The good news is I don't have mono. The bad news is that I do have strep. The BYM has been admirably attentive, but that's small comfort when I've had to keep him at a distance the past three days (at first thinking it was the flu).

I've been brooding over the topic of healthcare reform. There are a lot of troubling generalizations out there and I'm not sold on either Clinton or Obama's plans (although Obama's is more palatable to me -- Clinton's vision of enforcing individual mandates makes me cringe). I need to get a better handle on the economics involved. I'd like to learn more about alternative efforts to supply adequate care to the impoverished, the disenfranchised, and the "working poor." I've been musing over how churches have to contend with issues of targeted vs. unrestricted gifts (i.e., people wanting their money spent on glamorous tangibles rather than fixing the wiring). I've been pondering how many of us (myself included) carelessly underwrite celebrity culture each time we splurge on a gossip magazine, and if we -- I -- should make a point of directing that $5 elsewhere if we resent the special treatment they attract. (And yet, do they not deserve their share of that $5 if we find them interesting? Choices, choices...) I keep circling back to the larger, perennial dilemma of balancing individual freedom of choice against the needs/desires of society as a whole, and how thousands of intelligent, well-meaning people disagree on that and which trade-offs they consider acceptable.

All of which I haven't been able to pull together into a satisfactory post, but some of the several thousand words I've written so far will likely end up in a sermon later this spring, even though it'll be one of those sermons, where I end up scrubbing the stove and the floors because the Demon of Wanting to be Liked is yet again wrestling with the Seraphim of Searing Frustration (and the Principality of Persuasive Rhetoric lurking nearby with a watering can). There was a passage by Kathleen Norris I found myself revisiting last week:

...when we write about what matters to us most, words will take us places we don't want to go. You begin to see that you will have to say things you don't want to say, that may even be dangerous to say, but are absolutely necessary. A congregation can usually tell when a pastor is preaching from the center, or just sliding by with something easy. A good pastor will employ both methods; and preachers often find that with the sermons they feel bad about, as if they've failed, a parishioner will come up after church to marvel over how much personal meaning that sermon had for them. Such moments remind a preacher of how little control any of us has over our own words, let alone the Word of God.

- "Church," in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Today's subject line is from a version of the serenity prayer commonly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. The history of its many variants is interesting; here's a version I wrote several years ago.