Better

If you're a person who believes in some sort of personal Divine Being, do you ever play this little head game? Something disappointing happens, and either someone says, "Well, God must have a better plan," or you think something like, "God is sovereign and things happen for a purpose, so clearly I'm supposed to learn something from this, or He knew something bad was going to happen if my wishes were fulfilled, so it's all for the best." Then you sit around mulling this over for way too long and trying to envision all the scenarios that you might have been spared from, or trying to figure out what it is you're supposed to be learning.

Here's an example:

I was supposed to fly to Brother-Dave and Sister-in-Lu's yesterday. I was going to use up my last week of vacation for the year during the last week of the year playing with TWCN and Smiley-Guy. But I live in a usually-cold, wintery northern state, and Brother-Dave's family lives in a pretty far away cold, wintery northern state. My northern state had been a little tardy as far as snowfall and winter weather, in comparison to Ireland, where my parents live, which isn't even supposed to get snow, and was having a blizzard along with the rest of Europe the day my parents were scheduled to fly over here. Closed European airports notwithstanding, my parents actually got on a plane, which actually left, and actually arrived safely in our cold northern state that hadn't had any snow yet.

You would think if it had waited this long to snow, it could've waited a little longer, until the winter festivities were over or something. But it didn't. We managed not to get a white Christmas (snow on Christmas is, of course, totally irrelevant to the holiday, but it sure makes for a lovely landscape), but the day after, we began to get a blizzard. In this neck of the woods, it doesn't even seem like it was that bad, overall. But the timing was miserable, and the short version of the story is that I am now not going to Minnesota to see my brother and his family, and my parents, who were supposed to leave today, now have to wait to fly out there until Friday, and are still working on extending their stay, re-hiring a rental car, and getting back to the house here in the meantime.

This is when someone comes along and helpfully says, "Well, God has a better plan." This is probably true, but it sure doesn't seem like it from this vantage point. There's no use in pretending that any of this is of earth-shaking importance, but if it's important enough for God to have another plan than it, it must be important enough to get kind of a reaction from the people affected. The reaction, at least from me, is that being stranded at home on vacation with nothing to do (but church history paper research, which I can't do much of anyway, because the seminary offices are closed and it's hard to find info on the Protestant modernist-fundamentalist controversy anywhere else in this heavily Roman Catholic part of the world), as contrasted with playing tea party for a week with TWCN is a weird kind of "better." I'd debate it.

Then today I woke up with a cough, which has now established itself firmly in my lungs. So--maybe it's "better" that I was prevented from going because Brother-Dave's family spent pretty much the entire time at Sister-in-Lu's parents' house over Christmas, sick as dogs. Surely they do not need to get sick again, even if it's a completely different type of ailment. But really? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to keep me from getting sick?

Maybe God's trying to grow my character, and maybe it's even working, because in spite of this rant, I'm not actually angry, as I might have been in the past--just a little put out and kind of cynical/curious about reasons. Or maybe He's trying to grow my brother's character, by giving him surely one of the most miserable Christmas/New Year's seasons he's ever had. Or maybe He's trying to show two-and-a-half-year-old TWCN that life's just not fair and the sooner she learns it the better: apparently she cried when she found out I couldn't come to visit her. I wonder how she'll take the delay in my parents' itinerary.

Well, it isn't fair. None of this is the biggest deal ever, but it's disappointing and frustrating and disrupting and . . . not fair.

On the other hand . . . This is the kind of thing that leads some people to decide there is no God, or He doesn't love us, or He isn't all-powerful, and that, to me, seems like overkill. If there is a God, it makes sense that He might not make sense. I mean, made in the image of God we may be. God Himself, we are not (in spite of worldviews that try to tell us differently). In the first place, who am I to think any of this should matter to Him, really? And if, as I believe, it surprisingly does, does that mean He's going to step in at every moment, insuring that everything about my life is smooth sailing? (Evidently not . . . because it hasn't been!) I'm not writing this to prove anything. (Fortunately, since I'm not succeeding in that.) I'm just mulling this over. And here's what I'm thinking:

Maybe somehow, in some miraculous, sparkly-snowflake, cheesy Serendipity-movie kind of way, I'll meet this amazing guy this week and be married by next Christmas or something crazy like that, or maybe I'll just be stuck here with a chest-cold and no little-girl tea-parties. But either way, I still believe God is good, and God loves me, and God is all-powerful. I just don't think any of that requires Him to wait on me hand-and-foot, or forestall any disappointments, and I don't even think there has to be a "reason," or a "better," honestly. At least, not one that I'll necessarily ever see. The world is broken, and "broken" things happen here.

We celebrate God's coming into the brokenness at this time of year. He came ultimately to fix it--to fix us--but first He submitted to the brokenness and darkness, the disappointment and frustration and disruption (do I think His leaving Heaven to hang out down here with us wasn't a disruption?), and even now we're waiting for the final "fixing." It'll come. I hope I learn something from this, even if I'm not married by next Christmas, but maybe it's all just part of living here, and maybe, with God around, even if He isn't fixing it right now, that's okay.

