This blog post is part of a series that I began for telling our story. You can read the first post here.

Previous post

As you can see from the posts so far, trying to discuss the concept of the church year in conjunction with life gets a bit muddled. From Pentecost until the last Sunday of the church year, with a tiny few exceptions, we spend in what the church calendar calls “ordinary time.” For six months or so (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more), the church dons green fabric on the altars and pastors, and we follow readings in a different progression. During the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany/Lent/Easter season, the readings pretty much trace the life of Jesus and parallel the particular moments in His life that we are touching on. Ordinary time, on the other hand, can be a free-for-all.

Some churches will even bail on the assigned readings during this season and pull out special themes. It’s not a bad thing to do, it works pretty well during this time period. I, for one, am thankful that we stick with the designated readings. It ties us into the rest of the church world wide, and throughout a good chunk of history also. It also offers stability in the midst of chaos that seems to come hand in hand with everyday life.

As I said before, our move to Texas had come with so much change. Climate adjustments, work life adjustments, family emergencies and health situations, and now, pregnancy. My sister had only just had a baby a few months before I discovered I was pregnant, so we knew our kids would be close in age. It was fun to think about. In fact, her baby girl is our goddaughter.

One of the pieces of our relocation was tied into that story, actually. We had flown to Texas back in April to look for a place to live. As it happened, the airline did that thing where they asked for volunteers to give up their seats. We looked at the schedule and knew it would work for us, so we signed up in exchange for vouchers. We also got put on a more direct flight and would only arrive a couple of hours after our original time, so it worked well for us.

Kind of.

We figured the vouchers would help us out to fly to Wisconsin for our niece’s baptism, since we had already been asked to be godparents for her. But when we went to use the vouchers, we ran into a major problem. The computer had the numbers marked as being “already used.” This was when United and Continental merged, and our best guess is that both airlines used similar numbering systems on their vouchers, and unfortunately we had no way to prove we hadn’t already used ours.

So we paid out of pocket. It wasn’t a huge deal, other than the annoyance that we had basically changed our plans for nothing. But isn’t that how life goes? Ordinary time is rarely ordinary, and nothing quite goes the way we planned. That’s really how our entire story turned out.

Next post coming tomorrow.