Transitions

Many changes have characterized life in the nearly one month since my last blog entry.  I returned from India with a serious intestinal bug.  (As my doctor put it, my innards had suffered a serious insult; frankly, I felt as if I were on the receiving end of the insult.)  Even before I returned, the assisted facility where my father had resided for the past ten years told us he could no longer live there.  They asserted, moreover, that he needed an around-the-clock private duty aide in addition to the care provided by the facility; an absurd demand, in my opinion, designed little more than to increase the  cost of his care and hasten him out the door.

When we traveled to India in 2009 we were met with several negative perceptions of Americans.  First, that American women dressed inappropriately.  Second, and no doubt closely related to the first in the minds of our interlocutors, that “dating” in America equaled fornication.  And third, that Americans did not care for their elderly.  There were elements of truth in each of these stereotypes but the third hit close to home because my parents (and my father alone after the death of my mother) had lived in a facility since the time they could no longer live in their home.  We explained that facilities for the elderly in America were hardly the warehouses of the past.  (In fact, the range of services, food, and entertainment seems to me more like a cruise ship than institutional care.)  Most importantly, we asserted, older American parents simply did not expect or even wish to live with their children as did Indian elders of the same generation.  We concluded by claiming that the biblical injunction to honor one’s father and mother could be fulfilled differently in different cultures.  Nonetheless, we left feeling a bit guilty about whether our level of care actually measured up.

Moving my dad from one assisting living facility to another designed especially for persons with memory loss brought back these vague apprehensions with greater force.  We are convinced that the care that my father now receives exceeds whatever we could have provided directly but when we think of the virtues of the Indian joint family (which, we understand, is beginning to fray in India’s headlong rush to become a market-based economy) we can only conclude that care for its aging members stands out.

Finally—in terms of transitions, that is—I’ve just moved to Raleigh, North Carolina where I will be serving as visiting professor of law at Campbell University Law School for the 2010-2011 academic year.  Moving into a one-bedroom apartment and preparing to “batch” it for even four days a week makes me begin to doubt the wisdom of accepting this appointment but only time will tell if its benefits outweigh its costs.

Through all of these transitions I am comforted by the knowledge of God’s providential care.  As the first question and answer of the venerable Heidelberg Catechism puts it:

Q.  What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A.  That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven: in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.