There were ice storms the day I flew home. It didn't stop the planes, thankfully, but it did create delays. First there was a small hour's delay at Pheonix, then in the air over O'hare (and they kept telling us, we may get to land within twenty minutes. twenty minutes would go by and they'd say the same thing) then on the runway at O'hare (becuase they didn't have a gate free. and they kept telling us twenty more minutes. ten more minutes.). But it was all not objectively very long, and the politely chatty wife of a businessman was sitting next to me and we chatted. After that was a couple hours waiting for the bus, a couple hours of bus ride, and about an hour of white knuckled driving over roads like long skating rinks.
At some point, on the runway, it occured to me that there really is no use in waiting for anything. Everything that we hope will bring us relief from our problems, when we get it, creates another set of problems.
-When we're kids, we think growing up will make our lives easier (maybe?) becuase we'll have power, but it doesn't; it puts us in a position to have to deal with a lot of crap. Because we have the power to.
-When we're single, we think that Finding Someone, or Getting Married will solve all our problems, but it really just seals us into dealing with our problems and their consequences in one particular situation. We hope it will grant us all our desires, but it only traps us with the fact that our desires often can't be fulfilled.
-When mothers have young children, they think their lives will be easier when the children grow older and they don't have to lull them to sleep at night and wipe their rear ends. When the kids grow older though, they start doing terrible risky and/or stupid things, and the mothers are wracked by worry that they can do nothing about. And they look back fondly on the days when they could solve all their children's problems by lulling them to sleep.
-When men have bad jobs, or bad bosses, or are just bored with working, they wish they could retire, relax, and enjoy life. But they forget that the other term for Retirement Home is Nursing Home. And a nursing home is a place where people who are no longer able to work sit around, pretend that Bingo is important because its distracting, and if they're lucky, get visited by their children for a few hours every other weekend.
I don't mean to paint a gloomy picture. I think that all of these troubles have a point, and provide chances to trust God in ways that we would get nowhere else. But it doesn't seem worthwhile to wait for the situation to change. That won't solve anything. We deal with the problems we have, and if we can do that, good. If we make a habit of just dealing with what we're given, we stand a chance of dealing with what we're given,
and getting the good out of it. If we continually evade our problems, to chase after some bright future, we wind up at the end of our lives having done nothing. Isn't there a fairy tale about that? A boy with a silver ball and a golden thread? It would allow him to skip forward in time through anything he felt was unpleasent, but at the end of his life, he begged the fairy with tears to take the magic thing back and let him start his life again. Fairy tales aren't stupid, you know.
And I suppose by all those 'we' s just now, I can only mean 'I'.
At any rate. My grampa appears to be dying. He has been in a slow decline for years now, and has thought that he was dying, but in the last week he has taken a turn for the worst, and this looks like the last turn. He had cancer years ago, and it relapsed? came back? It is now spread in his bones all across his back. They have given him enough morphine to dope him up and let him sleep for the moment. My mum is helping my granma take care of him (she and he still live at home together) as much as she (my mum) can, and my sisters (and me) take care of our younger brothers as much as is needed. Which is not even different than normal. Nothing on the surface is really different. Except that he's dying- and it's kind of odd. I have spent my whole life, for the most part, in and out of his house, and, for the most part, with him.
I don't know how to explain the importance of this exactly. For the past few days since I got home the fields have been smoothed with ice. Whenever the sun comes out, it pours into them, till they become a sea of molten glass. Every tree and every dead weed looks like its made out of transparent fire.
That was the end result of all the delays. That was why I secretly didn't mind having to sit in the plane, on the runway.
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