Faith Works 1-8-22

Faith Works 1-8-22
Jeff Gill

Time and again, then and now
___

In the last couple of years, my wife and I have been introduced to a wonderful community, a welcoming fellowship.

They were all around us all along, but we didn't have the invocation ready before, we didn't know the liturgy or the terminology or the gestures. Now, what's amazing is how easy it is to feel included, how quickly we find fellow members in the most unexpected situations.

At work, in stores, getting our hair cut, just random encounters, it comes up: people our age who are caring for elderly parents who are losing their full range of abilities, physically or cognitively, but who are insistent, even angry about how they're doing just fine. Folks like us who are helping to keep multiple residences and vehicles and utilities going while having to support a general impression of independence, with regular imprecations about "living in an institution."

(General pastoral note to any and all who are reading this: friends, please, I beg you, never ask your children to promise never to place you into a nursing home, assisted living, care facility, or even institution. Because the odds are that most of us will have to spend some time in such a non-ideal location for our care, and it's also true that something like 75% or more of all who go into one do not, in fact, die there. They are means to an end, and the end is not always ours to determine, but please, just promise me you won't make your children promise you'll never have to leave your home.)

It is startling to realize just how many people in the 45 to 65 range are dealing with these issues, and it's rewarding to talk, even in passing with relative strangers, about how others are dealing with the same challenges. Getting bills paid on time, doing laundry, handling major household repairs. There's respecting elders and protecting personal pride, and there's health and safety and basic dignity. And yes, it often involves having to, um, not tell the truth. Which itself involves a number of personal compromises and conflicts between reality and loudly argued insistence as to how things once were, should be, or are even in the face of obvious contradiction.

You don't want to embarrass or humiliate anyone, let alone parents or beloved relatives, but you also have to find a path to deal with rock bottom realities that have to be treated as the hard facts that they are. Even if you're told that black is white and up is down and the year is 1972, or at least it ought to be and darn it, it is. So you nod and agree and make agreeable noises as you deal with 2022 and messes and wear and tear and decay, starting in the fridge.

And pray you don't have to replace the thirty year old fridge making ominous noises because you're not sure what other emotional eruptions it will evoke when strange men come in and take it away and put something new and not the same in its place.

These are odd challenges to deal with, but many, MANY are dealing with them. Or their first cousins. And the moment you mention something about an older parent living on their own who needs help to do so, you find there's someone a few feet away who is playing the same tune in a different key. Quickly, you start to sing together a song that you both know, and sometimes you even pick up a trio or a quartet before you're done.

Harmony isn't quite the word for it, but community is. We are many, and we're doing the best we can, and sometimes that's not quite enough. But it's true that learning you're not alone is incredibly redemptive, reassuring, even restorative. It's a strange kind of church we've joined, the fellowship of the facilitators. Let all God's people say: Amen.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's happy to hear from anyone who's in the same circumstance as he and his wife are. Tell him how you're making the implausible work out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.