Agree completely but suspect he figured he either had to speak now or forever hold his piece.
you better run! :smack:
Sounds like he already held his (friend’s) piece.
I got a panicked phone call three days before my wedding. The church we we going to be married in had burned to the ground.
Freak out city! Suddenly, we had to find a backup site at the last moment- and try and inform everyone of the change. (BTW, this was back before cell phones were common)
Thankfully, the hotel/restaurant we we holding the reception at came through for us, and set up a nice “Chapel” in one of their meeting rooms. One of my buddies was also nice enough to sit in his truck at the church site to direct the people who showed up there to the new site.
Aw, Meow Max, you stole my line. My cousin’s wedding had to be postponed. It was originally scheduled for 9/15/01. :smack: We’re not close, so I don’t know how they would have proceeded if all the planes in the US had not been grounded, meaning out-of-towners couldn’t get there. But they were grounded, and no one knew at the outset for how long, so that Saturday wasn’t going to happen.
IIRC, there were few or no penalties from the vendors, under the circumstances. This is something I wonder if future generations will find hard to grasp: the idea that everyone in the country was in the identical position of having to work around the ultimate disruption.
This was a few years ago, and I’m not directly connected to them, so I’m not sure. I heard that he was in seminary, but they were having problems making ends meet. In all honesty, I hope the answer is no. A priest handles a lot of personal things for the congregation, and needs more personal and emotional maturity than this guy showed. Not to mention, his background is Lutheran, not Episcopalian. I think it shows a certain disrespect for the Episcopal Church to just parachute in because “it’s almost Catholic.”
You would believe this if you ever met this guy. I dealt with him extensively in several different capacities, and have nothing good to say about him. (I deleted several examples because I don’t want to hijack the thread venting about him, and I suspect that no one else is interested in reading about the idiocies of someone they don’t know.)
Dude, why do you think we come to this messageboard?
Agreed. The Punkyova, see if you can use Google to look up “Ron stories” on the SDMB.
Oh, I read and enjoy the Ron stories. But this guy isn’t/wasn’t that kind of entertaining. An example:
He wasn’t called by my congregation as a parish pastor*, but he preached there on occasion. He somehow found out that we had a mortgage on the building (which most congregations do) and totally wigged out about it. He preached a whole sermon about how God’s covenant relationship with us was like marriage, and having a mortgage was like the unforgivable sin of divorce (which is NOT Lutheran theology), and if we loved God we would never have been so faithless as to take out a mortgage and we must pay it off now, as in this month. Plus, no one divorced should bother coming to church.
Over coffee afterward, everyone was angry, and one of the parishioners told him that if having a mortgage was that bad, everyone should stop giving to the church until theirs was paid off. He was visibly surprised to hear that pretty much everyone there had a mortgage on their house. (My best guess is that his wife handled the money.) Several people also asked him WTF (slightly more politely) about the divorce thing, pointing out that most of the congregation had some connection to divorce. Again, he was surprised. How can you be a counselor/pastor and not know that decent people actually get divorced and have divorced family members? He had no good answer to either of these questions, just stood there with a blank look on his face.
Then there was the time that a young lady went to him for counseling, and he spent the entire session telling her in (graphic) detail that he found her so irresistably attractive that he couldn’t stop fantasizing about her long enough to listen to her problems. She refused to pay for the session, or come back, and he complained to everyone who would listen (using her NAME!) for several weeks, until someone hit him over the head with a clue-by-four about the liability issues/unprofessional conduct involved.
So, yeah, an idiot, but mostly not in a way that makes for good SDMB stories.
*Except that he kind of was, to stay rostered, and that’s another (boring) complaint.
I respectfully disagree: I can’t speak for the others, but I’m horribly fascinated!
never mind - someone already posted the link.
Thanks for remembering Ron 
Seconded. Start a thread, and link from (and to) this one!
Word.
hh
I have a now-deceased friend whose life was full of pitiful but amazing tragedies. His near-wedding, which happened many years before I met him, wouldn’t even make the Top Five list of these tragedies.
On the very day of the wedding, would-be groom had an altercation with father of bride, ending with some of the latter’s blood on his face. Father of groom (who’d barely met father-of-bride) misunderstood situation, thoroughly beat up father-of-bride. The wedding was canceled.
My friend later had an affair with sister of above would-be bride; this ended in a tragic accident (and that wouldn’t make his Top Five Tragedies list either).
My brother knows a guy in his late sixties who told my brother that the night before his wedding,his friends got him drunk took his wallet and threw him on a train. He never did get married and lives alone to this day.
OMG, what are his five worst tragedies then?
Yes – septimus and madmonk28, I insist on more detail from each of you immediately!