The blog

The blog—informal opinions and chat about the parish

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Beginning Again

It's been a rough year for your webmaster (though not for St. Matthew's). I won't go into all of it, but surgery, death of a family member, trouble at work, and a few other things generally overwhelmed me, so the result was that this blog was totally ignored for a full year.

Not good.

So in the next few blog entries, I'd like to give some account of what's happened in the past year (quite a challenge!) and some idea of where we want to go in the future.

The Past Year
This is all just off the top of my head, so if I have missed anything, more apologies!
  • We added several new people.
  • We watched Luke Simmons graduate high school (There was never any doubt, by the way. He's a wonderful kid.)
  • A Twelve-Step All-Inclusive Recovery Group began meeting on Wednesday evening. (The idea is that it's not just confined to one type of challenge.)
  • Erin Fuller was received into membership. (For those who are not Episcopalians, this is an enormously big deal! Bishop Williams came down from Cleveland to officiate.)
  • We participated in the Diocese Capital Campaign drive, and raised a significant amount of money. So far, we have replaced the kitchen stove (so there's much less likelihood of the building blowing up) and two outside doors (so the cold air will tend to stay outside where it belongs). Next up is a roof, which is quite a project for an A-frame building.
  • I was part of the Bishop's Bike Ride, a pleasant little 240-mile jaunt through northern Ohio. We did that in five very rainy days. (Someone took a picture of trout swimming across a flooded bike trail he was using. I didn't get to go that way because my group got diverted.)
I'm sure there's more, and I'll post things as I think of them.

Not exactly our parish, but certainly something we are part of—the capital campaign raised enough money to purchase the camp property in Wakeman and begin work on developing it. This is an enormously big deal, both for the Diocese and for our parish. (It's only an hour away, so it will be very available to us for such things as leadership retreats.)

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