Look before this one slips away! Eric's little stream will bless you too. Glance quickly, Eric blogs proficiently profound.

Praying for Kurt

God in control, attentive Father,

as I come to you with the confidence of a child and the awe of a helpless woman, I'm still and quiet in worship.

In thanksgiving for Jesus Christ thru whom you express your magnificent love, I pray with respect thru his obedience to sacrifice his own life to save mine.

I wait for your Holy Spirit to teach me what to say, to interpret and organize my heart words, and to guide me in surrender to your plans and to hear your answer.

You favor unity, and pronounce special blessing on prayers offered in community, and that is why I lay these words here for others to read and agree and add the incense of their fragrant prayer at your beautiful feet.

Your creation reflects your glory and contains the mystery of new to old to new, life to death to life. You hold the keys to all secrets. Your eyes search the hearts and know the minds of each one you have re-named daughter and son. There is nothing that surprises you or escapes your notice. Yet, you delight in serendipity, in making the impossible spontaneous.

Look now on the broken boy, Kurt, gently held before you. You have been faithful to watch over his comatose condition and to give endurance to his family as they diligently care for him following the accident years ago. Thank you for your extravagant love. You have wasted nothing, no time, concern or tender treatment of Kurt.

Will your healing light touch the tears in the fabric of Kurt's body and mind? Will Kurt's soul ignite with your Holy Spirit who thoroughly understands him and his life and his purpose as his parents and friends can't even imagine?

Use our groaning for this family as a suffering tool to show your strength and your mercy. Use us to alleviate any mortal tendency to doubt and discouragement. Replace any craving for isolation and despair with our relationship and comfort.

As you draw each sunrise across the dark night sky as a reminder of your power and your promise to resurrect, turn fear into assurance.

We lean on your promises: nothing separates us from your love, in all difficulties you work good and purpose for those who love you, in your presence is the fullness of joy and the peace that passes all understanding.

Because your perspective is perfect, we look with anticipation to see what you will say in the life of this young man and the faith of his family.

Amen.

One Hundred Memories

Just for fun, here's my list.
I'm reminded how my unremarkable roots have afforded me as much biographical material as Haven Kimmel.


I repeated kindergarten; my mom enrolled me when I was 4 years old before there was such a thing as pre-school.

I'm the third of four children and I have four children, each one born in a different season and combination of city & state.

I have visited all US states except Alaska--most of them in summer road trips before I turned 18--and Mexico, Canada, and France.

I love to read.

I hate to sweat.

When I was six, my hair was 3' long and often pulled tightly into the perfect ponytail or braid until the day I took my Grandma's scissors out to Grandpa's barn.

I crawled under the victorian buffet in the dining room to avoid a spanking and watched while my usually stoic mother sat at the table and sobbed.

I took piano lessons for ten years, without a single recital.

I was a 10 year 4-H member and as a junior leader, I attended the National 4-H Congress in Washington, D.C. where I held hands with a boy for the first time. He wore a neck brace.

I winked back at my future husband the evening we met at the Sweet Shoppe at the Purdue Memorial Union.

I missed my second grade class Valentine's party because I was sick with German measles. My teacher, Mrs. Barr, delivered my decorated "mailbox" full of cards to my house.

I've had the mumps on both sides at once--the sight made my brothers laugh until they couldn't stand themselves.

The biggest disagreement I ever had with my parents was over their refusal to allow me to stay up after 10pm on a school night to watch TV's heartthrob doctor, Ben Casey.

My antique childhood home at the corner of Locust and Main streets was built before the Civil War. When I saw it last summer, it was empty with yellow danger tape stretched across the porch.

Eight blocks away, my name is engraved on the exterior of the Henry County Historical Society building in the heart of Middletown, Indiana. I suspect my mother knows why.

I used to sit at my upstairs bedroom window and wait until the DX gas station across the street turned off its sign before I climbed into bed. It's where my dad bought his Lucky Strikes.

On July 20, 1969, I huddled with my cousins in front of a little black and white TV in their house in Lebanon, IN, and propped my eyes open to watch men walk on the moon.

I've held four elderly pets in my arms as they died; three were euthanized.

My first grade boyfriend faithfully carried my books to and from school and asked to kiss me once by the pine tree in my back yard.

I've dated two boys who later became morticians.

I was a teen-aged candy striper at the hospital where I was born. At the annual volunteer event, the candy stripers performed, There Ain't Nothin' like a Dame for the hospital nuns.

I silently endured my elbow being inadvertently shut in the car door for the length of a gravel farm lane because I didn't want to cause a commotion.

