Oh, Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee

I’m sure that there are others who handle anxiety much better than I do, but being kept in the dark about my prospective appointment to a new church start in the Nebraska conference was making me increasingly uneasy. My call to Nate Holt yielded more concrete results: the senior pastor of Trinity UMC in Las Vegas (the Reverend Donald Smith) was very unhappy with his associate pastor (the Reverend Dr. John Cox) and was working with the Cabinet to effect a change. I should have paid more attention to the Rockbrook déjà vu, but feeling keenly that I owed my wife and daughters a sense of security I accepted an invitation to fly to Las Vegas to meet with the Staff-Parish Relations Committee and Pastor Don (my experience leads me to caution the reader to be wary of clergy that insist on being called Pastor So-and-so). Nate and his wife, Alita, were living in a luxury apartment on Desert Inn Road where they invited me to stay with them. I was, of course, struck by the heat, but was equally impressed by an aridity that made toweling off after a shower virtually unnecessary. The meeting with the S-PRC was not until evening, and the Holts graciously loaned me their car so that I could drive around and become a little more familiar with the territory. After an early supper, I rode with Nate west on Charleston Blvd. Somehow knowing that the Trinity people would not have any coffee (the Methodist cocktail) at the meeting, we stopped at a 7-11 to brace ourselves. Driving on west a few more blocks, my first thought was wondering why Nate was pulling up to another 7-11, but lo and behold, we were parking in front of Trinity United Methodist Church!