Perchance to dream

During certain waking moments, when I am cooking or playing computer games especially I flash on images that come from my dream life---consistent images and feelings that accompany them, mostly about beginning an appointment in a small town someplace, with good people, tree lined streets and my heart singing with the goodness, the rightness of it all. I have found this year, as I have visited several of my small churches this spring, taking their new pastor (nearly always a student) to be introduced, thinking, "gee, I wouldn't mind serving here...as long as I could get cable TV and the church wanted to do some things"...Gee, I wouldn't mind serving at Polo; Gee I wouldn't mind serving at Hale; Gee, I wouldn't mind serving at Hardin...just to name a few. And I keep dreaming I am serving in one of these towns; yet it really isn't any of these towns; it's someplace I have not yet served, or someplace I already have. There is a joyful sense of possibility at this time of the year. On Thursday, I am going to get around to as many of the newbie pastors in Heartland North that I can, to welcome them.

I have had flashes of some VERY interesting things over the last few days:

--walking by The Bunker in Westport this morning and seeing that somebody had drawn tattoos up and down the arm (it's called a "sleeve" tattoo when it looks like that, right?) on the mannequins in the windows. I loved it.

---talking with Mark Turnbough yesterday who came in just to catch me up on what is happening at Liberty---and while I took a phone call, he looked at my bookshelves. He mentioned after I hung up (and after seeing a Flannery O'Connor short story volume on my shelf) that somebody had given him something of hers to read---from his description of it, it had to have been "A Good Man is Hard to Find." He read it, he said, and he was really depressed after he did. Just like about everybody else I guess who reads it. I told him I had used part of it as a sermon illustration one time...This was very interesting because to be frank, Mark may not be the first person who comes to mind who is one of my pastors who would be reading Flannery O'Connor. I loved it.

---visiting with a colleague and speaking about a very sensitive subject for many, the real presence of evil in the world (yes, I believe that darkness, given an entry by our own negativity, can invade a soul or a space, given the chance) and by golly, we both agreed about it, and my soul sang. You had to have been there. I loved it.

---Closing today on a refinancing on my Saint Simon condo loan, the notary public/realty person who came to the office to do this finished her work (how many times can you write Susan Cox-Johnson...and then write out all the other ways in my life that I have ever signed my name...that's a LOT of ways when you have a hyphen), she told me that she had been an A.M.E. licensed pastor (the word she used and that I have heard others use is something like liscenctuate or something like that)...she started in telling me about her experience. I got Yolanda in on it, and wow, the energy in Glenda, the notary/former local AME pastor was outta this world. It was really neat to see a business transaction transformed into a moment of sisterhood among us. I loved it.

--this morning I had coffee with Tim K., and we talked some about many things. What a joy to sit with Tim and talk. I loved it.

Enough. Of course there are things I have not loved as much this week, but for the moment, I will keep them to myself. And the Cards won tonight. Tomorrow, as my mother used to say, will be another day.