Stan Taylor

My friend Susan’s daughter Sophie was diagnosed with leukenia eight months ago. Susan and her husband Randall have been keeping a blog about Sophie’s health. In yesterday’s entry, Randall totalled up the insurance claims so far (not including co-pays and other expenses that they’ve borne themselves). He writes:

The grand total (and still counting) is $173, 670.35. Basically that amounts to over $700 a day. We are incredibly, incredibly thankful for the terrific insurance coverage that we have, but can you possibly imagine how families manage without the kind of coverage that we have, or, worse yet, without any coverage at all? Granted, you cannot put a price on having a healthy, thriving child, but I fear for those who have to make tough decisions that we have never had to make in this process. There is no wonder that an experience like this can devastate families financially for years and years and years.

I’ve been a geek for too long. When I was writing the previous blog post, my fingers kept want to type ‘Perl’ instead of ‘Pearl’. I had to backspace and correct it two times.

I just completed the unabridged audio edition of Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. I avoided checking out this audio book for quite some time, assuming that it was a chick book, not particulary my thing: more about feelings and/or relationships than actions. Well, now that I’ve read it, I can firmly say that it is indeed a chick book, but it’s also the best book I’ve read in some time. The characters and their relationships are subtle, complex and quite compelling. I highly recommend this book.

In my occasional attempts to explain my religious experience and faith, I recently wrote:

I respect people who say that they are spiritual but not part of an organized religion. For me, however, personal spirituality is only half the picture. The other half is being in community with people who are also struggling to better themselves and who help me remember that I’m a small part of a large and complex universe.
It’s times like this–the aftermath of hurricane Katrina–when I’m proudest to be a member of a faith community. Yesterday, like most United Methodist congregations in the U.S. (or even, possibly, world-wide), our congregation took a special offering for hurricane relief. Our pastor related the relief efforts of other area United Methodist congregations and how we can participate in them. And another local church, St. Mary’s Baptist Church, has become the organizing point for hurricane refugees in our community. With the participation of other local congregations, we will do our best to support the refugees among us.
All of this made me realize how many people have given more of themselves because of the connectedness to others that they experience in their community of faith. And I’m proud to be a part of such connectedness and self-sacrifice.

As usual, Gordon Atkinson, a.k.a. Real Live Preacher, says it much more elegantly than I can:

While we prayed, I felt a mysterious sense of awareness. I felt that something important was going on, something beyond us and bigger than us. Something, in fact, so big that we have no need or desire to try to explain it, market it, promise it, or claim any kind of ownership of it. We were dear friends gathered in love and in the very name of God. It was a quiet episode and no record of the details exists. Our prayers were not recorded for sale in some inspirational book. No movie will ever be made about that moment in time.
And yet, this truth remains. I would do just about anything, go just about anywhere, and even sell most of my possessions for a chance to walk through life with these gentle pilgrims. I will own any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the center of my life.
The power of our shared community, which we call the Spirit of God, helps me to be faithful even when I am feeling faithless. It helps me to be trusting even when I am feeling cynical. It helps me to become like a child even when childhood seems very far away and long ago.
There is a truth here that is hard to put into words. It is a life truth, a living truth, a truth of sinew and muscle and shared history and held hands. It is a truth that is utterly beyond us and somehow within us. It is a truth that makes us feel so small and childlike that we may have slipped, unnoticed, into the very Kingdom of Heaven.
Something out there is much greater than I. I am aware of it and in awe of it. This is the beginning and the end of Wisdom.

Seen in a comment here:

While scanning my spam folder this morning before deleting the 64 messages that came in overnight, this one caught my eye:

By the way, Gmail’s spam filter is great: of the 150-200 spam messages that I receive each day, only about half a dozen don’t get filtered into my spam folder, and the false positive rate (good email that gets incorrectly identified as spam) is very low, maybe one message every few weeks.

Our neighbors named their children Faith, Hope and… Paul, Jr. For some odd reason I find this endlessly humorous. I wonder if they were planning on their third child being a girl.

Last week, I linked to John Scalzi’s lyrical and profound list Being Poor. This week, Scalzi follows up his post with this comment:

One of the more gratifying things about the aftermath of the “Being Poor” piece I wrote a week ago is how often I’ve been seeing it pop up on Christian-oriented Web sites, blogs and journals, followed by a sincere examination by the poster of what one ought to do about poverty, as Christians and as members of a larger community. By this I emphatically do not mean that all of a sudden these Christians are thinking about poverty seriously thanks to me, and that I should get a shiny medal or something like that. That would be a wildly stupid and arrogant assumption on my part, and while I’ve been known to be both wildly stupid and arrogrant, this isn’t one of those times. No, I believe these Christians were already grappling with issues like poverty, and this was just one more data point for them to consider.

What’s gratifying about these Christians using “Being Poor” to discuss poverty is not so much that they are talking about it but that I am seeing them discussing it, reminding me — as I do need to be reminded from time to time — that however much I rail against people I see as mouthing Christ’s words and ideas and yet living a life apart from the ideals they claim to profess, there are as many if not more people who genuinely struggle to follow the example Jesus set and stay on the path that He walked. It’s a reminder that the question “What Would Jesus Do?” is not just a snappy catchphrase on a bracelet, but also and hopefully foremost a genuine question that cuts to the core of how one should live one’s life and how one should approach others.

Scalzi touches on an issue that I try to impress upon non-Christians at every opportunity: for every wacko self-avowed Christian who makes the news, or for every fish bumper sticker you see in traffic, there are millions of us Christians quietly going about the task of trying to live out the Gospel. We’re far from perfect, and we frequently fail in our task, but we continue to try to carry out the New Covenant: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
We are your neighbors and coworkers–though you may not even know it, because for us, it’s about trying to live the Gospel, not necessarily talking about it.

I just completed the audio edition of Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman. The more of Hillerman’s books I read (well, listen to), the more I come to appreciate the quality of his writing. In addition, this novel passed my mystery novel test: I had no idea about the solution to the mystery before the protagonist, Jim Leaphorn, figured it out.

I finally finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince this week. I lost interest in the middle, but it picked back up again toward the end. Well written as usual, but I found it a little contrived in places. It’s really hard to say whether J. K. Rowling’s writing has changed or whether my interest in the series waned. Enjoyable nonetheless.