Your Dying Spouse 70 - Green With Envy {FMF}

Time for Five Minute Friday, the keyword-driven timed writing exercise hosted by Kate Motaung. We're also linked to Wedded Wednesday.

Today's word is GREEN.

That's a tough one. Or maybe not.

Execute.

Life has gotten a lot harder since we met last Friday. Every time I think , well, it can't get worse, atleast for awhile, it does. Now, it's getting really hard to keep food down, and I'l losing weight. Not a good sign.

Things feel ominous.

On Facebook and in other venues I read of friends whose lives are going well...they take vacations, get promotions, get represented by literary agents, get book contracts...I love to read about it.

And I'm not green with envy. I don't envy them at all.

It's not because "I have compensations". I don't. People who say that a terminal illness is a blessing are, pardon me, idiots. This SUCKS. I do not like incontinence, and my service dogs don't like mandatory baths after I puke blood all over them.

I'm not closer to God. he seems awfully far away at the moment, though I still believe in Him. I don't know His plans; I accept what's happening as part of them.

I'm not envious because envy obviates what good I might have been able to do. To wish a changed situation at the very least wishes the deaths of some of the dogs in my care, because the circumstances that brought them here were a direct result of that illness.

Here are two of them, Josie and Reebok. They were puppies, and a day from being euthanized. The first picture is on their way home for the first time, the second is now.

So others may have the vacations, the contracts, the fun. My life may not look like much, but saving a life isn't wasting your life, is it? (If that sounds familiar, it's from the most recent Rambo movie, a film with an unambiguously Christian message).

Endex.

And now, if I may, a brief revisit to last week's keyword, TRUST

I had initially thought to do a piece on the trust inherent in my relationship with the Almighty, but the thoughts didn't gel coherently. Now they have.

I trust God, but there's no way I can have an "Abba-daddy-trust" with Him. I'm being bludgeoned to death by disease, and sniped at by annoyance (did I really need a painful eye injury that refuses to heal, right now? Seriously?)

If there's 'good and not evil' coming, I'm not feeling it.

But I still trust Him. But it has to be the trust of a fully-functioning adult. A soldier in the abattoir of the Anzio beachhead in 1944 famously said (and only partly in jest), "Please, come, God. Come yourself; don't send Jesus. This is no place for children."

I get it. What the man was saying was, "Let me be a man to match what You're demanding of me in this place."

And thattrust has to be that of a grown up. Time to put childish things away.

I trust that He created a world in which free will is necessary for us to become beings who could share eternity with Him. He has His angels; apparently they aren't quite making it. He made us because he wants us. And maybe needs us.

And the only way we can reach Him is through an exercise of free will, to choose him, however imperfectly we think our execution of that choice is. If we saw our motivations from His perspective, I think we might be surprised at their basic purity.

And I trust that given the necessity for illness and painful death, I trust Him to give me the strength to try to help make the world a better place while I'm in it, and the intelligence and insight to know what to say.

And the compassion to try to understand what my wife is going through, as she sees her world irrevocably changed and the future she hoped to share with me passing beyond hope.

I would love your thoughts. Please, help me to understand.