Bipolar and Christ's Coming

 

[1]

Mark 13:32-37 GOD’S WORD Translation (GW)

 

³² “No one knows when that day or hour will come. Even the angels in heaven and the Son don’t know. Only the Father knows. ³³ Be careful! Watch! You don’t know the exact time. ³⁴ It is like a man who went on a trip. As he left home, he put his servants in charge. He assigned work to each one and ordered the guard to be alert.³⁵ Therefore, be alert, because you don’t know when the owner of the house will return. It could be in the evening or at midnight or at dawn or in the morning. ³⁶ Make sure he doesn’t come suddenly and find you asleep.³⁷ I’m telling everyone what I’m telling you: ‘Be alert!’”

 

Christ promised to return. He indeed left us. That was His great sign “I go and if I go I will come again.”

As a math teacher, I got involved trying to help students do mathematics. Some students do math easily and well. It is a delight to have them in the classroom. There was Amos[2] who did very well. He attended regularly and caught onto the concepts easily. It was easy to view him simply as an excellent student. He was a popular tutor and could tutor as well in one language as in a second language.

As a teacher it was easy to simply treat Amos as another student, this time a good one. But he was also a student with needs. He was deeply in love with Avis. She was a couple years older than he and working on her doctorate in psychology. Like so many psychology students, she was doing psychology because she wanted to discover what was making her problems. She had been diagnosed as bipolar, and her normal state was depression. She could consciously control this to the point that she was a successful graduate student.

Yet, her depression had a continuing effect on the couple’s romantic experience. Amos was very careful to understand and support Avis. He was always attuned to her needs. They married and bought a home in a beautiful mountain town.

We did our best to help support and encourage the young couple. We visited them whenever we could and invited them to our home and to go on trips to places like Joshua Tree National Park. They loved to go and seemed to appreciate the attention.

However, the progression of the manic-depressive disease continued to erode their relationship. Eventually they parted company. Their separation came as a surprise to me. I am certainly fairly knowledgeable about living in a relationship with someone bipolar, but I didn’t sense that their union was that fragile.

Even so, I am fully aware that Christ has promised to return. His promise warns us that His coming will be when we least expect it. It will be a marvelous event, but it does run the risk of bring infinitely more catastrophic than a divorce to us, if we do not remain prepared.

Lord, help me to be alert to more of the trials my friends and students are experiencing and to help wherever I can. And keep me alert to Your soon return

  

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[1] https://www.maxhealthcare.in/blogs/complete-guide-to-bipolar-disorder

[2] Amos and Avis were real people but I have given them these names to camouflage their identities.

Our Soul Among the Living

Psalm 66:8-9

New King James Version (NKJV)

⁸ Oh, bless our God, you peoples!
And make the voice of His praise to be heard,
⁹ Who keeps our soul among the living,
And does not allow our feet to ^[a]be moved.

On May 23, 2020, we were climbing in Joshua Tree National Park. Sylvia suddenly fell. Neither she nor anybody else knows what happened exactly. As she fell, I heard the sickening sound thud, …thud, ...thud, …thud of soft flesh striking rock at least four times. She fell somewhere between 20 and 30 feet (almost 10 m). In the picture, my brother, Elwood, indicates the position she was in when we found her deep in a rocky crevice. She appeared to be dead.

He and our daughter Julia were the first to reach her. They thought she had to be dead until they noticed a flicker of an eyelid. She then muttered, “Hurt!” Julia encouraged her to try and sit up if she could. She responded by sitting up--with their help. Julia yelled at me to go get help.

Cell phones have no coverage in that part of the park. I tried anyway and confirmed my suspicion. Three of us headed back to the Echo T parking lot. We found two women who had just passed their EMT training, and they went back to help. I remembered that there was a group of Search & Rescue people promoting their organization at the Hidden Valley parking lot. One of them grabbed a radio and immediately started calling for help. The she drove back with me to Echo T. As I pulled to a stop, a ranger, with emergency lights flashing, pulled in next to me.  Within a very short time an emergency helicopter from the Big Bear Fire Department was circling overhead, trying to find a spot clear enough to land. Finally, they landed back at the parking lot. It took the emergency crew three hours to get Sylvia out of the crevice and into the helicopter.

Sylvia was alive! They wouldn’t let Julia and me into the hospital, of course, because of COVID-19. Sylvia was talking to me when her doctor or radiologist came in. She laid the phone down, and we heard him tell her that she had fractured her scapula, a rib, and three processes on her lumbar region vertebrae. She reminded them of blood on her head, and he the saw the big gash there. They all missed a fracture on her fibula and several fractures on the glenoid fossa on her shoulder joint. These were all on the left side of her body.

She is alive and is getting around the house on a wheel chair until the fibula heals. Her spirit is amazing, and she counts herself as a miracle woman. Several have reminded her that God must still have plans for her.

Bless our God who has kept her soul among the living!

As Observant as a Child

[i]

Mark 8:18 

The Passion Translation (TPT)

¹⁸ You have good eyes, yet you still don’t see, and you have good ears, yet you still don’t hear, neither do you remember.

There was a family walking towards me on the Barker Dam Trail. The little four or five year old had been looking up at the great rock to his left.

“Daddy, why do they have goats on these rocks?” He queried in typical kids full voice.

“Maybe they keep them for food for the workers in the park.” His father plodded on, watching only where he was placing his feet on the sandy and stony trail.

Instantly there flashed through my mind the fact that kids are far more observant than we adults. I glanced up to the top of the great rock to my right. My heart thrilled at the rare sight of seven beautiful desert big horn sheep in a shady nook in the rock. They were studiously ignoring us. I looked back at the family retreating up the trail. Fleetingly, I felt like calling after the family and sharing with them what they were missing. I didn’t. Someone once quipped, “Ignorance is bliss.” All they had seen were lots of gigantic boulders and sand, and their kid had seen “goats.”

I stepped off the trail and sat down on a large rock and watched these magnificent animals for twenty minutes or more. There were a couple pine trees in the nook and a little green grass that some of them were munching on. Their grayish hides rippled over powerful muscles that enable them to nimbly leap up or down twenty feet if they wished to. Instead they stood there eating or chewing their cud. Big horn sheep are a rare sight in Joshua Tree National Park and I am thrilled every time I have the good luck to see them. It’s only about once in twenty visits or so that I see these magnificent animals that survive the harsh desert we were in.

Dozens of people walked by in both directions on the trail in front of me. To some of them I would say, “Did you see the big horn sheep?” and point in their direction. Many of them shared the thrill I felt, but the majority would glance up and keep trudging. I have no idea why they took the time to come out into this harsh desert.

How often, Lord, do I toil down the road of life oblivious to the great beauty You place all around me?

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[i] https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Mammals/Bighorn-Sheep/Desert