It's 9:20 AM, and it's 90 degrees.

These days, for morning prayer, I'm using the order from the Book of Common Worship (Presbyterian Church USA). Among the sentences for Monday is this:

You created the day and the night, O God;
you set the sun and the moon in their places;
you set the limits of the earth;
you made summer and winter.

Summer! And how! It is as if we have been plunged into the dog days of summer. It's hard to believe that, a week ago, I was wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt at Camp Caroline Furnace, because it was so chilly. By the end of the days I spent at the camp, it had become sticky hot.

I went up to Caroline Furnace, as part of my work as the Virginia Synod Discernment Advocate for Project Connect, to do some sessions in the training program for this summer's camp counselors. The purpose of Project Connect is to encourage young adults (aged 18-30) to consider what work God is calling them to do in adulthood -- and to encourage those with gifts to be good pastors or lay rostered ministers to consider that calling. I spent a day doing that, with the Discernment Advocate for the Metro DC Synod. Then, I spent three days mostly in silence and solitude at the camp, reading and praying.

Then, on Friday morning, I got in the car and drove south on I-81, to Roanoke College, for the Virginia Synod Assembly. Since I'm on sabbatical, I had first thought that I could blow off the Synod Assembly this year. But then I remembered: Oh yeah. Being there as a visible presence for Project Connect is one of the requirements for a Discernment Advocate ... In fact, the Assembly planners gave me time on the agenda to address the entire Assembly. That permission isn't given frequently. So I was able to do my job, speaking, stocking a display table, schmoozing during breaks and meals.

However -- since I am on sabbatical, I was not a very responsible Assembly member. I only spent a couple of hours, total, in my seat on the Assembly floor. I sat in the gallery with Patty (who came to the Assembly for the first time in her life, because I was gone last week and will be gone the next two weeks, so it was a chance to be together). On Saturday Patty and I were tourists in Roanoke, where there was a sidewalk art festival downtown, and the farmer's market, and a great pub for lunch, and time spent poking around the majestic old Hotel Roanoke. We worshiped at the Synod's festival worship service on Saturday night. On Sunday morning after breakfast we got in the car to drive home. Patty had never been to the Rockbridge Vineyard, which is owned and operated by one of her high school classmates, so we stopped there. And we stopped for lunch in Charlottesville at a hippy-type restaurant -- in an old house on a funky side street -- that's been around since we were in school. Then we came home. It was the best Synod Assembly I've ever enjoyed!

I drove 580 miles of interstate driving, and I concluded that the price of gas is still not high enough. Over those 580 miles, I passed a total of seven vehicles. (That doesn't count the trucks I passed on the way up hills on I-81; trucks that wooshed past me on the downhiils.) With the cruise control pegged at 65 mph, my Pontiac Vibe got 40 miles per gallon. I wonder why nearly everyone else on the road was so intent on wasting gas and paying more at the pump than they would have had they driven at the speed limit?