WIDTW
(What I Did This Weekend)
There’s a saying “While the cat’s away, the mice will play” and I suppose that applied to this past weekend. While Alison was away at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival I decided to “get my geek on” and attend the St Louis Code Camp.
A couple of weeks ago I got a call from the church I volunteer with asking if I would speak at the Sunday service at the Garden Villas retirement home that week. It was Wednesday and I told them that I didn’t feel like I could do justice to a topic with that little preparation time. Honestly speaking, I could probably have done it and that was just a very believable excuse, meaning that I didnt have to move other things around to fit the sermon preparation in. After I hung up it was as though I heard a clear voice say, “Now, if they call back, you need to say yes” so it was NO surprise when I got a call a few minutes later. God has a way of calling us on our excuses – calling our bluff as it were!
So, I was prepared for John (one of the church elders) to ask if I would reconsider the decision, and preach that Sunday. Instead he gave me an extra week offering me the Sunday after. After hearing the internal challenge, how could I refuse?
Last week I had a call in the middle of this week from my own church pastor asking if I would stand-in and do the bible reading in our church service. Sunday looked to be busy. Then I got a call from John saying “oh, never mind, our regular volunteer is able to make it after all” about the preaching opportunity. What do you do at that point, especially when you thought you heard God challenge that you needed to accept the preaching assignment and been working in earnest to prepare a sermon? I was clearly disappointed but then I realized: the end result is something that I’ve wanted to have for a long time now! I am now a full month in-hand (sermon for this month, and the following, planned and prepared) and no longer feel like I am living hand-to-mouth (as it were).
Saturday’s Code Camp was a riot! It was so much fun to get together with other highly technical folks and talk “shop”. We swapped horror stories, victories, advice and news. I bumped into several folks that I used to work with and got the chance to catch up. I ended up being a groupie to Kyle Cordes, of Oasis Digital Solutions Inc, as I went to both of his talks (“Selling your Software as a Hosted Service” and “Flying Boxes – a case study of a filthy rich client user interface”). Somewhere during the “Object Oriented JavaScript” talk my brain announced that it was full and would be going offline for maintenance. That was it for the day; I sat out of the final session with other similarly brain-fried folks as we talked about life in the trenches as consultants in large corporate offices. A nice way to wind down.
The weekend as a whole was busy. When it wasn’t busy, and I found myself alone, that was when it got complicated and less-than-pleasant. I’ve been on work related business trips before. I’ve been away a few times, but each time I amazingly busy the whole time and was with other people almost all of it. This weekend was a first. I was alone. Alison was out of town. It felt like I was missing a limb! Preaching at a retirement home brings me into contact with folk who’ve lost a spouse. They use phrases like that but I never had a real sense before of how it must feel. Well, yeah, now I do. I experienced for a weekend (despite knowing deep down that she would be returning) a visceral ache of loss. I experienced a taste of what some people live with the entire rest of their lives. I never realized what Alison meant when she said how much she hated the feeling of me being out of town on business trips. Not until this weekend. Somehow these things went from head to heart, from intellectual assent to personal experience.
We make a point of eating together – even if that means that we hit a fast-food establishment as we both run from one thing to another in a given evening. The worst times for me this weekend were meal-times. I simply couldn’t face eating if it meant sitting at a table alone. I grabbed some pizza at the Code Camp and a couple of random snacks, but mealtimes were the worst. Habits are good. Family mealtimes really bring a sense of “togetherness”. This weekend proves that they have become integral to life itself. Whatever else I face in a day I always know I can look forward to an hour or so of connection. Take that connection time away and I’m lost! I was so grateful, after enduring Friday night and Saturday, that I got invited out to eat by some folks from church for Sunday lunch. I didn’t have to eat alone.
Oh, speaking of Sunday. The sermon I’d prepared and didn’t use (postponed until the end of June now) was an encouragement to really appropriate the forgiveness of God, and the power of regret to hold us back from reaching the goals that God’s set for us and that we were called warts-and-all (from Philippians 3:7-14). In church, our reading was Luke 7:36-48 … a woman whose sins were forgiven after she anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume … and the pastor spoke on really appropriating the forgiveness of God, and the power of regret to hold us back. It was such an encouragement, after such a tough weekend, to feel like I’d heard God’s heartbeat for his people. Whatever my mixed bag of motives are, it felt like a nice confirmation that I had heard correctly, I had chosen the right topic, and to keep pressing on & not second-guessing myself.
What a weekend!