Ahhhh. I’m just back from the dermatologist. I feel completely alive. My arms, my head, my neck — all are tingling with vivid and unaccustomed sensations. Of pain.
And, within the next day or two, I’ll begin to look like a victim of some medieval plague.
It’s all a reminder of my misspent southern California youth. Ah, nostalgia! Beaches, the backyard swimming pool, backpacking in the Sierras and elsewhere, years on my high school’s swim team. And, thereafter, several years spent in the seldom-overcast Middle East. Gifts that go on giving.
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Meanwhile, unfortunately, there are others out there who aren’t having fun:
“UPDATE: Latest on Hurricane Harvey Impact: Church monitoring and assessing needs”
It’s presumably too late to make donations toward immediate relief in Texas. The funds and assets for doing that need to have been already in place. (And, happily, they were.)
But those funds and assets will have been measurably depleted by this natural disaster, and they will badly require replenishment before the next one. Moreover, some of the needs in and around Houston will likely be long-term. There are a whole lot of people whose houses have been destroyed, whose jobs and places of employment are gone (perhaps permanently).
“Texans Need Help. Let’s Show Them They Can Count on Us.”
Here are a pair of useful Church links:
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“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
Mahatma Gandhi
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The Church does a great deal of good, week in and week out, in every nation, state, and province where it exists:
“Mormons Around the World Country Newsroom Websites August 21, 2017”
I hope that its harsh critics do such good, as well.
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“The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. . . . Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. . . . We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
J.K. Rowling, author, philanthropist, and founder of the children’s charity Lumos
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, feed just one.”
Mother Teresa (aka St. Teresa of Calcutta)
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