As much as I’m having some success in fighting the migraines, Sue is just having frustration and has been fighting this for 3 years now.Â? She’s a pastor and has had to take a medical leave of absence because the pain on a normal day is comparable to what it was on one of my bad days.
So… please lift up some prayers for her.Â? She has been one of my big supporters since the doocing of 2005 and having gone through this for a month, I can’t even fathom how she’s made it for 3 years.
My father-in-law graduated from Fuller Seminary with his Ph.D today.Â? I am very proud of him.
But…
I am much prouder that last night at his hooding ceremony in the CATS program, he wore the cat ears that I sent him as a graduation present.Â? He wore them on stage, during his speech, and for pictures afterwards.Â? Bishop Egertson, his guest, also wore them in pictures and around.
Let’s just say that I am *quite* amused.
So we’re getting this stuff in Big Sky Country called r-a-i-n and it’s coming in the form of multiple fast-moving thunderstorms — the kind that are triggered by rapid pressure changes. This means… the lovely wonderful rain that we’re getting is triggering really bad migraines for me which are hitting me in the face and head. The Imitrex and Trimitex (Imitrex with Aleve) will moderate out the migraine so that I don’t have the nausea and dizziness but I still have some pretty acute pain. Add in the lovely jaw pain from the TMJ which is probably also triggered by the weather and you have a pretty potent combination of pain.
Yesterday, I managed to spell the pain a bit. Today was to the point where I was either going to take the pain or I was going to start screaming because it was so awful and that was 7 hours of my 8 hour shift. The last 45 minutes of my shift were spent with me in tears repeating Philippians 4:13 to myself to get myself through. I was crabby and I seriously had to remove myself from my work area a few times to avoid screaming at co-workers.
So why don’t I just go home? Because it’s not like that’s going to do anything for me either. THERE. IS. NOTHING. I. CAN. DO. FOR. THE. PAIN. Seriously. I accidentally took twice the safe dose of Aleve today between the two tablets I took at 10 am for my jaw and the Trimitex I took around 1 for a migraine that came on. I can’t do anything at home that I can’t do at work and at least at work, I get paid to be there.
I have a dentist appointment tomorrow at 8 am (!!!!). Please pray that they can do something for me to at least kill the jaw pain so I only have one part of my head exploding instead of two.
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So I did make it down to Church of the Incarnation for worship and Father Tim welcomed me very warmly when I walked in. (His welcome alone made the 2 hour drive worth it.) Worship was awesome and if I had actually been feeling like solid food was a good thing, I could have stayed for the parish potluck. Alas… the migraine wasn’t allowing me to do much eating so I made do with an oatmeal cookie from $tarbuck$.
I also got a Wal-Mart run in (which made me feel like my blood sugar had plummeted — thank God for Lipton Raspberry tea) as well as a few other errands before heading back up.
I’ve been downloading some podcasts from CBC lately and one of them was talking about sacred places. (It’s the “Best of BC” episode from May 10th.) It was interesting to hear the author of the book talking about the concept of it and how it differs for each person. They mentioned Haida Gwai as one that would be pretty obvious and places like the Parliament Lawn and folk festivals as places that wouldn’t be so obvious. So… my sacred places are:
[+] the redwood forests of northern California
[+] Greene Point Rapids (where my grandparents used to have their cabin) in British Columbia
[+] the Sweet Grass Hills
[+] a quiet church with the sunlight streaming through the stained glass
Where are YOUR sacred places?
I just finished Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett and reading it was like consuming a piece of fudge — I had to go slowly to savor every part of it. Her writing is like her speaking (duh) and she is an incredible wordsmith, making every word count in a way that caused me to slow down my reading speed so that I wouldn’t miss anything she said. Having been a semi-faithful listener of hers, I could hear her saying the words on the page (OK… maybe that was due to one of the shows on my iPod being her reading from her book) but her way of speaking is so unique that only she could phrase things the way she does.
The premise of the book (and her radio show) is that speaking of faith is something that transcends language and that what we know of someone’s beliefs is what we see manifested in that person. The Muslims she has interviewed are radically different than the Muslims we see plastered all over the news when it comes to speaking of Iraq or Afghanistan. She parses the things that we see in journalism (as she is trained as a journalist) and talks about how misleading much of the normal reporting is. She wants to promote understanding and much of that is done in first person interviews with people like Jimmy Carter, Ingrid Matson (first female president of the Islamic Society of North America), Leila Ahmed, Bruce Feiler, Sister Joan Chittister, Jaroslav Pelikan, Joe Carter (by far, my favorite show), and Richard Mouw. (By the way, I think everyone needs to download and listen to the conversation with Richard Mouw in light of the recent California Supreme Court ruling. It shows both sides of the issue very gracefully.)
The best part of the book for me (and it was all wonderful) was the last chapter in which she describes her struggles with depression very exquisitely. It was one of those passages (very short too in the grand scheme of the book) where she just captures the essence of what living with it is like — the numbness, the inability to feel joy, the thought that you might never really feel anything again… It was only maybe 5 pages of the 200 pages of the book but I just really resonated with it and it is probably the most real and accurate description that I have ever seen.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who approaches their faith intellectually in addition to emotionally.