#WeekendCoffeeShare: Memorials and Weddings

Weekend Coffee Share is a time for us to take a break out of our lives and enjoy some time catching up with friends (old and new)!

Grab a cup of coffee and share with us!  What’s been going on in your life? What are your weekend plans?  Is there a topic you’ve just been ruminating on that you want to talk about?

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!Click here to enter. The link will be active from Friday August 16th at 7 am (Pacific Time) until Monday August 19th at 7 pm (Pacific Time) to give us a good range of “weekend”!

Thanks for all your patience and understanding last weekend. The memorial service was amazing – Steve was such a great guy, the kind of person who really had a positive impact on everyone he interacted with. There were over 300 people at his memorial service — a service that we had about a weeks notice of, and came two weeks after he had the stroke the led to his passing. For that many people to be able to make it to a memorial, in that short of time… it was wonderful to be able to see just how many lives he’d touched, knowing that the people present were just a small fraction on them all.

Some of his family spoke, and a few of his closest friends. The service was held at the church I grew up in, where I had met Steve. Even though they hadn’t been in attendance for some years it’s where he had raised his family. The sanctuary was full, even with extra rows of seats added and people standing. We set up a space (of about equal size) downstairs, where the service was live-streamed, and had pulled up every single chair that we could find. They were all full… again, with standing room only. We all raised our voices in song, we shed tears and we laughed together.

Steve and I worked together at the church about 14 years ago. We ran a Coming of Age Program for the middle schoolers, trained as Our Whole Lives facilitators, and ran Sr. High OWL together. It was an intense time of leadership, and it was a time when we were both dealing with some major health changes — the conversations we had were transformative.

And now… by the time this posts I will be started on my journey to New Mexico to celebrate the wedding of an old High School friend of mine. I expect it will be a spectacularly fun time, the ceremony is taking place in a campground, with the promise of watching a meteor shower (clear-skies willing), taco eating, and I have heard mention of a potential water-fight. As much as I hate flying (I just am not fond of being crammed into a small space with tons of people and not really being able to move), it’ll be well worth it for the chance to celebrate this day with her!

I’ll come back to town on Monday, and then turn around and head off to my annual camping trip (which my friends will have already started on…) It’ll be a bummer to not be there for quite as long this year – last year I went up on the Saturday, friends joined on Sunday, and we stayed through Friday. This year I won’t be able to make it up there till Tuesday, but am thinking I’ll extend my stay through Saturday. We’ll see.

One last hurrah as summer, theoretically, comes to a close.

What are you up to this week?