By Kieran Lin Rich – KRich13@bellsouth.net

Jeff and I spent last weekend shopping for my perfect pants — or in this case, the perfect shorts.  Most husbands aren’t very enthusiastic about shopping with their wives; but, we have already established that Jeff is an exceptional husband.  And besides, the ellusive shorts were a sporting goods acquisition which put them firmly into the kind of shopping Jeff likes to do.

We were hunting for a good pair of sliding shorts.  Let me set the record straight before we go any further.  I have no intention of sliding.  Sorry Coach but the word “sliding” does not co-exist with the term “recreational softball team”.   While admittedly, I am competitive to a fault at times, sacrificing my body to “take one for the team” is something that went out with my A.A.R.P. membership.

We were looking for sliding shorts to give some extra support to a leg that also apparently went out with my A.A.R.P. membership.  Thankfully, we hit the sliding short jackpot at a fairly local sporting goods store.  As I happily headed for the fitting room loaded with options, Jeff trolled the aisles while visions of basketballs danced in his head. 

The first pair of shorts that I tried on were cute little pink and white things.   Very cute.  Very feminine.  Very little.  I squeezed into them, or tried to, as visions of the Michelin man danced in my head.  After many gyrations and no fewer than 5 basic ballet moves, I got the dumb shorts on.  Looking in the mirror, I laughed out loud.  The Michelin man thing was more than just a vision!

It was only after I peeled the shorts back off that I noticed the tag.  “YOUTH” it said in big, bold letters.  Oops.

Once I moved out of the Juniors department and started trying on adult shorts, things went swimmingly.  I found several pairs of shorts that would work and went out relay the happy news to Jeff.  He met my happy news with more options in the form of compression shorts.  These shorts would do the job I wanted them to do without the extra padding of sliding shorts.   Not only would I get the extra thigh support I needed from the compression; but, the sliding pads would be absent so nobody would make the wild assumption that I was actually planning to slide.  Obviously a win/win situation. 

Because I do have a learning curve, I looked at the tag on the shorts to make sure they were a reasonable adult size before I headed to the fitting room with them.  That was when I saw that my potential shorts had some pretty amazing features. 

Not only were the anti-bacterial, they also promised to stay stretchy, protect me from the sun, and keep me dry.  It was one last feature that kind of tripped me up though.  My potential shorts came with “noise-reduction”.  I had to read the tag several times to make sure that’s what it really said and then, I almost put the dumb shorts back on the rack.

I didn’t want shorts with noise reduction!  I just wanted regular shorts that I could blame when things went awry.  “I’m sorry, Coach.  I tried to get that ball but my shorts…they were just too darn loud!”  “Sorry Coach, just when I went to make the catch, my shorts taunted me and I dropped it.”  “Sorry Coach, I intended to slide but my prophetic shorts told me not to.”

In the end, I did buy the exceptionally quiet shorts.  Because my “loud shorts” excuse is now gone, I expect big things of myself at the game this week.

Trying to imagine the look on my coach’s face if I blamed my poor performance on my shorts has provided hours of good, clean fun.  However, I can’t imagine that he, or any of my teammates, would be too thrilled with me if I tried to use the “loud shorts” excuse.  And I REALLY do not want to imagine the long ride home as Jeff is also one of my teammates and has no patience for excuses or loud shorts.

My new shorts got me thinking about God and the excuses I’ve given Him over the years for not doing what I’ve been asked to do.  Too busy.  Bad timing.  Not equipt.  Scared to death.  In my mind, my excuses seem very plausible — even reasonable.  In God’s eyes, I’m sure my excuses seem totally ridiculous.  Kind of like blaming a poor athletic performance on loud shorts.

And so, armed with exceptionally quiet shorts, I’m headed into my week with a new motto and a new attitude.

No excuses.

No compromise.

Just do it.

I’m really praying that God doesn’t want me to slide.

By Kiera Rich – KRich13@bellsouth.net

We visited a new church this morning.  I wore long sleeves and tried not to shake hands with anyone.  The reason for this somewhat peculiar behavior is due to something that happened after church last week.

We were back in Atlanta for a visit.  I realize that normal people, after moving from a location, usually wait longer than three weeks to return for a visit.  However, as you probably already know, we are not normal.  So let’s move on…

We drove down Saturday morning and checked into the hotel where we had previously spent our wedding night.  Saturday evening, we went to dinner and a musical with some dear friends.  The musical starred a few more dear friends.  The director and sound guy were also…you guessed it…dear friends.

