I spent the last few days at the Summer Celebration at Lipscomb University. I would have liked to be there for the whole event, but there are times when real life gets in the way of what we’d like to do. What I especially regret is not seeing a good number of friends who were there; things just didn’t work out.

I thought I was going to be teaching in the Spanish part of the lectures. I was invited to speak a while back. I was then given a topic and a time. Later I saw the published schedule, and my name was there, with a different topic and time (Tuesday afternoon). Unfortunately, the new time listed was after the departure time for my plane back to Abilene.

So I reached out to my contact person on the organizing committee of the Spanish part. (I never got any official letter nor e-mail; I only had Facebook conversations with this person) He let me know that my topic remained the same, but that my time had been moved to Monday afternoon. I wrote back asking if it was truly on Monday, since I couldn’t be there Tuesday afternoon. Yes, I was assured, my time was on Monday.

I knew enough to be sure and attend the first session of the Spanish classes. There I was told that I was indeed scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, but that they could use me on Monday instead (at yet a different time). I would be teaching on the topic I’d been given, despite the fact that the first class I heard was on the very same subject!

Following that first morning class that I heard, the organizers approached me again. They had a problem. Schedule conflicts. And, in their words, since I was mature enough to handle it, they were bumping me from the schedule. So… there went my class.

We also had a Hope For Life/Herald of Truth breakfast Tuesday morning. It looked like it was going to be just as problematic. When we arrived, Shamblin Theater had not been cleaned from the night before. The carpet had food on it. The tables had leftover cake and plates on them. And there were no tablecloths on the tables.

Fortunately the event staff arrived quickly and provided the table cloths. We cleaned as best we could, and nobody complained about the state of things.

Then there was the food. We told them that our event would start at 7, but that we would need to have the food line open about 15 minutes ahead of that. “Sure, no problem.” However… they didn’t open the food line until a little after 7, which made us quite late in starting our presentation. (There was an 8:10 class, so we had no leeway) Again, we got it all done, and everyone seemed quite appreciative.

So… it was an interesting few days. I’m thankful for the people I did get to see and regretful about those I missed. I was quite disappointed not to get to teach, but glad that our breakfast went well.

So how has your week been so far?