Posted 2-3-20
Happy Monday to all. I hope all of you Chiefs’ fans made it to work this morning. They finally won a Super Bowl for the first time in my lifetime…and that says a lot. Regardless, congrats! Now clean up the mess and let’s start baseball please! No really…please!!
The “Big Game” brought together many strange bedfellows this year as always. One example: a few commercials rightfully presented the beauty, strength and matchless value of women and declared them equal in every way to men. Shortly later two female pop stars made a nearly R-rated halftime show allowing themselves to be objectified, but for a handsome paycheck, mind you. Political and special interest ads whose organizations paid some big bucks were also present as is the new norm. You know the drill.
But politics is of zero interest to me here…
The strange bedfellows I am interested in are threefold:
Mom and Google– I have mentioned here before and will undoubtedly do it again…mom hates/hated computers. She was happy that my brother and I made a living with them, but had no interest in technology, at all. Her favorite saying was “The only thing I know about computers is it starts with a K!”…always with a belly laugh. She did try to work with them after her diagnosis some 10 years ago, playing brain games and the like. However, she never embraced them for many, many reasons not the least of which was trying to remember passwords. Finally she had me change her password to something to the effect of Migraine because she said computers gave her a headache. A foe more than a friend, sure, but mom, as an advocate at heart, would have approved last night of this Google commercial (Severe Kleenex alert!!!) :
Breathtaking. Thank you Google!
This commercial could have been even better with #EndALZ at the end of it, but, I suppose, to gather the biggest audience possible, it had to be this way.
Memory Loss and Peace– Another strange bedfellow that came to my mind from the Super Bowl is how forgetting sometimes generates peace. Apparently several folks forgot a lot of stuff yesterday: Patrick Mahomes forgot he was 24 years old and too young to be so cool under pressure. He also forgot you aren’t supposed to peacefully kneel in prayer, just in protest. (Note…don’t base your faith over stars/athletes etc…. People let us down. The Lord doesn’t.) Andy Reid forgot that he had won the most games in history without winning a Super Bowl. He coolly led the team as if he did this kind of thing every day. And mom… The last couple of years has been extremely hard until the memory loss because so pervasive that she is no longer anxious. She has replaced pacing, stress, and spitting out meds with joy, peace, comfort and compliance as she descends to her ultimate end minus a cure.
Death and joy– It is interesting how death and joy, to a believer, are strange bedfellows. We, as Christians, know that humanity wasn’t created to die, but death came as a result of the Fall of Adam. We read this in the first few pages of the Bible and the rest of the text explains how paradise was lost and descended further and further until (Spoiler alert) it was ultimately redeemed at the end of the book. I have mentioned before that mom passing away someday makes me both sad and happy to think about. I understand and appreciate her eternal destination and am excited for her for that, but I hate it to happen because I wish her only good things even temporally. However, just like Jesus dying on the cross and being raised, the Good News has to follow the bad news. The Apostle Paul certainly got this paradox and wrote often about it, most notably in an amazingly personal glimpse at him in Philippians 1. It is worth the read…
Lots of twists and turns in the world of dementia. Surely never a dull moment, be sure of that.
Update: Mom was still doing good this weekend. My sister and I had a nice visit Saturday morning. Good times among the hard…such is Alzheimer’s.