Tour Blog — Day 2
Every church needs a Tami Munari. Not all churches have a Tami, but all good churches do. First United Methodist in Laramie, WY is one of those churches. When we pulled up, Tami met us at the door in an apron, like she’d been cooking — because she had. She’d made our entire spaghetti dinner for 85 people, by herself, from scratch, because she wanted the night to be right. She was also wearing a black top hat ringed with miniature silver horseshoes, which she told us was her cooking hat. Who has a cooking hat? As she walked our recon crew through the dining room, she had string quartet covers of 90s alt rock blaring over the speakers (she also likes playing George Strait during worship services). Tami is different, and she knows it, and she isn’t ashamed of it one bit. She also lets an occasional word slip that might make a stuffier church-goer squirm — holds it as a badge of honor, actually — but underneath all that spice is about as big and generous a heart as we are going to find anywhere on this trip.
But there is one thing you know about Tami as soon as you meet her: she LOVES First UMC Laramie. She’s been on nearly every committee in that church at one time or another and more positions than she could probably list — the kind of person a church runs on, whether they say so out loud or not. She told me, “I must’ve talked to 3 or 4 different people about having you guys come, and I probably need to talk to more, but I just decided that was good enough — because I wanted you to come.” She strikes me as a woman who is very hard to talk out of something once she’s made up her mind, and I’m grateful she’s built that way. While we sat down to eat and got to know each other, I introduced her to Sophie Mendenhall — one of my favorite kids to show off to our host churches, because of how put together she is. Tami’s eyes lit up and she about jumped out of her chair, “We are getting great young people like you! We went through some really dark days a few year ago and were worried we were going to close our doors, but we got through that, we recently welcomed our newest pastor and people have been really getting excited about welcoming new young people and having groups like you come here!”
As we were leaving, we started talking about how hard it is to find churches willing to host a group like ours, and how rare it is to find someone like Tami — someone who doesn’t just say yes, but actually champions it, fights for it, makes it a whole event. She mentioned, half-laughing, that she couldn’t wait to send the video to the ministerial alliance so they’d see exactly what they’d turned down. My guess is the next time we come this way Tami recruits the whole town!
That is the great thing about tour. You end up meeting people from all walks of life, and you find out that all these people are somewhat different than you, but they are your people. Tami is cut from the same cloth as New G. Tami has planted her flag to be a champion for a quality that seems in short supply sometimes: the willingness to show hospitality even if it doesn’t result in a new member or financial benefit for the church. I hope that as we go through this tour our kids see that kind of hospitality and kindness and it inspires them to want to be those types of people in their churches and communities. People who say that this whole Christianity thing isn’t just a place I go on Sunday, but it’s a really wild adventure to live that could take me ANYWHERE.
Tami left me with this quote: “As far as I can tell, Christianity is all about courage, and Jesus led by example.”
Love you all, Joseph
