A Week of Service

As I sit here at my computer on a Sunday afternoon, having taught the Mia Maids today, and waiting to leave for New Beginnings, I can hardly believe that a week has come and gone.  Wasn't it just last Sunday?

With John not working now (hasn't seen a patient, been in clinic, or stepped foot in a hospital since November 15), we've had some time on our hands.  For the first month, John was busy collecting information and documents for the lawyer.  Then Christmas came and everybody was home.  But now?  We are having to make our own fun...or in the case of the church, people will make it for us.

There is a bishop's storehouse in Farmington Hills (a suburb of Detroit).  Last November, I spent a morning there with Amber, stocking shelves.  As it turns out, one of the senior missionaries broke his ankle and is out of commission for eight weeks, and with our stake being the "agent" stake for the storehouse, the stake needed a replacement for him and his wife, and soon, because it takes time to find a new set of senior missionaries.  How convenient that the stake presidency knew that John isn't working at the moment ;-)

So a couple of weeks ago, President Sangster called us and asked if we would be willing to step in.  Tuesdays and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  I thought it would be something pretty awesome with tons of paperwork and administrative duties, but John probably had a more realistic view of what it would entail.

The first Tuesday, we couldn't actually show up until about 1 p.m., and as it turns out, it's good we didn't arrive before then.

Elderly people move really slowly.  They need to take lots of breaks.  They need to rest their feet, and have a snack.  And they don't think very quickly either.

What would have taken the regularly called missionaries eight hours took John and me two.  And there wasn't much office stuff to do--just stocking shelves which isn't really the best thing for someone lacking two discs in her spine.

We would have stayed until 6 p.m. (to see how the meat is loaded onto the trucks), but just that morning I had received a phone call from a Tuesday night temple worker, asking if I could substitute that evening for her.  She thought that she was getting sick.  Mind you, she wasn't sick yet, but she thought it was "coming on", and she sounded happy and smiley on the phone.  I figured since we would already be in Farmington Hills, just 20 miles from the temple, we may as well go to the temple too.

So at 5:20, we booked it out of the storehouse and flew as fast as possible in Detroit rush hour traffic to the temple.  Lucky me (for real), I was asked to be a "follower" in the endowment session, and to work the veil, my two absolutely favorite jobs in the temple.  John was happy to just attend a session, and I knew he didn't mind being able to look up at me anytime during that hour and a half ;-)

Wednesday, the heavens opened, and we got dumped on with more rain.  In fact, this entire week, the kids had school one day.  However, John has a ministering sister who is down on her luck, and she's needed car maintenance for a while.  However, she doesn't trust anyone to do it but trained mechanics (and even then, it's dicey), and she wants only the most expensive parts.  This from a woman who is currently homeless and living off of the church's funds.  John has been trying to convince her to let him change her brake pads for the past six months, and she finally relented.  He didn't want her coming to our house (good call, because she's honestly crazy), so they met in Dexter in a parking lot. John had to drag all of his tools there, and work out in the cold and snow.  It took him about four hours because apparently Volkswagens are a nightmare to service yourself.  And you better believe Sting was inspired to his write his hit based on Amy's actions, because she was questioning everything John did and every move he made.  In fact, after the pads were changed, and she had driven off, she called John and told him what a crappy job he had done and did he have the old brake pads still because she wanted them back.  I know it says in the scriptures that when we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God, but I can't imagine God would have treated John that way at all.

Thursday, we were back at the storehouse, although this time I spent a lot of time walking the parking lot talking to Mark and Amber (not at the same time...). There just wasn't a lot of need to go in.  I did eventually walk through the doors, and I received some minor training in how to pull items for "walk ins" and I saw how the main sister, Sister Hicks, decides how to bag the meat.  But once again, we left in a hurry for our temple shift.

Both John and I were rather worried that we would be assigned to work in the baptistry again since it's the last thing we need to sign off on for our training, and since we had been given some training the week before.  Training at the temple is hit or miss.  With John and me being so young, and having years of experience being patrons in the temple, they frequently just ask us if we have any questions, and throw us into a job.  We are usually watched to make sure we know what we're doing, and we're signed off.  It's really fabulous being the pet students of the coordinators ;-)

The baptistry is a different animal however.  There's a special breed of person who works in the baptistry.  It's the same type of person who works in community Scouting and in family history centers.  It's people who have worked there for decades, and believe that their way is the best way; essentially, they own the calling.  And to put it mildly, they are nightmarish trainers.