Leave It

Today I went out to rake some leaves. The lawn actually has looked pretty good, because on some windy day, all the leaves came down but ended up blowing to the edges of the yard, so I didn't think this was going to take too long.

But then I started thinking about it. Apparently some place in the north of England got somewhere around 10 inches of snow this week, so if they're getting that much already, it's probably likely we'll have some by the time my parents get here just before Christmas. And if we do, then all the leaves nestling in snow-like drifts among the flowerbeds would just disappear. On the other hand, and in the meantime, I realised it would look a whole lot better if I raked the beds out, too.

The short version of the story (because I know you don't want to read about every pile of leaves I picked up by hand and chucked in the wheelbarrow and wheeled across the lawn to the driveway to dump into the woods on the other side) is that it took me two hours to rake a quarter of the lawn. And then, just as I was wrapping up that quarter of lawn and muttering under my breath about how that was all I was doing today and I needed some lunch!, the wind changed directions. This meant that the leaves in the adjacent quarter of lawn that I had not touched yet, began to blow into the quarter I had. I valiantly resisted to the urge to swear, and I still went inside and had lunch, but do I ever hate raking! Especially by myself.

After I went in, Smug-Neighbour came out with his leaf-blower and tidied up his already pretty immaculate lawn. Former-Roommate-Sarah and I used to note with some disgust how he always came out with his fancy lawn equipment whenever either of us was doing lawn-work over here. Today I was telling myself we must have made that up, but . . . I really don't think we did.

Amazing Grace

Last night I rewatched the amazing movie Amazing Grace and I got to thinking about how popular it's been among American evangelicals, and how potentially weird that is. I think we like it because it's finally a well-done movie with actors we've heard of before (well--at least if we watch British costume-dramas), portraying a genuine Christian as--a little eccentric, perhaps, but--a really positive, liberating, historical figure. There is no question in the movie that Wilberforce's faith was the driving force behind his movement to abolish slavery in England, and there is no apology made for it. I think, for most of us, this comes as something of a relief. And it should. We should be proud to have a man like Wilberforce in our "family history."

Here's the thing I find potentially weird, though. Most of the American Christians I know (and I love you truly, but if you know me you probably already know that our politics don't match) today take a political attitude that is not unlike that propounded by Wilberforce's opponents. Those guys were the conservatives. Wilberforce was a threat to the then-current capitalist system. The entire economy was built on the backs of slaves, and getting rid of it was going to turn everything upside-down. Wilberforce was accused of being unpatriotic and a rebel and immoral and all kinds of things, all because he loved Jesus and therefore loved people, and he wasn't afraid to give up the comforts of his life and to identify with the oppressed . . . and to recognise that his people were among the oppressors.

Look. If you're a regular here, you know I don't like to talk about politics. Furthermore, I know I'm not exactly a woman of action here--it's not like I'm doing a whole lot, by myself in my parents' comfortable house, with my dog, to ameliorate the plight of the homeless or the slaves around the world or the sexually-trafficked. And in this day and age there is so much oppression and so many different things we could focus on that it's almost overwhelming to talk about any of it. But I've been wanting to say something about immigration for a long time, so I guess I'm just going to say it.

I really don't get the majority evangelical attitude on immigration. It seems to me that when we get all bent out of shape over people obeying our immigration laws or not, we're kind of losing sight of something--namely, that our identity should be found in Jesus, who loved all people no matter where they were from and whether they were law-abiding or not, and that our identity is not first and foremost as conservative Americans. What are we trying to conserve, anyway? By all means, let's conserve unborn babies. I feel very strongly about that. But it just seems to me that, at least when we're talking about people from other countries and whether they're allowed to be/work here or not, what we're trying to conserve is our own white sense of power and superiority and our own cultural convenience.

It seems to me that a more Christlike approach would be to see the influx of immigrants as an opportunity. Guess what, all of us whose churches send people to foreign countries to tell people about Jesus (and I'm not saying we shouldn't)? We can tell people from foreign countries about Jesus, too! And guess what? Getting all kinds of angry and moral-high-road with them, and then kicking them out, is not going to help. I'm hearing an awful lot these days about how this nation was built on Christian principles and most of the founding fathers were Christians and and and . . . but I say if that's true, then indeed--let's go back to our roots, and remember that with a few exceptions all of us were immigrants here, and this country was built with the premise that "all men are created equal." This place was designed to be a haven . . . for religious, political and yea, even economic refugees. At least, so it seems to me. Did I miss something, or did my Swedish great-grandfather show up here because of a job? Is that okay, and if it is, is it just because he's white?

