How things are.

The boys are healthy. Happy mostly. Jen is bigger. Baby’s good. Due late May. Still shuffling rooms. Trying to make out what life here will look like with three kings ruling roost. Jen’s as beautiful as ever. I’m impressed daily by her ability to manage a mess like this with such a predictable composure. And she works. She has a job and she does it well. It thrills me to be near her.

I’m treating another Crohns episode. Steroids again. Started fresh two weeks back. Less fun this time. The two months between last round and this one were the darkest months I’ve endured in a decade. Intense emotional/psychological unrest in the absence of the drug that synthetically raised me for the holidays. Feeling like a puppet on a string. The puppeteer being whatever drug is in my system. Or not in my system. Hard to trust me when me is jerked around so easily by necessary chemistry.

Began psychotherapy a few weeks back as well. Pray for Bob and Tom and Bryan. They’re a couple of the professionals helping me sort through me. I know two of them to be brothers in the faith. Committed to Christ and the caring practice of psychology/psychiatry. I am hopeful this will be beneficial. Having a hard time with reentry. Not just the physical stressors either - the bad belly, weak wrists, aching back - social/emotional muscles have atrophied as well and as badly. Faith muscle, too, maybe. Hard to tell when medicine’s got the best of you.

Easter came early this year. So early it hardly seemed like Easter. Eggs were hid well beneath six inches of snow. I related to the disciples locked in a room following Good Friday’s not so good goings on. At least from their perspective, things went horribly wrong. No doubt they were grieving big time. No doubt they were asking, “Now what?” They lost their leader to a gruesome death. They watched their friend die. The last three years of their lives hung over and haunted them like an investment poorly made. Frauds and fools each and all.

That’s where I am. I’m in that room right now, too. Or worse, like Thomas, I might be off somewhere else grieving by myself when the Lord stops by for some fish. Everyone else saw him, but I didn’t. Guess he’ll have to catch up with me later.

But I believe the tomb is empty. I believe it with my head, and parts of my heart believe it, too. But there’s a cold corner in there somewhere that needs a shot of Easter. Wish I could say I was one of the women carrying pretty smells to the tomb, or one of the guys with the legs who ran to see, but I’m pretty sure I’m locked up in that room with the rest of them.

And the good news for them is good news for me: locked doors are nothing to our Lord.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Still His,
Jeremy