Better now, thank you!

Thank you all for your helpful comments and STRENGTHENING affirmations after yesterday's deep gloom.

The sun is out again today...I spent a long time last night sitting up, reading -- trying to get ready for a retreat I am leading at the end of May...and beginning to feel quite excited about it.

And so far this morning I have four endorsements out of five for the re-wording of our recommendation to the Examining Chaplains. You know how they keep telling us to delegate? One of our committee members is an extremely adroit lawyer, and he just gathered up the fragments of our first attempt and wove them into something we could all sign in good faith without feeling that we'd been shafted -- or that we'd shafted our candidate.

And the dissenting committee member has sent me, spontaneously, marvelous promotional material announcing our Holy Week activities, full of positive ALLUREMENTS to come and take part in them. Her rhetoric in these doesn't make me wince at all!

I've just had a great long conversation with the stalwarts of our Fabric Committee about how to put together a long-range plan for the building, and how to get it approved and funded...it turned into a really good discussion...we reviewed a number of projects and eventually got to "tell us again what is the name of that box that we might get around to installing in the wall of the chancel to put the bread and wine into?" and when I explained it was an AUMBRY there was much fun and foolery about the distinction between "aumbry" and "hombre" -- "yep, that there's one bad aumbry, boys." Many of our older congregants are a lot closer to the protestant end of the Anglican spectrum than I am, by inclination. And this has now graciously become grounds for mutually understood teasing and "hoo-rawing"--which really is affectionate. So there was a lot of laughter. They are almost prepared to install an aumbry "just to please me" -- and so then I up the ante by expressing a tongue-in-cheek yearning for a pompous-glorious sanctuary lamp with rattly chains. Shrieks of mock dismay!

And best of all, I've had an e-conversation with T, who was recently being treated for postpartum psychosis, and for whom so many of the RevGals so kindly prayed. T sent me a doleful message saying she had lost her faith in God and in Jesus and in Holy Communion and so she has stopped taking communion and perhaps I would tell her she shouldn't come to church any more at all. She has a little boy by her first marriage, who is being prepared at his school for First Communion in the Roman Catholic church, and she's also dealing with his catechism-generated questions and observations. I kept trying to respond and not being able to do so, finally wrote a great long meandering reply late one night last week...and it seems, blessedly and graciously and thank you Lord, to have hit just the right note with her. We're going to have a visit, too.


So this is a good day (which, no doubt, the Lord hath made)!