Wednesday looked a lot like Tuesday—little bubbles of sermon popping up every now and again, but nothing substantial (except the eureka moment in Tuesday’s comments). I really needed Wednesday to look more like Wednesday should—over the hump, right? Thursday better be more than bubbles, or Friday will turn out not to be Day Off so much as Frantically Juggling Sermon and Kid Day.

There’s one thing I did this week that I wouldn’t have considered sermon prep except for the fact that I’ve been writing these blog entries, so I have Process on the brain. I wrote several pastoral care notes yesterday and today. This particular batch included cancer diagnoses, deaths in the family, and other medical issues. Some addresses were tragically familiar—grief touches certain houses again and again. I don’t get that. I can wrap my head around the inevitability of suffering, sort of, but I don’t know why it’s not at least evenly distributed.

Anyway, the point is, someone told me that you should never preach something without imagining a person with terminal cancer sitting in the pews, listening to your words. So, the cards.

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By the way, my feeble and slapdash greeting-card writing and sending skills are legendary around these parts. Apparently my husband has been infected by my incompetence. I bought a stack of Mother’s Day cards for our moms and stepmoms (between us we have two fabulous sets of each). All he has to do is sign. Well, somehow the envelope flap for his mom’s card got adhered to the card itself. I taught him the “spying on a loved one by surreptitiously steaming off the envelope glue” trick. It worked, but he put the envelope down on the counter and got a big grease stain on it. Apparently we are destined to send cards that are not only tardy, but untidy. Such is life.