Tuesday February 10, 2009

May I introduce you to a new friend of mine?  Her name is Dotsy.  We met after her daughter Googled “Microcystic Adnexal Carcinoma” and found my references to the disease on this website.  Remember how I mentioned, a year ago, that there are just over 300 Mac-sufferers in the world?  Well, Dotsy and I are two of them.  I’m well past my critical stage, but Dotsy is just entering hers, as she was diagnosed just a handful of weeks ago.  May I recruit your prayers and support for the McJourney she faces?  By all predictions, it will be much more bumpy and trying than mine was.  My surgery took 2 days (plus one more later) and required two sets of 16 stitches.  Dotsy’s will involve titanium plates, a new nose, a new mouth, and weeks of successive reconstructive interventions and physical therapy.  I keep trying to place myself in her situation, knowing that she will soon lose most of her mouth and nose and be unable to speak for quite some time, and I simply can’t.  Yet she is approaching this trial with honest grief and trusting confidence.  What a woman of God…

Pray with me for her–please.  Dotsy lives in Tennessee.  She is the mother of three and the grandmother of five.  Her husband is a college-level coach and she has divided her career in education between teaching a wide variety of grades and being a librarian.  She’s an avid reader and firm believer who challenges me with every word she writes and every insight she relates.  Go to https://dotsydetails.blogspot.com to read her nearly-daily journal as she enters this unexpected dance (her word) with her Maker.  And please pray for her every time she comes to mind.  Hold her up to the throne from which comfort and peace and rest flow in unending waves.  There’s a verse in Revelations that describes our prayers filling up bowls in Heaven until they tip over and the power of our intercessions is released.  Will you help me fill the bowls that bear Dotsy’s name to the brim?  Please.  I love her–having never yet met her face to face–and can’t think of a more worthy focus of our communal spiritual efforts.  My hope (and plan) is to visit her some day so we can blend my Journey and her Dance into something that unmistakably reveals God’s glory!

 
And lastly…drum roll, please…my first book has had a facelift!  “The Edge of Tidal Pools” has officially been transformed, with the help of BFA graphic artist Chris Bryan, from its garish old self to this new, more sophisticated form.  I took the photo on the cover last summer and immediately knew that it would reflect the story much better than the previous one did.  To order your copy of the new version, go to: https://www.michelephoenix.com!  Free shipping on all orders before the end of the month.    (Note: the strip down the middle is the book’s spine…this is a photo of the full cover!)