Please, Pray For Chewbacca

This past Saturday was our Friends Center banquet. The Friends Center is our YM's locale for ministerial training. The banquet is a fundraiser for said center.

There was a lot one might take from this event. Some might have been struck by this "coaching" our YM is chasing down as the next great tool for developing leaders. Others might think the sexy pendulum swung too far the other way this year. This was last year's entertainment.


They are a violin trio.

Seriously.

Anyway, true as those other things might be, I was taken by two especially outstanding facts. One, our associate pastor, the Friends Center Associate Director, The Voice of Huckabees*, is quite a trooper. And the second is, I could never watch a movie with our YM superintendent.

Anyone familiar with The Voice of Huckabees would know she is not the type to hog the spotlight, shill for silly bits of church programming, or do things unpreparedly, but there she was, up front, under the spotlights, doing a bit of acting with our superintendent meant to demonstrate how easy "coaching" is, only it reinforced the notion that this "coaching" is a strange beast.

If I were doing a skit in front of a couple hundred people meant to sell them and a Yearly Meeting on some program essential to the future, I would do some preparation. The Voice of Huckabees did, our superintendent, however, perhaps to show his total reliance on the Holy Spirit, did not. It was a bit awkward, but the ever faithful Huckabees, stuck with it and carried the pair through their bit of improv. And then Quaker Pope prayed. Specifically he prayed for those things Huckabees mentioned in their skit as her concerns. I should restate that: Quaker Pope, prayed for those things that Huckabees was pretending were her concern in their skit.

She was pretending.

Which brings me to my second point. I don't know what the risk of it ever happening may have been, but I will now go out of my way to be sure I never watch a movie, play, musical, read a story to or do some other bit of make believe with our Yearly Meeting superintendent. Not only would I find it very off-putting to be interrupted at key story points to pray for the characters, but it also seems a bit blasphemous.

*I think this nom du blog might work, though it isn't yet permanent. I know it's a bit obscure. It mostly hangs upon the fact that this is a reference to a character that says "Don't Look at Me".