Livin' on a prayer

Well, I've spent the last hour fighting tears since I thought I fixed my camera issues for a Zoom meeting earlier, only to learn when I joined the meeting that I only made them worse--as in no camera at all. Sometimes it's the littlest things that can be so frustrating.

Staying with a friend at the summer Bible conference, I had a friend of hers, a 77-year-old Believer visiting from Virginia who's half-German and half-Chinese, listen to me as we were getting ready for bed. She asked, "Did your dad ever have victory over the drugs?"

I said, "No," telling her that when he fell and broke his hip he was, coincidentally, next to his side table for his reclining chair and on it he had more than a dozen different bottles of pills (some, I know, were for calming anxiety) and injectables.

My dad lived alone and for more than 48 hours he repeatedly shot himself up with the very strong painkiller injectable Talwin. That's how much he didn't want to go to the hospital, I guess. Either that or he just wanted time to pray and get ready for what was ahead, which as it turned out, was his unexpected death.

I didn't know any of these details until after his death and I only talked to him briefly after he was admitted into the hospital, scheduled for hip-replacement surgery the next morning. I didn't even know he broke anything until I got a call from my sister earlier that day that he was in the hospital with a broken hip.

As I've written before, he was being prepped for surgery when they had to put him in intensive care and he died that afternoon from an undetected aneurysm.

I sincerely want people who read this blog to know that while I have had a long history of drinking, dating back to my early 20s, I am sober now finally.

I simply decided finally that I want to know what life can be like if I give myself more fully to the Lord. It's like this email message a man sent my pastor after he was diagnosed with cancer: "You'll never know that Jesus Christ is really all you need until He's really all that you have."

This is where I am as someone who is acutely lonely, especially for meaningful fellowship in the Lord. I have to trust Him to put people in my path who can help save me from the depression I face each day.

I guess that's really what this book I've been writing for the last 20 years has been about. Wanting to connect and share, using my journalism skills to try and help people better understand God's Word, knowing personally what good can come from that, but not knowing what people want to be bothered reading.

I'm still not certain of that and that's what's kept me from ever finishing the book. I feel strongly that I have to share myself--the real me--if I want to publish the kind of book that I think people will want to read.

Of course, I am scared, more and more, that time is running out for me to get this book published and it's really all I have left.

Actually, when I think about it, this book has been the only thing that's kept me going all along! I feel I would have died long ago from the loneliness if not for this outlet to keep me--the writer, the Believer, the missionary--alive.

The other day, having a sad afternoon in a summer that has been made harder by the fact I've been wearing a medical Velcro-strap boot on my left foot for 5 weeks now, I remembered a song by the band America that I loved from the '70s. It was the refrain from their hit "I Need You":

I need you like the flower needs the rain
You know I need you, guess I'll start it all again
You know I need you like the winter needs the spring
You know I need you, I need you