Once again, they were just going to throw John and me into the deep end, but I did want to know how to just bring the kids in and distribute the clothing.  So they grabbed one of my dear friends at the temple to show me around for five minutes.  I grabbed a pen from the prayer roll box and started taking notes on the back of my schedule. Trish has the same philosophy as me--as long as you smile, and stay on top of things, everything will work out.  At the end of our five minutes, she asked if I was worried about anything.  I told her that I could do anything except deal with criticism from someone else in the temple if things didn't go perfectly.  That I didn't want one of those women to come in and bully me.

My dear coordinators, however, were worried about me, not realizing that I had received absolutely no training in the baptistry, so they decided to send over Sister Patrick, a woman who usually works in the office...and who scares me.  Sister Patrick is one of those people whom I just don't ever want to bother, or ask a question, but when I do, I try and smile at her and sugar coat it and tell her how terrific she is.  And she just looks at me dead pan.

She's also one of those people who has done the calling for so long that she indeeds believes that she owns it, and in the words of Iam Fleming, nobody does it better.  She came over not five minutes after Sister Andrew left, and she started peppering me with questions.  Had I done this?  Did I take care of that?  I told her that I had done everything Sister Andrew told me to do...and she told me that it was all wrong.  She then proceeded to march around the baptistry, barking orders at me.  In fact, at one point she got mad at me because I wasn't distributing the clothing to the girls (after being told that I should give that responsibility over to one of the sisters coming with the youth).  So I went over to the cabinet to do that, but just seconds later, John came rushing over to me to tell me that Sister Patrick was wondering where I was and why I wasn't at the front door, greeting the youth.  I rushed back up there.  There were several other instances like this, but I only needed one to set me off.

The kicker came when I had done all the jobs she had told me to do, and I came back into the font area.  There were no chairs available (Sister Patrick was sitting in the one next to the font), so I sat up by the doors that are near the entrance to the baptistry itself.  I honestly needed a moment to just gather my emotions, because tears were very near the surface.  To my horror, she caught sight of me and marched right over, telling me that I was supposed to be sitting in the "coordinator's chair"....the exact chair she had just been sitting in.  So I went over like a beaten dog and took my appointed seat.

When Sister Raymond, my coordinator and one of my favorite persons in the world, came in to check on me, I just started crying. We receive so much training about making the patrons feel comfortable, and making sure that we are kind and friendly and unobtrusive, but obviously the shouldn't let the office workers go sooner than the training films are shown, because Sister Patrick could obviously use a couple of those lessons.  And she hasn't been the first worker to treat either John or me like this--it's the old school workers.  They just don't get it.

Plus, I have been desperately trying to find a good pair of temple shoes.  I wore the slippers for several months, but after standing for hours on end, I really do need something more supportive.  Plus, the floor is wet in the baptistry, and slippers just won't cut it.  I found a pair when I was out in Utah in December.  They're super ugly, but I figured they were better than nothing.  Well, I discovered that night, that that maxim does not hold true in regards to temple shoes.  Nothing would have been better, judging by my aching feet and legs after working in the baptistry for three hours.

And not to throw shade on gender-specific responsibilities, but I'm sorry.  Being a female worker in the baptistry sucks.  Like, big time.  We do very little but mop floors, haul wet laundry, and run washers and dryers all night, attempting to get the laundry done so that we can be the last workers at the temple, still folding the laundry long after everyone else is dressed and gone.  The men get to coordinate the baptisms and the confirmations, and witness everything, and talk to the youth, and just create a general feeling of love and acceptance.  But once my five minutes is done in "the chair", I'm off being a maid.

As I told John, I PAY a person to come in and mop the floors in my own home so that I don't have to do it.

So needless to say, we were very worried that Thursday night would involve another shift in the baptistry....

But thankfully we didn't even have a group of youth coming that night, so we were off the hook!

