Abundant Life
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Chronic Pain, Trauma, and Easter: Let Hope Arise
I am no stranger to chronic pain. I used to joke that the gift my ex-husband gave me for our first anniversary was an ulcer. I realize now that my misplaced sense of humor about it was a way of minimizing the very real stress I endured. But even though my mind suffered through the traumas of narcissistic abuse, the toll on my body remains long after the emotional pain left. Doctors have known for a long time that stress can cause illness. Stress puts pressure on all of the body’s systems, causing inflammation, heart disease, and digestive disorders. For me, like many others, lower back pain seems to flare…
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Suffering Disappointment? Time to Get Reappointed!
Disappointment comes from an old French word that means to lose one’s position. And isn’t that what disappointment really is? We lose those things to which we feel appointed. If we lose our house, possessions or health, we have lost the kind of life that we thought had been appointed to us. If we lose friends or jobs, we are dis-appointed from friendships and careers that had once been appointed to us. Losses often feel like demotions. Moving to Alaska was obviously somewhat exciting, in both good and bad ways. My husband was certainly realizing a dream to live on the last frontier. But for me, the move represented a…
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How to Move Mountains
I live in full sight of Highland Mountain. Just one of the many in the Chugach range, it sits at 3360 feet according to the internet. While not a particularly tall as mountains go, nevertheless the Alaskan sun can barely peek over it in winter. To me, it looks primitive and wild, like the old black and white pictures of Alaska that I used to look at as a child. Squat and rugged, Highland Mountain, as minor as it is in the realm of mountains, seems immovable to me. And yet it has been moved several thousand times in the last couple of months. Each aftershock shimmies up the mountain,…
