A couple of weeks ago I woke up after surgery--well half of me woke up. Because of the type of anesthesia I had received, from the waist down absolutely no one was home.
"Wiggle your toes." Nobody home.
"Can you feel this?" Feel what?
If my life had depended on doing something with my lower-limbs there is no doubt I would have died. I had no control over them.
Thinking back on my 50/50 body, I ask myself,
"Which end of my body best illustrates my day-to-day life?"
I'd like to think it is the waist up portion. I go where I want to go, do what I want to do. My destiny is in my own hands. I think, especially, we guys all felt our spines stiffen when we first heard the words of Invictus by William Ernest Henley. We want to think we are the "masters of our fates" and "captains of our souls."
If we keep thinking that, though, we are simply whistling in the "night that covers" us.
It doesn't take a great deal of thought to realize that my true condition is more like my waist-down post-op self. I live in a world that is held together by God's power. Were he to remove hissuperintending control for a nano-second, all that is, including both ends of me would fly into I-don't-even-know-what.I live in this strange matrix known as time, yet I have no ability make even a second of the stuff.
As Robert Burns mused to a rodent, "The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley." Like me, you probably don't speak the Scott dialect of the poet, but you know what it means.
I am out of control because that which I need to control in order to control my life is beyond my control. To live my life thinking, "I can handle it." is to lay a foundation on the sand of falsehood. My house won't stand. My life is not built on the sand of my ability--so called--to maintain control. My life is built on trust in the One Who transcends, and Who created all that is, and maintains it down to the falling sparrow. That's as solid as it gets.
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