Happy Wednesday

Happy Wednesday. I don't have anything to post today. We're outside finishing (let us pray) a deck we started about two years or 2 months ago, depending on who you ask.

I intended to bring you words of wisdom about the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina but I stay pretty busy nowadays planning our trip in Oct to continue the rebuilding effort in Pearlington, Mississippi which is now one of my favorite places on earth.

Everyone you talk to in this town says that none of the rebuilding would happen without the faith based organizations. The town is covered up in Presbyterians, Methodists, Mennonites, Baptists and the Salvation Army. The Red Cross, or "clipboards",as they're referred to in Pearlington, left after a couple of weeks when they finished delivering tents and MREs.

It's a very simple operation here. No one had money. No one had insurance. No one had anything. There's not much they can do on their own. They get grants to pay for the material and we provide the labor. It may be slow but we're ahead of New Orleans where the various governments seem to be bumping into each other looking for someone to blame.

I take that back, the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has made a camp in New Orleans. And there is some rebuilding. I won't know until I get there.

If anyone is interested in helping us, give me a call. We're leaving from Garland at 7am Oct 7 (Sunday) and returning to the same parking lot on Saturday evening Oct 13. No particular skills required beyond a smile on your face and love in your heart. We even had a one-armed man helping with the construction on one trip. No kidding.

Gotta go now. Beaven is hammering something outside.

Roommates

It’s time for the college kids to head out for school. This will lead to the freshmen “roommate horror stories.” For a lot of college freshmen, this is a person they have never met before and may not have a thing in common with. Anybody who ever lived in a college dorm has a “roommate from hell” story.

My first roommate was nothing special. I could tell how they matched us. I think she and I were the only Presbyterians around. Other than that, we really didn’t have much in common. She had a boyfriend on campus and mine was in Michigan. We rarely ever saw each other. It was all very civilized if a tad boring. Two Presbyterians in the same room tend to be very tidy with all that “decent and orderly” background. By the second semester we had gone our happy but separate ways.

When the next year rolled around I decided that I had such great luck with the first roommate I would just trust the luck of the draw for my next one and that is how I ended up with the lesbian.

Lesbians have never scared me much. Some of my best friends are lesbians. I had no problem with her being a lesbian as much as the fact that she was really messy. She wasn’t at all as tidy as the Presbyterian. We eventually drew an imaginary line down the room and I took the side by the door so she could leave everything she owned on the floor and I wouldn’t have to walk over it to get to my stuff.

Back in 1966 Lesbians were a relatively new issue on college campuses. I sat in a group of girls twittering about this new danger. When they all decided they would lock their doors at night I realized this would lock me in with her. And this was in the day when “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was more than a political phrase. She ended up getting kicked out of the dorm and I had the room to myself. And I kept the room very tidy. There are some differences you just can’t overcome.

Our oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was in for her own awakening when she watched her first roommate line up the various medications she took for STDs. That didn’t last past one semester mostly because roommate started asking Elizabeth to leave the room “for a while” and Elizabeth wouldn’t buy into the program. I doubt that roommate was Presbyterian either.

When it came time for the younger daughter, Emily, to check into her dorm room we felt pretty good for her chances since the University of the Ozarks is a Presbyterian college. We entered a bare room. Obviously new roommate wasn’t on campus yet. Within an hour Emily had the room decorated to suit her personality, which at that point in her life was—how shall I put this?— slightly “edgy.” She was still mourning Kurt Cobain and immediately put his picture on the wall along with Janis Joplin, REM. Michael Stipe and Jimmi Hendrix. When we left for lunch, her half of the room appeared to have been decorated by someone recently released from a home for disturbed youth.

When we got back from lunch we found new roommate had moved in and immediately left. I wasn’t surprised new roommate left so quickly. I’ve never seen a room decorated so differently. This girl had a tidy blue gingham bedspread with a matching rug on her half of the floor. A collection of fairly serious biology textbooks were lined up neatly on the shelf. And her wall sported only one picture: a calm but serene looking Jesus Christ. It looked like Emily might just as well have drawn a nun for a roommate. I wondered how they would adjust to each other.

The next time Emily came home she went immediately to the back of her closet where we kept our picture of Jesus. “Aha!,” she held it aloft in victory, “My Jesus is bigger than her Jesus!”

