I’m so embarrassed about this that the only thing I can do is blog about it. I don’t mind being self-deprecating. I don’t even mind being culturally illiterate. But I have found my highest level of incompetence in a very unexpected area. I cannot find out how to watch Oprah.

This seems to be a peculiar pocket of incompetence. Generally, I think I’m a pretty good online researcher. I always had a knack for legal research. I have found people who seemed fairly tucked away: my niece in an ashram, an acquaintance of nearly 40 years ago in an online church newsletter birthday list, and other people I have turned up in newspaper archives, for instance. But when I wanted to find out whether there would be an Internet webcast of the great Oprah-Palin interview, I encountered total blackout.

We don’t have a TV, and I have no idea what stations air on what channels in my area, or what station airs Oprah. My computer came with an antenna, but I would have no idea how to tune in Planet Earth’s number one program. All this is notwithstanding my pastor’s recent admonition to the ladies of the congregation that watching Oprah does not count as a hobby. I daresay.

I went to Oprah’s website and Sarah Palin’s website and turned up no clue as to whether there would be a webcast on November 16. I fruitlessly searched various news agencies. I would not insult any of my friends by imputing to them the desire to watch this program, so I would not ask to watch it with them. However, I do have a neighbor who styles herself as “ga-looed to the television” whenever anything is coming down. This would include major events from tomorrow’s weather forecast to the assassination of President Kennedy.

Okay, so I don’t know how to watch Oprah. We all have our spheres of incompetence. I can always catch the spin after the fact. By today’s reckoning, that’s probably the height of cultural literacy. As I said, I’m so embarrassed about this.

Lauren and Grace collaborated on this Diablog. Both have Addison’s disease.

Lauren: When Grace landed on my blog while doing a search for “how to live while living with Addison’s disease,” her quest and her use of language immediately resonated with me. An e-mail marathon ensued, and I invited her to co-author a chronicle of the pre-diagnostic, diagnostic, and management phases of our Addison’s journeys. We both live in the U. S.: I live in the Pacific Northwest; Grace lives in the Northeast. We are the same age, 58, both married, and we both believe that all events transpire not by random coincidence, but through the sovereign providence of God.

Lauren: The most remarkable detail I experienced a few months prior to my diagnosis of primary autoimmune Addison’s disease was that I knew I was dying.

Grace: For the two years prior to diagnosis I thought I was just getting old and slowing down. I’d joke, but it wasn’t really funny for me, that Wednesdays now felt like Fridays- I was running out of steam. If only I had known how true that was-I was running out of the stuff that drives the human engine, cortisol.

Lauren: I have a bloodline imperative that becoming an invalid is not an option. I have a routine. I have certain tasks that I do the same day each week. I have fibromyalgia and arthritis, so I budget my energy with the routine to try to belay total crashes that can last for days. I have certain rules that I follow to maintain my routine and to prevent stress. One of these rules is that I don’t go to bed during the day no matter how tired I am. If I fall asleep reading, that’s okay, but I don’t go to bed unless I have a fever and a serious acute illness, something that very seldom happens.

Grace: There was one rule growing up in our house-sickness was a personal weakness to be avoided at all costs. Not having a stoic personality, I earned an undeserved reputation for being a slacker. To combat this, and to help put food on our table, I developed an insane work ethic: I valued myself on the basis of how much money I was able to bring home. My career as a RN started out at the same time I became married and a new mom-at the tender age of 21. I thought crazy amounts of stress were normal, when in reality it was all I had ever experienced growing up. It took me close to four decades to realize what a nearly-deadly lifestyle I had embarked on.

Lauren: In the summer of 2007, I became faint walking to my laundry room. I was unable to stand for any length of time. I hyperventilated trying to speak. I simply had to lie down, sometimes after being up only a couple of hours in the morning. I recalled the humiliation and misery I experienced with doctors who did not believe in fibromyalgia. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” rang again, loud and clear.

Grace: Over the past two years I had begun to call out frequently on Thursdays and Fridays because I thought I was falling asleep at the wheel — in retrospect, I was having pre-syncopal (pre-fainting) episodes. Only by the grace of God I did not actually pass out and potentially injure someone else. I know of a woman who was diagnosed only after she passed out — at the top of her steps. She fractured multiple vertebrae and spent most of the next year in the hospital and rehab.

Lauren: I researched my symptoms, and came up with “adrenal fatigue” as a match. Unfortunately, naturopathic sites promoting adrenal fatigue can be a great disservice. I settled for this diagnosis, took extra vitamin C, and figured I would tough it out five or six weeks. If my symptoms didn’t resolve by then, I would see an endocrinologist.

