bread for the day

Since March I have been serving a church regularly on Sundays following the retirement of their rector. A few months ago they approached me to see if I would be willing to spend a day a week at the church office to be available “in case someone wanted to talk to a priest,” and to make pastoral calls as needed. At the time I was being considered for another position to do a specialized kind of work called interim, or transitional ministry, which utilizes that “in between time” between clergy leaders to take stock of the parish’s situation, assess its health, address issues, grieve or separate from the previous leader and prepare for the coming of the next one. Transitional ministry is a process, and I’m good at process work and enjoy it.

The interim position ended up going to someone else, so this month I began to make plans to work with St. James’ to help them out with the additional time they had requested. There is a great deal to say about the situation, but for now it is sufficient to say that I’m grateful for the opportunity to be engaged in some aspects of parish ministry again, though I don’t want to resume that full time as I had before. The part time effort now should allow sufficient time to continue working to get my business going, and perhaps by doing both I can feed the “right and left” parts of my brain and the associated parts of my soul. The remuneration will also help reduce some of the financial stress we are experiencing, and that will be a good thing. (The stained glass image is not from St. James'.)

Today, I’m finally loading products into the new storefront database on the website, and it looks like we might actually be able to launch by the end of next week. Cross your fingers, say lots of prayers that I don’t experience too much “technical freeze,” and hope for the best with me.