I'm jumping into this post with no other impetus (or ideas) besides this one: It's been 6 days and it's TIME TO WRITE A NEW POST. Where have I been? Here. What have I been doing?? Nothing. Some days ago (I don' t know how many; time is meaningless without landmarks); I went to stand up from sitting in my recliner. PAIN! Pain like I can't even describe shot through my back. Pain so bad that I froze...couldn't move a muscle for fear of jostling this hurting body. Pain so bad that I could not take a breath. Carefully, I sat back down. And there - and here (in my bed) - I had been for a number of days...close to a week, I think. Pain stayed at about a 9 on the scale (1-10)...and I couldn't do a single thing about it.
However, yesterday, I went for another stab at an epidural (haha). No doctor has ever been able to penetrate the spinal column and get into the spine itself with a needle to be able to inject steroids - although yesterday was the fifth attempt. I figured it was worth a shot . (haha again). Each doctor confidently brags, "Oh, I can do it." and then crawls away in humiliation having to admit that NO, they could not. (Arthritis has narrowed every opening in my spine through which the nerves travel closing them down and causing the nerves to be compressed and the spinal cord itself has become flattened.) This doctor said "I think, maybe I can do it." and Lo and behold: He could!
So now it is a waiting game. I'm had some improvement in my pain levels...but I do not yet know if the improvement will last for three days or three months. And there's no way to predict or to know until I've experienced it. Talk about "living dependently upon God's grace!" It is a bit hard to know that the relief is temporary...perhaps VERY temporary....but I am determined to get every bit of benefit out of it that I can. Today, I went like a whirlwind through my house, catching up on things that had been left a mess through the past week of my recliner-dom.
It is now Christmas Eve, as of 21 minutes ago.
The other day at our informal Bible Study gathering, where we just got together to sing carols and to pray...a song was played for us that I'd never before heard. I believe it was called, "One King" or something like that. It had a line in it...as we listened, while looking at my friend's Christmas tree, so huge, that it brushed her cathedral ceilings, and listened to the crackle of the wood stove....The line said something about "One babe, one King, who entered bringing Light into this dark world."
We had just been discussing the topic of suffering. It is a topic that I think a lot about....and experience daily. I thought of this world, darkened by sin and tainted and cursed with sometimes unfathomable suffering; and I thought of how, somehow: inexplicably and miraculously, the KING of Heaven donned the helpless, dependent flesh of a baby....contained and compressed all of his greatness into that tight, small space of Mary's womb...and came to bring us hope for an end to our suffering. He came to bring the Light of Heaven into this dark and hopeless planet.
I wondered, as I thought about this, whether he abdicated all of his Heavenly greatness; his 'GOD-ness' while he was in that womb....Did he have some kind of God-awareness of his new environment?? Did His greatness feel confined, pressed, and squeezed as he inhabited that small space? Was he "God" there? Or just a baby, with no ability to understand or recall his environment later on?? I thought of how Elizabeth's babe in her womb, "leapt" at the recognition of the presence of God contained in Mary's womb, early on in her pregnancy....and I knew that there was, in a real way, the existence of "God's presence" in that womb from the very beginning of her pregnancy.
And as God, I believe there must have been some awareness on his part. Whether that awareness of who he was and what he was here for, continued through his infancy and childhood, I do not know. But I do somehow think that that incomplete fetus understood and experienced, in that womb, his new limitations.... I think of the immensity of his Power and Greatness. I think of the worship that he received always prior, in heaven...and now, here he was, limited to a finite number of cells, crowded and contained by the loving womb which held him. And I believe he suffered in that womb...even as he later suffered on the cross...even as he suffered during his life under the vile treatment of mankind...
And I think of the love that compelled him to do this. And that the love was for you; for me. That he did it to personally alleviate MY suffering-and yours and to bring us a hope and a future....to give us an invite into his true Kingdom where we might experience, finally, an understanding of his majesty, power and greatness. We will see the adulation of angels for him. We will stand with the throngs of the redeemed, and honor and praise him as he really was due all along. And we will weep at the way we'd diminished him in our understandings; in our lives--just as he was squashed and diminished in that womb. And we will finally begin to see and comprehend the great gift that is our--the Christmas miracle--every day of our trek here on this planet.
Those who are his own will begin to see and to apprehend, the thing that angels long to understand and experience: The miracle of our redemption as a result of that incarnation. And as the strains of that beautiful song faded, and the fire crackled, I was awed and moved by a new grasp of the gift that is ours; not just this Christmas, but each day of our lives: The Love that drove that Light into our dark earth to end the curse of suffering and death and sin. And I was moved to tears which filled my eyes but didn't quite spill. Tears of gratitude. Tears of joy. And all the pain in my body faded to insignificance in the light of this gift.
The lights on the tree twinkled.
The voices of my friends surrounded me...
............... and the Love of my Father, filled me.
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