Please pray for the o'connors

We met the O'connors right before Amy and I became engaged all the way back in November of 1998. They were a recently married couple who had begun attending our church. Within a short time of our meeting We and the O'connors became the volunteer youth group leaders of our church. For the next 3 years we maintained a close friendship with them as we ran the youth group together and Mike and I were on the deacon board together. Right before Amy Emma, and I went to Turkey in 2000 we asked the O'connors if they would consider agreeing to raise Emma, in the event anything ever happened to us. They readily agreed.

Shortly before Charlie was born in 2001, we moved away from the area where the Oconnors and our church were located. We were all still in the Chicago area but we were now relegated to seeing them on a much less frequent basis. A few years after Charlie was born, the Oconnors gave birth to their son Max. A few years after that we had Lucy.

In 2006, I lost my job of almost 10 years. I quickly got a temporary to permanent job but without insurance benefits. In December of 2006 the O'connors called and said they were coming over to deliver some groceries that our old church had donated to us as part of their benevolence ministry. When they came over they not only had the groceries, enough for our family to live off for well over a month, but they also had 100's of dollars of Christmas presents they had bought out of their own pocket for each of the kids. I mean each kid must have had 5-6 gifts and they gave us a pretty significant gift card for us as well.

We still don't see them very often. We ran into them at Great America in the Summer of 2008 and just caught up with them this past fall at a wedding of two of our former youth group members. We were excited to see on face book recently they were expecting another child.

This is where the prayer request comes in. Cassandra just informed us on a note in face book that she miscarried their son at 15 weeks. God has used this couple in such a mighty way in our lives over the years. We want to do anything we can to minister to them in their great sorrow. Please pray for Mike, Cassandra and Max.

The Day After

Yesterday was the Super Bowl and in what is becoming increasingly usual for us we stayed at home unable to watch the game. We are not one of those families that does not have a television. We have a television, we just can't watch t.v on it. For several reasons we have decided to not have cable in our home. When we moved to our current home we discovered that our ability to get network television was greatly inhibited. Our reception usually contained more snow than the Atlantic coast states received over the weekend. As a result, 3 or 4 years ago we moved the television away from the antenna, and use the t.v only to watch dvd's and videos. We do watch episodic television through hulu and other online sights. I have watched every episode of Chuck without using a television to do so. The problem we have is with television events like award shows and sports programming. I have become perfectly fine listening to sports on the radio. If I really want to watch a good game, I put on a dvd from the 2005 world series. But spectacular events like the Super Bowl are ones that we now forgo. We sometimes go visit family on such an occasion but nothing worked out this year.

I listened to parts of the game on the radio. Amy and I watched some of the commercials on the Internet and we played some games and read a little. It was a nice relaxing way to spend any Sunday evening, even a Super Bowl one.

Next Time: Works for me Wednesday

They Ain't the Aints no more!

The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl LXIV by a score of XXXI to XVII. I mean if you are going to talk in roman numerals, talk in roman numerals!

This Saints won in their first ever Super Bowl appearance beating the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts seemed to be favored by almost every prognosticator out there. However, if you look at my post from yesterday, I picked the Saints after a lot of hemming and hawing. What can I say?

A Colts victory would have evened the annual AFC NFC grudge match to 22 games a piece. The saints pulled the NFC to a 23-21 mark with the win.

A brief history of the Super Bowl shows that the AFC won 8 of the first 11meetings, the NFC won 7 of the next 11 and 9 of the 11 after that. In the past 11 games the resurgent AFC have won 7, losing only four.

New Orleans Quarterback Drew Brees, a former standout at Purdue, was the bane of the Hoosier state tonight, completing 32 of his 39 passes for 288 passing yards and 2 touchdown passes.

Are You ready for some football?

I have been meaning to come back here and give my Super Bowl pics.

The game is tomorrow, so I better get to it.

I have not been following the past two NFL seasons as much as I have done in the past. There are probably several reasons for this, but the main one is that I no longer work outside the home.

