December 19, 2008

My doctor said I would still be feeling pretty crummy at least a couple of weeks after the radiation ended. The man was a prophet, but I am beginning to see some improvement. Yesterday I rode my exercise bicycle for fifteen minutes at a fair to middling clip, and was considerably less fatigued than a week earlier, when I rode five minutes, slowly, and was exhausted. I did not sleep well last night, which is typical after a day when the adrenaline runs, but that too is part of a pattern, and I can see improvement.

(At this point in the epistle, Alison came along and wanted to use the computer to download tunes onto her ipod. Because we trust her discernment in matters musical, I was glad to do it. It took all afternoon, and so now I'm writing on the 20th of December. But it was a matter of priorities, and now we'll get back to what I was saying.)

Fear is a terrible thing, and we all have more than our share of it. Fear in the night is even worse. Two nights ago, I was lying on the floor beside my bed with my head on a pillow (my favorite praying posture!) and fighting one after another. Some of you may know how it is--terrible things happening to your family, etc., etc. But I zeroed in on my prayer targets and finally put the fear out of my mind, though it took awhile. It seems the nights you pray the hardest, you get hit the worst. (The nights you don't pray, you go right to sleep!)

This morning I was lying in bed alternating between a nameless sense of dread and listening to my stomach growl, when I thought I heard the air horn on a Winston-Salem Southbound freight train. Believe me, that galvanized me! (If you've seen some of my train t-shirts, you know I'm looney on this topic.) I was out of bed in a heartbeat. Turned out to be a false alarm, but it got me up.

I fed the dogs, took care of the cat litter, and finally got around to feeding the birds. The tray had been empty for a couple of days, but the little rascals throw out a certain kind of seed they don't like, and I was waiting for them to break down and clean it up. You know who won on that deal.

I had to sweep my way up the stairs, on a wet morning, and sweep the discarded seed off the side of the deck, another chore, but it was worth it. English sparrows constitute eighty percent of what congregates on the railing, but the chickadees and cardinals and titmouses (or is that titmice?) and juncoes and occasional red-bellied woodpeckers make up for the nuisance. And I get to praise God for the deck. When my father-in-law helped us build the house in 1991, he built a deck that will be standing fifty years from now. (The house is not too bad either! One of our neighbors at the time, a contractor himself, gave us quite a compliment--"You've got a lot of nails in this house.")

Speaking of the house, I was thirty-nine when we built it, and the weight of the whole project lay on me like a cement slab. I would have had to read the directions to nail my sister's shoes to the floor, but between Priscilla and her father, the job concluded successfully in three and a half months. Believe me, I did a lot of the hammering and sawing and carrying shingles, but when it came time to think things through, it was not me doing the thinking.

Which is a picture of the kingdom--we all have different gifts for different jobs.

But I really don't think God put anyone in charge of worrying!

Auf Wiedersehen--Chuck E.

P.S.--Alison has been teaching me how to convert e-mail to word documents, and I would like to compile an entire collection of these little epistles I've sent out. If any one has been keeping them, could you e-mail them back to me? Thanks!