As you may know, I fully understand how the society in which I live makes so very much of Christmas, despite the historical fact Jesus could not have been born this time of year if the Bible narratives have any meaning at all. I generally play along until the Spirit of God creates a teachable moment. So please, let’s dispense with the emotional baggage about Christmas as a cultural celebration and simply make note of a commonly used label for the week approaching our rather arbitrary start of a new calendar year. (Is that enough cynicism?)
I’m not begging for money or stuff. I’m asking you to pray with me if any part of my ministry has meaning to you. Some of you have already been quite generous and I’m so grateful, so now I need to ride this out.
We have two meager paydays in my household. One just passed and much of it was consumed in paying off the annual county property taxes on that mobile home we just left to my son and his family. It was necessary to pay that tax all at once in order to transfer the title into my son’s name, which also ends my liability with the folks who own the trailer park where it sits. It’s now my son’s problem and he is a home-owner by Oklahoma standards.
But the tax was substantial and I didn’t have the money to order that new keyboard for my laptop. And it’s balky. At odd moments one of several keys will repeat until I take some action to stop the electronic signal (typically it means hitting the BKSP key). At other moments, other keys simply don’t generate a signal when I tap them, so I have to go back and hit it again, sometimes more than once. Yeah, it’s cranky and the problem is not exactly in the mechanics of the keys, but in the electronic signal processing.
I’m hoping we can afford to replace it on the next payday around the first of the month, because this is annoying. Pray with me about patience and persistence in the mission that demands I write. Everything else on this laptop is satisfactory but that.
For those of you aware of my allergies, there is a praise report: The crazy weather here means I can still pick some local herbs that offer relief. That includes dandelion and ribwort, for example. I can’t pretend to understand how they work, only that they do. A couple of times each day I grab a few leaves of each and munch them raw. This keeps the post-nasal drip, and resulting cough, to a manageable level.
Maybe I’m just nuts, but I am not entirely comfortable with the quality of workmanship from those people hired to prep these apartments between leases. It’s not nasty, but I’m seeing dozens of little details that annoy me. So I do things like rub some hand degreaser on the wood trim and then scrub with a wire brush or scrape with a blade to reduce the over-painting, drips-n-splatters and discoloration from human hands touching it. Later on I’ll rub in lemon oil to return its natural color.
I do a little at a time; I’m not that crazy. I’ll also scrape and smooth the ragged layers of paint on the painted trim, and bug them for a little of the official color they use to retouch some places on the wall that aren’t evenly colored. I figure by the time a year of residency is done, this will be the nicest detailed apartment in the whole place. It is not merely that am I just a nit-picking weirdo, but this is a good testimony that you leave a place better than you found it. Pray that I do as good of a job as I imagine I can.
God bless you all.
