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Prayer for Pat

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Two summers ago, a young man in our church, Patrick McCarthy, was working on a train tanker car when built-up pressure blew a large metal hatch off the car and into his head. The emergency room staff, on seeing his injuries, said there was no point in even trying to help him.

But to their amazement, he did not die.

It’s been a series of rollercoaster ups and downs with Patrick since. He came home to live with his parents last year. He’s made a good recovery, but, as is the case with people who suffer traumatic head injuries and are wheelchair bound, he’s susceptible to random infections.

Right now, he’s back in the ICU and back on a ventilator for yet another infection.

If you have a moment today, would you pray for Pat, his parents, Mike and Nancy, and for his two young children?

Thank you.

Sex, Politics, and Homeschooling…Oh, and Tornadoes

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Boy, did I pick the wrong time to take a mini-vacation from blogging! The unholy trinity of controversial topics erupted on the Godblogosphere in the last few days: sex, politics, and homeschooling.

I’ll be commenting on the first and last issues once I clear my plate. Call me Slammed right now. My posterior actually hurts from sitting in chairs all day typing away. Plus, we’re doubling up on my son’s homeschooling to end by the close of May. More sitting there, too.

And then my in-laws were visiting in Greensburg, KS, when that town got erased off the face of the planet by what must’ve been the mother of all tornadoes. What's left of Greensburg's main attractionI’ve been to Greensburg myself; my wife grew up in a minuscule town just eight miles away. A few years ago, we went back to that area and I had the curious pleasure of descending the depths of the world’s largest hand-dug well, the key attraction in Greensburg. How eerie that the first image we saw of the devastation was the smashed sign for the well.

Praise God my in-laws escaped unharmed, plus saved their van and laptop. They lost everything else, though.

Life is like that, isn’t it? In myriad ways, most of us escape the truly awful consequences of life by the skin of our teeth. I suspect that many of us will arrive that way in heaven. How sad to think that most of what we’ve done will be tested by flames, only to burn! I pray that at least something of my life is gold and not all dross. Don’t want to make it into heaven smelling of smoke from that testing! I deal with enough shame as it is.

More later.

Update: The images of the destruction in Greensburg are mind-boggling. When I saw this aerial series of photos, I thought one thing: Hiroshima.

{Image: Greensburg, KS: sign for The World’s Largest Hand-dug Well post-tornado – copyright, The Associated Press}

Business and…

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If you read the About Cerulean Sanctum tab at the top of the blog, you’ll eventually discover that I work from our home outside Cincinnati, Ohio, as a freelance business copywriter and copyeditor. The Web’s been devoid of that reality for quite some time.

I’ve struggled for about eighteen months attempting to get my biz site online. I wanted portal management software to create the site, Ethereal Pen Productionsbut I either got massive nuclear overkill or anemic, prissy code with an attitude. I committed to Joomla!, but its templating system favored graphic designers and code noodlers. With it perpetually in flux between two or three incompatible versions, I finally threw in the towel. In what must be considered massive irony and good fortune, version 2.1.x of WordPress included far better handling of static pages than previous versions (a former showstopper for me), so I took the plunge. The wraps came off the site yesterday. It still needs some tweaking, especially graphics-wise, but I like the lean look.

So, Ethereal Pen Productions finally lives on the Web. You’re invited to critique.

Better yet, if you need anything written, let me know. My kid needs braces.

And…

I’m still recovering from the blowback from Monday’s post, Dissing Discernment. I think all the principle players in the comments have made up. I know now not to juggle five things at once while replying to comments, so even this old diehard learned a few things from the whole conversation.

I didn’t know I was posting anything so controversial, but the whole topic’s a lightning rod. I suspect that’s one reason so few books on the topic exist. Tim Challies should sell a million copies when his discernment tome comes out. Or people will burn piles of it in the town square. You never know. (Maybe just in Canada. They’ve been testy ever since Gretzky fled.)

Whatever the case, blogging will be light in days ahead due to tax prep and deadlines on several writing assignments.

And…

If you’ve got a blog, check your bandwidth. I found a huge spike in my outgo this February. Lucky for me, I’m nowhere maxed out on my five domains. Still, Cerulean Sanctum drowned in bandwidth warning messages toward the end of last month, forcing me to re-apportion things.

So I did a little snooping and found something throttling my site: Yahoo! Slurp.

When I sent a message to Yahoo! asking about the sevenfold increase in the number of daily hits from them compared to the previous month, they told me they’d been experimenting with a plethora of new page-sucking bots and had been hitting some sites hard.

Well, no thank you very much! Fortunately for me, I’ve got some leeway. Nonetheless, their little experiment doubled my bandwidth outgo! (That’s not easy to do, either.) I can imagine that some sites that pay by the byte will receive a nasty little bill from Mr. Host courtesy of the crew from Sunnyvale. I guess the Yahooligans thought they could pick on me because I used to live there, but fled. (Heck, Gretzky got out of California, too!)

A heads up to all of you.

Be blessed…and be wary!