Stories from the High Tea

Betsy at her table
(c) Savoring the Sweet Life

 The women go all out in decorating their tables for the Annual High Tea. Betsy Veneziano was the chair and her table design was really cool. All the gals at her table also wore fascinators.

If you want to see all the tables you can go to Facebook to see Jacqui Todd’s photos of all the tables. Professional photographers also took photos, which she has generously given us permission to use here. You can see all the photos at Savoring the Sweet Life.

So many of the hostesses used china that either had special meaning to them or that they’d inherited. Today and next week, we’ll share two of those stories. Stay tuned for more in the September tidings.

(c) Savoring the Sweet Life

From Jennifer Burgess: 

I inherited this dinner set from my mother-in-law. She had this from her gift shop way back when In Long Island, New York.  From what I remember she said that it is one of the dinner sets her parents had brought over from Germany. 

I would say that it is at least 60 years old or more. I did some research and found out that is from Denmark. The artist is Fanny Garde. The  company is Bing and Grondahl. This design first came about in 1895 and is very popular with the Danish families and the seagull collection was discontinued in 1997. Now it is a collectors item so if you break it it is hard to find a replacement. The more common one is without the gold rim. The gold rim ones are very limited and has a number on it. This helps to identify the year  it is made.

Jennifer's and Ruth Lim's table setting
(c) Savoring the Sweet Life

My mother in law had always told me that what ever happens to keep this set as it holds a lot of memories as she used it a lot when the family got together. My husband David said he remembered that his mom only used this set on very special occasions, especially with her family, and she is very careful to make sure that her kids do not break any of them. So I'm glad I inherited this. 

Carried by a community

by Cindy Taylor

The first day we came to Good Samaritan, Mary Anne was celebrating her birthday. A Marine was being deployed, and Fr. Chris and the congregation gave him a special blessing. Those and holding hands for the Lord's Prayer really impressed me.

My husband John didn't grow up in a church, but he feels so at peace when we leave the service. He wishes there were an early weekday service so he could go before work. When I think about the effect Good Sam has had on our lives, I think of my husband and his walk with Christ. When I see him pray, it means a lot to me.

We had gone to a different church many years before, but when I had a miscarriage there was no reaction from anyone in the church.

Cindy's favorite picture with her granddad

December 13 2009. My granddad had died far away the day before. Though he wasn't ready to go, they couldn't keep him alive. I came to church that Sunday just sobbing, and people would come up to support me. Rebecca took me into the chapel to pray for me. It got very warm; the sun came out enough that it was like a spotlight on my face and Rebecca had just the right words to say. She carried me through that horrid pain. 

Are you carried by your community of faith? Of friends? If not, why not?

Reflections on the Prayer of St. Francis

by Leanne Shawler, Communications Director

I have a blog of my own, and have had for a few years. Recently, it’s morphed from sharing about my art and other daily stuff, to focusing on what’s really important: God’s love.

One of the ways I’m doing this is enlisting the help of a small group of Christian bloggers and friends to reflect upon the Prayer of St. Francis, line by line. We started back in April and will be finishing up in June. You can see the posts on this subject so far, here. They go from most recent, backward.

As we have a statue of St. Francis in our Memorial Garden, I thought it might be of interest to my fellow Good Sammers and other folk who read here. 

So far, it’s been an invaluable exercise, especially when I get stuck with the “hard" lines. Learning to stop, let the line sink in, write down ideas, even the bad ones and giving each short essay the space to develop. 

It’s also been enlightening to discover how God has been working in other people’s lives. I've gotten to know my companions in this project a little better.

Have you ever reflected on a prayer, line by line? (Would you like to? We could make it a recurring project here on the “love. be loved.” blog.)

Is respect central to your marriage?

by Christopher Smith

I’ve always believed that the foundation of a relationship between a man and a woman should be respect, plain and simple.  Love is wonderful to have, attraction is always fun, but without that solid foundation of respect, a marriage is on borrowed time, at best.   Unfortunately, love can fade, attraction can fizzle, but respect is tied to personality and as long as the personality doesn’t change, the respect for the person will last a long time.

