This is my first Holy Week to not be leading a parish in over twenty five years.

It is another new walk as a person who happens to be a priest.

Holy Week began for me on this past Friday. The Mission Amplification Team does an outreach project once a quarter, and on Friday we served lunch at The Beacon, a ministry of the Diocese of Texas with the people who live on the streets of downtown Houston.

We helped finish the preparations for the lunch which was certainly restaurant worthy, and then filled trays as the men and women walked through the line.  I was the last person in the serving line, and the choices I offered were tomatoes, croutons, thousand island dressing, and ranch dressing.  

I had been reminded in my  morning time of prayer that all we meet we treat as Christ, and so I was intentional as I greeted each person– to look them in the eye and smile.  Sometimes we even had time for a brief conversation.

It was Holy Communion.

This morning I went to Palm Sunday worship at my local church.  In the familiarity of the liturgy, there were portions that were different from my last twenty or so years of Palm Sunday liturgy.

I am in new unfamiliar familiar territory.

I am having lunch with friends today, an event I scheduled because I wasn’t responsible for worship.

I’m planning to end the day with Evensong at another local church.

Not in charge, I am walking with Jesus.

This will be a Holy Week.

I’ve been on vacation in Oregon with my family. It’s their Spring Break and so I went to play with the grandboys while their parents worked.

We started the week by making lists of what we most wanted to do this week. We called our week “anything can happen,” and we knew there would be good surprises in store.

Here’s the list written by the grandboys, a third grader and kindergartener. Number ones had been accomplished before I could copy the list:

Anything can happen wEEK

2.Tell story

3.Cook a lots’o stuff

4.GET NEW 🐱

5.DECORATE EASTER EGGGGGGGGGS

6.SEE DUMBO 🐘

Vanilla cake 🎂 💸

SFPILS

COOKING STUFF

2. 1 INGREDIENT BANNA ICE CREAM🍌🍦

3. STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE🍓🎂

4.WAKCY CAKE🤪🎂

5.EVERYDAY PANCAKES🥞

6.MASTER RECIPE FOR BISCUITS AND SCONES

7.CAKE IN A SHOEBOX 🎂👞📦

We’d already made cookies,

slime,

and seen a movie

before I’d had time to make a copy of our list (Austin loved removing items as we checked them off).

The boys not being in a church that observes Lent, we also engaged in some Easter preparations.

Egg dying,

card making,

and decorating.

Later in the week Austin had added “spills” to the week. We had lots of laughter and laundry with our unending clumsiness.

Nighttime was spent sharing a bed. Once again I was a grandma sandwich. This time we had the addition of a new cat, Alley Cat, who enjoyed sleeping on my head and giving love bites and licks throughout the night.

Before sleep, the reading aloud was now done by the boys, both good readers. I made up stories, and we always ended with prayers–an adapted Ignatian Examen followed by Compline. When I asked Austin when he’d felt closest to God, he’d reply, “I always feel close to God.”

Before I left today, Jonas and I were looking at our photos of our anything can happen week, and he titled each of the photos. Most of them he named, “Making.” Yes, we did a lot of making this week, and the best making of all was the relationship kind of making:

Memories and connections with one another that are one of God’s very best gifts to us.

I am so very grateful to have a job with vacation days and the financial resources to see my very far away family at least once a season.

I do not take it for granted.