I'd Like to Take This Opportunity...

I'm not a fan of Halloween. I love the dressing up, but I dislike the evil behind the day.

Tomorrow, kids are encouraged to dress up as their favorite movie or book character. I think of it as an opportune time to wear my glow-in-the-dark skeletal long-sleeved T-shirt. (I haven't figured out a character to correspond it to yet...but I figure pretty much anyone would work. Eve was the first woman with a skeletal structure...)

I've gone back and forth with the concept. If I wear something skeletal on Halloween, does it look like I'm condoning the holiday? And then I wonder, Why should the "day" have so much power?

Why did I buy the skeleton T-shirt? I like seeing how things work. And, while glowing 2-D bones aren't the real thing, they make me think about what goes on inside me. How amazing is all that stuff? Heart pumping, nerves tingling, tendons connecting, muscles moving, brain telling, bones supporting... How amazing is the God who makes it work?

So I'm "taking back the night." I'll wear my skeleton T-shirt and praise the God Who makes the real bones. I'll see the Trick-or-Treaters and smile because I know my Savior has defeated the real monsters and goblins. And the princesses will remind me of who I am--a princess, the daughter of the King.

McClinic

It's my guess that sinus drugs and flu shots don't mix well. I was on one when I had the other done last Wednesday, and I haven't been the same since. Just this annoying dizzy feeling that makes me feel uncoordinated and rather like the Headless Horsewoman.

So, sucking it up, I made an appointment with the on-call physician and went in.

The bad grammar and eau de nicotine were probably my first clues that this woman had skimmed her textbooks. Bedside Manners 101 was apparently a class yet to be taken, as I was snidely told that antibiotics did nothing for viruses. If I wanted, I could have a CT scan done, but that would be a waste of my money in her opinion. (Then why was it mentioned?)

I said I had felt somewhat similar to this a few years ago, when I was told I was dehydrated.

"Why do you think you're dehydrated?" she demanded.

Maybe because I feel similar to how I did a few years ago...when I was told I was dehydrated...?

"Have you been throwing up? Had diarrhea? Had a temperature?"

No, no, and I don't know. I've felt warmer than my cold-blooded self lately...

"Do you think you're dehydrated?"

I don't know. You're the doctor!

"We can send you to the ER to get fluids if you want, but we're not gonna do it here at 10 minutes to five."

It felt a little like a McDonald's drive-through... I'd like a CT scan, with a side bag of IV fluids....

What do I want? I'd like you to read my chart and listen to me carefully. I'd like you to be kind. I'd like to be able to relax and let you be the doctor. That's what you went to school for...maybe...

Regional Humor

Iowa SUX

"This whole country's at war. Why should I help just one person?" --Maddy Bowen

Do you ever find your toes twitching and your fingers curling up on themselves--searching for something to do...something to do with this feeling that's making your heart beat faster and your world seem smaller?

I watched Blood Diamond with friends tonight and cringed through most of it. It wasn't a cowering sort of cringing but a nails-digging-into-my-palms sort of thing. Or a twist-the-remote-until-it-breaks-in-half sort of thing...but what good would that do?

What do you do with a problem that's a country wide and a continent away?

"This whole country's at war. Why should I help just one person?"
--Maddy Bowen

Because if you help one, that's one. And if I help one, that's two. And if he helps one, that's three...

Sponsor a kid. Go to a reputable place. I've met Jo Anne Lyon from World Hope International. Highness listened to her present at one of his ministerial training classes this fall. Seems solid. $360 to support a child for a full year.

$360 = a lot.

$1 / day = I'm selfishly enmeshed in myself if I can't pass on my wealth to another.

Just one.

Thanks, Lloyd Christmas!

Sophea

When I was a girl, I dreamed of growing up, marrying a wonderful man, and
raising a family...

Abused by her stepmother, Sophea ran away to a Cambodian city. A woman met her on the street and told her she could employ Sophea at her home. Sophea followed...and was put to work in a brothel.

Two years later, at age fourteen, the girl convinced her "employer" to let her return to her family. Finding them, she found she was despised by them. She went to a field and waited for men. Having "earned" enough money for food and a bus ticket, she returned to the city.

A man there told her he could help her. He sold her to another brothel.

"How," my mind wondered. "How could she trust again? How could she trust an agency that may come to to help; how could she trust a man?"

I am now 24, and I am dying of AIDS. My greatest fear is that no one will come to my burial.

Half a world away, she had my needs, my wants. There are no guarantees.



World Hope International's page on human trafficking: http://www.worldhope.org/trafficking/faastdebut.htm

US State Department's 2006 report on human trafficking: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2006/

His Highness will be preaching this Sunday and, as part of the Worship Planning Team, I headed to church yesterday evening to help with visual aids. A heavyset, unkempt woman had just beaten me there. Highness sent me a text asking for a ten minute delay.

When he gave the all-clear, I went back to his office and was greeted by a shaking head. "I feel so bad..." he kept saying. "I thought she wanted some sort of couseling, and I don't have time for that... I've got to get through my sermon five or six times tonight..."

He gave me an overview--that she had needed financial assistance, and three other churches had turned her down.

"That made me feel even worse," he moaned. "I started thinking, 'Why are you doing this to me today, God?'"

And I couldn't help but laugh at him.

"What's your sermon topic...?"

He grimaced. "AIDS, human trafficking, and...poverty..."

