Emotional blackmail bread

Secretly delivering a gift of ripe peaches to my spiritual guru's home, I encountered a backyard of backhoes. I continued down the sidewalk until a man snapped, "Don't jump over that trench." I looked at him, startled. First of all, with my keen gymnastic abilities, I could have easily cleared his silly little trench. Second of all, who talks to people like that? Seeing that I was on my pastor's property AND that it was Sunday, I took a cleansing breath and swallowed every swear word that leapt to my lips. "Where would you like me to put these peaches," I asked with sweet insincerity before the frustrated contractor launched into a tirade about the perils of underground wires. Nodding compassionately, my poker face did not disclose that my van was filled with helpful electric-detecting devices along with the man who knows how to use them. But while Brad may have been reluctant to help a contractor who limited his wife's leaping, he was more than willing to help out our friend from being tasered by his own lawn. So he returned later...WITHOUT me (to ensure a curse-free construction site).

While we may not necessarily look thrilled about it, the Mosimans ARE helpers. If you need a haiku, celebratory banner, or an appropriate clipart embellishment, see me. Brad covers pretty much everything else. But we ABHOR the "thank you" part of the process. Please don't thank us in person. Feel free to write us long detailed letters chronicling how we have forever altered and impacted your life for the better with our charitable act of goodwill but mail it. And NO thank you gifts. That just starts the awkward and endless cycle of "thank you for the thank you gift." Ugh.

And our spiritual guru guy KNOWS this! We are the poster people for "Flight or Fight" and he has approached us with the cautious care necessary for addressing an undetonated bomb. So when he sent me an email saying that he'd like to bake us a loaf of bread to thank us, I naturally flipped. HOW DARE HE?!? "Stay away from us, you freak," I responded before informing my husband that we were going to start home-churching immediately.

But a week passed with no manna miraculously delivered so I began to breathe easier. Home-churching was becoming quite divisive. We couldn't pin down a worship leader and no one could agree on a time. I'd found several relevant clipart illustrations to embellish our bulletin but Brad argued that the cost of printing had to be factored into the tithe. We suffered a three-faction church split before our first service. "If Calvin had baked us bread, at least we could have had communion," Brad grumbled. "Sydney already drank the cran/grape blend so it wouldn't have mattered," I told him, handing him a can of orange soda.

And then everything changed. There was a knock on the door in the middle of the afternoon. No, I was not sleeping. No, I was not watching my seventh episode of "How I Met Your Mother." No, I was not reading smut on my Kindle. I was baking chocolate chip cookies. Seriously. Actually pulling a pan out of the oven when the knock occurred. There, framed in my doorway was my spiritual adviser, cradling a loaf of bread lovingly in his arms. "You'll want to eat it soon," he said, handing it to me as he glanced toward his parked van where the kids were waiting, "because of the humidity." I nodded wisely. Of course. The humidity.

"Amy, why is there a loaf of bread on the dehumidifier," Brad yelled later that day. I shared Calvin's dire warning while Brad rescued the loaf only to immediately put it under the knife. "He didn't have to do this," Brad mumbled through a mouthful of bread, reaching to cut another slice. "Don't worry," I assured my husband, "I tried to  balance it out by giving Calvin a handful of cookies." "I think the bread tipped the scales," Sydney said, already on her second piece. See? It never ends! But at least now, we can go back to church.