ACWI......attending church while injured

Four days after surgery and I am so thankful that it's Sunday. I have the greatest excuse ever for getting out of this house...church! I will take a shower, find a clean shirt, then strap on my stylish shoulder sling/harness and make my way to church with the unbridled enthusiasm of the newly converted. I will wear the sling not because it is required as part of my therapy, but because its presence will hopefully keep the David Johnsons of the world from greeting me with a hardy pat on the back, which would launch me into a bout of public weeping that I would never live down in a million years.

Attending church while injured, ACWI for short, has many benefits, not the least of which is the fact that it provides a handy topic of conversation for those sometimes strained fellowship times. For those of you who aren't Baptists, this is when the pastor extols the congregation to "find someone you don't know and strike up an awkward, forced conversation!" With my sling, I have a built in excuse not to have to shake hands and a conversation starter:

Random stranger: So, you break your arm or something?

Me: No! This is just the latest fall fashion excessary. All the kids are wearing them these days.

Another benefit of ACWI is that it gives you a pass on the musical chairs routine common in Protestant churches nowadays. One never knows anymore when you're supposed to stand and when you're supposed to sit in church. A song will begin and at first everyone will be sitting, but after a couple of awkward measures, a few people will randomly begin standing, especially the rhythmically challenged woman down front. Pretty soon, a full fledged group think experiment breaks out and before anybody knows why, everyone is standing. I'm thinking that if I'm wearing a shoulder harness, I will be given a pass.

Perhaps the single greatest benefit of ACWI is the blanket dispensation one receives from the ubiquitous clapping that has managed to infect Baptists congregations all over the fruited plain. Every song, regardless of meaning or purpose demands a round of applause. Every attempt at humor, successful or not, is met with thunderous applause. Even the most tender and nuanced song brought forward in the most subtle and thought provoking style gets crushed by wildly inappropriate clapping. Well...not today, baby! I won't clap, for anything! Heck, I couldn't even if I wanted to...which I won't! Now that I think about it, this sling business might be the best thing that's happened to me at church since I taught a Sunday School class full of tenth grade boys. Maybe this thing actually is a fashion excessary!

Surviving the Second Day

It's always the second day after surgery that gets you. The first day, you're all psyched up and determined to conquer the thing, and you're popping the full dose of pain medicine every four hours. The second day, all residual benefits of the nerve block are gone and you realize just how terrible you feel. Taking the bandages off is nice and taking a shower is glorious, but then it dawns on you that you've got six weeks of pain ahead of you, and it's time to start backing off of the pain meds. However, my second day was made so much better by three things...my wife, my siblings and my dog.

Pam is not a natural nurse. The sight of blood makes her lightheaded. A mere conversation about stitches makes her nauseous. But there she was yesterday morning, unpealing my bandage, taking short breaks to gather herself, all the while smiling and being about as upbeat and positive as possible under the circumstances. She took two days off from work to be with me as I have recovered, and spent that time making me delicious food and basically being the most adorable person you can imagine. But then it was time to go back to work and leave me alone for the day...with Lucy.

My dog has been baffled at my condition. She is totally freaked out by the black sling. She seems completely confused as to why I am moving so slowly, astonished that I am unwilling and unable to throw the frisbee with her. So, she has decided that her job, for the duration of this strange set of circumstances, is to stay permanently at my side at all times, staring at me for hours on end looking for any clues as to the reason for my condition. Occasionally, she will leave my presence to search for things to bring to me and drop in my lap. It's like she's thinking, "Here. Maybe this will help you snap out of it!" My second day featured the inability to sleep even though the medicine had made me groggy. So Lucy took it upon herself to demonstrate for me the sixteen different ways that she can fall asleep, just in case I had forgotten...

It's at times like these when I wonder how it is that people recover from illnesses without animals. 

Ever since the surgery on Wednesday, I have been checked on by my siblings at regular intervals. My nurse sister Linda has texted me, my big brother has called a number of times to talk baseball, a much needed diversion, and yesterday, my sister Paula came by and took me to Panera for lunch. My kids texted me all day to check up on me and in Kaitlin's case to give me a homework assignment..."well, since you'll just be lying around all day doing nothing, why don't you look up some examples of news texts that have multiple purposes? Oh, and I need them by noon!"

