A Soul Satisfying Week-end in the Middle of Summer

It's been a good week-end.  On Saturday, I had grading to do and sermon prep to do, and I did it.  The box of sermon props that I ordered for my children's sermon arrived, as was promised when I came up with the plan on Friday.

I got to the library to pick up the books that I had on reserve, and I spent part of the week-end reading for pleasure.   Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry is every bit as wonderful as I had heard.  I read almost all of it by week-end's end.

Our trip over the mountains on Sunday was beautiful.  In the early morning, it felt like we were driving through a movie set--the clouds hung low across part of the mountains, making some of the trees look like they had spun fiber in them, and in some places, it looked like steam or smoke was rising up over the trees.

It was a good Sunday service--for more on my children's sermon, see this post on my theology blog.  As we drove back home, my spouse and I talked about the possibility for next week's sermon, with the Gospel being the parable about weeds and seedlings and the property owner who will sort them out in the end.  Can we get around the standard interpretation of judgment?  I think we can, and that will be my approach.

For afternoon happy hour, I set up a tasting.  I had bought 3 types of Chardonnay from Kendall Jackson:  an oaked, an unoaked, and a lower calorie/alcohol version.  It did not surprise me that I preferred the oaked version, my spouse the unoaked, and we both had a shrug over the lower calorie/alcohol wine.  It's not very scientific, since we knew what we were tasting.

And now I have a few weeks before my fall commitments begin.  They're not completely free weeks:  I need to create syllabi for my in person classes at Spartanburg Methodist College, and I'm doing middle school Bible study for the last week of camp in August.  We've got home repairs ongoing (but that's likely to be a constant state for at least a year):  this week, we're expecting the counters to be installed.

Let me go for a walk and look for some dandelion puffs.