We moved. It's exciting and fun and adventurous and weird.
We've gone from our lovely home in College Station to a brand new "luxury" apartment complex that is closer to my work. A few notes about moving:
1) Moving is hard. My whole body hurt in an "I am now paralyzed and can no longer move" kind of way. I'm sure this has nothing to do with me being incredibly out of shape.
2) I've had a few sad moments about leaving College Station. Not nearly as many as I thought I would. When I did, Trey would remind me that we're exactly the same distance away from College Station that I drove for work every day the last year. Then he drops our moving-is-scary-but-exciting catch phrase: "It's not like we moved to Michigan!"
3) We had/have a lot of stuff. We left plenty of it in our house in CS (our boys live there now - pray for us all). But through downsizing we have laughed at how much stuff we have. My top two most ridiculous items, because of their quantity, are coffee mugs (I lost count) and black running shorts (at least 20 pair for the various sizes of my booty over the last 20 years).
I'm sure I have many more words of wisdom, but that's not why I started this post.
We know we need to find a church here. Backstory - I grew up good and Baptist, and Trey is a lifelong Methodist. We went to the same church for 24 years. We got married there, our kids were baptized there, all of life happened there. Then, last summer after watching a different local service online, we started visiting another church. For about the past year we've attended there. Now I think one reason God sent us to that church was to help us practice what it would be like to be the new people before we actually moved and became the new people.
Anyway, last night Trey says (as he does most Saturday nights as his hint that I'm not sleeping in on Sunday), "You going to church with me in the morning?" And I said yes because I mostly always say yes to Trey even if it means I have to get up early on a weekend.
So off to church we went this morning. We like an 8:30 service which often means we are among the younger in the crowd, and this service was no different. It was a small Methodist church, quaint, and we were warmly greeted by many people without feeling like we were the oddities of the day. It helped that it was the new preacher's first day, so folks were probably preoccupied with that.
We sang hymns (important for us in a church) and did all the usual Methodist things which was familiar and comforting. The prayers all included prayers for strength for those impacted by the horrific floods that happened over the weekend, so of course I cried. I think I was cool about it, though, so maybe no one noticed.
The message was about grace and hope and how it's our job to spread that in a hurting world. I liked it.
Then, communion.
The new pastor wasn't quite sure of all the procedures in this particular church, so after we finished the recitations in hymnal the nice ushers helped show him what to do. It was lovely and not stuffy at all - a happy display of the past members helping out the new guy. One side of the altar had a cup for dipping and the other had those tiny individual cups. The pastor offered that you could go to either side based on whether you liked to dunk or have a cup.
Sidebar: I'm sure there are technical religious terms for dunk and cup, but I don't know what they are. Church folks know what I'm talking about.
Our side had the cups, so it was cups for us. We didn't want to do anything out of the ordinary like go to the other side. I was surprised to learn that they started the line from the back. This meant we were some of the first people to go given our seats near the back. No big deal. It's communion. We know what to do. And also, these people didn't seem so formal that we would mess up and cause a scene.
So I make my way to front, accept the bread, and then make my way to the cups.
This is when things went very, very badly.
The nice communion server from the choir, in her white button up shirt, offered me the tray of cups.
"The blood of Christ shed for you."
I reached for a cup, but it was stuck.
So instead of solemnly drinking from the cup with a whispered "amen," I crushed the tiny plastic cup as it sat stuck in the tray. And the blood of Christ exploded all over my dress, my hands, the floor, and the lady's pristine white shirt. Like a volcano.
Uhhhhhhhh...
We made eye contact. She quickly said, "It's OK." I selected another cup, drank, said "amen" and fled for my pew attempting not to leave a trail of grape juice all the way to the back of the church.
Keep in mind that the communion line started from the back, so the vast majority of the church saw the new lady douse the choir lady in a purple juice volcano.
Awesome.
I laughed. It was my only choice. Though I tried not to laugh too obviously because I thought these people who do not know me at all might think I am disrespectful. And I realized that whether we come back to this church or not I will always be the lady new to town who doused the choir lady in purple juice during communion.
Needless to say, we left pretty quickly after the benediction.
The end.
