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It had been a full, good week. Jim and I had been at a (wonderful) preaching conference Sunday until late, late, Thursday night, and then woke up early and eagerly Friday morning to be with our daughter and son-in-law as their second child was born.

By Saturday morning, as I prepared to come to church for a portion of the special weekend adult education presentation, I was thinking, “Boy, this Ched Myers will have to be really good to even make a dent in my consciousness.”

I guess he was good – my consciousness got “dented.”

Well, here we are in October, the month of homecomings and Halloween. Somewhat lost at times is World Communion Sunday. Unlike homecoming, where we are reminded how much older we are and hopefully wiser; or Halloween, which simply leaves empty spaces in teeth that use to have fillings; World Communion Sunday reminds us that we all belong to each other globally. In Christ the old has past, the new has come, and packaged with that newness is awareness that in Christ we all belong to each other. The old ways of defining ourselves sexually or socially are now transformed.

I had to admit, as I got ready for our church’s first annual Day of Service last Saturday morning, that I wasn’t quite as psyched for it as I thought I would be. Maybe it was the overcast sky and the drizzle, or the awareness in the back of my mind that I would need to get spruced up right afterward for wedding later in the day, but I was sort of hoping, deep down, that I would hear a crack of thunder to let me know our outdoor service project was canceled for the day.

Well Rally Day is around the corner. Things are starting up. You can almost hear the voice over the P.A. announce “Start Your Engines.” Homecoming, that event colleges and high schools celebrate, and Rally Day, which church‘s mark, perhaps is not so much coming home to a place, but rather more to a Presence. Home is not only where we come from or where we are going; it’s more the present and a Presence. We are at home when we are in fellowship. We are at home when we are with, Another, who makes everyplace and every time our place.

We had, again on Sunday, some wonderful gifts of music to frame our worship experience. There was the clear, poignant, prayer-in-song given by a soloist, and the familiar and powerful hymn-of-testimony shared by a quartet. The music from Sunday so often keeps “singing” to me, replaying in my mind, on Monday mornings – a lovely, and uplifting, start to the week.

Because this church is such a fun place to be, Jim and I haven’t spent quite as much time at the parsonage (unpacking), as we might have. The few boxes remaining in rooms here and there, and the storeroom begging to be organized, are daily reminders that we are in “transition” – still in a process of fully moving from one place in life to another.

Someone once said that the two most important days in a person’s life are the days on which she was born and the day on which she discovers why she was born.
I would like to add moving as a third important day to that list.

Saying goodbye was so difficult: after just four days, we felt as though we were lifelong friends. Certainly, we had shared a great deal in a short time. We spent the morning talking with the UPAVIM Board about our purpose, vision and mission statements, and deepened our understanding of what our relationship means for each of us, and how it might develop in the future into practical outworkings that "promote quality and dignity of life: in BOTH our communities".

We have very little internet time today, but wanted to let you know that we're all well, and that the weekend has been a moving and extraordinary experience for us, both in our host families in La Esperanza, and in the time we have spent learning about the various projects and activities of UPAVIM.

After a night in the Las Palmas Hotel, where we failed to dry any of our clothes that were drenched in the previous evening's shower, we set off for ADIVIMA to learn of the tragic history of this region. We met Juan de Dios Garcia, who described with remarkable calmness the terrible massacres that took place in villages around Rabinal, including Rio Negro, where 107 children and 70 women were killed in one day in 1982. The resistance of the indigenous population to losing their land to a hydroelectric project was ruthlessly suppressed by the army.