I survived the dreaded second day, in large part because of some wonderful people...and a devoted puppy!

A Retraction

I got punked by the Internet. Yesterday morning I was sent an article by me niece that contained an excerpt from a monologue by Pat Robertson of the 700 Club. In it he suggested that gay people should be required to wear specially colored clothing to warn heterosexuals of their identity. The article came courtesy of a website named Religionlo. Most of the quotes attributed to Robertson in the article were accurate, but the the most outrageous one that was the subject of my blog was not. Accordingly to the myth-busting/fact checking website, Snopes, it was fabricated.

Frankly, the fact that I believed it was because of Mr. Robertson's history of moronic statements. Nonetheless, I should have done a bit more research on something as vile as this before writing my blog. This mistake was all on me and I apologize to anyone who read it assuming it was true. The fact that it isn't true restores a little bit of my faith in humanity.

The Pink Triangle

Maybe the worst thing about having surgery is that you can't have your coffee in the morning. So, I'm sitting here on the sofa, starving to death, writing what will be my last blog for a while, since left handed typing under the influence of opiates would probably not be wise. What I need is a diversion, and my niece just provided me with one when she sent me a link to an article asking me to opine about it's content. Here's the headline...

" Pat Robertson thinks Gay People Should Wear Specially-Colored Clothes to Warn Straight People."

Wh...umm, wait, is this from the Onion? Unfortunately, no, it comes straight from one of his 700 Club monologues. My first reaction was, wait, you mean like the Nazis did to the Jews with the Star of David thing?. Maybe he's thinking they should wear pink hats, or a pink triangle patch on their otherwise fabulous shirts? I swear, some days it's all I can do to put one foot in front of the other...

Every time this wretched man opens his mouth the cause of Christ suffers a body blow. People will read this and ascribe it to all Christians. That's how things work now. The most vile and outrageous drives the news, not the millions of Christian men and women out there spreading the love and grace of Christ. But hey, they don't have a TV show and a private jet, so who cares?

Today, I have bigger fish to fry than a demented Howdy Doody lookalike. Pretty soon, I will be in an operating room surrounded by several highly skilled men and women, some of whom might be gay. But I would never know because they won't be wearing special rainbow gowns. And I couldn't possible care less, as long as they are, in fact, highly skilled and can fix my shoulder without killing me in the process. 

Mercy, what an idiot!




NOTE:  Please read my post from November 5 correcting the record on this quote that I just discovered was falsely attributed to Mr. Robertson.

Doing the Right Things Well

This is not a blog about baseball, so hang in there with me. This is a blog about one of the reasons that people fail. To illustrate, this blog will be about Kansas City Royal relief pitcher, Wade Davis.

Last night, he was called upon by his manager to record a two inning save. That he was successful should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one. In his post-season career, Mr. Davis has pitched 31 innings and given up a grand total of only 3 runs, as close to a sure thing as it gets. But what people forget about Wade Davis is that for the first five years of his career in the big leagues, he was about as ordinary as it was possible to be. 

See, from 2009 until half way through 2013 his bosses had made him a starting pitcher, and as a starter, he was the very definition of average. He made 88 starts and compiled a record of 33 wins and 33 losses with a unimpressive ERA of 4.45. Those are the kind of numbers that make for a short, undistinguished career. But then somebody suggested that maybe he should become a reliever. Suddenly, Wade Davis became the reincarnation of Cy Young. The numbers are simply off the charts.

As a relief pitcher, he has thrown 171 innings, struck out 230 batters, walked only 43, allowed a mere 71 hits, and given up a grand total of 20 runs. Those are the type of numbers that not only get you into the Hall of Fame, they start renaming streets after you! 

So, what was the difference? What transformed Wade Davis from average to phenomenal? 

Success in life isn't just about doing things well, it's about doing the right things well. Wade Davis could clearly pitch well enough to become a big league pitcher, but he didn't find real success until he found the right niche for his individually unique style of pitching. As a starter he was ordinary, as a guy who comes in to get only three of four outs, he was and is unhittable. 

