Reason number eleven to get your ass to church

A followup of sorts.

As emails about my twitter feed keep coming in and I keep responding, an increasing number of you know that my husband was in a bike accident on Sunday night and has been in the hospital ever since.

He was wearing a helmet, thank goodness, because the significant injuries are to his face and head. He's alive, mentally OK and unparalyzed, but not entirely undamaged.
We're talking to plastic surgeons and researching exactly what a small subdural hemmorhage means. (What a big subdural hemmhorage means is well-known and extremely scary, and that subdural hemmhorages can be so tiny as to be insignificant is also true. We're in the middle, leaning toward the tiny but not completely there.)

We know he's off his bike for the season. What else it means is something we're still working on. The hours between midnight and noon today will represent the first twelve-hour period that I haven't spent hours by his side, but a girl has to bill a few hours occaisionally.

Suffice to say, our lives have been significantly upended.

And just about everyone who has heard has reached out. I have friends in a lot of different areas of my life that group easily by where I met them. I have work friends, law school friends, college friends and ex-coworker friends. I have blog friends, too, of course, but their scattered nature has meant that offers of prayers and someone to talk to have been about all they can do. Which is totally fine and to be expected, it's not like I could fly to Utah or Massachusetts or Georgia to make them cupcakes either and besides, theCSO has really enjoyed it when I've read him emails from people.

But my church friends have been like no other group in their speed, commitment and teamwork. I don't know what it is about church friends, maybe it's just that we're used to finding out that something needs to be done and working together to do it, but invitations to dinner, visits and roasted chickens have been marching my way with an organized precision that I would not necessarily have thought our somewhat disorganized faith was capable of.

I got the call from a minister, of course, and as theCSO doesn't know either of the ministers at my church well, we begged off on the visit. I'm sure the pastoral care committee assigned to do this stuff would be happy to join in with the chicken-cooking and the cheerleading. But has really amazed and impressed me as how smoothly and quickly my regular church friends have jumped up to help, the people I gossip with on Sundays and maybe eat dinner with a few times a year. My impression is that many facebook messages have been exchanged about what I might need and who might do what. We really haven't even needed the official resources of the church because the regular congregants have been so awesome.

One could assume that a whole bunch of people who happen to be especially useful in a crisis all happen to go to church with me and happen to be the people at church I've gotten to know well, but I think that's a few too many assumptions. And I don't discount the importance of committee work when it comes to building relationships where people work together to get things done. But then, other groups of my friends have worked together to achieve goals, too.

I think a big part of it is that my friends who have done the really superior job stepping up and working together are the ones who come together with me every week to focus on that which is greater than themselves, and that the spiritual aspect of our coming together makes it a natural thing for them to anticipate my needs and meet them while I'm still focused on theCSO.

At the same time, I probably am a project in some sense, but I don't feel like one. My family was an occiasional project for the Presby church I went to when I was a kid, and thinking of those times always brings to mind snarky C.S. Lewis quotes like ""She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."

That could have been a personality-of-the-congregation thing, but I have my doubts.

So anyway, I need to get back to work as I head back toward theCSO at 1:00. I'm always happy to be a UU and I'm always happy to be a member of my church. But I'm feeling both of those doubly today.

And I'm doubly committed to being there for the next friend who has a crisis.

CC

Clarification:

The night of the accident, I updated my twitter feed repeatedly with tweets expressing my fear and frustration. Twitter, as it always does, put those tweets in the box at the top right of my blog. The morning after, I pulled most of the scared-sounding tweets down as they felt like I was oversharing, though I kept them up on Facebook where people I've friended could see them.

In the twelve hours or so that they were up, lots of Chalicesseurs saw those tweets and emailed me, which was very welcome. Due to the fact that they were up from late Sunday night to sometime Monday morning, lots of Chalicesseurs also didn't see those tweets, which is also fine. I know they would have reached out had they seen them.

It might well have been that I wanted to be able to look at my blog without seeing them myself.