Friends,

I am on day five without my glasses, which a minor inconvenience that is creating an unnecessary amount of ennui in my life. I never get headaches, but since my spectacles went the way of the dodo, a slight dull ache has been nearly omnipresent, and focusing on this screen does not help.

Too many meaningful things happened last week. Here they are in order:

May 12: Last Chapel at St. Luke’s Day School. Also, the last time I will have both of my children as students in chapel.

May 15: Day School Graduation

May 16 at 3:00 pm: My recent kindergarten grad’s T-Ball game got canceled due to a chance of rain at 5:00. Andrew was off school, so I took him to Sport Rock with James Reily. Andrew has the mechanics of climbing down, but he has a hard time trusting the ropes and has been getting nervous about getting up high. To encourage him, I brought a small bag of foreign coins, and kept putting them on hand holds higher and higher until he nearly reached the top! I could not have been more proud!

May 16 at 5:08 pm: I text Leandra and we are leaving the climbing gym and we agree that Andrew and I will get Peruvian chicken on the way home. It starts raining hard as we leave the restaurant. Limbs start coming down, and we start to take the back streets. Everything is blocked and power is off everywhere.

May 16 at 6:00 pm: We get on the parkway, and it is a standstill. I take a picture to show Leandra later. We give up trying to get through and take Morningside Dr.

May 16 at 6:08 pm: I get a call that a giant tree fell at St. Luke’s and it is blocking Wellington Ave. I call James Reily, who I was climbing with to see if he wants to help. He and his wife Michelle start to go to St. Luke’s. We go straight to St. Luke’s in our climbing clothes and don’t try to make it home first.

May 16th 6:08 to 9:00 pm: About twenty neighbors, day school parents, and Church parishioners work to clear the street of the tree. I climb the fallen tree to cut the high branches that are blocking the road and fall a bit and lose my glasses. The atmosphere is intense, but people felt good about working together as a community. I felt proud. We go home to dark houses and put the boys to sleep.

May 17 at 5:45 am: No one in our house sleeps well, and waking up without the power on freaks the boys out, so they wake up early. There is no power, internet or cell service, so I pack them in the car and head to Starbucks on Route 1. I am supposed to be officiating my wife’s cousin’s marriage at St. Luke’s at 11:00 am, and needed to make a ton of phone calls, so the long line at the drive through doesn’t bother me. After an hour, we determine that we will press forward with the wedding with or without power, and I give up on my coffee and leave the drive through.

May 17 at 8:30 am: While driving to Church I talk to friends walking on the stone bridge and I first hear that there was two fatalities, one of which happened very close to us on the Parkway.

May 17 at 9:00 am: I pick up my mother-in-law and we go to Church, where I run into the DeMarco and McPeek families. I tell them I am getting to do a wedding in the dark, and everyone springs to action. I use my truck as a generator of sorts to power string lights around the altar, and get two spotlights we used for live-streaming worship during COVID to illumine the space. A tremendous amount of flowers get delivered and are placed all over the Church.

May 17 at 10:40: I race home to get my children and I ready for the wedding.

May 17 at 11:20: The wedding starts twenty minutes late. Kate Weber-Petrova played the piano and Jennifer Jellings sang. Everyone was happy and couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful it was. I was happy too.

May 17 at 2:00 pm: We arrive at the reception on the Patuxent River. There is a canon and all is well.

May 18 at 1:20: I awake to all the lights on in the house, and my children’s cd playing blaring “the wheels on the bus”. I turn everything off and go back to sleep for a bit.

May 18 at 8:00 am: Worship begins, and things feel somewhat normal. Tim Staples says he can show up at 2:00 with his chainsaw and chipper to help clearing up. After the vestry meeting I find out that it was a friend’s co-worker who died on the Parkway.

May 18 at 3:45 pm: I arrive with Andrew in tow to help James Reily book club on the book named, “James”, and Tim Staples is there with Richard McFarland working away. James Reily tells me that a wandering arborist quoted him $4,500 to cut up the wood from the tree.

May18 at 5:00 pm: We do children’s worship by the firepit, and Tim Staples joins in and immediately starts sawing again when he’s done. James Reily and Skip Jones join in.

May 18 at 8:00 pm: The boys are asleep and from my house I can still hear chainsaws coming from the Church’s direction. I go back and everyone is still working. I buy cold drinks for the group and return to help with my chainsaw. Tim frees the trunk of the tree from the stump at 8:24 pm and we call it quits.

May 19 at 3:30 pm: I deliver one of the massive bouquets from the wedding to the office that was mourning the loss of their friend and colleague.

I still have so many contradictory emotions that are happening within me. The death that occurred in the storm flavors everything, and I will never not drive my Morningside Drive without thinking of her, just as I do not pass by the benches near the stone bridge without thinking of the man who died there of hypothermia just a couple of years ago. I am tempted to feel guilty for feeling excitement and pride when we were working so well together as a community, but that is innately good too. I feel sorrow for the deaths and pain that occurred. I feel pride for how we came together. I my heart felt softened when my boys said they loved reading with Mama instead of watching TV. I felt the love between the bride and groom on Saturday. I feel intense humility and thankfulness to Tim, James, Richard and Skip when they worked for so long on Sunday to clean up. It is not either/or, but it must be an all the above. The feelings are dissonate, but they must be because the world is chaotic.

There is a movement within Christianity to create harmony and a systematic theology to make sense of our faith. While, I find these efforts to be noble and worthwhile, I feel similarly dissonate and chaotic feelings when I pray on the cross. I am mad at the betrayal. I am disappointed in the crowd. I am ashamed of what people are capable of. I am confused as to why God would ordain this pain. I am hopeful in the empty tomb. I am driven to live into God’s mission in the stories of the apostles filled with the Holy Spirit.

Easter is a season of fifty days filled with too much meaning for us to understand and process right away. One function of faith is that we do not necessarily have to understand to know how to act and what to do next. I am not sure what meaning I will glean from the events of the last week, but I hope we did well by helping where we could, coming together in labor when necessary, coming together in joy for a marriage, and we did not ignore the losses that happened around us and try to comfort those who mourn as best as we can. The disciples did not have a systemic theology when they were filled with the spirit. Maybe if they did, they wouldn’t have been mistaken for drunkards, but that is not what they were called to do. Instead, they were called to burst out of the room they were hiding to proclaim the good news.

Blessings,

Nick