Yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, was a crazy day for our little
church – maybe not as crazy as that first Pentecost Sunday with the sound of a
mighty rushing wind, and the dancing tongues of fire, and people breaking out
with speeches in an astounding variety of languages, but crazy enough for us.
To begin, my wife was out of town, leaving me and our two teenage children to cover the things she usually does on a Sunday morning. This is not a hardship, but I’m not much of a morning person; getting myself up and dressed on time is sometimes a challenge. Even so, we managed to do pretty well. We were all awake and dressed on time, the dog was walked and fed, we stopped to pick up a friend on our way to the church building, the lights were turned on, the doors were unlocked, the coffee was brewed (thanks be to God), and Sunday School classes were all started on time. I started to think that I might be able to put this day in the win column.
But that’s when things went wild. One of our church friends, Paul, had a sudden and surprising bloody nose, like someone had turned on the blood faucet, it was pouring out of him. We quickly decided that he should go to the emergency room; a bloody nose may not seem like much, but Paul is 92 years old and it was a LOT of blood.
I helped Paul into my vehicle, difficult to do since he had one hand clenched to his nose with a towel trying to stem the flow of blood. I asked one of the other church members if he felt comfortable taking care of things while I was gone, and told him that if he needed anything he could count on my kids.
Paul’s nose stopped bleeding after about 40 minutes – during the time that we waited for an ER doctor to become available. There didn’t appear to be any specific cause for the bleeding and, after another waiting for another half hour to see if it would start bleeding again (it didn’t) the doctor said Paul was good to leave.
By the time we arrived back at the church building, the morning service was already concluded; they’d not had much in the way of a sermon, but they’d read all the scripture and prayed and sung the hymns – though they had to pick a couple of different ones since they weren’t familiar with two that were in the program. “We hope that’s okay…”
Of course it was. And Paul was okay. It was just a crazy Pentecost Sunday.
To begin, my wife was out of town, leaving me and our two teenage children to cover the things she usually does on a Sunday morning. This is not a hardship, but I’m not much of a morning person; getting myself up and dressed on time is sometimes a challenge. Even so, we managed to do pretty well. We were all awake and dressed on time, the dog was walked and fed, we stopped to pick up a friend on our way to the church building, the lights were turned on, the doors were unlocked, the coffee was brewed (thanks be to God), and Sunday School classes were all started on time. I started to think that I might be able to put this day in the win column.
But that’s when things went wild. One of our church friends, Paul, had a sudden and surprising bloody nose, like someone had turned on the blood faucet, it was pouring out of him. We quickly decided that he should go to the emergency room; a bloody nose may not seem like much, but Paul is 92 years old and it was a LOT of blood.
I helped Paul into my vehicle, difficult to do since he had one hand clenched to his nose with a towel trying to stem the flow of blood. I asked one of the other church members if he felt comfortable taking care of things while I was gone, and told him that if he needed anything he could count on my kids.
Paul’s nose stopped bleeding after about 40 minutes – during the time that we waited for an ER doctor to become available. There didn’t appear to be any specific cause for the bleeding and, after another waiting for another half hour to see if it would start bleeding again (it didn’t) the doctor said Paul was good to leave.
By the time we arrived back at the church building, the morning service was already concluded; they’d not had much in the way of a sermon, but they’d read all the scripture and prayed and sung the hymns – though they had to pick a couple of different ones since they weren’t familiar with two that were in the program. “We hope that’s okay…”
Of course it was. And Paul was okay. It was just a crazy Pentecost Sunday.
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