I had a pretty bad night thanks to this cold and got very little sleep. This morning I had a very sore throat, pounds of congestion in my sinuses, and even my hair ached.
So we stayed home from church. It's been a year or more since we missed church on a Sunday.
I went out long enough to feed the goats and check on the chickens, build a fire in the stove, and then went back to my chair where I spent most of my day.
I did head into the kitchen late afternoon for my latest foray into the world of baking.
Snickerdoodles.
I made the dough balls too big by half so we got snickerpancakes.
Also, Pam said it would help to put the mixed dough into the fridge to cool before rolling them. That would prevent them from getting so flat when they bake. Yeah, pancakes.
But they'll taste the same. (yummm)
It is pledge week on our PBS station for the third or fourth time in the last couple of months. Tonight that list of specials included a one-hour Victor Borge show. Nobody else like him, ever. We laughed out loud and didn't need a sound track to get us to.
Last night I wrote about E because a FB exchange got me to thinking about her. It was in the wee hours of the morning when my mind went back to that point in my ministry and my mind went from there to what seemed at the time like the next logical mental stop:
Identify an individual in each of the churches you've served who taught you...anything.
I skipped over our "first church" because it was a total disaster that lasted for all of 18 months before I was unemployed and the church dissolved.
When thinking of the second church where we served for seven years I chose J, though I learned much from many of them.
J and his family began attending early in my tenure as pastor. Because he had management experience, had been a believer for decades, and showed a commitment to our small church he was asked to serve as an elder. I liked J and we got along well, even though he was about 15 years older than me (I was in my late 20's and early 30's at the time). In fact, I think he was the elder I counted on most, especially if a sticky situation arose, and that happened from time to time in that church, usually because one old guy, also an elder, opposed me at every opportunity. I could count on J to have my back when the other guys could be intimidated into silence by my nemesis.
Decades later I learned J was not who I, or anyone else at church thought he was. J was extremely skilled at leading a double life. He was a cruel husband and acted inappropriately with his step daughter. He lost his job not because of the ageism he told me about but because he was caught embezzling from the company and was given the opportunity to resign or face prosecution.
J died a number of years ago after having left his family to return to a previous relationship. I never saw him after we left that church because he left soon thereafter and was not present when we'd go back for visits. I'm glad, because once I knew who J really was I was (am) pretty angry.
His business gave away a nice kid's bicycle one year. Unknown to us, he entered our son in the drawing and told us about it when - behold! - our son's name was pulled out of the jar. That was a real blessing because we were dirt poor and couldn't begin to afford even a crummy used bike to replace the one that ... well, that's another story.
Yeah, he rigged that drawing.
I got played. J totally snowed me. The guy who was good to our family, supported me in elder meetings, and got our son a new bike was a crook, a mean husband, and a worse father. He wanted to be seen as a great guy and a spiritual leader, and he pulled it off. But he was a bad man in almost every area of life.
Yes, I learned from J. Not like E, who taught me about love and virtue. J taught me that sometimes wolves show up in sheep's clothing and that very bad people can look very good.
I also learned (and I have done this ever since) that before any man serves as an elder I want to talk in strict confidence with his wife. Yes, she might lie to me, but at least I will have given the truth an opportunity to emerge.
You can't judge a book by its cover, even when it's a very nice cover.
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