So today I went to the church to make copies of the lyrics for the songs for Crossflame tour (expect daily updates over tour- I'm going to hang out with the cool kids who stay up late and do bed checks at 12 [also, apparently I'm lame because I never left my room after the chaperons had gone to bed when I was on tour back in the day...] so I'm going to need something to keep me conscious after a full day of high school drama [so. bad. How did I stand myself when I was a high schooler? How does anyone stand kids who are in high school? Ugh] and other exciting times and I figure keeping up with my weblog is a choice way of doing that) which really entails at least an hour of standing at the copier in the church office and stapling.
My mom is the Childcare Coordinator at my church, so I know pretty much everyone in the office. They're some of my favorite people. I routinely lost everything from shoes to glasses when I was a kid, so I know exactly where the lost and found is and still check it every time I walk into the office. I know where the first aid kit is and I know where the janitor's closet is. In every building. I don't spend a lot of time in the Family Life Center where the kitchen and Fellowship hall are, or the youth building anymore. Really, I spend most of my time at church between the choir room, the sanctuary and the children's building and I normally just run in and out of the office. It was a little weird to just be chilling in there.
I printed up the 14 pages of lyrics and started copying them back to front. I was on page two, I think, when this guy came up with a paper in his hand and just kinda stood in front of the front desk. I smiled and went back to my copier (it was still on copy 27 of 50) and then walked over to the table where I was sorting the copies and picked up one of the books that was there waiting to be picked up for a bible study group. 23 copies later I picked up my original and asked if he needed the copier, since he was looking super expectant and rather impatient, and he said no, thanks. It was superbly civil. A page and a half later, he walked into the secretary's office and dropped off his resume for some position at the church. Darn copier lid. The only thing I heard was, "Are you still taking applications for [slam]?" Not helpful. And I probably could have just asked the secretary since she's probably the most awesome person ever, but I think I'll just do some detective work later.
Next exciting happenstance: One of the ladies in the church came up with the idea of sending handmade dolls to kids in Haiti after the earthquake. They just finished another batch and they're going down with a missionary group tomorrow, I think, so we had a blessing for them today. I was on page six when I got invited to go to the blessing which was being held in the sanctuary. So four of us and one of the pastors walk over to the sanctuary and there are the dolls, lined up on the steps to the chancel, right in front of the altar. They're mostly brown and black, but there's a red one, a yellow one, and, my personal favorite, a purple one with blonde hair. Best. Doll. Ever. There were also a couple with rainbow colored hair and a pair of twins, made by the pastor's wife, right on the front row. Our church likes giving away stuffed things for kids to play with- our youth director makes Build-A-Bears to give to kids in hospitals that we're taking on tour with us this next week. Spreading joy one snuggly face at a time. Or 79 at time. Whichever. So we blessed the dolls and prayed them a safe journey and I walked back over to the office.
One of the real chaperones for tour came in to get a form notarized and I failingly pitched my idea of getting reusable water bottles for the kids in choir so we could save the environment from the tons of plastic water bottles that we're going to drink over the next week (most of which aren't even going to be empty by the time they're thrown away... Chapel Hill has given me a recycling eye twitch). Hydration is important. So is having a planet for my epic and awesome grandkids. (I know they're going to be awesome. Hello. They're my grandkids) Anyway. I got all the pages copied and was working on stapling them together (maybe about 20 out of the 50) when Sunshine came in.
Thursday, and I always forget this, is Christian Aid day at the church. People bring in whatever they need help with and we see what we can do. I hate being the object of someone's generosity, but one day I'm going to grow a soul and I'm going to treat everyone like a normal person and not look at my feet when I walk down the hall past people who have the sense to ask for help when they need it. Anyway, Sunshine, who is a recently-hired waitress at IHOP (and now I can never tell my IHOP joke again... darn) is having some medical problems so she asked us to pray for her. One of our pastors was on his way out (annual conference is this weekend- party at Lake Junaluska! Goodness, I love my conference) but he stopped and pulled everyone in the office together in a circle to pray for Sunshine. She stayed and talked a little more with us after the prayer and said that her goal was to put some more positive back in the world, since there's so much negative out there. That is one of my problems. I can totally see the negative, but I never put any positive back in. So I'll be praying for Sunshine.
