Ring-a-ling? Ding-a-ling!

Spoiler alert—nobody gets any stars for this and I’m pretty much just whining, but the topic of the day is cell phones. Let them ring at church? No, no, never, never—uh-uh-uhhh! Seriously, leave them in your car, then you don’t even chance it. I’ve had them go off while leading prayer meetings, Bible studies, Sunday morning worship—even the contemplative Maundy Thursday service. Come on….

Talk on them while in the check out line? Same answer. It is totally rude—and while you maybe are thinking you are saving time by multitasking, you’re now increasing line-time for everyone behind you. And it’s rude. I’ve had random questions about impossible books to find, grumpy customers, people thinking they’re clever trying to use three coupons on the same book (really?!), and multiple cases of “after the fact” requests once the receipt is printed and you are supposed to be out the door, and I can smile for each of these cases. But customers on their cell phones—so so so hard to not spit on your book, almost impossible to keep smiling. And did I mention it’s rude?

Yeah, I know, I’m whining. And I’m probably a reflection of rude customers—just because you can talk anywhere (write anything) doesn’t mean you should. So be it.

By the way, we’re wrapping this shindig up in a week, if you can believe that. Christmas Eve is my last day! More over the weekend. Fa la la la lah, la la la lah.

Coffeetime

I feel like I’m stacking the deck toward ministry, so I’m going to give BN a serious one-up today: coffee. There’s something about Starbucks coffee—some sort of magic ingredient. And p-shah to you that say they over-roast their beans—no, no, no—not scorched but perfectly toasted. They have some of the best decaf around and if you want to venture out into “drink your dessert” land, well, the possibilities are endless.

Watered down church coffee, however, leaves about everything to be desired. Yuck. I am taking an admittedly unfair sweep across the church-coffee board here. Being back in the Midwest, the coffee is exponentially better that my southern friends who prefer sweet tea anyhow (bless their hearts), but still—it lacks the robustness and variety of working in a coffee shop.

Barnes and Noble: five stars Church: one (a token as a shout out to good coffees at some churches, especially the increasing number of fair trade coffee servers and First Pres, Burlington, NC, who keep the Peru connection alive by roasting their own Peruvian beans and brewing truly delicious coffee at mission conferences!)

No Advent in Retail

I just got a call from Barnes and Noble—I was supposed to work 8:45 – 4 today, but they’ve called me off due to lack of sales this week (and it didn’t help that the mall was closed on Wednesday along with most of the rest of the city due to the blizzard—which, btw, for those of you in West Michigan facebook updating that it’s much ado about nothing, it was not that here in Madison—we got a lot of snow and it is very cold—and yesterday my total commute time of 40 minutes—round trip—was a whopping THREE HOURS!!!). Back to BN—this call is like grace since I’ve been busy juggling orientation at two hospitals, starting back with the taxman, and the BN gig—I can clean, go to the gym, wrap presents, grocery shop (Tom’s been the grocery man for the last two weeks), and try to hunt down a lost extra computer battery in our storage unit (I think I may have had too much coffee this morning, you think? whatev). And while it’s grace, it’s also a big reminder that I’m spending Christmas oriented around retail.

BLECH!

For all my soap-boxing about how it is NOT Christmas now—it is Advent—a time of waiting and reflection and withholding from celebrating—until Christmas-tide actually begins on December 25 and then last twelve days AFTER that until Epiphany (traditional celebration of the arrival of the wise men), I’m working in retail. We begin our shifts with the doom and gloom of how sales are down: press those gift cards—don’t forget about memberships—upsell with the book drive. And I’m cool about it—I happen to be better at sales than I ever thought I would be, and my personality intuition serves me well for figuring out who might buy into what. But it’s like I have to set aside a whole principled part of me. Well, not the whole part—I mean, I’m selling BOOKS, which I love. And I’m upselling by getting people to donate books to children in foster care. And I do love BN, all things considered, so it’s not as bad as it could be. But still….

I’m also scheduled every Sunday morning early enough that I’ve only been able to attend our beloved Westminster Pres one Sunday in all of Advent, and I’m missing the kids program and caroling and I’ll just barely be able to make it to the Christmas eve service after working all day.

All of this wraps together under some sort of umbrella of Christmas/Advent spirituality, and Barnes and Noble gets the big zero on stars; church gets four.

Church should get five, right? Nope. Because I also remember how good Christ-followers overschedule themselves to death in Advent so that by the time Christmas finally arrives, the very next day they are taking down the tree and ending all the celebrating. What happened to being in the world not of the world? And arguments like “Why don’t we sing Christmas carols in worship during Advent?!” and “I want red poinsettias this year even though it’s a white poinsettia year!” can also dampen the old spirituality at least one star.

Well, I’ve preached enough for one day. Amen. Let us pray. And Advent blessings to you all!

Pay: the Short of It

Brevity being the soul of wit and all, let’s rate pay. Reverend: four stars vs Retail: one star (I mean, I do get paid something).

I could bore you with the details of the deals and compare other retail jobs with this one and consider that if I weren’t simply seasonal I might make more money and have benefits and then list out other jobs with masters degrees versus pay blah, blah, blah. But essentially, ministry gets it hands down on compensation.

While we’re at it, it’s all totally random and all, but here’s the score so far out of 20:

Reverend: 18                Retail: 12

Kiddies!!!

Guess, guess, guess who got to do the big story time last night at BN? ME!!! Awesome. It’s been on all the BN websites for weeks—at 7 pm last night across the country (we’ll pretend we’re all in the same time zone) semi-circles of little ones listened to the Polar Express—howling like the wolves, ringing Santa sleigh bells, and cheering along with the elves. How much fun that I got to do storytime. LOVE it—made my whole night, even after three other booksellers said—“You got stuck with storytime, huh?” (like it was a bad thing) and I was left with the disaster of spilled hot chocolate and 800 random books strewn all over the children’s section. Five stars for Barnes and Noble, simply because leading storytime is awesome.

I still give the church five stars for kid interaction as well. One of my favorite parts of being a pastor at First Pres was preschool chapel on Wednesday mornings—15 minutes of story-telling and sing-songing. Good stuff.