Write About Now

This week, just a few minutes after leaving a wonderful service at my church in which the elders prayed for relational, physical, and spiritual healing of our people, I sat in an IHOP and listened as a young girl found out her father had just died. For several minutes, all of us stopped forking in our three-cheese eggs and pancake stacks and listened with a mixture of embarrassment and sadness as her crying escalated to wailing and then graduated to an animal-like keening.

This week I attended the third birthday party of a little friend named Avery, whose only requirement for the festivities was that everything be PINK. “Like what?” I asked her during the planning stages, mostly because I like hearing her little voice. “Pink bawwoons, and pink cake, and pink clothes, and pink decowations,” she answered. The party was indeed pink—it looked like someone popped a huge bubblegum bubble in her living room—and completely delightful. By the end of the party she wore not only her pink party dress but a pair of pink sunglasses, a set of plastic heels, a tutu, a pink bracelet, and a big smile. After the party I sat and talked to Avery’s grandma about Avery’s aunt, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was going in for tests the next day to see if it spread.

This week one of my best friends got up at 5 a.m. to witness the birth of her nephew, a perfect little guy who blinked calmly at the lights and seemed a little taken aback by all the fuss of the hospital. Later that afternoon she accompanied her sister-in-law to a plastic surgery appointment, where the sis learned her options for reconstructive work after her double mastectomy. The sister-in-law is younger than me.

This week one of my friends missed work because of whiplash. My neck is fine, but this week I have a little emotional whiplash.