So Jesus Gave Me A Kick in the Pants....

If you read yesterday's blog post, or, heck, any number of preceding blog posts, first off, thank you.  Second, you know what an entitled first-world-problem sort of whiner I am.

I'm sorry about this.  Really I am.  I'm working on it.

Of course it's frustrating when my schedule falls apart and the children's activities are shifting and endless and the animals give me dirty looks and pee inappropriately.  Yep. 

Of course we could look at all those problems from the other end, and see that they're really not very problematic:

I had to wait with my husband for two hours at the doctor's office:
I have a husband.
Who wants me to go with him when he's having something stressful done.
Because he likes my company.
Also, I like his.
The problem he's having is completely treatable, and not life-threatening in any way.
We have easy access to excellent medical care.
We have insurance.
We can afford our co-pay.

I remember once being irritated because I had to give up writing time to console my daughter's horse while he got shoes put on.  (Despite wearing shoes for most of his life, the horse finds being shod so enormously stressful that if someone [me] isn't holding onto his head, singing to him, and occaisionally threatening to beat the living snot out of him, he tries to kick the farrier's head in.)  And then I thought how absolutely maniacally happy that sentence would have made me back in the day when I was first married, working at a job I didn't like, wildly hoping to someday have children and write books for a living.  And that I would get a daughter who liked horses, as I do?  Icing on the cake, man.  Icing on the cake.

This bout of retrospection and self-analysis comes to you courtesy of yesterday's difficult day at Faith in Action.  There are so many people who need our help.  There are so many really hard situations.  We nearly had a client go into insulin shock in our waiting room--someone whose Type I diabetes was undiagosed for so long that the person's entire body has beenr ravaged by the disease.  Someone who can't possibly work, who will probably die soon, who comes from a background of never having had resources like money or adequate medical care.  This client, who can die from undereating, had been down to one meal a day for the last several days. 

Then we had someone who on very limited income, carefully budgeted but nearly always inadequate, was pre-paying funeral expenses at a rate of $25 per month.  That client's parent had been buried in a potter's field, in an unmarked and unremembered grave.  That client wanted her children to be spared the pain of not knowing where their mother lay.

It lays heavy on my heart sometimes.  When a client's monthly income is taken up not by their child's medical expenses (covered under Medicaid), but by the gas money required to take the child to a specialist four hours away.  When one hundred dollars stands between a client and her family and eviction, and that client has absolutely no way of getting the money.

At the end of my tough day at Faith in Action, I go back to my comfortable house and pray.  Jesus kicks me in the pants some days.  Some days I need kickin'.