home.....

ok, so we are home.....completely, car-cleaned-out home.......and so i immediately launched into the preparation for a diabetes class series that starts tomorrow......in my thursday county.......i had downloaded the official state-authorized accept no substitute powerpoint presentations onto the laptop that i am allowed to use......and this evening i could not access any of my files because my password is only good for the laptop when logged into the state system...it would appear......and nothing i could type into the blanks could convince the blasted machine to give me access to ay of my harddrive files......omg.......and thus i must go first to my home county office in the morning to find the original disk....and then drive to my thursday county......and wing this presentation having not really studied the powerpoint slides ahead of time.......this would be problematic were i younger and less experienced.......but i have spoken of all the elements of this official script for enough years as to feel comfortable expounding freeform.....so i am more annoyed than worried.......but enough of this.......the funeral was as funerals often are......an opportunity to visit with ones favorite kin/inlaws and notsofavoritekin/inlaws.......and i came away uplifted by most of what i experienced.......most.......but not all.....i am still troubled by the distant inlaw who interrupted the pastor as he was giving the benediction and asked to speak............reasonable people just don't interrupt funerals.........and so it was to my gasping horror that she related her concern that her motherinlaw might possibly be going to hell rather than heaven....and how she had ventured on a methodical scripture study with her in the days/weeks leading up to her death to assure herself that her spouse's mother....and her children's grandmother would be going to heaven......and then she challenged us all....those present to consider whether we would be going to heaven or hell.......and to make a decision at that very moment as to.....yeah, that's right.............she made what baptists call an altarcall......at her motherinlaws funeral............gentle readers........funerals are not the time nor the place to try to proselytize............when it is my time to go......don't even think about it..........i will haunt you from where i happen to be at the time..........heaven or hell........i am still troubled that someone would actually take time out from her busy life to try to query a dying, choir-singing and regular church-attending woman on her prospects for heaven or hell........it is that sort of behavior that gives christians a bad name, i think.......the notion that somehow this woman had an in to god's ear and could tell my beloved sisterinlaw whether or not she would go to heaven or hell.........as for me.....i consider faith a private affair.....something that is always just between me and my maker.....and certainly not something to be broadcast.....or used as a tool to control the thoughts and concerns of others..............as for the rest of the service..........the music, the readings, and the kind words were a fitting testimony to a woman who had led a kind and giving life.............i shall miss her..........