Tuesday, July 7, 2026

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Missing you

They shall cry out to the mountains, “Cover us!”

and to the hills, “Fall upon us!”

 

“Sow for yourselves justice,

reap the fruit of piety;

break up for yourselves a new field.

After that surgery, I miss being with you, Lord. The relationship is all horizontal. There’s no room in my mixed-up head for thoughts to or from what I usually call God.

On the other hand, scenes and words and emotions reverberate and reflect like a hall of mirrors, slowly turning my thought into a maze I can’t often get away from. Get out of. Escape. These reflections are all of people, images and words.

Melissa said, “So at the end of every day, the words you need to hear are, “I love you.” And so then I cried. First because it was so true, and second, because she loved me.

Margaret and I have been working that plan. Not because of instructions, but because it just comes naturally. “I love you.” Thank you for touching me and holding me and for all the beauty of our life together.

Our forty-seventh anniversary will be on August 19^th. Seems like a long time, and we’ve forgetten much of what’s happened during that time. 1979 is a while back. Of course we lived separate lives. But still, together we have more shared memories with each other than with anyone else.

How valuable is that to me these days, to both of us? Priceless.

But Mr God, although you’re mixed up in all of it, I just haven’t talked to you since June 15, 7 am, rolling gurney into the surgery, cold, some kind of music, hopefully, blaring that I do not hear at all. My friends and family pray, and they tell me so, everyday for me and Margaret. So I’m glad to be saying something to you now, and I can be patient while I wait for you to speak back to me.

Your silence reflects my silence, I suppose. It’s interesting that I feel mostly guiltless to be buying stuff, with abandon. For awhile it feels good, and then I realize that I might just be polishing the Golden Calf, waiting for you to come to me.

When I’ve always known that you’re already there. Perhaps the little TV and mini-frig for my bedroom, and beautiful drapes that weren’t there before, and the adjustable bed which is impossible to plug in deep underneath the bed, and the remote that keeps getting lost (which is probably why I’m up at 5 am writing to you, Lord) … perhaps … what? Something’s missing. People visit and it’s hard for them to leave because I love to listen to their stories, and tell them mine, sometimes gentle, sometimes jagged fragments. Seventy-six years of memories.

Margaret is a few weeks older than me. And I’m grateful that we’ve watched the same history wash over us and drain away, leaving similar wet shiny marks that we often remember together. Music, events both personal and public, and I think mostly the FACT that we have lived our lives for all our lives, during the same in the same years.

I notice it’s hard to put that into words. There’s a buzzing in the back of my head, and lingering, I suppose permanent, tinnitus. And because my eyes are seeing double, I have a patch over the left one so I can type.

It’s good to close them both, though, Lord. And just be still and be with you. I haven’t done the dialogue with God thing with lately.

Well, yeah, Dave, I miss you too. Want to talk a little more. Up the vertical ladder as well as with the people you and I both find so fascinating.

Just seeing those words on the screen invites me back to bed, to be quiet with you.

Well, then, go. I’m right behind you. Before you. All around you. Not just for the Navajo’s, for you to, David. Let me show the good, true and beautiful. You don’t really know it, but you’ve been trying too hard.

I feel exhausted by all that trying. Like the shame thing, once I. begin to uncover the top layer, another one appears. I’m tired of all this protection that doesn’t protect, and words inside me, one ear talking to the other. Oh, Lord, who will rescue me from this body of death?

Just keep talking, David. Go lie down in your bed, and I’ll be with you there, and I’ll never be leaving you. You are mine.

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