My mother has dementia. She is slipping away from us slowly. Due to circumstances in my life I cannot go for a visit until the first week of March. I pray, wonder and desperately hope that SHE will still be - tho' diminished - there when I go. She slips away more with every passing day.
A dear friend - whose mother died a long slow death with Alzheimer's - emailed me this AM: "We are not our minds - or even the sum total of our minds and bodies. But as Mother became worse and worse, I wondered where 'she' was - her real self. I knew she was not lost to God, and I used to pray that the further she went from us, the closer she'd be to God. But I still wanted to KNOW. Watching her decline seemed like looking through the dirty glass of a door that became more and more cloudy as she moved further and further away. So, it became a factor both of distance and of opacity. And the door I was seeing in my mind was like one of those hospital doors with a window, but beyond which only certain people - like patients - can go or be taken. I would imagine pressing my face to the glass and trying to make out something of her shape. Or her smile. But it was all dissolving into fog without substance. ... Cancer and Alzheimer's seem to me to be as good a parable of what sin has done in this world as anything."
She's right! Sin broke us all. Sin breaks our minds. Sin breaks our hearts. Sin breaks the heart of God as He sees our broken world. That's EXACTLY the reason Jesus promises to eventually renew and restore ALL things! It's not over yet and the inbetween is both real and heart-breaking but there is HOPE in what we cannot see. THAT hope is real and certain when we know Jesus! That hope comes from a state of heart - NOT a state of mind!
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