Strike that

Last night at Newberg Friends we had what was for me a harrowing experience.  As one of the clerks of the meeting, I had done most of the drafting of a carefully-composed 580- word proposed minute for one of the two or three most momentous decisions in the 128-year history of the church.

I thought what we had written was so achingly beautiful, so precisely perfect,  of course people would adopt it.  Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, I sort of imagined people leaping to their feet, formerly angry partisans hugging each other in joy and relief and joining to write “A+++++…” on the walls of the church.  Our minute would go down in history as direct evidence of divine intervention in human affairs.

The meeting took two hours to adopt one sentence  of all that lovely prose.  And even that one sentence was pretty much completely re-written to cut it from 44 words down to 35.  In other words, the meeting, doing its best to discern God’s will among deeply divided people, decided that at least 94% of our words were better off left out.

Huh.  Talk about divine intervention. The meeting, full of people who disagree wildly on any number of things, came to unity around one thing:  God didn’t like 94% of our words.

I can take a hint. Or if not a hint, a thunderbolt from God. Just you watch.

.