To See The Light

I’m at mom’s today, and through Monday; her live-in caregiver has gone home for a long weekend to take care of her mother. So I’ll be on the couch again for a few nights. Mom seems a bit tired lately, more easily nodding off – she’s napping right now, or getting confused about where she is. I see on the television that the stock markets down again today, and no one seems to really have confidence in the economy, or where this country is headed. And just before I came here to mom’s my friend called to tell me she got the results of tests taken yesterday – and they were not good. She is being transported to the hospital’s cardiac ICU where they will try to drain the excess fluids which are putting a stress on her weak heart. I’m sad that I can’t be there for her.

Things aren’t looking good today. Period.

It’s easy to feel depressed on days like these. And the depressed feelings can so easily roll into anxiety, which plays tricks on our mind and generally makes us someone not nice to be around. It’s easy to get angry, it’s easy to be upset at minor inconveniences, and it’s easy to just want to have a stiff drink and go to sleep. To try to forget; to make believe things aren’t so. But they are. And while we might want to hide from them, we most often can’t. Life goes on. Someone needs us, like my mom needs me.

But then I got a call from another friend. Things haven’t been going well for her either for a while. Today, however, she sounded upbeat. Her small business seemed to be doing a little better, and she felt some optimism. Her adult kids have been acting like young bratty teen-agers, and her young teen-ager has too. But she said that she decided to not react negatively to their negative feelings and comments, and to not fight back or sass back. She decided to accept any negative comments to her, smile, and just pray for them. She decided that she raised them as best she could, and she was not going to argue them to be better people, but she would pray for them to be. She was putting more faith in God. And she reported that her relations with her kids seemed to be a little better, or, she laughed, “maybe they just don’t want to fight when I don’t fight back.” She laughed. That sounded nice on a day like today.

Maybe that’s a way to make days like this a little brighter. We just have to open the blinds to see the light and stop staring at the darkness. Things aren’t really as dark as they sometimes seem. We just need to see the light that is hidden somewhere. It is there. We just need to have faith and trust in God, like my friend. As we’ve discussed before, he DOES make all things right. ALL things. And when it seems the darkest, He IS the Light. We just need to look for it and see it. It is there. He is there. Always.