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For Wilshire Baptist Church

There’s an old saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. Monday afternoon LeAnn and I ran some errands that danced all around that thought and then some.

First, we went to Texas Oncology at Medical City to drop off a disk of my most recent scans from UT Southwestern. We hadn’t been to Texas Oncology in two months, but after being there weekly through the spring and summer last year, going back felt familiar. As we walked in, I looked over my right shoulder to see the ever-present Christmas tree, always decked out for whatever season or holiday is coming, which in this case was St. Patrick’s Day. But familiarity came mostly from the kindness of the staff, who we realize deal with patients who are rarely “living their best life now,” to quote a more contemporary saying.

Continue reading “Be Still and Know”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Life sometimes seems like an endless chain of reboots. Or, if you want to join me in some alliteration: repairs, rebirths, renewals, replenishments, rejuvenations. But I’ll go with reboot because it’s so 21st century.

Such as last week when I went to my mother’s house to reboot her dishwasher. On a couple of occasions she has pressed the start button and it beeps and the lights flash but it doesn’t run. After one repairman said he could fix it and then declined to even try, a phone call to another repairman resulted in a simple fix: reboot the washer’s computer by cutting off the power at the breaker box and turning it back on. Voila!, that did the trick. Meanwhile, over at LeAnn’s mother’s house, her desktop computer started acting up and the solution was the same: reboot it by pulling the plug and restoring power.

Continue reading “Reboot”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

What did you do with your leap day? I’m talking, of course, about February 29, which comes around once every four years and stretches our normal 365-day year to 366 days. The practice started in 45 BC to keep the Roman calendar synced with the seasons. Pretty smart, don’t you think? I do.

And yet it is incomplete. While the calendar said February 29, it also still said Thursday. I wonder why nobody ever thought to give that extra day a completely different name — something that would stand out and set it apart? Still have the other seven days of the week but have that extra day with a special name in there as well. Where is Hallmark when you need them?

Continue reading “Leap of Faith”