Seniors and Sterns Sunday Send-off
Stay tuned to the Current for a story about Ocracoke School's class of 2014. (It's coming soon!) Meanwhile….
The Sterns will be on the island until June 22, but are starting to say their goodbyes now to the island they've called home for four years.
"I've made better friends here than anywhere else," Laura said, adding that everyone in her family will miss Ocracoke, all in different ways.
"I appreciate the ease with which I got to be a pastor and a mother at the same time," she said of the support she received from the church and community.
Her kids (Gretchen, Nicholas, and Charlie) love the island (though, to be honest, the boys can't remember anywhere else.) Laura is happy that her young family had this time here.
"I think Ocracoke is a magical place for kids to grow up. Charlie was two months old when we got here," Laura said. (The little action hero turned four last week.) "I will always identify this place with Charlie's baby years."
The past two years have been challenging, however, since her husband returned to teaching in the fall of 2012. Andrew's been commuting to Rocky Mount every week where he is a professor of religious studies at North Carolina Wesleyan College.
"This is a good time for a transition," Laura said. "Gretchen's going into 5th grade, so I want her to get a year in before middle school, and it will be good to have Andrew home every night."
Pastor Laura will be moving to Wakefield, NC (it's somewhere between Raleigh and Wake Forest, and about an hour from Rocky Mount) to become the associate pastor at Millbrook UMC. Leaving our little Methodist Church behind, she'll be working with a much larger membership. Millbrook hosts three services each Sunday, totaling about 500 in attendance. Laura will preach each week, either at the traditional services (8:30am and 11am) or at the "contemporary" service (9:45am).
She's excited about the church and its outreach work in the surrounding community. There's diversity – racial and socio-economic – within the congregation, and the church strives to be multi-cultural. Millbrook supports a soup kitchen and homeless shelter, works with a women's prison, and does other compassionate mission work.
Laura found a house to rent (the church gives her a housing allowance rather than a parsonage), a preschool for Charlie (right at Millbrook!) and a good public school for the Gretchen and Nicholas (they will probably have an art teacher there, but that's a story for another day.) Although her family will all be together, she knows it won't be just an easy walk from her front door to her church office anymore. The big-city anonymity will take some getting used to again. "When I leave my house on Ocracoke, I'm in the community in my pastoral role," she said. "That will be different." (Imagine going to the grocery store and not seeing anyone you know. List the pros and cons.)
While this has nothing to do with her move to Millbrook, an interesting factoid about Laura is that she's preparing for a trip to India in January with Gretchen (who'll be 10) and her mother, Catherine (who'll be 70). They'll visit the village of Himatnagar where Catherine served in the Peace Corps in the early 1970's. How cool is that?
As for Ocracoke United Methodist Church…. it will be welcoming Pastor Richard Bryant and his family on July 6th. What better way to meet Ocracoke than during 4th of July weekend, right? Richard and his wife, Mary, are NC natives, but they are coming to Ocracoke from another magical isle – Ireland! They have three daughters (Jordan 15, Caroline 13, and Mackenzie 10) and a black lab. Richard has lived and preached in five different countries, and speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbo-Croatian. (To whom will he talk on Ocracoke?) Mary likes cooking and painting, and the girls' interest include video games, writing, and jewelry design.
