From The Deacon's Bench

I have been attending Episcopal Churches for about 50 years.  Over those years, I attended, or was assigned to, at least eight different parishes.  Not being one to just sit in the congregation only on Sundays, I always became "involved".  I cannot even begin to put a number on all of the various meetings I have attended.   While the locations changed, and the subject of the "work" that the committee was undertaking changed, one common thread has been present.  Things would be going along well until... that four lettered word (which actually contains six letters) would come up. You know the one, right?  Yes...C H A N G E I can't begin to tell you how often I sat with folks attempting to come up with strategies to introduce a change.  Also, the countless ways to try to counter the inevitable reply "I don't think we need to change that, after all "we've always done it that way" .  Quite often that would be followed-up with this other ditty.....

  I don’t know about you, but as we begin a “new” year, I often look back in history to see what was happening not only during the most recent “last year” but also decades ago.   There is one thing that I have learned from this exercise…we humans seem to continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. It’s one thing to make one kind of mistake, learn from it and not repeat that mistake, but it is entirely different when we make the same exact mistake over and over again. When God created us, he afforded us “free will”, which is a wonderful gift, and I can’t imagine what our lives would be like without it.    However, I think that we are often seeing demonstrated lately is “free will” without any thought as to what the consequences of the act may be. As children, we all made mistakes.   When our parents became aware of those mistakes, often, they would use it as a “teaching moment”.   Depending on the exact situation, that “teaching” ...

  For some time now, I have been receiving a daily meditation e-mail from the Henri Nouwen Society.  I find that these meditations usually help me get started on the right path for the day.  I will admit that I don't always stay on that path, but I'm getting better. I'm going to share the following recent meditation that really "spoke" to me.                                                   Fools for Christ Sometimes we have to dare to be fools for Christ. That means that sometimes we have to be willing to give food to people who don’t really need or deserve it. And sometimes we have to be willing to work with some people who might even exploit us. Maybe this is as close as we can come to an experience of self-emptying. It is the experience of being useless in the presence of the Lord. Understand me well, I am not trying to...

 I don't know about you, but I seem to be having issues with time.  (For example, I just started writing this November blog post on November 5th) Due to the events of late 2019 and throughout 2020 and 2021, time schedules became "optional" at best.  For many humans, especially me, this has caused a great deal of angst.   As I reflect, I realize that time schedules have always been a part of my life.  As a teacher, and a technology coordinator in two different school systems and as the director of a communications office for a large corporation, time schedules were a central part of my workday.  Once retired, while time schedules were not as restrictive, they did exist.  Events were scheduled, trips were planned, grandchildren's games/events were attended.  Family gatherings were regular part of our life.  Until very recently, those kinds of events were either cancelled or in some cases held but with little or no options to attend them....

Our language contains many  homonyms, you know, two words that are pronounced the same way, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. This fact can lead to some confusion from time to time.   Two such words are Profit and Prophet.  For quite some time, I have thought about how these particular  homonyms are uniquely related.     Let me start by giving dictionary  definitions  of Profit and Prophet. Profit is  a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.  A more general definition is receiving something because of some action. Prophet is  a person regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God. I believe that much of what we do in our lives is directly related to whatever our motivation is.  It is the answer to the question why did he or she do that?   So, with that in mind, when we m...

If we were playing a word association game and I said "search", I would be willing to bet that more people than not would respond with a word or words related to finding information on the internet.  I'm also pretty sure that if the word association game took place forty years ago, the "answers" would have been very different. However, I would like to focus on a different aspect of "searching".  With all that is going on in our world right now, I would like us to think about how we may be searching for answers to the question WHY.   Why are we seeing thousands of people suffering and dying  Why have our daily routines changed Why have so many people questioned science  Why have so many people ignored lessons learned in the past  Why have some been blinded to the fact that their unsafe actions may indeed have dire consequences I don't have any easy answers to most of those questions, and I'm not sure that there are indeed easy answers.  The answ...

Disappointment can be defined as sadness or displeasure caused by the nonfulfillment of one's hopes or expectations.  While this definition is fairly simple, the concept of  disappointment is  far more complex, because we tend to have various "levels" of disappointment.  We quite often are more or less disappointed in  ourselves, or for members of our families, or for close friends, or for strangers, or for adults, or for children, or for pets and so on and so on. Disappointment is nothing new.   Over and over again, as we read Holy Scripture, we see examples of disappointment.  We see humans "falling short of the mark" over and over again.  Think about Adam  and Eve... However, a close examination of the New Testament examples reveal that Jesus was never disappointed; how could He be, since He knew what would happen before it happened, and He knew that humans were flawed.     Because we are flawed humans, we quite often e...