Jesus hung out with "tax-collectors and sinners," and what I get from that is that He didn't require people to get their act together before He spent time with them. He was perfect and never sinned, but He never told anyone they had to be the same before they could follow Him around. Sure, a nation needs to have its laws. I'm not a proponent of anarchy. But I think the general refrain, "I don't mind if they immigrate here as long as they're legal" is frankly simplistic and self-referential. And I think as Christians we need to have a bigger picture about the whole thing. Jesus told us to go into all the world and tell it the Good News. If all the world is coming to us, does that mean we should tell it the opposite? I suspect it means we all have the opportunity to change the world with Good News instead of bad.

Sure. Terrorists might get in. Or we might breed our own. (Warning: this video is offensive . . . but it makes a point. And it makes me think that if we were still talking about a war on terror, we might want to look within before we start pointing fingers.) Bad things are going to happen either way, and I don't think we're going to keep the bad things out by keeping people out--or by giving them a hard time for getting in. Sometimes, by making immigration laws more stringent, worse things happen. It seems to me that if we're going to tout this country as being a Christian one, we should be reaching out to the world the way Christ Himself did. We should be on the front lines like Wilberforce was, standing up for human . . . humanness. Not preserving our own comfort-zone and living in fear of the Other, but loving, come what may.

I know. This is not a bullet-proof argument for relaxing immigration laws. It probably isn't even an argument at all. Someone will accuse me of being a "bleeding heart liberal" or whatever people are calling them these days. I don't know about that, but I'm fine with it if it's true. I'm just saying, if we say we follow Jesus, I think we should stop getting all sidetracked with manmade laws, and stop living in fear, and reach out to people.

Isn't It Ironic?

The first time I ever heard anyone go on a rant about Alanis Morissette's song's use of the word "ironic," I was still living in England. The ranter was this somewhat arrogant young British chap whose British manner of self-expression made the rant funny even though he was arrogant and he was using his diatribe as a a sort of "proof" that Americans have no idea what irony is. I think he meant people from the United States. (Isn't it ironic that she's Canadian?)

Since that time, however, I have heard a few North American rants about this very same thing, except they specify the artist herself as the one who doesn't know what irony is. These rants are actually kind of trendy, as a quick perusal of the comment section under the YouTube video makes evident. I confess that I have ranted similarly before . . . when I didn't realise just how many people were experts on the meaning of the word ironic.

The latest rant I heard on this topic, however, came from Dave and was directed at me. I had used the term to describe a series of coincidentally badly-timed real-life events which were in nature not unlike Morissette's vignettes. It was at this point that I got both snippy and embarrassed, because I had to admit that, even though I have a B.A. in English Literature and am continually correcting people's grammar and spelling in my head (if not aloud), I myself am probably not overly clear on the meaning of the word irony. Dave, who has a B.A. in Philosophy which requires better-than-average language skills as well, became very intent on trying to tease out the knots of this issue for me. However, because the examples at hand were Morissette's lyrics and my bad luck, the explanation fell a little short of a language lesson. It may not be ironic, but it's kind of a bummer when your life is getting moderately sucky and you are wrong about the word you want to use to describe it.

We managed to agree that a more accurate adjective for the situations posited by Morissette and actually being lived through by me is annoying. But last night another such episode transpired, and I would just like to say, in both my and Alanis' defense, that the reason we want to use the word ironic for these kinds of situations is because annoying doesn't cut it. That word is too broad. Lots of things are annoying and don't incorporate these weird little twists of what-have-you. There isn't a word for these scenarios, is the problem, see. There are combinations of words, but nothing nice and concise like the word ironic.

"Who woulda thought--it figures," is Alanis' more accurate summing up of both her and my scenarios, but you can't go around saying that all the time. Even "doesn't it suck?" or "isn't your luck terrible?" or "isn't it bad timing?" doesn't really do it, even though all of those things do, in fact, describe the situations in question. None of them touch on that thing inherent to these situations that Alanis is calling irony--maybe it isn't, but it's something beyond suckiness and bad luck and bad timing. I think we need a new word, guys. Right now, I'm calling it "go-figure timing," but don't try to make a song out of it, because it's still really unwieldy.

More About Apostrophes

We have discussed apostrophes before. Then the other day, Antagonist-Andrew (long-lost Starbucks friend recently rediscovered on Facebook) pointed out to me this link. I find it delightful and I think I kinda want that t-shirt.

It did start me off on one of my etymological musings, though. I started wondering who decided apostrophes would be used for possessives and not for plurals, when normally they're used for contractions. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm really sorry. You can just skip this post. This is, perhaps regrettably, how I think sometimes.)

Then I wondered if originally possessives were contractions--like, maybe people used to say stuff like, "David, his book," and the "his" got smushed into the preceding word and ended up as "David's book." This, of course, doesn't immediately explain why we don't say, "Anna'r book" for women ("Anna, her book"), but there might still be some reasons:

1. When possessives started coming into the English language, it was a more patriarchal society so they didn't care about gender-inclusive language.

