Sunday Sermonette: Pulling Rank With Pastor Swank!*

*Title courtesy of ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©

Pastor Swank Burns for Quenching!

Posted by scott on August 26th, 2010

LIAR AHMADINEJAD THIRSTS FOR FIRE

Iranian thug President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: “The bottom line is we do not need a bomb. The time for nuclear bombs has ended,” per AP.

Then is he going to wipe out Israel with a teaspoon?

The jawbone of an ass would be more traditional, although it’s not as handy if you suddenly need to eat soup.

Is he going to welcome back his adored Islamic messiah with fireflies?

I don’t know, but I have to wonder: how much do you really adore your Islamic messiah if you plan to greet him with nuclear weapons?  Have you thought about baking him a cake, or getting him a gift certificate to Chili’s?

Ahmadinejad is the typical Muslim zealot: liar, liar and more liar.

In Dante’s Inferno, “Alchemists, Counterfeiters and Falsifiers of Words” are condemned to the Eighth Circle of Hell, where they are forced to wear the Persian President’s Flaming Pants, which perpetually burns their flesh away, and are uncomfortably snug in the crotch.

He champions peaceful uses of his nuclear plants while daily stapling his own citizens to misery and hopelessness.

 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in undated file photo.

Why are there Iranians in exile who constantly warn the free world of Ahmadinejad’s madness? They do so for they have suffered first-hand from his clones and himself.

 Members of the Iranian Parliment Subcommittee on Pensions and Tax Policy.

Ahmadinejad is surrounded in his executive suites by his satanic cronies.  They are murderers, rapists and stealers, like unto their fiendish prophet Mohammed.

Talk about union featherbedding!  Why, back during the Bush Administration, we had one guy to handle all three of those jobs!  (In the interests of full disclosure we should point out that Dick Cheney seems to have outsourced the rape to private contractors, but we should also note that his cybernetic life support implants aren’t nearly as fancy or efficient as Darth Vader’s — so he can’t be hands-on about everything.  Still, his pulseless, electrically-driven, frequently reanimated body is pretty versatile; for instance, after John Kerry conceded the Presidential election in 2004, Cheney celebrated by drinking three Amstel Lights and farting the Imperial March.)

Therefore, when Ahmadinejad courts the UN audience with promises of laying down his bombs for picking up peace doves, he lies superbly.

I am, as you know, a huge fan of the pastor’s work, but the line “laying down his bombs for picking up peace doves” strikes me as particularly poetic, like a Pete Seegar song written by Latka Gravas.

Yet Ahmadinejad and his clique are far more frightening. They lie in order to gain time to construct the final bomb. They smile while delivering hope-filled speeches about peace, all the while craftily scheming the planet’s last hour.

I’m also a bit worried for him.  The pastor’s not a young man anymore, and he really needs to stop watching James Franciscus films and eating Mexican food just before bed.  Or at least limit himself to The Valley of Gwangi and just one Fresco Bean Supreme.

Ahmadinejad is so married to his messiah’s return that he has spent millions in erecting edifices in the messiah’s honor.

While Pastor Swank’s congregation, the New Hope Church of Wyndham, Maine, meets on a couch (although it can get a little crowded during Easter services, and sometimes the choir has to sit on the ottoman).

Muslims believe in the second coming. They hold to that tenet with all their longings. They say that the messiah left the planet at age 5, only someday to come back when the globe’s surface is on fire.

With the Islamic messiah’s return, Islam World Rule will be secured.

So they’re going to pick up the planet cheap at a fire sale.  Smart.

In contrast, this is the biblical Christians’ hope:  Jesus followers hold to a second coming of Christ.

The Bible states that Christ Himself forecast His own return to His property, planet Earth.

Unfortunately, much like William Rehnquist’s two homes, there’s a covenant in Earth’s deed prohibiting the sale or transfer to “‘members of the Hebrew race.”  Sorry, Jesus.  Should’a read the fine print.

Christ stated that He would return when the world was caught up in wars and rumors of wars, famines, the increase of sin,family members increasingly taunting one another, persecution of Christians, pestilence, earthquakes, and the gospel preached globally.

If my little sister’s brattiness wasn’t enough to bring on the Apocalypse, I’m beginning to think the Book of Revelations may not be 100% accurate.

