The only thing I don’t like about preaching is the way God seems to hold me to account for the things that I say. This walking the walk thing is hard! While you haven’t heard Sunday’s sermon yet, it focuses on the difficulties many of us have in receiving a gift, which gums up the works on several levels. You’ll see what I mean on Sunday.
So I should not have been surprised that my move has tested my own ability to receive. It started small—the lovely flowers (and cat treats!) and notes of welcome, and an offer from Sue Powers to bring dinner on Tuesday night. With everything still on the Cape until Wednesday, I was more than grateful. But then it got harder.
On that sweltering day, I eagerly went up to the bedroom to turn on the air conditioner. The cord didn’t reach the plug. “Hi, Sue? When you come with dinner, do you have an extension cord you could bring? Oh, and an adaptor?” Of course, a wonderful dinner with an extension cord chaser was immediately given. But now I had to put someone out. it was only the beginning.
The past 36 hours have been a constant parade of people giving to me of their time, advice, food, and service, some of it planned, much of it not. Jim Clayton, Colin Simson, and Frank Leathers were all on the floor of the parsonage kitchen, trying to figure out why the refrigerator was leaking (it’s fixed now), Sue helped to unload my overpacked car, and every bit of information I needed was just a text to Sherry Miller away. And I needed a lot. So much for serving a congregation. You were all serving me!
But the biggest one was Wednesday night. The boxes were all in the house, the cats delivered and in hiding, and I scrambled to eat the food graciously left from the night before, take a shower, and find something to wear to the Backyard Blessings, which is a gift from Pam Reeve and Sue DiMarzo to all of us at Crawford. I was running late. I got in the car. It wouldn’t start.
The day before when unloading my car, I had managed to bump the switch for the cargo light without noticing. Now a day later, it had drained the battery. It was advertised that I would be at the Backyard Blessings, and I started frantically texting and calling to try to get word to Pam. Sue Powers was soon on the road, giving up her own quiet time of reflection to pick up the pastor who was supposed to lead a church but couldn’t manage to start her car.
I arrived, frazzled, just as Pam was beginning the closing time, after which she didn’t miss a beat and patiently walked me around to the blessing stations, shining her phone for me to read in the dark. Once that was done, Susan Blomquist volunteered that she and Jim would bring me back and jump the car. Which they did, in the dark. They even had to help me find the switch to open the hood of my own car. Jim had already been at the parsonage almost non-stop to help with my electrical outlet and air conditioning issues, to haul away junk, tweak ceiling fans, break down boxes, and all sorts of other things that I never expected to need, but did.
And so I skid into the end of my first week in ministry with you, and you are the ones ministering to me. Gift upon gift, blessings upon blessing, going above and beyond when you’re tired and stretched yourselves. These days have been the definition of grace—that unmerited gift from God to all of us and channeled through each of us as we complete the circle of giving and receiving. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but nobody gets that blessing until someone is willing to accept the gift. It takes two.
It can be hard to receive, especially when raised in this culture of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. “No, no…I can do it.” Except when you can’t. But by opening up to receive the gifts of others we eventually learn to accept the gift of grace from God, the greatest giver of them all.
Thank you for your warm welcome to Crawford. I hope to return the favor.
Blessings,
Anne