Since this last post I've come to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee a battle free nights sleep is to address the dreams. Cut out alcohol altogether. 1/3 bottle of wine nightly is gone.
Signs are very positive. 5 nights now no alcohol and sleeping peacefully. Those short scenes( cannt realy call them dreams because there is no story associated with them, just a quick , short scene) that I wake up to are funny but meaningful suggesting a cleansing in progress.
Want to note here an example of why we should choose our words carefully and always think of the impact they will have on the person they are directed to.
Yesterday I was with an elderly lady (93) . 4 weeks since I had last seen her but there was a change in her. She was very down. Today she is having to go for more tests because they found a shadow on her lungs. So here we have an elderly lady who may be coming to terms with the news that she can not go on for ever and her days here on earth may be ending soon. Recently she had just lost a cousin and she showed me pictures of the hearse leaving from her house.
We had never talked of anything spiritual and finding the right angle to approach this topic took a bit but I asked her what religion she was , was she Catholic? This just opened the flood gates as she swung her arms in the air and started a verbal abuse about anything to do with the church. This was a lady who had lost her husband during the war and brought up her son on her own. He is buried in France and she often has family go over to France to lay flowers. She was showing a hatred and distrust for the church and any faith .
Some of this reaction may be due to her worry over health but there had to be more. Certainly at a time like this faith would be a help. She told me the story.
Last year, prior to a Remembrance service in her local church she had bought some silk roses in memory of her husband and gone into her local church to find a place to put them.
A woman who seemed to be organising things shouted across the church " No, you cannt put them there! " my lady told her she brings them every year and they are for her husband but this woman insisted indignantly that they were to be removed . They would have to go over with some others and displayed elsewhere and after the service. She brought them home upset .
Since last November my elderly lady has recalled this episode with disgust. This was someone who represented the church.( She may have just been a member of the community who's role it was to organise the display of flowers but nevertheless was still seen as a representative. ) Represented the teachings of this church and yet failed to show any compassion towards this elderly war widow who was bringing the same silk flowers to place in her local church that she arranges to have laid in France. Her visits to church have ceased and she sees all those within the church preaching the bible as hypocrites. Her faith has gone and she doesn't know what to believe now.
What a shame this stupid woman was present in church at the time of her visit. She failed to understand the importance of this lady's visit and the symbolic gesture of the flowers. She handled it shamefully. If she had allowed her to place them at the time then discreetly removing them to a different position later would have saved all this.
I've been thinking this for a while that there are many ' Hangers on' who I feel think it's good to be connected to the church and vicar and be seen to be doing charitable work for the community but when put to the test are just hypocrites.
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