Unfortunately Mr. T. won’t be bursting through our tv screen to say those immortal words.

 

Why? Because we have no TV signal.

 

Our internet has been a little buggy of late here in the beautiful parsonage. Today a comcastic geek technician came and unclogged our intertubes. Actually he gave us new ones! New coax cables, new splitters, and a promise of a whole new line from the node on the street to our house so we can attain absolutely screaming feedspeeds!

 

That’s all good.

 

Unfortunately he borked our cable tv signal, or at least I think he did, or at least there’s no signal anymore. All we get is a blue screen of death on our set.

 

This won’t begin to matter to me until I try to watch TruTV and can’t. But it matters to my wife who wanted to watch the Olympics tonight. My reply was, “What Olympics?”

 

I did try a few incantations in the general direction of the TV. Alas, they availeth nothing.

 

So another geek technician has been summoned. He or she will purportedly materialize between 5 and 9pm tomorrow. Let’s hope we have both tv and internet when he or she finishes.

Well, not died really, but went to sleep. For the last 12 hours and change, if you stopped by all you saw was a white space with “this blog is inactive” at the top left.

Inactive is a wordpress euphemism for taken down. When I navigated around the back end to my wordpress dashboard I saw that serotoninrain had been deactivated because they believed I had violated their terms of service.

Was it because I said my copier was a piece of crap?

Was it the fact that I have status messages?

Or could it have been… SATAN!

Whatever it was, I immediately began repeatedly emailing wordpress through whatever channel I could find, with ever decreasing amounts of patience. Finally about ten minutes ago I received an email with an apology and a “we’ll never do it again” promise. I’ll believe it when I don’t see it.

I’m not much appeased, I can tell you. It’s like with twitter and how it, you know, doesn’t work. At some point it doesn’t matter that it’s a free service because it’s gone so much it might as well not exist.

I was well into a search for another host when the apologetic email arrived. Who knows, I may still bolt, but I’ve decided to sleep on it and see if my blog is still here in the morning.

In the meantime, let me reiterate what I’ve said before: there will never be an ad or even a tip jar on serotoninrain regardless of the host. I will never post for money (though I will link to the articles I write for 422 Business Advisor and I am paid for those). Finally and most importantly, I will do my best to make each and every post as completely devoid of interest as I possibly can. I think regarding that last item, that I’ve done a pretty darn good job so far!

So there.

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I now live on rural route 6, which I sometimes deliver.

It is the most rural of all the places I’ve lived, but that’s not saying too much. My family lived in the city of Trenton, NJ until I was five. We moved to the suburbs after that and I’ve lived in suburbs ever since.

My wife’s is a different story. Her family lived in suburbs or small towns most of her life, until shortly after we graduated from college. Then they moved to the house my father in law built with his own hands (not to mention his own wood from his own land, sawed on his own sawmill…) in very rural, extreme northern, Almost New York, PA.

Needless to say my wife thinks we’re still living in the suburbs.

But in the suburbs, as I’m quick to point out, one doesn’t typically see a sunset like this. And if one does see such a sunset, there is probably not a chicken barbeque sign in the lower right of the frame.

 

Nah, this is country livin’.

…is the super short homeward commute!

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I have a real office now. & what’s even better…

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Yesterday I ran headlong into disappointment.

When I was suddenly and surprisingly appointed to this church in May the district ministry supervisors told me that I needed to go to local pastors school as soon as possible. So, I registered immediately.

There is a process for a candidate like me and local pastor’s school was a little further down the checklist from where I was at that point. Still, they said go and I went. At school the instructors and the dean all told us that once we successfully completed licensing school, that result would be forwarded to the bishop’s office in our conferences. The bishop would then issue the license.

I knew that I wasn’t getting a pass on the intervening steps. No skipping. But I thought, like my appointment, that my license would be issued pending  continuation through the process, which I fully intend to do.

That brings us to yesterday when I called the district offices to find out when I might expect that license. See, the license indicates my authority to administer the two sacraments (baptism and communion) in our church. Baptism isn’t much of an issue right now in our congregation, though I’m hoping to change that. Communion however is a regular occurrence. I’ve been holding off on it until such time as I could officially consecrate the elements.

What I found out yesterday is that I cannot be granted a license until some of those intervening steps have been completed. Chief among them is a psychological examination. Because we’re on Methodist time here, the process of applying for the exam, taking it, getting the results, and then meeting with the committee on ministry can take up to SIX MONTHS!

It’s a minor incovenience. For communion, it simply means that I need to have the elements consecrated by someone who is legal before they are served. Nonetheless, this information really took the wind out of my sails. I’m not sure why. I guess it was the conflicting information I received from people who are supposed to know what they’re talking about. I was looking forward to seeing that license in my hand, and also serving my charge fully. Until I can do that, I still feel sort of like a pretender. I’m not, but I feel like one.

Still, I have work to do here. There are people who need visiting and sermons that need preaching and committees (ugh) that need to meet soon. Plus there are other miscellaneous projects and events that require a pastoral presence. And that pastor is me, whether I have the license or not, because I’ve been appointed to this charge. So I have to suck it in and continue to do what I can until I receive the license that finally proves for human beings the reality that God has brought about.

After church today I went to visit a man whose wife is very sick. I thought she was at home but she’s at a rehab unit following hospitalization while I was at school. The man and his wife were once an integral part of the congregation I’m serving. But because of misunderstandings and other things that look distressingly like pastoral neglect (although it was so long ago, who can tell?), they vanished from the congregation.

He’s very old. I’m finding that many pastors have difficulty with visitation of older folks. I certainly understand it, but for some reason I don’t have the same difficulty. What I do know is that if I had not visited this man today, I would have robbed myself of a tremendous experience of grace. And I mean, grace given to me.

It was great. He told me some of his story and threw in a few old jokes. He talked about his family and his wife. He let me pray with him… no one had done that for years. And he gave me a pretty good description of what it means to be a minister and not just a preacher. I’ll let you think through what the difference might be.

Now, I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and say, “Wow! What a great day! I get to do more visitation!” Even so, I’m grateful for the experience of grace I had today.

Wasn’t it Tuesday evening, when I was agonizing over the move, like two seconds ago.

I turn around and suddenly it’s Friday evening, half of my stuff is unpacked, a sermon plus two articles are written and sent in, and I’m relaxing. Relaxing!

Of course, the relaxing part needs to end after only 20 minutes, but this was the most low key 20 minutes I’ve had in six weeks.

I think I might make it… until tomorrow when I’m back on R7.

Joe makes every pizza 2 order. Mine is broccoli rabe & sausage

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