Memorial Memories and Musings

It is Memorial Day here and I am at home where my parents lived out their last 30 years. I helped build part of this house back when I was 18 and just graduated from academy (high school). I spent the summer working on improvements to the little cottage that was the nucleus for the rest of the much larger house. I then framed up the first story after the basement was poured by contractors. At that time I had absolutely no experience in carpentry and the results are now obvious to an experienced eye. But the house is still standing and has now become our own home.

It was at this very time three years ago that we were shocked by the sudden death of my step mom in a tragic car accident on her 32^nd wedding anniversary. My dad was living in a nearby nursing home and that left no one to look after the house or the thirty some odd cats depending on her daily feedings or to visit him. My sister and I rushed down here upon receiving the news of the accident and visited her in the hospital an hour before she died. The following days and weeks were times of trauma, amazement and self-discovery in ways that I would not necessarily care to repeat.

We ended up moving here, doing some much-needed remodeling on the house and shortly after bringing dad home from the nursing home to care for him the rest of his days. His death last year was much more expected and less traumatic with the surrounding circumstances somewhat documented in various posts on this site. Since that time we have really been wondering what God has for us here. It was unavoidably clear that we were supposed to move here but other than caring for dad and being forced to face some deep roots of faults within myself, we are still feeling baffled as to what we are “supposed” to be doing.

Why am I saying this all now? Well, I'm not even sure of that except that this weekend reminded me of these events. It is not a time of grief or painful reminders of bad memories as it is for some people in their lives. I am fully at peace with those events. Sometimes I wistfully wish that dad and mom could see the changes we have made on the house. I know they would have been very excited and thrilled about many of them, though it would have been an almost unendurable stress for them to live through the construction process. Sometimes I can almost hear their exclamations when they would see the addition I added onto the front of the house dramatically expanding the living room to a comfortable and spacious place to share life with more people. But that is never going to happen and I have to pull my mind away from such reveries and wonder why this is here.

I continue to feel that there is some reason, some divine destiny for this house that is yet unrevealed. My dad had the same feeling for many years himself which is why he designed the house with 8 bedrooms. The only time that I know of when all the bedrooms were utilized ironically was at the time of my mom's funeral. But I know that was not the purpose for which this place was designed as it was. My dad, and now we, have believed for a long time that God has some kind of “ministry” in mind for this house. I am not even completely sure that we are the ones who would be involved though I certainly wish to be. I do not want my negligence in some way to cause me to default on God's plans for this place and see its fulfillment come about through someone else without us. But I still seem to be stymied as to what is supposed to happen.

That is not to say that we have not had our own ideas of what this place was to be. But even that has created its own problems at times, at least within myself. When we first moved here I was very eager to share many of the things we had been learning about spiritual and emotional healing with people we knew around here but soon felt the chill of suspicion and disinterest withering away our enthusiasm. Worst of all I began to see that my own inherited spirit of criticism and bitterness was a slow poison that worked to discredit the very ideas and concepts that I so wanted to share. They had been instruments to begin a healing process in my own life, but my transformation was not progressed enough to undo the harmful effects of years of deep-rooted habits of thinking and feeling that still plague me yet today.

These habits and attitudes that affect all of my relationships were largely formed in me while I was growing up among some of the very same people I now face on my return to this area. This has created a situation that magnifies these fault-lines within me as I react to familiar triggers that activate old self-defeating patterns of belief and self-perception. I know this is the kind of thing God does to get us to face ourselves so we can realize what we need for Him to do inside of us. The really frustrating part is that it is taking so very much longer than what I had hoped it would take. I feel like my spiritual progress at times could easily be outstripped in speed by the slugs I used to watch crawling around in our backyard when I was growing up nearby.

I want to grow up more and make some progress in my life – at least part of me does. But another part of me has been evidently quite effective in hiding critical areas of my thinking from my consciousness and preserving some of my faults from exposure to the light of God's healing. These faults are very operative from their hiding places but not easily dealt with, at least with the methods and means I have been trying so far. Sometimes I get a good view of part of them and ask God to deal with them. They are slowly starting to be exposed but it feels sort of like splinters that very slowly work their way to the surface of the skin while causing a great deal of discomfort while I wait for them to come within reach.

Maybe this is coming to my mind partly because of the present attention I am giving to the beginning of Romans. I know that when one exposes himself to the Word of God he will have something happen that will much less likely happen otherwise. As I plunged into chapter two yesterday I came under such heavy conviction of my own areas of hypocrisy that I could not even bring myself to write anything. Sometimes writing really can be an avoidance for heart work – not always though. There are times when writing is a most effective tool to get into my heart. But there are other times when my heart needs more time to ponder and soak and receive what is coming in without the distraction of trying to explain what is happening when the experience itself is not yet matured. That is how I felt yesterday and still do to some extent. The revelations I am receiving in this chapter are so strong and so connected to the previous chapter that they are unnerving but very needed.

At the same time, due to my less than nimble memory, I need to at least take notes for future reference so I can capture many of the insights that I am finding in this area of the passage. I am always struggling with finding the balance between sharing what I am learning while still in process or waiting until the pieces make more sense and then sharing it. So far I have tended toward the immediate sharing which makes things a bit more messy but maybe much more personal. It is quite opposite to the standard educational model promoted today, but so far it seems to me to be my attempt to live from my heart in real time (or at least closer to real time).