full day ... full week ...

monday took jose into richmond for his therapy ... tuesday drove down to irvington to pick up a massive amount of food donations (relative to the size of the congregation ... 18 people) ...

then came back and drove up to fredericksburg to visit with bob and katherine self . bob has just been diagnosed with inoperable cancer ... in the lymph nodes ... there is ONE treatment option available to him ... a type of chemo ... he turned 90 this past spring ... i'll be getting up to fredericksburg a lot over the next several weeks ... it is a fast-moving cancer.

tuesday evening i got word that edna mckendrie, the mother of one of our young couple's wives, was found dead at her home ... visitation was this evening ... i've been asked to do the funeral tomorrow ... and valentin farfan, a mexican friend, is spending the night with us tonight so i can drive him into richmond in the morning so he can get on a bus to go home to tend to some legal business there and then come back and keep working ...

such is the life of a rural pastor ...

mom and dad and lolly and jacques and elizabeth rose and aaron are here ... we had 22 people altogether for thanksgiving dinner today ... it was awesome ...

gathering coming up on sunday ... here at jerusalem ...

grace & peace

it's been a while.

my first instinct is to apologize ... but i would then quickly ask ... who would i be apologizing to? :-)

let's see ... when was the last post ... oh ... almost a month ago.

since then, i've been running to ... well ... just running, it seems. all good and necessary stuff ... but running as if i had the energy of a teenager ... which i don't.

i said goodbye to uncle john parker the same week that i was called in to be with a woman who lost her baby 8 months into her pregnancy ... last week i went in to be with a couple of burn victims, arrived at the hospital to find that one of them had been medevacked (sp?) directly to MCV ... and found out the next day that he didn't make it.

got an email yesterday asking for some paperwork that is long overdue ...

got asked if i'd be willing to check into taking a public speaking course again ... by someone who has a lot of trouble hearing but won't consider hearing aids ...

and i'm having to think about going back to school in the spring???

so now it IS time to apologize ... for whining ... but i'm going to leave this here for now ... and probably delete it later.

i have a sermon to write.