I realize that today is a time for terror, for ghoulies and ghosties to wander the streets scaring each other while students restricted to quarantine hunker down for an all-day horror movie fest, but the things that terrify me this weekend have nothing to do with Halloween. First Sunday at our new churches! Dashing from one service to another, trying to learn names of people whose faces remain half hidden under masks, standing around at a reception where someone is bound to be overtaken by the urge to hug! I just don't know if I have what it takes to do all this again.
But today I'll distract myself with work--drafts to read, annotated bibliographies to grade, classes to prep. To start the day off right, though, we set out early this morning for a hike along the Pine Ridge Trail at Lake Katharine. With morning temps below freezing we had to bundle up a bit, but this is probably the last weekend to see fall colors before the rest of the leaves fall down so we thought we'd better take a look before it was too late.
We've had a lot of rain this week so we could hear the waterfall long before we got near it, and the creeks were all above their banks where a few weeks ago they were nearly dry. But the trail was not at all bad and the woods were aglow with sudden shocks of yellow and orange. We saw a few deer but mostly had the place to ourselves. In a few weeks the woods will be full of hunters and then we'll be well into winter weather, so who knows when we'll be out on that trail again?
Tomorrow we set out on a new kind of adventure--getting to know a whole new congregation, finding out way through unfamiliar territory toward unexpected friendships. An unknown trail may look scary, but one day it will feel as familiar as the trails I love so much at Lake Katharine. The only way to get to know them is to take that first terrifying step forward.
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