Every Preacher's Nightmare

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And I can't believe this actually happened to me, but about 3 pm this afternoon, approximately nine pages into tomorrow's sermon, I touched the wrong key and everything on my screen disappeared. And no matter what I tried i couldn't get it back, even though I'm CERTAIN I'd been saving regularly, just the way I always do since this last happened to me over 20 years ago. The only thing I can think of is that I did change the name of my file on the desktop, so I may actually have been saving my REAL file to another location...which I will probably stumble across, or figure out how to locate in another week or so. In the meantime though, imagine my panic! -- fortunately, since I've had such a long time to be thinking about this sermon, I had a good deal of it already written out almost word for word in longhand anyway in various notebooks and on random scraps of paper. So I just went back to the beginning and started over, not quite as polished as I'd been before, but what the hell -- I'm finished now, still hours earlier than I would have been back in the days Before Cancer, when I was still working full time at the office, preaching EVERY Sunday (instead of once a month), and writing my sermons in all day (and night) Saturday marathons based on an outline and a page or two of notes. And this Sunday's message is quite possibly the antepenultimate sermon of my career, with only Memorial Day Weekend (May 24) here in Portland and the Summer Solstice on Nantucket scheduled on my calendar.

Meanwhile, my colleagues at church have been giving me a hard time because not only do I know precisely how many sermons I have preached (this Sunday will be 653) but I can also generally tell you the titles and when and where I preached them (although there are a few sermons from my student days when I'm not exactly certain of the exact date or venue). What can I say? It was easy enough to figure out, and actually only took me a day or two to pull it all together. I'd have a lot harder time figuring out exactly whom I've married, buried, and christened...although I THINK I have pretty good records of those events tucked away somewhere in my files as well. Again, what can I say? I'm a historian and a pack rat -- what ELSE am I going to do?

I suppose I also ought to mention that about eight years worth of those sermons -- everything I preached on Nantucket, in Carlisle, and here in Portland, are all available on-line -- just go to my profile, scroll down, and click on the appropriate link. Now I'm wondering whether I ought to post a "Table of Contents" on each blogsite as well, just so people know where to look for what they're looking for. Maybe tomorrow. I've had enough computer excitement for this evening. So instead I'm going to try to get a good night's sleep, in anticipation of tomorrow's worship service, and the 149th anniversary of the death of Theodore Parker in Florence Italy, May 10th 1860....