And Pastor Bill walked in to pick up something he had printed out earlier and his wife talked to the lady at the front desk while other conversations went on and I hummed the tunes to the lyrics I was looking at over and over again. It was a chill, sociable moment where I rehearsed again the back from college speech: "Oh, school's great, it's out for the semester!"; or "Yeah, it's nice to be home and take a break from classes. I'm a physics major, you know." "Oh, really? Wow." and small talk about physics; or "Yeah, I'm at Carolina. Oh, your son/daughter went there? Small world! I love it!" Those are the main variations. I avoid the "what are you going to do with that?" question like the plague. Free advice from one pastor: Go work for a while. Get out in the real world, see some things, do some things. You'll be better off for it. The plot thickens. And then people left to head out to the conference and I stopped humming because there wasn't anybody to cover up my voice.
I finished the copies and decided that the nicer thing to do would be to put them in the choir room because 1) we wouldn't leave them if I put them in an already packed crate and 2) I don't think they'd actually fit in the choir director's box in the office. So I borrowed keys (one of the goals of my life is make it so that the doors of a church don't have to be locked. Really? It's a church. Are you trying to keep Jesus out or in? I'm thinking locked cabinets for sound/ AV equipment and a locked closet for musical things that don't need to be stolen. Like pastor's offices and the sacristy, OK, sure, lock that mess up when no one's around, but I think we'd be OK if someone stole a pew bible. Geeze. *looks guilty but feels much better*) and I walked over to the choir room. Two cool points for Ron- he already has the sheet music packed up. So I put the lyrics in the sheet music crate and decided to cut back through the sanctuary to return the keys and get back to my bag.
Now, the sanctuary we have now is not the old sanctuary, it's the new sanctuary. The old sanctuary had the ugliest green carpet you've seen in your life, no middle aisle and these awesome stained glass windows. I loved it. I'm getting to love the new one, but I honestly probably liked it better when it was under construction and me and my little brother could go play around in it when we were supposed to be in big church... oops. Anyway, the new sanctuary is super super tall, with this ginormous cross up behind the choir back behind the chancel and this large dove stained glass window up above the balcony that only the choir and the pastors get to see on a Sunday morning. Why do you think I'm in the choir? Lord knows I can't sing and they don't need a flute/french horn player every Sunday.
I walked around the chancel and came to the first pew and leaned up against the little wall we have between the congregation and the rest of the church and looked up at the ginormous cross. Now, some people see God in nature, some in the stars, some in the faces of other people. I see God in buildings. Corners of buildings, actually. High corners of buildings, so I love me some cathedrals. I can't explain it, I don't know why, so don't ask me. It's not like God isn't in the other things, it's just that if you asked me what God looked like, I wouldn't say a sunset, I would say the ceiling of the cathedral in Dunblane. Anyway, me and God haven't been particularly tight because all I can ever think to pray about is what I'm going to do with my life and that's a touchy subject, so I really just end up walking away angrily. So I'm looking up at the cross and I notice that there's this little gap of white wall between where the brown behind the cross starts and the ceiling. I guess all that houses the pipes of the organ because the bigger, more impressive pipes are up by the cross and you can kinda see through it. They won't let me up there. Anyway, I found God and started talking about my future, but it quickly transitioned to Crossflame. I was pleasantly surprised.
And then it kinda hit me that the reason that I couldn't pray about anything other than my future is because I hadn't been caring enough about anything else to pray for it. Since November. It's amazing how God's got your back even when you're one of the bigger jerks in recent history. Sometimes, I don't think you need to pray for God's blessings, because He's already given it. Then sometimes I think that you should probably ask anyway.
And it's kinda crazy how the things that are driving you insane are the things that stop you from being insane. It's going to be a great tour.
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