Don’t flay the sheep.

What’s going on…

Rather than a Friday Five, just an update about what’s been going on:

• Too much working. I have violated my day off two weeks in a row now. This is bad. Partly, it means I am just plain busy. It probably means my time management skills aren’t as good as the could be. But, most importantly, I think it means that I am trying so hard to do so well and prove that I can be so good at what I’m called to do that I cannot simply let go of some things, delegate some things, or just let some details be. Notice all the “I’s” in that sentence. Somebody needs to get her spiritual ducks into shape.
• The really fun thing I did this week was prepare for the youth group’s Sunday night event, a cycle of prayer stations that I’ve been calling “winter soul”. I remember sort of hating this part of the year when I was in high school: Christmas was over, exams, no break in sight, cold, yucky, etc. (I liked it better when I lived in NY and there was a once-weekly school ski trip.) Preparation has been fun (but, I should have let some of the details go…) I’ll post more information about this event later, but for now, I’ll tell you that I’ve been doing things this week like: creating a giant roll of paper with paint-foot-prints on it; collecting little whit Christmas lights; making soundtracks for some stations. I love it that these eclectic things are part of my work!
• Trying to figure out where to go from here with the confirmation curriculum. I have big ideas for the future, but for now, I’ve got to figure out the rest of the year. I can decide what information is most important, and I wish I had a better handle on how to work on spiritual, rather than just intellectual, development with them.
• I’m officiating at my first funeral this afternoon. I would have officiated at my first funeral last week, but the sister of the deceased (not a church-member, but an out-of-town, referral-from-the funeral-home situation) asked for a more “fundamentalist” pastor after pleasant 10-minute conversation. I guess she had been a little nervous about me from the get-go because I was female (she said she wouldn’t even have talked to me if our administrative assistant had not referred to me as the associate for children and youth). The female pastor thing made her wonder how liberal I was, so she asked what I thought about salvation and I gave her a little speech that solidly acknowledged Christ’s role in salvation, but also admitted that there was some mystery about how it all works and we humans don’t really get the final say about who makes it and who doesn’t. Well, apparently, this didn’t go over too well with her, and she was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to present the gospel truth in conducting the funeral. I was grateful that she was nice about it.
• And, the biggie, Zora seems to have a cows-milk-protein allergy. This is just not fair–she’s been exclusively breast-milk-fed, she’s got a genetic background without food allergies, babies usually develop this a lot earlier than 4 months, etc. (Then again, the placenta previa wasn’t fair either…) So, she’s been on a round of special formula while we figure this out, and I’ve been pretty much attached to my pump non-stop to keep up my supply. This is exhausting, by the way. I’ve heard of moms who for some reason have to pump all the time, and I don’t know how they do it. I’ve also had to cut every trace of dairy from my diet. This is tough for someone from a family that guzzles milk (one of my sister’s friends used to chastise her dairy habit by yelling, “Milk is NOT a thirst quencher!” every time she reached for the carton.) You would not believe how many things have dairy in them, including…SOY CHEESE!! Basically, I’m now a vegan who eats eggs and meat.

Next week, I’d like to: work less, pray more, start feeding Zora again, and find some soy cheese without milk in it!

This entry is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.