I've raised three ducks and four Easter chickens and named them after the characters of Car 54, Where Are You? I rescued a Muskovie duck from the Lafayette, Indiana animal shelter, named her Gertrude, and set her free on the Tippecanoe River.

My dad showed me how to hypnotize rabbits.

I helped bottle nurse 13 Airedale puppies when their mother died the day after they were born.

I had an imaginary friend named Davis.

I was a habitual teller of tall tales by age 7.

I used to wrestle my little brother to the ground and pull his ears.

I've been to Radio City Music Hall and seen the Rockettes. The movie was The Chalk Garden.

My best friend and I performed "Let's Get Together" ala Hayley Mills, The Parent Trap, in a school talent show.

I was lost in the woods while at a family picnic.

I've studied French, German, and Spanish.

While my family attended a women's '96 Olympic soccer game in Athens, GA., I stayed home and surfed the Internet for the first time.

I burst out crying and then sat down, embarrassed for life, when it was my turn at a high school public speaking contest.

My dad bought a new Chevy every year or two while I was growing up; my mom insisted each new auto be midnight blue so no one would notice.

My first car was a used red Corvair, stick. I quickly arranged to trade it for a used red Corvair, automatic.

I was baptized on my ninth birthday.

I have never doubted my salvation, nor ever felt worthy of it.

Growing up, I lived in 2 places within 10 miles of each other; since then, 13 places, 900 miles apart.

I tearfully sang There will be Showers of Blessing in a devotional circle while standing in a downpour at Camp Indogan.

I left church Camp Indogan early due to extreme homesickness and happily did ordinary things at home, like shelling peas and swatting flies.

My garden wedding was at home, and all the decor, dresses and food were handcrafted by friends and relatives. (I hope someone remembered to pay the preacher.)

I didn't think I would ever be able to marry unless I could walk an aisle in high heels.

I owned two pairs of Earth Shoes and one pair of Earth boots.

I prefer my dental work without Novocaine.

My dad called me LeeLee. My mom calls me Lee Ann or Sharon, which also happens to be my big sister's name.

I was elected class treasurer by my Junior and Senior classes which instilled in me optimistic hope in the democratic process and left me a tiny bit cynical about political systems.

Geometry is the highest math I ever learned.

P.E. was my most agonizing high school class and it was Statistics in college that still gives me nightmares.

I quit school chorus after 5 years in junior and senior high because the new director was incompetent.

I was a hallway monitor during chorus class my senior year.

I used to drive a tractor to spread pig manure on my uncle's dairy farm.

I saw white deer in Seneca, New York when I lived in Trumansburg, near Ithaca.

I discovered a wild hen turkey and her poults at a revolutionary war ancestor's grave in an obscure cemetery in the middle of an Indiana field last summer.

I was responsible for the daily care of a pony who tried to brush me and my sister off everytime we rode her.

My husband resembles Paul McCartney.

I am famously unphotogenic.

I married a genius inventor. My dad and grandfather were also inventors. My other grandfather was an authentic singing hobo who read the dictionary a to z and had his letters sent to me, postmarked in odd places, such as Hell and Pitcairn Islands.

I hate to swim.

I'm a published poet.

I've been to Second City in Chicago.

I like to lie flat on the floor and imagine the room is upside down.

When my sister married, and I had a room to myself for the first time, I painted it Horizon Blue. It was the only blue thing in my parent's house, not counting the car in the garage.

There is a building at Indiana University named for a family member.

I earned my BA from Purdue University in 4 years, and picked up my MRS two weeks later, almost 31 years ago.

The highest paying job I've had was, as a member of the UAW, assembling ignition switches and inspecting armatures in a Delco-Remy factory.

I learned how to re-upholster furniture.

I liked to climb trees.

My favorite pie is homemade black raspberry and my favorite sandwich is the renowned Hoosier breaded tenderloin. After extensive statewide research, I've determined the best 'loins are at Shouts, Anderson's bowling alley.

My first date was with my dad to a drive-in movie, Tammy Tell Me True.

My dad won a trophy at the Daughter/Dad Bowling Night when I was in junior high. I found it, 25 years later, in his desk drawer after he died.

My favorite Disney movie was Sleeping Beauty.

One of my biggest disappointments is that Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland is a prop.

The Indiana State Fair was the highlight of my adolescent summers.

I drove my girlfriends through a haunted cemetery on a dare.

The first time I drove a car (Datsun B210) with a manual transmission, I wrote down ahead of time when and where I would make each gear shift.

I sewed orange curtains for a green GMC van sporting an orange racing stripe and replaced the back seat with a rocking lawn chair before my husband and I drove it to Utah one summer. Years after we discovered its quirky ignition, we'd spot it parked around town, stranding its current owner.

