Slow down

Or burn out

When I started what was intended to be a weekly church, my idea was to offer it for a year, and then re-assess.

Well, a year and some weeks have passed and here I am trying to re-assess.

It's been quite a year. I don't recall much of worth reporting  that happened during 2022 before September when my Zoe had recently gone back east to her junior year in college.

After that, couple weeks on my own and then I fell out of bed in the middle of one night (I don't know exactly why, maybe food poisoning) and couldn't get up and had no strength in my arms so my wonderful son Cody helped me get to a hospital where I stayed a few days with pneumonia.

About that time, I got word that before long I would be a great grandfather. Very cool.

The next remarkable occurrence was a spell of Covid. And soon after that, my ear started hurting. I've long had ear problems because of plugged Eustachian tubes. So, knowing what I had done with ear pain before, I ordered prescription ear drops and then waited for them to arrive in the way they had before (by mail from Kaiser), but they didn't and almost two weeks passed during which I was too preoccupied and not vigilant enough to check, then my ear started hurting fiercely. So I landed in the hospital again, this time with a severe ear infection. Please note that in all my many previous years, I had never stayed overnight in a hospital except while keeping birthing mothers' company.

Anyway, not long after my ear quit hurting, I at last felt up to attempting a trip to Tucson to meet my great grandson.

Only I didn't reach Tucson. About 20 miles west of my destination, I was driving the I-10. Both the right and left shoulders were outrageously littered with tire debris. Maybe some debris was also in the fast lane, or maybe something else sent me careening into the median. All I remember is that suddenly I was crashing through sagebrush aiming to get back on the road, and then something (no idea what) socked me hard in the face. The tow truck driver told my heroic daughter Darcy, who lives in Tucson, that it looked as if something flew up and smashed my windshield and that blow knocked me out and then I smashed into a car abandoned in the median. What I recall after the blow to my face is getting treated by the Arizona Highway patrol as if I were the kingpin of a terrorist mob. Then came an ambulance and four days in ICU at Banner hospital in Tucson, which is a story in itself. For now, I'll just  note that it's a for-profit that bought out the University of Arizona hospital probably because the same legislators who refuse to clean trash and abandoned cars from the highways wouldn't adequately fund the University.

Anyway, so here I am still recovering and hoping to God the remainder of the year is more fun.

Maybe I'm getting old. Anyway, my friend Stan commented that for now, at least, I should go slower. And God or intuition tells me that's good advice. I had already realized that trying to keep up writing novels, publishing and attempting to promote books (some of my own and some of other writers), running Perelandra College, and producing a weekly (this here strange church), a monthly (for followers of my writing), and a quarterly (for friends of Perelandra College) . . . all that had long been keeping me busier than felt healthy, which makes my fit family consistently remind me that I need to get more exercise.

What I am driving at here is that I am going to try to slightly lessen my responsibilities by letting go of the Outsider Church schedule. I will continue to write and post here but refuse to kick myself if I miss some weeks. I hope to let go of schedules.

I haven't been attending to the paid subscribers, and I got an idea that will help me do better at that. For the past few months, I have been reading the collected works of Feodor Dostoyevski, who is my favorite author ever and also perhaps my favorite theologian. So I will start letting Mr. Dostoyevski take over for me by posting wisdom of his to paid subscribers only, and maybe

clarifying what a passage means to me.

Please do yourself a favor and become a paid subscriber and get more familiar with the author many besides me consider the best, at least of the modern era, without needing to read the whole collected works.

By the way, the collected works in ebook cost me either a dollar or two dollars, I forget.

Enough for now.