2. If you must say it, "Jesus's" is easier to say than "Jennifer'r."

3. No one except people from central Massachusetts wanted to sound like people from central Massachusetts by adding "r"s to the ends of words that ended in vowels.

So. Now we actually have a reason for possessives to have apostrophes and plurals not to have them. Listen up, apostrophe abusers! Just stop it, okay?

Decisions, Decisions

Like many people, I have an "alternate email address." This is the address I give to grocery stores and Borders Booksellers when I sign up for their rewards cards and don't really want to get their advertising interspersed with the email I actually want to read. This means, though, that sometimes I miss out on some deals I might be interested in. (Not usually, though.)

Today I was checking Alternate Email and noted that CVS was offering to let me "Choose My Free Gift!" Woohoo! Of course I knew enough to be fairly certain it was going to be a choice between items they might want to give me for free which I might or might not be actually interested in. Sure enough. The choice was between a four-pack of CVS-brand disposable toothbrushes (Aren't all toothbrushes ultimately disposable? What makes these special? Do they dissolve in water? And isn't that counterproductive?) and a chocolate bar. So . . . basically? Between dental hygiene and not dental hygiene, evidently.

Things I Wonder About Sometimes

1. Hybrid Words:

Why do I like making them so much? I was going to say, "Not only was the last post my cancerversary post, but it was also post number 444." Groundhog Day was the Milk Guy's and my e-niversary. I was inordinately proud of the word guacaritas the other week, and there have been a few others on this blog, like Buxerati. See if you can find them all. I can't!

And yet, hypocritically, I hate when other people do this. Actually, maybe I just hate when famous people and corporations do this. I liked it when the Milk Guy called his chihuahua/min-pin mix a doberhuahua or a chihuaberman. But daycation and staycation give me hives. Adding holic to the ends of words similarly makes me want to tear my hair out. I don't really know why.

2. Accords

Why in the world did the Honda corporation's advertising department never jump on the Pirates of the Caribbean craze and spoof one of the many scenes where a pirate says, "Do we have an Accord?" What? Because it doesn't look piratical? Psshhh!

3. Forgetting

Why do I never write this stuff down so that when I finally decide to blog about it, I only remember half of what I wanted to blog about?

Mornings

I am a morning person. Very rarely do I say bad things about mornings (although sometimes I used to faux-sympathise with Starbucks customers when they complained that 8 a.m. was "too early" and I had already been up for over four hours).

This morning, though? I would like to rewind and get a do-over, please.

It actually kind of set up last night. I'm trying to organise a group of youth to go to a Christian concert at Six Flags this Saturday (and we actually have a lot of interest, coming, as it does, on the heels of a youth retreat that everyone seemed to enjoy very much. More about that in a happier post after I get this out of my system). Although there is a lot of interest among the teens, I'm having a terrible time recruiting chaperones, and furthermore, logistics are proving challenging for more than one family involved. This has elicited some tense moments and is stressing me out a little.

Meanwhile, Oscar had a tummy ache again for some reason, and something even less pleasant than usual was issuing out of his hindquarters last night. I assumed, when I put him in his crate in the kitchen and went upstairs to bed myself, that if he were in distress and needed to go out urgently, he would whimper enough for me, a generally light sleeper, to wake up. This has happened in the past.

Evidently, however, I'm still catching up on the sleep I missed at "Conference." I slept through the whimpering. I spent most of the morning washing Oscar, washing his toys, washing his crate, using up rolls of paper towels (so much for being an environmentally conscious hippie), and then trying to clean up myself.

I'm still not sure I should've brought him to work with me today . . . but the alternative would have been to leave him in his crate all day and come home and repeat the whole wash cycle all over again. And he's doing okay right now. Which is good, because when I got to church I had a phone call from one of our Sunday school volunteers who isn't happy with her assignment and I had to try to convince her that she still wants to help out.

All of this pales in comparison with, say, being persecuted for one's faith in India, but it's still super-annoying, and I'd still like to be able to hit a restart button.

Sleepy?

So remember that fabulous mattress I bought last summer? The one that made my bed look like a contender for the bed in the Princess and the Pea? Well, like the princess in that story, turns out this mattress has been ruining my sleep. And my back. I'm hoping this story will have a happy ending. It's not shaping up that way yet.

The first three months of the mattress were great, and when I had my surgery and needed all sorts of pillows and stuff to keep me from moving around in my sleep, I thought it was wonderful. Plus, I was in so much pain for other reasons that I didn't notice the growing dent in the pillowtop. After I started to really heal, though, I noticed that I was waking up with back pain again. Given that this was why I had replaced the mattress in the first place, this didn't seem too good. But it wasn't bad back pain. Maybe I was making it up?

