February 17 – “Days of wonder and excitement”

After a failed attempt to get our car worked on yesterday (our mechanic is also a pastor and he had a funeral scheduled), we had an interesting visit or two to our bank.  We had a deposit to make, and that part went fairly smoothly, except that I forgot to fill out one of the deposit slips.  Not a problem, though.  The teller looked it up for us and we were all set.  Step two was to pick up a new signature card for the church’s safe deposit box so our newly elected signers could have access to it.  I went in about a month ago to start that process, so I figured it would be all done by now.  Not so much.  To his credit, though, the guy who had been assigned the task sat down and did it right then.  Took about 10 minutes.  Our third issue involved some IRA’s Chris and I set up some time back.  They don’t have much in them, but the maturity date was due and Chris wanted to see if the interest rate had gone up any.  We did some adjusting and got a whopping .3% rate.  That’s three tenths of one percent.  Not very much.  But hey, every penny counts, right?  We figured all he had to do was enter a few figures into his computer, press enter, and we were done.  Nope.  He had to close out the old accounts and open completely new ones.  It was going to take him an hour or so.  He asked if we could come back by later.  Wow.  We waited until much later, almost closing time before going back in.  He had turned over the job to someone else, and she had everything ready to go for our signatures.  All done in five minutes.  Not sure if the headache was worth a tenth of a percent, but it is done for another 18 months anyway.

After our first dealing with the bank we went out to the church to do a little cleaning.  We forgot that we were hosting early voting, though.  Chris did a quick run-through of the building while I took down the Ash Wednesday sign from the marquee.  Oh, and speaking of signs, we also had to remove some political signs from church property.  The church decided years ago that we could be good citizens by hosting voting, but we didn’t want to appear to favor any particular candidate.  Besides, the sign are quite a bit of clutter.  Especially when the candidates don’t return to collect them after the election is over.  So we just uprooted them (and one of them was a big one – double iron standards holding it up) and placed them on the ground.  We did explain to the election judges what we were doing in case anyone complained.  They were absolutely sympathetic to our request.  We did then move upstairs so we could stay out of the way of the voters.  Chris attacked the bathrooms and gave them all a good cleaning.  I put together the new heavy-duty shelf for the kitchen and loaded the top few shelves with stuff we had stored.  The two small tables that had been the makeshift shelves, I carried into the storeroom and repurposed them into shelves for that area.  That made it possible to reorganize that room a bit more.  It is taking forever in there, but we are slowly getting it close to being a truly usable room.

Sounds like a pretty boring day at the Vaughan office, doesn’t it?  Hey, they come around every so often.  I’m happy to push away from the computer work at least one day a week.  But now it’s back to sermons and Bible studies and emails and the like.  Oh, and I guess we need to head out soon to get the car into the shop.  Will these days of wonder and excitement never cease?

1 John 4:20 says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”

Father, thank you for all the days you give us.  Wonder is, after all, a matter of perspective, isn’t it?  Amen.