Thursday, November 28, 2019

If you have a spare prayer this Thanksgiving . . .

The last time we saw Dan was at the funeral of a mutual friend in 2018.  He and Bob used to work together—I only saw his wife at the wonderful Christmas parties.  They had the most beautiful children—dark, Italian and very well behaved.  According to her story, Dan is now disabled and she has arthritis (plus another surgery from 20 years ago over which she has battled insurance companies and doctors without satisfaction).  So she hired a company to rake and take away the leaves.  On Tuesday.  Well, if you live in the tsunami lane we’ve experienced the last 24 hours, you know that all the neighbors’ leaves are now in their yard, and the money and frustration were wasted.  She said this, which is why I’m asking you to pray for this stranger even I don’t know well—and I suspect there is a hidden message in here for her adult children and grandchildren, so you can throw that in also:

“There are days when I just feel like jumping off a bridge and this is one of them. Last week a hit-and-run driver bashed our only car and took off leaving us to deal with the expense and effort to get it fixed. By "us" I mean me because I have to do everything, large and small, by myself now==which isn't all that different than what I have always been stuck with. All I do is work: cook, clean, fix stuff, laundry, yard work, and so on into infinity. If I had known I was going to spend my entire life getting stuck doing the scut-work nobody else wants to bother with so they can enjoy their lives unencumbered by it all I'd have taken that jump a long time ago.”

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