Alzheimer’s

What Love Is

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 2 Comments

“Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
You leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all” (Joni Mitchell)

It’s Valentines Day, a. k. a. Single Awareness Day. It’s great for those who are in relationships (or who still have great hopes of relationships). For those who are perpetually single who spend way too much time with their cats? Not so much.

Still, I’ve been around enough to know what real love is and is not. So I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the matter.

Love is not a feeling. Well, it is, but it’s so much more than that. I heard a pastor today say that love involves the head, the heart, and the hands. Love is primarily a choice, an act of the will– that’s the head. It’s also emotions– that’s the heart. It always leads to acts of selflessness– that’s the hands.

Love is not just romantic. There’s brotherly love and comfort love and– best of all– that unconditional love that always starts and ends with God.

If I say I love someone, that means more than a warm fuzzy feeling or a Hallmark sentiment. It is a decision to place that person’s welfare above my own, to do everything in my power to help that person realize all their potential and help them to become everything God created them to be.

That’s love.

If you want to define love, you begin and end with God’s ultimate expression of Himself in the person of Jesus. He gave up absolutely everything for you and me. His sacrifice forever set the tone of what true love should look like.

I believe love isn’t Romeo and Juliet dying for passion, but the old couple down the street growing old together. it’s the man with arthritis painting the toenails of his wife who has Alzheimer’s and can’t begin to repay him, much less express thanks for what he’s done.

Love is always sacrifice. Ultimately, love means you give without expecting anything in return. The final word on love is Jesus dying on a cross for people who would ultimately reject His sacrifice and many more who accept it and then take it for granted. Yet, that love perseveres.

That’s love. I don’t completely understand all of it, but I know that I can only love someone else if God first loved me and His love in me flows out to the other person.

I definitely know I want more of it.

 

 

More Music & Nostalgia

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Today, I got a CD in the mail. Not a big deal. I’ve gotten a few of those over the years (understatement of the century to say the least).

This one was a bit different. This was an album by a band called Johnny Clegg & Savuka that my uncle introduced me to almost 20 years ago. I wish I could thank him again, but he’s no longer living. All I have left are the music and the memories. I can see his face every time I listen to a Grateful Dead song.

In fact, both my uncles on my dad’s side helped to instill in me a great love for music as well as inspiring me to broaden my musical horizons, a move that I have never once regretted.

For me, music is better than just about anything else at conjuring up old memories.

Whenever I hear a Julie Miller song, I’m immediately transported back to Union University circa 1993 and some great friends who really modeled what real Christian faith lived out could be. Not stuffy, pew-sitting faith, but vibrant every-day kind of faith that was honest and transparent.

I can hear any Phil Collins song and immediately feel the same way that I did as an 8th grader way back in 1986.  Heck, just about any 80’s song will transport me back to junior high/high school.

That’s what makes the musical aspect of worship so great. Music is the best way to trigger memories of God’s faithfulness in the past to remind you that He’s still faithful now.

I can still remember how my grandmother, long after she’d forgotten her address and the names of most of the people she loved, still able to sing the old hymns that were embedded deep in a part of her brain that Alzheimer’s couldn’t touch.

After all, music is the only expression that activates and utilizes every part of the brain. But that’s another topic for another day.

 

Severe Mercies

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“God never withholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful — ‘severe mercies’ at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better” (Elisabeth Elliot).

I saw where you entered through those gates of splendor you had written about all those years ago. I read where your own suffering had ended, that ‘severe mercy’ that God gave you to bear, Alzheimer’s disease, was finally over.

You taught me that the mark of a man is in being both tough as nails about what he believes and fights for and tender toward those he fights for.

You shared the words that your first husband, Jim, wrote, before he was martyred for his faith: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

You showed me that faithful obedience and surrender to Jesus aren’t the keys to joy. They are the joy, that a heart given over completely to God is a heart at rest.

You helped me see that trust doesn’t always require explanations or answers or reasons why. Faith is its own reward and God above all is enough.

You defined true femininity when you wrote these words: “. . . my plea is let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is”.

I hear God saying to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into your rest.”

I and so many others will carry on your legacy you left behind in your books and speeches and letters. We are your legacy.

So thank you. May all who come behind us also find us equally faithful.

Elvis Turns 80?

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Elvis-Presley

So, today would have been Elvis Presley’s 80th birthday. August 16 will mark 38 years since he passed away very suddenly in 1977 and left the music world in mourning. People still show up at Graceland on the anniversary of his death almost 40 years later to mourn and grieve his passing.

I was a huge Elvis fan when I was a kid. Maybe it’s because my dad loved Elvis’ music. Maybe it was because even at a young age, I connected with the singer who grew up in Memphis and never forgot where he came from even after he became mega-successful.

Elvis is a reminder to all of us that fame can be the best and worst thing to happen to a person. It’s the best because all their dreams come true and it can be the worst because all the scrutiny and pressure on that person increases a thousandfold and any character flaws that person has are magnified and exposed in a myriad of ways.

So maybe that’s why I haven’t been hugely successful and popular with my blog. Yeah, I’ll go with that.

I’ve heard stories about how Elvis never lost his love for Gospel music and always sung spiritual and sacred songs at his concerts. I can’t speak into the man’s beliefs, but to me that says something. It reminds me of my grandmother who passed away from Alzheimer’s a few years back. She couldn’t tell you her address or probably remember your name, but she could still remember the old hymns that she grew up loving.

There’s power in those songs, both old and new. When Andre Crouch sang about the blood that never loses its power, he was singing powerful truth.

So I watched a couple of Elvis movies and remembered that as an actor, Elvis was a really good singer. His movies aren’t the best ever made and can be painfully bad at times, but they’re still fun to watch.

I personally would much rather listen to his Gospel recordings.