And lead us not into temptation, and,.... Deliverance from evil?

Believe it or not, the Preachy Thang today went fine:)  Eleanor and I went out to the eastern edge of the burbs here, where things get a little, shall we say, gritty, and I preached the same gospel I would have preached in our safe RSWP¹ pulpit- and lived to tell the tale:)

You can read it, if you incline your ears to such, at this google link.  The three symbols I mention at the beginning were the props I brought for the childrens sermon, in which I told them that "things" were nice, and new "things" were nice to get, but that it's not right to just live to acquire All The "Things", and that the best "things" are the ones that you keep as memories of people and places and times.  I brought the broken-spine Bible my original church gave me in third grade; my original Mets hat from probably the early 70s; and this, purchased just the previous afternoon:



That got us to "Live Long and Prosper," which the sermon then riffed on.  When I first came in, I kept a promise to floundah, one of the folk who saw my preview yesterday and encouraged me to use the sound effect: basically, if the organist was a 68-year-old retired schoolmarm who would probably MI or TIA if I did it, I would pass, but if it was a cool-cat kinda second-job gigging musician like the one we got the last time I did this, I was in.

Chris, I'm happy to say, was one cool cat, and when I showed him this-



- he was perfectly fine with it, came in right on cue, and got the appropriate laugh from most of the congregation.

They were all fine with the message, and I dismissed them with a fine Vulcan benediction which I said would be Christ's message to them- "I have been, and always shall be, your friend." None of them seemed especially redneck on the way out. Eleanor wound up making contact with a congregation member who's actually an ordained minister but whose work for the church is at a local nursing home; she knows the work our own Barbara does, who Eleanor's talking about helping in that kind of "faith adventure," and was very encouraging about her finding her way in this.

In the end, about the only sign of true cluelessness in the whole place was a newspaper clipping I saw on the back wall. It dated to 1953, perhaps the only time a sanctuary this small actually made the Big City Buffalo Evening News, and was for a church fundraiser in which congregants volunteered their services (babysitting, gardening, whatever) to the highest bidder. Noble, yes; calling it a "slave auction," though? A bit too 1853 for my liking.²

Overall, though? They liked me- they really, really liked me. Now to see if I can explain Firefly to them next time;)

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¹ Repressed Suburban White People. See note 2.

² I might have said something to the effect of, "hmmmm, black folk don't come round here much, do they?" except, ummm, for the fact that our RSWP congregation doesn't much, either:O

Shop-ping!

I actually spent more time on errands in various retail establishments in the past two days than I usually do during the course of an entire week. Weekend schmeekend.

Yesterday: after picking up the prop for today's children's sermon at Toys R Us, first stop was at the Transit-Klein Wegmans for lunch, since I was going to the adjacent AT&T store to see if Eleanor's phone could be resuscitated. No, it couldn't, and I found out that her March-somethingth date for an upgrade is somewhat cast in stone. Fortunately, my customer service representative Marlo (how could I not love someone with That Girl Name?) tipped me off to a much less expensive alternative: Go to Walmart or Best Buy, get a prepaid phone, don't buy any minutes, and just put your wife's SIM card in it and it'll work fine!

Much as I resisted a second-in-a-month journey to Wally World, I needed to kill 20 minutes before I could get my hair cut before looking like a long-haired Commie-type pinko something at church today, so I shot across Transit to the local Chinese Embassy to see what they had. They had few prepaid phones and way less customer service, is what; and I left empty-phoned.  I resolved, though, to try the other retail choice after trying to pick up the Next Book On My List from the Elmwood Avenue library branch that had the only remaining copy north of Orchard Park.

Emphasis on "had," since it had just been checked out by the time I got there. Oh well: I stopped at the next-nearest Best Buy and got Eleanor a perfectly functional new phone, with no new contract, for a ridiculously little amount of money compared to the penalty payments for getting one with a contract; got the grocery list filled at the Wegmans on the way between there and here; and restocked the wine cellar before finally returning home. Three outta four ain't bad:)

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That got us to this afternoon.

Eleanor had made a Farmers and Artisans run, but we still needed milk, so I stopped at my third Weggies in just over 24 hours for that on the way to the gym.  This, though, is when I realized that I'd sailed out without anything to read at the gym, so I said, fine, skwoo it, and headed to the book section to just buy a paperback of Sarah's Key.

On the way, though, I had to get one more reference in to Broken, since I haven't mentioned it here in, what, a week?



That is not the correct Broken- but it came as rather a shock that there's a NYT bestseller out by the same name.

Sadly, one aisle over, there was an even more disturbing use of the verb:



The good news here is, I was NOT the customer who upended the display copy of the damn thing. Not that his disciples will notice, seeing how most of them, probably, can't read at more than a third-grade level:P

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Gym was lovely, with Sarah's Key in my sight and Lucy Kaplansky's first two albums in my ears. Dinner was Mostly Leftly-Overlys, which were just as lovely. Tomorrow is a no-mail, no-bank, catch-up kinda day. Life is plenty sweet:)