So Friday rolled around, and our ward's New Beginnings was only two days away.  I had been given the unenviable task of providing desserts for 50-60 people.  Please, let me do anything but decorate and provide food, and I'm happy.  But coming up with creative, themed desserts? Heaven help me.  Literally.

Everything is edible and tasty...
except the flower.

The theme was spring and new growth, and the decorations were going to be flowers, so I decided to make dirt dessert cups--you know the type.  Pudding in a flower pot, covered in broken Oreos (dirt) with gummy worms or flowers in the dirt.  The only problem is that there aren't many flower pots out there at the moment, but there are seed pots.  Another problem?  They have drainage holes, and pudding isn't exactly solid when it's first poured in.  So I thought I would wrap them in burlap and twine.

I also came up with the idea of "mystery seeds", an unknown seed in an envelope that you could then plant in the seed pot later in the spring.

And to insult to injury, we have some gluten-free girls in our congregation, so I needed to provide fruit for them as well.

No joke, I don't know what I would have done without John, seeing this very large and ominous project on the horizon.  Just walking into any craft store sparks fast breathing and cold sweats, but the idea of people seeing what I make?  Terrifying.

I spent three hours on Friday, shopping for all of the ingredients.

And Saturday morning, it was back to the temple because we agreed to take one Saturday shift a month, and the fourth Saturday was rolling around.  When I reminded John, his reaction of disbelief was almost comical.  I mean, if I didn't know better, I would think God wants us to move closer to Detroit...except there aren't any jobs there.

So 6:15 a.m. Saturday morning, and we were up and driving to the temple for our five hour shift.  And when we showed up, nobody had John on the schedule which is always a bit worrisome and disappointing.

This is our origami guide-dog reindeer.  Mark made him back in a Christmas sacrament meeting, and he ended up lodged in the heating vent in the Greenie.  He feels like our lucky omen, or something, now that we are driving through snow, sleet and ice almost daily.

However, we stayed so busy.  I did end up with an hour long break in the middle of it, so I went out in the waiting room, reread the Come, Follow Me lesson and emailed my thoughts out to the family.  But after that, I was initiatory director for two solid hours, as was John.

I'm still not used to having a break during our Saturday shift.  All of the other workers bring breakfasts and lunches and snacks they can warm up in the microwave.  I didn't have anything but these in my purse ;-)

Holy smokes, we were super busy (unlike Thursday night where we workers often have to serve as patrons).  And in respect to the poor woman who was turned away from the temple a couple of months earlier, I refused to turn away anyone who wanted to do initiatories.  Instead, I told them to get dressed, I found them some names, and we all worked together to make it a success.  And I kid you not, we probably got fifty initiatories done in those two hours!

But I won't lie--we were so tired. In fact, John and I both decided to get a good, solid meal at the nearby Melting Pot, and then we went home and slept.  Or I slept while John went running.

He got home from his run, and in true John fashion, wasn't going to take a shower when he knew he was just going to get messy.  But his shirt was wet, and he was cold.  I told him that hygienic kitchen procedures probably demand him wearing a covering over his chest hair, right Glo? ;-)

Because once the nap was over, we had to kick it into overdrive to get the desserts made for the next day.  It was several hours of mixing, and chopping, and arranging, but John was a champ, stepping up to help me.

Of course, I needed to print the Mystery Seed envelopes, but last night, at 8:15, my printer decided to die.  The printer that I inherited from Ethan when he left American.  It has been a work-horse of a printer, but we had to take it out back and shoot it.  So we flew to Staples to buy a new one.  One that we discovered wouldn't load and print envelopes....fifteen minutes after Staples had closed....and that had three paper jams this morning.  No worries--I just need to add three extra steps to print the label and instructions out on paper, cut the paper, tape the paper to the envelopes and add stickers to hold it on.  Yep, no worries.

And this morning, I taught the Young Women's lesson, came home, changed out of my clothes, and we chopped and arranged and worked some more, all so that I can write this blog post, take a short 45 minute nap, load everything into the car, and go to New Beginnings in a couple of hours.

Just a small portion of what I've made for tonight.

But through it all, I'd take a week like this over a week of worrying about our future.  When we are busy, we don't have time to think about the bad things that are happening in our lives.  Learn the lesson from me--stay busy and let the Lord take care of the rest.