The Grammar Commando Visits

Actually I shouldn't really be the Grammar Commando, because I'm really not that picky about grammar as long as you say what you mean to say. (I'm all in favor of splitting infinitives and dangling prepositions like fish bait.) It's the unintentionally humorous misspellings that get me.

Like this one: "I will email you privetly."

THIS is privet:

I guess a "privet" email would be like the little hedge postbox in Little Women.

An email sent to an individual rather than a list would be a private email.

Guest Post at Faith Permeating Life

I have a guest post on "What Marriage Means to Me" over at Faith Permeating Life today. Thanks for the opportunity, Jessica!

And I'm going to post a real post over here soon, I promise. DOB's parents are visiting and things have been busy.

Anniversaries

Easter, despite being a movable holiday, has become an important anniversary for us, and one whose significance has grown over the years.

It was the day, nine years ago, that we got engaged. It was the night before Easter, three years ago, when we began a line of questioning and seeking that would take us far afield and bring us home again. It was Easter last year that we invited our children to join us as part of Christ's body.

This year on Easter, we officially joined the church we have been attending for the past year and a half. It probably looked like a pretty obvious step for many--one lady commented she had thought we had been members all along. We show up for all the services, we read and sing and teach. But for us it was a big step to join, to state that we had found a place and a people we were confident enough to commit.

Growing up in the more conservative sort of evangelicalism, I always thought the mainline churches were just "country clubs" where people didn't really believe all that any more, but just went to church out of habit. I'm sure there are many that are like that. But we've found a place where the Good News is still proclaimed faithfully, and where we can hear it and live it in a generous way that has room for struggles and differences.

One phrase that was new to me on coming into the Lutheran tradition is "remembering your baptism." The Lutheran view of baptism is that of God acting through the water, setting his seal on us. Instead of being challenged to try harder, to recommit our lives, to promise God more, we remember that God already did it all, we recognize that God has guided us this far, we look for how God is working now, we know that it's still all God.

So today I'm remembering with gratitude the way God has spoken to me, through the places I have been, through the churches I have attended, through my baptism when I was eight, through my parents' teaching, through God's people and His world and people who don't see God as I do but have yet grown my faith anyway. 'Tis grace has brought us safe thus far, and grace shall lead us home.

It's All About Timing

Last night was the Maundy Thursday service, which involves foot washing and solemn music and prayers.

Well, there was a lighter, if slightly awkward moment, during the children's sermon when the pastor, trying to illustrate the drama of Jesus' washing the disciples' feet, asked, "If the President were here, would you let him wash your feet?"

Whereupon one young boy piped up, "No, I wouldn't, 'cause I don't like the President, cause he lied this one time and . . . " (Our church is, I suspect, politically diverse but definitely not one where politics comes up in conversation much.)

But everyone expects lighter moments during the children's sermon and especially from this kid, who had also volunteered, when the pastor asked for examples of unimportant jobs, "Pastor!"

So the service had moved on to quiet, solemn prayers and music and it was to end with DOB singing a song, which I was supposed to accompany, and then, just at the last verse of the last song before it, Dot uttered those five little words which no mother of preschoolers delays to respond to for anything.

Still, perhaps there was time. So I swooped her up silently, figuring to steal rapidly out the back and return before the current round of music and prayers were done.

Only I neglected to calculate on the life-sized cross propped in the back of the sanctuary. As I swooped Dot out of the room, I clonked her forehead full-on against the cross-piece. Fortunately she was so startled and intrigued by the suddenly falling cross that she didn't actually scream, but then I had an urgently-needing-to-depart preschooler and a large crashing wooden object on my hands and the music running out.

I propped it up long enough to last until some attentive folks came to properly right in and then I dashed onward and got all my laughs out while Dot was in the bathroom and walked serenely back in just in the nick of time.

Thoughts on Cleaning Off My Desk

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

So that's why I couldn't find any pencils.

I hope the IRS never audits me.

No bag in the shredder and I bought the wrong kind of bags at the grocery store. I am thwarted by myself at every turn.

Found the timer. If I could find the camera cord too, it might be worth all the suffering.

I hate Sunday School teachers. And everyone else who gives children anything but nutritious food that is consumed immediately, with no wrappers. I guess that makes the Costco aisle ladies my only friends.

The sun is shining! The children are playing outside! I can see my desk!

I never did find the camera cord.