(Click title for audio version)
Are you feeling dispirited? Tired and low on energy? Are the stress of worry and anxiety sapping your spirit?
Me too. Some days are just about more than I can take. Senseless dying. Senseless killing. I go along and think I am coping well and then I hit the wall.
And then I get a call. It is Virginia. She lost her husband (my mentor) a couple of years ago. We keep in touch. There she is, on FaceTime. Smiling, asking how I am doing. At 98, she lives in the home she shared with her husband. She has been outside working in the yard.
I inquire about her health and how she is getting along in this time of isolation. She exercises with the Y on Zoom every morning at 8:00 a.m. She and her writing partner are updating one of the books they wrote some years ago. It is a book on care for people with dementia. ( After raising 5 children and being a minister’s wife for 40 years, she went back to school at 65, got her masters in gerontology, developed a new way of helping people with Alzheimers, wrote books, lectured all over the world, and is now updating her book).
Oh, and she has also been meeting with the committee she is on to help make her city dementia friendly. And she is also active in her church. She then tells me about the theology book she is reading.
And when we hang up, I realize that my dispirited self has been inspirited. Inspiration has suddenly taken up residence in one of the rooms of my soul. I can inhale more deeply. My soul sees more light.
How is it that Virginia inspires me? Certainly her life and her achievements are part of it. I have always wanted to be like her when I grow up.
But, I think it is more. I think it is how she has, through most of the wars of this and the last century, through riots and pandemics, through stresses and joys of parenting, through threats to her family because they have always welcomed all, through the death of her son and her husband, through health concerns and radical social changes in her life time, through all that life offers, Virginia still gets up every morning and lives fully, rich with compassion. She cares about the world and continues to do all she can to improve the lives of others.
And I think, “If she can do that, so can I.” I still have breath. I can still inhale. I can think and hope and pray. I can cry out and work for justice, for equity. I can share and smile. I can still contribute. My dispirited soul is, at least for a while, spirited.
Virginia inspires me. When you are dispirited, who inspires you?