My Day

Doesn't that sound boring? Even though I know something will usually pop into my head to write each night for this blog (and for the NaBloPoMo challenge), sometimes it feels like I'm really reaching. Anyway, here goes "My Day."

This morning I drove down to Turley to take some cookies to the Community Center and visit Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa. Rev. Ron Robinson is the adviser for Unitarian Universalist students there and offered to show me around. We attended the daily chapel and had lunch. Since graduation is this weekend, they had their awards ceremony during lunch, so I also got to meet quite a few people, both faculty and students. It was so much fun to watch each professor give awards to the students they felt did the best work in their classes. Each gave awards of favorite books, so I got to make a list of some that sounded really interesting. Look out, Amazon, here I come.

I got a library card and some enrollment information, including schedules of summer and fall courses, with the intention of auditing a few classes. One interesting-sounding class meets each day, all day, for a week in October. What is perfect is there's an RV park right next door to the school so I could just stay there for that week instead of driving down from Bartlesville every day.

Ron and I talked quite a lot about a ministry possibility at a church fairly close to Tulsa. Their minister left earlier this year after a number of years with the congregation. However, after hearing more about the situation, I decided they - not me. It would be great experience for the right person, though.

I'm getting more and more excited about ministry again after a several-year period of being away from it. What's even better is now knowing and admitting what type of ministry I'm capable of doing and realizing there's no reason to settle for anything less (or more), just to be able to say I've done it. As much as I love preaching and planning services, it's a good step to admit to myself, and others, that I am not cut out for the rest of parish ministry, that my skills and capabilities and desires lie elsewhere. Right now it seems as if the pieces are slowly falling into place, and it's exciting to watch where the process is leading.

On the way back to Turley, we stopped at what I thought was The Dulcimer House to buy strings for my dulcimer. However, it turned out to be the owner's own house and they do business by appointment only. I was able to get the strings, though, because he was home, and we had a great conversation about dulcimers. He invited me to their dulcimer club that meets this Saturday, so that will be fun.

When I got back from Tulsa later this afternoon, there was a vase of beautiful, magenta-colored peonies on the porch. A friend brought them over earlier because she "thought I'd like them." I sure did - what a wonderful surprise! Very sweet.

And that was my day. Not so boring after all.

Chris