a stripped down life

When one has been ill a long time, real life crumbles away. The veneer of it at least. One reaches a point where one doesn't really care...and that not caring either leads to great despair, great indifference, or great joy. On Sunday while i was cleaning (yeah, yeah, i know. I shouldn't be cleaning on a sunday) I suddenly got an overwhelming sense of joy about my solitariness. Of course I'm not as solitary as most reclusives. I have a hubby and two sons and some lovely friends -- who are also solitary reclisive types-- and my email friends.

But for the most part I live without seeing people and I rarely encounter people. So there I was kinda bewailing my illness and the way my life has turned out....and cleaning ....to the best of my ability.....when this flaky joy comes into my heart. I'll try to explain what the joy was saying to me. (yes, joys can speak). It said something like: "Look how happy and free you are! You know what it's like to not be bounded by all those rules and expectations of a normal life. Because your family hasn't got the tiniest semblance of an ordinary life, you are so free!" (Trust me, life in this house is very strange and grief-stuck most times.)

That's not exactly what the joy-grief (greif-joy?) said but it was close. I can't really explain it but instead of feeling as if my neighbors and my church brothers had abandoned me...and instead of feeling that normality and life had abandoned us... I felt the joys the desert hermits must have felt....a total freedom from the world's cares, rules, judgment....a realization that I was a bit like those folks who had willingly (or unwillingly) turned their back on normal life. It was wonderful. Strange, but wonderful. God must've been in it. It certainly is making me indifferent to stuff the world considers important. Which may or may not be a good thing. Dead to the world, and the world is dead to me.

Perhaps it's the nature of the situation...being ill for so long. I DO believe that God's word is working mightily and powerfully in me, though. But illness does make a person indifferent to life as others live it. In some ways i DO think that this indifference is good for my particular soul. Since my childhood, I was always so pleasant and repressed...and I'm sure the root cause of this too-long-endured illness was me repressing my emotions. Now, the indifference separates me from people...from my old desire to be liked by people....from the fear of man, from my worries about the stuff the world worries about. I think that's a good thing. Because the Christian community --especially the white ones--- has been pretty harsh to me... and it's good to be free from them..and to neither love nor hate them. And it's good to live a stripped kind of life....especially when one is aware that YOU GOD SEE ME.