Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Asking Myself

     Few baby boomers can forget President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural charge: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country ...." Despite being electrified by it, however, I have lived constantly juxtaposed to its famous and beautifully unselfish philosophy. I don't ask what I can do for others. Instead, my beggar's heart asks, "What are they doing for me?"
     I ask if my adult children are living like me even though my modeling is errant. I ask if my husband is serving me even though I am too proud to serve him. And, as a daughter whose current focus is to assist aging parents struggling through their last days, I find myself asking if their needfulness could be, of all things, more convenient.
     But, with thanksgiving I proclaim a God who shows me that care-giving is a giving process, not a matter of questions. This most pure Care-Giver is teaching me that tending to the needs of my mom and dad is the releasing of a love that knows no bounds. I am learning that with Him there is no need to muck around in mud trying to establish boundaries when I can be on the high places experiencing moments of glory, the glory of His pleasure. For it is His pleasure I feel when I sit with my parents in a darkened room, when I rub ointment onto an arthritic back, or even when I find one of their 'lost' computer files for the hundredth time .... 
     So who am I, the most self-indulged person on the planet, to write of caring? Well, I am a child, a child walking near God's garden ..... 
"... And the Lord shall guide you continually and satisfy your desire in a scorched place and make your bones strong; And you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters do not fail." 
 Isaiah 58:11