Summer: Day 26

Sunday June 26

Today, like pretty much every Sunday, we went to church. But today's church service was a little unique. About 10-15 minutes into the sermon, the church's fire alarm started going off. Our sweet pastor stopped, looked around, realized what it was & searched the faces in the crowd for deacons, elders, other staff members who could go figure out what was going on. Was there really a fire? Did we need to evacuate the building? Was the alarm pulled accidentally? Fortunately for him, about 25 past & present deacons & elders jumped up & went to check out the problem. They pretty quickly came back & stated that it was a false alarm -- a child had pulled the alarm. Oops! But for the next 5 minutes, the alarm continued to go off. The congregation giggled, they got up to go get coffee refills....our pastor laughed it off & commented about how he could preach over a lot of things, but probably not this VERY loud alarm that kept going off & going off. At about the point that I was afraid he would tell everyone to just pack up & go home, it finally stopped! It turns out that no one could figure out how to shut the alarm off. Our worship pastor blogged later today that they ended up yanking the wires out of the unit to get it to stop. It was a funny interruption in the service, but Ross (pastor) jumped back in & never missed a beat with the sermon once the fire alarm stopped ringing.

I've wondered how the teachers in the classroom reacted to the child pulling the alarm. The 4 and 5 yr olds are the same group of kids I co-teach during the 1st service, so I suspect it was one of "my" kids. I'm sure the reaction was shock & then giggles because really....what kid hasn't wanted to (or tried!) to pull one of those alarms on the walls in their school, church, grocery store, etc? No harm was done and no one got hurt, but I'm betting that child and all the class learned a big lesson today....leave the fire alarms alone!

This afternoon, I crawled into our bed for the weekly Sunday afternoon nap. It was delightful! I'm so glad we observe the 11th commandment over here.

The 11th commandment is our silly name for it....we jokingly say that it says "Thou shalt nap on Sundays."

Tonight, I had a crazy fun time with a room full of 7 toddlers. I previously cared for the 3-5 yr olds at a local church during their small group meetings, but tonight I had the church's babies. It was fun, but tiring! How quickly we (mommies) forget how busy 1-3 year olds really are once our own children pass that age! Now I remember why I always taught 3-5 yr olds! They were all adorable & sweet & fun until about 30 minutes before pick up time---and then it got to be late, they were all tired, one mommy came to pick up her children & the crying train began. And everyone got on board. Whew. I think I earned my paycheck tonight. ha ha!


And now...a book review.

A few months ago, our church shut down the library to use the space for something else. When they closed, they asked church members to come & take as many books as they wanted. Since we are a family of book hoarders, we of course filled up several bags with books for our shelves. When I found Francine Rivers' book Her Mother's Hope, I grabbed it. It was still pretty new to the market at the time and I had already begun hearing people's reviews about this wonderful, amazing book, so I figured I would enjoy it. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to read it until recently when I pulled it off my shelf & dove in.

The storyline was good, but it was longggggggggggggggggggggggg. I kept thinking surely it would be over soon, but then the story would make a twist & a turn and I'd spent the next 200 pages focusing on that new plot. It just kept going & going & going. And in the end, it left me hanging. There is no resolution. It's like one of those movies that drags on forever & leaves you saying "I will never get that 2 hours of my life back." While I know other people loved this book, it was not one of my favorites. I have really enjoyed quite a few other Francine Rivers books. I would've quit & given up on it about 2/3 of the way through, but at that point, I kind of felt obligated to finish it and I kept hoping for some resolution to the many, many plotlines. I felt like I'd invested that much time into the story, so I needed to see how it ended. Now I'm looking back thinking "Yeah, I should've just quit then."

But here's the thing. After nearly 500 pages of living with Papa, Mama, Elise, Marta, Niclas, Bernie, Hildie, Cloe, Rikka, Elizabeth, and the bazillion other characters woven throughout this book, I'm stumped. I'm a tad curious what the resolution to this story is, but I really don't want to read another 500 page novel to find out--and I don't know for sure that it will all get resolved! Will it lead into a 3rd novel for this series? I'm stumped about whether or not to locate a copy of the sequel.

While I think on it, I think I'll just enjoy some of my stack of magazines for a while.