Author: admin

How to Stay Active and Mobile in Your Senior Years

What scares you the most about growing old? Is it Alzheimer’s, dementia, cancer, or a devastating neuromuscular disease?

Then there’s age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, hearing loss.

There’s a long list of age-related diseases we can acquire or succumb to as we age. But there is one thing that we can do: avoid general deterioration.

 

I spend a lot of time watching older people and observing the daily activities at the residential facility where my 97-year-old mother lives. And there are things that stand out for me.

 

Movement—

I am taken aback and saddened by the tremendous loss of mobility.

A large number of them use walkers. They slowly move from elevator, to dining room, back to the elevator, hunched over their four wheels, in hopes that they don’t teeter over, fall, and break a bone.

The longer they use the walkers, the more they hunch, the more they move with their legs in a splayed out position, shuffling more than picking up and swinging their legs in a natural gate.

They spend far too much time sitting in a chair, watching television. So often it’s the only mode of entertainment they have.

And the lack of activity contributes to a steady decline in strength and mobility, flexibility and balance. Muscle tone deteriorates to the point of no return.

Flexibility is compromised.

Fat to muscle ratio changes, with muscle coming out on the losing end.

All of that deterioration leads to a decrease in balance, an increase in falls, and more loss of mobility.

And sadly, all of that inactivity also increases your chances of suffering memory deterioration and dementia.

 

A different picture—

And then I go to the gym and see elder adults in their seventies, eighties and nineties trying to maintain whatever they’ve got in order to stay mobile and flexible and strong so they can enjoy life more. They tell staying strong and mobile is what motivates them to exercise.

And I wonder which camp I want to end up in, or am more likely to.

I know from experience that the more and longer you sit and spend parked in a chair or on a couch, the more likely it is you will deteriorate. I’ve been stunned how quickly it’s happened to me over the last year. Before I realized it, nearly a year had elapsed without my adhering to the regular exercise program I’d been following for years.

And I’ve paid a price for it. Now I’m trying to slug my way back to strength, flexibility and mobility. It’s tough. But I’m determined to ward off the walker as much and as long as I can.

 

What you can do—

It isn’t complicated. And it isn’t expensive. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here’s some things you can do to:

  • Daily stretching exercises. Harvard Medical and Mayo have some great suggestions on their websites.
  • Join a gym and do some light weight lifting. If you can’t do that, then buy some small weights to do upper body exercises at home. Learn how to use your body weight as resistance for muscle strengthening.
  • Buy a DVD that teaches you tai chi, a great activity for people into their senior years. It increases breathing, strength and balance.
  • Take yoga for its breathing, strengthening and flexibility benefits. It’s also a great social activity, although I wouldn’t endorse the spiritual aspects of it.
  • Take daily walks.
  • Increase your protein consumption. Recent research indicates seniors need more protein.

 

The important thing is to pick out something you can do to keep moving and stick with it.

Maybe you can put off buying a walker a little longer than the average person.

Until next week,

Keep moving!

Andrea

“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

The Many Faces of Time and Post-Surgery Healing

Have you ever grieved the death of a beloved family member or friend? It shatters your heart, implodes your world , sucks the air out of life, and disorders your brain. You get inhaled into that swirling vacuum of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—the classic 5 stages of grief. (Some psychologists even make it 7 stages, with the addition of shock at the onset and then testing after depression.)

Cancer patients and others who receive devastating chronic illness diagnoses become familiar with them.

Even people suffering through a relationship break-up can experience these stages.

And the loss of a beloved pet can break your heart and unbalance your life.

 

Another type of grief—

But there’s another type of loss that’s hitting home for me right now, one that’s triggering all of these stages too.

The loss of probably the most precious commodity any of us have.

Time.

Time lost, although I’m not sure how you can actually lose time since it’s not something you can gather up and store. But I understand why people say they’ve lost time. It just feels as though something you thought you controlled sifted right through your fingers like water.

Then there’s time wasted.

