Musing on a Week, a Month, a Year, a Time Period

Look back on it, 2014 was a transformational year.  I returned home from a domestic mission and learned, in delicate layers, the changes in my clarity of perception and thought, personal strength, and courage that the experience had gifted to me.

My discovery of personal strength was with the early appearance of our beloved baby grandson, Sebastian David.  In barely a four-day period, our daughter, Krista, went from ill, to deathly ill, to a lifesaving cesarean that saved both her life and the life of her unborn child.  There was a numbness that came over me as I experienced this event in waves of shock, each ever higher than the last.  It was like standing on a sea shore watching a tidal wave approach and having no idea what I was seeing until it is too late.

Nature’s hidden move

The long, low, gathering, swell

Hissing grains of sand

Feeling the crushing

Weight of weightlessness, I sat.

I could not go on.

It took me a while to breathe again.  It wasn’t a collapsing, breathless gasp, so much as a flush of weakness that told my brain to desert my body for a moment.  With recovery came questions about my baby, my daughter.  Why was it taking so long to get her back to her room?  I would learn quickly of the meticulous thoroughness of the doctor, the piecing of her poor body back together.  There was now a whole world of knowledge once secret that now lay exposed.  I learned quickly.

Ten years have passed by and more tests challenged me, in ways large and small. The domestic mission forced me to look at the world in a different way.  How I viewed the world became clearer; I became more selective of what I would allow into my life, my mind, or my time.  Awareness of how fear intruded into my life turned me in the direction of eradicating the control of fear from my life.  Faith over fear became my primary goal.  Reliance on God as an all loving Father slowly became my guidepost.  Reading Cardinal Sarah’s tribute book to Pope Benedict XVI, made this clear to me through Benedict’s own words, like nothing else has.

I look back on the opening month of 2014 as I sit here on February 1, 2024, and realize I did not have the tools to act with the purpose that I have today.  Certainly it was possible for me to make choices for the good of another and guide that other to a better road.  But my faith in God as a gentle, loving Father, was not the first door I walked through as I sought responses to life’s many and varied challenges.  My life was very much do as I say, not as I do.  But, no more of that now. 

Through conscious practice, I started to turn to God.  This turning happened especially when I could not explain my depression, sadness, my sense of isolation, or aloneness.  I forced myself to pray the prayers of my youth, the formal prayers of my Faith.  Conversational prayer and meditation came harder and both are still hard.  Talking with the Father isn’t easy.  It’s like dressing up to look my best and finding the right words whilst still not accepting fully that He knows what it is my heart. 

My layers of change over the last ten years have been mostly subtle but also with moments of forceful demands for my attention.  Time has given me a ten year long view of how renewed I am in strength, clear-sightedness, and courage.  Narrowing my desires to Faith, family, and friends makes life more manageable.  I know what I can control and with the guidance of my Father, I can do it with courage and clarity.