[Magdalen] Prayers of Thanksgiving

[Jay Weigel]

...going up today for the ordination of my longtime friend Sarai Wender to
the vocational diaconate in the Diocese of East Tennessee.

I have known Sarai since she was a wild and crazy teenager, some 32 or so
years ago, and watched her grow up and mature. Her parents were friends of
ours. Her mom was a longtime LPN who went back to school and got her RN in
her 60s. Sarai, who was very much the youngest child in her family, was
determined to be something else and worked as an administrative assistant
for the president of one of the local manufacturing companies, until, in
her late 20s, she figured out that she was really supposed to be a nurse
after all. She went back to school and started over. Somewhere along the
line, she married a delightful German guy who worked for the same company
as my late ex and had a couple of daughters. I didn't even know she had
embarked on this latest path until a year ago but I'm delighted. She's the
third nurse I know who's taken this path, the first being our own Brudder
Jon and the second a former fellow home health nurse. Perhaps nurses make
good deacons because so many of us have already learned to serve....