Busy Week

This is going to be a busy week. I am going to clean my house tomorrow and perhaps have lunch with an old friend. Tuesday, I am taking an elderly friend (yes, that's relative) to an eye doctor's appointment in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Wednesday, I going back to Bartlesville to take my brother-in-law to his doctor's appointment there for a colonoscopy and Thursday I will clean the church again, mop floors there and pack to leave for a Restoration Studies Symposium where I am co-presenting a paper. I am really looking forward to the symposium since I have never done that before. At my age, all new experiences are valuable.

I need to change my hair appointment from Wednesday to Thursday if at all possible in order to work all this in.

The Community of Christ Seminary in Independence will be the site for this Symposium. There will also be tours of the Community of Christ Temple shown at right. I've seen it numerous times but there's always something new. There will also be a tour of the archives with Ron Romig.

Today is the anniversary of our church's beginnings. Our church was officially organized in 1830 as the Church of Christ. Later the name was changed twice to The Church of Jesus Christ and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In 1860, when some of the people who chose not to follow Brigham Young and his embrace of polygamy to Utah, reorganized the church, our church added "The Reorganized" to the first part of the name, making the name an unwieldy "The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints". After that, much to our dismay, we were forever being confused with the Utah Mormons. But later, in 2000, the church changed it's name again to a name that speaks more adequately to it's mission. We're now officially "Community of Christ" . We are into community building...building communities of love, hope, joy and justice.

It's a great non-creedal church. We are given direction by the church but not directions. That's the way I see God. God gives our lives direction but we are on our own to choose our own path...be it good or bad..God will try to guide us but does not coerce us. Hopefully we all learn from our mistakes and make life lessons from them because we all make mistakes. I know I have made some major ones in my life.

So today I start a major busy week . The highlight will be my trip to Independence, Missouri on Friday. Every time I go there, I see dozens of people I know and have met on dozens of other occasions. That's the lovely thing about being a member of a church of 250,000 members. It is possible to know dozens, even hundreds of them personally. I always look forward to that.

Yes, it's going to be a very busy week but an exciting one.