I believe that everyone has at least the potential for doing great things. The fact that most people don't  is the result of settling for good enough instead of pushing for more, pushing for great. Sometimes it's laziness, more often, I think, it's just a matter of failing to find that niche, that subtle shift in focus that can transform people from good to great.

Wade Davis was going along just fine as a mediocre big league ball player when suddenly, a subtle change in his job description turned him into a star and landed him in my blog! I'm sure he'll be thrilled to check that one off his bucket list!

Halloween, past and present.

Halloween. It's a day filled with very mixed emotions for me. I love watching the little ones and their costumes. I love the sound of their little voices and the wide-eyed expressions on their painted faces. But I despise the older teenagers with their ironic non-costumes holding out their pillow cases for free candy. Although I do for the most part enjoy the fun of it all, there's always that neighbor that seems just a wee bit too fond of the festivities. You know the one...nary a candle in sight at Christmas, but on Halloween, his house looks like the set of Psycho.

When my kids were young, Pam insisted on no scary costumes, which often meant she ended up making them herself, with amazing results:

Just look at the year of the Dalmations! Whenever I see that picture I want so badly to travel back in time to relive that moment. It was magical. But then I remember another Halloween that featured my single biggest failure as a parent, an ill-conceived threat made to a tantrum-throwing child to not let her go Trick or Treating if she didn't get ahold of herself...which I foolishly and stubbornly enforced to the very much not make believe horror of my wife! Needless to say, that's a night I'd like to have back!

Twenty years ago there was a faction of friends in our church who were very much in the anti-Halloween camp. It was their view that the holiday conflicted with Christian teaching, and was dangerous because of its glorification of demonic themes and such. I always thought they were nuts. Watching my adorable children walking around the neighborhood dressed like Pooh Bear and Tigger was about the most wonderful thing ever. Besides, my kids thought that the alternative fall festival at church had lame candy....or maybe it was me who thought that. It was a long time ago and I'm easily confused.

Tonight, Pam and I will sit on our front porch and hand out the goodies, hoping that Lucy doesn't lose what is left of her mind at the spectacle of it all. I will compliment the children on their costumes, and try my sarcastic best to shame the free-loading and humorless big kids. Then, we will have our first fire pit of the year, and roast some hotdogs for our Liberty nursing students. 

It's going to be a fun night!

Who Cares, right?

In case you happened to miss it, during the dead of night, our courageous Congress just rushed through a new spending plan that adds a trillion more dollars to the National Debt. In the process, the happy spenders in both parties finally rid themselves of the accursed sequestration limitations that they themselves had imposed to force discipline on themselves, since they were rightly convinced that neither party could be trusted to stop piling on to the debt without it. Now, everyone is happy. The Republicans get more military spending, the Democrats get more welfare spending, and the American people get another trillion of debt piled on their backs. Everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except Senator Rand Paul, the reluctant Presidential candidate from the State of Kentucky. Last night he took to the floor of the Senate to give the shortest filibuster speech in history, a twenty minute stem winder that included this nugget:

"This filibuster will go on to about 1:00 in the morning and then we will find out who the true conservatives in this town are!"

It turns out that there are about eight of them.

The establishment Republicans were quick to point out that this was in no way an abandonment of conservative principles, since all the new spending was totally offset by reductions in other spending. What they weren't as eager to point out was that these offsets are scheduled to kick in ten years from now when, hopefully, most of this current crop of spenders are dead! Oh, and just to make this deal even more perfect, it features that most time honored tradition of Washington budgetary quackery, it speeds up by one month a 2.3 billion dollar payment from November to October to make the numbers add up.

Beautiful.

So, once again, the wheels of leviathan grind on. Politicians pay lip service to balancing the budget and reining in the debt while doing the exact opposite. But at this point, will an extra trillion here or there really matter? What the heck? Let's just pretend that none of this budget stuff matters. Let's believe in the growth fairy, let's keep letting the Federal Reserve print more money. As long as we keep building more weapons and dreaming up new entitlements, who really cares?