I have decided to end the week like I begin it.

Or how I hoped to begin the week.

At Starbucks, drinking coffee, writing. One activity I know brings fulfillment and hope for me.

 

Of course, this week was different. It didn’t begin with writing and planning and organizing. It began with a phone call. A kind, powerful man was dying. He was doing well, and then he wasn’t. And then a few days passed, through a weekend. He couldn’t keep going, his body couldn’t keep going.

His big family was there, an Episcopal priest and an Orthodox deacon, friends numbering 17 in all gathered at his bedside when he took his last breaths.

The breaths some of us have heard before: those hollow, rattling sounds, slow. I’d call them labored, but the man is hardly there anymore, to labor is to do something with intention and he wasn’t breathing that way.

This man inspired awe in me. His family, the whole of them together, do the same.

The death of parishioners hits clergy differently. Some are always harder than others. And remembering our friends and the people we are just getting to know are times as unique as the people. As I pray for Skander, I also pray for Bud and Bruce and so many more whose loss was so personal. Or John or George, whose loss to the church was so profound. Titans & Saints.

This week stretched me. Not in the way of the running around, writing four sermons of Holy Week sort of way, but in the emotional I could make this easier for myself way. I refused. I prepared. I stuck with it. I did the work. And I felt better about it.

I’m thankful for a man I wished to know as well as everyone else in that room – the strange reality of the new rector – and yet I knew him from the moment we met. I knew him from all of the conversations I had with everyone else: people who are better because of him. I knew him from the stories and the jokes and the admissions. I knew him from the laughing and the gathering and the eating. I knew him from the tears and the sobbing and the stoic standing, waiting, leaping to help and coordinate and settle that tumultuous low, very low day.

The week was to begin with coffee. With sorting and planning and writing. It was to begin with Lenten preparation and announcements to the congregation of an awesome Lenten program. It was to begin here, at this table in the corner, the coveted pub table by the outlet. Here, where my preparation would help us launch into our most significant season.

Instead, it is here where I am tired and reflective. Trying to think of the most profound thing I can write, the thing I could say that would make your day better. And all I can think about is this family and their gratitude, my people and their hopefulness, my family and their love. And I have nothing to say, and only slightly more than that to give.

I have my coffee. I have my table. I have my moment “alone”, ears plugged to the “ambient bass” station on Songza, and I have you with me. That is how we end the week. That is how I give thanks for my work today.