Food is Love

And now it has been almost eight years since I wrote in this blog. We have lived through a global pandemic. The kids are all adults, living on their own. Three of them don't go to church. One goes to the Unitarian church. Of the three who don't go to church, two are matter-of-fact and one is downright ugly sometimes. But God has no grandchildren. They're adults. I did my best. It's up to Him.

As for me, I go back and forth between believing and not believing. It makes no sense to believe, and yet sometimes I feel it. But I go to church anyway because I like it and I like the community. I am definitely no longer Roman Catholic and quite assuredly Episcopalian. In fact, I'm being received into the church next month, in spite of the fact that sometimes I believe and sometimes I don't.

Let's see: 

1) I am the head of the lay eucharistic ministers for our church.

2) I am on a cooking team for our Wednesday night suppers.

3) I am a food shopper for our grab-a-bag ministry.

It seems all of my ministries involve feeding people, whether literally or symbolically. That is not surprising. Food is love.

Whoa.

I had absolutely completely forgotten about this blog.  It's been four years since I posted.

FOUR YEARS.

I just read through it all and I'm so happy I did.

I still go to my "new" church.  I spent all the years in Women's Bible Study.

My kids sometimes go but mostly don't.  My husband is now a Chreaster. (How do you spell that, anyway?)

I am still a little child.  I am less of a sheep.

Mission trip teen told her older sister to get out of bed and get to church because "you need some Jesus."

God is good -- all the time.

Daughter headed on a mission trip last week to a large inner city area with our church's youth group.  She hasn't been interested in church for a long time, but she is motivated to help the poor, and that was enough to get her interested in the youth group for the trip.  She has come home rejuvenated, and actually told me she prayed for something to happen, and it did.

I am tickled.

God's plan

God's plan for someone close to me has been remarkably obscure over the past few years.  It is very hard to trust when you never get even an inkling of a break, when you can't see any light, when you can't even find the tunnel.

I want to trust.  I want to.

But some days it is just effing hard.

Because of Thanksgiving, all four of my kids were home for the weekend. I had placed a lot of importance on the idea that we would all six be together in church on Sunday for the first time in over a year, so when the teenagers started fussing about having to get up early and go, I was teetering right on the edge of tearfulness.

In the end, we all got there, mostly on time. But we had to sit in two different pews--ironic, yes?

The one who never sings, prays, or participates in any way? Well, I was grateful she was there, of course. But then I was pondering how when she she received communion, that would impart a little grace to her whether she liked it or not -- AND SHE DIDN'T GO TO COMMUNION!

Part of me was quite sad; part of me knows she is a little wanna-be rebel. Of course I said nothing, but my mother's heart grieved a little.

Then, twenty minutes later, the youth minister is telling me that she needs the deposit for this child's mission trip. WHAT?

I think she is a girl of action, not abstraction.

And I think God has no grandchildren.

Had a long conversation with a friend from our old church this week. It seems that the reasons we left that parish were just one facet of some major dysfunction going over there; and in the year and a half since we left, things have really fallen apart.

I am relieved in one sense because we "got out," so to speak. But I am tremendously saddened for the parish itself. Apparently there are actually cliques and battle lines being drawn and all that nonsense. I've heard of dysfunctional parishes before but never really been part of one (though you could argue that I was part of a hugely dysfunctional denomination, I suppose).

Sigh. I am so grateful that God loves us despite our frailty, both personal and institutional.