The Big Baptism

After Friday’s problems with the money not going through to the right account in time for the shopping to be delivered, things were to get worse before getting better.

In order to solve the issue of having no food or drink for our guests we took out a temporary overdraft in order to purchase what we needed. So much for trying our best to become debt free. However, the up-side to it was that I ended up going to a different supermarket to the one the shopping was originally ordered from, and luckily they had deals on much of the stuff, including the drinks. We ended up saving over a hundred pounds! This will now cover six months car tax on the minibus.

The weekend then kicked off with an ongoing problem with Ben reaching a climax, ending up in him leaving home. Life has ups and downs. We’re on a down at the moment I guess. It’s hard.

The weekend was also spent busily trying to prepare for Sunday. Cooking and food preparation took up much of the time and when we weren’t doing that we were trying to get the hall we had hired ready. Tables needed setting up, balloons needed inflating and displaying, drinks needed arranging. This was done over Saturday and Sunday morning, but as we’d fallen behind getting everything ready and were rapidly running out of time we decided that we had to forgo Mass on Sunday morning. Thankfully, our friend and Godmother to be of our youngest two children did still manage to go after helping us to set up the hall in the morning and it was so lucky she did.

It turned out that the Priest taking Mass was unaware that any baptism was being held that afternoon. The main Priest had told him that ours was in the main church in a town nearby along with four other families. This was certainly not what we had arranged with him months ago, and so a lot of confusion later and the mix up was solved, thank God. Can you imagine what would have happened if our friend hadn’t have gone? There would have been no baptism, a hall full of food and drink and guests who had travelled for nothing.

With everyone’s help the show went on. A member of the congregation offered to collect and take back our non-driving priest, and the altar servers all offered to return for the baptism. We are truly thankful to everyone and that everything turned out ok in the end.

It seems that this weekend has been a real test for us. Something or someone didn’t want it to go ahead. It didn’t work though because it did go ahead and was a wonderful day in the end. The children looked beautiful and did us so proud. It seemed our guests had a good time, at least, we hope they did! We missed a lot of people who couldn’t be there to share the day with us, but know that their thoughts were with us regardless.

Yes, a good day in the end.