Time stolen.

Time we’ve let others steal from us, because we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say no to their time-wasting plans or demands.

Time you try to manage. (Now there’s an elusive idea.)

Time you need.

Like time to grow and time to heal.

 

Have you ever wondered why you had to put up with so much during a season of your life and fervently prayed to get out of it, only to discover later that God was working behind the scenes, preparing you for something grander. Something you wouldn’t have been able to do if you hadn’t slogged through that difficult time?

I’ve experienced plenty of those. I’ve watched my beloved go through that type of thing several times in his career. Once the good, productive fruit starts to emerge, it’s easy to look back with hindsight and point to the preparation.

Post-injury and post-surgery healing can feel like that—a big waste of time that only carved an empty, fruitless hole in your life.

 

How much better it would be if we’d just slog along joyfully and expectantly, knowing God has His hand in everything in our lives and always knows best. Why can’t we be more willing participants?

 

Experience—

When I was pregnant with my younger son, I was confined to bed. Completely. Tilted 15 degrees head down. Every. Single. Day was critical to my unborn baby’s development. Every. Single. Day was a practice of supreme patience and personal surrender in the face of abject fear.

“Four months is a small period of life,” my gentle doctor said. To me it seemed like eternity.

To Cory—my developing son—it meant life or death.

Thankfully, I made it three months, and we were rewarded with life. Only because God gave us a miracle.

Two entirely different views of time, with one result.

 

And now, 24 years later, I’m puttering around thinking about time and realizing I’m a slave to it. A slave to the time it takes to heal from yet another surgery, even though I wasn’t fully healed from the last one in November. Some people keep telling me “healing takes time,” which I know because I have a degree in helping people heal; and weary of others who think I should be healing faster, either because they did following their similar surgery, or because they think I’m protecting myself too much.

Actually, both admonitions are right: healing does take time; and you have to stress yourself to heal. It’s a fine balance of both.

Are you old enough to remember when doctors sent back-injury patients to bed rest for weeks? That advice didn’t work very well. They need to be up and moving, as long as they aren’t doing any further harm to their injury. Even open heart surgery patients are extracted from their beds and made to shuffle around the hospital corridors within 3 days of surgery. Controlled, appropriate stress makes the system rebuild and heal.

A bedridden patient experiences severe and rapid muscle atrophy. Strength and balance are lost and compromised. Often, it’s impossible to correct that kind of damage.

And that’s the key. A delicate balance between stress and rest.

 

The danger of time—

But the biggest problem I’m having is that I have way too much time on my hands and fritter it away by allowing my brain to backtrack down memory lane and assail me for all the time I wasted, the time I didn’t choose to do the best thing, the time I missed out because I was too lazy or fearful or paralyzed into inaction.

I spend too much time dwelling on those memories, romancing what wasn’t and maybe could have been, and turning them into idols. All that memory work is making my heart sick. And that’s affecting my healing.

 

Scripture to the rescue!

The passage from the epistle that St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians is repeating itself in my mind. Two different versions put it this way:

 

“…making the most of your time, because the days are evil” (NASB; italics mine).

“…making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (NIV; italics mine).

 

And then there’s the passage Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians:

“…we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

 

Letting my mind wander backward down memory lane, and allowing myself to let others’ opinions (or my own warped ones) about how slowly or quickly I should be recovering are unproductive. They only promote dangerous self-guessing, depression, frustration and grief. Depression, frustration and grief that get added to the depression, frustration and grief one normally experiences post-injury or surgery.

Depression, frustration and grief heaped on depression, frustration and grief.

Now there’s a real waste of time and life resources.

 

Change of direction, and thinking—

While I may need to formally grieve those lost opportunities and failed moments at some point in the future, right now I need to resist allowing them to suck the energy out of what I need to be doing at this moment: taking the limited energy I do have and focusing it on healing and whatever else God lays on my heart to do.

