2/14/2010

It’s been a busy week at the Power House in Baltimore, Maryland.

It started out Sunday with Morning Worship. With the storm the night before, we anticipated a small gathering. Not wanting to rattle around in the main room and being interested in saving on the heating bill, we met in a circle in the front room. I was surprised that 10 people made their way though the snow to participate in the communion service.

Just 2 kids came to Kids’ Church that afternoon. We watched a Veggie Tale video and saved our regularly planned craft and lesson for another week.

That afternoon we sent in the funds we’d received at the church to help the relief efforts in Haiti. Since the earthquake, we received over $700 toward the efforts there.

We decided to cancel our “Big Game” party scheduled for Sunday night. We knew that a few people would probably come but didn’t want to waste food by cooking everything up and not have it eaten. We’ll use the food in a couple of weeks at after our February Celebration Service.

This cancellation will impact us for a while. Selling snacks at this event was the primary way of raising camp funds from within the neighborhood.

Another cancellation from the storm was my flight to California for training at Saddleback Church. They couldn’t rebook me until it was too late to make the trip worthwhile.

I got a call on Monday from the folks at Amricorps. They’ve finished their research and are ready to present their project to community leaders. They wanted to use the building to present their work to neighborhood organizations and get feedback and/or buy-in and we were able to accommodate their needs.

I also got a call that evening about the death of the grandfather of a person who was active in church until they moved away several years ago. They needed someone to officiate at the funeral on Saturday and asked me to do so.

I had left messages with some church leaders in the Los Angeles area about the conference at Saddleback. My ticket was non-refundable but fully transferable so I thought perhaps someone out there might be able to benefit from the program. I got a call about someone wanting to go on Tuesday. I don’t know if they were successful at making it happen or not.

The next major storm hit on Tuesday evening. The memorial service for Elizabeth, which had originally been scheduled for the previous Saturday but had been postponed due to the weather, was scheduled for that evening. Despite the storm, a couple of people came. Tamara and I shared in the readings and Vonceil ran the AV equipment.

The storm continued throughout the day on Wednesday. With school closed we automatically canceled SonRisers. We also canceled Mid-Week service that night. I went to contact the Narcotics Anonymous group leaders about their plans for the evening and realized that I hadn’t updated the number since Maurice died. I went over to the church (a task in itself), did some shoveling, and got the building ready in case anyone came. No one did.

Thursday was dedicated to paperwork, reading, and shoveling. As the day progressed we shifted our concerns away from keeping the electricity on and the roof from collapsing. The new concern is for flooding in basements. This was exacerbated be a water main break on my street. They were able to get it fixed but we were without water for a while and some neighbors did get water in their basements.

We were glad to know that Ultimate Pizza was delivering on Friday. We had an unusually small first session, a normal sized middle school session, and a surprisingly large third session. In fact, we had a couple of new kids and some others we hadn’t seen in several years. This included another student of Vonceil’s who was active in church when he was in elementary school.

I sent out emails and made a few calls at the end of the week to the handful of people who drive to church rather than walk. Though we are planning on services on Sunday, no parking is yet available. The church’s parking lot was used to pile snow off the street. What parking is on the street is the result of people shoveling out their own cars. Parking in someone else’s space under these conditions is not cool. Tensions about parking are running really high right now.

Tamara and I went to the funeral home on Saturday morning. It was the first time I’d driven since 2/5. Driving conditions in the city were still amazingly bad. We had a slight delay in starting the funeral waiting for people to get through the snow-filled streets and the procession to the cemetery took a different route than originally planned after we learned that some of the streets were not yet fully passable.

A good sized group of kids gathered for our monthly Solid Rock Café on Saturday evening. Though having a dozen kids show up for this event isn’t a huge number, it’s the biggest group of people we had at a single activity all week.

Looking ahead to next week we have our full schedule of activities. This is despite the fact that we cannot accommodate parking. A few people won’t be able to come Sunday morning because of it. I’m not sure if the nursing school will have to change meeting locations for the same reason as well. School is still iffy this week (it’s still quite a mess outside, mass transit is running on a limited schedule, and we have more snow and ice forecast) so we’ll be ready to roll with what to do about SonRisers on Wednesday. Sunday night is our monthly priesthood meeting.

Along with the individuals and activities mentioned, please keep the following families in the forefront of your prayers:

The Bagley Family
The People Family
The Parents Family
The Covington Family
The Shorter Family
The Eisenhardt Family
The Purnell Family
The Conley Family

Thank you for your continued prayer support.

Jeff and everyone at
The Power House
“Building the Kingdom of God Here and Now”
PowerHouseMD@Juno.com
www.pigtownchurch.org
http://thisweekatthepowerhouse.blogspot.com/