Strike that bit from my last blog entry about not crying at the drop of a hat. Or rather, let me add a caveat. I cry at the drop of a hat when I attend church at First Presbyterian back "home" in Ann Arbor. It started maybe even before we were TTC. We would sing hymns and I'd get a little teary-eyed. And then we encountered the fertility problems and I couldn't sit through a baptism without crying. At that point we stopped going to church altogether. That was about a year and a half before we moved to the Netherlands.
We went back to the States over the holidays, North Carolina to visit family and Michigan to visit friends. And while in Ann Arbor I decided it would actually be really nice to get up early on Sunday and go to my "home church." It's not the church I grew up in, but it's the church we chose and the church in which we were married. It's the church where we could feel like we belonged and still feel anonymous. (Sorry Rev. Brouwer!) It was the church where we were challenged by sermons both intellectual and practical, and where we enjoyed a Dave Brubeck Christmas cantata! Such a beautiful and special place.
I figured that with the fertility problems behind us and no baptisms listed in the worship bulletin (PDF), I was home free! And then we stood up for the first hymn. "Angels, from the Realms of Glory." I got a little teary but recovered during the Prayer of Confession.
The Gloria Patri? "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son..." I nearly always lose it anyway, so no worries about a few tears shed there.
The hymn between the scripture and the sermon? "What Child Is This?" I totally kept my cool on that one.
And then came the Prayer of Dedication. Oh goodness.
It being New Year's Eve Day and all, Rev. Brouwer began talking about the past year (not an easy one for me - so many changes with my job and the move and the pregnancy) and about the year to come and - OH MY 2007 IS GOING TO BE A WHOPPER. I lost it completely.
Thank god it was a prayer and (I hope) everyone behind me was behaving like good Christian boys and girls with their heads bowed and their eyes closed because they might have seen my shoulders shaking. If not my shoulders shaking, then they surely would have seen me holding that pathetic, soggy tissue to my face and my face tensed into a grimace, overcome with I don't even know what.
Fortunately for me, the prayer was very close to the end of the service, and for the most part I was able to avoid the lines of people waiting to wish Rev. Beery a happy retirement at the door. It was starting to rain lightly as I made my way back to my rental car. I drove off to get myself a chai and a slice of lemon-poppyseed cake from the Caribou Coffee at Stadium & Packard. The guys at the register and the espresso machine were suspiciously friendly -- was my face splotchy from crying? were my eyes red and puffy? No, a visit to the ladies' room reassured me that my face was normal. And I remembered that the staff there were always oddly chipper anyway. I quickly got over the crying. And I'll return to First Pres (and that particular Caribou) any time I'm back in Ann Arbor.