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.

Wild About Harry

Have you noticed how quiet it’s been lately? There’s a blanket of silence over the world. Everyone is locked inside their house reading the last Harry Potter book. My email volume is down and I can’t remember the last time I had a phone call from someone outside my family. The single greatest challenge I faced this weekend was the arrival of nine overnight guests on Saturday, the day the book was released. Fortunately my guests arrived with their own copies of the book and we all relaxed in the knowledge that we didn’t have to hide in corners to grab a few sentences. We were able to read together, boldly, in the light of day.

I feel part of a great community—a worldwide community of people who were and continue to be doing the same exact thing at the same time. I wonder how long we will travel our separate ways until we’re allowed to show our heads and ask who has finished so we might discuss it. Is a week too long?

Steve’s mother, Nancy, his Aunt Charlotte, sister Debbie and Debbie’s two kids hit the door Saturday morning with Emily and her family close behind. They had four copies between them—one extra for me. I had already run into town for my own copy even though I had a guaranteed release date delivery from Amazon. I couldn’t wait until the mail arrived at 3:30. In fact, I had considered running into town around midnight Friday. Wal-Mart is open 24 hours a day, you know. I particularly liked the way Amazon packaged the book. Written on the package was “Attention Muggles – Do not deliver or open before July 21!”

We don’t get to see Nancy very often so it was easy enough for me to lay the book aside and enjoy a good visit. But the minute she started making a pie with Sarah and the others drifted off with their own interests I picked up the book.

Because of our strong code of ethics none of us reading the book could talk about it while we were reading. There were four of us in my house: Emily, Steve, his sister Debbie and myself. Elizabeth stayed home in Garland but called once in a while to check what page everyone was on. And page numbers became our new language. I read slightly behind the others since I was cooking and cleaning most of the weekend. Steve disappeared a couple of times and we knew he was off reading. So Emily made him take the girls outside to play while she caught up. Emily would occasionally make a startled “erck” sound and I noted which pages she was on. Pages 56 and 475 seemed the most traumatic to her.



By Sunday morning all the company left to go back home. I knew Debbie would be able to read for the whole two-day drive back to Ohio; Em and Steve would send the girls outside to play with neighbors. It was time for me to get serious.

I took out my Exacto knife and performed a little trick I’ve done on large books in the past. First you carefully cut…. Now WAIT a minute. Hear me out. I know my Mother is rolling over in her grave right now and the rest of you are thinking of Nazi Germany and how I’m only one step away from book burning but HEAR ME OUT: I would never do this to a book I wanted to keep, to re-read or refer back to several times. But Harry Potter is a one-read book for me and once I’m finished, I’m through with the book. These books are so widely purchased that there isn’t even a re-sale value. They’re disposable as far as I’m concerned. And we’re talking about a 759 page book here. I’ll bet it weighs a couple of pounds, at least. OK, are you calm? Can I proceed?

First, I cut the hardback away from the spine with a vertical incision on either side where the hard cover is joined to the book. This should separate the cover from the actual pages. Then I divide the book into thirds at chapter divisions. And not any chapter, it has to be a chapter that begins on the right side, not the left. Take a sharp serrated bread knife and close the book over the knife with the cutting edge facing the spine. Slice through the spine at these two divisions. Voila! You end up with a much more manageable lap friendly book in three sections, each the size and weight of a regular paperback. The other advantage to this is that you can have three different people reading the same book. And if you really want to save the book, just put a rubber band around it.



By Sunday afternoon Emily and Elizabeth, without coordinating anything ended up at the same place in the book and couldn’t put it down. They both finished around 11pm Sunday night.

That left me with nobody to talk to. I couldn’t even discuss page numbers. Finally yesterday Beaven went into Dallas for lunch with his buddies and at 2:57 p.m. I finished the book along with a gallon of Blue Bell Chocolate Chip ice cream. All was well.

Synod Youth Workshop

I survived my annual week at Synod Youth Workshop. It was actually the easiest one I’ve ever done. And I have a great picture to show you but it's on the other computer and I'm leaving first thing in the morning to run into Dallas so I'll have to post it later.

