Sunday was a blur, starting again at 5:20 AM and spending half the day at the swim meet. Both mornings of the meet I sat next to a very interesting woman named Janet, the mom of five kids, all swimmers (now or in the past) with my daughter’s team. This mom had been involved in swimming for 7 years and boy, did she teach me a lot! And guess what? I taught her a few things too, but not about swimming…


Although she is not currently using her training, Janet has a Master’s degree in Speech Pathology and audiology. And as I told her about my passion, she started to remember all the kids who came through the doors when she worked at an inner city Chicago hospital. Some of those kids weren’t going to get better with just speech therapy, and some of those kids had far more “wrong” with them then just language issues. She knew it, she saw it, but she didn’t necessarily have an answer for it. Gee, do you suppose they were using language as a control mechanism? Or maybe they had brain wiring issues that went deeper than the speech center… Victims of abuse, neglect, pre-natal drug exposure, etc. etc. etc. It was very interesting comparing notes.


This morning after Beth and I visited the dentist, I dropped Beth back at school and then drove to our church for a meeting scheduled weeks ago with our head congregational care pastor. The church to which my family belongs embraces over 15,000 members (probably more than that since Christmas.) When we joined in 1994, there were 400 members. There are so many members now, we have an unbelievable number of pastors, and there is one gal in charge of all the other congregational care pastors, who are assigned church members according to the member’s last name.

To be continued...

Photos courtesy of Church of the Resurrection