When I worked outside the home, I would listen to sports radio on my way to and from work. Even though I did not watch the game s over the weekend (We only use our t.v. to watch videos and d.v.d's I would get a pretty good idea of how teams were doing by listening on the radio. Now, I can certainly tune in the radio and listen at home, but I don't. This means I am no longer as knowledgeable about the NFL as I once was.

This doesn't mean that I don't have anything to say as to who I think will win.

Since my favorite team is in the NFC, I generally lean towards the NFC. However, there are some AFC teams I like (Steelers, Colts) and other NFC teams I dislike (Cowboys, Falcons, Vikings). I also tend to pick against teams that have won it all recently in favor of teams who have not.

So, I have been not sure whether to pick the Colts, whom I like, and who are on paper the superior team or embrace the Saints as the feel good story of the year. I also can't help over thinking the choice as a vote for the Saints is a way to express my dissatisfaction that the Colts last Super Bowl victory was at the expense of my beloved Bears.

I am going with the Saints. Much of the reason why I liked the Colts was because of former coach Tony Dungy who I have been a big fan of since his time with the Buccaneers. I also have a hard time rooting for the team that stuck it to the Bears.

While my heart says Saints, my head would not be surprised at all at a Colts victory.

Sickness Disease

Last Wednesday night Amy as she was driving home from a Naperville hospital after visiting her Mom who was in for pneumonia felt arm and chest pains and drove herself to our local emergency room. I rushed over there and they admitted her early Thursday Morning. They ran every test you could think of EKG, Ultrasound of the heart, X-Rays, blood work, and some of these multiple times. They were able to rule out heart attack, mini strokes, basically everything. Yet for most of her visit, her arm still felt like something or someone was clamping on it. Eventually that feeling subsided and they released her with a clean bill of health. Our family doctor will check on her in a few weeks to make sure everything is okay.

This is the second time in less than 2 years that she has gone to the doctor with legitimate symptoms and they have not been able to find anything wrong with her. It is incredibly strange.
These visits both remind me of what happened with Amy when Lucy was just a few days old. We had been out of the Hospital for less than 48 hours and Amy could not find any comfortable position to lay down in and was having trouble sleeping. We called my Dad in the middle of the night and he came over to watch the older kids. I remember it was snowing pretty hard as I drove Amy and Lucy to the hospital at about 2 in the morning. We didn't know whether to keep Lucy with us or keep her at home because she was less than a week old. Once we got to the Hospital they sent me back home with Lucy while they began tests on Amy.

I got back there about an hour later. After a long battery of tests they determined that Amy's heart and kidneys were both working at about a 25% level. They admitted her to the Heart Hospital. I drove home at about 8 a.m. I was devastated, I had had no sleep the night before and I just prayed a ll the way home. 4 years prior I had donated a kidney to a family friend. I was tempted to despair as now I would be unable to donate one to Amy. I wondered how I would possibly be able to raise 3 kids on my own if anything were to happen to Amy. But mostly I was struck with how much I love Amy and how much of who I am is tied into her. I did not understand how I would make it without her in my life.

When I got home I took care of the kids and started calling people for prayer. This was on a Sunday morning. By Thursday Amy was released and both her heart and kidney were at basically 100%. We never got an adequate response as to why the levels had gone down and then gone back up.

What was really strange was that less than a year later my brother was hospitalized with about the same kidney and heart levels as Amy had experienced. Amy and I both expected that his levels would go back up to normal as hers did. Keith's diagnosis was not the aberration that Amy's had been. He died less than 3 years after the condition was found.

I have had other friends and family members pass away from cancer and other illnesses in the past few years. My experience on that ride home in December of 2005 has built an empathy for the relatives, especially spouses of sick, dying and deceased people. Even though my experience with Amy turned out to be only a false alarm, it gave me a glimpse of what others go through.

I am not sure why I am sharing all this. I have been thinking about that time and thought the need to get it out there.

Next Time: WFMW