This article, Our Sunday Morning Diaspora, from the “Grow Christians” website this morning hit a chord; so much so that I responded in a long comment: I am the Children, Youth and Families Minister at St. Chad’s Episcopal Church in Albuquerque, NM. I have been part of our “online” services as a musician and now as the Zoom-to-Facebook-Live traffic controller.…
Year: 2020
Ritual
I am 48.5 years old (tomorrow). And for whatever reason, this occurred to me this morning as I was waking up listening to NPR: I need rituals. The commentator was talking about how mental health professionals are working to help families connect meaningfully with their critically ill COVID-19 relatives. One health professional connected a nephew to his uncle and though…
Refreshed
I finished the previous post a few minutes ago. I’m not sure I got a night of great sleep last night, but I feel better this morning. Partially, I think it’s because of a set of emails I reread from three friends in response to an email I sent to a group as this all started. I know that part…
Tired
I am so tired. I don’t know if it’s tired of pandemic “stay at home” orders, or tired because of allergies, or tired because of depression or just tired. When I was in the depths of depression when Catherine was little I sometimes didn’t feel like I had the energy to cut up an apple. Today I slept on the…
Overwhelm
Remember Distraction? That should be the name of my web browsers. Right now I have five browser windows open–four Chrome and one Edge. Within all these browser windows I have 46 different web pages open. It’s kinda like the web browser version of hoarding. I might “need” what’s on each of these pages for some reason, so I don’t close…
Distraction
In 42 minutes–at 10 am–my church is doing its second Facebook live session of worship since “social distancing” began. Now it’s 31 minutes. I sat down here before 8 am to rework a lesson on John 9:1-41 for preschool-5th grade kids and it was going well for a while. Then our choir director texted that she was sorry she could…
On a lighter note!
The only person I have shared this blog with is Natalie. I was just looking through my list of posts and wondered if someone started reading if they would think I’m such a whiner! So here’s some wonderful stuff that’s happened lately: Because life has slowed, my anxiety is better. Being in the hospital with Catherine was an “in the…
Ministry
Until I woke up this morning knowing I “need to” plan for some sort of distance ministry to my church families, I was feeling pretty relaxed. My “to dos” were things like sort a huge pile of papers that I’ve been avoiding, make sure we had the ingredients for pancakes and make sure dinner was made. Now my “to dos”…
COVID-19
I know it says something about me that I felt immense peace and maybe even giddiness as our little world shut down because of COVID-19. Now that I have a kid crying in the shoe closet, denied a birthday party, I feel more conflicted. I keep reading articles that are vague in how strictly we should be quarantining–probably because no…
Relationships
Recently I was listening to a podcast titled “Emotional Currency” that argued that money really is about relationship. If there wasn’t an “I’m giving you something to get something” sort of thing, we’d all be alone. The podcast mentioned the illogicality of gift-giving. It makes more sense to keep your money and buy yourself something you like while your “friend”…