Grace: By the grace of God — yet again — I had a MRI done as part of a workup for migraines in 2007. The results were normal except for a partial empty sella, and that was the first clue that something physically may be wrong with me. The sella tursica is a bony cavity in our head, located at the base of the brain, and that contains the pituitary gland which is one of the most critical glands in our body. The pituitary is the endocrine system’s “Grand Central Station”; it sends out chemical signals that control the function of multiple glands such as the thyroid and adrenals. We each have two adrenal glands, one on top of each kidney. The adrenal is composed of two portions; the inside part, or medulla, makes adrenalin; the cortex, or outside portion produces many hormones, one of which is cortisol. If the cortex no longer produces cortisol, this creates a condition known as Addison’s Disease. It used to be fatal before steroids were invented — timing is everything! Good thing I wasn’t born 50 years earlier.

Lauren: My symptoms worsened, and I had been presumptuous in assuming that an endocrinologist could see me within four months. At that point, my husband and I both knew I wouldn’t make it that long. He moved a few mountain ranges and somehow got me in to see an endocrinologist within the week. I saw the doctor, was tested for everything imaginable the first day, returned the second day for an ACTH-stimulated cortisol test, and heard back from the doctor the following evening. Chronic adrenal failure. Addison’s disease. Impossible. It’s funny how I could know I was dying but never suspect I had a chronic disease.

Grace: My type 2 diabetes was not under great control, so in early 2009 I made an appointment to see an endocrinologist for the first time in my life. I took a copy of the MRI with me, and told him not only the information about my diabetes but also what had occurred 29 years earlier during the birth of my last child. I had a rare complication of pregnancy and suffered severe post-partum hemorrhage requiring about 15 units of blood. Because of this, my BP was critically low for the better part of a full day. When I was conscious I asked my nurse what was my systolic BP (top number)- with a hesitant voice she told me-40. Not good. Not good at all. Weeks later my OB doc told me this much hemorrhage can cause damage to the pituitary gland, because it was deprived of its own blood flow. After the MRI result, I began to wonder what had really happened to my pituitary-if it was functioning properly it should have taken up the entire space of the sella tursica. But my MRI showed an empty space where the pituitary should have been. What happened?

Lauren: As far as work issues, I had already put careers as an epidemiologist, journalist, and attorney behind me and had been happily at home for nearly 10 years when I was diagnosed with Addison’s. Consequently, I was fortunate to have no upheaval in my life concerning whether I could continue working. Life goes on pretty much as normal, even if normal is never the same again.

Grace: Summer of 2009 I was formally diagnosed with secondary Addison’s Disease and started on a lifetime of oral steroids to replace what my body no longer made. It was easier to replace the steroid than it was to repair my lost sense of self — I had always worked fulltime, with overtime. Sadly, I had once defined myself by my money making capacity and now was unable to work. Who was I, really?

Lauren: I am not so sanctified as to have no resentments. To name a few: my life depends on the stable production and distribution of a controlled substance, and on the continued existence of endocrinologists, and the necessity of living within driving distance of them. I become excessively indignant with people who push naturopathic remedies for Addison’s (there’s no such thing!) because they believe hydrocortisone must somehow be “hard on me.” But I have learned to simply respond, “When you say that, all I hear is ‘drop dead.’” Hydrocortisone replaces cortisol, nothing else does, and cortisol is necessary to life.

Grace: My last job was as a university hospital-based nurse case manager, primarily dealing with insurance and discharge planning issues. It had become extremely stressful during the past year, in no small part due to the recession and increased needs of the patients. As a nurse case manager, had been able to get doctors to do pretty much what I asked of them, including filling out forms and writing prescriptions as I instructed. Now I was (drum roll please) a patient. Roles reversed. I have to tell you-it sucks to be the patient . Now I have to plead with doctors to get my paperwork done, especially for disability. People tease me how ‘lucky’ I am to be able to stay home now. You have got to be kidding me — lucky? But maybe I am lucky — lucky to be diagnosed, to have a loving and supportive family. Lucky to not have been born before Dr. Addison figured out what this disease was. His wife had the disease, and it killed her.

Here is a non-technical and very palatable pumpkin soufflé-like comfort food for people who cannot have piecrust or sugar. These things become an acquired taste with discipline, but this is actually very good.

