Bees in My Bonnet

 When I was at the worst part of covid last year, I could barely keep awake and when I was awake, I had no mental stamina to read or concentrate on anything. I couldn't listen to a narrative, or I'd get lost. My mind felt numb and consumed with the pain going on in seemingly every part of my body. So I went to BibleGateway.com and started to listen to Psalms. I have been memorizing Psalm 119, so I listen to it routinely. I've made my own voice recording but I hadn't a year ago so I was still using the online Bible Gateway version, in the ESV. Because I wanted to focus on Psalm 119, and I often was tossing or turning for a few minutes beforehand, I would back it up to a few chapters earlier. Sometimes I'd start at 113, or 115. I wasn't necessarily focusing on the words - simply letting them fall into the air and pick up a phrase here or there which might settle in my soul.  Somehow, in some way, my mind was clear enough at one point to actually hear  what Psalm 1...

 So what might one write when not quite in a lucid state of mind? What might I say when I struggled to breathe, to prepare my teenage daughter for her life ahead?  I thought a lot about death a year ago. I looked at my life and told myself, 'Well, I guess 44 years is a good enough life. God hasn't promised more or less. Who am I to say that is too soon to go?' Then, of course, I noticed that in Hong Kong they didn't seem to like the number 4 very much. They thought the way it sounded 'say' sounded very similar to the word for death: 'sei'. And in fact, to me, they sound identical. And here I had completed 44 years around the sun, and in my glum state of being, figured my life was rapidly closing up shop.  I asked one of the kids to deliver the laptop to me, and I was able to put together a few thoughts for Priscilla on her orientation weekend.  Here is what I wrote, thinking it might be the last thing she hears from me: Dear Priscilla, I so much wish I c...

 It was on this day one year ago that I ended up in the Urgent Care because of chest pain. They didn't find an immediate cause for chest pain, but did a routine covid screening test, and it came back positive. I had not had covid yet, and I was trusting it would be a mild case and geared up for the obligatory quarantine. I had been focused on my 2 oldest starting college, and all the logistics that involved - one going to Georgia, another nearby, and planning how one parent could be in one location, and I in the other. It was going to be a stretch to attend parent orientation, and try to take in all the upcoming changes. Our family was suddenly going to be shrinking. I didn't seem to have time to think about it or prepare for it. I didn't know how I'd feel settling Priscilla into a dorm room, watching her connect with friends and shift her focus from home to school and social events. I had already had a year without Caleb as he had been at a gap year program in Wisconsi...