Post (heart) day celebration recovery

That special day is over. Wwheeewww! I can sigh with a deep, satisfied relief. Tuesday, was almost a disaster.

I know, I know. I may be exaggerating, but I need to rant today.

It took almost an hour to get home, from U. Station to Arlington, VA. What gives?

It usually takes 20 minutes.

Getting home from the office building was at least two times much more difficult. I guess many folks were rushing to be with their "honeys" and loved ones at home, at the obligatory fancy restaurants, or at expensive shows/movies, to wine and dine on this emotionally symbolic day.

When I arrived at the house, I quickly changed in 10 minutes, gathered all necessary items for our "special" Celebration Session, or so I thought.

Bouquet of balloons in red, pink and white colors, check.

Bags of food, including grape juice, pita bread, candy, seltzer, etc, check, check, and double check.

Matches, check.

Why matches? For the candles, of course!

Valentines Day booklets, check.

Ribbon, check.

You get the idea.

Then it's time to rush to the church in the middle of the city for prep work.

Why are we doing this?

The YA leadership decided to have a celebration for the membership. Not until Sunday, did we finally decide the theme, teaching, food, and details.

So, you know what that means. A lot of rushing for errands on Sunday and Monday nights.

We decided to have communion. It's a first for the life group. Another activity, we planned was a Valentine's Day activity in which all participants had to write a note about something they "loved" about that person. Each person had a bright red bag with their name labeled at the top. The completed love notes were put into those nice little bags. Funny, some folks did not know everybody and struggled to apply appropriate words on their notes. They ended up writing a sentence or two. While other folks took great pain and time to write that special note for each person, despite how well they knew that person.

A____ checked with our head pastor for pertinent videos. It was decided to show a video on "choosing the right mate". On Tuesday, she led a discussion after we watched the video. Some pertinent questions were brought up. I could observe that our younger adults were engrossed with the video and the discussion.

While running to the church on Tuesday, I was hoping to get to the church by 6:30 pm, but, due to traffic, I arrived around 7:15 pm. Missing were stapler, among other stuff. One of the balloons deflated. My neatly sorted papers for the VD booklet spilled in the back seat. What else could go wrong?

So, during the weekend, I was on the search for the perfect bread. At the end of my search, I go to a local Bread & Chocolate bakery for that special bread. I end up purchasing a birthday chocolate cake and bread. Anyway, the funny story is that I bought challah bread, instead of the typical unleavened bread. As a former Catholic and Eucharist minister, I would think that I could remember that unleavened bread is used for communions, eh? Nope, I was in such a rush to impress folks with some classic Jewish bread, I absolutely forgot about it.

Not until I asked the associate pastor to bless the bread after Sunday service did he gently remind me that this was the wrong bread type if we were going to accurately enact this exercise.

Fortunately, on Tuesday the associate pastor purchased and blessed the pita bread and grape juice in time for the happy event. I think that people enjoyed the festivities, the communion, and the teaching. Afterwards, we munched on the challah bread, chocolate covered strawberries, shortbread, cookies, etc.

Also, we still had time for praise and worship!