This last week, Thanksgiving week, I was on vacation since I had one vacation Sunday left this year, and I really can only get away for on the last Sunday of the month. However Bob still had to work Monday through Wednesday.
Now normally when one spouse has more vacation time than the other, the one with more vacation will play happy homeowner (as is the case with my brother and sister-in-law). However we live in a parsonage that was just remodeled last year. And since we live a whopping 50 yards from the church (yes I will never complain about my commute) it also means that for me to really not work on vacation, I need to get out of the house too. Luckily Bob lives part of the week not at home.
Bob normally works from the house on Mondays and then commutes to New London (the other side of the state) on Monday night/Tuesday morning and stays there until Thursday when he comes back to Georgetown and works from home again on Saturday. When in New London he stays at the St. Francis House, an intentional living community. So on Monday night we packed up the car with our stuff and the dogs and headed to New London for the week.
On Tuesday I went to Bob's work, the Homeless Hospitality Center, just to stop by and meet his co-workers. However they were in the middle of sending out a mass mailing as part of a fund raising campaign. So I decided to stay and help. Well I ended up forging the executive director's name on about 800 letters over the course of Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon. (BTW the vast majority of letters you receive from an organization trying to raise money that are personally signed by the head honcho, are actually signed by some intern, volunteered or other low-level person.)
When I wasn't there, I explored around New London, read, and needle-pointed (I'm trying to finish a stocking before Christmas).
Thanksgiving itself was low key for us, just a trip to the dog park, watch some movies, and hung out. But we did also go pick up the "snack" for the overnight shelter that the Coast Guard Academy's food services provided. The "snack" for 50 people was actually enough turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, salad, acorn squash, stuffing, green beans, bread and brownies to feed over 100 people. The food barely fit into the back of our car (but again remarkably everything fits into a Fit). But we had to pick up the food at 4 and the shelter doesn't open until 7. So with the help of the 5 ovens in the various apartments of the St. Francis house, we were able to keep all the food warm.
Friday and Saturday was spent with some shopping and a trip to see Harry Potter 7.1 but by then Bob wasn't feeling the greatest. So on Sunday morning he slept in and I went to the UCC church across the street from the St. Francis House.
And during worship I learned two things: 1) I must have drunk some of the kool-aid and 2) some sermon examples, while attention getters are also distracting. Let me explain.
1) A seminary friend jokes with her internship supervisor that most people who have graduated from our seminary end up being fairly high church, liturgical and sticklers for these "rules" even if they did not start seminary that way. Therefore somewhere along their seminary journey they "drunk the kool-aid" that made them this way. I do not feel like I fall into this category. I don't think you need anything more than a glass of wine (or other liquid) and a loaf of bread (or other food form) in order to have communion and other than chalice and paton I have to look up the words for some of the other dishes that are sometimes used. I think it is completely okay to go off lectionary for a worship service, especially if you put in prior thought about your worship plans. And I don't have a problem with Christmas carols during Advent, or at least I thought so.
So as people gathered for worship at this UCC congregation, people suggested their favorite Christmas carols and we sang the first verse or two. And I was fine with this, until we sang "We Three Kings" And that just made me cringe. But I don't think it was so much a liturgy thing as a calendar thing. We Three Kings is sung at Epiphany in January and while it was the first Sunday of Advent, it was also still November.
2) The pastor preached for quite awhile, probably 25 or more minutes (aka 3 times my typical sermon length). He started off by having us sing "All I Want for Christmas" then talking about various gifts you can give people including....wait for it....a solar powered bikini! What! Apparently it has solar cells in it that catch the sun's rays while you are tanning and you can hook it up to charge your ipod or cell phone. Okay so I think he eventually went back to Jesus being the greatest gift and in Christ we find peace and hope and those are the only things we need for Christmas. But for me, I spent then next 10 minutes thinking about this solar powered bikini - are you able to get it wet? how does it hook up to your electronics and where exactly and how big are those solar panels?
So basically I was reminded that while sermon illustrations can often help people understand what you are talking about, sometimes they lead people into thinking more about the illustration and less about the point you are trying to make.
So that was basically my week in a nutshell - forging signatures, using 5 ovens and figuring out a solar powered bikini.
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