Perspectives
This Sunday, Tropical Depression Claudia is passing over North Carolina, a loosely-organised weather front. The rainy weather is keeping me indoors, affording me the time to do some office work and write. One thing I've got to do is shredding paper from seven years earlier, like old bank statements and letters from debt collectors. Every so often, while shredding, I'll see letters from our credit union of 'insufficient funds'.
I use shredded paper for mulch - but that's something I cover in posts about gardening. Today, I'm writing about the extortionate cost of medical care in the US. On the couch in the living room, Stacey is recovering from a medical operation. The medical insurance she is required to use from her employer - or lose her job - has a deductible of $2,000. The insurance year runs from June to July. And since she's not been employed there for an entire year yet, she is not guaranteed any paid medical leave.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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Land and our emotional landscape are often closely tied to each other. The acre and a third most of my writing centres around was orginally bought by my late wife Cynthia, and I. She loved gardening, understood the interconnectedness of life, and I learned a great deal from her in our almost 14 years of marriage before cancer took her.
I have been fortunate enough to marry again, to Stacey, who I love dearly. For her, the garden is a practical place and our conversations about it have been about using it as a space to teach healing. She had seen early on in our relationship how the garden had become a place of burden, not a space in which I was celebrating the vibrancy of the life present everywhere.
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Christmas is a time for reflecting on how much we've been given and being thankful for what we have. To those who have suffered the loss of a loved partner, Christmas holds us to a hard standard.
When your loved one is gone, they are beyond the reach of your gifts and your thoughts of them are a reminder of loss. Christians celebrate the season as the time when God gave humanity the gift of becoming fully whole. But this first Christmas, I am not whole and have no view ahead of an emotional horizon in which I am able to foresee ever being whole again. I'm told this will pass, but this year, the horizon all around is uphill.
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