The blood of whom?

Oh, it was a day that memories are made of...
The pastor of this particular internship church wasn't going to be there on Sunday, so he found a substitute pastor to do the liturgy while I preached. That substitute himself had a family emergency at the last minute, so he told me to just take care of preaching and liturgy both. I stumbled through the liturgy since it was my first time at this church with it's own traditions, but it was okay.

Then, as I walked back to the altar, going around the communion rail, I ran into a piece of church architecture, beautiful old hardwood, that came to a solid point an inch above my temple. Smack. Not one of those ones where it was a dull thud that you shake off. It felt like a classic 'sickening smack' where I could tell that the skin had been pierced. I managed not to curse in front of the church as they sang 'Let the vineyards be fruitful..." - good thing I think. I tried checking my face, but found no blood, so I thought the leaking feeling I was perceiving was mistaken.

I distributed communion uneventfully enough. Then, someone brought me a tissue after communion. Apparently, I had been bleeding all through communion, with blood seeping down through my hair, right over my right temple.

I can only imagine what people were thinking as they received the body and blood of Christ. Talk about an object lesson.

The rest of yesterday was marked by me feeling, thinking, and driving as though I had been mildly concussed. I went to the hospital to be safe, but with no memory loss or apparent brain damage, all they decided to do was to staple shut the lacerations I got from the collision. It looked pretty neat actually. It looked like three red lines radiating out from the center point - like I had run into the point of a square.

However, I survived.

What a Sunday...