"The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife." - Will Durant

Sudoku for Bible nerds

The truck is a few gallons of gas short of being ready for initial fire-up. I still have to wire in the wipers, lighter, and heater, but those connections won't take me long at all. The battery is installed, oil and coolant in, and all engine related wiring done. Tomorrow I'll fill the gas can and dump it in the tank and that should have it ready to go. Or at least run.

Aron is coming over Sunday afternoon for the big event. He's a professional mechanic and will help me figure out anything that's wrong. It will also be helpful to have one person in the cab pressing on the foot starter button and one out front making sure everything in the engine compartment is as it should be. And that's not a given!

This morning I was pouring in the coolant and heard the sound of liquid hitting the garage floor. After racing to get a basin underneath the leak I discovered the shop that did the work on the block and head failed to put a plug in one of the holes on the side of the block and coolant was coming out of that hole at a steady clip. We don't need to discuss how many trips it took me to find the right size plug, but it's all sealed up now and holding seven gallons of coolant and water.

That has me wondering what surprises await when I turn the key and step on that big button on floor.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published On Death and Dying in 1969 and the book immediately became the seminal work on the stages of grief. Several books followed over the next couple of decades expanding, elaborating, and in some cases criticizing her work. Forty-five years later psychiatrists still discuss the validity of analyzing the grief process in terms of stages. Kubler-Ross said there are five, others have expanded it to seven, and some insist not everyone goes through any stages.

But everyone agrees that the grief process, with identifiable stages or not, applies to more than just those dealing with a physical death. Late in her life Kubler-Ross said the paradigm should be applied to children dealing with the divorce of their parents, someone losing their job, or a lover sent packing.

Or a pastor watching his church come to an end.

It's been a pretty sucky couple of weeks.
All the good and correct theology secures the base, but God made us emotional beings. Mr. Spock may have been a clever character for the scripts of Star Trek, but he was pure fiction. In the real world we both know and feel, and sometimes the disparity between those two dimensions is a chasm.

Nothing to do but soldier on and wait for the dissonance to resolve.