Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Ica and I just closed down Third Street. We got a wild hair that we’d walk down there. It was cold and a light mist blew on us, so the café au lait sure hit the spot. We found Jim Embry there, fresh back from his trip to the Slow Food Movement’s Conference, Terra Madre. We had a good hour long talk about where we can go after the information and contacts he gleaned over there in Torino. I have to say, we are a bit jealous of his trip!

We walked back home under a moon playing hide-and-seek with us. We have been talking a bit lately about how there is a lack of “conversation.” That is, most folks don’t have much to say. There’s not much room for serious engagement of ideas. As we walked home, we wondered how it is that most of our best conversations happen outside of the church. I mean, that’s good because we’re engaging with non-believers. But it’s also sad, because if people could get past having their ideas under scrutiny, we could all learn a lot and have a great time.

Any time you talk to Jim, you come back pumped up for gardening. I hope the idea of our garden can get bigger. Quickly. I don’t want to just grow stuff. I want to find better ways to draw growing and eating together. How can we share in the growing and the eating? How can we work in the dirt and sit around the table? This is where real, life-changing fellowship will grow. I wish I had a monastery, a place where I could take some of our hurting kids, put them down in a safe place where they could rest and flourish. In the meantime, the garden will have to do. But it will have to do better.

That was last night. Worship this morning was awesome. Rosario preached and knocked it out of the park. Lots of people at the altar. A few months ago I told Ica that this church plant thing was going to happen and then Roz would be preaching there every Sunday. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, you have to admire the heck out of a dude who does not juts go to the Bishop and say “I am ready for a church,” and then he gets sent to a place with a building and a budget. Instead, he goes and starts the whole thing. That’s what the church desperately needs. There was a time when guys like Roz needed to be sealed in glass, with a sign on it that says, “Break only in case of emergency.” You can’t train Rambo and expect him not to kill. The church needs it desperately. Anyhow, the other part of my feelings about Roz going on is that he has preached once a month for about a year now. It is really good for me to have the chance to hear the Word, because he always brings it.

Well, after the sermon, John went up to the altar. His first time. I asked him why he went up. He said, “I was praying for Joe-Joe.”

“What did you pray for?”

“That he would remember something about Mommy.”

A few weeks ago, Joe woke up crying in the middle of the night, missing Melissa. I held him and told him stories about Melissa, things he might remember. But he was just so little in all this. John was laying in the bed, not sure what to do or say. I guess he knew what to do this morning.