Thursday February 4th. It’s raining and the rain is supposed to get harder before the day is over, but be gone by tonight. It’s also 39 degrees outside and that means it is a cold rain. I think I’ll just stay inside and let the world pass me by today. 

Yesterday we of course went to the churches and we ran the bulletins for Sunday and set the pulpit up. It doesn’t take very long these days. The last time I was pastor at this parish running thee bulletins was a major deal. Tat was because I was making work for myself by running off the hymns for the older crowd, making a lot of large print bulletins, and I was even writing a monthly newsletter and printing that out. When I retired from the parish in November of 2016 I don’t think the pastor that replaced me did any of those things, but I know he hated running the bulletins. Since I returned to the parish a year ago, we have had the COVID outbreak and because of that we have had to alter so much of what we do. For a while, we were shut down and only dong virtual services. Then we started back to doing both in-person and virtual services but no singing. However, we don’t have a large attendance in person so I don’t have to run a lot of bulletins. What we have changed though is that because we now have two large screens at my St. Lucas church, I’m doing slides to go with my sermons which I had not done before and because we have the screens, people follow the liturgy on the screens and use very few of the bulletins that I do make. And the order of the service has changed somewhat too. We no longer pass the offering plate because of COVID restrictions. We just set the offering plates at the entrance to the sanctuary and people drop their offering into that. When we do communion, we no longer pass the elements but rather we use the pre-packaged sets and people pick them up as they come in for worship. It meets the requirement but I personally think it loses a lot of the ritual. Ash Wednesday is coming up on the 17th, and I am hoping to do the Imposition of Ashes. There are a lot of pastors that would not do that but I’ve had my COVID Vaccine and allegedly can not acquire or spread the virus. And of course, people have the choice to either come forward and let me touch them or not. 

I woke up extremely early today. Got up to make  bathroom visit and then my mind flooded with all kinds of stuff including the fact that we still need to put together our taxes and get all of that pout of the way. So I got up, went down to my office and collected the stuff I need into the appropriate piles. I still don’t have everything I need because the military won’t be releasing our 1099R until the 10th of February and my two churches need to figure out what form I’m really supposed to get. They each sent me  different form. One church sent  W-2 and the other sent me a 1099NEC. So, I’ve texted the treasurer of each church and asked them to straighten it all out. 

That’s about all I have for you today. Try to stay warm and dry and safe. Have aa blessed day and maybe help someone else have a blessed day. Peace.