Month: Dec 2022

“45 minutes to live”

Looking back over the past week, I am overwhelmed by the good!

2 different Emergency Rooms, 2 racing ambulances – a laser-eyed Cardiologist that made me feel my precious husband was his brother,

‘3 death defying blocks’ in a man who is not any kind of candidate for a heart attack. “His heart, all…in great condition….but he has survived 3 deadly blocks esp the last six months, and a silent heart attack” ( a painless one???He’s not diabetic!)??? The answers riddle the questions.

Crib outside ICU

2 am, 3am, 4. Fortis hospital – quiet except for a few others like me. Clutching the soft amber blanket given by one of our gang of friends that came by to huddle and pray together; I could not exhale. Some of them (angels!) helped with paper work. Another brought our kids from home. Waiting without knowing what that precise minute is doing to your beloved, is a life changing event. It hauled the sacred in like never before, not pausing to wait for me to catch breath. After everyone left, and it was hitting 5 am, my favorite hour on earth, Time stood like a rearing race horse. If I breathed the earth tip tilted.

“Say something,” I whispered. Deadly still took over and a wordless voice told me my NoelJeff could be taken, or left behind for more earth time; it was His calendar and not dependant on human blocks and cardio skills.

I jumped up alert, the amber blanket folding down at my shoes.

There it was again. A voice not sweet and tender but deeper than the ocean of fear welling up within. “Fear no human situation. Fear the One who made it all.” How on earth was I suddenly feeling so deeply loved/ cared for by my Invisible One? I was also numb, watching everything like from the inside of a storm. Anyone thinking this is self counselling …. bro., you got to taste this to know this.

6am, 6.39..am, unsure of what the clock said, I just sat there. An Attender smiled and hung around asking if I needed anything. He had the firm face of Health care workers, somehow softened around the edges but with the ability to bear you bad news.

The next 24 hours free fell into the blue sky above my scalp, tingling. You don’t want this terrific brew of grief, shock and awe at the tininess of us humans. Dr.R., and his large hands showed us how my husband’s heart looked and what they were about to do in there….

signatures, bills, nods, thumbs up and Doc vanished into an interior where my Soul mate lay between this life and another.

How on earth had he had a heart attack? We were having a normal dinner, it was chilly, he never liked sweaters, but that night he needed one. We checked pulse; covid had brought home some equipment. He smiled, amused, when my daughter said it was low and why don’t we just go over to local Zion hospital? “Ok. I’ll get the keys…” He drove. He is an angel but you never really get to tell him what to do. Except later that night, last week, 12am, rushed into an ambulance that tore down a busy lane, with a nurse holding onto my hand; the very young nurse, two drivers, and I in that crazy siren….

( my lines and paras jumble, am still getting my head back together)

outside Cath Lab, our muslim friend, prayed out loud, his arabic syllables melting in with my daughter and my internal kneeling. A moment we will never forget. He prayed a verse, praising God’s existence. We prayed to a risen Christ. I had this Image of a Cross shaped Stent😊, uh couple of them.

As they wheeled him out he did a 360 degree grin and replied, “I’m feeling fantastic!”

whattt???

My doc sis bundled me into nearby Ashraya Intl’ hotel; unsure what we ate. She had to leave by 5 am. There it was again: dawn sweeping away shadows and blinking in thru the shutters. Breakfast buffet down stairs alone was a whole new chapter of oxygen. It could’ve been just me, forever. No more morning teas with him, no more random car rides and oh… hiding his stuff for the sheer joy of a prank, no more his warm hands holding me close esp when I sulked….

what can I say. Am staring startled at tender mercy new every morning. We are back home. My husband is in recovery and doing well, stents and all. He has energy like from a decade before????! And I cannot get that Voice out of head, that One deeper than the ocean within.

In today’s Reflections just now, Noel J. wrote this, printed with his absolute permission:

REFLECTIONS. ✨✨
Throughout the Bible we find this phrase, “Do not be afraid”.
God wasn’t trying to scare people!!
He is real. Everything He tried to tell us was about His love for us, He wanted to commune with us, and that He is our God and we are His people!
God wants us to follow Him out of love rather than fear. To overcome crippling fear, we must think more about His love.