I laughed more...but it stung, me, too. I'd gotten to church all gung-ho about the visual aids project, then got delayed for more than ten minutes. Why was this lady infringing on my time? I was on a mission to put up signage relating stats of how many people in our world don't have electricity, how many don't have clean water, how many live on $2 a day...

Walking through the darkened halls of church a while after that, I thought more as I hung my signs.

• 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day.
• 1.8 billion people have access to a water source within about a ½ mile of home. They consume around 5½ gallons per day. The highest average water use in the world is in the U.S., at almost 160 gallons per day.

I don't have a concept of how much 1.3 billion is...but I understand a dollar. I don't get 1.8 billion...but I know I'm not likely to use 160 gallons of anything if I have to carry it each day.

I got home, turned on the tap, and splashed my fingers through it as I waited for them to register the concept of "cold." My hand suddenly shot forward with my glass; a few seconds later, I turned the water off.

• About 1.6 million children under the age of five die each year from diseases such as cholera and typhoid, which are caused by dirty drinking water.

It wasn't cold, but it wasn't killing me.

I'm not a fan of distance driving in rural areas at night. One reason: roadkill, which I'd rather not cause or be discovered as. Before the sun began to set prematurely, I found myself getting involved in a Bible study 45 miles from home. Now, even before the Daylight Savings change hits, I head off into the sunset--meaning a black, black drive home.

On tonight's journey, I wondered about road conditions come the onset of winter. I detest icy highways even more than I distrust dark ones, though I do have all-wheel-drive and am really curious about how my side cushion air bags work. Then I was reminded of the full moon a week or so ago--how the countryside really was bathed in light, and how it was a pleasant drive home. The week before that, I had the setting sun on my right and the approaching moon reflecting off the ponds on my left as I drove toward study. Again, the moon accompanied me home.

But I've taken science classes. I get that whole "full moon, partial moon, no moon" thing. It's silly to think I'd have light for each night of my travels...

I said goodbye, stepped into tonight's cold, and began my drive home. Not far outside the city limits, I noticed a glow in the direction of my town. Couldn't be. So far away? But none of the in-between hamlets were big enough... For the next forty miles I watched the lit sky, until I was in my driveway and looked up at the cover of clouds above me.

Sun's light reflecting off the moon some nights or manmade light bouncing off the clouds another week; either way, He provides.

Amazing Grace

I've noticed I have a really low tolerance for whining this year. That low tolerance makes me...whiny... So here goes, on my new track to being less whiny about my intolerances:

I met with some parents for 25 minutes after school today. Their child is in my remedial reading class but doesn't want to be there because he doesn't like to read. Despite his smiles and lively face in my classroom, he goes home and reportedly tells his parents things that I wouldn't want to hear. I try not to take this personally. I make every effort to find material that is interesting and/or life-relevant. After all, if I'm bored, how could I get reluctant readers interested in reading?

The parents make a suggestion about how I could incorporate regular classroom material into my curriculum. Having much flexibility, I tell them I'll talk with the regular reading teacher about this. I tell them this a few times in a "problem solved; thank you for coming!" tone of voice, but still they sit across the table.

At our last meeting together, they shook their heads and said they don't know what to do with their son. They read his assignments to him because, again, he "doesn't like to read." I asked them what will happen when he begins high school next fall, and they looked at me with big eyes.

After singing the praises of their child's untapped intelligence today, I brought up the shirt he wore on the first day of school: "Genius by birth, slacker by choice." I couldn't look at them after I said that, for fear that accusations would burn forth from my eyes. My parents would never have let me wear such a demoralizing shirt to school.

I am aghast at how many parents of middle schoolers shrug their shoulders and say, "We just don't know what to do with him!" I was a pain-in-the-butt teenager who scrubbed the toilet with her mother's toothbrush (told her three months later) and threw table knives down the hallway at her mother a few years after that. (None hit; get over it...) My parents most certainly did not dismiss my misbehaviors as, "Oh, that's just how she is!" There were consequences--physical, emotional, and mental. I learned that certain things are not acceptable. I'm still learning that there are better ways to do things. (I see the irony in learning later in life that procrastination is not the best M.O.) But if my parents had ignored that crappy teenage attitude?

So on to the non-whiny part. I was thinking, as I drove home, that hopefully, my electronic comments are not viewed as negative for the most part. I hope people read the optimism that really is inside me. I have this perverse drive to temper it with "reality" too frequently, but I'm working on that. So--how to apply that to this situation? I thought of these parents and how they're representative of so many parents in today's American society. What's the "good" spin on that? All I came up with is that it'll be amazing if I can show grace to them.

Going forth tomorrow, planning to be gracious--under the power of the One Who is most gracious to me... And that is amazing.

Respect the Wall

Temperature in the 80's, it was a beautiful South Dakota day with wind strong enough to move a grown man. After "helping" M and E smooth sand and arrange concrete blocks to support their coming hot tub, I lay on the fantastic grass and just existed in the sunshine while they went to E's truck to pick up another block.

Then there was movement at the edge of the work area--a midsized beetle anxiously attempting to climb the hard plastic wall that separated the grass from the newly-laid sand. I watched, amused. What would she find when she made it across? A barren wasteland, nothing like the grass she imagined.

I pictured her life in three minutes when the boys returned with the block. Smack, settle, grind--bug in gravel, end of journey.

She was still throwing herself at the black plastic when I looked back at her. Then she changed tactics and ran along the edge of it, hoping for a break in the wall.

Why? You don't know what awaits you on the other side...

Oh, the irony... How many walls do I hurl myself against or race along the side of? Maybe the grass is greener on my side.