an overdue update


since i try to write regularly, my recent lack of posts frustrates me. over the past several weeks our little family has navigated a number of major transitions that i would like to discuss more fully, but at this point a simple update will have to do.

as i just announced in a mass email to family and friends, sinners and saints is no longer self-identifying as a church but is continuing to journey forward as a community. fortunately this transition is not the result of major conflict within the church, a significant moral lapse among our leadership or our failure to fully embrace the forty days of purpose as a primary church program. rather, after almost five years together, most of our members have been dispersed around the country where they are expressing the Kingdom of God in manifold and marvelous ways. Moreover, our remaining Beverly contingent has decided to partner with existing, missional communities such as the gathering in salem, park street church in boston or st. mary's orthodox church in cambridge and invest our lives in any additional number of innovative incarnations of God's mission. for my part, i'm simply glad that up to this point, to the best of my knowledge, none of us have made shipwreck of our faith and i'm looking forward to the unexpected ways that God is going to utilize our members and our quirky little community in the future.

i always thought that saying goodbye to the s & s church would feel like failure. fortunately, up to this point anyway, it absolutely does not feel like that at all. rest assured that i'll compensate by failing in other ways.

in lighter news, a little over a week ago dr. j and i finally sold our jetta tdi and disbanded our little car co-op. although our car co-op never saved us the amount of money we hoped, we forswore bio-diesel months ago and we're still trying to find "creative" ways to dispose of the resulting, completely bio-degradable, bi-products on the aforementioned alternative fuel, i'd have to say that our co-op was still a success. for my part, car co-oping taught me that i can live interdependently with people other than my wife,* i don't need to travel as often as i thought and volkswagens are completely worthless pieces of euro-trash that reasonable people should not purchase. in sum, i'd have to say, yeah for car co-oping, woo-hoo for wise resource management and fuck you volkswagen.

due to the arrival of our absolutely amazing son and our resultant childcare needs, i have been working a second job with our remarkably inefficient, customer unfriendly mass-transit system. i think it's safe to say that this job has put undue stress upon pretty much everyone and everything that is important to me and, as a result, i'm desperately hoping that God provides me with an offer of sustainable employment in the near future. there are a couple of decent options resting right over the horizon right now. let's pray that one of those options is realized and my sixty five hour work weeks** quickly become a thing of the past.

in other news, things have been going incredibly well at my day job. over the past several weeks i've placed four or five clients and as a result i now know the core values of target, inc., how to efficiently clean a u-haul storage unit and a few ways that one can circumvent the security cameras at tj maxx. brilliant. in all seriousness, empowering disabled men and women by helping them find sustainable employment is usually a deeply meaningful and utterly fulfilling task. on the best days the job makes me want to be both a better man and a better pastor. moreover, on my worst days, i can take a few moments to observe the afternoon break dance class. so i'm not complaining.

* granted, i am talking about the wilcox's here, but still.
** i realize that i'm wallering in self pity here. please feel free to pick up a hammer and nails.

---

addendum:

ramos weighs in on the commencement of s & s church.