Looked Like a Jelly Doughnut to Me

But it wasn't.

A jelly doughnut, that is. Our priest's wife taught Sunday school today. First she talked about Lent, which Ed and I mostly missed (the talk, not Lent) because we were in the kitchen setting up coffee stuff. By the time we got seated she had moved on to talking about Eugene Peterson's idea that images are important to help us grasp and focus on theological concepts. Okay. And I learned that The Message and The Living Bible are two different translations. Good to know. And then we got the the main thing, which was looking at a painting by Anneke Kaai from a book called In a Word, by Kaai and Eugene Peterson.

This is not the painting. This is another one from the book, and it is called Grace. The one we looked at is a big orange circle with a smaller orange circle in the middle and some yellow and black, and it is called Love.  Our class was supposed to look at the painting and talk about the feelings it gave us. I love our church*, and our priest's wife is a wonderful teacher and preacher (she happens to be a Methodist minister), but I am getting very tired of Sunday school classes in which all we do is talk about our feelings. The picture here, "Grace", is pretty, but I can't say I loved "Love."  Katie's class got out early so she sat with me and we snickered (quietly) over our art interpretation. I thought it looked like a peach, cut in half, and Katie thought it was a jelly doughnut, and we had some other ideas that seemed pretty hilarious to us, none of which made it onto the white board.

So we failed Sunday school, but we made an "A" on coffee hour!  My mom spent the past week baking and cooking up a storm, and her breakfast strata (eggs, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, bread, and I don't know what all else), bread pudding, cinnamon crisps, and blueberry crumble coffee cake were a great hit! We transported the food, set it out, cleaned up, and I washed the grapes. Very skillfully! And graciously accepted gushing compliments on my mother's cooking. So now we are off the hook for coffee hour for a few weeks and, I think, have pretty much compensated for our dismal lack of appreciation for modern art.

And we have flowers blooming in the yard (no thanks to me)! Yay!

*And I especially love our church since this year for Lent we are doing the Rite I form of the Eucharist. And today we sang the Trisagion and the Sanctus to the same music we used in Florida (otherwise known as The Right Music). The organist (who isn't really an Episcopalian) played with a bit more "vigor" than one have expected, but it was definitely an improvement!