Back and Blogging again.

I know y'all missed me terribly. Had a good time at a wedding up in the D of C. For those of you who know that area, we stayed in Waldorf, MD, the wedding was nearby in Bryantown, but the reception was in Bowie--30 miles away. In any event I got lots of birthday wishes from people I didn't really know at the wedding, so that was fun for me. We also got to visit with out friends Scott and Terri in Mannasses.

Finding a church on Sunday was a bit of an adventure. I found a PCA church in the Yellow pages and determined from the map roughly where it should be and noted they had a 9:30 service. So we checked out and headed over in that direction. The street where the church should have been was an industrial park. There were two signs for the church, but we couldn't find it anywhere. I decided we should just go to the first reasonable looking protestant church we could find.

Just down the street we found a United Methodist church. We pulled in the lot where about 4 or 5 people were standing around, then went into to the building. Completely empty, apart from a solitary elderly lady who sai nothing to us. I found two stacks of bulletins and noticed one stack said 8:45 and another said 11. As it was only 9:30 we decided to get back in the car and try again.

My wife had noted a tall steeple in town; a sure sign of baptists she informed me. So we went. I was slightly hesistant since I hadn't been to a baptist service since I left my parents church after college. he parking lot was full and we followed a stream of folks to the door. Once inside we were quite immediately geeted and asked for our names by a woman a few feet inside. And immediately (I feel like St Mark now) we are led to another woman. "This is Paul and Lenise" spake the first woman. The second woman replied "Greetings, can we get thee into a Sunday School class". She led us away. And lo, there was a Sunday School class which served breakfast. We partook of the food and sat down, having been introduced to the teacher.

The class was pretty good. They spent about a third of the time just taking prayer requests from the class and praying for them at the beginning. This insured that the length of the lesson was fitted around the prayer time. (Note to self, make sure to do this if you teach a SS class again). They were following a printed curriculum and how to minister in various situations. The particular lesson was on natural disasters, with the story of Paul's shipwreck as the text. This was particularly interesting as there had very recently been a terrible tornado in La Plata (pronounced La Plate-Ah), the next town to the south. Many of the class members either lived there or had close family there. The tornado went right through the middle of town, completely destroying everything in its path.

I won't belabor you with the rest of my trip. I'll just say that I'll give the baptists a bit higher regard next time I'm looking for a church out of town. God Bless 'em.