So This Donkey Walks Into A Church . . .

From 24 March

Palm Sunday in Wisconsin - March 2013

Swapping out the rows of trees that sway in the breeze coming off the South China Sea for flurries and a handheld frond, Palm Sunday 2013 was celebrated in the company of the good people of Grace Lutheran Church in Cambridge, WI. With a live donkey, palm procession, visual reading of the passion narrative, and the impromptu visit of their new international partner it was a service filled with delightfully holy chaos - in other words, the perfect environment in which to re-enter the United States for a month of visiting with different sponsors and supporters.

To describe the visit as unexpected would be an understatement. Somewhere during my thirty hours of travel from Kuala Lumpur to Seoul to Detroit and then Milwaukee, an e-mail appeared in my inbox that introduced the congregation as a new sponsor and asked whether or not I’d be free to visit the following Sunday. With the YAGM Malaysia mantra of “never say ‘No’ to an invitation” in mind, I jumped at the chance to be with them - jetlag and all. 

I’m so very glad that I did.

The congregation has a lengthy history of supporting the Global Work of the ELCA. Most recently they were supporters of my (former) colleagues Brian and Kristen Konkol and their work with the YAGM program in Southern Africa. While I was excited to be able to share about my work in Southeast Asia, it was equally thrilling to hear bits and pieces about the congregation’s life and work in Southern Wisconsin. Even more I was grateful to begin to get to know the people here, over coffee with members in the fellowship area and a spur-of-the-moment lunch after worship. From those encounters, and others like them, strands of relationship have been brought together that will knit us and our global communities closer together over time. 

This, too, is sacred work. 

This, too, is why I do what I do.

What’s more, as our time together drew to a close, flurries came drifting down from above. For someone now acclimated to the tropics, the freezing temps were brutal but refreshing. After more than two years without snow, those first trace amounts elicited in me no small bit of joyful giddiness. 

Little did I know that I had landed in the midst of the-winter-that-would-not-end.