Saturday I’m having a tooth extracted by Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg.  I found him when no dentist would extract the wisdom tooth of someone close to me, and Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg volunteered to do it.  It was a high-risk extraction, close to the brain, and he did it successfully.  I was grateful, and have returned to him when I needed a DMD.

There are people on this earth who help us in our perilous moments, and he is one of those people.  They live among us in our Judeo-Christian civilization and only come to notice when the times get tough.

I am grateful to God for all of them.  Were it not for them, our existence would be more precarious than it is, which in Western Civilization, is not bad.

The deliveries of food were regular, while my wife and I recovered from our respective accidents.  That’s what you get from a God-given son, who has a biblical love of his parents.  It is manly and generous, and we are grateful for it.

For his post high school career, he started out at Washington University in St. Louis, but he expressed a desire to go to Boston College, even though that college was flooded with applications the year after Doug Flutie enacted his famous touchdown pass.  So we told him to try again.  This time he succeeded.  For his sophomore year he got in.

It was a successful three years at the Jesuit college, and he landed a nice banking job on graduation.  But that was just the beginning.  He went on to explore the entrepreneurial field, and succeeded again.

I had occasion to go to City M.D. for a lacerated hand, which refused to stop bleeding because I was on a Coumadin regimen.   So my wife recommended the walk-in doctor.  But much as I looked in my wallet, I couldn’t find the Medicare card.

My memory was no help.  When did I last use that card?  In desperation, I prayed to the Holy Spirit.  Slowly, the last time came back to my mind.  Finally, I remembered actually putting the card back in my wallet.  So it must be in the wallet!  I planned a thorough search.

Berhold, the first place I looked, behind my wife’s picture, I found it!  I am now a believer in the power of the Holy Spirit.  That wasn’t chance.

The Olympics still achieve their goal of camaraderie and fellowship.  Sunday afternoon the US women’s volleyball team played Brazil, and it was good to see how they supported one another to win.  The Brazilian team also worked with one another, even though they were trailing.

We alternated the Olympics with the St. Jude golf tournament, where it was every player on his own, and the contrast brought out some of the realities of life.  There are times we have to be team players and times when we, often morally, are on our own.  Some of life’s biggest battles are fought within

His name was Maximilian Kolbe, and he died voluntarily of starvation, in place of another prisoner at Auschwitz.  Things like that happen to people who volunteer to serve, in this case the Christians’ God.  He is now a saint in the Catholic Church.

Another saint who volunteered is St. Edith Stein.  She was a Jewish intellectual who became a Carmelite nun, and the Nazis hunted her down and killed her.  So, it is risky to do good for the Lord, as we say, but the rewards before and after are way beyond what we dream.

These are almost anonymous saints in the minds of the humble faithful, but they attest to what millions believe.  There is a divine consensus; we just don’t know about it yet.