Tonight my mom and I will have another favorite meal—lobster tail with drawn butter (along with an avocado-laden salad, asparagus and a big baked potato with sour cream and butter).
Last night we had prime rib (left over from Christmas and being held in the freezer just for my return) put in the slow-cooker with carrots, onion and garlic and eaten with roasted fingerling potatoes (rosemary-and-thyme seasoned) and another big avocado salad and asparagus.
As hard as it is coping with my sister’s shocking demise last April, I find it even harder knowing my mom is so alone and fighting anxiety and depression when there’s no one at home except her and Murray (our Chocolate Lab). She relied so heavily on having my sister nearby and knowing that Rita and her family were a constant.
Now she hasn’t even talked to my niece outside of the two recent holidays. It’s hardly any better with my brother-in-law. I guess there’s just a lot of hard feelings on their part over the way everything ‘went down’ with my sister’s illness and her diagnosed brain injury. My mom doesn’t even know what it is.
The big struggle I have is how to be truly content in my day-to-day life knowing my mom is hurting, alone, without family and fighting for basic contentment as she grieves over losing the daughter she loved so dearly. It seems like an impossibility at times. After all, she is someone who resides in the far, far depths of my soul.
*****
A story that’s always been told about me is how on one Halloween eve when I was only 5, my dad took a bunch of us neighborhood kids around in his Cadillac to go trick-or-treating “in style.”
My mom stayed at home to answer the doorbell and she was absolutely floored when she opened the door one of the times it rang to find me standing on the stoop in my costume. She said, ‘Lisa, what are you doing here?!’ I answered, ‘I just wanted to make sure you were still here.’
That’s the kind of attachment I’ve always had with my mom. Life surely could not go on without her, or at least it doesn’t feel like it could.
*****
Paul starts out in Philippians 2, “1] If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,
[2] Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.
Jordan says, “The Christian life is not rules and regulations and performances and if, ‘I see this happening—OOOH, that’s God working!’ Life starts out of, as Jesus Christ says, ‘the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.’ (Luke 6:45).
“Proverbs 4:23 says, ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.’ Your life proceeds forth out of something inside of you. The outward activities are just the expression of something that’s inside and this passage is talking about what’s inside that is to be working in and through you.
“Bowels and mercies. People say, ‘What’s that?’ Go back to chapter 1 and Paul’s already told you. He writes in verse 8, ‘For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.’ Obviously he’s using a figure of speech or a metaphor.
“You can easily find another place it’s used that will explain it to you. The bowels of something is the innermost recesses. Bowels of the cave; bowels of a ship.
“Isaiah 16:11 says, ‘Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kir-haresh.’ He’s talking about, ‘I’m going to have some groaning way down in the depths of my inner man; my inward parts,’ and he’s not just talking about his physical anatomy; he’s talking about his soul.
“I John 3:17 is another place that helps you. ‘But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’
“He’s talking about the innermost part of a person’s soul. The inward part. By the way, the issue about the bowels of compassion—that’s where compassion comes from.
“If there’s something that can go right down into the depths of your soul where life really comes from . . . is there any of that? It’s all in Christ. Now he says, ‘If all this identity and these things you have in Christ are true, here’s the mindset it’s going to produce.’
“Philippians 2:2 says, ‘Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.’ He’s saying, ‘Here’s the thing I’m trying to get done in the ministry.
Paul goes on, ‘Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.
[4] Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.
[5] Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:’
“ ‘In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves’—that’s the whole key!
“By the way, verse 4 is a great verse to remind you you have to be careful when you read the bible. If you take that verse out of its context, and take it literally, you can see how that verse will get you into trouble!”
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