Illness
I just completed four weeks of wearing a sling on my right arm due to surgery in October. The doctor cleaned out arthritis, bursitis and repaired a torn bicep and rotator cuff. Surgery went well and my rehab has been exceptionally easy. Everyone told me that shoulder surgery was the most difficult to overcome. Fortunately that didn’t happen to me and I’m definitely on the way to a full recovery.
A few days after the surgery, I was getting dressed and needed my wife’s help to buckle my pants and button my shirt. At that moment I remembered a man we visit as part of our nursing home ministry. His wife also helps him get dressed when he is able to move from the bed to a special wheelchair. He is fifty-three years old and for five years has been unable to move any limb below his neck, speak, breathe without a tracheotomy tube or feed himself. To survive each day someone must assist him with every bodily function. Unable to move his arms, he cannot clean himself. He relies on someone else to do that. Sometimes I wonder if I could live like him. Could I pass each day and night, confined to a bed, unable to do the most basic effort to stay alive? What purpose would there be to live?
Even though he cannot speak, I learned a very important lesson from him. My purpose may not be about me. It may be about someone else. Even though he lies alone in bed his family and friends visit him. His son and daughter-in-law had a baby this year and I’ve seen many pictures of him and the baby together. My daughter once told me that I needed to live so her children can know their grandpa. Her memories are full of adventures with her grandpa and she wants her children to have the same experiences. She wants them to remember riding the lawn mower with me, feeding birds and just sitting around the table having a meal. Her grandpa was not famous to the world but he was a world to her. Sixteen years after his death she still misses him and the walls of her home host his pictures. One of his purposes in life was to love her and leave her with memories of a wonderful man who cherished her every moment he was with her. She learned unconditional love from him and gives it to her husband and children. What greater purpose could he have?
From a sling in an arm to unconditional love – that’s what I thought that day as my wife buckled my pants and buttoned my shirt. If you wonder what your purpose is: remember a man lying in his bed alone and a grandpa who made a world for child. Each man’s unconditional love reached across generations. What purpose is greater?
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