Category Archives: Prayer

Let’s help Amit find some bone marrow

10/06/2011 Nichole 2 Comments

My friend Amit has leukemia. I’ve known Amit since 2007, when he hired me to write for Photojojo. I haven’t ever actually met him face-to-face, but through the magic of the internet, I know that the guy is smart, kind, generous and funny. He’s one of the most enthusiastic and positive people I’ve ever met, and he needs your help:

Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that If it hadn’t been caught, it would have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.

If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.

If you know any South Asians, please point ‘em to the links above. Thank you.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help us get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.

via Amit Gupta Likes You

I’m not of South Asian descent, so I guess it’s unlikely that I’d be a match for Amit. But I signed up for the national bone marrow registry anyway. Maybe I’ll be a match for someone else. And you might be, too. Maybe you’re Amit’s match. Please take a few minutes to sign up for the registry (or go to the party in New York) just in case.

blessings, Prayer

Finding laughter and inspiration with a stadium full of faithful women

09/25/2011 Nichole

I haven’t really spent all that much one-on-one time with my sister-in-law, save for the occasional trip to Target. So I was most pleased when she agreed to use my extra BookSneeze-provided Women of Faith ticket.

Women of Faith — photo courtesy WomenOfFaith.com

I thought it might be a nice opportunity to get to know her a bit better, and I was right. Among other things, I know now just how skilled she is at parking an SUV into a very small parking space, that sentimental children’s books make her cry and that she may need a caffeine intervention.

We spent the majority of Friday and Saturday with several thousand other women, all there to be inspired and uplifted. There were, as you might expect, laughter and tears.

Par example:

The Comedy

The lady in front of me came perilously close to falling out of her chair laughing when Ken Davis was on stage. He was — and I don’t use this term lightly — a hoot.

The Music

Natalie Grant activated the waterworks with her rendition of my favorite hymn, “It Is Well.” It was acapella, the crowd sang backup, and it was just beautiful. That song always makes my heart soar.

The Women of Faith worship team all had beautiful voices. And I know this is insignificant in the great scheme of things, but they were all wearing extremely cute clothes all weekend. I especially loved the purple hosiery.

Mary Mary — a wildly entertaining and talented pair of sisters — nearly had me throwing my hands in the air. Nearly. This is a thing I very rarely actually do. Even when I just don’t care.

The Speakers

Henry Cloud spoke on happiness. “Happy people,” he said, “are connected from the heart.” He also said that we “run on the fuel of relationships.” Both of which are kind of what I was trying to get to in that post about finding friends. A good bit of what he said was just what I needed to hear, and it did indeed strengthen my resolve to find some good monkeys. (Which would make sense if you clicked on that link and read a bit of the book.)

Luci Swindoll was at the Women of Faith event that I went to years and years ago, and I vaguely remembered that she was wry and wonderful. Incredibly enough, my memory was accurate! She is indeed wryly humorous and thoroughly wonderful. This time around she was talking about enjoying every moment of life. I want to remember this part in particular: “If we enjoy the world, we improve it.” I think I need to do more enjoying and less wishing for something else, be that a different season, a different pants size or a different pizza topping.

The fabulously named Nicole Johnson presented a short dramatic bit that went straight to my heart. It was about invisibility. As in: I Am Washing All These Socks Etc and So On and So Forth and No One Ever Notices. Rockford is pretty good about saying thanks for the stuff I do, so I more frequently feel invisible at the grocery store. Where for some reason the deli guy never, ever acknowledges my presence. Nevertheless, it spoke to me. And now I might just buy her book on the subject.

Nicole, Lisa Harper and Sheila Walsh all talked about hurt that carries over from childhood. My parents divorced when I was 5 or 6. I remember bits and pieces of that time period — my next-door neighbor telling me my dad was moving out; the 12-hour drive to my Granny’s house, where we were moving; watching “Gremlins” without sound on the drive-in screen from the balcony at my dad’s apartment — but I don’t specifically remember any feelings of devastation at the time. It did squish my heart when Lisa Harper talked about being disappointed over and over again by her father, who didn’t show up to pick her up for his weekend visitation. I missed my dad every single day growing up, but it could’ve been worse. I consider myself very fortunate to have a dad who valued his time with us enough to show up when he was supposed to show up. Even so, I have a very hard time when he leaves after a visit, and I’m sure I’m overly sensitive on other topics where he’s concerned. I think it’s because I still feel a little cheated from all that time I missed out on with him when I was small. And thus, Nicole, Lisa and Sheila made me weepy.

