Welcome

Welcome to the “Caring Spirit” blog! I am a new navigator in the murky waters of the blogging world, so I hope you will be patient with me! I have great teachers, but I’m forever dealing with a lifelong “fear” of technology! I don’t even have an electric can opener if that tells you anything!

I am a part of the forty-nine percent (49%) of the people in the United States who are living with at least one chronic illness. Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, arthritis, lung disease, and dementia are among the top chronic health issues.

For nearly twenty years I have been living with a rare chronic illness—a sarcoma that accounts for only 1% of all cancers. And, wouldn’t you know, I have the rarest of the rare—recurring mysenchymal phosphaturic tumors—making me about 1% of 1%. Believe me! Being “rare,” “unusual,” “unique,” “fascinating,” “special,” and “a living laboratory” is not all it’s cracked up to be! One of the most distressing parts of my illness is that there is no cure—today. The wonderful part of the story is that I am alive and functioning fairly well most days or as I sometimes say, “Fine for the shape I’m in!”

The name for my blog, “Caring Spirit,” is inspired by all the caring, loving folks who have been and are being Christ to me on a daily basis in so many surprising ways! The name is also inspired by THE SPIRIT who loves us and lives in us—THE SPIRIT who “helps us in our weakness,” who “intercedes with sighs too deep for words” when we don’t know how to pray. (Romans 8: 26-27, NRSV)

I invite you to join me as I reflect upon the journey so many of us are on. I write as my days unfold or my memory is jogged when I come across old notes and thoughts jotted on scraps of paper or the margins of my Bible. So these reflections are not necessarily in chronological order.

Terry Waite, the British envoy who was taken hostage in Lebanon in 1987 while trying to negotiate the release of prisoners, was held and tortured for five years. He wrote this prayer found in one of my favorite devotional books, An Iona Prayer Book by Peter Millar (page 43). Terry’s prayer is my daily prayer:

“Lord Christ, give me some of your Spirit to comfort the places in my heart where I hurt… then give me some more of the Spirit so that I can comfort other people.”