July 31, 2012

Pardon the extended break

Hi there!  It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted and there have been several good reasons for it.  We took 700 pictures during our three days at the Grand Canyon, and by we, I mean my husband took pictures from his new Nikon digital SLR camera, as well as me.  The kids and I took turns using are small digital camera to take pictures and, when the batteries on both of those were exhausted, my husband and I used our iPhone cameras.  And they are beautiful, breathtaking pictures, at least most of them.  However, they are mostly of rocks and, really, how many pictures of rocks do you need to see?  And which picture of rocks would interest all ten of you who read my blog?

But what pulled me away from pondering these "very important questions" was some work as a result of a my new role at church. I was asked to coordinate all of children's ministry for our church.  I had been coordinating the elementary group for the last six months to help the woman who had been coordinating the entire group for the last year as the church began.  Because our church is a church plant, we really only have two different children's ministry groups:  younger than five and 1st through 6th grade.   When the coordinator of nursery gave notice a month or so ago, our pastor asked me as co-coordinator to start praying for a replacement.  At that time, I felt God put a big bulls-eye on me for the job, but the idea scared me to death and I wasn't being asked, so I didn't volunteer. Coordinating this can be a big job, even for a church small enough only to have the children divided into two groups:  kids younger than six and elementary age kids.  However, whenever God targets you for a job, it is EXTREMELY difficult to avoid doing it.  Even running away didn't help Jonah.  After praying with my husband, who made me promise to step down as a teacher, we agreed that this was God's job for me at the church.  As soon as I was given the job, there were some big projects to complete in a short amount of time, mainly getting enough people helping out in nursery, train them and do the required background checks.  And thus The Blog That Would Be the Definitive North Rim Grand Canyon Picture and Commentary Blog was postponed for God's work.

And now, I am going to give a brief homage to the Children's pastor at our Illinois church, Jan Meuth.  I worked with Jan for roughly ten years, on and off, in between getting married and having babies.  I worked with kids from babies up to 5th graders to help her out.  At the her good-bye luncheon, I told her that I didn't work so long with her out of sense of duty, but because she always cast out such a wonderful vision for Kid's Ministry that you wanted to be a part of it. She could be detail oriented, but she was also good at recruiting people to work out the details of her vision.  She was so gracious and so generous with her wisdom and she was great at communication.  Her fingerprints, along with God's, will be all over the way I coordinate our Kid's ministry program.  I hope someday to be half as good as she was in my new role.  Thank you, Jan Meuth, for all you shared and taught me.  May God continue to bless you and your family.

2 comments:

Adrienne said...

Welcome back! This is articulated beautifully, I'm sure your friend Jan would be so proud to see the work God is doing in you now!

tandemingtroll said...

Thank you, Adrienne! I really enjoy your blog, too, though I don't always comment.