Blog Your Blessings Sunday

by Hopeful Spirit on Sunday, February 11, 2007


I am very late get­ting this posted! That doesn’t mean I’m not grate­ful and don’t have bless­ings to enu­mer­ate here. Oh, I do! That’s part of why I’m so late.I am grate­ful that the Divine Cre­ator has been work­ing on my heart. You see, I have a lot of friends and even some rel­a­tives who still belong to the church I left. And that can make things kind of awkward.

Among the ways that I served my for­mer con­gre­ga­tion was set­ting up the for­mat­ting for the weekly bul­letins and then proof­read­ing what the church sec­re­tary input each week. Every week what she for­warded to me was a mess … I spent a lot of time putting my orig­i­nal tem­plate back in order, not to men­tion cor­rect­ing typos, spelling, punc­tu­a­tion, gram­mar and use of lan­guage errors. I did the same thing with a weekly pub­li­ca­tion out­lin­ing all of the church’s upcom­ing activ­i­ties and events, as well as the prayer list.

I also cre­ated and main­tained the church’s web­site. When I left, given that I was smart enough to main­tain own­er­ship of both the domain name and all con­tent, I sim­ply shut the site down.

Tonight I went out to a musi­cal event with a cou­ple of rel­a­tives, one of whom had attended wor­ship this morn­ing. They asked that I come meet them at their house so that we could drive together.

I walked into my rel­a­tives’ house tonight and there on the kitchen table was the bul­letin from this morning’s wor­ship, as well as sev­eral weeks’ worth of the announce­ment publication.

Inter­est­ingly, they ran a blurb about the fact that I am no longer par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­duc­tion of those doc­u­ments. They also noted that the web­site I cre­ated and main­tained for some six years or so is “no longer operational.”

Did they thank me in print for my ser­vice or acknowl­edge the count­less hours I spent on those projects in any way?

No.

I just shook my head and said “thank you” to the Divine Cre­ator for once again show­ing me that my depar­ture was absolutely the right thing for me at this time in my life.

They did note, how­ever, that they are in the process of set­ting up a new web­site that will be oper­a­tional on some unspec­i­fied date. Appar­ently, they have secured a new domain name which was printed in very large let­ters on the front of the bulletin.

It was spelled wrong.

I even said “thank you” again when one of my rel­a­tives was yam­mer­ing away in the car about a cou­ple of things said by the nox­ious pas­tor dur­ing wor­ship this morn­ing. I wanted to scream, “Why are you talk­ing to me about this when you know I don’t go to that church any longer? I don’t want to dis­cuss this, given that it has absolutely noth­ing to do with me!” Instead, I just bit my lip, did not respond to the com­ments and changed the sub­ject as soon as possible.

Thank you, Divine Cre­ator, for tak­ing me away from all that strife, ten­sion, dys­func­tion­al­ity and evil, thereby allow­ing me to focus my efforts on devel­op­ing a closer rela­tion­ship to you.

And in the future, when I am with my rel­a­tives, would you please make them be silent about their atten­dance at my for­mer con­gre­ga­tion? For that, I would be very grateful.”


Tech­no­rati Tags:

You might also like:

{ 2 comments }

1 MsDemmie February 12, 2007 at 1:45 am

From what I have read you are indeed blessed to be away from it all.

Happy BYB Sunday

2 Viola February 16, 2007 at 6:36 am

I’m glad you are not there anylonger.
And why did your relatives feel it necessary to show you those bulletins? It’s like rubbing it in your nose …kind of things. That was too bad!

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: