St. Mark's News

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June and July 2015

St. Mark’s News Volume 19/Issue 6

From the Assistant Rector I’m not one who typically tries to read the tea leaves. It’s not that I don’t take God to be alive and active in the mundane things. I very much do––my life, in fact, depends on it. It’s just that I don’t think I can always trust myself to be an authoritative interpreter of where God’s action is present. And so, for me to come to the point of saying with any kind of certainty that one thing or another is “God’s will” . . . well, it takes a lot. The first week of January, I got a rather strange phone call from the head of the search committee at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The parish name was one that I recognized, as I had several previous connections to it. The In this Issue Dean/President of my seminary, The Very Rev. Dr. Paul F.M. Zahl, for From the Assistant .................... 1 instance, had served as one of their previous Rectors. A classmate of mine Vestry Highlights ....................... 3 in seminary was a second connection, as he had served at All Saints as Outreach ................................... 4 Assistant Rector shortly after graduation. All Saints also has developed a Parish Life ................................. 6 shared ministry with Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, Parishioner Highlights ............... 7 where I took my first ministry job out of college almost ten years ago. Christian Formation ................... 8 Celebrations .............................. 9 I was not looking for a job at the time. I had, after all, just come to St. Caffeine Ministry ...................... 10 Mark’s three months prior, and have loved my time here. Moreover, I had ROTA ...................................... 11 only become engaged to Janna. This meant, among other things, that we were in the initial stages of talking “future,” and the early stages of our planning was leading us toward taking a “transition year” in Waco. In this scenario, I would press forward and finish (most of) my dissertation by the summer of 2016, while continuing to commute to St. Mark’s part-time during the week. We thought of this as a good chance to get settled into our marriage.

I relented to an interview for essentially two reasons. The first is that it was just an interview, and for a young professional (in any field), an interview is a good thing. The second reason I agreed to interview was that I was already in Washington D.C. that week for a family visit. Months passed. Looking back, one of the funny things that happened during these months is that I bought a fridge for my home in Waco. It’s a funny remembrance because I had been holding off for months on buying a new fridge (after my freezer broke the previous summer) because I didn’t want to make a big purchase until I proposed to Janna, and we knew where we were going to live the following year. By February, we had become “sure” enough that we would be going forward with our “transition year” plan, and put a new fridge in my home in Waco. However, as time passed, a few things started to change for us, mostly as a result of our time in pre-marital counseling. The first is that we became increasingly wary of starting our married life split between two cities. Having spent most of our dating life “long-distance,” we wanted marriage to represent a move toward presence and stability. The reasons are a bit more complex, but, in essence, we began to feel that the best thing we could do for our marriage was to start out on a new adventure, in a place that would be new to both of us.

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