My body hurts this evening. It aches, as if I had the flu or Covid. But, I don’t have the Covid. I administered a 15 minute rapid home test over the weekend. It was like operating a pregnancy test, except instead of using pee, I used fluid from my nose and mixed it with whatever fluid comes in the kit, and then squeezed drops of it onto a test card. The card indicated that I am not Covid pregnant. And who knows if I have the flu. But, I am definitely on my period, and I believe my aches are originating from there.

I am also tired because I was awake at 4:30-ish this morning in order to kick it off with a new week at work. Besides that, I didn’t sleep well last night, as I worried myself sleepless, thinking and praying for a friend who has been in the hospital for the past week or so. It was much relief today, after work, while I was in the grocery store, when she texted me back and told me she feels shitty. I couldn’t help but have double hope with her words, as she is a comedian and can make jokes, joy and gratitude out of her health situations. First, it was just great to hear from her, which hopefully means that she’s still struggling strongly through it all. And secondly, she had been constipated and I can’t help but to hope that “shitty” also meant that she was finally able to take one. She went into the operating room shortly after our little text exchange, so I wasn’t able to get the full story on that for now. (When I do, I won’t report back here.)

Hopefully I’ll get better rest tonight. I suppose it all depends on if I put my prayer antennae up. Actually, it’s more like, if I pay attention to my prayer antennae. I have at least four very good reasons to have my prayer antennae up on high alert at all times and respond when signals come in. Those reasons are the 15, 13, 11, and 10 year-olds who live in very close proximity to me. They could go south at any moment, like any of of us could, and it seems like I ought to be in frantic prayer for them at all times. But I am not. I’ve learned to talk a lot and teach them about all of the awkward and horrible things in life, and all the good and proper things, too, and also that God is real, loves us, and that we can talk to him at all times. And so I don’t pray for them frantically at all the not-supposed-to-be-awake hours of the day.

But I do like to pray for them when I can. Especially these days, I like to pray “thy kingdom come thy will be done in their lives, and give them their daily bread and lead them not into temptation but deliver them from the evil one.” I do pray that for them pretty consistently these days. It’s not always been like this. I’ve not always known what and how to pray for my kids. I always want to spend hours upon hours praying for each one about every specific little thing. And because of that and the discouragement of not having the time to do that, I’ve not prayed at all much of the time. But, I’ve come to learn that Christ’s command for how to pray is sufficient, and so I like to use his framework and when there are specific things to throw into the framework, I do, when I need to and feel led to.

Anyhow, I’m supposed to be working on writing my memoir, or my article, so I think I’ll sign off of here and get to that task. It’s just good to get the writing gears going and to let some half-naked thoughts out. I do hope to keep this kind of writing going. I used to have a substack dedicated to my half-naked thoughts. But, I’ve abandoned that and think it’s better to have all of my writing in one place over here. It doesn’t make sense to write there and over here. But at the same time, I didn’t really want to clutter up my website with sometimes awkward and bad writing. But, I’m learning that it’s probably best to just let all of my publicly presentable and not always perfect personality out with my polished stuff.