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I manage to squeeze in a nod to Outlander


July 8
United Methodist

Ben and I are both early people. If something starts at 10:00 (like this week’s church service), we aim to arrive at 9:45, and our anxiety levels increase exponentially for every minute after that. When I googled the location of this church, I misread '15 mi.' as '15 minutes,' not '15 miles.' We were both pretty anxious to find ourselves entering the building at 9:59. Not the church’s fault, but not the best attitude for us to have on visiting a new place.

If you’ve read more than one of these posts, you’ve probably (correctly) realized by now that I’m just a bundle of anxieties and insecurities. This process is making them worse, but I’m giving myself a blue ribbon for sticking with it.

We picked this church because several months ago, when I told a friend that my church was about to close its doors, she invited me. She’s a person with whom I agree about many things: our world view, our love of all things Outlander, our appreciation of a fine cup of coffee and a pastry. We were teachers together; we still get together occasionally to reminisce, and I figured that anyone with that kind of good sense knew how to pick a good church, too. Ben and I chose not to attend on their previous pastor's last Sunday, nor on their new pastor’s first Sunday, so it took us a while to get to this one.

Here’s something a little bit odd. Last Sunday (read about it here) we attended a UMC with a new woman pastor, and this Sunday was a different UMC, also with a new woman pastor. The odd thing: the women were perhaps clones of each other—both 60ish, sturdy women with pale, jaw-length bobs. If they were both in front of me in a line-up of felonious pastors, I’m sure I couldn’t pick out which one was which.

I’m not going to harp on this next issue for every post, but I will say that “passing the peace” is nicer when you actually know someone (my friend was right behind us) to pass it to. So perhaps I’ll just try to set that aside; presumably, wherever we settle, I’ll eventually know those people.
Competent music (humbly led), good sermon (Jesus as light of the world, nicely delivered), really pleasant breeze (the church can't take credit for that, though) making the service quite comfortable. This one is still on the list, but there are at least three more that we want to check out before we start Round Two. I’m having coffee soon with the friend who invited me, and I’ll have questions for her about some of the things on my list that I wasn’t able to observe. In the meantime, I give it an 8.5 out of 10.

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Comments

  1. Catrina BradleyJuly 11, 2018 at 2:54 PM

    I didn't love it, but didn't really mind "passing the peace" (I hadn't heard it called that until you started your church search) when I didn't know anyone, but now that I know pretty much everyone, it's fun. It usually turns into a mad house of mingling up and down the aisles. Our service is on the radio, and a senior adult shut-in used to tell me it sounded like a hen-house full of cackling chickens. Glad you found a possibility.

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