Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Your Dying Spouse 329 - YGBSM

After The Weekend From Hell, part passed in pain-induced shock and thus unremembered by me (but engraved on Barbara's soul), the fun continued.

I was bitten by a brown recluse, one of the more venomous spiders in the US.

The bite is halfway up the thight, and the leg's swollen and nasty, with involvement into the lyph nodes in the groin. It hurts, and amputation would seem really cool right now.

And...there's the abscessed tooth.

Hence the title..after the extraordinarily rough weekend...this too, God?

Ya gotta be s****n' me! YGBSM.

But no, He's not. This is simply what happens when you live in a fallen world.

You get sick, you get bitten by spider, accidents happen.

If God shielded you from it, as a reward for being a good Christian, He'd be undermining His own purpose.

And His purpose is to let each one of us choose to become citizens of Heaven.

We have to choose Him. That wasn't His original intention, but we've inherited Adam's 'curse'; we've inherited the rejection of Grace.

And we can't earn it back.

We can only live the lives we have, with all the horrible things that may happen, and live in faith, and hope, and in the love that affirms that we are, in spite of it all, Loved.

We can accept that love through our adversity, as a help and a guide, or we can choose to distort that love through the lens of entitlement and our idea of 'justice', and throw it back in God's face.

I don't deserve this! It's not fair.

No, we don't deserve the trials of this life.

We deerve far worse. Eternal damnation, in fact.

The thing that saves us, the only thing, is the miracle we inherited, along with the curse of Adam.

Someone already served our sentence.

And we're free to go.

The musical theme is, perhaps appropriately, Pat Benatar's We Belong.



Still hoping to get the new and improved version of Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart up and running in the near future. Just haven't had the energy to do it yet...but if you would like to read it, please say so in your comment and I'd be glad to send you a PDF (which should fit your Kindle).

I have another blog, "Starting The Day With Grace". The focus is a grace quote from someone you might not expect (like, say Mick Jagger) and a short commentary. I hope you'll join me.



Marley update... been moved to a sanctuary, and Bay County will revise their 'dangerous dog' codes.

WE MADE A DIFFERENCE!

And marley has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.


If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.









5 comments:

  1. Wow. It does seem as if you've got quite enough on your plate, Andrew, and somehow you manage to keep trusting and moving forward. Thanks for modeling perseverance through adversity.

    I'm looking forward to seeing the "new and improved" -- maybe it will motivate me to make some changes on my blog . . . someday.

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  2. Oh my goodness! Do you need an antidote shot for the recluse bite?
    I am so sorry, Andrew!
    Continuing to pray.
    Here's a joke to distract.
    "Why didn't the man pass gas in public?"





    "He was a private tooter."




    Ha ha ha!!
    (Not my own joke)
    -Tammy

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  3. Oh my goodness! I'm so sorry! Thank you for sharing the hard stuff and the harder stuff. Thank you for putting it all in perspective.

    "I don't deserve this! It's not fair.

    No, we don't deserve the trials of this life.

    We deserve far worse. Eternal damnation, in fact."

    Yes. Praise God for His abundant grace that gives us far more than we deserve!

    Praying for perseverance for you and Barbara today.

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  4. Andrew, I don't understand why, as a military veteran, you don't get all the professional medical care you need. For some people I know that took a lot of red tape and hassles, but Barbara should be able to take care of a lot of that for you.

    By the way, I don't get your replies since I can't access my google account. Feel free to e-mail me privately at jan@janetanncollins.com.

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  5. I think you could write a second book about suffering and the deeper life. You've developed a unique perspective and the ability to find the silver lining during the endurance. Bless you, Andrew

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