down but not out

So I had a recent wrestling match with forces of health and darkness. As someone who is always in motion, suddenly I was not in motion.  Maybe not suddenly, but quick enough. At the end of a recent short, but very active trip, I fell into a heap.  Suffice it to say, that heap lingered for a couple of weeks, causing me not only to miss planned travel to Arizona, but to miss travel in the most minute sense– up and down the stairs, across the room, down the hall. It was like trudging through banks of snow.

Wow. As a friend asked me this morning, do you think this happened because you are not one to slow down, but perhaps should learn to do so, and this was a reminder, a nudge?  I don’t know.

What I do know is that it was a trial and a test of the realities of my time of life in which I find myself. Oldering. I had a couple of weeks of severe aches and pains, and debilitating tiredness.  Two trips to see my doctor provided no answers. The truth is I very much did not like what I began to imagine could be a new normal for me.

I trudged and trudged, then trudged some more.  In body, mind and spirit.

There’s good news this day.  I’ve pretty much bounced back and am on schedule to take my chair in the air in about fourteen hours.  Whoo hoo!

My best friend and I have had a decades-long tradition of sharing Advent time.  For years we went to northern New Mexico.  That changed a few years ago, and now we travel in January for Epiphany time in northern New Mexico.

Advent time has been moved to Houston.  I know, I know. Houston in December is not exactly an Advent winter season.  Still, it seems to work.

If you’ve followed my blog for a time, you may recall that Frosty the Snowman has played an important part in our Advent time in Houston. Frosty ended up bringing healing to the very real situation of my friend’s experiences (and mine also) with floods and relocations for the past two and a half years. Such a surprise it has been to have some of Advent focused on Frosty.

I mentioned in my last blog that I receive a daily AdventWord meditation from the Virginia Theological Seminary. Two days ago the word was rough.  In the Gospel of Luke we hear John the Baptizer quoting Isaiah, who proclaims that the “rough ways will be made smooth” in preparation for the coming of God. Our tasks on the way to smoothness are to examine our own harsh words, sharp elbows and other impediments to both human and divine relationships….

….so that we can be made smooth, the word for yesterday. “To make the way smooth for each of us to experience the liberating life of God, we must remove all the obstacles we have constructed that blocks the path of grace”.

I clearly was in the “rough”.  There could be further rough ahead, but I now catch glimpses of the smooth up ahead, and for that I give thanks!

Traveling mercies.