Some people live for food. No really, they think about the next meal before they are even done with the one they are eating. Meals, food and delicatessens are what drives them from hour to hour. My dad used to say of a particular relative, “They travel on the stomachs: Visiting all kinds of national monuments and beautiful places it is some simple pizza joint that they remember most and talk about with excitement.

Some people eat just to stay alive. I am in that category. I could work for hours in the greenhouse and totally forget meals and such. I could crochet for hours if I did not drink so much that I am driven to the bathroom. I don’t enjoy watching telvesion shows or videos about cooking. On the other hand it was my three year old daughter that grumbled about me rushing her meal and said, “Can’t I savor my food?”

Mealtime for me has always been about the conversation and togetherness. Even as a child I was always the last one at the table. I told everyone with such a captive audience, I thought every dinner was a theatre. Mealtime was entertainment 101 for me. What jokes and witty comments would incite laughter and or anger? I learned that my siblings had buttons that could be pushed and I learned what would and would not be tolerated by my parents.

What was it like to have a formal dining room and an appendix dinette? The kitchen was my mother’s domain. My dad was only in their on rare occasions. The dinette was the daily use eating zone. Nothing like the kitchens of today that have “homework” stations for the kids while mom or dad cooks the meal. And the formal dining room was used only for company. This was where I sat and did homework once in awhile, otherwise homework was done in my own space of my bedroom with it’s little desk and chair.

I often think of the kitchen and dinette as after thoughts in old houses. Of course back in the day of wood cook stoves, the heat made it important to keep the heat out of the rest of the house during summer. We had moved from a house with an addition of a large kitchen where the table was part of the room. The change was a poor one for our family. I think the “appendix” in the new house made it part of the reason my parents marriage collapsed.

Of course, it does not help that I had left for college and the communication between my mom and dad was already pretty bad. Then after my spring illness of appendicitis, that’s when things got really bad. I returned home to see that my mom was barely keeping up with this abandonment. And my dad was unwilling to make any changes.

My appendix had been surgically removed. The room that we had grown up eating it was now just a vague dry hopeless place where my mother and the three children left no longer ate with my dad. His silence on weekends, mealtimes and presence in the home was only occasionally interupted by bouts of angry outbursts. I tried to stand up for the others. But it was too late for intervention. The surgical procedure of the “heart” of the home had already been done by his constant belittling and badgering. Like a battering ram on the love that my mother was trying to give, the destruction was complete.

Friends were few and far between. What else was there to do? I felt my mother needed an ultimatum. Now that thirty some years have passed since the divorce of my parents. It’s clear that my mother was the glue and the love that drew us all together. My father’s eightieth birthday managed to gather some of us around him for a party. But his continued unbelief and faithless thought process towards our mother have pushed most of us away.

My dad’s 85th birthday was spent in unremarkable normalcy. On the other hand I watch the happenings of my in-laws through the years and the family grows and also finds itself distanced by all the extended happenings. Yet when dad needed a pep rally in the nursing home to keep him out of the “failure to thrive” annals, we all came together to make an attempt at cheerfulness.

All these things are going on simultaneously. Life falls apart, life moves on and little lives are being brought forth into the new world. Lives struggle with health. Lives learn new things. Lives march into the next unknown. And we still get disappointed when our expectations are not met by others. We still disappoint ourselves when we react inappropriately. We still are unable to change another person’s will. Whether we love and live in hopefulness does matter, doesn’t it?

This past weekend the roller coaster of emotions brought me back to the song above that I found a week or two ago. The old version is rather unknown. And this composition also is not highly memorable. Yet all of life’s emotions, feelings, wishes, wants and needs are nothing apart from being “In Jesus.”

I finished my book from Mother Theresa, but the wisdom it contained will continue to speak Jesus into my life and others. I had the chance to speak to my father in law in a moment of lucidity one evening. I told him about the book I was reading and how “thinking about the pain and suffering of Jesus when we have pain and suffering” can help us in our pain. It is because Jesus suffered for us, that we can endure. I don’t know how much of it helped. He told me he was “not worried about tomorrow.” So maybe it did help some.

All of us need the blessed assurance that if we confess Jesus over our pain, over our trials, over our emotions, over our family then God will intervene in the way that He chooses. We have to be okay with that.

So life continues on and IN JESUS I will try not to take things into my own hands. Only God knows what the appendix’s purpose really is. We have lost past family members in the early 1900’s from an appendix rupture. My brother in law has suffered from years from the effects of the the rupture toxicity. My appendix was removed and left me with ITP for over a decade and then another surgery, splenectomy.

There are organs in the body that can be lived without. And some that once damaged will lead to death. When a family looses it’s dinette of bustling conversations and playful bantering over the mealtime… well, I see over the years the family just drifts away from each other and soon learns to live without the spleen, without the appendix, without the arm that once fed it and kept it so vital. New families emerge and must learn not to make the same mistakes.

Living a life IN JESUS is more important now than ever before.