On a daily basis, that might not be much and end up appearing pretty measly—between the physical therapy, re-conditioning workouts, and obligatory naps with elevated and iced knee. And that’s okay. I need to be satisfied with it, thank God for it, and be grateful.

Right now it’s all about focus. I’m having to put on blinders and double down on mine.

At some time in the future, I know the good fruit will emerge. And when it does, I’ll be jubilant!

 

How about you?

Are you experiencing a time of recovery, where frustration and depression threaten the outcome of your healing?

While it can be a day-to-day emotional and physical struggle, it can also be one of the sweetest times in your life. Time you saturate yourself in God-time. (Can you tell I’m preaching to myself too?) Pruning time. Nurturing time. A time when God is never so close, because it’s a time we are more acutely aware of His presence.

Don’t overlook it. Don’t grieve it. Don’t waste it. Make no apologies for taking it.

As my friends tell me, healing takes time.

However long that is for you.

But it also takes energy and work.

Thank God for the process!

 

Until next week,

Shalom!

Andrea

“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

Arthroscopy and a Miracle

A funny thing happened on the way to my knee surgery. Something wonderful and rather miraculous.

But I still don’t know when it happened.

Let me explain.

 

A little history—

As a competitive gymnast, I put my knees—and body—through the contortion and compression ringer. Way back in high school I was slapped in a thigh-high to ankle leg immobilizer because of excruciating knee pain and unceremoniously diagnosed with “chondromalacia,” a condition that develops when the smooth, lubricating underneath surfaces of the kneecap get damaged or wear down from…well…wear and tear. At fifteen, I was already experiencing severe wear and tear.

The pain kept me from sleeping. I couldn’t find a comfortable position for it. Keep it bent too long, and I’d have to straighten it out to get it to calm down, at least a little. I needed to sit on the aisles for theater and movie attending because keeping it bent, with the kneecap surface grinding into my femur, was intolerable. Changes in air pressure exacerbated the pain, as did lying out in the sun too long. Adding any excess poundage to my medium frame also worsened the problem.

The condition was still giving me fits in college, and my team physician prescribed 7 aspirin 3 to 4 times a day. It certainly reduced the inflammation, but I was too exhausted from anemia to stay awake or experience discomfort. That was a rough college semester.

 

Athletic Training to the rescue—

Once I completed my athletic training degrees (B.S. and M.S.), I understood what my “mechanism of injury” (cause) was and how to deal with it and became a specialist in the biomechanics of the lower extremity and learned how to treat my own knees as well as my patients’. I developed a knee treatment and exercise protocol to keep my legs strong and avoid further injury.

But I couldn’t reverse the damage done. And while hiking the sometimes-brutal landscape of the Camino de Santiago last fall, my kneecaps (and femur) once again fell victim to the ravages of bone-to-bone grinding. I ended up hobbling (yes, HOBBLING!), into Logrono, our last town on our first journey.

 

Seeing a doctor—

After our return from the Camino, I made an appointment to see a local orthopedic doctor that specializes in regenerative medicine of the joints. Maybe he could help me?

After examining my x-rays, and pointing out the frayed surfaces of my kneecaps, he said he could probably help me regenerate some of that surface cartilage through stem cell injections. Cells extracted from my own tummy fat. (How wonderful that they’ve found something useful for it!)

Because the cost is exorbitant, and insurance companies won’t pay for it, I’d need to save to have the procedure, which I hoped to do last month, after I’d made enough recovery from my November toe bone spur-removal surgery.

But something happened during the rehabilitation from that bone spur. Either I put too much pressure on the right leg, and damaged my meniscus; or an already-damaged meniscus was further eroded during my rehab. One Friday back in January, I saw my stem cell doctor again, told him my right knee felt as though it was hanging by a thread, and wondered what he suggested. He said he wanted to get a look inside the knee to see what was going on. That meant an MRI, which he ordered. (That’s what I hoped he would do.)

 

But the following Monday afternoon changed all my plans.

On the way out my front door to get into the car and drive to Phoenix for a three-day Crisis Management seminar, I finished off what I’d started.