Sunday morning, we attended our old church and worshiped with still more dear friends.  And then Sunday afternoon, we went to the emergency room.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a “dear friends moment” that brought us to the ER.  Instead it was more of a “Dear God please make the pain go away” moment.  I had been nursing what I thought was a toothache since Friday and it had progressively gotten worse.  The pain had gone from a dull ache to bright, exploding moments of agonizing pain.  Not only did the pain get worse but it began to dance around — affecting the entire right side of my mouth, my right ear, my nose, my sinuses, and finally my fingers.  This concerned Jeff and me quite a bit.

So we spent the afternoon in the ER.  I made Jeff drive completely out of the way so I could return to the hospital where I had my sinus surgery last spring.  I liked that hospital.  They were nice.  They were competent.  They had treated me so well.  But most importantly, they could find my veins.

Someone once described my veins as “Roly-poly gummy worms.”  The veins are small, squishy, and tend to roll around a lot so I guess the description fits.  However you choose to describe them, medical people do not like my veins.  I should qualify that.  MOST medical people do not have strong feelings about my veins one way or another.  However, medical people that have been charged with the task of drawing blood from my veins do not like them in the least.

My ER nurse was no exception.  She muttered and sputtered and poked and cursed before finally, and literally, throwing up her hands in frustration.  For all her efforts, she failed to produce even a drop of blood.  The next contestant, another ER nurse, only poked once but got the same, unsatisfactory result.

With each poke, a new bruise began to form.  These bruises were the cause for long sleeves and no human contact this morning.  My wrists, my forearms, my elbows, and my right thumb are in various stages of pokey-needle induced discoloration.  It is truly ugly.  I look like I have been hanging out in dark alleys shooting heroin instead of sitting in an ER praying for someone to come into my life who could actually find a vein.

The ER finally called the lab and as we were waiting for the head vampire to give it a shot, I began to wonder how important those few vials of blood really were.  I know that diagnosing disorders and diseases has often been described as fitting together pieces of a puzzle.  I also know the results from blood work provide a valuable piece of that puzzle.  However, they were putting me through a myriad of other tests and exams and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was another way to get the answers that they wanted…a way that didn’t involve endless poking on yours truly — Miss Pincushion 2008.

I am thrilled to report that the head vampire finally did strike blood.  Jeff and I rejoiced.  The results were good.  We had a course of treatment and yet, through all of this the ER nurse just looked mad.  She honestly seemed to be offended that my veins had dared to give her a problem.

Thanks to my bruises, I have thought a lot about that frustrated nurse this week.  She’s probably seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people come through the ER and probably drawn blood from most of those people.  In her mind, I’m sure the pattern goes something like this:  Person A enters the ER.  After a sufficient fermentation period in the waiting room (Anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 years.), Person A is given a gown that doesn’t fit and told to get comfortable in a bed that feels suspiciously like plywood covered in a sheet.  After a second fermentation period (Anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 years.), Person A has their blood drawn by Nurse.”  To her way of thinking I’m sure that’s the way the story goes.  It ALWAYS happens that way.  It WILL always happen that way.  No thinking or questioning required.  Patients in the ER get their blood drawn.  End of story. 

How many times in my life have I been like that?  How many times have I decided the outcome of a situation based purely on “how it’s always been”?  I’ve always told people that one of the best gifts God gave me was my ability to be creative.  However, God has probably been extremely disappointed in me as a steward at times because in addition to being creative, I’m also really stubborn.

I have been known to bang my head against the same wall repeatedly.  Sure, with age and experience I have learned to take a step back.  But with me the step back usually only serves the purpose of allowing me to get a good, running start before crashing into the wall again.

It usually doesn’t occur to me to look for another solution to a problem because I know the solution.  Or I think I do.  So I sit spinning my wheels, wasting time in the mudpits of hell, instead of using God’s gift to me and trying to think of a creative solution. 

Jeff and I have just spent our Sunday afternoon doing something that we both love to do.  We watched football.  We watched a team use the same players to run the same play, thus getting the same pathetic results — down after down after down.  And we laughed at them and mocked them with the sarcastic wit that seems to run rampant in our family.  “Oh look!  They’re running it up the middle!  I wonder if it will work this time!”

In case you were wondering, it didn’t work that time.  Not on that play or the dozens of times before or after.  That offensive play against that defensive team simply did not work.  They could have run the play all night and it wouldn’t work.  And yet, they still ran it and I laughed.

Made me wonder how often satan sits on his sofa and laughs at me for repeating the same ineffective manuvers in my own life and for beating my head against the same wall — especially when God has provided me with all the tools that I need to make a better choice and find a better solution and not be stuck in the trap of “That’s the way the story goes.”

