GO
Now this is a topic on which I can say I’m an expert! There has been a lot of forgetting going around here in the past few years.
It started with a major flare of my epilepsy about ten years ago. I had four years of seizures…at least once a month and at times, weekly…after nearly 30 years of a breakthrough seizure every 7-10 years, that was a lot of seizures…and cramped my lifestyle in a major way! (Oh yes, they were grand mal. My crunched tongue can tell you that!)
But that problem was resolved and my brain came back to life for the most part. I forget dates, I always have. Now I forget names more, even names I know well. I forget words. The word I want won’t come so I give my husband synonyms and we find the word together. It’s a game…sort of.
Not getting enough sleep, having to deal with too many details, getting overwhelmed, getting overloaded with information…it is so easy to forget in these settings.
I have learned that memory is a gift. The ability to think is a gift. There are no guarantees how long we will have those gifts. God doesn’t owe them to us. They are only a gift…for now.
But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness…” II Corinthians 12:9 (context 12:7-10)
STOP
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This is Five Minute Friday. It is an exercise from the blog GypsyMama. Go take a look at her blog either from this link or click the button on the right. There are many of us who link to this blog and write on the topic for five minutes. We’d be glad for you to join us. These are fun. They don’t have to be perfect!
**photo credit-photobucket i_m_eve
Oh, yes. All we have is a gift. So true. Thank you for sharing your story.
I loved how you ended this, Martha! It is so true and so encouraging! Thank you!
thanks leslie and betsy for stopping by. glad you were encouraged:)
. . . memory is a gift. The ability to think is a gift. There are no guarantees . . .
A perfect reminder, thank you.
Martha – thanks for this post, for sharing something so central to who you are and for being vulnerable about your fears. Thanks especially for the reminder that memory is a gift without a guarantee. SO true. It’s nice to find someone else at the same stage of life I am – it definitely feels like a younger woman’s cyberspace some days, so I’m grateful to have found your blog and am now subscribed.
thanks for stopping by again diana. welcome to my subscribers. feel free the rest of my regular readers, to subscribe. it’s free:) join the party:)
I enjoyed your post. My grandmother’s cousin had a bunch of seizures in high school, that left her partly retarded. She was an interesting character but still a Christian. I often think that when I see her in heaven, I’ll be able to talk to her differently because she will be without her physical handicap.
I’m glad you did not have worse damage than you had but sorry you have to deal with your memory problems.
Thanks for coming by holly. Yes, that is our ultimate hope…heaven. The more broken we are, the more broken our world is, the more we realize and rejoice in the fact that this is only temporary. Heaven is eternal and will be forever and all the broken pieces will be renewed in ways we can’t even imagine! Hallelujah!
Martha, Thanks for the reminder to be thankful for something I take for granted–my memory. Like you, it isn’t as good as it used to be, but some of this is just the aging process. This last week I had the scary feeling I was also losing my hearing. I slept through the tornado warning sirens when I was in KC. They should have raised the dead. And I couldn’t hear my new cell phone ring when it was in my hand. I have a family history of hearing loss…but this was extreme. Well, come to find out, my new cell phone has a hidden little teeny switch that turns off the ringer so you can avoid going into settings to change the mode. Whew…I am now thankful that I can hear and am only losing my ability to read stuff printed in teeny print, my ability to learn techie tricks, and some of my hearing! 🙂 Ah…what I used to take for granted!!!
marcia, i totally identify with what you are talking about! those moments of freaking out when i think, “oh no, I’m losing another one of my senses!” or “uh-oh! this must be the beginning of Alzheimer’s.”
Then, we just have to take a deep breath and remember the faithfulness of God in the past (as the patriarchs often rehearsed, His unchangeableness, and continues faithfulness for whatever comes in the future.
Then, taking each day as it comes. Because at this point, looking too far into the future can be a fearful event…not like when I was younger.
It certainly gives a new twist to senior adult ministry doesn’t it?