Faux Pumpkin Pie

1 29-oz can pumpkin — not pumpkin pie filling
4 eggs
1 teaspoon each of: ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon each of: cloves, salt

Separate eggs into two bowls. Whip egg whites until frothy and stiff. Combine pumpkin and spices with egg yolks and mix thoroughly. Fold in egg whites. Butter a pie pan — a silicon brush works wonderfully well for this — and pour in pumpkin mixture. Bake at 350° and begin testing for doneness after 45 minutes. My oven took an hour.

Faux Pumpkin Pie works as a breakfast or lunch entrée, or as a dinner side dish, or as a dessert.

When I was in law school, we used to encourage one another with these words: “there’s always beauty school.” This is not a faithful saying, nor is it worthy of any acceptance whatever. Most of us never would have made it through beauty school. But beauty school was code for a refuge for  the kind of dumb.

I have had several hairdressers over the years who were reasoning beings, as well as a few who were possibly employed a little above full capacity. I can say the same for the population of lawyers I’ve known over the years.

Now, the woman who cuts my hair is a good woman. And what, you might ask, covert nuance of character am I trying to suggest with this epithet? Is even “good woman” code? This good woman was a bit under the weather today, but very cheerful as always. She was surprised to learn that I have a diabetic cat; she is surprised to learn this every month. I went through the drill again: layered ends, keep enough length that I can pull it all into a ponytail; you know, I’m just trying to maintain the same length. I hate change.  She asked whether she should take the same two inches off that she trimmed last month. She asks this every month. Hair grows half an inch a month. If she trimmed two inches off every month, within a year, she would be out of a job, and I would have no more worries about a crooked part.

But she’s a good woman, and I like her a lot. When she asked if I had read anything by John Hagee, I brought her a copy of Arthur Pink’s The Sovereignty of God when I came the following month. The month after that, I asked how she was liking Arthur Pink. She said she liked him a lot. I think this good woman likes everyone a lot. She’s still reading John Hagee’s book; she can’t put it down.

In praise of this good woman, I have to say that she is probably trying to urge me toward a bit more style. I think she thinks Seattle Grunge becomes me. Today, she finished up my trim, but didn’t happen to comb my hair back out of my face. She handed me a mirror, and I said I couldn’t see. She’s a good woman; she handed me my glasses. So I re-created Cheryl’s new style for me for the purpose of this one exclusive photo op.

Note to Heidi: I am not trying to copy your house-Mufti look! This was an original created just for me. :-)

Ebed-Melech did not live at a time when thousands of members of the media would have shown up to cover his amazing rescue of the prophet Jeremiah. If he had, he would have been all over international television, satellite radio, the Internet, and the Schenectady Gazette, and everyone would have known his name and remembered it for at least six hours. I have brushed by his name, immediately forgetting it, on every prior reading I have done of the book of Jeremiah. But this time I followed a cross reference, thinking, ” who is this guy”?

Ebed-Melech’s name is probably a tripwire on Bible trivia quizzes. In fact, his name itself is rather a horror. It means “servant of Melech.” But how fortunate that his pagan Ethiopian parents permitted him to live and receive the name instead of passing him through the fire as a sacrifice to their idle idol Melech. Who knows what sorts of aspirations they had for him or what his childhood was like; all we know is that in the providence of God he was assigned a great and gracious destiny.

Ebed-Melech actually made it to the big time, for a slave. We meet him as an adult, a eunuch in the court of King Zedekiah. The king had consigned Jeremiah to the miry dungeon because he prophesied doleful things like the conquest of Israel by Babylon, the captivity in Babylon of the people, and the wasting and burning of Jerusalem. “The Chaldeans are coming! The Chaldeans are coming!” fell somewhat short of cheering the king’s heart. Zedekiah was one to prefer good news to God’s truth, and cast the prophet from his sight. Ebed-Melech spoke up to the king on behalf of Jeremiah:

My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon, and he is likely to die from hunger in the place where he is. For there is no more bread in the city. (Jer. 38:9) NKJV

The king conceded to his servant’s request, and Ebed-Melech took with him men and rags and made a rope for Jeremiah to tie around himself, and they pulled him up from the dungeon. Thus Ebed-Melech, a pagan-born Ethiopian eunuch, approached his king, advocated for Jeremiah, devised and implemented a plan to rescue him, and saved the life of God’s great prophet. If Ebed-Melech’s life was otherwise uneventful, the magnitude of his service to God in saving Jeremiah is imponderable.

Nor did the favor go unrequited. God blessed Jeremiah with the commission to return to Ebed-Melech, and announce to him the glad tidings of his salvation.

