From time to time I receive email comments on my blog. Yesterday's novella sparked a few, so I thought I would answer them:

Are you okay?
Yes, I believe so. I am better today than yesterday...better yesterday than Wednesday. Yesterday, the repair shop called at 11:00 to let me know my car was ready (they had a hole open up in their schedule). While that was good news (driving a truck is harder than I thought), There was no way that I was going to be able to pick it up. The agent said that he could extend the rental one day since I was ill, but if I did not bring it back today, they would have to start charging me and that would mean the whole weekend since their shop would not be open again until Monday.

So, after lying in bed all day yesterday, I got myself up, dressed, and scooted down the stairs with Kashi on my lap (he did not enjoy the experience). When the agent saw me shuffling my way into the service center, he came and brought me a chair at a nearby table and told me he would take care of everything. I took a half-hour nap while the paperwork was done.

Then, when I tried to shuffle out to the car, one of the other men muttered something about how ridiculous it was and scooped me up to carry me back to the car. Now, mind you, I am not slight in the least, but he seemed to have had a past in football or something. The third man had already started my car and turned the air-conditioning to full blast. After ensconcing me in the driver's seat, all three of them moved my things from the rental truck back to my car, including plugging in the connectors for my phone and GPS and putting my CD holder back on the visor and wrapping my little frog from Bettina around the strap. While watching them work, I noticed that the carpets had been cleaned and the windows and the mirrors and the dash and.... They had detailed my car inside and out! Boy, did I feel the princess!

We have a rather large grant application due soon, so I thought I would try to work a while since the repair shop is literally just a hop, skip, and a jump from where I work. Shuffling up to my office was harder than I thought it would be and left me quite wobbly and tuckered out. I worked 2.5 hours and then came home to finish adding code (Google Analytics tags) to our website. On the way back to my car, a woman from the floor above us and her daughter helped me outside.

So, I am tired and weak and sore. And I am still very upset about what happened. However, I am also surrounded by God's Grace in so many ways that I cannot help but be thankful for how much care He has given me...even to the point of using strangers!

If you know you are sensitive to heat, why didn't you leave?
I wish I had, if only for the trouble my illness has caused for Pastor and his family and for K in her care of Kashi for me. I don't know. I did say I had to leave as soon as Pastor walked in and I would like to proffer I stayed because I felt encouraged to see if the air might be turned on soon enough for me. But, to be honest, I am not really sure if anyone actually encouraged me to stay or if I just was hoping I wouldn't have to miss the service since Pastor said he talked to the staff about the problem.

I have also written before about how I feel as if others treat me as if am complaining or exaggerating the danger when I say it is too hot for me. Oh, my goodness, I believe I will be 90 before my family stops criticizing me for not going on their vacation to Jamaica. When I am at my father's house or at those of my friends and ask for the air-conditioning to be turned down, I am either met with doubtful questioning as to the veracity of my need or the thermostat is changed just one or two degrees. So, I struggle with feeling as if I am being selfish. Wednesday night, since I would have had to ask for someone to walk back to the rental car with me, I wanted to avoid the disruption, the focus on my problem. Is that prideful? I don't know.

Frankly, I think it stinks that I have to avoid things because of long walking distances, smoke, and heat. That sure does fetter life. And I wish that the people in my life helped me with identifying those things so it was not always me that had to do so since my brain is full of those MS cheese holes. After the fact, B told me that nursing homes are usually warmer due to a common lack of circulation amongst their residents and going to a prayer service in one probably would not be the best idea for me. I know that this is my problem and my vigilance to own. I just wish she had mentioned that fact during one of the several times I've talked about wanting to go to the prayer service. Can I be absolved of my blame, at least in part, because I did not know this all important fact?

Yes, I should have left. To my defense, I have only had the wet noodle effect before, not the wet noodle and all the other symptoms exploding at once effect. I didn't think the consequences would be so great. However, the bottom line here, the answer to the question, is quite simple: I was stupid.

If your pastor is doing that pastoral care stuff you keep writing about why did he just leave you on your bathroom floor? That doesn't sound very caring to me.
Maybe I should let him answer that! No, that would be ducking what I have been trying to share here about pastoral care.

