Putting The Pieces Together

Welcome back from the dark months!

Not long after I arrived at the lodge last night, the windows began rattling and the clouds opened up pounding the pavement just beyond the basement wall with a late summer thunder storm. As the rhythm of the weather played loudly in the background, I sat at my makeshift desk and planned out several overdue tasks. Before long I was joined at the lodge by other brothers trying to get that last bit of work done before the meeting.

In just a couple of days, we will be sitting in the sweltering lodge room resuming our usual meeting schedule after a couple of dark months. Still being new to Freemasonry, I keep trying to think of the different things that I will have to do during the course of the meeting. Tonight was the final preparation before diving back in to the usual program.

The last week or so I have been scrambling to finish up a number of summer tasks and placing overdue orders that will, hopefully, last until this time next year. Actually, since much of the material I am ordering is for new masons, I hope that I have to receive another shipment sooner rather than later. Either way, this crop of invoices should be arriving in the mailbox soon.

Of course, that was only a small group of things that needed to get done. There are other items on my list that kept getting pushed further and further back until late last month and this past holiday weekend. Thankfully, part of the time that I took off from work I was able to dedicate to checking off those items including sending the notice and getting the minutes done from our previous meetings month ago… I really have to get a better routine together for knocking those out as I can’t keep pulling them together last minute.

Even with all the work that had to get done and a hint of uncertainty for this quickly approaching meeting, I am looking forward to seeing all the brothers coming together once again for a meeting. While there is a certain amount of stress leading up to each evening at the lodge, I still find the time within those walls to be a tremendous respite from the everyday grind. Maybe with a better schedule, I will be able to enjoy those nights even more.

So, the dark months have once again come and gone. A whole new set of tasks awaits us in the coming months as we push forward in an attempt to meet the goals we set forth at the beginning of the year. Hopefully, the momentum from late spring was not lost and new petitions will be waiting for me on my desk. It really is an exciting time of year and one that I am looking forward to (even if the lodge room feels like an oven).