigue, cognitive changes and trying to make sense of it all.  It's its own desert.

Our lives have, since all of this, have not been static.

Just recently, my husband underwent a double bypass and an aortic valve replacement.  He is in recovery now, and he's doing well physically. 

We are knee deep in medical appointments.  I am truly grateful for his recovery and how God has been in this every step of the way, guiding us, bringing us sweet people to help us and a church that has stood by us.  Our family has been wonderful. 

But the desert is exhausting.  It challenges all your assumptions of how life works, and I have on more than one occasion questioned God.

I have been in the dark night of the soul on more than one occasion.

You see, when you are the desert, you lean into God like never before.  I love God, but I have watched a slow fading of my husband, and it cuts me deeply.  We have been married for forty-four years.  The desert has not been kind, although God has.

But the desert tests you about how you see God, what He means to you and what you believe about grace, forgiveness, His sovereignty and His reliability.  

The desert can been merciless, for your soul erupts with endless questions, with no easy answers.  

People have been kind to us, that is for sure, but the greatest loneliness you can feel is with another person.

Was life, pre-desert, easy?  No, and it would be way too easy to romanticize it and make into something it wasn't.  

The desert is a place where you meet God in a way you never thought possible.  

I am still there and I am still meeting Him in ways I never thought possible. 

Next time, we will examine how despite God taking the Israelites out of Egypt, it was way harder to take Egypt out of the Israelites.  

 

Life in the Desert: Not Wanting This Journey, But Here It Is

People say all the time, "Life is a journey," or "I am on a journey," and this sounds good.  The image that comes to mind is you are on a road of your own choosing, and despite a rock or two in your path, you walk on, aware that you have not reached your destination.

But what if the journey you are on is not of your own choosing?  The road that you now walk is not familiar and each day is more like a strenuous hike then a gentle amble. 

Then it hits you:  How did I get on this road in the first place?  Maybe I chose to walk it initially, but then it became something I had not planned on, and now each mile is a drudge. 

I am personally in the desert.  I went from teaching literature and writing at a community college to a full time caretaker after my husband suffered a stroke and a heart attack ten years ago. My life changed in a New Your minute. So did his. 

His road became my road. After seven years, I went back to work, but the stress of teaching high school and continuing to caretake wore me down.  Modern teachers do a lot of caretaking of students--their needs, their mental health, their unhappy home life and their parents, who are either absent from their child's education (until they get a bad grade and it must be the teacher's fault, right?) or they come in like a Mongolian hoard or your administrators do, wanting to placate a parent who has spent all morning in their office. 

So, I am at home full time.  Just recently, my husband had open-heart surgery.  It was a long procedure, and everything went well. But his road is my road, and it will be a long one as he recovers.  

I want to explore desert life in light of the Israelites' sojourn. It struck me that they never asked to be slaves in Egypt.  In Genesis 42, we learn that a famine in Canaan, where Jacob and his sons lived, drove  Jacob to send his sons down to Egypt to buy food. 

Legitimate reason, right?  Why not?  

We are starving, there is food available for sale to us down south, so let's go!

Joseph is in charge and his brothers don't recognize him and he tests them by demanding that they bring their brother back, to prove they are not spies. Sometimes the road has obstacles and these sons of Jacob (and brothers to Joseph) hit theirs, but the famine drove them to do what Joseph requested. They arrive at Joseph's court and having proven themselves not to be spies, Joseph invited them to eat, but "They served him by himself, the brothers by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, because Egyptians could not eat with Hebrews, for that is detestable to Egyptians." (Gen. 43:32). 

Whoops! Another obstacle.

Oh great. I can smell the food, the table's set and now these Egyptians have some stupid custom that we cannot eat with them. Oh, wait a minute. OK, we get to eat. So what if it's in another room. We will get to eat!

But this obstacle can be overcome. It's a short detour, but not a lengthy, soul-sucking one. That comes later when a Pharaoh rises to power and didn't know Joseph (or was either probably unaware or didn't care about all he had done for Egypt) and saw the children of Jacob as a threat, because of their very numbers.  He embarked on a murderous program of their baby boys.  He enslaved the people. 

Not a road of their choosing.  Nor, did they count on the length of stay: 400 years in Egypt.  What started out as a journey to survive a famine became enslavement.  The people, starting with Joseph and Jacob, had no idea where this journey would take them, and how it would turn out for everyone. 

But that's the broad sweep.  How about everyday life for the Hebrew salves?

Hey!  I heard that we were free once, and didn't have to work day after day in the desert sun.  What happened?

Joseph did right by us. We had food and what we needed and Goshen is a nice place to live.  What happened?

The Pharoah has set up a plan to kill our baby boys!  WHAT HAPPENED?

All good questions, but that is truly the motto of the desert:  "What happened?"  Life as I know it has changed so much that my life is now almost unrecognizable.  All that I took my identity from is gone.  All that I saw as part of my life as faded into view and now I face the uncertainty of wide open desert spaces with rocks, wind and emptiness.

What happened?

Come, walk with me in the desert.  You may have just left one and you are trying to process the experience; you may be entering one, and wondering what the future holds or you may be in yet another one, wondering if there is any other kind of terrain in your world.  This might be your first sojourn and you are looking for a map.

