Body and Soul Regulations...

It's been a really weird couple of days.  I guess you could say that for most days that are out of the norm, but these are different.  I came home Tuesday from work and within an hour was laying in bed under multiple blankets shivering.  I can't remember the last time I had a temperature like that, nor what it feels like.  It's really quite bizarre, your body is burning up but you feel like you're freezing.

I looked it up and the best I could understand is that your internal thermostat considers 98.6 normal and externally regulates accordingly.  So when you're out in the cold it tells your body to shiver and warm up, when you're hot it tells the sweat glands to activate and help cool you down.  However, when your temperature gets out of whack, your internal thermostat now considers that the new normal and then basically regulates the same way. In my case it was saying "normal" is 103 so I better shiver and warm up because my skin is cooler than it should be.  Crazy right?  What's also just as cray is that when your fever breaks and you start sweating, it's because your skin temperature climbs high enough from all of the shivering and blankets while your internal temperature starts to drop, so the signal to the system is to sweat and cool yourself off.  Cray cray.  I love how the body works, so purposeful, it's hard to comprehend anything other than a Creator had much to do with it all.

Then Wednesday I got a couple of calls in the morning that I missed but caught up with me later.  The short of it is that a friend's 15 year old daughter committed suicide.  When the words came out of my wife's mouth I thought maybe she said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah" so I shook my head and asked her to repeat it.  She obliged and added, "I'm really sorry."  I've spent the last 24 hours trying to understand why stuff like this happens, how will my friend ever survive and what in the world could I possibly do.

All the answers I come to suck, I hate life's truths sometimes.  Shit happens because it just does.  My friend will only survive in some ways, a part of him died and he will hurt for the rest of his life.  I can do absolutely nothing for him to take away the pain.  Knowing this, I sent him a text saying, "I'm so sorry Jim." He replied awhile later with, "Thanks David, send prayers." I have to tell you that response was a tough one for many reasons.  I didn't send my thoughts to be thanked for them and so I felt selfish. Then he asked me to "send prayers." Of all the things one could need in times like this, he was asked for prayers.  Prayer by definition is a deliberate invocation that seeks to activate rapport with (in this case) God. He asked that I call on God for him... humbling request.

So as I've been coming out of the fog of being sick and shock of the news, I've been faced with some deep questions of my own.  Is the Creator who made my body the same God Jimmy wants me to pray to?  For years now they've been very separate to me. Is it possible that our souls were designed as purposefully as our bodies?  Is it possible Jimmy's internal thermostat on his soul is out of whack and crying out for some type of regulation from the same creator who built our bodies to do it naturally?  Maybe, probably, hopefully... certainly not an answer I have right now.  But what I do know is that I love my friend more than my desire to be sure so tonight I send a prayer.