The Company

I don’t think I’ve specifically told you all that much about my sister-in-law. She left a successful career more than a decade ago to stay home with her children, and she has put her every effort into raising them ever since. There are four of them now, and she’s homeschooling them. All four of them. With one teenager, two staggeringly close their teens and a 4-year-old. The mind boggles. But that’s not all she does. She also volunteers at her church, her house is beautifully decorated, she’s a great cook, she has a lovely singing voice, she’s tall, she grows her own vegetables and she looks perfectly put-together every day. What I’m saying is: If she weren’t so nice, she would be very difficult to tolerate.

She would laugh and wave this off with a slightly self-disparaging comment, but I tell you with all sincerity: She’s one of my heroes. She’s the model of a wife and mom that I hope to be. (Except not with the four children. The very thought makes me swoon in an unpleasant manner.) (Even though I love those kids quite a lot.) (Two is enough for me and my puny energy reserves.)

So! I enjoyed the weekend overall, and I did come away on Saturday more inspired than I was on Thursday. But there was something that rubbed me the wrong way. The “theme” of the event was “Imagine,” but the sessions didn’t really reflect that at all. It seemed like they’d just kind of randomly picked a word and Scripture (Ephesians 3:20) in order to make some nice-looking logos for the T-shirts. I’m thinking maybe they don’t really need a theme. The overarching theme for some of the speakers seemed to be “My most recent publication, which is available for purchase in the concourse.” I know this is a business, and I know the speakers/authors need to sell their wares to make a living. But I’d suggest they ask the speakers to lay off mentioning their books and let the emcee handle the sales pitch.

Lest we end on a sour note, here is a video clip of the very funny Ken Davis:

Disclaimer: BookSneeze and Thomas Nelson gave me a pair of tickets to attend this event.

Prayer

How to win acquaintances and influence very little

09/17/2011 Nichole 9 Comments

We’ve been attending a church across town for about two years. It’s a nice church. The full-band music ministry was a little jarring after about 10 years of attending the exclusively a capella churches of Christ, but I’ve grown to enjoy it. And the messages or sermons or whatever you’d like to call them are generally much more thought-provoking than fear-inducing. The kids love their Sunday school classes, and Rockford really likes the pastor.

But there’s still something missing, for me. Community. Friendship. Fellowship. I just haven’t found it there.

I’ve talked about this here before (here: all the way back in 2008!), my difficulty in finding connections. And I have met a few people since then, but I still don’t know that I’d qualify all that much of my progress as more than acquaintances. Maybe I don’t give out a “call me, let’s go do something!” vibe. Or maybe it’s that I don’t take that initiative and call people myself? I’m afraid of rejection, I guess.

Anyway. The church. It is nice, but I wanted to try to find something on our side of town. I was thinking that maybe if we were attending church with people who lived nearer to us, then we might run into them in the community and something like Oh Hello I See You Everywhere Let’s Be Pals would happen. So we tried a tiny church near us last weekend. It’s actually a church plant that just started meeting in a community center, and three or four of the people I’d call acquaintances attend it. Those people were kind and welcoming, but I don’t think we’re going to be going again. There isn’t a children’s ministry or really a spot to form a children’s ministry, and Rockford and the kids gave it a rather lukewarm “review” afterward.

However! They started a Bible study for women this week, and I went. My new goal is to keep going and force them to befriend me. (Sad! But true! Unless I chicken out.) (And maybe it’s already working! I was invited to A Thing after writing this, but I couldn’t gom)

But, oh hey! This wasn’t supposed to be about my sad sack of a social life. It was supposed to be about this: I’m going to a Women of Faith in a few weeks with my sister-in-law. The events are all about finding inspiration and laughter and hugging, I think. I hope to come away from the weekend inspired and with a new resolve to get out there and find my people.

(Just so we’re clear: I do not like the Moody Blues. But the song popped into my head as soon as I typed the last three words.)