I'm home today while the Air Conditioning Guys install a new unit for the kitchen/family room part of our home. The weather is hot, steamy and miserable from days of rain followed with this morning's scorching heat. We've struggled through two days of "too hot to use the kitchen" and "too hot for good humor". By this afternoon, we'll be cool again for family room life.
I ran errands this morning to be home for the AC Guys. I arrived home to find the mailbox overflowing with college ads (for LD, the High School Senior), two bills and THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY.
I sorted the mail, threw another load into the wash and wandered off to read the new mag.
I turned to Gordon Atkinson's When Members Leave. He's got that right.
The next article, Life Expectancy: On Not Praying for a Miracle by Dayna Olson-Getty blew me away. She writes about her pregnancy with a baby with acrania, a birth difference where the skull does not form. She writes, "We can expect that if he makes it through birth, our little one will live for just a few minutes or hours".
With real honest words, Olson-Getty describes the planning she and her husband are making for their baby.
This article is part of the picture of why I am a Christian. To live our lives, with honesty and realism, to be faithful to God while enduring what makes no sense to many while living into a future with God, this is what is beautiful and weepy about faith.
If you got your September 22 issue of the CENTURY, read this article. If you don't subscribe, consider ordering a subscription.
Thank you, God, for people of faith. God bless the Olson-Gettys,
St.Casserole
5 comments:
thanks for the reading tips. we've had the rain here too & it's supposed to get up above 90 again - hope you are cool & comfy by now
Thank you for this. I got my copy out of the mail basket and read both as soon as I finished reading your post.
One I will copy to give to my session, and one I will carry around in my heart for days to come.
Prayers here for the family. It's not a magazine that I receive, but you've told their story so well that it will rest on my heart for some time. May God be with them...
Have not read mine yet. I am an issue behind.
I read the Olsen-Getty article, too, and it brought tears to my eyes, remembering times during CPE in the NICU with parents whose newborns would not live the night. Emergency baptisms. Sacred time. Being intentional in the midst of grief is the challenge of faith.
And Gordon's article was, as always, a wonderful examination of the soul. Our denominations sometimes are so focused on one kind of church - the one that keeps on growing and growing - that those that are small for some very good reasons are thought automatically to be bad or unhealthy or in need of some juicing up (usually testosterone related). People come in all sizes and shapes and with different gifts. So do churches. May all sizes and shapes and missions of churches be blessed.
There. I'll get down off the soapbox now.
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