...sometimes, at the oddest moments, something unexpectedly fills your troubled heart with a sense of peace.

As is typical of a day in early March, in Wisconsin, the skies were a brittle pale blue, the sunshine clear and abundant and the westerly wind, full-force and biting.

I was driving, alone (which if you know me is a rare luxury) down twisting, deserted country roads, my car bouncing and jostling and threatening to turn into a kite and blow skyward at any moment.

I was on my way to a small town hall in the middle of nowhere to help set up a funeral luncheon. I have a fascination with funeral luncheons. Going back to the first one I remember attending for my grandfather, stretching through the ones I worked for friends of ours who own a funeral home and continuing on into the present. It seems, when you initially think about it, such an odd concept, really: food for the newly bereaved. Like in the midst of heart-piercing sorrow the first thing you're going to want to reach for is a hot ham sandwich and a square of carrot cake. But quite honestly, that is exactly the truth. Perhaps it is because of the memories certain foods stir up within all of us. Or maybe it is the nurtured and cared for feeling that follows being handed a stiff paper plate piled full of food you did not have to think about, shop for or prepare. Or then again, maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe it is psychological and innate. Maybe after witnessing the fleeting brevity of life in all it's stark reality we instinctually grasp for what grounds us; what ties us to our existence in this moment, what fuels being alive. I have often wondered about it but perhaps that is the reason the first thing Jesus asked Jairus' daughter upon raising her from the dead was if she wanted something to eat. Hunger, being a sign of life.

The dirt and gravel parking lot was empty when I pulled in and turned my car off. Across the country highway I could see into the cemetery and witness the new plot being prepared. I watched the slow methodical work of the men and their machinery and the free-wheeling tricks of a hawk fighting the air currents directly above them.

It must be a thought-provoking job, digging graves. Peeling back layers of the earth, scarring it and fitting in the apparatus that will lower someone's beloved son or daughter, mother or father, sister or brother irrevocably into the ground. I wonder if they think more about mortality than the rest of us. I wonder if they ever stop in their work and say a prayer or are tempted to attend the funeral themselves and grieve with everyone else. After all, it seems rather personal to dig someone's grave.

When the others arrived I left the warm, sunny shelter of my car and joined them as they hurried into the compact cement-block building.

Well, we were out of the wind at least. But no warmer.

We took turns fiddling with the thermostat, supposedly on, and checking vents. Someone would invariably exclaim "I think it's working." And someone else, still firmly zipped up in their winter coat and wearing gloves would respond "I don't think so." We turned the oven of the outdated brown stove, (the color alone will tell you how outdated) set into the equally outdated and yet not without ironic charm kitchen, up to 450 and left the door ajar. We opened the heavy metal door of the furnace room and poked about. Nothing happened.

A fellow church member arrived, dropping off his wife's gorgeous four later cake for the dessert table and in black suit and tie he disappeared into the furnace room. Several minutes later we heard a click and then a rumbling, muffled hum.

Heat.

Never before had that cheery, indicative drone sounded so welcome. We nearly danced with joy and lined up to shake the man's dusty hand.

But no sooner had our well-dressed hero left to attend the funeral than the air inside the town hall filled with that distinctive assaulting odor they taint natural gas with. The pilot light had gone out.

Luckily we were in the midst of hauling plates and platters and cake pans out of the truck they arrived in and into the building. The doors were open and we left them so, despite the sharp wind, until I, for one, felt less light-headed and the air inside the town hall became clear again.

It was back to icy hands and feet and thick cloying steam clouds that rose in tell-tale fashion from the coffee cups we all clutched. Once again the oven was turned on and it's door propped open. The small kitchen became the really popular place to be.

In the end, after further investigating it was discovered the LP tank behind the building was completely empty. And when the series of phone calls we made to the people we rented the hall from remained staunchly un-returned, we surrendered to the cold and drank more coffee and hoped all the people soon packed into the place would warm it up some.

In the kitchen, the empty oven still baked away.

During the on again/off again drama of the furnace situation we continued to set up tables and unfold those brown metal chairs that are seemingly ever present in town halls across the country. We wrapped paper napkins around plastic silverware, laid out colored place-mats and draped the buffet line (card tables we duct taped and zip-stripped together into sturdiness) with plastic table cloths. We arranged lots and lots of food.

Comfort food, it was. Rife with memoriescn food. Take me back to my childhood and every church potluck function I ever attended food.

Crockpot beans and lemon squares. Creamy pasta salad with peas and powdered sugar dusted brownies. Rolls. Real butter. Punch.

We worked hard and talked. Talked like we seldom do in the after church rush to collect coats and kids and drive home and get everyone fed. It was purposeful and nice. It made me understand why, for generations now, churches have held potlucks and get-togethers. Why my own mother, in the Lutheran church I grew up in, decorated the altar every month with a group of other ladies; why my grandmother, despite complaining often, never did quit the church choir.

There is something so peaceful and unifying about work done with others, in the service of others. You don't often think it will be but it is. I set out from home on that early March morning wrapped up in unrest. Thoughts about all the things that seemed upside-down in my life swirled before me like an obstructing haze. Our church had lost a dearly loved member and yet for all my efforts I couldn't quite connect to this. It seemed another thing in our busy, over-cluttered, keeping with the culture and therefore appropriately disconnected lives today that can't quite penetrate as it should. And it gets added to the unrest. To the haze. To the upside-down-ness of it all.

But after all the work was done and I walked back to the parking lot beneath an ancient stand of giant, creaking oak trees, the sunlight dappled leaves of last fall crunching under my feet, everything suddenly flipped around. Like an egg timer being righted inside me just as the last of the sand was about to drain out. The haze and the unrest skittered away like the brittle oak leaves. There was peace.

I got into my car, watching the stream of mourners filter down the cemetery hillside, buffeted by the wind and bathed in brilliant sunshine. There was still the list of things, running somewhere in my head, of all I cannot change or control or even fix. We had only just begun to grieve together as a church body.

And yet there was food. There was the stuff of life. And it was ready and waiting and tangible. I may not be able to do anything about that list, the one we all have, the one that seems to grow and unfurl nightly like some smothering scroll while we sleep but you see, I could still make a ham sandwich. And cut a square of carrot cake. And serve it to someone on a stiff paper plate.

That much we can always do. And sometimes it is enough.