It didn’t take much. It often doesn’t, especially when you get to a “certain age.” I stepped backward off the landing, planted my right foot, turned the key in the lock and pivoted on my planted foot.

Bad move. And a ripping sound toward the back of my knee confirmed it.

After crawling back into the house, (wailing in pain and frustration to my two attentive and sympathetic dogs), icing, and awaiting my husband’s return so he could take me to the after-hours clinic, I got my MRI moved to “stat,” and slid through the magnetic tube that Friday. The following Tuesday I was back in my doctor’s office.

“Good news,” he started, “is that you don’t have arthritis in the knee joint.” I was thrilled, especially after a grizzled Physician’s Assistant with no bedside manner assured me in the after-hours clinic that I had arthritis and my meniscus had to be “mush” due to my age. It meant no knee replacement necessary, for the time being, at least. Then he continued. “But you do have a meniscus tear. They’d normally just let it go, but you have a flap on yours. They’ll need to cut that out, so the knee won’t lock up on you during activity.”

Since he doesn’t do surgery, he recommended another doctor, a believer in stem cell therapy. My doctor hunted him down and brought him back to the room. (Impressive service!) The surgeon told me it was an odd tear (of course; I don’t do anything “normally”) and there wasn’t much to be done but snip that flap off. “And clean up anything else I find in there.”

I knew what that meant: clean up any of the chondromalacia debris. I wasn’t in hurry. Wanting to build some strength in my legs before undergoing the knife, I scheduled surgery for six weeks later.

 

The surgery—

That morning, Chris said he’d never seen anyone more ready and excited to have knee surgery in their life. True. I was excited to find out what was going on there, myself. I sort of felt as though I had this morbid desire to use myself as a guinea pig. I chatted up a storm with everyone. Even the anesthesiologist and I got into a discussion about walking the Camino de Santiago. Fifteen minutes later the procedure was over. They’d blocked out an hour.

Chris had just settled himself into doing work on his computer in the waiting room when my surgeon bounced down the hall toward him, a jubilant smile spread across his face. “Come in here,” he said, as he waved Chris toward a private consultation room.

The surgeon tossed the glossy pictures of my internal knee anatomy toward Chris. “Look at this!” he gushed. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Chris pretended to know what he was looking at as the surgeon pointed out the structures. “See her ACL (anterior cruciate ligament)? That glossy area indicates it was damaged, and then healed. That’s remarkable. And see the color of the ligament itself? It’s shape?” Chris nodded as he stared at the picture. “That’s what a ligament of a twenty-year-old athlete looks like!”

Chris’s gaped at the surgeon, who continued. “And, aside from the tear, her meniscus are also in near-perfect condition—healthy, good density. All I had to do was snip off that flap. And see the fibers branching out from the tear edges? It’s healing itself!”

Chris threw out a couple of “Wow” comments as the doctor continued. “And see the smooth cartilage on the bones? She has NO arthritis. Absolutely amazing!”

Then the doctor flipped to the second sheet of pictures. “Now there’s the war zone!” He pointed to the pitted kneecap surface, with the fragments of sheared and scraped-off cartilage hanging off the kneecap and floating in the joint fluid. “Typical gymnast knee. Lots of brutal shear force. I just cleaned off the mess. The good news is that she actually has about 1/3 of the surface cartilage left for stem cells to bond to. She’s a prime candidate for the treatment!

“I don’t know what you guys are doing, eating or exercising or good living. But whatever it is, keep doing it!”

 

Recovery—

Chris couldn’t wait to share the good news. I was thrilled. At my post-op appointment, the surgeon confirmed what he told Chris and said he didn’t think I’d ever need a need replacement.

I lay on the couch post-surgery and bragged to anyone who called to check on me that I had the knees of a 20-year-old. But it didn’t take me long to think a little deeper about what had transpired.