After Christmas I moved to the downstairs guest bedroom so I wouldn't have to heat the whole house, and I slept delightfully well on the mattress down there for three months. By the time I moved back upstairs, the dented mattress had un-dented itself, and I managed to sleep well on it for a week or so, and then the dent reappeared and the pain came back. I was definitely not imagining it. One morning I woke up with a crick in my neck so bad that it gave me a near-migraine, and Thursday at midnight I woke up with a charlie horse in, of all places, the front of my leg, next to my shin-bone. It was excruciating. Also--that is a very difficult muscle to stretch out, I discovered. I crawled out of bed and tried flexing my foot, but it could barely move. So I tried massaging it, and was hit with such a sharp stabbing pain and overwhelming wave of nausea that I gave up and climbed back in bed. Not that I wanted to be there.

Today I finally succeeded in convincing Sleepy's, the illustrious company from whom I bought this piece of nightly torture, to send out an inspector at some point, but it turns out that they do not honour warrantees for back problems, only for manufacturing defects. The first customer service person I talked to tried to talk me into saying that there wasn't a dent (which I must have actually said, because I tend to cower in situations like this--but that was foolish, because it made things difficult for me later on) and that really I just wanted a new mattress.

Well, I do want a new mattress. I do think this one is defective, but the fact is that even if it isn't, I want a mattress--that does not have a pillowtop--that is just a normal mattress--that doesn't make me afraid to go to bed at night--that doesn't leave me crippled the next day. And I don't think I should have to buy a brand-new mattress myself (even at a discount) when the one provided for me (at the suggestion of the sales people whose diagnostic computer swears up and down that I need a soft, cushiony bed; I don't think so!), defective or not, has been causing me pain that could require extra expenditures on my part at a chiropractor's or something. I don't really care what is or isn't wrong with the mattress. I haven't had it a year, and I think I should be given a credit regardless.

But customer service does what they're told, and Sleepy's just wants to sell mattresses, and so that dent better still be in the bed when the inspector comes . . . sometime within the next month. Because until I get something better, I'm sleeping in the guest room.

On My Own Terms

I want to be a cancer survivor on my own terms, I'm realising. I suspect this is both reasonable and unreasonable (or at least ungrateful), but right now I'm not value-judging it. I'm just telling you what is.

I have friends who I have ongoing conversations with. We talked about stuff before, and we talk about stuff now, and sometimes the stuff is related to cancer, but that isn't all we talk about. I like that.

Here's what I don't like:

I don't like when people I don't really know, with whom I rarely converse, decide that now they know something about me, and they come up to me and get a pained look on their faces and say, "How are you feeling? Are you okay? Really? That's good, 'cause you look great."

Um . . . thanks?

I think a lot of these people are really well-meaning and genuinely concerned, and I feel for them in the awkward scenario of only knowing one thing about me to talk to me about. I mean, I've been in similar situations. (And I probably haven't been any more graceful in them.) But being on the receiving end of this tends to grate after a while. I want to say, at a slightly-louder-than-conversational decibel level, "Hey! Everybody! I am not my cancer! I have other aspects of my life and personality we could explore here! I don't even have cancer anymore, guys! They took it out!"

This, of course, ignores the facts that:

1. There is an upcoming treatment that is making me very, very nervous.

2. If these same people I don't really know started trying to probe into other aspects of my life, I'd probably resent that even more.

3. I am quite happy to talk about having had cancer if it excuses me from doing something I don't want to do.

I can't come up with a conclusion to this post which doesn't imply some sort of value judgment from either myself or you, so instead I will end with an all-purpose quote from the Milk Guy and say,

"There it is, then."

Fed Up

On Friday I was going to write a post that went a little something like this:

"I have decided that I think that auto insurance and health insurance plans should merge. I do not think I should have to pay more money this year for ailing anything."

I figured by this you would know that I was having car trouble.

It turned out, though, that I wasn't having car trouble. I was just stupid. I don't want to tell you what I did, because then the full extent of my idiocy would be on the internet for all to read, and I need to retain at least some self-respect . . .

But anyway, before I found out all that, and before I could whinge about it, we had an ice storm. As the Milk Guy said, "I used to kind of like ice storms. They made things all shiny."

Yeah. Not anymore. I lay in my bed all night on Thursday (after the power had already gone out), listening to tree after after tree losing life and limb. You might know I kind of like trees. I felt like crying for them. I was also scared out of my brains that one of them was going to fall on my house.

It's kind of surprising one didn't. The yard is a wreck. The road is a wreck. I would like to know why I voted to keep our state tax, when so far nothing has been done (except by neighbours) to take care of the trees leaning on power lines and the branches dangling precariously above the road. I'm immensely grateful my mom has been here during this ordeal, or I might actually have lost my mind, being in the house and dealing with this all by myself. (It hasn't been totally by myself, as it turns out, and as I will likely describe later, but it would have felt a lot more like it without Mom.) Still, I feel mighty close to losing my mind anyway. Fortunately there's a woodstove in the house, and people around who do have power, but meanwhile, we're filling up water bottles at friends's houses, flushing our toilets with water from a creek, washing dishes when we have to, showering elsewhere, and stumbling around in the dark. It doesn't look like things will get better any time soon.

