Ravioli and gooey butter cake

Today is a painful day for those of us connected with the about-to-be-disconnected United Methodist Church.  The next few hours may prove me wrong, but it looks inevitable that the church will split.  Delegates from all over the world are meeting here in St. Louis (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday), and the whole world is watching our break-up.  Though my heart is heavy today, I did enjoy having lunch with my friend Mike Feely, who helped my mother and me pack up to move from Morristown, Tennessee back to my hometown of Chattanooga.  That was in June of 1992, when I was appointed to serve at Signal Mountain United Methodist Church.  I'm now retired, and Mike is Director of Development at Camp Lookout in the Holston Conference.  He and his wife are in town for the 2019 General Conference, so he was able to attend University United Methodist Church with me on Sunday morning and go to lunch afterwards.

The photo above shows Mike eating gooey butter cake, a St. Louis tradition.  My friend Donna, who ate with us, made sure he also had toasted ravioli, an appetizer created in St. Louis, her hometown.  We ate at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant in the Delmar Loop across the street from this statue of Chuck Berry, so I snapped a photo of Mike with Chuck.  Did you notice how deftly I managed to find something cheerful for this blog post?  Oh, yeah, St. Louis cuisine is much more fun to think about than what one blogger called the United Methodist Church's "schizophrenic theological practices."  Click on that link to read what the Rev. Buzz Trexler has to say about our church's impasse.