Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I was scouring the walls of my shower this morning when I straightened up, bumped my head against the water knob and gave myself a surprise shower. As I walked into the kitchen to start lunch, Mom passed me in the hallway and asked, “Why are you all wet?”

Papa valiantly loaded himself into the Camry to go to work this afternoon. Around six o’clock he came rolling back up the driveway. The nurse had sent him home on limited disability for at least a month. My head was spinning as I heard the verdict. At least a month! What an odd shape for a blessing to come in. Having Papa home for a month is both exciting and daunting—a totally new thought. What in the world are we going to do for a month? And then I laugh. All kinds of thoughts begin to fill our minds—we can finally invite some of the families over that we’ve been hoping to see. And I have some confusion and questions that have been nagging me for months—things I couldn’t seem to resolve on my own but tried to cheerfully ignore. I’m not sure if I can even put words to them, but Papa has been just so busy and tired that I didn’t want to exhaust him. Perhaps he’ll have time to dissipate the fog that surrounds most of my brain and clouds my convictions. So much for recuperation for him--perhaps I'd better hold off a while yet.

I'd scoffed at the official ground hog who, reportedly, turned tail and climbed back into his hole back in February. "He saw his shadow!" they announced. "Six more weeks of winter!" I've never given much credence to weathermen, hairy or otherwise, and we've been enjoying days of warmth and sunshine. "It wasn't his shadow he saw," I declared to Josiah, "It was the new presidential administration that sent him back into hibernation." Today the weather grew nasty again. Cold. Drizzly. Uninviting. The political climate is at least as nasty. I think we're on a collision course with socialism, thanks to nodding, smiling politicians who swear to uphold the constitution and then go at it with a grappling hook. Even Hillary Clinton as Secretary of state didn't turn my stomach like seeing our own Kansas Governor, Kathleen Sibelius, appointed to the cabinet. Bleak is the political horizon, which reminds me once again that the battle is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities of darkness--and I should be spreading light to individual hearts and pleading that Christ will soon return.

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