I have a whole lot of processing going on in my head, but suffice it to say that right this second? This ordeal is bugging me a whole lot more than the cancer diagnosis ever did.

Plus, yesterday my exhaust system started dragging on the ground. Maybe I do have car trouble after all.

Good for Goodness' Sake

Earlier this week, a friend of mine, who more or less espouses this view, alerted me to this ad campaign.

The thought of it does weird things to my stomach. It kind of awakens my inner reactionary and makes me want to stamp up and down on a poster while wearing stilettos and rant or something. This would probably not go very well, partly because I never wear heels and a first attempt at stilettos while trying to destroy something would likely end up destroying me more quickly than the poster. Also I don't think reactionary reactions are usually very effective.

Having said that, I've got to say I agree with Wildmon on this one. I just don't see where the basis of goodness comes from without a God. We have sort of discussed this here before. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, while coming from the mouth of Jesus, might work as a basic manifesto for all people with or without a belief in God. But I've discovered that, just because I love to be given books for my birthday, not everybody does, so if I literally did unto others as I would have them do unto me, some people might not consider I had given them a good birthday present. On a larger scale, somebody might say that assisted suicide is good because it prevents suffering, and I might say it's bad because it short-circuits personal development and denies God's sovereignty over that life.

Although I think there are really solid reasons for believing in the Christian God, for the sake of argument let's say I could be wrong. Or the assisted-suicide-advocate could be wrong. Or somebody that believes in a totally different kind of God could be wrong. But we can't all be right about what good is. And without a God, who decides? I suspect even atheists have different ideas about what constitutes "good" in any given scenario. So do Christians, if it comes to that. But atheists, as far as I can tell, don't have any external basis for deciding what goodness is; it's entirely arbitrary. Christians may not always get our goodness right, but at least we have a basis for it. I think, frankly, that an atheist's basis is the same one--it's just not acknowledged.

On the other hand, I do think there's a reason to "be good for goodness' sake," particularly for Christians. We have a God who loves, who didn't want robots, who doesn't add up points for us to get into His good graces. He wants to relate to us, and He wants our goodness to come out of relating to His goodness--He is goodness. I'd rather be good for His sake than because Santa Claus was coming to town . . .

Disgruntlement

First of all, why do they call those obnoxious blue things with the asymmetrical ties in a hospital "gowns"? Why do we use the same word to refer to the article of clothing that can make a woman look the most regal, and the article of . . . something . . . that makes everybody look completely stupid? I'm just asking.

Secondly, it turns out my insurance may not pay for the Oncotype-DX, the test which is meant to show what my risk of recurrence (and therefore need of chemotherapy) is. It is a very expensive test. Also, nothing got sent away for it yet, which means that my wait time is growing proportionally. Also, my medical oncologist is still just itching to dose me up with dangerous chemicals, although she did give me the paperwork to fill out to at least get the ball rolling, which is more than anybody else managed to do.

The good parts of the day, which I feel I should mention to battle my crankiness, included:

1. A good chat (probably also and professionally known as a "session") with my counselor.

2. The Milk Guy's homemade mac-and-cheese, plus his loan of a (metal) thermos so that my mom's and my Starbucks Signature Hot Chocolate would stay hot.

3. A shopping trip (on which I actually found some things I needed, for once), brought to me (and my mother) by some very kind people in another country.

Plus . . .

The light fixture in the hallway burnt out three brand-new bulbs--one with a puff of smoke, even.

And Now for Something (Sort Of) Completely Different . . .

David-of-Six says this post should instead be entitled, "Water, water everywhere, except the kitchen sink." He's right, actually, but I'm stubborn.

Back in June or something, the kitchen sink faucet started dripping. The Milk Guy came over for dinner one night, and after he had evicted the wasps that had moved into the grill (at some danger to himself) and had grilled our vegetables, I asked him, "Do you know how to fix dripping faucets?" He got a kind of roguish gleam in his eye, repositioned the water handle and said, "All fixed!" We both knew it wasn't, but it wasn't the hugest problem in the world, so I let him off.

My parents came to visit for a couple of weeks later in the summer and I asked my dad, "Do you know how to fix dripping faucets?" I got a similar response.

After my parents left, the dripping began under the sink. I couldn't find exactly where it was leaking from and figured I could manage with slight drips until my parents came home at Christmas, because who wants to fork out money for a plumber when it's not that big a deal? I put two plastic bins underneath the pipes, every so often bailing them out the back door.

