Merry Christmas!
Dec. 26th, 2005 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lorimtIt is good to be home and eating grandma's chocolate covered cherry cookies while wrapped up in blankets and reading. Christmas has been good, with lots of family and good food. The church services were very nice as well.
(As I edit this entry, I realize there ought to be another paragraph here. Since I'm not finding the words to smoothly add it into the narrative, I'll just stick in this note: the church services themselves, worshiping God, hearing the Christmas story another time - all these are deeply meaningful and important to me, enough that I have a hard time writing about them directly. Instead, I've written around the outside with a realization that occurred to me as I was writing. This'll have to do as the segue between them. :) )
Every time when I come home for a vacation, I realize how much of the congregation is old family friends who've known me since I was small. It used to be that they were "grownups who know Mom and Dad" and the reason my brother and I had to wait all of 15 or 20 minutes after the service to get home. Now that I'm a bit older, I actually manage conversations of my own and there is a great sense of community and home.
Now for a bit of context, and explaining why this should be at all surprising. We live in a mid-sized town, nowhere near a city, but not quite small-town either. My mother is a doctor and when my grandmother moved to town, she dived into lots and lots of volunteer work. Also, I apparently look a lot like my mother, though I really don't see the resemblance much. This means that since I was quite small, people that to me were total strangers have come up to me, often recognizing me by name or at least relation to my mother and asked me to pass along a "hello". This really disconcerted me no end, especially since I'm phenomenally bad with face-name connections. Here was someone who obviously knew me and not only did I have no clue who they were, I didn't even know if I *ought* to be able to recognize them.
The happy bit of this story is that now that I'm no longer working at the town library and running into mixes of people who know me from all sorts of places, it is much easier to recognize and connect with the people I know from church. I no longer rack my brain for "how am I supposed to know this person?". It makes it much easier to connect the people and the stories to the faces, and means I can talk to someone I know and am comfortable with.
All this in addition to the simple fact that the congregation is full of wonderful people who are a joy to talk with and have been people I've looked up to since I was small.
Merry Christmas!
(As I edit this entry, I realize there ought to be another paragraph here. Since I'm not finding the words to smoothly add it into the narrative, I'll just stick in this note: the church services themselves, worshiping God, hearing the Christmas story another time - all these are deeply meaningful and important to me, enough that I have a hard time writing about them directly. Instead, I've written around the outside with a realization that occurred to me as I was writing. This'll have to do as the segue between them. :) )
Every time when I come home for a vacation, I realize how much of the congregation is old family friends who've known me since I was small. It used to be that they were "grownups who know Mom and Dad" and the reason my brother and I had to wait all of 15 or 20 minutes after the service to get home. Now that I'm a bit older, I actually manage conversations of my own and there is a great sense of community and home.
Now for a bit of context, and explaining why this should be at all surprising. We live in a mid-sized town, nowhere near a city, but not quite small-town either. My mother is a doctor and when my grandmother moved to town, she dived into lots and lots of volunteer work. Also, I apparently look a lot like my mother, though I really don't see the resemblance much. This means that since I was quite small, people that to me were total strangers have come up to me, often recognizing me by name or at least relation to my mother and asked me to pass along a "hello". This really disconcerted me no end, especially since I'm phenomenally bad with face-name connections. Here was someone who obviously knew me and not only did I have no clue who they were, I didn't even know if I *ought* to be able to recognize them.
The happy bit of this story is that now that I'm no longer working at the town library and running into mixes of people who know me from all sorts of places, it is much easier to recognize and connect with the people I know from church. I no longer rack my brain for "how am I supposed to know this person?". It makes it much easier to connect the people and the stories to the faces, and means I can talk to someone I know and am comfortable with.
All this in addition to the simple fact that the congregation is full of wonderful people who are a joy to talk with and have been people I've looked up to since I was small.
Merry Christmas!