I have to admit with slight embarrassment that my daughters stole this picture from our old church sanctuary when we were moving everything to the new one. Jesus had lived in the basement of the old sanctuary for years. As a result, he had gotten very tattered and slightly mildewed. The girls insisted that no one would miss him. Once home, we couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the picture once the novelty wore off. I mean, just how do you get rid of a picture of Jesus? It’s like the flag, only worse. At least the VFW will tell you how to dispose of an old flag. But there doesn’t seem to be any rules for a picture of Jesus. You certainly can’t burn it like you would a flag. And you don’t just throw it out in the trash, do you? I could only imagine how it would look to see Jesus peeking out of our trashcan at the curb. I figure people who do that go straight to hell without any negotiating.

So, Emily took Jesus back to college with her. I’m not sure exactly where she hung it—in between Jimmi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain maybe. The two girls ended up great friends. At the end of the semester it was time to redecorate and Jesus came home to live in the closet again.

We’ve moved twice since that time and for the life of me I can’t remember what we did with Jesus.

The Dalai Lama and me

I noticed that today’s posting is my one-hundredth. I’ve been posting to this blog every week for a little over two years. So, I’m thinking of taking today off.

When we first moved out here permanently I thought of what an excellent opportunity I had to get peaceful. So I subscribed to just about every lefty liberal tree-hugging magazine I could find. Our mailman doesn’t know what to make of it. Especially since Beaven subscribes to all the electronic geeky ham radio magazines and has antennas hanging from all our trees. Oh, and we get packages delivered by UPS almost every day. I’m sure it must look like we’re plotting to blow up the Washington Monument.

I couldn’t believe how many magazines are out there that I’ve never heard of. The first one I got was actually an old friend but I had never had a subscription to it before: Utne magazine. Then I got Yes! magazine and Ode, both of which say they cater to the optimist in me. Surely you weren’t expecting a magazine called “Yes!” to be anything but positive. I get Mother Earth and Mother Jones both. I subscribed to the Texas Observer strictly for my Molly Ivins addiction and now will have to find something else in the magazine to love. I finally reached my limit when I found a Buddhist magazine called Shambala Sun. I thought how peaceful and minimalist this reading would be. Yes, it is, but I was startled to see how many advertisements it has-- just as many as O or Martha Stewart Living magazine but without the perfume samples.

I thought Buddhism was all about bare bones living but, no, it turns out you have to have accoutrements to be a Buddhist. You gotta buy beads and bells and candles and meditation pillows and all sorts of equipment. It kind of took all the fun out of being serene. I like my serenity to come without luggage.

However, I don’t have a lot of time this morning to write something memorable. I’ve been working on this book for the last couple of weeks and it’s taking a lot longer than I thought. I thought I could just take each report I wrote after mission trips and put them all together and voila, have a book. It’s not working out that way. But at least it's starting to be fun.

So, forgive me if I cop out today. As a consolation prize, I will leave you with more of my bedtime reading: words from the Dalai Lama (in this month’s Ode). I offer these words without requiring a meditation pillow or candles:

“Everything is interdependent. Everything is interconnected. So my interest is very much linked to everyone’s interests. Our survival and our future are very much linked to one another. Therefore the destruction of your so-called enemy is actually the destruction of your self. The concept of war—‘destroy your enemy’—is old-fashioned. It is out of date.

“To use the power of the gun is a sign of weakness. The power of the gun is short-term. Very decisive, very powerful, but in the long run, the power of the gun cannot remain. This violence, it won’t work.

“There is too much greed, a limitless sort of desire. This is a source of problems, a source of suffering. If you always keep the feeling ‘one more, one more, one more,’ until the last day, you are never satisfied. Mentally, you are a very poor person, always hungry. If desires are without self-discipline, you want to kill someone, you want to steal from someone, you want to rape someone, you want to tell lies, you want to take alcohol or drugs. That’s self-destruction. In order to be safe from self-destruction, you need some self-discipline. Not some order from the outside, but you have to analyze the value, the consequences. Use your intelligence.

“There’s too much emotion, too much negative emotion: frustration, hatred, anger. I think that’s the greatest obstacle. So I think as a first step this should be cooled down. Reduced. Forget these things. And I think for the time being, we need more festivals, more picnics. Let us forget these difficult things, these emotions, and make personal friends. Then we can start to talk about these serious matters.”

And Jane says: “Namaste.”

