Life goes on.

This is an entry I had not planned on making. I will be taking a break from the Volunteer Village for a couple of days. My father died Saturday and I will be joining the family gathering to celebrate his life. I leave Mississippi tomorrow to travel to Colville, Washington and will return to the Village Saturday evening. In the meantime the camp will be tended by my able assistant and a member of the PDA National Team who was pressed into service. The number of volunteers is low and I am comfortable with the way the camp is taking shape. With the help of my assistant, I have been working to establish a visible and practical file plan, both paper and electronic. My goal is to have procedures and files such that a rookie could walk in and keep their head above water. I just hadn't expected to try it out so soon, but life goes on.

The shock of learning of a loved one's passing is never easy, and if I couldn't be at home then the next best place to be was with a group of friends who will cry with you and hold you and pray with you. I had only known the team from Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona for a week. They have already returned home, but the time they consoled me in my loss was precious. Thank you, my friends. Life goes on.

My father was a man of contradictions, as we all are, I suppose. He was a preacher whose life was wrapped around words; yet he was a man of few words. He was a man whose voice and demeanor struck fear into the hearts of the uninitiated; but whose dry wit and twinkling eyes brought tears of laughter to those who knew him. He was a country boy from the northern reaches of Wyoming; yet he traveled the world and he savored the beauty of a J. S. Bach organ fugue and he heard the divine in Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Chambered Nautilus." He was a man of the world; but he is a child of God. Life goes on.


iXs,
the Rev