I’d turned 61 just four days prior to surgery. Twenty years old was four long decades ago. Even if I took into account:

  • my pension to eat well and consume a lot of anti-inflammatory foods;
  • my liberal use of anti-inflammatory meds during my twenties;
  • the likelihood that I’m blessed with good genes, (my mom is 97 ½ and without any skeletal problems);
  • and my athletic escapades and genetic bent toward strong, powerful muscles that hold joints together;

 

I can in no way account for all of those factors subtracting 40 years from the age of my knee.

 

Somewhere along the line, some heaven-sent miracle arrested the aging of my knee; or I received a healing miracle sometime during the last 40 years.

I won’t know this side of heaven what the answer is, but I’m SOOOOO grateful. I probably won’t need my knee sawed out and replaced with a bionic, titanium alloy model. Something that’s so often done these days that it reminds me of assembly-line surgery.

 

Healing process—

So now I’m working on rehabilitating my knee. Recovery is creeping along much more slowly than I predicted, but I’m guessing that’s all in God’s plan too. Another lesson in slowing down, trusting. Practicing peace in the face of incapacity and pain.

Surgery recovery has a way of putting life into perspective. It whittles life down to what’s important and really urgent.

Turns out not much is really urgent, although we elevate a lot of things in our lives to urgent. Sometimes I think we do that to make our lives seem more relevant.

And we get brainwashed into believing that unless our lives seem relevant, then we aren’t relevant.

I’m also amazed once again at how God has created the body to heal itself. Sometimes that’s a slow process that needs cooperation. Otherwise, healing can go haywire. I confess I’m not always a patient person, so the healing process is also a lesson in patience, another product of the Spirit’s fruit.

 

Any way you look at it, it constitutes a miracle.

There’s a lot to be learned from an injury.

Youthful knees or not!

Photo:

By the way, the above picture is not a photo of the moon. It’s the inside of my knee. The damaged part of it. The grayish area is where the surface cartilage has been worn down, “like sandpaper,” the surgeon said. Gymnastics. All of the surface should be pearly white.

Hopefully it will become that way if and when I have those stem cell injections!

I’ll be praying for another miracle!

 

Until next week,

Shalom,

Andrea

“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

Perhaps Today! Actively (and Expectantly) Awaiting Jesus’ Return

I’m a mug junkie. I have mugs overflowing around our house. Mugs in the cupboards. Mugs on a special shelf in our solarium-breakfast room. I even had my husband add another shelf to one of our kitchen cabinets to accommodate all of them. The cabinet right above the coffee maker. The cabinet stuffed with mugs, tea, and coffee-making supplies. It’s gotten to be a family joke.

I don’t remember when I started “collecting” them. I had a few mugs scattered around, special ones I’d picked up at seminars, (with conference logos and company promo material), national park mugs, and mugs from Hawaii with our Anglicized-Hawaiian names on them. But when I gave up collecting vacation-spot T-shirts, I gravitated toward mugs, which are much more difficult to haul home (unbroken) in a suitcase!

Now I have “retired” mugs on display on a special shelf, the ones I don’t want to break or wear down any longer through usage; and the noteworthy cracked ones I can’t bear to part with. And I have several secreted away that no one else is allowed to use but me. The mugs given as extra-special gifts, or the ones that remind me of sweet times Chris and I have spent together at some charming Bed and Breakfast.

But there’s one mug I’ve never used. It’s been prominently displayed on my writing desk for over 25 years. The blue marble-look mug I received after donating to a well-known ministry. The words on it remind me of something I should keep forefront in my mind. Every day. Words especially appropriate for this month when we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord.

Perhaps Today!

 

Can you guess what those words reference?

They’re a reminder that our Lord will return one day. They’re a hope that perhaps today will be that glorious day—when He’ll return, subdue the earth, vanquish his foes, and lift up and resurrect the faithful.

 

Jesus’ Second Coming—

Of course, not everyone believes He will return. And not everyone harbors the hope within his or her heart that He will. Some are terrified it might be true.