Go and speak to Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will bring My words upon the city for adversity and not for good, and they shall be performed in that day before you.
“But I will deliver you in that day,” says the LORD, “and you shall not be given into the hand of the men of whom you are afraid.
“For I will surely deliver you, and you shall not fall by the sword; but your life shall be as a prize to you, because you have put your trust in Me, says the LORD.’” (Jer. 39:16-18) NKJV

My pastor’s sermon yesterday was therapeutic, convicting, and vindicating. He pointed out that the thirteen years between the birth of Ishmael and the birth of Isaac record no events of significance in the life of Abraham. The message was that life is full of protracted uneventful times. I realize how much I covet events for the sake of events themselves. I think of myself as being “perfectly spontaneous as long as nothing upsets my routine.” But the truth is that I require upheaval even though the stress in its wake is destructive.

I suspect that much event-seeking is largely cultural. Americans are calibrated to elections, holidays, school years and summers, distinct phases of childhood, advanced education, career, family, home purchases, retirement, & c. We are exposed to events of life and death, to media events, shopping events, cultural events, political events, and cardiac events. Clearly, it is typical for people to require events to mark time, or to feel useful or purposeful.

I don’t know whether or not my need for events is more extreme than other peoples’. Perhaps my uneventful phases are so markedly uneventful that I require fairly meteoric events to make up for a sense of “lost time.” It’s time (for instance) to move to France! But in the Providence of God, we have a Cat who will brook no event generation if he can possibly help it. Coolidge is the very model of a serenely uneventful life. He marks time, whether consciously or not, by the opening of cans, the administration of shots, and the presence or absence of his people in his abode. He tends to be more active when he has admirers to whom to demonstrate his prowess. I can’t honestly say that my life is very different from his. I can honestly say that I am able consciously to desire alternatives, which is perhaps a habit of gainsaying God’s providence.

We are conscious beings, and consciousness is always eventful. In a sense, we make our own gravy. I’m not talking about imagining alternatives to our present realities. I’m referring to the fact of consciousness as an ongoing event. Life is never uneventful even if it remains undisrupted or not particularly busy. This I find specifically vindicating. I don’t have to generate events or look forward to events or wish for major events to happen. I can remain conscious, write, absorb things that I read, and encourage a friend while scarcely realizing I am doing so. I prepare meals, clean bathrooms, do laundry, take out trash, pay bills, and essentially maintain an organized household routine. My husband and I shatter our morning fast with coffee, a pleasant event. I make cups of tea throughout the day, each one a mini event and an opportunity to appreciate something. I suppose my thought is that events do happen, even if they do not approach the magnitude of taking out four kings or negotiating with God to save a city. This implies that consciousness of our particular events should direct us to contentment .

Does this mean that contentment should preclude entirely the need to drum up intercontinental relocations? I’m going to posit no on this. Contentment is not resignation; contentment does not displace aspiration. I believe that consciousness must beget aspiration as well as contentment. The apostle Paul was content in bounty and in trial, but he always aspired to keep up the good fight in the service of Christ. I think this is the model for event management in a Christian’s daily life. My work then, is to aspire to conform my aspirations to God’s gracious will, while knowing that I can only aspire to contentment.

Noting no correlation between spider consumption and obesity...

Once we were up, I made much of the Cat for rescuing us from the alarming arachnid. He kneaded my lap in self-infatuation and returned to the crime scene, where he now had the bed all to himself.

But there was something terribly wrong, and the terribly wrong thing was on the dining room floor, and that thing was the late spider’s evil twin, huge and terrible on the dining room floor. I called to the Cat, who looked very alert, but who was too fat and happy to bother. Noting my rigid spider-in-the-room stance against the wall, my husband dispatched the spider, which ended its world tour in the sewer system with a summary flush, and has no doubt by now contributed its atoms to an EPA Superfund site. Ecology has nothing to do with my dining room floor.

As pantophobic as I am, I still manage to discover new sources of potential menace and destruction daily. A primary source of new material for my terror watch list is my husband’s law practice. A pickup truck parked quietly in a warehouse spontaneously combusts, possibly due to a defective cruise control, and engulfs the warehouse in flames. What if the truck had been parked next to my beloved Audi at Top Foods? How would I have got home? A tropical fish aquarium apparently has a defective heating element; flammable plastic bio balls in the aquarium burst into flames, and an office building is leveled to ashes. My Cat’s veterinarian has a tropical fish aquarium in her office. What if the heating element failed… how would they get all the animals out in time? Defective surge protectors cause buildings to burn down all the time. Our house is full of such perilous power strips. Every time our lights flicker, I am ready to grab the Cat and head for the Marriott.

