My church shares our building with another church called Trinity Reformed Church. Mark woke me up this morning and told me that Trinity was having an Ash Wednesday service. I jumped out of bed and got dressed and went in.
When the minister went around putting ashes in the form of a cross on people’s foreheads, he said, “Remember, you came from dust and you will return to dust.” That’s a very sobering thought first thing in the morning. It causes one to think about mortality.
Speaking of mortality, my sister let me know that she had heard from one of Elaine’s kids today that she died a month ago of a heart attack. She died less than a year after Dad. I can’t say I have any feelings about it one way or another. Lauryn says that she and Rob had just had a visit with Elaine about a week and a half before she died. She seemed fine to them then. Her son thinks it was a combination of Dad’s death and moving recently that did her in. I can believe that her recent move might have been what caused the heart attack. She moved from Tigard to Salem to be closer to family.
On a cheerier note, I was interviewed this morning to become a vetted volunteer at the Refugee Center and it’s now official! I will be helping out in the sewing room on Wednesdays until we leave. I also told them that I’m interested in helping with baby showers when a refugee woman has a baby. Also, Mark and I will be participating in a Neighborhood Kids Club on a Tuesday next month. It’s at an apartment complex we’re already familiar with because we’ve made a couple of donation deliveries there in the last week. There’s a couple from Jordan who has a 2-year-old boy and 7-month-old twin girls and the woman’s mother lives with them too and helps take care of the kids. The wife’s name is Bayan, and she and I hit it off during our first delivery last Friday. Since then, she has sent me pictures of her kids when they were littler and I have sent her a picture of my son and of our Turkish daughter, Kader. She and I have been texting together – she writes in Arabic and it comes to me in English and I write to her and it comes through to her in Arabic. Modern technology is so great!
This afternoon, I also had an interview with the new head of education and leadership management at ARMS (Abuse Recovery Ministry Services). She is familiarating herself with all the leaders of ARMS groups, and even though I don’t have my own group yet, I passed my training and I’m considered a leader now. I’ve been co-leading with another woman on Zoom for about a month and a half now. I’m hoping that the 2 women who have offered to co-lead ARMS here will get a group started sometime this summer, and I’ll see about getting something going in Door County too.