Category: faith

Most Thursday mornings, I go over to my church. In my mind, I’m going to hang out with my minister and a couple of people who are generally in the office on Thursday mornings. For me, this is “my time!” It’s a couple hours each week where I can put all (or most) of my stress, my obligations and my worries aside and just be among friends. We talk, laugh, tease each other, etc. That’s how I look at it.

But last February, at our Annual General Meeting, our minister really surprised me. Usually at our AGM’s, people are thanked for this and that and various things they do and what not. So, as Mike was going through his list of thank you’s, honestly, I was half zoning out and it took me a few seconds to hear him say: “I also want to thank Gerianne.”

My first thought was: “What the hell is he thanking me for?” He went on to tell people “Gerianne comes over most Thursday mornings and is with us in the office. She contributes ideas, gives feedback and input, helps us plan things like bible studies, our 3D family worship evenings, and so on. So, I want to thank Gerianne for her valuable contributions.”

I sat there thinking: “Wow! And I thought I was just hanging out. He’s making it into a purpose thing – with intent and value. That’s friggin’ awesome.”

What I didn’t have the chance to directly tell Mike that evening is how much I really appreciated his thank you and comments. As I said, he saw a purpose to the time I take “for me.”  Mike saw the bigger picture and my contributing to the life of our church.

Still, of course, when it comes to Mike and my relationship, there always has to be a punch line. So he ended his remarks by mentioning that in one of our bible studies, he asked us to journal our reactions to what we were learning. His last comment was: “And for those of you who didn’t like the journaling, y’all can thank Gerianne for having to do that, ’cause that was her idea!”

Recently though, I’ve been accepted into Teamwork’s Self-Employment Program, and as fantastic as that news is and as much as I’m looking forward to learning incredible things, since the program’s classes are all day Tuesdays and Thursdays, it means for 4 months I won’t be able to hang with my amigos. I know we all say: “It’s only 4 months.” But sometimes the possibility exists that “it’ll never be quite the same.” New “inside” jokes and “you know” things will naturally take place, and that’s to be expected. Still, it was nice to get this message from Chelsey when I got home from my first Thursday “away”: She wrote: “Weird without you today!” These words tugged at my heart-strings for a bit. Everyone deep down wants to be wanted and hopes they’ll be missed. It’s just nice to know that I was missed this week.

Just a random end thought. One of the things I very much love about the Presbyterian denomination (going back as far as I can remember) all of the clergy go by their first names. There is Mike, Sydney, Nancy, Kenn, Gwen and so on. There does not seem to be an attitude of superiority. Not very often do I meet a clergy where they introduce themselves as: “I’m Rev. so and so.” There is very much the attitude of we’re all in this together. No one is greater or less than, which is really nice if you think about it.