Catching Up

I just realized it’s been a week since I posted anything here.  Partly that’s because I haven’t really had anything to write about, and partly it’s because I just didn’t get around to it.

Last week the house really did expire out of multi-list and the phone and mail man have been kept busy with realtors wanting to pick up the listing.  We had one realtor over to “see if she could help us since we hadn’t been able to sell yet”.  She didn’t offer any great suggestions – just drop the asking price.  Unfortunately, I have to get a certain amount out of it, and if it means waiting until the market has improved or until I’ve paid off more of the mortgage, then so be it.  Not a happy situation to be in, but there it is.  We may put it back in multi-list and realtor.com as a “For Sale by Owner”, but not immediately.  We’ll probably test the waters again in late January or February.

Russell Jonas, Jim Finley and I spent Wednesday morning going through the Session goals and reconciling them with the council goals.  Looks like we have some work to do getting the councils to take ownership of the goals the Session made.  I’m still not happy with the whole process, but I have saluted smartly and marched out to do the bidding of the strategic planning group.

I’ve been reading Carol Howard Merritt’s newest book Reframing Hope.  It’s a wonderful roadmap to redefining the church as a both/and rather than an either/or.  She had done a lot of work on generational differences and has real, practical suggestions for allowing the church to be relevant to younger generations without alienating the Boomers and older folks.  I’ll do a better review of it here once I’ve finished reading.

Yesterday, I was Lay Reader for the 9:30 service and I used Romans 9:20-21 as the Call to Confession where Paul is convicting the people for wanting to tell the Potter (God) what they should be rather than allowing God to use them as God wished.  Elizabeth was preaching on the Jeremiah 18:1-14 text and the printed Prayer of Confession made reference the Potter, but the text and the sermon comes after the confession, so I figured they needed a little context for the prayer.  I used Romans 9:23 (edited) as the Assurance of Pardon.  All that was fine except I used the Jerusalem Bible as my translation and didn’t realize how sexist the language was until I was actually reading it.  I had a terrible time getting through it because I kept wanting to change “He” to “She” (at least once), but I was afraid somebody would rise up in protest.  Our congregation can manage inclusive language if they don’t realize it’s happening, but I don’t think they could handle “God – She” (at least not from the Lecturn).

I got a good laugh (internally) when someone asked Elizabeth if she thought Jeremiah was the reason Bishop Jakes had named his church “The Potter’s House”.  Ya think?

We’re off to my brother’s house this afternoon for a hamburger cookout.  It will be nice to see them.  Even though they live less than 20 miles away, we don’t get up to see them very often.  I’ll take lots of pictures and bore you with them tomorrow – I promise.