By Elisabeth Frausto, Staff, La Jolla Light Writer
Nov. 9, 2020

La Jolla restaurant employee Edgar Uribe has multiple sclerosis that went untreated for a decade, until a local nonprofit stepped in to connect him with the care he needed.
Uribe, a busser at Piatti in The Shores for eight of his 10 years at the restaurant, has been receiving medical care facilitated and paid for by Big Table, a faith-based nonprofit that works to connect workers in the food service and hotel industries with whatever assistance they need.
Uribe said his MS “didn’t get really bad until last year.” He tried to find treatment, which proved difficult due to his citizenship status, he said. “I didn’t get any help.”
Uribe was referred to Big Table through Piatti guest Martha Ehringer, who complimented Uribe’s hard work to the restaurant’s manager, Tom Spano. Uribe was “charming, sweet and helpful,” she said.
When she learned of Uribe’s MS, Ehringer spoke to Spano about referring him to Big Table, which she had just learned about as outreach chairwoman for St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church.
Jesse Vigil, city director for the San Diego chapter of Big Table, said Spano submitted the referral for Uribe. Big Table, which has an office in Pacific Beach, does not accept self-referrals.
Uribe “is a great guy,” Spano said. “He works as hard as he can; he’s a good person in and out. We hope his MS can be halted, if not reversed.”
Big Table “got me a doctor, who prescribed steroids,” Uribe said, which “calm down my nervous system.”

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By MARCUS C. LOHRMANN, pastor, Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church, La Mesa
NOV. 11, 2020

Prayer is a vulnerable project.
Step back a moment to consider the audacity of the thing: In prayer, meager human beings set out to connect our hearts, minds, strengths and souls with the source of all life and creation. Talk about ambitious!
One psalmist articulates how ludicrous this can all feel: “When I consider the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and stars in their courses ... who am I that you would be mindful of me?”
Cynics point to this preposterous ambition as its central weakness, yet the inclination towards prayer is an ancient and constant word of “nevertheless.”
Suffering exists: nevertheless. Futility always seems to get the last word: nevertheless. The world isn’t always as it should be: nevertheless, we persist in hope. Suffering and futility never get the last word on us.
To pray is to become vulnerable to the Divine reality of nevertheless.
We are shaped by the daily postures we assume. We are shaped by the positions that our bodies take as we move through the world, as they are bent over by the forces around us. As a pastor, I have become deeply concerned with the spiritual damage that persistent postures of division inflict upon us as communities and individuals.
This inclination towards division has become such a mainstay of American punditry, political speech and water-cooler conversation (or maybe in 2020 we’d say Zoom conversation) that to let the word “unity” dribble out of one’s mouth is to welcome, even to expect, mockery and derision by the cynical.

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Channel 7 NBC News asks for Fr. Mark's perspective on Christmas without inside services.