Are you LISTENING?

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted much. My laptop is in the shop and right now I am dealing with some serious degrees of pain. I’ve had to go off of the methotrexate which I was taking for my psoriatic arthritis, because it was damaging my immune system to the degree that I was getting one sickness and infection after another. As a result I was pretty miserable all the time and in the hospital way too much. So my pulmonologist insisted (in duet with my husband) that I go off of it. I did so reluctantly, because at the dosage I was taking (which was the maximum dose), it was the first thing that had ever helped my pain and slowed down the crippling effect of this disease. Well, now it’s back full force; my spine beginning to pretzel and the pain in my neck, back, hips and hands is verging on intolerable. I’ve been really limited to my recliner and bed for the past week or two…and let me tell you: that is getting REALLY old very fast. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this: just wasting it by sitting in a chair.

With my laptop gone, life has become even more limited…I’m losing contact with “my” world of you cyber peeps. I have a PC and I can manage to sit at the chair at that, for about 10 minutes at most…. Fortunately I have a NEO, which is a small, portable word processor which is connectable to the computer to upload stuff that I’ve written on it. That is how I’m writing this now.

Another thing which has happened just today is that my very good friend, David, with whom I’ve spent hours each day chatting for the past two years, was taken to the hospital. I’ve know for a while that he needed to be there….but now that it’s happened, I am very worried….I’m afraid I may lose him….And we’ve come to depend on each other. He is disabled and for the most part, homebound also….so we were a perfect chat-match. So now, that is one more connection being torn from my grasp in these long and lonely days.

I have to ask myself (and God) why all this is happening….the laptop, the pain, and David being admitted…and the answer that God has given me is that He wants more of my attention. It should be HIM that I jump up to greet in the morning…not internet friends. And while I don’t think that God made David sick for my benefit, He used that event to make His point…just like the pain keeps me stuck in this chair…all of this has torn from my grasp “other” things that have crept up the list for my attention and slowly, insidiously, have displaced God in my affections. Love is as love does….so while I would never say that I love the internet more than God, I was acting as if I did…and isn’t that really what matters?

God used these facts and one fiery sermon delivered by my pastor yesterday to make His point. At one point the pastor got pretty irate as he saw some people drifting off to sleep—because the sermon was of critical importance, with the potential to be life-changing for everyone that was there. I confess, I was listening with jaded ears…hearing but not listening. My eyes may have even been a pair of those which started to close…I don’t know for sure. But let me tell you, the Pastor really got my attention as he raised his voice to wake the slumbering and then chastised us for tuning God out. And that is what I had been doing….whether or not my eyes had drifted shut. God had a message for me and He was going to make sure that I heard it. I did hear.
Now we’ll see if I was LISTENING.