Christ stated in Matthew 24:29-31 that His rapturing (“gathering together unto Him”) of the believers from the four corners of the planet would coincide with His open appearance in the atmostphere above the planet.

“Messiah One, this is Houston Capcom…You are cleared for re-entry.”

Sunday Sermonette: I'm in the Tank for Swank!

Thanks to everyone for the kind words about Mary's dad. He may be coming home in a day or so -- coming home to a hospital bed in the living room, but that's better than living in a room in the hospital, since as Wo'C Chief Medical Officer Dr. BDH has observed, "Those places are filled with germs and errors."

Pastor Swank, Private Dick

Posted by scott on November 5th, 2009

I was feeling a little depressed about the repeal of marriage equality in Maine, when it suddenly hit me: Who better to seek spiritual comfort from in this dark time than J. Grant Swank, Pastor of Our Lady of Wyndham Church and Breakfast Nook?  Surprisingly, however, Pastor Swank doesn’t appear particularly interested in his local politics this week, choosing instead to pull up the collar of his trenchcoat, tug down the snap brim of his Fedora, and shadow the President around town.

Barack Hussein Obama discounts the realism of the final check-out.

We said final check-out’s at 11 and we meant it!

His pride is in zenith gear at the moment; no doubt his residence at Pennsylvania Avenue does him no good in correcting that.

No, you got a bum zenith gear, you’re gonna want to take ‘er back to the Dealer if she’s still under warranty.

Obama early on stated that he answered an ‘altar call’ at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. For an altar call to be scheduled in a liberal sanctuary is something else. He witnessed that he met Christ at that juncture.

Subject Obama and J. Christ then walked three blocks north on Decatur, and stopped for lunch at a diner called “Mother’s.”  Subject Obama had a plain hamburger patty with a Cling peach and cottage cheese on the side, and a glass of ice tea.  Subject Christ had some wafers and a glass of blood.

That church would have had to be white-hating Jeremiah Wright’s. How all Wright’s rant fits in with an old-fashioned Dwight L. Moody style altar call is beyond me.

Turned out the call was for Phillip Morris.  Scratch another lead.

Nevertheless, the point is that Obama has not followed through with a biblical lifestyle or scriptural ethics in public life; consequently, whatever happened in his soul was not abone fide conversion to Christ as Lord.

Seems this Christ fellow went by a whole host of aliases: The Carpenter’s Son, Horn of Salvation, Holy Thing, Head of the Corner, First begotten of the dead, Lamb of God, the Living Bread, Root of Jesse, Rose of Sharon, and the Notorious I.N.R.I.  (Coincidentally, “Bone-A-Fide” is the title of Christian rapper T-Bone’s 2005 album.)

Obama in fact belongs to one of the arch-theologically liberal denominations in existence. He attended for two decades a demented cultic type local church overseen by a warped black preacher who taught black elitism vs. white values.

I figured Obama had a enough juice in this town to fix the fight, so I called my bookie and laid a double sawbuck on black elitism.

Therefore, for Obama to continue on the theologically liberal journey is to understand how he takes no serious note of the Judgment Seat of Christ. The theologically liberal carve our their own religion, even calling it “Christian.”

Obama and his gang had been bootlegging Salvation, but now the Revenue boys were onto ‘em.

Obama is a prime example of this persona. His wife joins him in that.

Now that he is in the Oval Office, hubris rules his life more than ever, though in prior years it propelled him to claim the impossible.

Like a snake who talks, or some dead guy who hopped off the slab and ankled out of the Morgue. Crazy stuff.

That has led the non-thinking to follow him in mob hysteria, giving him messianic status.

Which is why Christ wanted to sit down and parley, once he heard Obama was muscling in on his territory.

The Bible teaches that every mortal will appear at the Judgment Seat of Christ at death. That includes every human born since Adam and Eve. That includes those of every religion and of no religion. One cannot escape the final check-out — the Judgment Seat of Christ.

Sanitized For Your Protection.

It is at that experience that the soul confronts the One who said He was “the way, the truth and the life.” Each of us therefore stands before Eternal Truth in Christ. Each of us gives an account of every motive, word and deed that transpired during our lifetime.

And make sure you and your pals get your stories straight before you go downtown, ’cause Christ is gonna double-check your alibi.

