We're Looking like Popcorn

Every once in awhile, my pretty little city turns out to be drop-dead gorgeous.  Like now.

I live in an older end of town and in mid-spring, all of our white blooming trees are in full bloom.  There are banks of those trees, around our local hospital, out by the mall, a couple of parks.  I'm simply breathless with it.  We're drenched in full blown beauty.  OK, OK I'll forgive the month in winter when we don't get above freezing, and the late summer when we don't get under one hundred.  

This is worth it, and we look, for all the world, like masses of pop corn.  Sweet and fun both.


So, our first  Big Trouble Support Group, the one we're working on in church, so that people who find themselves with diagnosis like Parkinson's, cancer, Hep C, et al.  You know, people in real trouble.

I don't know if this will hold, but I was a little afraid that people would be the teensiest bit unstable:  they might talk too long, or be a little bit unrealistic, or socially out of it.  Well, the people who came last night had all of that burned out of them, and they were the most pragmatic, kind, and considerate people you could imagine.  Real live troubles bring out the pragmatists, the humanists, the humility in all of us, I'm guessing.  
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They were people who needed our attention and our prayers.  People need love and support in the best of times,  in trouble,  well. . .    They want to come back.  Here's my hubris, I sometimes think I know what they are thinking.  That almost always fools me.  People often need something entirely different.  So I'm always the learner.  There were three other women of faith, Maryanne, Audrey, and Debbie.  Serious women doing serious things.  Exactly whom we all needed.  

This feels like the center point of Christianity: helping people who need help.  There is no more daunting task, nor a more sacred space. 


News on the cancer fighting front:  Gail is on her last week of radiation,  only 2 or 3 treatments left.  She looks great.  She kept her hair, her energy is marginal, her stamina is profound.  Julie, who is a little over  7 years out, still has a good scan.  Had one last week.  Big smile here.