Sighting a bluebird makes my day.

My college roommate pierced my ears.

I've felt the earth quake.

I've skidded off the interstate in a snowstorm riding in an old Volkswagen Beetle on the way to the airport.

I've watched the sunrise at the peak of Haleakala Volcano and then coasted a bike down the Maui mountain to the Pacific Ocean.

The best blueberry muffins I ever ate were in Providence, Rhode Island. The chef revealed his secret recipe was Jiffy Mix.

My mom and I sewed all of my clothes while I was growing up.

I learned how to exhale smoke rings in college.

I didn't enjoy coffee until I was 50.

I read the Bible in plain English for the first time while taking two semesters of Bible as Literature, taught by my favorite college professor, former Jesuit priest Jan Wojcik, at a state university.

I've been to Wall Drug Store in Wall, South Dakota twice.

I attended the World's Fairs in Seattle, New York City, and Knoxville and ran into people I already knew at all three.

I watched a moose run through our campsite at Yosemite.

I like to whistle.

I had a canary named Sunshine that would sing in the dark.

I can identify 50 trees.

My big brother instructed me not to say anything unless I can spell it.

I am a flawless speller.

I was stopped for speeding on the Blue Ridge Parkway and in Old Town Lilburn for passing at a break in the yellow line--resisted the urge to explain and received warnings both times.

I've seen where buffalo roam.

I stayed up all night when my dad died and gazed into the dark sky, imagining his whereabouts.

I saw sundog rainbows for the first time the October day we buried my dad.

I linger at cemeteries until the grave is closed.

Warning! If you present the doctor with a minor complaint, she has been trained to feel obligated to fix you, bar none.

I was just beggin' to get my annual physical scheduled before the last hours of the medical insurance calendar year slipped away. Little did I realize that the holiday extravaganza I baked for my offspring as an excuse for me to indulge in sweet and buttery confections would cause my routine lab work to ring bells.

One doctor whistled to another, and it appears that a portion of my inner anatomy will fall victim to a surgeon's skill later on this week. It's all enough to make me want to put a few oatmeal cookies back on the plate.

Recently, as I was reflecting on scriptural lessons learned from Denise, Emily, Joyce, Jody and Matt, I was convicted to wonder if God may have a motive for the hours I've spent waitin' in offices, sweatin' thru lab tests, ridin' elevators, and gettin' results to land me beyond my control in an operatin' suite at a mid-town Atlanta hospital.

How would my Wednesday's childish full-of-woe-is-me attitude change if I deliberately demonstrated my belief and security in the power of Resurrection? Not that I plan to leave home on Thursday and not come back--but that in a sense, I'm already "home" and what's more, in order to win friends and influence others.

I could almost get excited.

In her Atlanta Journal Constitution column today, Linda Sharp observes how "winter storms demand rather unique solutions."

Whether they want to admit it or not, women secretly think men are not nearly as resourceful in a bad situation as women. But the following situation is one in which only a male could demonstrate this sort of resourcefulness.

A Slovak man, Richard Kral, was trapped in his car under an avalanche and freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

When things turn desperate, we often are forced to seek desperate solutions.

Rescue teams found Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi had been buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realized the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He said he had 60 half-liter bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday.

Must have been a long holiday.

After cracking one open to think about the problem, he realized he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

"I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I relieved myself on it to melt it. It was not easy, my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there," Kral said.

At first I was skeptical of this report, but after documenting that parts of Europe have been hit by the heaviest snowfalls since 1941, with some places registering more than 10 feet of snow in 24 hours, I was becoming more convinced.

While it is still not advisable to drink and drive, you may want to rethink carrying a brewski or two just for emergencies. In light of recent winter storms across the United States, it might not be a bad idea to have all solutions at your disposal.

One of my favorite parenting mantras is "Limitation only enhances Creativity." Perhaps Mrs. Kral implanted this gem in Richard to ensure his survival.

For posterity's sake, I offer my proven formula for removing pet stains and odors.

Stir together until well blended:

1 cup hydrogen peroxide
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 squirt liquid hand soap

Saturate the spot with this mixture. Do not blot up. Let air dry.

I have poured this over hardwood flooring and upholstered chairs and cushions without damage or fading. However, if you not feeling risky, experiment on an inconspicuous sample first.

Recipe can be doubled, but should be used same day and not stored. Repeat, do not store in a covered container--the combination of chemicals is unstable for storage.

I've used glass and plastic as containers to mix, and I've even transferred solution to a plastic squirt bottle to control the saturation.
The results of this formula, made for pennies, is far more successful than any other product or strategy I've tried.