This Rocks

I haven't blogged oh in some time and thought I might get back to it. The past month has been a series of kidney stones and infections. There were days I was so exhausted from not being able to get good sleep that I identified with the detainees at Gitmo except no one is trying to get information out of me. The pain and the fatigue have made it difficult to function and stripped pleasure right out of the equation. That moment when a stone passes and for a day the pain stops is indescribable. There is this tangible move from pain to relief and that become my single source of enjoyment. Movies, television, the computer all fade and seem empty. I have known what it was like to travel, to sing in front of audiences, to have songs recorded, to have riden roller coasters and to have danced but all those things have become either difficult for me or can no longer be done. In the end these too are empty and without satisfaction. I understand what Solomon wrote in Ecclesiates when he said that all was vainity. Vainity means in the original Hebrew emptiness, a waste of valuable time. The Epicurians mistakenly were lumped in with the Hedonists in Greek philosophy and this mistake has explained a great deal of what Solomon. Hedonists believed that pain was to be avoided at any cost. Epicurians believed that there was no afterlife and that we should enjoy the time we have here on earth with no thought to a cosmic judge. Solomon tells us that both these ideas end in the consumption of pleasure but still produce pain and that pain is emptiness. When I was a child going to my grandmother's house meant a weekend of gorging. I was so happy to get home to feel hungry again. What we don't understand is that without pain we can never know the sensation of pleasure. Just as the stone passing allowed me to truly appreciate what it was to be without a stone, so pain in my life teaches me a sense of appreciation for the simple things that appear when pain is gone. In the end the only enduring satisfaction is God who makes our physical existence of both pain and pleasure turn upside. What we think is pain cements our passion for lasting things and what we think is pleasure addicts us to things that are empty and fleeting. In these past few weeks I knew as I always know that God wanted me still to hear specific instructions that were important for the days and years ahead. I could curse Him for the pain and discomfort or bless Him for the message.