Letting Go of the Past
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I love to draw, and for well over a decade I attended a drawing group in San Francisco. There, drawing a new model each time, I would produce ten drawings per night on 18×24 inch sheets of tinted paper. Some were quick gesture sketches; some were completely finished with shading and color. I was faithful, and went every Tuesday night. After ten years, despite pieces I had given away or sold, I had collected what felt like a ton of the drawings in the large tablets. They were so big I needed to store them in the hallway of the loft where I was living at the time, an old factory building. I was able to keep them out of the way by putting them into an alcove no one was using. In 1993, we had a terrible rainy winter in Oakland, where I lived. No thunder, no lightning, which are exceedingly rare in California, but downpours for days on end. Cold rain that came down so hard it hurt to walk in it without an umbrella. Downpours for literally days at a time, causing little rivers along the curbs; the cuffs of my trousers never dried for weeks. Read more →
What Now?
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Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had what the surgeon called a “strenuous” surgery, was off work for nearly three months and debilitated for another six. But…it was OK. The results of the surgery had been the best possible, and this kind of cancer wasn’t supposed to come back. I spent the last month of my medical leave polishing a sermon about what I’d learned from having cancer, and from the debilitation of the treatment. I got much more out of that writing than you could imagine. And then…a shadow on a scan. It looked like it might have come back.
Health
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I was listening to a tape about health during my hospital stay, and it defined health as the ability to fully participate in one’s life. That stopped me. I had to rewind the tape and listen again. Maybe I’d heard wrong, lost my concentration; surely I must have missed something. But no. The tape said, “Health is the ability to fully participate in one’s life.”
Both Whole and Healing
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I was diagnosed with a chronic pain disorder when I was 35 years old. Though my symptoms can be traced back many years earlier, I had managed to, well, manage the pain for some time. That was no longer possible. Finally getting the diagnosis was a relief, but what it meant for my future was uncertain.
Boldly Co-Existing with Mental Illness
Another Helping of Brokenness
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I am prone to sudden jerky movements that are beyond my control. The other day, I was out on an errand. As happens so often when I go out, I experienced how we judge one another. And how sometimes we are both spectacularly loud and spectacularly wrong in our judgments.
Burnt Kabob
From Your Minister
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Recently, at one of CLF’s online worship services, we featured a guest minister, Teresa Ines Soto, who lives with cerebral palsy.
REsources for Living
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I don’t know about your family, but in my family healthy eating is an ongoing battle. Yes, I am the kind of parent who generally thinks that junk food is bad, and vegetables are good. Not surprisingly, my daughter is equally strong in her opinion that junk food is good, and vegetables are to be avoided at all costs.
The tools and strategies of healing are so innate, so much a part of a common human birthright, that we believers in technology pay very little attention to them. But they have lost none of their power.
