Here are five things worth paying attention to this week. These are designed to expose you to a perspective you may not normally come across in your daily lives. 

1. Anglophilia and the royal wedding. “Who will be up at 4 a.m. to attend the wedding on TV?” someone asked at our home base fellowship. A lively discussion ensued, celebrating Meghan Markle—California woman, a commoner, an actress, who is bi-racial, from a family of divorce, who has gone through her own pain of divorce, all insurmountable obstacles for some previous royal matches, now surmountable. Leveling of humanity was a value we at the church all espoused, and hope for a more just freedom to choose and covenant in love. A wake up call at 4 a.m. is not out of the question for any of us.

2. Vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sundaes. Our congregation provides an ice cream booth at the Southern California Mennonite Central Committee relief sale the first weekend of May. Sweet fellowship over the screech of our four White Mountain freezers. The last mix concentrate was saved for the Sunday evening service potluck, and we gave thanks for the 23 freezers churned into instant relief justified as a contribution to world relief. It is one thing for us to budget $1,500 for MCC and another to earn the additional $1,500 by the sweat (actual, not metaphorical) of our brows.

3. Women Doing Theology Conference. The Mennonite Church USA Menno Snapshots blog by Melissa Florer-Bixler, has set us talking and planning for someone to participate in this important event. The hope is that every MC USA congregation will send a representative. We want to hear and feel through one of our own leaders how this gathering of Anabaptist and Ana-feminist theologians can help us see inward for change and outward for vision through fresh leadership.

4. Attending a memorial 3,000 miles away. The memorial service for C. Norman Kraus is available on YouTube. Watching his grandchildren quote his words about “the efficatiousness of Jesus”; hearing him quoted, “If we can hold the limits of our perceptions with humility, we can be more gentle with each other”; or his confession, “No one has exclusive access to the truth”; these words moved us deeply. My heart said “yes” when someone said, “Humility was his paramount conviction.”

5. On Caring, by Milton Mayeroff. To begin a series of meditations at our home base church on the subject of caring, led by a pastoral counselor, a chaplain, a therapist, a geriatric physician, we first read On Caring, the 1971 book that became the first reading required of all my counseling classes in 40 years of seminary teaching. I wanted students to understand the core meaning of caring, and Mayeroff’s analysis as a philosopher was precise: “To care for another is to bid one to grow.” The little book works out what this means in all of life and sets one’s thoughts on a path of clarity not often experienced when thinking about compassion. Our discussion was both electric in insight and self-disclosing in honesty.

David and Leann Augsburger are two semi-retired people who co-lead a home base church (Peace Mennonite Church, Claremont, California) and volunteer to welcome, care and connect people in the San Gabriel valley.