SPIRITUAL DEMENTIA HAPPENS

Hebrews 11:7b

“He {Noah} obeyed God, who warned him about things that had never happened before.”

I’m in the middle of things that have never happened before.  Are you?  Maybe these things have happened to other people, but not to you, and not to me.  And even so, since they’ve never happened to me or you, because of God’s great creativity in making you & me, those same things are now different, since they’ve never happened before in our lives.

I’m facing the loss of my mother to dementia.  Dementia is a terrible disease:  the slow fading away of a loved personality, the morphing of a person into someone unknown, the slipping away of a sharp mind into a shadow-world where no one can follow, and the fear that someday I will  follow her into that gray place.  Words can’t convey what dementia is.  The only medium for explanation is personal experience.

God knows her, though.  He is there with her in that place where she lives.  He can understand her fears, her paranoia, her need to escape.  I can take comfort in that.  When He spoke her into motion, He knew this day would come.  She is no less His today than she was when she was 12 and meeting Him for the first time.

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual dementia in my life.  I forget God’s goodness when I experience loss or when I don’t get my way.  I major on minors, like my mother worrying over not having a car anymore (and what would she do with a car?).  When I’m slighted, I get irritated, as if being slighted has any eternal significance at all!  Sometimes I make up stories to explain away my insignificance in the universe; my mother is sometimes a spy, a much-sought-after “person of interest” in a non-existent crime she witnessed, or the victim of abuse who needs sympathy and support.

There are many spiritual lessons to be learned from experiencing dementia close-up and personal.  I watched my mother the other day trying to find the fish she had secreted in the cast on her wrist; of course, there was no fish, but she spent a good share of visiting time looking for and stressing over this fish.  

And it occurred to me, how much time do I waste looking for something that isn’t there while ignoring what is right there in front of me?  Is He watching me like I was watching my mother, with pity and sympathy, trying to get me to see what He sees?  Maybe He wants me to see my co-worker’s need instead of focusing on some insignificant want in my own life.  Maybe He is asking me to step up and out of my little boxed-in comfort zone and risk something for another’s soul.

Maybe, just maybe, as I go and visit my mother frequently, there might be some ministry opportunity in that place where she lives.  Who knows?  I need to find that box-cutter!

Father, please help me to use this opportunity

To learn all that You want me to learn, and then by Your

Grace get out of my boxed-in comfort zone and use all that

Learning to display Your majesty to those in my world and in

My mother’s world.  Amen.