Image courtesy norian.com.
My father-in-law started chemotherapy yesterday. His cancer, which was gone for a little while, has come back. It’s a familiar story for a lot of people, unfortunately, but when it happens to someone you love, it is so totally a new agony.
I’ve been thinking about how to pray for him. I have not come up with any good answers, so I mostly just beg. But I came across some prayer beads the other day when I was rifling through our junk drawer. (Please don’t tell God that I was keeping them there.) My church had given them to me upon my graduation from graduate school last year. I had appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t my thing, so into the junk drawer they went. Then, this Sunday, the current graduates at church were given their own little red bags in which I knew strings of prayer beads were nestled. I thought about my lonely little beads. I thought about my search for solitude and ways to pray. I decided to make them my thing, at least for a trial run.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’ll also try and respond to the Facebook thing sometime soon. I love what you wrote. Most of the time, I really love Facebook because it gives me adults to “talk to” in the middle of the day when all of the adults are at work and I’m reading Barney’s Color Surprise to Miles for the fifteenth time in a row. (The sun is yellow, you guys. Still. Sorry to ruin the surprise.) But I understand the complexities, too, and I like the conclusion you came to.
