Tired and Ready for Camp

This has been a week of weeks, for more reasons than I care to count.

First, we're leaving tomorrow for a week of Confirmation camp in Nebraska with seven of the youth from our two churches. I'm thinking it's going to be a great week. Maybe even a GRATE week! (stop your groaning, you two). But making sure all the money is accounted for and everything is just not in my inventory of spiritual gifts, so it's been a little stressful this week.

I've been nervous for about a week because of my track record with planned time away and funerals. It seems that whenever we decide to get away, be it for a church trip, a continuing education event or a vacation, someone in the congregation dies and I've got a funeral to plan. This is not so much a complaint as it is a painful observation: I'd rather have the time to spend with the family after the funeral and all the pomp and circumstance is done, since there will still be lots of grieving to do after the flowers are gone and no one is sending condolence cards anymore. But tomorrow is going to be rushed because we need to leave directly after the committal to make it down to Nebraska in time for supper at my parents' farm. So I have to leave a family for whom I care a great deal very quickly, and it just doesn't feel right. It's what has to happen, and that's just how ministry works sometimes, but it doesn't feel right.

The other thing, of course, has been planning our confirmation activities for camp. We're going with a series of NOOMA videos on different aspects of life as a Christian, and I'm pretty excited to see how it goes with our kids. But that was a loong session in front of the computer to get it all put together this evening. At least Microsoft Word works on the new machine. I nearly had a heart attack at 11:00 when a lightning strike knocked out our power and the document was lost, but Word was able to recover it and I promptly saved it just in case. You never can tell.

Add in with all of this a baby who has started demanding a 2 a.m. bottle, my continuing back stiffness, an emotional exchange with a friend that is now resolved but not yet behind us and cats who decided to spray some of our clean laundry this afternoon, and you've got the makings of a LOOOOOONG day. It was. Now I've had my beer and a bit of blogging and I'm off to bed. It's time to sleep hard.