Fellowship

Chapter 18 in “A Purpose Driven Life” is about fellowship. It talks about how the word has come to mean coffee and donuts after the service, and how it really has a much deeper meaning that we have lost. In fellowship we should be able to listen to each other, support each other, pray for each other. I think I have to read that chapter again, it was so rich I couldn’t take it all in.

Last night we didn’t exactly fellowship in the true sense of the word. But we did party. Since this is the 75 anniversary of the founding of our parish, we have been doing some sort of special event each month. Last night it was the St. Patrick’s Day Potluck Dinner. We spent much of the day setting up in the church basement and when we were done, the place looked kind of nice with shamrocks and garland and tablecloths and tables full of raffle prizes.

They asked me to be the person making announcements, and it turned into a full time MC job. That was OK, since I had fun with it.

We had an older member playing his accordion, then some of the members of the Men’s Choir did “Danny Boy” and some other songs. Then the hit of the night was a group of students from a school of Irish dance who jigged and reeled their way around our little staging area. The whole show ran a bit long, so a two hour dinner on paper turned into a three hour extravaganza in reality.

Everyone had fun, though, and commented on how nice everything was. My next door neighbor was the one who really planned it all. Peggy is very good at events, and thought of everything to make this dinner turn out so well.

I found time to sit down and eat something while the dancers were doing their thing, and I just plopped down anywhere and wound up meeting some nice people. The couple I sat with had just celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary and were recounting that day in February fifty-nine years ago, when it was cold and snowy and no one came to their wedding. It was just them, the priest and one other man in the whole church. But they didn’t care. They had just come through the horrors of World War II and they were ready to get on with the rest of their lives. The husband told me how he had landed on Omaha Beach, got wounded along the way, and later went through France, Belgium and Germany all on foot. As I listened to him, I wondered who would tell his story after he is gone. How will our grandchildren know of the sacrifices people made so long ago?

At one point in the evening I was very sad because Kathy was not with me. She stayed home. She was missing something wonderful, something that could have helped rekindle her feelings for the people and the church. Please pray for her—she is going through a rough time in her faith life. She has asked me to be patient with her as she works through her feelings of bitterness and dissatisfaction. It’s hard to me to know what to say to do about it.

So there. All this to say, maybe it wasn’t biblical fellowship, but it was still pretty wonderful.