Pastor's Devotions by Tim Harris

Last week, my daughter Joanna turned 20!   I can’t believe it; I have no more teenagers in the house!   Time surely does not stand still.   It does seem like it was just yesterday that she was that little girl with bows in her hair, playing with her dolls in the living room.    Unfortunately, Joanna was sick on her birthday so we could not fully celebrate with her.   Her throat was so swollen from having “mono” she couldn’t eat cake (or anything else that felt too difficult to swallow).   Instead, she requested flan—which she not only likes, but was soft enough for her to get down.   So, that evening I came home at the end of the day with a bouquet of flowers (a dozen pink roses) and a flan.   It was the best I could do to help her celebrate.   I would have wanted to do more, but due to her illness the best I could do was flowers and flan!   We all know that, sometimes life interrupts our plans. There are times when our re...

Recently I developed in my left ring finger what is called, “trigger finger.”   Sometimes the finger doesn’t want to bend. And when I do bend it, it sometimes gets stuck in that position.   In fact, I often wake up at night and then again in the morning to find my finger stuck in a bent position. The only way to straighten it out is to pull it with my right hand.   (Oh the joys of getting older!)   As I was showing my finger to a friend, they pointed out that the cause could be the fact that my wedding ring had become too small and was pressing down on the finger so tightly that the tendon had become inflamed.   It was a struggle to get the ring off, which I almost never do. Once it was off, however, I noticed the finger was—and still is—indented in the place where the ring sat.   My wedding ring had made its mark on me!   (Right now the ring is with a jeweler being resized.)   You might say that, I’m a marked man! And, I guess that’s wha...

Over the past year, it’s become progressively more difficult to communicate with my mother.   Although she often knows what she wants to say, because of dementia in her left frontal lobe, she has lost her ability to find the words necessary to communicate those thoughts. They call it, aphasia.   And not only can she not find the words she needs, her loss of language skills has affected her ability to process information and remember the purpose of various objects.   She can become easily confused and thus, as you can well imagine, quite frustrated.   All of us have those moments when we can’t find a word or remember a name, especially as we get a bit older. But, can you imagine not being able to communicate a whole sentence; to have all the wrong words come out of your mouth—and not even realize it? (The speech therapists call it, “salad speech”—i.e. a toss up of mixed up words!)   And, not only is it frustrating at times for the person who is trying to com...