Posts from — February 2005

Last Sunday our 5th grade Sunday School lesson was on “forgiveness”. As sections of scripture go, the story of David and Bathsheba is not one of the easiest to explain, but the teacher’s guide suggested that I tell the story from David’s point of view.This turned out to be very powerful both for me and for the class.

Speaking as David, I covered the whole story from rooftop voyeur to grieving father, covering all the messy details and wrapping it up with a discussion of God’s amazing forgiveness. At least one of the kids was able to recall both the main point and the details later.

There were several ideas presented, including “forgiveness doesn’t mean there are no consequences”, and “hiding a problem is not the same as fixing it”. This could become one of my new favorite lessons. God is good!

My dad has recently been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. This is unusual for a non-smoker, but there are plenty of examples - lots of stories of second-hand smoke, asbestos exposure, other chemicals. One of the leading suspects in Dad’s case is his colon cancer that he had a few years ago.

Yuck…

I hate this.

I hate the disease. For what it’s worth, I’ve got our three desktop machines using all of their spare cycles running on the cancer project from grid.org. Those folks are burning over 100 CPU YEARS per day just to find likely matches between drugs and proteins on cancer cells. It’s not fast enough yet.

I hate not knowing. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m having to face mortality and the end of an aspect of my comfortable existence and my not being in control. I’ve been told that bright, intelligent, sensitive people can freak themselves out faster and more thoroughly than anyone else, simply because they can imagine more worst-case scenarios per hour than anyone should. I find myself shifting between imagining the worst, avoiding the problem, feeling wonderfully supported by family, friends, and prayer, and feeling guilty about not handling this the right way (whatever that is!).

I hate having to give up my self-sufficient pride and embrace the humility that comes from needing the support and prayers of others. I’ve been trained for years to be the stable, supportive, strong, caring, wise one, and now I have to learn to let others hold me up.

I even hate how selfish this entry sounds, now that I read through it.

The postXing software looks like it will work well with WordPress. 
I’m giving it a try now.  We’ll see.

Paint.net looks pretty good as a replacement for the basic (or not-so-basic) image editing user - and it’s free!