St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

(Yes, that’s an R.E.M. reference, from that revolutionary 1992 album, “Automatic for the People.”) Jim and I have spent this week with a thousand other EPC pastors in sunny Sacramento, California, for our denomination’s General Assembly – learning, networking, strategizing, and voting as participants in the wider connectional body into which they are vowed. It’s a pretty awesome and humbling responsibility we have to stay committed, supportive and accountable to an extended family beyond our family at St. Patrick, but we are vow-keeping covenant people. So while there’s been a whole lot of socializing and sweating (it’s been 110 degrees all week!), it’s nothing at all that we could classify as “suffering for the Kingdom.”As I’ve been mulling over these themes of hurt and healing for Sunday’s sermon in our “Psalms! The Voice of the Heart” series, we’ve also been sharing in many conversations with other pastors and missionaries about what Jim jokingly calls “The Doctrine of the Sneakiness of God.” The more we r