It’s amazing to me how little I have heard of this throughout my life.  For example, my wife has a pillow that was given to her during her Bachelorette party with the term “Wisdom for the Bride” written across it.  It has very interesting, and very valid pieces of advice, such as “don’t go to bed angry” and “always communicate”.  Yet I did not see anything regarding respecting each other. 

To me, respecting one’s spouse is partially acknowledging the marriage as one unit, but also accepting one’s spouse as an individual with their own desires and goals.  The very same rules you learn growing up about treating others with respect applies here.  While ideally there is a 50/50 dissemination of responsibility when respect is the foundation of a marriage, as situations change in life, this must shift temporarily.  If one spouse is at a time in their life when they’re weak, the other becomes stronger to support them and get them through it.  But it must be temporary and it must not be exclusive to one side only.

It seems in society that the “norm” is for one spouse (quite often, the male) to simply do whatever their counterpart wants automatically.  Many times this is simply to avoid confrontation.  That does not and never will fly with me, as my wife can attest.  If my wife disagrees with something I’m doing, we sit down, discuss it, and come to a compromise.  The same works, vice versa.  If we fight, we fight…but we get it out in the open and we do so respectfully.  I don’t lay down for her and I certainly don’t expect her to lay down for me all the time.  This is a huge part of my personal idea of respect in a marriage.

I was lucky in that the marriages in my family gave me quite a bit of material to NOT emulate.  I came from three previous generations of Smith men who were notorious wife beaters.  My father abused my mother and myself severely for years before she finally had the courage to divorce him.  She eventually re-married, and while the man she married didn’t abuse her physically, I got the sense that he didn’t respect her at times.  He would not allow her to go out with any of her friends or do anything by herself (or would do so begrudgingly).  I think as the years went by, she resented him for it.  I did not want that to be us.  This example was one of many that helped formulate my views on marriage and respect.

But, while I was raised by my mother to respect others, the one event the cemented the idea of respect in a marriage was when my Grandmother passed away.  Two days before she passed, she gave me her final wish.  She asked me to promise her that I would not become like my father (her son).  Her wish was that when I got married, that I would respect my wife and not hurt her. She felt my wife deserved to have a happier life than she and my mother did.   She knew from the time I could walk that it was part of God’s will in my life to break the cycle of abuse.

I took that promise very seriously.  She passed 14 years ago, and I still honor it today just as much as the day it happened.

Without a doubt, respect must be the base of a marriage.  We must not ever forget that, while it unifies us into one whole, marriage does not dissolve us as individuals.  I believe one of the purposes of marriage is not to change a person, but to support, enhance and nurture that individual throughout their journey in life.  A marriage is healthiest when both sides do this for the other.  My grandmother believed this.  As we move forward in our marriage, I like to think she lives on in us, but most of all, I’d like to think that she was proud of us for what we have become.

Is respect central to your marriage? Or is there another foundational element of marriage that is central to you?

PS from The Editor: the last session of Laura Henson's "What's Love Got to Do With It? Building and Sustaining Healthy Marriages" is this Sunday at 11:15amish.

Reflection on Holy Week and Easter

(Ann Carlton wrote a great thank you for our Holy Week and Easter services. You can find it online in the "What's New?" section in the April 22 Good Sam Notes pdf edition (online soonish).)


by Leanne Shawler,
Communications Director


I sing in the choir for my church and so was at every service for Holy Week except the noon Good Friday and the early morning Easter service.

All in all, I have to say this is the most profound and moving Holy Week I've had in a long time. If I had to guess as to why I would say some of that is because of my faith journey over the past year, some of it letting go of needing to stage manage every detail of our services (ok, so folks in the office are laughing as they read this -- but I mean in the moments right before the service. I prepared plenty), and some of it because of the love our community holds for God and each other, and God being present during those services. 

