Father’s Day started with big plans.Kristine was up at 5 A.M. cooking the lechon and cilantro lime chicken for our Father’s Day Feast this afternoon. Melanie was to bring the tacos and guacamole. So the day started out peacefully enough as we all got ready for church. BELOW IS THE LINK TO OUR CHURCH SERVICE WHICH WAS ENTITLED “RISE UP.”

We had quite a few visitors and I got to meet them all at the end of the service! Amanda and I stayed to close up the church while Melanie and James and Joe and Kristine went home to get our feast ready. As we were waiting Amanda told me she had been having some chest pain through Children’s Church. That in itself was concerning, but she also had major surgery a few weeks ago and chest pain was one of the symptoms she was told to look out for.

We locked up the church and drove to The Vicarage to get her doctor’s number in Concord. The doctor was quick to call us back and to send us off to the Emergency Room at Emerson Hospital in Concord.

So Amanda and I put the feast aside and went for testing.

It was about an hour and a half before Amanda got in for testing, but once she was off to XRAY I went to The hospital cafeteria for a belated lunch. They didn’t have Mexican food so I opted for some clam chowder, salad and a coffee.

After another hour and a half or so the tests all came back negative so the doctor sent Amanda home with her mystery pain and instructions to take Tylenol, to go to bed and to “come back if things get worse.”

Through this whole time I kept going back to part of our teaching in yesterday’s leadership training.

We were having a discussion about suffering and blessing and how those two things are just two sides of the same coin. Our suffering (trials and difficulties) and our blessings are both tools to bring us deeper into the presence of God if we allow them too. As I was sitting in the cafeteria eating my clam chowder I was thinking how quickly an expected journey of blessing turned over into an unexpected journey of difficulty and I began to remind myself that this unexpected difficulty like the expected blessing is just a tool to be used to bring both Amanda and myself deeper into God’s presence.

As Julian of Norwich said, All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”. We just have to continue to believe that by faith through the difficulty and through the blessing.

We got home. Amanda took her Tylenol ate a bit of taco meat and gave me her Father’s Day presents a mixed gift bag from The Vermont Country Store. In it were two whoopee pies a jar of orange marmalade and some beautiful bamboo wind chimes which I immediately hung in my outdoor prayer chapel.

Melanie and Joe gave me their gifts too and fed me cilantro lime chicken and cake!!!

It was an unexpected Father’s Day. It started in blessing circled around to difficulty and came back to a blessing just like most good stories in our world today. It was an adventure and I am learning I do really love those.

HERE’D TO THE ADVENTURE OF TOMORROW!