Friends,
Greetings from the Presbyterian conference center at Zephyr Point on Lake Tahoe. I’m here for the week, teaching a class on Islam. There is a good group gathered for something called “The Zephyr Experience,” which is kind of like a mini seminary for lay-people. There are six teachers up here, at least half of whom have a relationship with MPC (the other two MPC-related teachers are our former interim pastor Beth Brown and Greg Love, who teaches in our adult education program).
Ordinarily I wouldn’t write a contact piece while away, but this week I wanted to make sure I provided you with an invitation to talk to me if you have any questions about Gil and Maria Chiguila. As you may know, Gil and Maria worked for our congregation for eighteen years. They were our janitors, our caretakers, and they did odd bits of handiwork around the church keeping us in good repair. During the span of their employment, Gil and Maria lived in the caretakers’ house, just across the creek from our sanctuary.
In 2012, when Beth was our interim pastor, the session decided the church needed to change its staffing model. The church was no longer big enough to afford a caretaker, and the house was a resource that was needed to support the church in other ways—either as staff housing or as a way to generate rental income. At the time Gil and Maria’s daughter, Rosa was in her first year of college, and Gil and Maria asked if they could stay in their house until Rosa graduated. This seemed fair, and so we arranged for Gil and Maria to stay on a few more years.
Rosa has now graduated and we are now in the early stages of renovating the caretakers’ house for use as a manse for our Associate Pastor Talitha and her fiancée, Michael. If you have any questions about any of this, please don’t hesitate to contact me. You can email me this week ben@mpcfamily.org (though the wifi is spotty where I am staying); or we can talk after I’m down from the mountain.
By the way, Beth says “hi.”
God’s Peace,
Ben