It is the same with his endorsement of killing womb babies. Obama has no regard for deity’s abhorrence of abortion.

Although deity seems fine with spontaneous abortion.  Maybe it’s like Planned Parenthood and he’s getting a cut of the action.

Obama lies. Therefore, he has no qualms about sleeping with lies accumulating during his daily rounds.

Obama is totally opportunistic. He says and does what will further Obama, not adhering to scriptural expectations.

Now of course there are scores of others who live that same immorality; however, what is unique about Obama naturally is that he is the President of the United States. His power over America is exerted mainly in the groove of anti-God, anti-Bible.

I wondered how Obama Got His anti-God Groove Back.

And so they intercede on behalf of Barack Hussein and Michelle Obama and their children to be genuinely saved.

Yes, according to these photos and surveillance reports from Grant Swank, the Continental Oops, even Sasha and Malia are headin’ straight for Hell.  Think about that the next time you’re tempted to buy one of those knock-off Louis Vuitton bags from some stall on Canal Street.  Stick with the national brand savior, and always ask for Christ by name.

Sunday Sermonette: Pastor Swank is Brain Alive!

Originally published August 20, 2009

Political debate is all well and good, but conservative pundits has so far failed to entirely check the progress of President Obama's healthcare reform.  And why? Obviously, because they're speaking English! As any rhetorician will tell you, the only way to argue against a new policy is with new, made-up words. Enter Pastor Swank:

OBAMA MOB HYSTERIACS PUSHED BACK BY BRAIN ALIVE CITIZENRY 

Thinking heads throughout the Republic are finally getting some headway, particularly regarding Obama’s Whack Non-Health Blanket.

I tried diagramming this sentence, but it wound up looking like those dick drawings that John Madden doodles on your TV screen during football games. So let’s just see if we can untangle it instead.

Okay, “[T]hinking heads” suggests that they’re disembodied, so this is probably a reference to the 1963 documentary, They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

This would make sense, since Obama is basically synonymous with Adolf Hitler in the public imagination. Next, “throughout the Republic,” is obviously a sly reference to the upcoming Star Wars game, The Old Republic, which is highly anticipated by conservative gamers, because Dick Cheney is a playable Sith.

“[F]inally getting some headway,” probably means it was the Pastor’s birthday, or wedding anniversary.

“[P]articularly regarding Obama’s Whack.” Swank realizes that Obama is black, and obviously feels that his point is important enough that he should attempt to communicate with the President in his native tongue, while “Non-Health Blanket” is clearly an reference to the smallpox-infected blankets the U.S. Army bestowed upon the Plains Indians, and which, according to the House bill, will now be a part of your grandmother’s Medicare benefits.

Whew. Really getting into the substance of Pastor Swank’s prose, with its rich and allusive language, is like trying to read Joyce’s Ulysses without annotations. Maybe we should just skim.

Obama is pained due to recent right-thinking citizens howling loudly and long enough. Grassroots town halls have screeched at Congress. The mob hysteriacs who voted in a celebrity rather than a free enterprise, constitution-friendly statesman are losing ground.

So the mob hysteriacs who voted for Obama are being shouted down by the new, right-thinking mob hysteriacs, who are also howling, presumably because they've seen the best minds of their generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysteriacal, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking looking for an angry fix, because that's the only place you can get your prescription filled now thanks to Obamacare.

As for Obama wanting a Canadian cloned health-blanket, Canada’s health care stinks. My cousin needed immediate spine care. His Halifax Nova Scotia doc was brusque, mean-hearted and just plain crude in his response to my relative’s plea.

Canadians are notoriously rude to people who can’t be bothered to keep their spines in working order.

The cousin ended up at Lahey Clinic, Burlington MA, for state-of-the-art surgery that responsibly corrected the problem. Thank you, America!

Great, so we’re already paying for the health care of illegal immigrants? I demand to see an itemized bill.

Mob hysteriacs put Obama the Anti-America President in control. But as we are now realizing, the hysteriacs, though many are still loyal space cadets in the brain space, are losing hold. The ground is slowly giving way to the brain alive citizens of this country.

This isn’t a particularly good argument against health care reform, but it is, I admit, a great plot synopsis of Fiend Without a Face.

As a Christian, I believe that what is happening right now is God inserting His powerplay into societal happenings for God has a vested interest in this particular country.

