Strength and Depth

Last night was the St. Paul's 'Revival'. As I expected, it was a joyful event that affirmed our fundamental strength. There were brief presentations of twenty different activities, all within the bounds of our mission of following Jesus together in worship, prayer and service. It was moving to me to hear all the different voices of the good, dedicated people whose time and effort gives our community its strength and its depth.

As I was praying and reflecting on it all this morning it occurred to me that everything we would want to help us follow Jesus from now until the hour of our death is at St. Paul's. Together, we are truly blessed. Now our work is to claim our strength and share it with others.

I got a fun response from last week's blog post. With Ronnie's permission I share with you the following story:

Dear Christopher,

I guess a person betrays their age when they have a story to tell about something from the more distant past. I was reading your blog and saw what you wrote about the afternoon light in the church and I must share a story about that. In the days when I was secretary there was a man living in Ross who made commercials for television. He was looking for an appropriate location to shoot a short item about Narcolepsy and made an appointment to look at St. Paul's with this in mind. I took him and his cameraman into the church in the late afternoon when the sun was shining through the windows on the lectern side, and slanted shafts of light were beaming into the church. They were both awed, and he made arrangements to shoot the commercial almost immediately. When the great day came I did my day's work in the office, and when it was time to close up I went downstairs to peek into the church from the acolyte room. When I opened the door, I found a heavy drape across the opening. I did enter the church from the front door and discovered it was quite full of people pretending to be parishioners. Someone invited me to join the crowd. The atmosphere was thick with smoke from a machine and also incense and the filming was pretty tedious and extremely slow. But the exciting thing was that we had a genuine movie star in the Parish Hall attempting to do the voiceover - his name was Cliff Robertson. This was really difficult because every time he'd begin, a pile driver across the street in what was then the Bell Savings Parking lot would start pounding away. We had been cautioned to step lightly in the office so as not to disturb him, but the pile driver was ridiculous. Anyway, they worked from early in the morning until very late in the evening on the project, paid St. Paul's five hundred dollars for the use of the church, and only one person I know every saw the finished commercial.

Ronnie

Christopher, of course you may pass it along. I also remembered that when the ladies of St. Anne's heard that Cliff Robertson had been at St. Paul's all day, they were quite annoyed with me for not letting them know.

R.