Join me. If you notice that once the Israelites went into the desert, they went together--in a community.  God does not have you out there alone.

Even Jesus, who entered the desert, went out with His Father and the Holy Spirit, and the angels ministered to Him when His time out there was done.  

Come. 

No one asks to go in to the desert, but we can choose, even if we are broken and weary, how we respond. 

Come. 

The Messiah Will Not Arrive in Air Force One, Part III

I have been absent from my blog because my husband just had open heart surgery. He had an aortic valve replacement in 2014, and it was no longer doing its job. He also needed a double bypass. He's back at home, recovering well.

It's been a long journey, and will be for a while, but God is in the desert of our lives. We may view the past as sweeter, complaining just as the children of Israel did: "The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, 'If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.'" (Ex. 16:1-3)

Did you catch that? It had only two months since they saw God's mighty display of the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea and, most of all, their liberation from slavery.

Yes, they had pots of meat to eat. Why? Because masters feed their slaves. They ate with the whip nearby.

Yes, they could have died in Egypt, had there been no blood placed on their doorframes, but they didn't. Why? God was liberating them and taking them to a place they couldn't even begin to imagine. 

The past isn't always as sweet as we remember it, but in the light of current events, the past seems to have a golden hue. Yes, I am in a trying time, but God, despite my grumbling in the desert, has led me day by day. My verse during this time is, "You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself." (Ex. 19:4) I have heard the gentle sound of wind as I have travelled in this desert. It has been hard. Very heard. But I still hear that gentle wind. God is faithful, even when I am not.  We can come out of Egypt, but it's hard to get the Egypt out of us.

So, let us continue our exploration of who we are counting on for the reclamation of our country.  I came across two scriptures that are informative to this question. The first comes from Psalm 146:

"I will praise the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes,
in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord their God." (2-5)

Psalm 118 echoes that same declaration: 
 
"When hard pressed, I cried to the Lord;
he brought me into a spacious place.
The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?
The Lord is with me; he is my helper.
I look in triumph on my enemies.
It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in humans.
It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in princes." (5-9)

Interesting, huh?  It's is far too easy to depend on others to make things right.  We are then able to cheer them on, when they accomplish the things we have on our political "to-do" list.  But we feel we have the right to excoriate them when they fail us, bringing out an ugliness that is not a good representation of the God we serve. Our justification for our ire and condemnation is that they failed us. 

Really?  Do we get a free pass to be verbally abusive and condemning when our leaders fail us?  Look at the verses from Leviticus 19: "The Lord said to Moses, 'Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: "Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy."" (1-2)

These people were former slaves.  Yet God, because of His mercy and grace, brought them to a new space:  They were to be good not to avoid the whip, but to be representatives of God in a world filled with violence and violation of all things holy.  

Yes creation speaks of God, but we personalize God, make Him evident in our lives or when we fail Him, we misrepresent Him in our lives.  I love how The Message puts it:

"Friends, this world is not your home, so don’t make yourselves cozy in it. Don’t indulge your ego at the expense of your soul. Live an exemplary life in your neighborhood so that your actions will refute their prejudices. Then they’ll be won over to God’s side and be there to join in the celebration when he arrives. Make the Master proud of you by being good citizens. Respect the authorities, whatever their level; they are God’s emissaries for keeping order. It is God’s will that by doing good, you might cure the ignorance of the fools who think you’re a danger to society. Exercise your freedom by serving God, not by breaking the rules. Treat everyone you meet with dignity. Love your spiritual family. Revere God. Respect the government." (1 Peter 2:11-17)

Yes, but don't trust it.

Yes, but don't let it be a substitute for your own responsibilities and witness.

Yes, but don't let it lure you into anger and verbal reprisal when it fails to do what you think it should do.

Serve God where you are:  desert, Promised Land, or somewhere in between.  

He is faithful.  

So should we be: to Him and to letting the light of His love shine in our lives. 

It's not satisfying to our flesh to pray and serve the community we are in as opposed to going out in the streets and yelling for the political blood of our opponents, to post mean things and riling ourselves up about how the other side is just plain ________ (your choice of invective). 

But we are not to satisfy our flesh.  

It is not faithful. It can cause us to create division amongst the people we know, love and serve with, and all for what?  When the political event is over, and so are some of our relationships, then what?  

Jesus knew that empires change not because of better leaders, but because of changed hearts.  He could have overturned the Romans (and if anyone needed to be kicked to the curb, it was them) but Jesus chose a quieter, more subtle and yet way more powerful way:  transforming people's hearts, conforming them to His image and empowering them to love, serve and reflect His work in their lives.  

The Roman empire continued to be ugly, violent and contrary to all things holy, but God's people endured. The Romans are gone. But we are here, aren't we? 

One final note:  We may have to stand up against a violent and ugly government (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie Ten Boom and Father Oscar Romero come to mind) but He needs to call and empower us to pursue His way of challenging evil, not our flesh.

Keep praying and pursuing the call on your life, but don't get suck into the political maelstrom that is seeking to overwhelm us all.