This Classical Life

FUNERAL WORTHY HYMNS
All the Way, My Savior Leads Me
Be Still, My Soul
By Grace I Am An Heir of Heaven
For All the Saints (Ralph Vaughn Williams tune - sung at the end, triumphantly.)
Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken
Hark the Voice of Love and Mercy/It is Finished
I Belong to Jesus (someone arrange this one - great for kids and adults)
My Jesus I Love Thee
On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand
The Sands of Time are Sinking
This Joyful Eastertide (if it is the season of Easter, especially)
Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand

I am always coming up with more hymns that I want sung at my funeral. As if it’s going to be some gigantic sing-along. I guess I can’t imagine anyone eulogizing me, so I imagine lots of songs? Whatever. But as we were singing “Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand” tonight, I felt like it had to be included also. At least all of my hymns are thematically about death and bodily resurrection, I’m tidy that way.

I was reflecting this week about how much I love my iPod. I love driving around alone in silence (silence is at a premium when you have two toddlers) and having a song pop into my head, a song that was my favorite in the fall of 1999 but haven’t listened to in a year, and being able to have that song coming through the speakers in fifteen seconds or less. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

Mike got his ginormous Mac Book Pro from school the other day. It’s hard not to have Mac-lust when you’re sharing your home with one of those. I covet. Wishing, hoping, dreaming…

We’ve been members of PaperBackSwap for a little over a year and have received over 60 books. It’s a GREAT program. Now is the time to sign up. Currently they give you 3 starter credits (a.k.a. free books) for signing up and listing 9 books you are willing to send out (you send out your unwanted books to receive a credit worth another book, paying only outgoing postage.) Starting in October, it will move to 2 starter credits for signing up and listing 10 books. Now’s the time to join up. And if you sign up using one of the links in this post, we get a free credit as well. And we’re all about free books.

We had a congregational meeting Sunday, following worship, and it got me thinking about the presbyterian form of church government. Honestly, I am not that married to it, I think it works well enough, but I’d say the say thing about an episcopal system, as long as churches have regional and national accountability, I’m pretty satisfied. Anyhow, congregational meetings at our church are rather interesting. They are hands-down the most participatory and interactive of any church I’ve attended. In some ways, that is very good. But there is this interesting dynamic, pretty unique to our church, that I can’t put my finger on. I think it may be one part congregationalism, another part national politics, and a healthy shake of skepticism but it seems to manifest itself in asking hard (sometimes borderline inappropriate for the context) questions of our leaders.

But in the end, votes still occur and business gets done. And now we can get about the business of being thankful we called a new senior pastor in record time. Many thanks to friends on the Pastoral Search Committee: your hard work did not go unnoticed by us. We’re grateful for you.

I won the first week’s drawing over at How Kids Think! $50 to spend at Amazon.com = happy Kristen.

I know I have a lot of great promised posts that have yet to appear. A great deal of grading, teaching, mothering, designing, and just plain surviving have been getting in the way.