Yep, I really wonder…

By Kiera Rich – KRich13@bellsouth.net

We had an interesting thing happen on Friday morning.  Shortly after we returned from a morning workout that neither of us were interested in, the phone rang.  I glanced at the Caller ID and was more than a little confused by what I read as it was our name and number.  Had the cats finally figured out a high-tech way to alert us to the fact that they were out of food?

Jeff was in the other room and out of sheer curiosity, he did answer the phone.  It wasn’t any of our critters.  It was Dish Network calling with a “special” offer.  It would have had to be extremely special as in our heavily wooded apartment complex, we don’t get a satellite signal. 

I seethed about this event well into Friday afternoon.  How dare they?  We did what we were supposed to.  We jumped all over the “Do Not Call” list and registered ALL of our numbers — including home, fax and cellphones.  We re-registered our numbers before they expired.  Thankfully, the FTC adopted a new policy in February 2008.  Numbers no longer expire and drop off the “Do Not Call” list.  For more information on the “Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007″ click here or visit the National Do No Call Registry page here.

And yet, we still got a call from a telemarketer.  It definitely violates the spirit of the “Do Not Call” list but I had to ask myself, is it violating the Registry rules if we call ourselves?  Have the clever, enthusiastic people who want to clean our carpet, sell us satellite service, and install vinyl siding simply figured out a way to beat the system?

When I was in elementary school, we lived very close to a murky, smelly pond.  As an adult, the memory of the pond makes me reach for Lysol; but, as a kid?  I thought it was the coolest thing ever.  In the winter, we ice skated.  In the summer we caught frogs and some kind of tiny crab.  And we fished.  Or we tried to. 

The fish in the pond were a special breed.  I believe their official Latin name was “Makeus Kidz Crazius”.  Those fish were incredibly smart.  Probably from a lifetime of summers spent with kids trying to yank them out of the pond.  They seemed to always sit just below the surface and double-dog dare us to catch them. 

We tried everything from nets to fishing poles to big, pokey sticks.  We even tried to knock them out one time with a baseball in a tube sock — figuring that once they were lying unconscious in the shallow, pungent water, that they would be easy to catch.  But those wiley fish scooted away concussion-free while still managing to get me in trouble for ruining my good basketball tube socks.  Infuriating, clever, little fish.

This went on for several summers.  Each year, I got older and my fish-catching schemes became more elaborate and refined.  I was really quite tired of being laughed at by a bunch of fish who proved year after year that their raw intelligence eclipsed mine by a long shot.  Thanks to the Girl Scouts, I could pick a Mocking bird out of a line up.  I’d really never heard of them before; but, I was quite sure that if I searched hard enough, I would find written evidence of Mocking fish.  Their natural habitat?  My neighborhood pond, of course!

And then came the summer of the bologna sandwich.  I was between 5th and 6th grade and my parents had just gotten divorced.  I was facing a long summer at home alone because I refused to go to the YMCA’s day-camp.  (Little did I know that in a few short years, I would be working at that very same day-camp.)   And I ate a lot of bologna sandwiches because with my pre-teen wisdom, I had decided that peanut butter was for babies.

Our house was already up for sale and I knew that this would be my final pond summer.  With dogged determination and an air of finality, I made the decision to catch one of those stupid fish once and for all.  And the plan was hatched.  Nearly every day, I packed a lunch and headed for the pond.  Armed with a fishing pole, my dad’s tackle box, a library book on fishing, and a little hammer (Whack-a-fish, anyone?) I was ready for action.  And every day, I came home hot, smelly, and fishless.

I honestly thought if I was patient enough and smart enough, I would eventually catch the fish.  The only problem was that the fish were unfazed by patient and smart.  They had seen it all before.

I had tried every kind of bait I could think of and several ideas I had garnered from my library book.  Nothing worked.  I had mentally moved on to the plan that included trapping the fish by damming off a portion of the pond.  Then I figured I could drain that area a bucket of water at a time and catch my stupid fish.  Thankfully, the plan was never launched because I was finally sick of bologna.

One afternoon, I sat on the edge of the pond throwing bits of my sandwich to the ducks who were the daily spectators to my fish quest.  I figured I owed them something for not laughing at me.  And then it happened.  I tossed a piece of sandwich and a bad throw landed it in the pond rather than on the grass.  Two dozen fish instantly clamored to the surface, vying for a tiny morsel of Wonder bread and dried out bologna.

Faster than I could sing the “Oscar Mayer” song, I had a bologna-baited hook and my line in the water.  Not two minutes later, I had a startled, gasping, fish laying on the grass next to me.  I’d done it!  I finally outsmarted the fish that had mocked me for most of my childhood.

