The Meandering Mind of a Christian Woman

            Once again, I am sad, my uncle passed into glory yesterday. Yes, I am happy for his transition; he no longer suffers in his mortal coil with pain and can hear the glorious praises of angels without hearing aids. But I am sad for me and for my aunt and cousins who will feel the loss of his love and humor. What has dawned on me is that as a culture; we do not want to allow people to be sad. We always want to make things cheerful, why is that? Why are we so uncomfortable with sadness?             God created us with a range of emotions to feel and experience. Yet, we only want to experience the “nice” emotions; love, joy, happiness and the like. However, in a bittersweet way we need those lower emotions of sadness, frustration and anger to help us truly appreciate that when life is, in our opinion, good.             The bible and ...

So, we laid my mother to rest this past week. She had been declining the past four years with ever increasing dementia. We saw her go from being slightly forgetful to unable to operate kitchen appliances or set the table to unable to stand on her own to the inability to communicate in full sentences to the inability to be able to communicate at all and finally refusing to eat or drink and into a coma. Over the four years we prayed for her peace and for our own. It is painful to see a once vibrant woman lose herself and her memories and her words and in effect, her children when she no longer recognized us. We wanted her to pass away to heaven because she had already left us mentally. I told myself I was ready for her to go, especially as caring for her became more difficult and she looked past me or through me with no sign of recognition. I was convinced that my grieving process had already taken place. I have much to learn. I have to tell you, no one was more surprised than me when...