I think I’m one of the slack-est bloggers around.  I keep thinking I will do better with blogging on a regular basis, but truthfully my life isn’t always interesting enough to blog about.  That and then things get busy with travel (again!) so I end up letting this thing sit for days and weeks at a time.

Let’s see, where did I leave off?  It’s been over two weeks and last time I posted I was worried that I was starting to wallow in depression.  I would imagine that some of you have wondered if that’s what’s going on with me.  In truth, I still feel a little of that coming on, but I’m doing ok.  I tend to have what I call a “vocational crisis” about every year or two.  One of the things that has helped me in recent years is the book Pathways to Purpose for Women by Katie Braselton.  So I grabbed that off the shelf and am reading it for probably the fourth time.  While I’m not one to jump on the Purpose Driven Life bandwagon, she’s actually a staff member at Saddleback and part of the Rick Warren group.  This is a different take on being purpose-driven, though, where it breaks down the journey to vocation into reasonable steps and is geared specifically toward women and our particular needs.

In the meantime, just when I was getting settled back into a routine at home, I got a call from my mom two weeks ago Sunday to tell me that Arlene had passed away.  Arlene was my grandpa’s first cousin, but they were raised together so she was basically my great aunt.  The other family connection is that her husband is actually my grandma’s first cousin, so the family tree kind of doubles back on itself.  When I was growing up, we didn’t do a lot of holiday stuff with my dad’s family.  I haven’t seen any of my first cousins since we were kids.  On my mom’s side, we have no first cousins.  Mom’s only sibbling, a sister, doesn’t have children.  But we did stuff with mom’s family every holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, sometimes other times throughout the year).  So Glenn and Arlene, their two daughters, and their families, were the cousins that I knew best.  This group, plus us, my grandparents, and my aunt, was the extended family I knew and loved.

Arlene has been sick for the last few years, possibly Alzheimers, and was in a nursing home for the past year or so.  She started to decline in the last month, so I wasn’t surprised to get the call.  Thankfully I found an inexpensive flight and headed back west for the third time this year.

On top of all of this, my sister’s husband just accepted a call to a new congregation.  They will be moving from South Dakota to Wisconsin in a few weeks.  So while in Nebraska, I helped her and my mom prepare for a garage sale (she held it at my mom’s house because it’s a bigger town and easier to sell things).

So many transitions.  The year is starting to heat up, with lots of activities at church.  I’ve been teaching Bible study for a couple of weeks now and it’s going well.  I’m also going to be temporarily heading up our church’s praise team, something that scares me as well as makes me excited.  Busy, busy, busy!  Yet not much that sounds interesting enough to blog about regularly.  I’m going to try to get back to my focus of pastors’ wives.  It’s what my life is and will be, and I hope to keep sharing what little wisdom I have related to it.  Thanks for sticking with me!