Skip to main content

Claudia

Met Claudia today. Nice lady.

Seems she is a resident at a residential care facility here. She’s been here only a week or two, the result of moving here with her daughters. They had moved here for work and asked if she wanted to move with them. She did.

One of Claudia’s daughters had called the church office, wanting someone to visit her mother. I happened to be there harassing our Youth Intern as he worked on the new webpage and our office administrator gave me the message. I’m glad she did.

Claudia is a talkative and relatively energetic lady. She’s in a wheel chair because apparently she tends to black out without warning. She sees the wisdom in using the chair, although I get the impression that given the chance, she’d just as soon take a relaxing stroll outside.

After assuring Claudia that we’d have folks come and talk, bring her communion, and a congregational bulletin, I asked if she’d like to attend services at the church. She was concerned about not having a dress to wear. You see, living most of your days in a wheel chair makes slacks and blouses easier. And so she doesn’t have a dress, or least an appropriate one, for church. Another concern was the imposition that having someone pick her up would be on whoever that might be. What with the wheel chair and all.

One doesn’t want to be a bother, you know.

I told her she could wear whatever she wants; we won’t care. And that we had more than a few folks who would be willing to pick her up and stay with her for services. If she wanted to come, we’d make it happen.

Claudia is a life-long member of our church. She’s familiar with our more conservative groups, but I don’t think she leans their direction too much.

I hope to be like Claudia one of these days. Oh, I don’t know that I want a wheel chair, or to black out if I stand up too long, but her commitment to the family of God, a desire to have human interaction, and concern about others’ scruples are wonderful.

HR

Comments

  1. Hoyt Roberson,
    How are you brother? Good to see you on the blogosphere.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Hoyt,

    Didn't know you had a blogsite. Discovered it through Kevin and Cindy's blog. Bruce and I are praying for a swift recovery for her. Quite a shock I can imagine. Anyway, you might check out my blog...pthweatt@blogspot.com. All my girls have one too...it's how we all manage to stay in touch. Jen has just had her first baby, a girl and so Bruce and I are grandparents again. This part of getting old is fun. Hope to keep in touch.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...

Where’s the Church Building?

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...