I'm still doing it. Every time I pull myself up out of that pit of self-pity, self disgust, and inactivity, I go sliding back down the slippery slope to the bottom of the muck. It's no one's fault but my own, and I don't mean to whine but I am. I continue to be amazed at my lack of ability to change, to re-energize, to get things going. I feel stuck, on a treadmill of nothing, paralyzed by an unseen power.
What I am now missing most is the goal, the necessity of planning, training-- and the ability, of course-- and the growing excitement that getting ready to do the Chicot Challenge gave me. And I wonder. I wonder what God is trying to tell me. Is He challenging my faith? Am I to believe against all odds, to receive healing and recover and start training again and do the swim? If so, I am failing royally. Is He telling me it's time to move on, that a new phase in my and my wife's life has opened up, and it's time to leave the past behind? Or is He telling me to get the surgery and face the long road back to swimming?
Part of my problem with that is the nature of my injury. Everything changed when I received the results of the below the surface look into my shoulder. I have a long list of injuries, but one, tendinitis of biceps tendons (or was in tendinosis?) has lasted now more than seven months and the doctor told me might last forever. That did not happen in a single incident which I was sure was the case. That is one of the reasons I have dragged my feet on the surgery. Will I ever be the same? Will it happen to the other shoulder? Do I really want to continue doing something that I now know is breaking down my body maybe even more than it is building it up?
Since my bodily wreckage, I have begun to read again, I am studying more, and I think that my preaching is inching up, getting better, reaching a new level. I think that though no one has told me thus. Maybe this is what God wants. I really am confused. I know, God is not the author of that, but my obtuseness sometimes is. I am groping like a blind man trying to find THE path, the one God wants me to travel. I'll figure it out. That's my experience with God's will. If you search you will find. It just doesn't happen on my time.
Even my writing has slowed to a slug's pace in part due to my compromised mental state. Also, I no longer have my weekly training reports that always jump started my blog posting. Not only that, but somehow we seem to be doing less in-class writing in Comp I this semester. How did that happen?
But my outlook on some things have improved. Penny and I recently attended a Ministers' and Wives' Fellowship meeting way out on the edge of Montgomery County. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and we both felt at home. Over the last few years when we pastored our little church in Moorhead, I became a bit of a recluse. I refused to go to revivals or any other sort of church meeting. I always left those feeling attacked. The anti-intellectualism I faced became overwhelming, disheartening, soul souring. So I just stopped taking part. Now we are Baptist, and not once have I noticed a hint of the attitudes that so wore on me in our former denomination. After our Thursday meeting, I told my lovely wife that, "I feel at home." She shares my sentiment. Maybe that is what my broken body is about. It allows us to re-involve and not feel rushed and pushed to do it.
I still have more questions than answers. But I'm still looking, asking, knocking, and praying. Praise be to God.
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