Anticipated Grief of a Real Imaginary Kind

I have been waiting for today to come and end. All week I've been working toward a bunch of deadlines which all ended today. This morning I had history class as usual, then came the funeral sermon, a quick lunch, then internship debriefing, work and at last...time for me. First a quick pause to talk about the sermon.

All week I have been pouring over this random situation I selected last Thursday and how to preach some kind of funeral sermon about it. I've never written one before, so a fresh challenge it was. The situation I had was a 40 year old woman named LaVonne who died from breast cancer leaving behind her husband and 3 kids aged 15, 12 and 9. I thought it woudl be challenging enough but not too far out of reach from all the tragic funerals we had at Trinity last year. Strangely the situation I selected randomly last week became reality this week. I discovered about a month ago that the husband of a friend of mine (Ben and Kirsten) has a brain tumor and surgery is not an option. They also have a 1 year old son Raider. Just this last week I found out that Ben's brain tumor is a stage 4 glioblastoma. The kind of cancer from which he is unlikely to recover. What was originally a removed funeral sermon suddenly became a very personal reality. It felt like I was trying to write Ben's funeral sermon instead of imaginary LaVonne's. I finally pulled something together that seemed decent--definitely not my best work--and gave it today in class, volunteering to go first to just get it over with. I was good until about 2/3 of the way through when I started thinking and only bad things happen when you start thinking during a sermon--I started crying. It was excruciating to get to the end. But I made it. My classmates were most generous in getting me a roll of toilet paper to blow my nose and our lab leader Pastor John Mann gave me a handkerchief which, while wrinkled and scraggly looking, he promised was clean. So it's been a long day.

Tonight I only did things that I wanted to do. As part of my celebration tonight I had my first chiropractic visit. Mostly because I was curious about what it would be like, but it released so much tension and stress. I felt like I was standing taller and straighter and much more at ease. More importantly...I did something for me. I invested in my well being and it felt really good.

Continuing the celebration, I watched the Grey's Anatomy premier. It was pretty good. I like the story line that the hospital is low on the list of top hospitals. It mirrors the slowness and awkwardness of the last season. I'm curious to see where it goes. I'm also hoping Christina's hot new military surgeon comes back. During the first half of the show I hemmed a pair of pants that I bought about 6 months ago. Somehow the motivation of wanting to wear them tomorrow spurred me to finish them.