Milking the Deer

So, I just got back from my final First Call Theological Retreat (for the non-pastors who are reading this, the ELCA requires all pastors to attend a special retreat for the first three years of their ministry).

Region 8 does the first call retreat altogether - so the pastors at this gathering are serving somewhere among Metro/Suburban DC, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, or the western 2/3s of Pennsylvania. So you've got people serving the full range of areas, from extremely rural to small towns to small cities to sprawling suburbs to the inner city. As you can imagine, it's interesting to be mixing it up with people working in such widely varied contexts.

Inevitably, we start sharing some of our craziest stories, and this morning at breakfast we were doing just that.

I shared the story of my first funeral/interment, when the funeral director accidentally locked the ashes in his minivan, and had to borrow a family member's cell phone and wander around this little country graveyard until he got reception and could call his assistant to bring the other set of keys.

Someone else spoke of a shut-in they went to visit. This elderly, legally blind man had a neat row of birdfeeders out behind his house. The pastor commented on how they had never seen that many birdfeeders so close in a row like that. The old man said he can't get out to hunt anymore, so when he feels like hunting, he just sits on his back porch and picks off the birds at the birdfeeder. "But my eyesight's not so good anymore, pastor, that's where this automatic really comes in handy. . ." !!!

Then there was the pastor who had a woman leave a bible study early because she had to get home to milk the deer. Well, this pastor had heard of milking cows and even goats - but deer? This they had to see. Turns out, this woman and her family were deer breeders, their goal is to breed bucks with bigger and bigger racks, which they then set loose on their property, and people pay lots of money for the right to hunt on the land and catch a trophy buck. "Milking the deer" is collecting a, um, donation from the bucks with the biggest antlers for breeding purposes.

Uff da - talk about a dirty job!

That pretty much stopped the conversation, because nobody could top that. And because we were all laughing so hard, along with this poor colleague, at the memory of them finding out what milking the deer really entailed.

The world takes all kinds. And if you stay in this gig long enough, eventually you'll meet them.

Peace,
Catrina