One last day on the bus, looking forward to visits with 4 congregations in the eastern part of the diocese. We are now done with all the longer stops and won’t have a chance to share many more stories. I find, however, that I have not found the venue to share one of my favorites, except with Sally Boyd, the local priest in Wright where this happened. So I think this is worth sharing with a wider group on this blog.
This last Christmas, I was invited to celebrate and preach the Christmas Eve service at St. Francis, in Wright. Sally was taking advantage of a well deserved opportunity to be with her gathered family on vacation. The small group of dedicated Episcopalians got organized, planned the service and then advertized it throughout their community, but no one knew if we would have more than a handful of participants. People in Wright, it seems, often are gone on the holiday visiting family and taking advantage of school being out.
When Chuck, Warren Frelund (the Region II Ministry Developer) and I arrived there were only three people at the church, but the coffee hour table was laden with goodies and we recruited a youngster who had great enthusiasm to acolyte. As we began our preparations, the church began to fill up. As I got instruction on blessing the Christmas candle in the Advent wreath, I counted upward of 20 people and thought, “This is really important. I’m so glad we could be here!” And the service went beautifully, with all the people singing out the old Christmas carols, a beautiful solo at the offering, and our faithful acolyte keeping an eye on me from several pews where he was enjoying different company. I noticed at one point he joined a gentleman sitting alone in a pew and wondered briefly about a single man in a church filled with family groupings.
At the end of the service, that single man came over to shake my hand and confided in me how deeply he had needed to be in church and hear the message of God’s love this Christmas Eve. His son had been killed just 6 weeks earlier as he was serving a third deployment in Iraq. His wife could not yet bring herself to leave the house, but he promised to take the words of hope he had heard that night home to her.
I cannot tell you how deeply this man’s story touched my soul. As a mother who has endured the long terrible wait for a child to return from war, my heart broke for this couple who would not know the joy of their son’s homecoming. I gave thanks again and again for the faithfulness of the little church in Wright who had incarnated in their community the gift of Jesus, reaching out to their neighbors with welcome and the message of God’s new life in our midst. And I thought then, as I know now, that this is why it is so important to support all our congregations, no matter how big or small. I am not wondering at all about the importance of the ministry of congregations like St. Francis. I only wonder how we can continue to empower them to follow what is so obviously God’s call.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment