My musings, and reflections, this morning involve the weekend at church and having 3 grandkids staying with us last week as well. I mentioned last Monday that we had the grandkids with us, but we took them back to their parents on Friday. So today I am musing and reflecting on that experience as well as the ministry from this past weekend.

Our church had a campout on the church grounds on Saturday night. We had a campfire, with s’mores, talked and got to know people much better (we have only been here 6 months so getting to know people better is a common theme), watched a movie together outdoors on a large screen and on Sunday morning we had breakfast together and then we had our Sunday morning worship outdoors.

-I didn’t know what to expect from this event. It was very enjoyable and I really got to know many people better.

-We have great laypeople who love to serve and work for the, Lord, the church and its people. I love serving with these people.

-We had a great mix of people participating in the events on Saturday evening, ranging in age from 4 months to 86 years old and most everything in between. (In case you are wondering I was one of the “in betweens”)

-There is something special about disrupting the norm that gets people mixed in with some people they don’t normally spend a lot of time around. That is a very cool thing. Now to figure out how to do a few more things throughout the year that are just disruptive enough to mix us up without creating chaos.

-An outdoor service has many things that can go wrong. Weather – ours was nearly perfect for late July in the Midwest. Sound – trying to use some type of portable sound system while not being able to control your acoustics is challenging. Our sound worked okay, and I will take okay in an outdoor setting. Sometimes the sound of other stuff outside is a problem, we were fortunate that we had almost no competing noise on Sunday. Visual distractions – being outside certainly lends itself to having wondering minds. When you are looking at trees, or critters, or other people’s reactions to critters it can be difficult to stay focused. Our people did well with this and there was very little obvious zoning out. Seating – using lawn chairs and chairs from your church can certainly create less than ideal seating. Most people seemed to do fine with seating and we didn’t have anyone who chose to seat themselves way away from the group. For all of the things that can go wrong very few of them factored into our service.

-We had visitors who live in our community even with an outdoor service. That was encouraging.

-We had a very good spirit during out time of worship. That is not always the norm with outdoor services.

-People were very engaged in the message and there was some great response to the challenge in the message.

As for musing about the grandkids …
-The house was very quiet this weekend.

-I, and my wife, were very tired this weekend.

-I love the awe and joy with which 2, 4 and 7 year olds see everything in life. I need to recapture some of that each day. My guess is that you need some of that as well.

-I loved having the grandkids with us. It has even more meaning to it these days because we have 5 grandkids that are in Africa. They, and their parents, are serving as missionaries and we have not been able to hug them in over a year. So having the other grandkids visit, for a whole week, and getting multiple hugs per day was very special. I am getting rather emotional as I am typing this, so it must be time to sign off.

How was your Sunday? Here’s hoping your musings are positive this morning.

Dennis