Sunday, February 25, 2007

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13:2

We had a very strange stranger in our midst this morning. A young man came to choir and sang in the tenor section who had never even been in an Episcopal church before. As he sat next to me, I could tell immediately that his voice was good and his sight reading adequate enough that he was able to sing all the hymns and anthems. But something was not quite right. He seemed extremely nervous throughout the service, told me, as we were headed to communion, that he wasn't going because he'd never been baptized, but then he came. Later I heard him tell someone he grew up in a Catholic orphanage and was baptized as an infant. Mike said he came in their Sunday School class and asked for prayer because he doesn't have a car. I invited him to check out the Inquirers' Class that meets on Thursday nights and to choir rehearsal on Wed. night. My suspicious nature says he may be a con artist or a mental patient, but one of our older ladies claimed to know him and said he had a degree in music, so maybe he's just searching for a spiritual home and will turn out to be a real asset to our choir. I hope so. We need another good tenor.

I went to Pan Asia for lunch with Debbie and Ann, who are also former members of St. Peter's. Conversation was lively. Ann knows more about the debacle at our former church than I did and told me some things I had never heard before. The priests who almost ruined that church also came close to bankrupting them, I learned. After getting fired, they joined forces with the African/Anglican Communion headed up by Bishop Troublemaker himself. If they are representative of the people in that renegade band, they are a bunch of outlaws, and the sooner we can ex-communicate them, the better off TEC will be.

Betsy was just here to pick up some mail. They went to Oxford for a basketball tournament and had to spend the night because the weather was too bad to drive home in. We didn't get much of a storm here, but parts of the state got a good bit of damage.

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