Pub Theology

So…here’s the looooong story of how Bishop Conley got to eat dinner in our dining room….

Months ago, Fr. Lux invited Bishop Conley to speak at our Pub Theology. He agreed and Fr. suggested that we offer him some type of meal before his speaking engagement. I offered our home, not sure if you can really even offer to have the Bishop to your house. Fr. thought it sounded like a good idea, and the Bishop, again, agreed!! We were thrilled. We spent a good deal of the month of March painting our bathroom and hallway and finishing various other projects around the house (because, you know, the Bishop is very particular about the color of bathrooms he uses….) We were telling everyone we knew! We invited Jake and Jena and their kids and had a full menu planned two weeks before the big date.

Then, a week before the Bishop was scheduled to come, one of the Knights of Columbus who is in charge of the parish fish fry asked me if there was any way the Bishop could make an appearance at the following weeks fish fry. The fish fry was scheduled to take place at the same time as dinner at our house. “He could still eat at your house, but just pop into the fish fry for a bit. Some of us at the Fish fry won’t be able to make Pub Theology and we’d really love to see him.” Luke and I discussed it and decided we were just being selfish keeping the Bishop all to ourselves. Having the Bishop eat at our house and go to the fish fry seemed to make for a very chaotic evening, so we just opted out of having him to our home.

And that’s where it was left until a week later-the day of Pub Theology. I randomly decided to swing by the church with the kiddos in the morning to make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and after praying for a few moments, we saw Fr. Lux.

“Father, did you get my message this morning? I never got a confirmation from you that we were good with having the Bishop go to the fish fry instead of our house”

“I actually never heard back, but….I just got a voice mail from his MC….” He checks his voice mail on speaker phone while I listen “The Bishop would be happy to go to the Fish Fry, but would still like to eat dinner at the Deavers, if that works. I did send you an e-mail about that earlier this week…”

This was at 10:30 the morning of. Also, I’d been battling all day sickness and plenty of fatigue and had spent most of the week on the couch with a messy house to prove it!

Father: “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll just let him know dinner at your house won’t work any more”

Me: “Noooo…we’ll make it work!!” For goodness sake, when the Bishop wants to eat at your house, you say yes!!

I gave Luke a quick call, “Dinner with the Bishop is back on! Please take off as much time as you can today so as to help me not lose my mind.”

I loaded the kiddos back in the car. “Ok….I have some great, great news for you all!” I told them. “The Bishop is coming for dinner tonight! It is going to be so awesome. That means we have a ton of cleaning and cooking to do today. I’m going to need you all to be super helpful or playing downstairs. We are all going to have to work together on this!” Patrick thinks about this and says, “That’s not good news…”

The rest of the day was a frantic whirlwind of choosing a menu, grocery shopping, and cleaning. By God’s grace, I felt pretty good all day and, miraculously, not even that stressed out about it. I really think if I would have been planning for him all week I would have been much more anxious about the whole thing, cleaning under the fridge, shampooing the carpet and doing all kinds of superfluous tasks. When I only had 7 hours to get ready, though, I just managed to do the best I could in the time allowed.

The Bishop, Fr. Rayer, his MC and Fr. Lux showed up at about 6:15. The evening was such a blessing to our family. I guess I thought we would talk about deep, intensely spiritual things and solve all the problems of the world, but instead, we talked about how the Bishop hikes 100s of miles on his vacations and likes to text Tim Miles (Husker basketball coach) in his spare time. It was amazing how relatable, personable and just human he was!

We chatted for over an hour over Shrimp Scampi, garlic bread, spinach salad and blueberry pie. The kids were really excited to see him and then really shy. After dinner, we got his blessing and took a few pictures. Of course, the pictures leave a little to be desired…

But, it is proof that he was, in fact, in our home!

Pub Theology went beautifully, as well. There were about 150 in attendance. The Bishop spoke about how he came to love the Catholic Church and then about the laity’s role in the New Evangelization.

 

There were people there from North Platte, McCook and Lincoln!

The rest of the weekend Luke and I would just look at each other, bewildered and say, “Can you believe Friday night? Can you believe we had the Bishop eat dinner in our house? That was one of the craziest/wildest/awesomest/greatest nights EVER!”

What a blessing March 22nd was!