Sometimes you just can't escape

Now what on earth could I mean by that you ask. Well I will get to that quick enough, but first a Joe update. Tomorrow he will have his second round of chemo of this 3 week cycle at Duke. No doctors appointment, just labs at 7:20am and chemo at 8:20am. He should have time in between to go to the food court and get him some breakfast. If all goes on time, he should be done somwhere around 9:30am. We've got our fingers crossed on that one! His right leg is still swollen from the knee down, although possibly not as bad. He is under strict orders (from me of course) to mention this to the nurse when she is doing vitals and blood work so that it gets mentioned in his chart. He's gotten reasonably good at following direction so I won't hound him about it.

At 9am tomorrow morning, our niece Brittany is having surgery in Greenville. Although the procedure is expected to go smoothly, it is nonetheless surgery and she is only 13. She is quite scared, as anyone would be, but Joe and I have both been keeping up with her daily. It will be an anxious morning waiting to hear that she is out of surgery and all went well. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

Now for the "Sometimes you just can't escape" title. I was raised, as was Joe, in a Southern Baptist Church. The Southern Baptist of our time however, is a far cry from the Baptist of today. I was out of the church before the book burning in the seminaries and the fundamentalists took hold with a very tight grip. Other than for my mother's funeral and the funeral last year of Miriam Batten, I haven't stepped foot in the church I was raised in for more than 37 years. 2 times in 37 years isn't much, right? I felt I had justification as I no longer shared the belief system that the more fundamentalist Baptist church now held. So why go if you don't believe as they do? Since moving to Durham 13 years ago, I sporadically attended Pleasant Grove UMC where Joe was the music director and eventual member. Special music occassions or when Joe would beg were about all the church I had "in me". When Joe was diagnosed, I started attending more and more regularly and last year became a member. I have loved each and every moment shared with all my new friends at PGUMC. Everyone there has been welcoming, friendly, caring and supportive. I can't say enough about how wonderful the church is and how much I enjoy being a part of it. The past 2 weeks has been the 2012 General Conference for the United Methodist Church. This is an event that is held every 4 years where the "business" of the church is petitioned, discussed and voted on. Some petition items never make it out of committee, while others do make it out and onto a general vote. This year there were many petitions to make the UMC a more welcoming and inclusive Church. Most notably, a multitude of petitions to have certain passages in the Book of Discipline removed and replaced with more "accepting/inclusive" language. To be direct, removal of language stating that gay persons and the church are incompatible. I have used the GC2012 APP to keep up with each of the petitions (there were lots of them) and have checked the results of voting daily as well as daily recaps also included in the APP. To say that things did not go well would be a HUGE understatement. Rather than more accepting, the language that has been adopted is more critical and homophobic than before. The extreme conservative and more fundamental elements of the Church seem to have prevailed at this conference and rather than things getting better, they seem to have gotten worse. Therefore, my title, "Sometimes you just can't escape". I thought I had gotten away from the bigotry exhibited by the Southern Baptist Church only to find myself a member of the United Methodist Church when it seems to be heading in the same direction.
What's a person to do? You love your local church, in this case Pleasant Grove UMC, yet you find yourself at odds with the changing tide of the greater UMC.