2222 What would we do without committees?

Although I love being retired, I'm ecstatic about not being on committees to earn a paycheck. They truly made potholes in the road to a wonderful life and career. And things have always been so, I think. The committee gets a charge, works hard, battles for every concept and sentence in the report, brings it to the larger body (none of whom have done an ounce of research on the problem), only to get a bazillion "what ifs" and "why didn't you do" comments. Librarians can spend 15 minutes placing a comma. I used to envy the guy who sat in the back and slept.

Yesterday I checked out a black Lutheran hymnal published in 1930 from the church library. I wanted to examine it to determine if it was the edition used in the 1940s-50s at little Faith Lutheran Church in Forreston, IL when my family attended. We weren't Lutherans, but this little community of believers took us in and treated us like we were one of them (we were Church of the Brethren).

I'm a preface and index reader (it's a Librarian thing), so I got quite a chuckle out of the prefatory remarks on the book's history.

". . .representatives of eight synods. . . met in Chicago, May 3, 1921 and organized the Lutheran Intersynodical Hymnal Committee. . . In 1928, after the Committee had devoted much time and labor to a careful selection of hymns to be included in this hymnal and to a thorough revision of hymns from other languages as well as to the making of new translations when those hitherto used were not deemed satisfactory. . .[provisional was printed] with a view to the solicitation of criticisms and suggestions. . . The Committee again revised its work, also eliminating one hundred and thirty-two hymns, mostly translations, and including ninety-three other hymns."

The origin of the hymnal committee was the Iowa Synod, so I'm guessing there were some improved translations of Scandinavian and German hymns in the provisional text, but I can't be sure since it doesn't say.

Ah, committees. You gotta love 'em.