God Works in Mysterious Ways

God works in mysterious ways. Over the last month or so, there seemed to be waning interest in Why All People Suffer. I was doing less interiews and as measured by Amazon, book sales were softening. My wife Sue noticed some rotting boards on our deck and encouraged me to renovate the decking with some weather resistent composite decking material. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to do these kinds of projects and learned how to build a deck from my father almost 50 years ago, so I eagerly took on the project and added a few design fourishes by consolidating the staircases so we could go from the upper to the lower floors of the two story deck without going to the ground in between. I put together a 43 page package of specs and drawings and got a building permit and set about rebuilding the deck on July 30. That's when the harsh reality of Parkinson's set in. I have a particulalry difficult time getting out of a chair now and working on a deck requires a lot of working on your hands and knees so I struggled to get up each time I did any task. This happened literally dozens of times an hour and I worked on the deck as much as 12-15 hours a day for the last three weeks. As you might imagine, my muscles ache and I'm exhausted every day. I also started physical therapy on August 3 at the urging of my neurologist, taking something called "the Big Program", which has the objective of recalibrating the brain of the Parkinson's patient to think big when it tends to minimize things. It is an intensive program, 4 sessions a week for four weeks. The therapists do a beginning and ending assessment and I made particularly strong gains because I was able to apply the techniques from therapy to the heavy workload of working on the deck. This made me appreciate that even if you have a serious degenerative disease, you can make forward progress if you are motivated. The question still is out on how I can motivate myself to this level of exercise when the deck is done. We shall see. While all this was happening, there has also been a resurgence in interest in Why All People Suffer. The Avila group which held a webinar on the book last month with 458 participants, offered me the opportunity to teach a course for their spiritual development program based on my book which can be found here: /https://avila-institute.org/avila-courses/ssf122-why-all-people-suffer/