Let's see... He prevented the security staff from calling an ambulance because he knew I did not want that. He drove me home, essentially putting my need ahead of that of his family. He helped me inside. He didn't blink when I asked him to unzip my skirt. And when he was not sure if I was lucid enough, he did what he had to do to get answers from me. [He emailed that he was worried the whole diabetes thing that I am ignoring might have been a problem. He's never seen such extreme fatigue and pain before, so he didn't know. Given that I am ignoring that issue (other than I now avoid sugar unless I have eaten something else as well), that was mighty caring of him to remember, to consider, to worry about for me. And at any point in time, he could have just put me off as someone else's problem, taken the easy path, and called an ambulance. With his wife being a nurse, I am confident that if I had at least not been convincing in my own belief that I could ride it out safely, I would have had no choice about the hospital. He cared enough about my desire to stay in my own home where I would at least have my birdies and puppy-dog for company and not have to deal with all the things I dislike about hospitals to try and make that happen for me.

One of the ways God has show His Grace to me is that last evening my ex-graduate-school-professor-staunch-Christian-man J called. Every year or two, we talk. They are marathon phone calls that are steeped in theology, literacy, some very, very blunt ex-Tennessee-mountains talk, and usually end with our mutual lament that Robert Jordan died before he finished his Wheel of Time series...thousands of pages and no ending! [Neither one of us has high hopes for the writer hired to finish the job.]

He doesn't mind the fact that my updates to him are always filled with more trials than triumphs. He doesn't mind my larger-than-life questions. He doesn't mind that I ask him to repeat things because I am taking notes! [There was this very interesting metaphor about just because someone is taught brass was gold and then learns that it is actually brass doesn't mean that brass is the standard. The gold is.] He laughs with me, aches with me, and then tells me that I deserve better. He is a champion of the likes that I have never experienced apart from him. When we spoke about my mind slipping away and feeling as if I have not honored all that he taught me, he actually told me to shut up! And he meant it! There is no failure on my part in his eyes. I needed to hear that, especially after such a stupid decision Wednesday night.

One of the things I like best is that he is fully aware that there is evil in this world and calls that ugly spade a spade.

It does not bother me that he is not the greatest fan of some of the theology that I have been studying. Nor does it bother him. What is more important to him is that I have this very strange pastor in my life. With great conviction, J said that, although he has never met the man, he loves him. He loves him for the care he has shown me. He loves him for the godly example he surely is. For a moment, J reveled in the thought of how different the church in America would be if pastors and ministers and priests would spend more time as shepherds and less time being political and judgemental and divisive. I agree with him on that. Surely there would be more love and more peace if more people had the opportunity to have Christ's care of them channeled through the men-of-the-cloth in their lives!

J said he would have probably left me on the floor as well, though he probably would have stayed the night or gotten someone else to do so. J said it took a great act of courage for Pastor to trust me enough to allow me to stay at home when he had never seen me that way. I agree on that one, too.

The bottom line is that unless a pair of muscle men magically appeared, I was not getting into my bed. Even if Pastor and his wife could have managed it, there probably was not enough room in my 5x7" bathroom for them to haul me to my feet and carry me out of there. I survived the night. I survived the assault that blasted hot room dealt me. I am very, very grateful he got me home and allowed me to stay there.

Call me biased, but I think that leaving me was certainly in keeping with the idea of pastoral care, not against it.

What was the worst part?
While it would seem natural to say the pain or perhaps having others see me so bad, I think the true answer is losing my bible and my notes. It is just a copy of the Living Word. It can be replaced. I know that, but I miss not having it to read, not having it beside me in the bed. That notebook has several years of lessons. Lessons I am not capable of remembering and was still able to savor and dwell upon because of my notebook.

Pastor emailed he was going by the nursing home to look for them and the hymnal and my brand new pocket version of the Book of Concord that he had just given me. Since there was no follow-up email, I am certain that, in this case, no news is actually bad news.

Once when I was a youth leader in college and again when a missionary in Africa, I gave away my bible because someone else needed it. Perhaps that is the case here.

Still, losing them, I believe, was the worst part. Well, that and how horrible I feel every time I think of Pastor's children stuck in the car while their parents tried to help me. Much guilt there...

Where do you keep your thermostat?
Depends. Normally, between 68 to 70 degrees. Unless I am having one of those strange chills. Then, I crank it up to 70-80 degrees.