What is the message of Christmas?


One song writer put it this way, you may know the song.. “Love came down…”
One of my favourite scriptures from Romans reads,
“We’re able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us, and we feel this warm love everywhere within us because God has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with His love.” Ro.5:5 LB
1.Jn.4:18 says, “Perfect love drives out fear.”
Have a blessed day y’all 😃

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hug! 👆🏼

I have so much to say; deep peace & love jostle for attention inside. Wishing y’all the same as we watch another year wrap. May our fantastic Invisible One hold you close too.

Why, Twitch?!

Suicide is a deadly option, but those who’ve been to its edge, say that it just simple plain & total, takes over. This smiling happy face, Twitch has been our family favorite. Anyone who can move like that, in pure honest-to- goodness joy, is a masterpiece. This Story will go on a bit before Media turns its glare on other news.

Last night while we were searching the skies for stray comets that might slip over to our side of the city, the sky an indigo purple at mudnight –

I got thinking how tiny we must look from space. A glowing jewel, really. All our generations of man, woman, child, flora, fauna, war, bruise, buried place…our judgments, abuse, rejection, courtesy, indifferences, war, treaties, indifference, cultural/ spiritual kind unkindness; …

🥀 Thank you Cindy of https://chronic-joy.org/ for you eternally meaningful cards.

all that, is a dot in space, but close up we are breathtaking beautiful. C’mon. We have our shares of pain, our investments in disgrace, but creativity is stunning. We’ve too been called Creators of projects. We hate, but we love. I believe it is love that causes the insecure to turn bitter. Somewhere a need was not met. Somewhere a disbelief began. Somewhere we were hushed into a depth no one else could know. We own cellars. We bully our self into a submission that believes the worst Faith: we are dispensible. We are rich with a poverty that can seep like a deadly tide and we won’t know when it will wreak its lethal harvest.

The city where I live in, Bangalore, is known as our Suicide Capital. When I was in my early 20s, we did a Documentary on Suicide prevention. I helped out a lot; thought I knew how this went.

Nada! The next month there was this acquaintance who hung herself. To this day I remember the last time we met, her eyes sparkling with a new love. They were getting married that year she said, she was wearing a green Tee and long blue skirt. Kay didn’t make it. I had seen nothing in her that betrayed underlying conditions.

Unsure where am going with this Post. Just stay safe y’all. Life is short, but here we learn how to die please. Life is precious. We are precious. None dispensible. Its a Planet that needs us to do only what we can do. Like it or not, thats the truth of Mortal existence. We are a necessary link in someones life. Like it or not, we each own finger prints none has. We are Creators ourselves. There’s much to do. We were Created. For purpose.

Beyond this there is a Space yet to be made friends with. Beyond what we know, think,imagine, we are immortal.

Fire dance

WordPress Daily Prompt: have you ever performed on stage or given a speech

Yes, I have performed even my Tefillah* on stage & ones in streets & inside my teeth.

Ma would weep.

For me praying used to be racing sandslopes to where the sun was still in grey waters waiting to give me gold:

a gold that took everything,

It still seeps my tides of Will & Time: a refining Fire mill.

Later I saw grown ups pray / rocking at walls, then walk away; but do watch when a Prayerer sways: each sway is a flame that is given away, not necessarily warming only the Prayerer.

***

Yeah though shhhhlisten I have the deadliest condition : unanswered prayers. These mutate at Change;

I do not wait for You, God, for togetherness’ sake, my Asking only dictates!

Forgive me, Abba

I’m returning, racing to where You wait, like the silence of the sun, unchanged.

I’ve seen too much to dismiss the Dawn that brought me here: my best Tefillah is yet to be

where Abba burns the dark to dance with me,

in the firemill that changes the Asker.

***

*Tefillah : Hebrew. Outpour of heart, in Presence of the Almighty.

