Thankful Notes (#325)
Today was good and hard. It was good because we got some important things done. It was hard because some of those important things weren’t easy.
We planned for an early staff meeting first thing in the morning with everyone. This Friday is our first Campfire Gathering event, so we had some details to work out and assignments to make. I also shared about my concern/anxiety about our tentative plan to start having indoor in-person services in August with limited numbers.
To be honest, I wish I knew what to do… but I’ve never lived through a global pandemic before and I’m just trying not to kill people via church services.
Being honest isn’t always easy. And saying “I don’t know” isn’t being weak or copping-out.
We also had a staff clean-up day planned because the church playground was overrun with tall weeds and some of the equipment had been broken. Pulling weeds is not exactly hard work but it’s not exactly easy either. We worked hard together and got it done.
The reward was seeing our campus come back to life and no longer look on the edge of apocalyptic… and also, pizza. After sweating and doing a bunch of manual labor, pizza is the perfect reward with its bread and sauce and cheese!
Not long after our pizza reward, the USDA Food Bank delivery arrived, and it was time for all-hands-on-deck to unload and unpack and organize and refrigerate the dairy and produce. Again, this work isn’t terribly hard… it’s just manual labor (and I think it will be one of my happy memories of the pandemic).
I’m an Enneagram #5, which is often called the “Observer” or “Investigator.” Basically, #5’s have a rich and complex interior life and are generally pretty satisfied to live within the safety of their own “mind castle.” This is true for me… I always have a lot going on in my mind and I don’t often feel the need to say much about it.
However, there are a few things I’ve been thinking about and I do feel a compulsion to say something about some of these thoughts I’ve been kneading like dough in my brain. There are three different rounds of dough (thoughts) I’ve been working on and they are not necessarily connected, so I will just share them as individual potential loaves of bread… like a baguette and some ciabatta and some naan.
Here’s a preview: the baguette thought is “I’m happy to be a sheep,” and the ciabatta thought is “nowhere to lay our head,” and the naan thought is “news outlets.”
The “I’m happy to be a sheep” thought comes from my… Read More
