For the harried, hurried, faint of heart, or short of attention span, feel free to skip ahead to the TL:DR section.
Click here to listen to me read the post, with Moose Tracks chiming in a bit at the end. 😉
“Lord, you are my portion and my cup of blessing; you hold my future. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”
Psalms 16:5-6 CSB
Celebration
Good morning to you, crumbles! Or shall I say, “Happy blog anniversary”? Today marks 14 years since that first welcome blog post. The first series we explored was called “Blessing the Boundaries.” At the time, I had crashed into the worst lupus flare I had ever had, one from which I have never entirely recovered. The Ebony Dog and I lived on the sofa, and my chest hurt almost too much to breathe unless I lay on my side.
In that wilderness season, my dear husband Amore told me I needed to start a blog to find my online people and redeem that time. Through that initial post series, I sought to make peace with the very narrow boundaries the Lord had imposed on me (us). I sought to proclaim His boundaries as good and pleasant and to find joy in this “inheritance.”
My health is better now than in those early days, but I am substantially homebound again and don’t know when that will change. We have walked through the loss of Amore’s parents and sister and the recent loss of my mother after a long journey with Alzheimer’s. I have had cancer twice and a long list of surgeries. We have moved house and lost my faithful Ebony Dog but gained Moose Tracks (Mayhem).
Through all this, the Lord has used this place and other online interactions to link me with kindred spirits. He has made real friendships from long-distance interactions with people I may never meet this side of heaven.
His boundaries have indeed proved good, pleasant, and joyful.
A Need
Over the last year or so, He has brought new friends to me through this place, my online home. From them, I have learned that many people with energy-limiting conditions—ME/CFS, Long COVID, fibromyalgia, autoimmune diseases like I have, and many more—find screen reading too challenging to undertake long or often. For some, it exacerbates a wide range of symptoms. However, they may be able to listen instead of read.
Other new friends are caregivers as I have been. Stewarding that gift and responsibility means their best chance to engage with my posts is in their ears while they walk or work on household tasks.
For those new friends and readers, I began recording most posts, but Blogger isn’t very friendly to adding that feature, is it?
It has also become increasingly clear that the normal isolation of chronic/prolonged illness, caregiving, and aging has intensified in desperation and alienation, especially with numerous churches and ministries discontinuing the remote worship, discipleship, and fellowship options that opened up the world to this population at the beginning of the pandemic.
While I can’t address any of these illnesses, the needs requiring care, or the debilitating aging process, I have been praying over what might be mine to do to offer gospel hope and encouragement in this peculiar time. Joni Eareckson Tada has said that people with disabilities constitute the largest unreached people group in the world. The number of people suffering with chronic illness and disability has grown very rapidly since 2020 and does not seem to be slowing down. With regard to Long COVID alone, for example, the research team led by Dr. Danny Altmann estimated a year ago that some 400 million people around the world are experiencing some level of long-term illness months to years after their initial infection.
An Opportunity
In praying for the people whose names and situations I know and the millions I don’t, the Lord has led me to enlarge the boundaries of this writing ministry in order to diversify and expand the ways that the Lord’s work through me can serve the reader or listener. The next step toward that end is to move most of my online energies to Substack: crumbs from His table fellowship here.
TL;DR
- If you read now via RSS feed reader or on the web and have no interest in audio versions of posts, posts in your inbox, and the other prospective added features, you don’t need to do anything. I will continue to post written and photographic pieces here, though without audio or comment interaction.
- If you already receive posts via email, between now and the next post, Lord willing, I will export those subscriptions from Mailchimp to Substack. You also don’t need to do anything. You should be receiving a welcome email from the new platform. You may still reply to me directly from the emails instead of in Substack comments if that is more comfortable.
- If, however, neither of the above applies to you, and you want access to audio and video posts and, Lord willing, the kind of online encouragement, discipleship, and fellowship sketched out above, with the style and tone you are used to here, you are cordially invited to subscribe to the new crumbs from His table fellowship at crumbsfromhistable.substack.com
