Thank You

First, a quick update on our building, for you who are wondering:

Four rooms were primarily affected: the upstairs kitchen and meeting room, and the bride's room and adjacent storage closet on the main floor.  Everything has been cleaned up, dried, and dehumidified, and once we know exactly what we are looking at from our insurers, we'll get started on bids from contractors and carpeting specialists to restore what was lost.  Everyone seems to have taken the flood damage largely in stride...I may well have been the one who took it the hardest.  As I explained to the congregation during a town hall meeting yesterday (for the purposes of outlining everything I just paraphrased here), I think I took this whole matter personally, as though this was meant specifically to get me down, even though it was nothing more than a freak act of God.

I had already been fragile because of a few hurtful interactions with people outside the congregation (seriously, even if a pastor isn't YOUR pastor, please be nice to them), and in some ways, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.  I was convinced that we would get distracted by this, lose all sorts of momentum that we had been building up towards with the September launch of all of our activities and groups, and so on.

None of which, of course, proved to be accurate.  Our Sunday Schools, our Bible studies, the rebooted youth group, all of it is humming along just fine.  The only program directly affected was our upcoming Children's Church School, because we had to turn their classroom into an impromptu storage closet to salvage everything in the affected rooms.

And while their pastor was staging a nutty, my congregants kept on keeping on.  I can't say enough about how much more resilient they were than me during the past two weeks...so much so that several of them saw how the whole matter was affecting me and offered me the sort of emotional support that I am typically there to offer them.

So, to y'all who did reach out to me to be a source of emotional and spiritual support over the last couple of weeks: thank you.  There are many of you, both inside and outside of the congregation.  Know that your thoughtfulness and care was appreciated by me.

And I'm back to writing.  I have a number of posts lined up for the upcoming weeks, and I look forward to getting back to blogging as a regular part of my ministry.

As they would say on The West Wing...break's over.  What's next?

Yours in Christ,
Eric