Elias.

A son of prayers, if there ever was one. He's still wheezy more than a baby should be (the surgeon told us that infants with TEF have softer tracheas), and his herniated belly-button might be causing us more concern than it warrants (doctors don't do anything about them until kids are four years old or so) - but overall he's been gaining weight quickly and acting more and more like his brothers and sister did at his age. I can finally write about him now, since the raw agony of panic has for the most part subsided, along with the bulk of all those feelings of foreboding I had before.

Still, the valleys of the shadow formed such a regular sort of rhythm for the last several months we can't help but feel a bit of flinching expectancy. Father, please forgive our fears, and at the same time don't lead us into temptation-deliver us from evil.

Also been feeling a general cloud of malaise - probably from lack of sleep and company - these last few weeks. Brandy has had even less sleep than I have, and the older kids have suffered quite a bit of neglect in the mornings. It's a little disappointing how much our family boat can rock after a few big waves. But still, the comforting rhythms of Thanking our Father in Heaven for our breakfast, reading to the kids before bed, or going through the first ten or so questions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism have done a lot to help us find our sea-legs again. The one thing I do miss is closer fellowship with other strong believers (or even not so strong believers).

I guess we could seek it out, but it's difficult to find time or presence of mind to arrange anything that would work, and so many friendly visits with believers we don't know so well can end up being mostly small talk.

Small talk...is it the human equivalent of canine rear-sniffing? I guess it's necessary in its way, as a sort of preliminary to real conversations that might follow; but it can be very tiring.

Going through Genesis for our weekly bible-study. Brandy can't participate as much since she's doing the bulk of baby-holding, and since bible-study hours coincide with Elias' fussy hours. Ben and Rose have been our faithful attendees for the past six months or more, others have come and gone, TJ's been so busy with his extra work at the Roaster in Camano Island he hasn't shown for a while. In a lot of ways a good bible study is a lot harder to put together than a "teaching". The organizer has to come up with questions that aren't too hard for people to understand, but aren't too easy either. Just like in a class, people are hesitant to answer the first because they think they'll get it wrong and embarrass themselves, or reluctant to answer the second kind because it's boring or degrading. Thinking of good questions is like fine-tuning a dial.

But life is Good, God has blessed us, I am full of blessings and peanut butter. The only think I want right now is Light, more Light - conscious fellowship with God in Christ.

The brain. Feels like it's frozen, fuzzy-frozen like something left too long in the freezer, so long that it's responded by a winter coat of frost.
Not sleeping, staying up all night walking around in the dark through empty buildings and driving through empty streets. Sometimes my job feels like a post-apocalyptic novel. All I need is the zombies.
Sometimes I think I see one in the theater building but then realize it's only a mirror, one of those full-length ones that the resident thespians use to check their outfits before entering stage left.
That zombie stares dully back at me with his tired brown eyes before using his expandable baton to poke at the enormous spiders infesting the corner of the stairwell.

The moon is spectacular tonight. Or, this morning. It's 5:54 and the moon just rose an hour or so ago. It's a waning crescent that has the subdued light to the rest of it, just enough so you can still see that it's a round thing, not just a hanging scythe. It looks like a black-brown velvet against the blue-black sky.

So, here I am at work again. We just went through some training on fire alarm systems, and when my boss Mark was giving us an informational lecture, I was losing consciousness in a bad way. It was good information, but I kept waking up, and nodding off, and waking up, until he said "and soon we're going to go out and test the actual alarms outside so Judah can stay awake" -at which point I asked to break and get some coffee. Which worked for the next 30 minutes of lecture or so.
A man can only pinch the skin on his leg so hard, after all.

Well then, My lovely wife is moving the kids beds into our room for the duration of my dad's stay, I'm happy to have a chance to exercise my very rusty hospitality (Brandy's a natural) and also the 5th commandment. I figured it would be better to let him have a door, I always like to have a door when I'm staying with other people, it makes me feel less like an invader.

It's strange with me, any huge thing I adapt to within the first day so it feels like it's always been this way. I have no gift for novelty. I wonder if it got burnt out of me from all the moving when I was young?
It feels like my dad's always been here.

But it's still strange, trying to resume a relationship which hasn't existed in person for over a decade.
And last time I saw him, he was taller than me.
Everything changes. Well, except Someone.

That's one of the most comforting things about our God, I think. He's a person, and he's a person who doesn't change. Change is like wind, and it's nice to have a windbreak to step into, a feeling of comfort, of home, someplace and someone to go back to when everything around you is rushing through a swift process of change and decay.

I've decided (well, I decided it a long time ago) that the thing which makes our faith in Jesus Christ special, and different, is because it's faith in JESUS CHRIST. and through him, in a specific God, Yahweh, the I AM. He's not just some generic "God" - for there are many "gods" and many "lords" but He's the one we know and believe. The philosophic system can be ripped off or superimposed onto another religion, but we're not asked to trust in a philosophic system, we're offered to place our belief in a specific person, Jesus Christ.

Been reading Thomas Wingfold, there are some points in that book that almost...well...they do...make my eyes water up. I was at work so I had to duck down my head and suck 'em back into my tear ducts.

I keep on expecting life to slow down. At least the maintenance part of it. But it never has, and I'm starting to think it never will. After reading T.W., I decided to try and actually obey something of God's word, the "Do all things w/o arguing or complaining." it's strange to think that I, calling myself a Christ-ian, have not consiously tried to obey anything He says for a long long time.