Friday Musings

Friday is my day off, though it usually means my day to catch up on my own stuff, and perhaps sneak in an e-mail or two. And it's also usually my day to help around camp, where my fiance is director.

Yesterday, in addition to the phone calls and e-mails that seem never ending, I got to visit some of our nursing home folks. Chris went along, and we had a nice visit with Joe Long, whose memory at nearly 89 is better than many people I know of any age! We stopped in to visit the Dinsmores, at their New Holland store in Ceresville. We also took advange of having lunch at Famous Dave's, the place we're having cater our welcome/rehearsal dinner for our wedding. Got to fit those little errands in where we can!

One of the highlights of my week is the women's study on Thursday nights...we've finished Bad Girls of the Bible, and have moved on to Really Bad Girls of the Bible. Liz Curtis Higgs, the writer, is just a hoot, and we have a great time. We get to study women who had all sorts of experiences, and each one brings up a new issue. Our study last night of Jael and Deborah led us to discussions of women is leadership, the men who support them, and gender roles in general. The story of Jael, which has her killing Sisera by driving a tent stake through his head, also brings up questions of violence, and demands the question of what situations might bring out the violent in us. I think there was general consensus that the truth is we don't really know what we're capable of...good and bad. And we all had experiences where we knew that the line between flipping out and being overwhelmed into passivity was thin indeed.

Meanwhile, I've been doing what I can to help as a member of the worship planning committee for annual conference. This year the bishop decided to aska group of young adult clergy to take on the task. It is a big one indeed, since Rev. Vivian McCarthy, who had led that in her role as conference staff, is now a district superintendent, and thus not able to do it. Trying to do Vivian's work indeed takes lots of us, though I think we started with two dozen pastors. That number has dwindled, and we've had less than a dozen at our past two meetings. Most people are still involved, and as we discussed at our last meeting, the time we'll really need all hands on deck is at Annual Conference anyway. I must admit I was unsure for a while there how it would all pull together, but I'm really excited now...with the orders of worship basically finalized, all the other pieces are much clearer to see, and I'm more confident than ever that we'll really be able to pull this off...though of course with a lot more work.

I didn't get a chance to send an announcement/update e-mail to the church yesterday, so that's my task for this morning, but hopefully I'll have that done quickly, and can move on to other things...like making and mailing a couple final wedding invitations and helping with flyers and planning for camp. At least it's awesome weather right now...

:-) Sarah