Minutes to Memories

It was quite a morning around the Ocean Springs Church of Christ, let me tell you...

It all began for me last night. We started using PowerPoint slides in our worship assembly a few months back, and our main slide guru called me around 9pm to inform me that he wouldn't be here this morning. Our backup slide guy is an elder/pediatrician who happened to be on call this morning. Our backup to the backup is our other elder, who is in Little Rock for Thanksgiving. The hits just keep coming, huh?

Well, the elder/pediatrician-on-call was there to run things this morning, while I crossed my fingers that he wouldn't be called to the hospital.

Then Miranda called ten minutes before worship began to tell me that her friend, Matt, wanted to be baptized this morning! This was great news, of course, but this would be our first baptism where we have to raise the projection screen and everything that comes along with that - so we scrambled to make sure we were ready for that...

It was at this point - two minutes past time to start our service - that I noticed that our deacon in charge of making sure people showed up to play their parts in the service did not show up for church today himself, and that about half of the folks who said they would serve didn't show up either.

Sigh...

But we started anyway, and everything went just fine (with the only exception being that the baptistery water was FREEZING cold, even though we installed a heater, but the man who installed the heater is the main slideshow guru guy, who was in Alabama).

Sigh again...

We had one other complication to work out at the end of the service. Pam, one of our friends/church family members, is moving to Dallas after about seven years living here. Pam has been through a lot in her life in those years, and today is her last Sunday with us before moving back close to her family. We are going to miss her a lot, and we hoped to make her farewell appropriate this morning.

When things like this occur, we have one of our elders pray over the individual along with giving a Scripture plate (from Mississippi Mud Works, pictured with Pam above). Of course, today, one of our elders was in Little Rock while the other was operating the slideshow while holding his beeper. Our plan was for he and I to switch out in the A/V booth during the last song, but thankfully, Keith stepped up to the plate and volunteered to finish out the service in the slideshow seat.

Worship is supposed to invigorate you, right?

But I'm exhausted.

My Sunday has been good, but I hope yours was good AND smooth.
:-)