I was reminded of my successful fishing experience on Friday when the telemarketer called.  We have learned what telemarketer numbers look like on Caller ID and we ignore them.  We have learned what area codes they call from and we ignore those too; but, like any good fisherman, they have learned to switch the bait.  A call from our own home number?  Sure, we’ll bite!  How could we resist?

And isn’t that just like satan too?  (No, that’s not a typo.  “satan” should not be capitalized.)  Just when we figure out how to deflect an attack, he switches the bait to something we don’t recognize.  Something much more enticeing than stale bologna and Wonder bread.  Something we just can’t resist. 

By Kiera Rich – KRich13@bellsouth.net

I had sinus surgery last month.  At my pre-op appointment, the surgeon gave me a video tour of my sinuses.  It was grotesque and yet, strangely fascinating at the same time.  It was like watching a procedure on Discovery Health but having it be virtual reality as I could feel the scope in my nose and see the scenery on the big screen.  It was a very bizarre experience by anyone’s standards; but, it might make an outstanding thrill ride at some progressive thinking amusement park!

A few days later as I was enjoying my breakfast (A puffy, clear bag of IV fluid.) in the pre-op area, I thought about my surgery which was just a few minutes away.  Although I’d gone under anesthetic numerous times before — including an 11.5 hour operation when I was a teenager — I was still apprehensive.  The stakes seemed higher somehow, this being my first surgery as a married woman, and I felt pressure to “perform”.  I had a lot to come back to.

I was also picturing the scope tour I had of my nose, remembering how my surgeon excitedly pointed out landmarks to me as we went.  He definitely knew his way around the inside of my nose.  And yet, I was still frightened.  That element of giving up control and trusting other people to take care of me has always  been a difficult one for me. 

As you probably figured out by now, the surgery was a success.  45 minutes of surgery provided relief that nothing else could.  The headache I’d had for 5 months was gone, taking several other pesky symptoms with it.  I was thankful for the skill of my surgeon and the hospital staff who knew my body and how it functions so much better than I do.  I was very happy with my decision to go ahead with the surgery — even though I was scared.

And now, on the other side, I keep wondering how my nose looks.  I wonder if the landmarks are the same and if I needed to, could I find my way around.  I also keep thinking about signing the pre-op paper work.  You know, those cheerful documents that list every possible outcome and every little thing that could go wrong and end up with ” or death”?  My heart was definitely pounding when I signed those papers, but I did it without really thinking twice because I was so desperate for relief.

I think it’s pretty interesting that I was so willing to give myself over to a guy that I’ve only met twice and trust that he’ll do what he is supposed to and that he won’t kill me.  And yet, as God has been reminding me, there are areas of my life that I can’t seem to trust Him with.  Why is it easier to trust the flesh of man than the One who created me?  I truly wish I had the answer.

What if God took me on a little tour of my insides?  I’m sure I could feel the God-scope moving through me as He pointed out the landmarks and things that weren’t supposed to be there.

“See Kiera?” He would say, “This is where that big tumor of envy used to be.  You let me remove it, remember?   See how well it’s healing?  And this, this is where all those deceitful-thought polyps hung out.  It looks so much better after your deceitectomy!”  We would go a little further before God would stop this scope abruptly.  “Eeew!  What’s this?  Anger.  Hmmmm…it’s been here a long, long time.  I need to remove it.  I can start the surgery immediately.  Are you ready?”

And then I hear myself say, “No, God.  I like my anger just where it is, thank you very much.”

“But I can fix it!” He would say.  “I can take it away.  It won’t bother you anymore!”

“It’s ok.  Really.  Let’s just leave it.”

“It will continue to grow.  You know that, right?”

“Oh yes, I know.  As you said, God, it’s been growing there for a long time.  I know it’s there.  I know it’s getting bigger and darker with each passing day.  But I like my sin.  It’s comforting and fits me like an old bathrobe.  Thanks for the offer to remove it.  Really nice of You; but, like I said, my sin is just fine where it is.  Thanks anyway.”

I can just imagine the look on God’s face as He withdraws His scope and packs it away.  He says no more but I can tell I have hurt Him deeply.  He wants to help.  He wants to save me from further pain.  But I won’t let Him.  I just won’t sign the consent form and give myself over to Him.

How stupid is that????

You know, I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately.  There are definitely areas that I don’t seem to be able to let God into.  They are mostly areas that began as deep hurt but that have festered into anger and hatred over the years.   I know that I need to allow God to lance those boils and let the infection out so He can begin treating it.  I know I’ll feel so much better on the other side.  Old problems will fade away and I will emerge stronger and healthier than ever before.

If I could just fight through the fear, give up control, trust, sign the consent form and allow God to change me on the inside…