 

I thought about my “Perhaps Today!” mug when reading a chapter from Max Lucado’s book And the Angels Were Silent: The Final Week of Jesus. Reading that book has been my Lenten practice nearly every year the last 23 years.

The particular chapter that brought the mug to mind is titled “Be Ready.” The verse associated with the chapter is Matthew 24:42:

 

“So always be ready, because you don’t know the day your Lord will come.”

 

It’s a winsome (and stark) reminder that being ready for His return is a way of life. A critical one.

Jesus’ Last Sermon on Earth—

In his book, Lucado examines what Jesus says and does (and doesn’t say and do) the last week of His earthly life. It’s a lesson—when time and distractions are stripped away—on what’s important. This particular chapter looks at the topic of Jesus’ last sermon.

What would you think a last-sermon topic would be? Like Lucado, we’d probably preach on love, or family, or church attendance, ministry support. Spreading the Gospel. Doing good and being good. Marching for some social justice issue.

But Jesus focuses on something He evidently believes is far more important.

He focuses on being prepared.

Or, as Lucado bluntly puts it:

 

“He preached on being ready for heaven and staying out of hell.”

 

Hell. Now there’s a word many recoil at. “Does anyone believe in hell anymore?” you might ask.

Jesus is a firm believer in it. If you haven’t tallied up the numbers, He talked about hell and money more than anything else while He was on earth.

But it’s become a passé or quaint subject. An idea reserved for the undereducated or simple-minded. As Lucado points out:

 

“We don’t like to talk about hell, do we? In intellectual circles the topic of hell is regarded as primitive and foolish. It’s not logical. ‘A loving God wouldn’t send people to hell.’ So we dismiss it.

But to dismiss it is to dismiss a core teaching of Jesus. The doctrine of hell is not one developed by Paul, Peter, or John. It is taught by Jesus himself.

And to dismiss it is to dismiss much more. It is to dismiss the presence of a loving God and the privilege of a free choice.”

 

And that’s the point: we all have a free choice. To choose heaven or hell. And God will honor what we choose.

 

Where will you choose to spend eternity?

God talks a lot about what we’ll gain by going to heaven, how we can get there, and what consequences we face if we choose poorly.

And that leaves me with one more point Lucado made. An ironclad argument against this idea that there is a heaven but no opposite place—hell—in existence.

 

“To reject the dualistic outcome of history and say there is no hell leaves gaping holes in any banner of a just God. To say there is not hell is to say God condones the rebellious, unrepentant heart. To say there is no hell is to portray God will eyes blind to the hunger and evil in the world. To say there is no hell is to say that God doesn’t care that people are beaten and massacred, that he doesn’t care that women are raped or families wrecked. To say there is no hell is to say God has no justice, no sense of right and wrong, and eventually to say God has no love. For true love hates evil.

Hell is the ultimate expression of a just Creator.”

 

I’ll add one more thought: If there is no hell, why would Jesus have to endure humiliation, abandonment, torture, and a cruel Roman cross to provide a way for us to enter and enjoy heaven? Was that all just one big wasted event?

Surprisingly, staying out of hell and making the choice for Him and an eternal life in heaven, is the same topic he preached on during His first sermon.

He constantly warned people to be prepared. He focused on the subject the last week of His life, three short days before His death.

 

And I believe it’s a subject we need to return to today. Not by standing on street corners with signs, pointing angry fingers at people and shouting at them through angry, twisted lips and with blazing eyes that they’re headed for doom.

I think it’s something we need to continue talking about in a loving, firm way. With hearts of concern for the rejecters or uncommitted. As I’ve heard pastors say, “If you saw someone in a burning building, wouldn’t you try to do everything you could to save them? Or would you just walk by and say, ‘Oh well?'”

 

I know many think we believers-in-hell are feeble-minded, duped, or downright nuts. But that’s okay with me. I’d rather it weren’t true; I’d like to believe that God just says, “Okay. I’m going to let everyone into heaven, even if they’ve rejected me. Or just annihilate them so they’ll never know what they’re missing. That’s a belief to which many faithful are now subscribing. It just sounds nicer.

