The End of An Era

This morning we drove into Gresham (actually a part of Portland, Oregon) to join the folks at Peace Mennonite Church in their last worship service. The group, in a discernment process, decided last month to end their years as a congregation and set the last Sunday in May as a celebration of their many years in the Portland area (80 years! Started as a mission plant in 1939). This church building had become very familiar to me over my years of service on the Board and as Moderator of the Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference because it was our meeting place for many of those years. The offices of PNMC were housed on their campus.


It was good to see many of the people I have worked with in the past there today as well. Our time together was bittersweet as stories were told and the history of the congregation related. One of the many groups that use this church building is a group of African immigrants. They shared some of their music with us -- lively and vibrant, it made you want to dance in praise.


We would have stayed to visit longer, but yard work was calling us. I finished removing the edging bricks around the flower bed in the back where Daughter Dawn had had her strawberries. We've transplanted the berries to the yard perimeter, but part of the bed had been taken over by a nasty yellow flowered plant about a foot tall. Son-in-law Todd had sprayed it a couple of days ago, but we've had so much rain it really didn't do much good. Knowing that we didn't want to till all of the green mass into the flower bed, I took Todd's machete to it and removed a good portion of the top of it. After Todd roto-tilled it, there was still a LOT of green matter. Dawn raked and picked out a lot of it, but we decided we were not going to plant the perennials Dawn had gotten for it until it sat for a few days and was tilled again.


While we were working Todd's bio-parents, Denzel and Dorothy, arrived. Todd and Forry were very glad to have an extra pair of hands to help them lift and hold the top beams of the grape arbor while they were being bolted into place. I went back to Auntie Violet and made a crab pasta salad for supper and we barbecued the chicken sausages that we had gotten at Trader Joe's. As we sat down to eat, it once again began to rain! It has gone from a light shower to now a pretty steady rain. I think I may be growing gills...