Bettina's brilliance knows no bounds!

Now, I will say that I called her to find my knee brace...either one of them!  But, alas, she could not ferret out where they were for me.

The exhaustion is catching up with me, which is a deep concern given that we have 17 days to go until our event.  A real tipping point for me is my knee.  When I am overly fatigued, my muscles fail to always hold my joints in place, as I have written before.  This makes for excruciating pain when one moves the wrong direction.  Usually, I will rotate in one direction, but not all of me.  By this, I mean that I will turn my upper body and thigh one direction, and my foot will drag on the floor, keeping my lower leg in place.  My knee will just sort of separate.  I usually scream colorful metaphors at that point.

It has always been my right knee up until today.  Now, my left knee is crying foul and doing so when I bend it.  So, for example, when I go to sit down and try to tuck my left leg beneath me, my kneecap moves out of place.  It is bloody awful.  And I keep forgetting not to do it!

When I arrived home from work, I went straight to my basket of braces to put on my knee brace.  I found my arm sling, my finger splint, my back brace, and three ankle braces (my left ankle has never forgiven me for spraining it some four years ago), but neither one of my knee braces was in the basket.  I took everything out of my closet (clothing is still piled about the floor of my bedroom) and still no braces.  So, I called Bettina.

For once, her infernally steel-trap mind failed her and she could not tell me where to find the braces.  However, she did promptly figure out a quick solution to a task I had offered to pay her to do for me.

For me.  That was your hint.

I have oft blogged about the givens there are in Lutheran doctrine that are assumed in me, in my faith, but do not exist in Protestantism, despite both denominations being of Christianity.  Lately, I have desired to put them all together into one piece, to try and make sense of it.  However, I have not wanted to plow back through my blog since last May.

I write for me, as I have oft said, to work out the things in my life and to record them, since all too soon the days are coming when I shall no longer remember the things of my life, perhaps even the good things of Christ.  But this journey into confessional Lutheranism has been hard, terribly hard.  Yes, I have discovered the ineffable joy and peace of the sweet, sweet Gospel, but I have also been confronted with the depths of my sin.  It is no secret I see Law most everywhere, hear Law before anything else.

Right now, I care not to walk back through that journey, even if doing so might illuminate just how much I have learned rather than how little I have lived of that truth.  I fear would find the latter more often than the former.

So, I offered to pay Bettina to read back through all those entries and cut and paste all the givens for me into Word.  She is so stinking brilliant.  Seriously.  Not but a few minutes after we hung up the phone was she calling me back with an idea.  Simply add a search engine widget to my blog and...presto...all the times I have used the word "given" would be at my fingertips.  Thirty seconds later, after mere clicks of the mouse, I had the information I sought.

That means, dear reader, should you wish to review, say, all my entries on my beloved Walther, all you have to do is type "Walther" into the search engine to the left side of the screen beneath my links and you shall be able to feast again on his good teaching!

Imagine the joy!

While I would normally say this astounding display of her brilliance would be the high point of my day, I will say that two others topped it.

One, I was able to talk with Papa Dore during lunch.  Our conversation was not the easiest, for some of his words were a bit of constructive criticism he needed to give me, to teach me.  But the good part came in being able to talk through my being hurt and that being okay with him...not that I was hurt, but being honest about it since he was not meaning to be hurtful, but I am just too darned sensitive to criticism just now.  The merest breath of a syllable of a less than positive word and I am reduced to weeping and despair.  SIGH.

The second best part of my day was pure joy.  Pure joy!  Tonight, I was able to Skype with many of my new sibling!  Oh, how I am loving technology this day!

Do you wish to know how great my new sisters and brothers are?  The first greedy suggestion out of my mouth was that they should sing me a song.  Mere moments later, the hymnals were out, one of my brothers was playing the flute, and the rest of my siblings were singing Gospel to me.  Oh, how blessed was I...am I....

The last hymn was my choosing and, therefore, one I knew.  My disappointment was that for some reason Skype suddenly started dropping in and out, so I was singing primarily to myself; I did not get to hear my family sing the most glorious of hymns with me.  Which one?  Oh, you know!  We Praise You and Acknowledge You O God!  While I was greatly disappointed to not being able to sing it with them, I still savored the knowledge that states away, they were singing the hymn as well.

After the hymn sing, I read them three stories!  Yep, Myrtle had a stack of books just waiting for my first Skype call ever since the camera arrived in Indiana last Wednesday.  Tonight, we read three of my favorites:  Frannie and Pickles; The Dragon Take a Wife; and Frog and Toad: A Swim.  It doesn't get any better than stories of friends Frog and Toad!  When Bettina reads them to her children (translate to mean reads them to me), I imagine her to be Frog and I Toad.

That hour on Skype was hands down the best hour of my life in the past year.  Period.  At one point, one of my brothers turned to his mother and asked, "Can Myrtle come over?"

Oh, how I long to do that very thing!