Finally getting around to FWCC?

Next week, I'm planning to post a series of reports about my trip to the FWCC Section of the Americas Annual Meeting in Providence and my side trip to Boston. Some of it I wrote in the first few days after I got back, and some of it will include reflections since then.

Part of me thinks, oh, it's too late to write about that now. In internet time, two months ago is ancient history. But there are a number of reasons I couldn't blog about it before now.

One is that I was just too tired, and too many other things happened right away afterwards. I've learned, I think, that one week is not enough time to recover from traveling ministry. There's sleep to catch up on, children who become extra clingy right before and for a while afterwards, a husband who'd like to talk to me, and other general family/household chores that have to be done. And that all has to take some priority.

So writing became something I fit into little cracks in the schedule, but it came out in little chunks and anecdotes and never felt coherent enough to post. Some of what I wrote is probably not blog fodder, since it's about other people and not my stories to tell. Then I started working on an article for a print publication about the workshop we did, and that took a huge amount of what little time I had for writing. The discipline of editing is hard work. But that process has convinced me that it's not too late to write about the experience - if the article is even accepted, it won't be published until October.

A third reason I think I didn't feel clear to write about the trip was that I was waiting to report to my anchor committee. Getting that committee together took a long time, but it finally happened, and I feel freer now, or at least better able to discern which of the stories are important, and better able to reflect on what I've learned from the experience. I didn't know, or couldn't have articulated, that I was waiting for the anchor committee to meet before I posted much, until right before the meeting, and then more clearly during the meeting. But in practice, I think it is a good idea to sort through some of the swirling ideas in my head before I start to publish about such a big experience.


So I still don't have it all laid out in neat paragraphs, but I'll be working on some of that editing over the weekend. Plus we'll be helping paint the social hall in the meetinghouse and going to the picnic for families of incoming kindergarteners at our children's elementary school. And finishing the rhubarb pie I made yesterday.