Although now that God actually owes more on America than the country is worth, he’s considering just mailing the keys to the bank and walking away.

This is the only nation ever created by biblical believers seeking a land where they could worship Christ and live by the Bible.

The Crusader kingdoms don’t count, because technically they were just pre-season exhibition countries.

Those founders prayed with their blood.

Services were messy. James Madison made a point of bringing extra Wet-Naps for Benjamin Franklin, while Alexander Hamilton always wore a lobster bib to church.

Their petitions are still very much alive and well at heaven’s throne. With God, a thousand years is as a day and vice versa.

Which is why God hasn’t smote Canada; waiting 8 weeks for a hip replacement doesn’t really seem all that unreasonable to Him.

Couple the founders’ prayers with the earnest biblical believers’ cries present-tense and you have a mighty call-out to the divine going on 24 / 7. God is responding to those sincere pleas.

Through His call center in Mumbai. As the Lord sayeth, “Your earnest biblical believers’ cries are very important to Us. Please stay on the line, and your mighty call-out will be answered by the next available cherub.”

We biblical Christians have just begun to witness the divine thrust retrieving our nation for its foundation’s sake.

Hey, what you do behind closed doors is your business, Pastor.

Bonus Doghouse Riley comment:

Nice to see the Good Pastor sittin’ up and taking nourishment, since unless he’s over 65 the source of his health insurance is a Divine mystery.

Nice, too, to see the return of the ol’ “The Founders were Christian, The Founders were x, y, z” routines. Ya gotta love the Classics. Not that they ever went away, exactly, but the juxtaposition of solemn invocation of our Forebears by the denizens of the very sort of ill-informed, weed-sucking, corn-distilling mobs, the abhorrence of which was the single source of their total political agreement, reminds us that, when all seems bleak, you can always laugh at the parade of dipshits going on somewhere.

Left by Doghouse Riley on August 20th, 2009

Sunday Sermonette: A Hank O' Swank!

First published April 13, 2009. Original comments below the fold.

Mad About The Boy

I see Pastor Swank has deigned to favor us with his Bull Connor impression today.  You may recall that during the late campaign, many of our old friends in the right blogosphere struggled to depict Senator Obama as a Teleprompter-addicted dullard who would comically turn white with fear at the first whiff of an Islamofascist; but they still stopped short of addressing him the way a harried traveler might query a shoeshine provider on the whereabouts of the Chattanooga Choo-choo.  The one exception to this conspiracy of restraint was Pastor Swank, a man who considers it his God-given right to use the English language in any way he sees fit — as a chamois for his golf clubs, say, or a furnace filter, cock ring, or doily — and who fervently believes that “grammar” is just another word for “tyranny.”  So it came as little surprise last fall when he began referring to Obama as “the Boy.”  What did shock me, however, was the speed with which he dropped it in the face of criticism, almost as if he were self-aware, perhaps even evolving toward sentience.   As it turns out — not so much.

Socialist ‘The Boy’ will lay low America, by Grant Swank

Mob hysteria rushed The Boy where he is today.
Liberal media worked alongside mob hysteria.

I find this reassuring.  Even though a majority of Americans are in a mob, and enraged or suicidal enough to rush the President, our hysteria is apparently friendly and cooperative and works well with others.

Now The Boy sits in the White House, surrounded by the crooks he has known during his so-called career mired in Illinois.

Okay, show of hands.  Which is worse — Mired in Illinois, or Stuck in Lodi?

What is so frightening is that the socialist Marxist Muslim B. H. Obama is the brainwashed child of Jeremiah Wright.

Wait, I thought he was the secret love child of Malcom X.  Come on, can’t we stick with that story?  Because then we can dissolve to “Twenty Years Later” and end with a big, score-settling confrontation between a grown Malia Obama and a cyborg Louis Farrakhan, climaxing in a shoot-out with lasers at the Audubon Business and Technology Center.

Though not much is said these days about Wright, he is right there in the Oval Office.

And, one presumes, in the woodpile.

He is implanted in the thought patterns of both Michelle and B. H.

Just like Spock’s katra was implanted in McCoy at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  So I guess the lesson here is, if you want to grow up to be President of the United States one day, never let your pastor touch your head when he’s dying of radiation poisoning.

