What to do if someone starts crying in front of you

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.  ~Kenji Miyazawa
In the spring of 2000, I received a phone call informing me that the qxh (quasi-ex-husband) had collapsed at work and been taken to a nearby hospital.  By the time I got there, he was being released.  They had decided that he was having an asthma attack, so despite the fact that he couldn’t walk, they gave him a nebulizer treatment, saw it didn’t help and sent him home.  I helped him out of the wheelchair, into the car and he pretty much held onto me and the wall on the way to our apartment.  Within 10 minutes, he came out of the bathroom, collapsed on the floor and said, “call an ambulance.”

Which is where a good wife immediately dashes to the phone and screams, “help – my husband’s dying!” to the dispatcher.  But I hesitated for a split second.  There was part of me that wanted to say, “stop being a baby.  I’ll help you back into the car and we’ll take you back to the hospital.” 

So, What’s the Deal With Adam and Eve? Part 1

Facepalm. Words. They fail.

I am fascinated with the creation stories.  I have mentioned before that it was the habit of ancient Hebrews to meditate by holding two thoughts which seem opposed together in your head at once.  I may have also mentioned that I have both a very high regard for scripture and I value science as a tool for understanding how God’s other testimony – creation – works.  Which right there creates a conflict which many people think they can make go away by picking the side that makes sense to them and hanging out there.  But I always figured that if God made the world (which I believe he did) and scripture is true (which I believe it is – in all sorts of surprising ways) and science was saying something different, God had an answer.  And not like, “well I only made the earth look billions of years old in order to see if you would trust me enough to think it’s really 6000 years old.“  A real answer.  Two true things cannot contradict one another.  If they are in conflict, it doesn’t mean one is right and the other is wrong.  It means we don’t understand them well enough yet. 

So with this as my mindset, I set out holding these two ideas – biblical creation and the evidence of science - in my head at the same time and meditating on them. 

Now Its Time For A Love Poem

A Tweet to the first person to guess correctly how old I was when I wrote this!

*Ahem*

A Love Story

A turn of fate

A twist of the eye

The misalignment of moonlight

The glow of stars

And you are in love

Suddenly the world is blind

And you are beautiful

You’ve found someone to share your lunch with.

You cry at his jokes

And laugh at your wedding

Then you buy a frog

and the kids live happily ever after.

So you sell the washer and dryer

To buy a garden

Where you plant ladybugs until 3 pm

When it’s time to go, dear

And you ride away on your tandem bike.