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People notes

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

Topeka priest visits members in Middle East

	The Rev. Don Davidson (left) and Specialist TJ Melkus, a member of Davidson's parish serving in the Sinai with the Kansas National Guard.

The Rev. Don Davidson spent Thanksgiving just about as far away from Kansas as one can get. The rector of St. David’s, Topeka, who also serves as command chaplain for the Kansas National Guard, was part of a contingent visiting Guard troops in Germany, Kosovo and the Sinai Peninsula.

Davidson had the chance to visit with two of his own parishioners who are serving with the Guard in Egypt..

Specialist Shawn Stovall is serving near Sharm el Sheikh, where his job is to keep track of the hundreds of soldiers serving through the 2/130 Field Artillery Battalion from Hiawatha, Kan. Davidson was able to deliver cookies made by Stovall’s mother-in-law, Connie Wold.

Davidson found Specialist TJ Melkus in a remote outpost in the Sinai, where he and other soldiers serve three-week stints watching and protecting the region as part of peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Specialist Shawn Stoval

Davidson delivered homemade salsa and apple butter from hisfamily.

Davidson was part of a traveling party that included Kansas Adjutant General Major Gen. Tod Bunting, who also is a member of St. David’s.

Former Kansan has new book of Lenten meditations

The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead, former rector of St. James, Wichita, and now dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Jacksonville, Fla., has a new book of Lenten meditations that has been published by St. Mark’s Press. The press is a ministry of Good Shepherd Church in Wichita.

Titled Get Over Yourself; God’s Here!, the book sells for $14 and can be ordered from St. Mark’s Press or from two bookstores (Eighth Day Books and Watermark Books and Cafe) in Wichita.

This is Moorehead’s second book of Lenten meditations; she also has published a book of reflections for Advent.

In this book Moorehead reflects pastorally on the nature of sin and repentance in a contemporary context.

She pondered what the modern-day equivalent would be to Jesus’ proclamation of “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

She decided that to a world devoted to the cult of self it well might be, “Get over yourselves! God’s here.”

Repentance is not about focusing more and more attention upon ourselves, our foibles, faults and failures, she notes. Rather, it is a process of shifting attention away from ourselves to God.

Moorehead offers a vision for a practice of repentance that helps readers avoid the ruts of self-absorption and self-analysis that are so prevalent in today’s time and culture.