They are just beneath the skin anti-white, anti-Jew, pro-Muslim and ready to crush any semblance of a Christian nation.

Fortunately, Swank stumbled into a church where they happen to have boxes of these special X-Ray specs that can see beneath the skin of the First Couple…

N.B.  The pastor is all out of bubblegum, bitchez!

The Boy and wife have no regard whatsoever for the Christian heritage to this country. They play out their church membership in the most liberal denomination in the United States. But behind that act out is their allegiance to the Koran, Allah and Islam World Rule.

Why do you think Michelle Obama is always going around sleeveless in public?  It’s her only chance to flash the guns, since at home she has to wear a burka.

As The Boy has traipsed across the planet recently, he has acted out in body language and spoken word his admiration for Muslims wherever he went.

Not since Lillian Gish in the 1928 classic The Wind have we seen this kind of vivid pantomime.

He bent over backwards to befriend the very coalition out to destroy this Republic.

Having drained our nation of its economic security, The Boy will march forth under Allah’s banner. Those Muslim cells planted in America are waiting for their chance to join The Boy in usurping every office in the nation.

Oh no — Muslim stem cells are going to unite like Voltron to create a giant Lion Force Caliph who will make Barack Obama the Mayor, City Clerk, Animal Control officer and Library Services Administrator of every city in America!

The Boy is Marxist. He is Muslim. He is therefore not what we have always defined in the generic sense as “American.”

Generic humans are a little pastier, and taste more like mayonnaise.

If the hysteriacs had only known who they were pushing into the presidency, they would have never elected The Boy. Even now most of them do not see his destructive agenda. They are still blinded by his charisma.

Quick — We need more magic sunglasses!  And some wrestlers!

That in itself is so frightening for it reminds thinking citizens of every despot who ever bobbed to the political and powerful top.

And do we really want to be ruled by iron-fisted flotsam?

Now the United States is victim to “one of them.”

Oh…so that’s what McCain meant by “That One.”

Flanked by Swank!

Pastor Swank may be retired, but that doesn't mean his spiritual advice is not still as fresh and steaming as the day he first loosed it onto the Internet. After all, if people still read Thomas Aquinas on the Epistles of St. Paul, then why not Swank on the Dead Kennedys?

Originally posted August 30, 2009

Sunday Sermonette: Pastor Swank Thinks You’re Crazy

Pastor Swank is beginning to feel like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes — the one sane man in a World Gone Mad!  He’s also starting to feel a touch like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green — the lone voice of truth drowned out by the din of a World Gone Mad!  And he’s showing increasing signs of feeling like Charlton Heston in Omega Man — the last soul who’s kept his humanity in a World Gone Mad!  And Albino!  Also, I think he sometimes feels like that one girl with the pixilated face who won’t take her top off — the last bastion of decency in a Girls Gone Wild!  But that’s just a hunch.  The important thing is, he thinks you people are dangerously unstable.

Baby killer Ted Kennedy praised?

Sane people know for sure that this sphere is laden with crazy people and crazy situations.

It’s true, the inmates are running the asylum!  It’s a sort of autonomous collective — an anarcho-syndicalist commune, with the members taking it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.

Ted Kennedy is one of those personages and his passing is one of those situations.

True.  It took me two or three tries before I could even say “brain cancer” without cracking up.  I don’t think there’s been a wackier demise since Chuckles the Clown.

This man endorsed killing womb babies.

And I thought Bob Dole sold out when he did those Viagra commercials.

One becomes so utterly weary dealing daily with the nuthouse mortals throwing their power around that it becomes a numbing press upon the psyche. That in itself causes some of us moralists the leisure of simply overlooking for the umpteenth time the lunatic happenings that fill up our years here.

The good Pastor has made a good faith effort to deal with our dementia, but it’s just becoming all too much, and he’s seriously considering putting the country in a home.

Kennedy was one of the countless persons championing slaying boys and girls inside female bodies.

Granted, it’s not the Most Dangerous Game, but it’s still nice to get out of the house and into the womb, camping with your buddies, putting out your fetal decoys, sitting in your baby blind with your dog and your gun, sippin’ a beer and occasionally blowing on your Zygote Call.

I know that Barack Hussein Obama is like unto Ted. So is Nancy Pelosi. And therefore the bloody list winds out into eternity.

