11 June 2007

"Where's Your Pastor?"

My weekend started off slowly and gained speed as the days flew by. I was a homebody on Friday night and most of Saturday during the day. I was ok with that, as it gave me time to recuperate from the week and also allowed me to purchase and figure out the wireless router for my laptop. Woo Hoo!!! This should be considered a pretty major accomplishment for me, since I still don't understand how to download a CD onto my computer. If this blog service didn't give step-by-step instructions, I would still only be thinking about blogging because I never would have figured it out on my own.

Saturday night I did venture out to meet Scott for dinner downtown at the BBC on Theatre Square. Even though Scott was a tired boy after working that day, we did enjoy the lovely non-humid weather by taking a short walk around the blocks and seeing the progress, or lack thereof, of some downtown redevelopment projects. Scott and I both have a big affinity for the downtown area and are excited about a lot of the things that are happening down there.

But Sunday was the big day, in several ways. The Kentucky Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church started that afternoon down at the Galt House. The past two times Louisville has hosted the conference my Mom was in charge of all of the volunteers and making sure all of the "behind-the-scenes" non-business related things were taken care of. It's a huge job and I and many others were drafted into service. While you sleep very little and have 300 different questions asked of you each day, it's also a lot of fun (or at least I think so). Well, this year Mom has a slightly different role at the conference, which means I'm not living down there for the next 4 days, but I'm still volunteering. I was there from about 1:45 until 9:45 last night. Ugh! And I'll be back there this evening, too, for our Ordination and Commissioning service.

Anyway, my volunteer spot is the information booth, and I had just taken up my post and was trying to get oriented when an older minister came up to me and said "Where's your pastor?" He knew what church I belonged to because it was on my name tag. Well, I was dumbfounded, at least for a good 10 seconds. You see, I had joined a new church Sunday morning - the first church other than the one I grew up in and was a member of for 34 years. While I'd been going to my new church for over 6 months, I guess I still hadn't quite thought of the minister there as "my pastor" just yet. It probably doesn't help that I've known my pastor for 20 years, and know him in many different roles other than as the minister at St. Paul UMC. So when the gentleman asked, I was slow on my feet and had to consider exactly who the man was asking about. Eventually my brain caught up with his question and I was able to give him the correct answer: "I don't know, I haven't seen him here yet." But it made me realize that I have a long way to go still in wrapping my mind around the reality of my new church family and the pain I went through in leaving my other one.

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