Like the Energizer Bunny....

..... last week I just kept going and going, meeting with a young man who wants to be baptized, doing hospice calls, presiding at a funeral, going to community meetings, meeting with a baptismal family, having coffee with parish members, planning Bible studies. I also planned to attend (as always) our Synod Assembly last weekend, where we would introduce our churchwide Book of Faith initiative, a plan to get our congregations more deeply into reading and hearing and discerning God's Word in the Scriptures.

And I kept thinking, hmmm, I have a little sore throat.

And a little cough. But just at night.

But I wasn't sleeping all that well, because of the "little cough".

And on Friday I got sick. Really sick. I had to leave the Synod Assembly and go home. Actually, someone took me home. We went back and picked up my car on Saturday night.

On Sunday I went to church. I did feel much better, having slept and slept and slept. I also Prayed in Color for the first time, and found it a really meditative experience. Maybe I should have stayed home again on Sunday, but I just couldn't bring myself to miss Sunday serivces for the second time in a month. And I really really really wanted to be there for the baptism, for the little red-headed baby who would stare at me for the whole baptism, and whose fingers curled around mine.

After church, we drove out of town to my mother's home town, where several of my relatives still live. Let's just call it "the farm." It's down in southwestern Minnesota where my grandfather farmed, and where one of my uncles and his two sons farm now. Another aunt and uncle live in town, in my grandparent's house. Going there is like going home.

Scout went with us. She rides well. She had never been to the farm before. We haven't gone down there in years. Too busy. And I told my aunt, "I don't want to do anything. I just want to relax." She made hamburger stroganoff for supper.

After supper, she had invited everyone else in from the farms, for cake and ice cream, for my birthday. It was a little surprise.

Just for a little while, I could remember that I'm not the energizer bunny. I'm not. I'm a sinner, and a child of God, and I live by grace, and by God's love for me.

And the occasional cake and ice cream doesn't hurt a bit.