Disappointment

I'm here in South Carolina picking up Lizzie from the Citadel and taking her to view local colleges and amazed that I can find the enthusiasm to do this. I find myself locked between trying to be a cheerleader propelling her into her future and looking with a cynical and jaded eye at the outcome of my life. This in itself is a bad enough place to be, but the truth is that I feel that way about most of the lives that I have been involved with. It's not just that I look at where I am and think "This is where I never wanted to go", I look at the lives of the people I most admired as a youth and think, "I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to end up there" too. And in this context I'm telling my daughter "Go for it. Make your life what you want it to be." Only, I have come to believe that nobody really gets that.

Speaking of lives that ended where they shouldn't have been, isn't it a shame that the amount of love that has been expressed in the past few days for Farrah Fausset and Michael Jackson couldn't have been expressed while they were still alive and could have enjoyed it.

Just thoughts.

It's Final

We got the news this week. The City has voted to accept our counter offer and will be purchasing our property. I hope that they will love this place as much as we have. I hope they will treat it with care. It is the only place that I feel at home anymore. My children grew up here. My marriage broke apart here. I was sick here and they cared for me. As a body, our church will go on. We will just do it in a different place. I'm sure like any house, it will become home.

Please take me out of the cloud

There is a discussion over at Crass Pollination about the ethics of treating obese people. It seems that there are quite a few med-bloggers who feel that they have the right to deny life saving treatment to a patient because the patient is obese. Their issue is that they may sustain an injury by treating the obese person. Sincerely, I hope the injury they sustain is a career ending one, because these people truly do not deserve the to have the trust that is being placed on them, and that they are being highly paid for. This is clearly a community that I have no wish to be associated with. So please...remove me from the med-blog cloud. If this is the way you all think, if it is ok for you to stand around and judge someone to death, then I don't want anything to do with you.

In the Sanctuary

It's dark in here, and quiet. I come here often when there is no one else here and I wish that I could say that I come here to meditate and pray. But I come here for a lot of reasons and mostly I come here because it's dark and quiet here, and usually pretty peaceful. Soon the city will have bought this building and will tear this place down. It will be sad for me. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that my children grew up on row 13. They all spent a fair amount of time here, but Lizzie more so than anyone else. I will miss this place when it's gone, but by then we will have another place where we worship and pray and live as the body of Christ. Still I will miss this place.

Primordial Scream of the Soul

I'm sitting in my cube at work right now, and I can't scream because I'm sitting in my cube right now.  A co-worker just told me that her aunt has just been diagnosed with a recurrance of breast cancer. While we were talking another co-worker whom I've never seen before joined the conversation because her sister has been diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.  And my soul is wounded as I sit here in my cube, and I want to scream up to the heavens.  Does it never end?  How many of us will be gutted by this terrible disease?  I cry silently while no-one is watching.  My soul wants to scream.

 

Things Going Away

This past weekend was Graduation Day here in Cherokee County. I attended, not so much because I had any great affinity to any of the graduates as I wanted a chance to prepare myself for coming events. Lizzie is going to be a senior in high school when she returns in the fall. This will be the twenty fifth year that I will have a child in school, and the last. It occurred to me that twenty five years is the technical definition of a generation. This will be the ending of an era for both Lizzie and me. I am excited for the wonderful things that I feel my beautiful daughter has in store. With her intelligence, creativity and drive, she will have a wonderful life ahead of her. But for me, I wonder what's going to happen. Raising my children has been my motivation. I stayed alive five years ago because I was not finished. My grandparenting years are not anything as I hoped or invisioned them to be. I'm not sure that what I have in exchange is motivational. I guess what I'm saying is that I am uncertain of how to live in the life I see in front of me.