But I can’t have it my way. I don’t make the rules. God does. And I don’t think He would have spent so much time warning against it if it were just some big cosmic joke. A “just kidding” discussion.

 

What to do while we’re waiting—

Does looking forward to His second coming mean I do nothing but twiddle my thumbs until it happens? Many people that laugh at us, thinking that’s what we’re do.

But when I think “Perhaps Today!” my looking forward to it in anticipation should drive me closer to preparation, being found busy and active, as Jesus instructs us to be. Doing His work down here, like a faithful ambassador, until He returns.

So, along with the “Perhaps Today” thought, I try to start every day with a Jewish adage I learned some years ago: “Rise up like a lion in the service of the Lord.”

You never know when or at what hour you might be called. You might as well be busy during the waiting and anticipation process.

And then it will be too late.

 

May God grant you a happy, expectant “Perhaps Today!” heart as you prepare for the commemoration of His final week, crucifixion and glorious Resurrection, and live every day of your life until He returns!

 

Until next time,

Shalom!

Andrea

“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

A Birthday Self-Assessment and Vision

Do you ever think about the past, spend time thinking about the sweet memories of yesteryear?

Your birthday is a perfect time to do some self-examination, an assessment of the last year.

But we can fall into that pit of reviewing more of the bad things than the sweet ones—our mistakes, our sins, our really bad moments, and the bad things that were done unto us.

 

A week ago, I did the birthday self-assessment. I looked backward, and I sought God for the forward. And then I had a revelation.

As we age, we seem to spend a lot of time looking backward, at the regrets, the inability to measure up physically to the person we used to be.

Then the Lord in His graciousness revealed something to me that perhaps He’s already revealed to you.

Here are some notes I wrote in my journal—

 

“Lord, in some many ways, I hate growing old, even though I know with each passing day, month and year I get closer to eternity with You. And I suppose that should make me rejoice with each extra candle. Knowing how much joy You must take in knowing your children’s journeys on earth are winding down, until full renewal and the fullness of time results in a restored body and life that won’t flinch or pale at length of days.

“So why do I live and breathe and behave as though this is it? I want to walk toward You, in joy, in peace, in hope, in Longing, thrilled anticipation of that glorious, perfect day. I want to rejoice over moving toward perfection rather than wallowing in and lamenting my failures. I want to move on, with a heart saturated to overflowing with happiness and peace.

“…It is good. It is enough!”

 

The little red journal I’m using right now has Scripture verses at the bottom of each page. I read them after I’ve written that day’s inklings. The verse at the bottom of the first page I wrote on for my birthday was this:

 

“The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Proverbs 4:18).

 

A perfect verse for what the Lord had laid on my heart to ponder.

My path is a shining light. Only I can allow it to be darkened by my thoughts, attitude and behavior.

God is the light that shines on that path.

And that shining light will shine brighter and brighter as I move toward the perfect day—the day when the Lord will renew Heaven and Earth, and I will be counted among the happy citizens of His Kingdom. In a body designed to work and live and rejoice forever!

 

With those facts planted in my heart, why would I not enjoy the walk down the path, toward the brighter light? Why would I not look forward to that day when I will be absent from my body and present with the Lord?

Why would I not embrace every added year?

I should embrace every year, even as my body fails and abilities decrease. And that’s my goal this year: to be focusing on that light and have my heart set on eternity.

 

May your paths shine brighter and brighter, and may you be looking forward toward the brighter light, not at the dull one behind you.

 

Meditation Mondays will be going on hiatus until April 1, so I can focus on recovering from my recent knee surgery. I’ll have a way for you to sign up to receive these posts, and in return, I’ll have a freebie for you to enjoy!

See you back here next month!

Blessings,

Andrea

“Certainly there was an Eden….We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.” —J.R.R. Tolkien