I Have All The Best Words

I have been struggling through a book written by the brother of one of my friends while recovering from the 'flu.  The author is a Doctor of Divinity and the book is about the Pauline epistles.  I confess that I am struggling with it; it was obviously written for scholars, not lay readers with an interest in the early Christian Church and I have had to haul out both my dictionary and my bible.

I would like to make clear at this point that my preferred deity is the invisible pink unicorn.  That is actually not an official religion and in the last Australian Census I had to opt for being a member of the Pastafarian church which has, as their deity, the flying spaghetti monster.  This is a registered religion in USA so it is official.

My interest in religion goes back to my school days when I first started to read the Bible critically and realised that the stories being fed to us were the Sunday School version and not based on anything much found in the King James Bible.  My interest has primarily been the historic basis of the Old Testament but I own a book called "Who Wrote the New Testament" so I have some basis for understanding the book I am reading at the moment.  I'll give Doctor Harding a plug here  -  it is called "The Pastoral Epistles?".

The new best word in my vocabulary now is 'parousia' which was totally new to me and never used when I was at school.

I have had a bad week what with the 'flu but there has been one very positive outcome.  On Wednesday morning I found that Poppy, my girl-cat, had ripped one of her claws and it was hanging by a thread.  I took her to the Vet thinking that I would have to fast her overnight and take her back first thing on Thursday morning to have the toe amputated.  However, it was just the claw and there was no infection so the Vet said that surgery that morning was just finishing and that she could sedate her and remove the claw immediately.  

That was good and I took her home with some pain relief to be given with her food.  When we got home I realised that I had a completely different cat to the grumpy, hissing and spitting cat I had known and loved for the last six years.  Gone were the hissy fits whenever her brother approached, gone was the low growling when he tried to curl up with her in bed and it occurred to me  -  knowing that she had arthritis in the right front leg, that she had been in chronic pain.  So when we went back to check the claw I mentioned this amazing change in her and the outcome is that she will be on long-term pain relief which goes on her food and which she loves the taste of so it is very easy to administer.

And we now have peace in our time.