And once you’re on the bloody list that winds out into eternity, they will not stop spamming you.

But with all that as an hour-by-hour atrocity fact

That’s my favorite Trivial Pursuit edition.

moralists must once in awhile come back to the baseline which is to shout loudly that these creatures are bad. They are evil. They say that righteousness is wicked and wickedness is righteous.

They’re trying to tempt us into Hell with their clever wordplay.

It is heavy enough just to read their lambasting Israeli fruitcakes who thought themselves god let alone have to minister to the devil bent year after year.

Wondering if you’re one of the crazy personages who’s causing a numbing press upon the Pastor’s psyche?  Well, Swank has thoughtfully provided the previous sentence as an eye test chart for your sanity.  Read it through again –  if it still makes no sense, you’re probably okay.

Is there any wonder that Jesus wearied having to minister to the numb in head who wore clergy garb in the name of Jehovah? Thank God Jesus had only three years of public ministry. With enemies attacking His every holy deed, three years certainly was enough.

If they hadn’t crucified him, he definitely would’ve needed a nap.

That is why when liberals read this article they have fits. Their bodies twitch and their jaws drop to the dust. How can anyone type out a sentence stating that Ted Kennedy is a child slayer? How can any decent person even think of speaking such syllables when a man has just breathed his last?

Well, take it from me, it is indeed possible.

Pastor Swank has done the possible!

And not only possible but absolutely necessary in order to cleanse our thought patterns and speech cadences, let alone filter our souls of all that gradually attaches itself to up the mire.

“Up the mire?”  We used to call it “driving the Hershey Highway.”  These Mainers and their crazy New England dialect.

Get this: Ted Kennedy represents one of the most devilish categories of homo sapiens inhabiting God’s Earth because, for one, he could not say and do enough to increase the number of slaughtered womb children.

Listen: Pastor Swank has come unstuck in time.

The Corsican Swanks

Okay, this is weird...

[First, I have to tell you, I brought Mary our Kindle this morning, and she used the hospital wifi to connect to World O' Crap, and all the well wishes in the comment thread below made her smile. Which is no small feat, as she was in a fair amount of pain, and hungry as hell, having gone without solid food since Wednesday night.  But as of press time (I'm writing this at about 9PM Saturday) she's had lunch and dinner and kept both down, and may be home as soon as Monday. Crap, I shouldn't have said that, because now I've probably jinxed it...]

Anyway, I get home from the hospital, eye the Mesa of Lost Laundry and half a dozen other silent, mocking household chores, and figure I'll just take a quick dip into the archives and pull out an old Swank post for a Sunday Sermonette. And since I've been revisiting the Pastor's output in more or less chronological order, I look for the post which followed his last (seen here).

And guess what? It's the one where Swank goes to the hospital!  Specifically, it's the one where he bitches about having to drive his wife to the hospital and then dozes in a La-Z-Boy while she has hand surgery, but it all turns out okay because he meets a "hunk" with a wasting disease.

Okay, except for the napping in the hospital room and the flirting with male patients, this is exactly how I've been spending my last couple days days. You realize what this means, don't you?  Swank is stealing my life! He's the Jennifer Jason Leigh to my Bridget Fonda in Single White Female. He's dopplegangerbanging me!

So...anyone want to join the church I've just founded in the northwest corner of my living room? (Two can play at this game, Pastor!)

Originally published March 27, 2009

Swank Versus The Medieval Barbers

Pastor Swank has lost 40 pounds in 40 days, and now enjoys “increased energy and clarity of thought.” (Let’s hope not, or this post is going nowhere fast!)  Still, you can’t argue with results, and according to the Pastor, an amazing regimen of laxative teas, banana splits, and nasal spray has cranked up his nearly 70-year old metabolism and made the hypothalamus his bitch!

And what’s Swank doing with his new, boyish vim?  Well, let’s check his latest Townhall blog and see…

Monday was hand surgery day for Priscilla, my wife.

Several days prior she had been sick with the flu. Fill in the blanks.

Okay…we need a noun, an adverb, and a breed of cat…

But Monday she was well enough to have the cut-through.

The doctor cut all the way through her hand?  That sounds more like amputation than surgery, but I’m no expert.

However, waking up Monday for me was not fun. I now had the no-energy-at-all. Yet I was to drive her to and from the hospital. After all.

