The God of Order and Logic

I finished my visit with Dad in the Nursing home the other day with a prayer as usual. He prayed for at least 10 minutes to God who is the “God of order and logic” to come in and sort out our mess and muddle. Whilst to begin with this sounded silly to me as I guess I had not put it high on my list of God’s qualities. God doesn’t fall into a Myers Briggs type box; logical or creative he can be all things rolled into 1. The more I thought about this the more I realised that this made sense and it was coming out of what my Dad was experiencing inside his head. He has found it so hard to communicate to us just what kind of world he lives in now. “It’s just a muddle and a mess” he says.


It is not like some alzheimers sufferers who may not realise they are in a muddle and are in kind of a happy muddled world – no, he knows things are wrong which is must be even harder for him to conquer the frustration. Over 14 months we have seen this horrible tumour take over bit by bit with changes of personality, mood swings, confusion and memory loss– it’s quite scary really. We are still resisting its advances as much as we all can and my Dad is still himself in many amazing ways like his humour, his care for us and he is still very spiritually connected which is great. His prayers are really something else – very powerful!

My Father has always been a very detailed, pedantic, intelligent person and he would often spend his time correcting grammar, proof-reading mum’s reports and we share the same passion for good quality writing. Even though so much of this is lost now - and he can’t even use his computer anymore – his occasional high quality vocabulary demonstrates that his intelligence is still very much there (just clouded over a bit). He is so desperate to make some sense – “I’m talking a load of twaddle again aren’t I?” he says.

At times he insists things that certain objects are not what they are or what we tell him they are. My Dad – previously a quality assurance engineer in Marconi – was insisting to me that he needed to take the power lead from the radio into the bathroom to plug into the toilet to make it work! His brain is telling him different stuff. He still has a keen ear and picks up on stuff from others and the telly. He hears Eastenders in the background talking about a wedding dress and the next conversation 10 minutes later he is expressing concern that we have to sort out a dress for a wedding deadline and it is all his responsibility. A few weeks ago we would talk about someone who is elsewhere and then for the next half an hour that person is hiding behind the curtains or under the bed.

It is very much the Brain tumour that has caused all his suffering but through it all he knows that God has all the positive traits and gifts he needs to help sort him out – a bit of order and logic!

God is wholly good and all things come from him so let us praise our God who can bring order and logic and goodness to our human chaos. Even when we can’t see any clarity, logic or reasons – He is still to be trusted and will ultimately bring right this muddled and messed up world in his timing.