One of the funniest memories I have as a child was listening to a performance of Bill Cosby's, "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With". My aunt happened to be visiting at the time with her husband, and with him she had raised my cousins, her two boys. She was pretty "straight-laced", and had always struck me as being fairly stoic. I loved her to pieces. Her brother (my uncle) and his family were present too. He was the family joker. Great sense of humor. Loved him to pieces too. I was ten or so and I thought it might be fun so I asked them all if they would like to listen to it. I got precisely the opposite reaction from those present than I (or anyone else for that matter) expected.

As the reenactment of things between the Cosby brothers progressed, I thought my aunt was going to die. I had never seen her laugh so hard. She was sitting on her chair.....sort of. In parts of the story, she was only lightly touching down on it as she rolled from one side to the other. She actually waved people in the room off and slapped her knee at points. She was absolutely delighted. My uncle on the other hand, was nonplussed. No. That's not accurate. He was annoyed. He seemed genuinely miffed. The idea of being entertained by misbehaving children for him was an idea that was apparently completely foreign to him. He sat through the entire thing---stone-faced. It made quite an impression on me. Never did figure it out. People react to things often times in unexpected ways.

This week I surprised myself. I made a huge pickup at work and it took real time and laborious physical effort. My job is physical, but this was over the top. Somewhere in the process, I must have injured my right knee. I either injured it or over-taxed it. I don't know which. I began to limp and it got worse and worse. The pain in my knee was horrible. I had to sit down at work and rest it between customers, which did absolutely no good whatsoever. I'm very used to doing physically, anything I want to. I have a lot of energy, and can put forth a real high burst of it for short periods of time, or I can pace myself and usually outlast most that I work with. That isn't a boast, it's just the way I have trained myself to survive in the work place. It is for that reason, that when something like this happens, I can be pretty "Woe is me." I don't like having my energies or abilities curtailed in any way. Due to the concentration of pain in an area of my body that so diminished my ability to function, I was surprised at my own reaction.

I don't know what the deal is there. I would like to call it growth in my walk. Heh. lol Maybe it is. Maybe I happened to have gotten up on the right side of the spiritual bed that morning a week ago. I don't know, but what I do know is that my reaction was positive. I began praying to God to get me through it, and reminding myself that I should think to thank Him for things like this, just as I thank Him (hopefully) for the things He provides which I so enjoy. His grace and His mercy in something like this are always....and I do mean always present, even if we can't see how He is using it to the good, but use it He does. Perhaps I just needed slowing down a bit for my own good. We normally have three or four employees and I have been working by myself for a while. She needed some time off in the middle of this and mentioned out of concern, "I don't want to kill you by working you this way, but I don't want to kill myself either." She talked about closing the business for a couple of weeks because of my knee. I told her that I didn't believe that would happen.

All is well now, a week later. lol We've hired two new guys. I went to the doctor and walked out armed with a prescription for anti-inflammatory drugs and a newly fitted knee-brace along with instructions for icing techniques and a system of exercise to repair an injured calf-muscle. Life can have some really unexpected ups and downs, but there is one thing we can be sure of, and that is that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow---and He loves us to pieces.