Parked cars, fish aquariums, and surge protectors are fairly ubiquitous objects, and death and destruction by fire inheres in all of them. The reader will readily see how one’s terror watch list can grow beyond the capacity of reasonable vigilance. Add a slippery floor to the equation, and chances of survival plummet to abysmal.

One way to make a floor more slippery is to remove the pit from an avocado. I recently rehearsed this maneuver at home. Having sliced an avocado in half without hurting myself, I grasped the pit between the thumb and first three fingers of my left hand. I am right-handed. The pit was launched, its trajectory dead-on with the posterior elbow of my right sleeve, where it landed momentarily. From there, it hit the counter, bounced neatly once, and hit the floor. Marmoleum isn’t really that slick, but our floor probably isn’t perfectly level, either. Barreling with fair velocity, the pit slimed a green contrail in its wake before careening into the woodwork and depositing the rest of its slime there. Had I been obliged to flee the kitchen in the unbelievably likely event of a fire, which any number of wires or appliances spontaneously gone bad could have sparked, the avocado slime trail would have been the proximate cause of my death. The fat green pride of California jumped to the top of my watch list.

What’s a reasonable person to do? Go through life parking under sprayers, wear a fire suit indoors at all times, and give up avocados? Of course not. You sue, punish, and regulate automobile manufacturers, aquarium heating element manufacturers, and avocado growers, who knew or should have known that their pits have the tendency or capacity to be lethally slimy. Then you die from collateral complications of litigation stress, having made the pantophobes of the world no safer, and still very much afraid.

Remember: we have nothing to fear but everything.

One of the greatest promises in the word of God is the reward promised to peacemakers: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Mat. 5:9) This must tell us that peacemakers do something to effect peace; they don’t merely talk about, or promise to bring about, peace. So peacemaking is a gracious work and a godly commission, not an advertising backdrop to a political campaign.

The 28th chapter of Jeremiah chronicles the false promises of peace made by the false prophet Hananiah. Hananiah was very dramatic, and he pitched a good story with a happy ending. God’s true prophet, Jeremiah, wore a yoke about his neck as an illustration of Israel’s captivity under the king of Babylon. Hananiah tore the yoke from Jeremiah’s neck and broke it, claiming on behalf of God that the peoples’ yoke of captivity under Nebuchadnezzar would be broken in just two years, after which all the captives would come home. It sounded great, certainly just what everyone wanted to hear. But unfortunately, Hananiah’s words were not the true words of God. He made the people trust in a lie, and he died for it. We’re not told how he died; perhaps it was nothing dramatic, except that Jeremiah told him he would die within the year, and he did. That was the test of the true and the false prophet: whether what he said came true.

Jeremiah’s prophecies were not popular with his king and countrymen, but his words were of God, and his prophecies bore out. And what he told the people to do who were destined to go to Babylon and endure long captivity, was “seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.” (Jer. 29:7) This is hardly what people wanted to hear, but it is what happened, and after 70 years, a remnant returned to their homeland. God instructed his people to pray for the peace of the place of their captivity, when peace seemed impossible, either politically or spiritually, for in Babylon’s peace was to be found their own.

If the people of Israel were to pray for the peace of Babylon, surely to goodness we are to pray for the peace of our neighbors and our cities and our nations, for in their peace is our own.

Every day, Yahoo! features lists of cities that are Least Stressful, Most Likely to Rebound from the Recession, Most Expensive, Least Expensive, Most Dog-Friendly, Most Intelligent, or Most Likely to Serve Nachos after Midnight. But even Yahoo!, in its demographically torqued exuberance, doesn’t assure its reading public of peace anywhere. Strife and discord do not flee from cultural amenities, beautiful parks, bicycle paths, or prevalence of high incomes; nor are they repelled by theological darkness, poverty, preventable sickness, or diverse worldviews. There has never been a time of universal peaceful accord on earth since the expulsion of our first parents from the Garden of Eden, and I am not inclined to believe that man will ever bring such a time about. Discord fuels fear, and fear fuels power, and I see no trend toward men’s relinquishment of power.

This is not to say that increased harmony between people and nations is not a worthy, and to some extent attainable, aspiration. Overall, more people have more freedom from fear of annihilation today than in Jeremiah’s time. And yet we still have wars, threats of wars, and every form of depravity that has ever existed. Still, every four years in my country, peace is at or near the top of a political campaign agenda.

It’s stupid, I know, but I wonder whether Hananiah would have been a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize if dynamite had been invented 2600 years earlier.