After the Sixes moved in, the drips from the faucet were par for the course, and the drips under the sink had turned into torrents. Oh. The arm wasn't properly connected to one of the joints. That's easy enough to fix. We shoved the two pieces back together and the drips (at least the lower ones) stopped.

Then they started again. Not to mention the sink was clogging. David-of-Six replaced some of the piping under the sink. It didn't help.

On Thursday we (by which I mean the Sixes) called a plumber. The plumber couldn't make it until Monday. The kitchen was starting to smell. The sink was not draining. The dishwasher was backing up into it. Some of the other sinks were clogging up, too. "Pump your septic tank," Everybody said. Yesterday a guy came and pumped the septic tank. It was fine. Nothing was wrong with it. Fortunately. It was a good preventative measure, Everybody assured me. I'm sure it was. But the sink was still not draining, and it was still dripping. Also, now water spurts out from under the handle.

A friend called a drain-clearing company for us. They sent someone to us yesterday afternoon. He ran a snake down the pipes and wrestled with them for about two hours. There was, indeed, a clog. He removed the clog. In the meantime, he discovered that a pipe beyond the cellar wall had broken. Most of the water was still going down the pipe. Some of the rest of it (and its attendant sludge) was going into the insulation. Mmmm.

Licensing restrictions apparently prevented him from fixing the pipe. He was not sure he had removed all the sludge, but was afraid to try anymore, lest he damage the pipes further. He advised we call a plumber. The plumber, he said, could fix the pipe. The plumber could fix the leak. The plumber could fix the drips and the spray. Then, if the sink was still clogged, he--the Drain Guy--would come back for no extra charge and clear out the rest of the debris. He removed the piping immediately under the kitchen sink and turned the water off there.

So . . . we're still waiting for the plumber. Tonight we ate on paper plates. I lugged two-and-a-half days' worth of seven people's dishes into the basement and washed them in the lower level sink. While I did my laundry.

Why. (?)

I have this very hazy memory from my distant childhood of this short-term playmate who used to ask "What for?" after everything. I don't remember if we lived in New Jersey or Massachusetts or even Honduras when I knew her. I don't remember her name. To me, her name was always "The What-For Girl."

Conversely, I have few memories of asking "why" very often myself. Until I turned about 22, that is. Ever since then, it seems like I've wanted to know the "why" of everything, which is unfortunate, because you just can't. Often, I am not very pleased with the fact that you can't, and I have been known to describe myself by saying, "I fight with God a lot."

It's never been a question of disbelieving in God. I can't do it. I tried once. Maybe if he'd stop making Himself known every time I'm "this close" to giving up I could do it, but He just keeps showing up and in the process I feel assured that 1) He is there, 2) He loves me, 3) I have no clue what He intends for me. The part I have a hard time with is the last part, and the trusting that His ideas for my life actually are better than mine. So . . . I hurtle "whys" across the universe and try futilely to wrestle with the God of it.

Until now.

I know. You don't believe me. Especially after yesterday's post. But the thing about my anger yesterday is that when it came down to it, I wasn't asking why in the great cosmic, universal sense, but more in a confined, causal sense. And when I really dissected my anger, I realised I wasn't truly angry at God. I almost felt like I was angry at the doctors and the writers who were telling me these things when I didn't truly have any (or much) control over the situation in the first place and I already know the world is broken.

A few weeks ago my car temporarily tanked, and I thought I was going to have to get a whole new one. I got really furious at God and wondered why He allows me to struggle so much. The next day I found out the car was okay (well, it was going to cost a lot less to make it okay, anyway), and the day after that I found out I had cancer, and although I cried at the news, I had no sense of fist-shaking at the heavens at all.

I still can't figure it out. I don't think I've instantaneously grown up within the course of that one day. I don't think I've even fully given up asking why or getting mad at God about things, because there have been a few more minor things in the midst of all this that I've taken Him to task for. But somehow I don't feel like I need to demand the reason for this one.

Maybe it's because I feel like there is a reason, even though I'm not clear what it is. It's not like I feel, exactly, that God Himself reached down and gave me cancer, just like I know He didn't reach down and kill His own Son Jesus. It feels more like, as with the crucifixion, God knew this was going to happen and already had something good and big up His sleeve to do with this.

Obviously I don't think it's going to be anything like "saving the world" or that. Only Jesus has that down. And I'm not even fully convinced that I will ever see the end result of what my having cancer will bring. I just have this weird sort of bedrock sense that, as Julian of Norwich said, "All will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well."

I suppose that, since I'm such a "What-For" kind of girl these days, and since I've just asserted that I have no desire to rage the "whys" about this situation, tomorrow I will be vastly upset and start asking why all the time. It could happen. I'm just saying that so far? It hasn't. And that, my friends, might be a small miracle in itself.

A Little Tip

This post is not about cancer.

Imagine that.