“At which point I would be alone again.  Naturally.”

I literally dragged to the van, turned the key and hoped to stay put on the frost heaves of River Road.

Well no wonder you felt so crappy, Pastor.  I had the dry heaves once, but at least the bathroom was heated.

By the time we got to the hospital, Priscilla went off to see the surgeon. I waited in the state-of-the-art reception solarium.

American medicine has made enormous advances in waiting!  Why, our waiting technology is light years beyond those socialists in Canada!

I was handed what appeared to be a type of remote which would wiggle and tickle when it was time for me to visit Priscilla through those awesome closed doors that signed AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

So they gave you a vibrator?  Yeah, I can see how that would make the time go faster.

At the end of the long, long hall was the cubicle housing Priscilla. Thankfully, the hospital with its most accommodating provisions, had a lazy-boy chair for the visitor-with-patient. I made swift use of the chair, tilted back and closed my eyes.

“I was exhausted from all the hyphenating.  Guess I’m not as young as I used to be.”

It was now mid-day. I dared not put anything in my stomach because of you-know-why. Yet the strength was not upping.

Stupid strength.

Nevertheless, I was the designated driver. So home we went, Priscilla talking about meds for pain and my head gradually focusing on what was really important.

I collapsed on the couch, losing contact with the world through the few hours beckoning. When awakening, Priscilla said, “You know, I’m going to have to go back to the hospital because the nurse left a needle in my arm.”

Sure enough. The nurse had forgotten to take the “port”—is that what it’s called; I have no idea about medical terminology?

“So I’m going to make some up.  I’ve decided that sharp thing they use to take blood from your arm is called an ‘isthmus,’ and that thing they make you poop in when you’re stuck in bed?  I’m either going to call that a ‘grommet,’ or an ‘antimacassar.’”

Anyhow, it’s the needle that’s put into the flesh by which more whatevers can be added to the body for this and that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!  Ease up on the jargon there, Dr. House.  We’re only human.

Yes, it was there all right. And it could not stay. Infection and so forth.

She might develop inflamed adverbs!

I don’t know if I can drive into the city. The hospital. It seems so far away,” I replied, unthinkingly, for who else was going to do it?

Back in the car. Night had fallen. I felt wretched. Priscilla was dealing with pain-after-hand-surgery.
We got to Mercy Hospital Emergency Room, checked in with the receptionist and so on and so on.

“Then we each told two friends about Faberge Organic Shampoo…”

To my right there sat a handsome young fellow who started to explain to me that my wife could have been taken to the local fire department where a medic would have extracted the object without us having to do what we did.

Set her on fire?

From that subject, we moved to his subject—which was that he suffers from diabetes, has an esophagus problem by which he cannot eat anything but apple sauce diluted with water.

“I’m losing weight. I have gone down from 225 to 155.”

“So you’ve discovered the laxative and nasal spray diet too?”

Then there came out this detail from Jeremy: “My mother is strict when it comes to religion.”
I asked him what church she goes to.
He replied with the name of the sanctuary. “I know where that is. And I believe what your mother believes. You don’t know it, but you have been talking with a minister.”
He looked startled—but pleased.

Well, startled anyway.

Jesus was in charge. And how many times has this same sequence played out in my life over and over again: problems, difficulties, barriers, slumps and then—surprise—the hand of God in-my-face?

“Thank you, Jesus!  May I have another?”

“Thank you, Jesus, for overruling today. The nurse forgot the “port”? We had to go back to another hospital because it was merely a nuisance?

That’s life. It’s a damaged world.

Except in the winter, when it’s really more of a marshmallow world.

Yet Jesus has promised in the consecrated life to use everything “according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28. Recall?

Pray for Jeremy, will you? Pray for Jeremy. It was such a privilege to have met him. He certainly is one hunk who could use a lot of saving grace and a healing miracle besides.

I’d like to help, Pastor, but my Hunks Who Need Praying For list is pretty full already.  Maybe I can bump Wentworth Miller and squeeze Jeremy in after The Thunder From Down Under guys…

Thank you, Jesus. I know you know and are in charge.
Now as to the state of the present-tense world. . .

Oop!  Hold that thought, Jesus.  I’m late for my Smooth Move Tea and Dristan enema.