Coming home from the Royal Oak’s Farmers’ Market along about 9:30 yesterday morning, the lovely lady I live with was overheard to say: “Let’s see, we’ve got brussels sprouts, new potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans for the casserole, shrimp for the appetizer….Becky said she would bring the dessert….I’ve got everything but the turkey. Unless, that is, you want me to get a ham.” Which I don’t. Although I’ll concede that a ham might be easier than a turkey. I don’t really think Kris wants a ham. And I know Julie doesn’t want a ham. So I guess I’ll have to go out to the woods this afternoon and “bag” us a turkey.
I Thirst
Sometime late Thursday afternoon, when the church was teeming with kids rehearsing with various choirs, the bubbling water feature in the narthex was knocked to the floor, disassembling its component parts and flooding the narthex carpet. What surprised all of us was that it was not the roughhousing of middle school boys which did the deed, but a bit of over-zealous leaning by some grade school girls.
Family Secrets
Sometime during the evening of Thursday, January 20, after the last program of a busy church had ended and the last member of that busy church had left, the church’s pastor….the only pastor the church had ever known….the pastor who had started it from scratch and nurtured it from a handful of visitors to over 800 members….the pastor who, in ten crazy, wonderful and relentlessly-forward-surging years, had led those members from the auditorium of an elementary school to a beautiful facility known as Christ United Methodist Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina….
A Wintry Spirituality
A preacher happens upon a group of boys who are surrounding a stray dog. Stopping within earshot, he listens to their conversation. Then he enters their circle and inquires as to what is taking place. The boys tell the preacher that they have found this stray and are deciding who, among them, will get to take him home.