Maundy Thursday: I felt a bit disconnected during the foot washing -- the choir sang and so didn't participate as we've done in past years -- although one of us did go up after we'd done singing. I’m not sure whether or not I missed getting my feet washed or not. It was nice to sit back and not feel like I had to stage manage the whole thing as in previous years too. 


I was deeply moved when we buried the sacraments in the Memorial Garden. It not only felt like we were actually burying Jesus but I suddenly felt as if my sin, my body had been buried with Him. 

Reading of the Passion

The combined Good Friday service with the Newman Center was special even if it started late and went longer than I expected, but I just went with the flow and experienced it as it happened. 


“let us kneel ... let us stand..."

Patty (who works in the Newman office) and I wove the solemn collects/prayers of the faithful together ... I would've made the prayers a lot shorter as it was tough to kneel on tile, which I felt I had to do given that I was right behind the altar. How could one not kneel?  

Saturday's Easter Vigil was the high point for me: we spent a good chunk of it outside, sitting around a sort-of campfire, telling and singing God's story in history, and Revbecca asked us if we would add our story to those we'd already told. God is still working in history.

I decided for energy reasons, and because I was still getting over a nasty cold, to skip the early morning Easter service. They had dolphins show up (it was on a pier). I am bummed about that. Dolphins! Pelicans!

Easter itself was a bit of an anti-climax after Vigil, although Chris gave an awesome sermon about the freedom given to us by the Resurrection and the baptism was just a wonderful moment too. 

 What were your favorite moments of Holy Week or Easter?

Experiencing Jesus' Passion...

by Thom Kassebaum

At the age of eleven, I was diagnosed with a kidney condition which made it necessary for me to take large doses of medications for several years. When I was in high school, one of those medications had to be administered intravenously, usually in the back of the hand.  

Between frequent sessions and the occasional slip of the needle, the backs of both hands became scarred. I attended Happening 16 where I heard "I AM" in a still small voice in my head. 

Six months later, I went to a Discovery Weekend [a family retreat] at Good Sam, where the teenagers had a small group of their own. We listened to a recorded description of Jesus' passion. 

We heard in vivid detail of what a cat-o'-nine-tails was, how many lashes it took for that whip to kill someone, what kind of thorns were smashed on Jesus' head, what the "hand" of the ancient world referred to... on and on. 

I started to daydream, wondering what it felt like for a piece of steel to go through my hand from my palm, using my thumb to mimic the nail. I closed my eyes to fully experience it and my fingers gently brushed the bandage from where the intravenous needle had gone in. I turned my hand over and pressed hard. No, I didn't know what it felt like for the nail to go in from the palm, but I sure knew what it felt like for a small-gauge needle to go from the back forward, what kind of damage was inflicted in the name of "helping".   

"Unless I see the nail marks in his hand, and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe." 

 I put my finger where my nails were, I put my hand in my side; how much more did He die for me! All I remember is seeing His face and mumbling to myself, "My Lord and My God" and, "the doctors were only trying to help."

Why Go to Holy Week?

by Nancy Higgins

We have been challenged to identify where we see or feel God at work in our lives, and I feel that presence most closely during Holy Week.

I'll admit that my first time to attend the Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Vigil services came as a result of being in a choir. However, I discovered how easy it was to really understand what Jesus went through, and His sacrifice for me in these 3 days. 

On Maundy Thursday we hear that Jesus washed His disciples feet. What an amazing act of love. I can feel that love when someone else washes my feet. Even if I have my hands washed, the love of one Christian for another comes through. 

Later in the service, when the altar is stripped, the nakedness of the altar is shocking. It make me even more aware that the next day Christ will die for my sins. We follow the Light of Christ to the memorial garden, and then go home to think about what will happen on Friday.

Good Friday is solemn, as those of us who have experienced death of a loved one know. But as Christians, we know that the next night will be a celebration. And that is what Easter VIgil is. We start in the Memorial Garden where we left Christ, but now we know the tomb is empty. Joy abounds.

I invite you to come and share with fellow Christian the love and sacrifice of our Lord. And please join with me on Easter shouting Alleluia Jesus is Alive.

Have you ever felt that you were walking with Jesus through this time?