Sadness, Anger, and Sympathy

A friend of mine posted this a bit ago. She frequently posts these types of messages and prayers. They fill me all at once with sadness, anger, and immense amount of sympathy.

Let me give you a bit of back story.

She and her husband are in their early fifties. They were young, vibrant, active, and adventurous.

Her husband had always been a tall, strong, imposing figure. Yet he was really just a giant teddy bear of a man, always at the ready with a hug and joke.

In the blink of an eye that changed for them.

He was riding solo on his Harley Davidson when someone turned across traffic in front of him. Unable to stop he slid underneath the vehicle. After days of touch and go, not knowing if he would live or die, he pulled through.

She was awash with relief and sang the praises of her God.

Then the devastating news came that the brain damage would be permanent and also the paralysis.

That has been some four years ago now. The longer it goes the more desperate she becomes. She loves her husband and takes very good care of him but it is now more of a mother/child relationship. She has amply displayed her commitment. Yet she longs for that husband/wife relationship that she once had. She would never verbalize this but she can’t even move on. It isn’t even as she would want to if she could, but she can’t have her husband back either. Neverland.

And while all of that fills me with a great sadness it also fills me with sadness that in order for her to come to terms with her situation she must do these mental gymnastics.

She prays to the God she believes caused her situation to thank him for it. Thanking him for causing her circumstances in order to bring about her dependence on this invisible entity that cannot give her an embrace, cannot kiss her lips, cannot hold her hand – this invisible entity that cannot carry on regular conversation but is only voices in her head.

Yes, it is indeed sad.

It makes me so angry to watch as she struggles day after day with his pain management. She has long given up praying for healing. She believes her God’s answer is, “no,” that her husband must suffer and she along with him for some greater purpose. And that purpose is a desperate need for dependence on the very being that caused the pain in the first place. She will sing his praises and glorify him for breaking her down.

On Earth we call that abuse.

It’s like watching a parent beat their child until everything in them is broken and watching that child beg the parent to do it all over again. Stockholm syndrome doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The anger that wells up inside of me is visceral.

And at the same time I’m filled with so much sympathy and so much understanding of why she needs this to be so. It might all be too much to bear if it doesn’t serve some purpose. She needs to believe that all of this has some meaning or else she might just throw in the towel. It would likely break her mind to believe otherwise.

This is why religion persists, why it will likely always persist. And who could be so cruel as to even attempt to take the one thing that is holding it all together for her away?

Why do possessed people have their pupils enlarge?

And other reasons people visit this here blog.

I will admit I don’t have a huge following owing to the fact that either:

1) My writing is sporadic, at best.  I don’t post daily, or weekly, or even monthly.  I post when the notion strikes me and so there is no specific schedule.

or

B) My writing isn’t of interest to a wide variety of people.  It’s either navel-gazing for my own purposes or it’s niche writing that is of interest to a handful of people.

I’m cool with that because my writing has been mostly therapeutic and largely not audience-oriented.  Most of the traffic I seem to get here is through search engines and because of that I get, probably, some very disappointed visitors.  They query their search engines for important things that their inquiring minds wish to know such as, ‘Why do possessed people have their pupils enlarge?’, and then they click on the links that pop up on their screen.  I’m sure they’re disappointed when they find I don’t have the answer posted, only that it makes me angry that any rational person would believe such a thing.  So in an effort to accommodate I’ll give it a go.

Scientific research shows that pupils dilate, or enlarge, for a number of different reasons – none of them having anything to do with demon possession. Drug and alcohol use, sleepiness, mental illness, sexual arousal, depression, and even thinking, depending on how smart you are, can cause pupil dilation and constriction.  So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you’re looking at someone and their pupils are dilated they probably aren’t possessed.  No, better yet,I’m going to go out on a limb and say they definitely aren’t possessed since, y’know there’s no such things as demons.  Unless it’s their own personal demons.  Then, yeah, you could call it that, I guess.  But you wouldn’t be helping them any because exorcisms don’t work on that. Okay?

Seriously, that’s the fourth most asked question that gets people to this blog.

The third?  People wanting to know what size pvc pipe to discipline beat their infants with.  Who knew there were that many people interested in this?  WTF?!?  For the love of Pete, put down the pipe and go figure out what is wrong with your kid that is making him or her cry!  And it isn’t the need of a spanking that is causing whatever the problem is.  You do know spanking your infant will make him more cry, right?

Then there are all sorts of queries about narcissism.  ‘What does it feel like to be in a one-sided relationship?’, ‘relationship feels a bit one-sided’, ‘What does the Bible say about narcissistic relationships?’.  They go on and on – probably a hundred or so – but my personal favorite has to be, ‘Should a Christian be in a relationship with a narcissist?’.  To which I say, Honey, if you are a Christian you’re already in a relationship with a narcissist.

Finally, the number one query that brings people here – sluts.  Liberal sluts, sammich makin’ sluts, dirty sluts, slutty sluts.  You name the kind and its generated a hit here.

Needless to say I find this all slightly disturbing.