Angels

I was reading last night that most people believe in angels. It was in those "last few minutes of the day" kind of reading where I just pick up randomly from the stack of books by the bed. This one was from a book Nancy Gray gave me years ago: “The Best Spiritual Writing of 1998” (I told you it was a big stack of books.) The article was by Marc Gellman and called “What Are You Looking For?”

Everyone has seen an angel. It’s the all-time champion of conversation starters. I dare you to find anyone who says they haven’t seen one.

Our angel came one spring when my family was driving to a church retreat. It was the time of year when North Texas gets rain that comes quickly, rains furiously, then leaves as quickly as it came. We were pulling a tent trailer and had all the food for the retreat packed in the trailer. We were on our way to the Texoma area and found ourselves crossing a low spot on the road. Surrounded by farmland, the only thing higher than the grass was a small house where the rain had washed the home’s woodpile out of its tidy stack and into the stream of water that gushed across this low spot in the road.

Beaven thought we could ford the stream of runoff but he didn’t account for the logs floating in the water. Once under our car, they couldn't float away and got tangled up in the tires. When Beaven tried to back up, it only got worse. We found ourselves jack-knifed and headed for the ditch with water swirling around us.

Beaven got out of the car to check on the situation and a man appeared. Neither of us saw him walking toward us or could say for sure where he came from. He just appeared. He didn’t look like any angel I had ever seen. He was really kind of scary looking: lean and dark the way a construction worker gets from long hours in the sun. He had a three-day’s growth of beard and in his white t-shirt he had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. The only thing missing was a tattoo.

He got down in the water on his stomach and started pulling logs out from under the car. Then he guided Beaven’s steering until we were straight and finally out of the water. Once on the safe side of the ditch, Beaven and I both looked for him to express our thanks. And he was gone.

We looked around and then at each other. The guy was just gone. The landscape around us was bare except for the farmhouse 50 yards away and grassy fields. The guy was just gone.

We were, and remain still, convinced it was an angel.

Here’s some of what Marc Gellman says about angels:

“Another purpose of angels is that God always needs to teach us how to listen better. Angels teach us how to listen because if you know that every person you meet might be an angel, you are going to listen to that person not just with the ears in your head but with ears in your soul. This is the reason I give to beggars. I know that my coins and dollars have probably bought crack and booze, but I still give because my money might, just might, have bought some baby food or diapers or soup, and I can’t take the chance that I have stiffed an angel. Indeed, rabbinic legends teach us that the Messiah will appear on earth as a beggar waiting for some act of kindness by a stranger before announcing himself. If you can learn to see street bums as potential messiahs, you can learn to see angels when they meet you in the fields of your life.”

You never know. And we have to live our lives with that in mind.

No Shit

You can tell by this photo that we have our grandkids for the week. That's why I'm late today and why this will be brief. We spent the night at Daingerfield State Park. We first went to that park almost 30 years ago. We fell in love with it and we've been going ever since every time we get a chance. It's a tiny, tiny park with a three-mile hiking trail and a lake in the middle. We went equipped to do it all and we did. Note the hiking boots, picnic supplies, life jackets, swim noodles and other various plastic things that require Grandfathers to search for highly specialized equipment to blow up while the Grandmothers are quietly blowing them up the old-fashioned way with lungs that can yell across a 50 acre lake.

In short, we had all the standard vacation equipment. It brought to mind one of our family's favorite stories of the year we took a similar station wagon packed the same way to the coast and decided to take a side trip to NASA since we were in the Houston area. As we drove in with our sunburned faces, with everything in the car covered in beach sand, we stopped at the guard station. The sign said "State Your Purpose." So Beaven leaned out of the station wagon and told the guard "We're just visiting."

I started laughing. Elizabeth started laughing. Emily started laughing. We laughed so hard we couldn't talk. We laughed until our eyes teared and our mouths drooled. Beaven just looked as us. We must have been hysterical for about 20 minutes. Finally Elizabeth stopped laughing long enough to tell him, "Well, Dad, I don't think he thought we were astronauts checking in for our flight to the moon."

Today, 25 years later, we can say "Just Visiting" at any family gathering and still laugh for another ten minutes.

If we are paying attention, life give us many of these "No Shit" moments. I'll leave you with another one from this morning. Read the sign on the paddle boat we rented this morning for about 5 and a half minutes: "Fast pedaling can cause rapid tiring of legs."

Have a very fun No Shit Summer. Find something to laugh over for 20 minutes. Make a family memory.