A Pause in the Busy

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

When you work in a church office, the holidays have a different impact on your life than the average church goer.

Logistics.  Plans.  How can we best facilitate folks who make a decision for Christ receiving encouragement and discipleship in their new journey?  How can we keep straight the dozens and dozens of folks who chose to be baptized in the massive baptism service two weeks later?

Nobody really cares about the numbers - and that is the truth - but we can't do any kind of meaningful follow up without some kind of tracking process.

Enter the data base admin.

That would be me.

As the church has grown and changed locations, what we used to do won't work.  So we need to tweak and adjust to accommodate growth.  It's a good problem to have, but it does need consideration and work.

And it's really, really easy to get consumed by the logistics and processes that are meant to help people...and lose sight of why we're doing it at all.

So this week, I got a bit of a blessing.  My friend Suzanne, who was my teaching leader years ago when I was going through Bible Study Fellowship,  has started doing monthly Bible studies.  She limits the size to fifteen...the number of ladies who can squeeze around the very large table at the venue she has found...and it's first come, first served on the sign ups.  This month's study was on the 4 cups of Passover...specifically, the four cups of the final Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples, and I happened to see the sign up link shortly after she posted it.  It was during lunch and I hesitated, but then I decided I could just take a bit of a long lunch (the benefits of being a part-timer; my hours are somewhat flexible) and go, and I signed up.

I did not know how badly I needed to break away and take some time to focus on the whole point of the season. It was a wonderful, refreshing reminder of that last night and how it all played out.  Suzanne brings all the tools she learned in the years of leading the BSF class to her presentation and it's deep, provoking, and satisfying.

I did learn some things.  For one thing, the history of the  afikomen (I have referenced that before) wasn't quite how I had learned .... it appears that it was a much later addition to the meal, commemorating the Passover Lamb after the ritual sacrifices were no longer able to be done due to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.  But...Jesus did the same thing with his bread that now happens with the afikomen; he broke it and everyone had a bit, and it was likely at the same place in the ritual of the evening...after the completion of the meal.    'Remember me when you eat this bread,' he said....and it is now eaten to remember the Passover Lamb.

Also, I learned that the meal began with singing psalms...specifically, Psalms 113-118, collectively known as 'The Hallel'...as a preparation of mind and spirit for the night.

Suzanne challenged us to spend some time in those Psalms during Holy Week, and I thought that was a great idea.

I am even going to try to blog it as I go.  We'll see if I can keep the Busy at bay enough to do coherent posts.