A Summer Day

WED., AUG. 15, 2001, 11:16 AM
FARM, STUDY

It is a summer day, o son, but the humidity is down, and the temperature is pleasant. This is quite a wondrous time in your life, but you feel uncomfortable today. ( 11:18 / 11:36 ) It is an ideal middle-of-the-year day, but this room now looks and feels messier than ever, and your spirit is also feeling “messy.”

The University starts up next week, so the influx of students already is beginning. This will be the start of your 5th year of retirement, and though you still have a mailbox in your old Department you have long since given up your office, and you will “go up there” less and less. It has been good… retiring “gradually”… but you now anticipate less and less time there, mostly on the Bible Study day. In some ways it is sad, for you did love that life as a professor, but you do have this fine place and enough matters to keep you busy.

Having said that I’ll now chide you about the “production” and mailing out of this last Ruminations. It has been written (even a bit “over-written”) for several months now, but it is not yet ready for mailing. You have not announced that you have given this up, too, so I’m pushing you now. Don’t fret about its being late. Just finish the task and get it on “its way”! When you accomplish this We’ll consider “fewer per year.”

It is disconcerting to have your big lawn mower break down just as you were going to do some “major mowing”… which is needed, as the grass grows in this summer weather. You don’t feel good, in your spirit, as your place doesn’t look as neat as it should, in summer. Oh, I know you have some disabilities, but I’ll just say that you’ll have even more if you don’t “avail yourself of this good bodily exercise.”

You have two competing feelings (and these are part of the discomfort I diagnosed this morning). One is that you’re still functioning pretty well for a “75 year old”… that you can compensate for loses… that life is still fun and, finally, a positive experience.

Its opposite is that the losses are accumulating, most of them will be with you “for life,” and that it is sad to acknowledge such losses. You hope your eyesight, in the “good eye” will stay with you for what life you have left, for the thought of being blind is certainly not a happy one. Your feet are tolerable now, but you don’t expect them to improve much more. You can still function pretty well in what you have to and need to do, and you’ll just have to accept that this discomfort will be with you, for the rest…

You may get some judgment, on Friday, on how the cancer is “proceeding” in your prostate. Happily, it isn’t painful… just bothersome with frequent urination and slowness in “voiding.”

Also you’ll get some judgment on the irregular beating of your heart, and whether this is anything serious.

All in all, I want you to see that there is little reason to seek medical treatment for any of these “conditions.” Obviously “modern medicine” can come up with a treatment for almost every “weakness,” but I want you to be aware that your body, now, with is losses, is compensating and adapting… and any major medical treatment would ALSO have to be “adapted to” and “compensated for.”

I want you to live out the rest of this life fully and joyfully. When I, as Jesus, went to the cross I didn’t fight against it… swear… or cry. It was “My Time,” certainly at a younger age than you are, and though I suffered I lived out those last hours as positively and “normally” as possible.