• From https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/7oah7u/my_favorite_strip/?rdt=38155

I’m sure I am not the only one who used to love sick days. When you are a kid and a sick day is a day off of school––and barring some kind of serious or longterm illness!––it is like a perfect trade. You get to be at home, watch TV or play video games, sometimes you get special food, special drinks. And all it costs is a scratchy throat or some sniffles. What a deal!

As an adult, though, sick days don’t mean what they used to. Once you are grown up, a sick day is often a huge challenge that at its very best puts you behind, disenfranchises family or friends and upsets daily rhythms that are hard to get back on track. It’s a reminder that, for us in our social world, to be adult is to be someone who is not usually supposed to be someone who receives care.

I had to take a sick day last week––the day of flower communion. I was very disappointed when it happened, and it immediately put me in a place where I was so aware of all of the obligations I was not meeting, all of the people I had to either reach out to cover for me or to somehow disappoint in the process. And in that time, all the care I could offer myself was the chance to not be present where I was otherwise expected to be present (and where I desperately wanted to be!)

It’s unsettling to realize how, in our lives, an experience like being sick can be, at one age, a chance to revel in our need for care, and at another age, a terror of recognition that sometimes we need care.

I don’t know if UUCC is a place where we can utterly reshape how our society thinks about vulnerability and the need for care among people who aren’t the school age wards of responsible adults. But I do know that UUCC is a community of care. And every time we step out in an act of caring for others, we are affirming both our values and the worthiness of everyone who needs care, and time, and rest.

And also, erm… sorry I was sick.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD

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