It all started when I found out that I would have a funeral to do today--Sunday--and that we were also supposed to get a storm on this very day. And we did get some snow, but not nearly as much as they were forecasting. Good for us, since we had some driving to do.
For some reason, I ended up having real trouble working on the message for this funeral. Many of the family are not believers, though the deceased, a wonderful lady from our church, was. That makes knowing what to say and how to say it a little tricky and sensitive. This is especially so since this family have faced a number of similar losses over the last couple of years. Thankfully, the message did come together. I finished around 1am this morning. It wasn't my best sermon, that's for sure, but I was mostly pleased.
The next unusual occurrence happened after I finished this sermon. Like I said, I finished preparing the sermon late last night/early this morning and when I finally settled in our bed it was somewhere in the vicinity of 1:30am. And I had no sooner settled down (for a long winter's nap?) when our three-year old daughter woke up with what sounded like the croup. Poor girl, she sounded absolutely miserable. Exposing her to lots of steam by taking her into the bathroom with the shower water on hot and full didn't seem to break it. Neither did covering her up except for her face and taking her out in the cold. That's when the tele-care nurse suggested we take her to out-patients or emergency just to be safe. So we did. At 2:30am.
What's kind of funny about the story at this point is that once she was in our car, she began to become much more alert and awake, and she began talking up a storm, joking, singing, and generally acting very happy, even with the hoarse cough and raspy voice. Up until we left, she was beside herself with misery and just wanted to be left alone to sleep.
Emergency proved fruitless. After an hour and a half of waiting with no visible end in sight, we decided to take her back home. This was around 4:30am, and our decision was in part prompted by another young woman who let us know that she had been waiting since 9pm! Yikes! At that rate, we would have been there until sometime late morning. So we left for home and arrived, after a sleepy drive during which my wife diligently made sure I stayed awake, at around 5:30am. And then we crashed, pretty sure that if the storm didn't result in a cancelled Sunday school that we would not be going. But there was snow--and so we didn't have to make that choice.
The strangeness of the day didn't fully end there. I left my wife and little girl home while I trudged tiredly off to church to preach, and when I got there found out that my pianist would not be coming either because of the roads. Understandably so, since they were very messy. Our hymns, therefore, were improvised and sung a cappella. It more or less worked, but with the frame of mind I was in, it left an odd tint on the service. My mind was not entirely present to the proceedings.
And as a result of the snow, a church dinner was also postponed.
I did the funeral. My wife sang at the funeral. Ultimately, all went fine. Except for such glitches as forgetting the hard copy of some hymn lyrics, which my wife had to then sing by memory, and my knocking the TV power cord from the socket during the deceased's video tribute while slipping a note to the organist (which sounds rather clandestine, doesn't it?). Oddly, that caused little disturbance. One of the deceased's daughters more than graciously accepted my quick but sincere apology.
All in all, it just felt like an odd couple of days. A little left of normal. And after all was said and done, we just felt--unsurprisingly--very tired. We came home and basically did not do much of anything. I plan on doing much the same tomorrow. Well, not completely.
Through it all, I hope and pray that God was still at work, even though my ministry was performed through layers of exhaustion. Oddly enough, despite my lack of complete satisfaction with my own "performance," people who attended the funeral seemed genuinely appreciative of our ministry. That certainly says something about how God can use despite ourselves, especially after the adventure of a night-time when you're awake into the early hours with your sick little girl.
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