Acts (Bible) Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Acts The last few hours of Triennium in West Lafayette, IN meant packing. After breakfast, the adults check on the teenagers’ rooms. Then we store ALL our stuff in one room as we go to the final worship.

The Scripture was about the Ascension of Jesus, in Acts 1:6-11. The intent of the sermon, which was quite inspirational, is how do we make a difference in the world now. The subtext is that you don’t worry about that “heaven” stuff; it’ll take care of itself.

You know how you go to a meeting or conference and come back with all sorts of great ideas that fall to the side in fairly short order? I know it’s quite possible that could happen here too for some people. Yet the building blocks of most of the days gives me some hope that the some of the lessons learned will stick for a while.

At bare minimum, the kids from the Albany Presbytery made some new friends from other churches. I know my daughter is still texting a number of them a couple months later.

We depart, but we don’t go far, as we eat in town at some sandwich shop. Then on the road. We stop at Napoleon, OH for a bathroom break. I step off the bus and get blasted by a scirocco, a hot wind that was not at all refreshing, but rather, oppressive.

It becomes apparent that we’re going to get back to Albany far earlier than the promised 8 a.m. arrival. We stop for dinner in Ashtabula County, OH, recalibrate our trip, and determine we’re going to get home about four hours earlier. Time to call our rides with the news. Ah, the lightning strikes in front of us do not bring rain for us.

I knew this before, but it was reconfirmed: seeing four episodes of Scooby-Doo in a row will rot your brain, even if you’re not actively watching it.

We stop at Amsterdam c. 3 a.m., about 45 minutes from Albany, so two families don’t have travel as far. Then onto Albany. When we got back to the church parking lot, there was a lot of goodbye hugs. My wife took us home. My daughter and I blew off church that morning. In addition to the fact we were dead tired – I didn’t sleep at all that night – we had attended church five times since the previous Sunday, so we figured we had a little worship latitude.

Very early on in this blog, I laid out the rules for naming the daughter, most of which were negative:
*No name in the top 10 in the Social Security list of most popular names for the most recent year available.
*No naming after any family member, living or dead.
*No unisex names…This comes directly from the fact that my father AND my sister were both named Leslie.
*No single-syllable names; it had to have two or more syllables, to balance off the shortness of Green.
*No names that easily went to the nickname.
*It should have a recognizable spelling.
*No names beginning and ending with A. We have nieces named Alexandria, Adrianna, and Alexa.

But I should have emphasized more how much I liked the name, Lydia. I like that it has three syllables but only five letters; very efficient. I actually didn’t notice at the time, but I like that she has the same initials as my late father.

And I like that it’s not only a Biblical name but a New Testament name.

From Acts 16 (NIV):
13 On the Sabbath we [Paul and his companions] went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

So Lydia was a woman of means, she was hospitable and she had faith, something I hoped for my daughter, who seems to have the latter two, and she likes purple to boot.

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