Here is something I was thinking about at Starbucks the other night:

If you go to a bar and buy a drink, it is etiquette to leave a dollar tip. If you go to a restaurant and buy a meal, it is etiquette to leave 15-20% tip. So why, I wanted to know, is it okay to simply leave the 6 cents you got as change when you tip at a coffee shop?

I don't actually have any answers to this question. I'm not clear how much to tip in a coffee shop, either, when I'm the customer (though I try to err on the generous side for obvious reasons). I'm not exactly ranting--although when people don't tip at all, I think that's just not fair.

I certainly don't think a coffee that cost $1.73 merits a $1 tip, although some rare people are kind enough to leave that. But we are providing a service, and in this case, it's even something people could make at home. Since they are disinclined to do this, and they're paying for this beverage in the first place, you would think they could throw in a little extra for the person who made the coffee so they didn't have to . . .

Well, at least--I would think . . .

And ALSO . . .

. . . is it really somehow cosmically necessary that every single sink in the house and the upstairs toilet be having plumbing problems right now?

Better Than You?

The church I go to here has a chapter of Celebrate Recovery, a 12-step ministry developed out of Saddleback Church. I think I may have mentioned not preferring programmes--quite possibly because I am not very organised myself, so organised things make me feel skittish and boxed in, even if that's not truly what's happening.

But I have a lot of "room" for Celebrate Recovery, partly because I went through one of their step-studies one year and somehow (though I still can't explain how, exactly), God used it to break some patterns and stuff that needed to be broken in my life. And partly because the people in my church who are regular participants in the programme are some of the most genuine and grace-filled people I know.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about the programme and my friends in it is the acknowledgment that no one is better than anyone else--that we've all messed up pretty royally, and that we don't have any greater merit than someone else who may not know Jesus and who is maybe tangled up in the same sins we are working to get rid of. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and about how somehow I, and I think Christians in general, accidentally slide into thinking that I (or we) are better than people who don't know Jesus yet--even though it was miraculous grace that saved us, and not anything we did.

Last night a few of us went to hear a local Christian band play. They were actually really musically excellent, and the band members seemed genuinely humble and had a straightforward but appealing way of presenting their own faith in the Gospel. Unfortunately, their host's approach was not nearly as winsome--and, I don't think, as theologically accurate either. At the end of the gig, after the band had set up a good atmosphere for considering the claims of Christ, the host got up and began to rant. In his rant, which went on for a good fifteen minutes, I think, he bashed Muslims (of whom there were none present) and non-Christians in general (of whom there was at least one present). We sat cringing for most of the diatribe, until the guy said, "If you don't accept Jesus, you're stupid!" (Yes. Complete with exclamation mark.) It was at that point that I stood up and walked out of there.

The resulting impression was pretty terrible, although I don't think any of us blamed the band. I left imagining a little more clearly maybe, some of what people who are not Christians must go through when they're around Christians. There's absolutely a call to share Jesus with people--but when I feel like someone's putting themselves above me, I don't necessarily think of Jesus, and I don't know how I expect someone who hasn't gotten to know Him yet will get any kind of accurate impression of Him if they feel like I think I somehow have more merit as a person than they do.

A Time to Rejoice and a Time to Whinge

And now is the time to whinge. Well. Actually. I suppose that really it's always time to rejoice. I further suppose that, even if that were not the case, I should really rejoice a whole lot more than I do. But . . . right now I'm going to whinge anyway.

Getting old is really annoying:

For as long as I have had teeth, not one of them has had a cavity. Today I went to the dentist and found out that . . . one of them has a cavity. I really can't take any credit for my previously cavity-free teeth (can you say "cavity free"? is there such thing as an absence of a hole?)--it's heredity and early and regular fluoride treatments and such. But I feel somewhat affronted regardless. The dentist is calling it a "pit," which I guess is not as deep as a "cavity" and is somewhat less invasive and painful to treat, but whatever. There is something wrong with my tooth. I am not pleased.

Probably the reason there is something wrong with my tooth is that I have taken to drinking milk steamers with honey syrup in them at work, and this is because of getting old, too. No, no--I don't think old people drink milk all the time. But, because of getting old I guess, I have some other physical health concerns which are soon to be checked out. The presence of caffeine affects these tests, and so I have not been drinking anything caffeinated, formerly caffeinated, chocolate, anything, for three weeks. Me. Let me remind you I work at Starbucks. I really only like my brewed coffee with milk, or maybe black tea--but those are off-limits. Herbal teas are getting on my nerves. So I'm drinking steamed milk with syrup, and I just bet that stupid syrup made that "pit."

Also, my metabolism has finally slowed down, I think. I am finally my optimal weight--instead of dangerously below it. This is cause for rejoicing indeed--except that now that I'm there, and my metabolism is slowing, I feel that I actually have to make conscious choices about whether or not I eat french fries (a long-standing weakness) or stuff with whipped cream. And sometimes those choices have to be "no." Sheesh.

Okay--so I guess I don't have so much to whinge about after all.