Blog Your Blessings Sunday

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.”

Wel­come back to On the Hori­zon! So glad you’re vis­it­ing again. Be sure to leave a com­ment and add any posts that you like to the var­i­ous social book­mark­ing sites using the links just below the posts. Thanks for stop­ping by!

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