I responded to a Skeptic not realizing this was going to be more than sweet poetry shares…

Poetry partnerships are responses to each other’s poem.

I hadn’t a clue that the articulate, kind eyed Skeptic’s Kaddish was agreeing to many extra miles just to be seen with my Yeshua verses.

In his Post David Bogomolny says,” Yes, I responded to Faith Poetry.”

“…I mean, really, one of the main reasons I avoid such poetry is because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. What would be the point of responding to a true believer’s sincere God-loving poem with my skepticism? What would my cynical response accomplish? And- believe me, I have almost nothing left in me today but cynicism…” David Bogomolny, Skeptic’s Kaddish – ben Alexander David.

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I’m a ‘Faith Poet’? Now I know, thank you David. Love the description.

‘He didn’t want to hurt me’ … ben A.D. Ah’m. You don’t see my cactus heart – I’d have been the original doubting Thomas’ daughter had it not been for What we been staring thru’ the dark at !

David writes with skilled ease and forms I never knew existed. Like it or not, this impatience at “faith”, coupled with careful toeing of thin line between here and the Shekinah, is fascinating; his Kaddish of grief, at loss of his father, the renowned Israeli American Mathematician +, Alexander Bogomolny is a Prayer Wall all by Itself. These are lyrics of beauty in ashes. It stirred me to look closer at scepticism. After months I was blogging again and two passages from his Skeptic’s Kaddish ran at me; both are necessary to Everything.

“Papa…in describing you …I have sometimes invoked an image of you as the “genius version of Forrest Gump” because you lived through so much momentous history but remained unruffled by it. You innocently savored life’s little details and exhibited a childlike fascination for moments that went unnoticed by most. It seems to me that your life experiences were filtered through your soul before ever reaching your mind.“

His other line : “… it feels to me as though nobody has any interest in listening to those with whom they disagree politically …..”

Two random readings from a professing skeptic, and neither felt hostile to a Bible hugging momma (me);

so. We did a couple of back and forth Poetry shares. One cannot presume to know another’s journey;

as for me, it wasn’t my Ma’s insistence nor Dad’s that provoked me to stare in the Unseen. Left to myself I’d’ve been the Skeptic of skeptics, you’ve no idea. I didn’t find heaven in the pews and baptism pool till a certain clearing of my mind began. The Unseen was right there beneath my own skin and the veins of leaves, of Life;

like a Poem in our mind that becomes a written word, I stared in the dark: this is how the Unseen world works for me, this is my definition of Faith. “ ..so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” Hebrews 11.

I find God staring at my own narrow ways through other humans who can forgive one another too. Love like that hurts like little else can. And it wrecks me to pieces, in a Peace that defies defect. Nothing missing, nothing broken – Shalom. Peace.

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Our local Sati, Dowry deaths to mention a few, had begun to build me into a museum of crime records. It is not impossible to go there. I could not forgive that everyday there’s a grisly rape, an honour killing, there’s war & sins of the powerful / ‘righteous’. One summer holiday between Anne Frank and Jungle Book, I came across Corrie Ten Boom’s Hiding Place:

the power of Forgiveness mingled with Love that asks nothing in return but a certain giving: this is an act of Soul. Without which we are….what? And if we do have Soul, we are miles more than meets the eye. Sigh. Yes!

Then we could not limit our self anymore nor stay indifferent to evidences of Life beneath surfaces. Maybe we would begin to listen to each other, know why we are what we are. We are more than a few dimensions. We are minefields and diamonds that surface from generations of bruises we carry like tattoos in our skin, and stars we seek.

Sheer relief : I didn’t have to play God anymore. I gave up my panel of Controls. One could swing a hammock in a desert if you could find two good trees! There would be dust storms, there would be songs. And there could be nothing missing, nothing broken inside-out if you dared. It would be tiring. Uneasy. No blame games. Only Grace.

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I am grateful for people who believe what they believe with an honesty that is unafraid to look at the Unseen. People like David who is a true ….Tolerant?

May you be startled.

You deserve the best.