My church is located about an hour from th Virginia Tech Campus. Many of my parishioners are avid Virginia Tech fans. I heard the sorrow in their voices and saw the shock in their faces. On Monay evening, I began thinking about the best way to help them and the larger Bluefield community deal with their feelings of grief.
As I saw it, there were only two options. I could take a portion of the upcoming Sunday service and deal directly with this tragedy, or I could design an entire service just for this purpose. I decided on the latter. First of all, to wait until Sunday would be too long. I felt there needed to be a quicker response to the situation. Therefore, I planned a service for Wednesday night the 18th. The one saving grace that made this possible was the calling system we use that lets us contact all of our members with the same message. Thus, on Tuesday night the call went out and all that was left was the planning of the service.
On Tuesday, I was required to be at a meeting with the Bishop and the pastors of the Annual Conference. So, my planning became random thoughts about the best way to deal with th grief, anger and all the other emotions that I am sure were going through the minds of my parishioners. Needless to say, I began to see the Lord’s hand at work in preparing the service. By Wednesday morning the outline of what needed to be said and done was in my head and I spent most of the day preparing the service and the accompanying bulletin. I had already alerted my worship team and they were gathering the materials needed to make the service a reality.
That night about 40 persons arrived at the appointed hour. We heard the words of scripture. We prayed for those affected by the event. We sang the songs of the faith. We read the names of those that had died. We said the Apostle’s Creed. All in all, we reminded ourselves that even in the midst of chaos, there was a God that was a sure foundation for our lives. Though the world might be shaken, because of our faith, we were not.