But first I have to tell you what a wonderful Fourth of July we had out here in paradise. If you will remember, the last two or three years have been so hot and dry by July Fourth that people were afraid to set off fireworks for fear they would burn up most of the southern half of the country. Last year there was even a state-wide ban on the sale of fireworks. So, we have missed our fireworks.

This year, however, it was a very different story. Our biggest challenge this year was waiting for the rain to let up long enough for us to be able to light a fuse. But before we could do that we had to mush our way to an open field and stand in puddles of water and high grass, swatting mosquitoes delirious from a recent population explosion.

I hadn’t fully realized just how much I missed fireworks until I visited the stand this year. Standing on wooden pallets and leaning over to look at the display took me back to childhood and asking the people selling which were the best fireworks to buy. “I want something that will go up in the air and look pretty.” Or “I want something that makes a big noise.” Those magical words used only once a year: Snakes, Pop Rocks, Sparklers, Bottle Rockets (wait-that one’s been banned. Come to think of it, so have Cherry Bombs. What a loss.) Who can resist fireworks?

Of course, out here in the East Texas boondocks, we have our fireworks stand right next door to the gas station. Joe Bob’s gas station. I am not kidding.

By dusk the town seventh grade boys were already setting off firecrackers and rockets in the soggy field behind Joe Bob’s. God love ‘em. Kids just like to blow things up. We all do. And this year it was just time to blow stuff up. It was great.

However, with a granddaughter who is afraid of loud noises we had to keep it pretty tame. But I did manage to teach her to appreciate the smell of gunpowder. What an aroma! The smell of childhood………A good time was had by all.

Back to my week at Synod Youth Workshop.

The best way to describe the week is to list what we did: two worship services, five keynote addresses, nine small group meetings, two dances, a variety show, a night out on the town, a service project, and lots of music, and energizers. All of this on an average of about five hours of sleep a night. To prepare for this required two days of orientation held the weekend before the kids arrived on Monday. It’s a physically demanding week. But by some miracle I can’t explain about the only thing on me that really hurts today is my neck from balancing three pizzas on my head on a walk from one corner of the campus to the other. I may be older and “fluffier” than I was the last time I led a small group but apparently I’m in better physical condition..

The equipment I take for this week includes about three boxes filled with construction paper, poster board, pens, markers, beach balls and other craft flotsam and jetsam. I also take an ice chest, a laptop computer, two printers (separate ones for photos and text) , an iPod (with speakers), a coffee pot and, of course, my dancing chicken. I couldn’t get through the week without the dancing chicken.

It was the 50th anniversary of the event and everybody was counting to see who has been coming the longest. I’m in about third place in terms of longevity. In a group of about 40 staff this year only two other people have been coming since 1991. But I slip a couple of notches when I deduct for the 3 or 4 years I stayed home to have a grandbaby or went somewhere else like Guatemala. After deductions, I think I’ve been to this event twelve times. But twelve times is still a lot in small group leader life. Most people last only about five or six years. I think I’m addicted to the zest of being around young people. They move fast and are some of the most creative thinkers you can be around.


Friday night Cummunion Service

We studied the Beatitudes this time. It’s in the bible in a couple of places but the one we studied is in Matthew 5:1-11. The keynote speaker, who just happened to be my own pastor this year, used the Eugene Peterson version of the bible called The Message. This one puts the beatitudes into different wording but much easier to understand. Remember the part about “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you…..”

I never could get much past the “revile and persecute” part because it conjured up images of the Spanish Inquisition with torture and prison and I just couldn’t picture myself in the position of being persecuted. It has a long and complicated wording so I’ve always just skipped over that part. But this year, the same verses read:

“You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.”

As I was discussing it with the kids in my group I found myself using the word “risk” instead of persecution. I asked them what was important enough to them to take a risk for. We ended up with a really good conversation about their feelings on gay rights and the war in Iraq and a bunch of other things people don’t agree on but feel strongly about.

However, at night when I finally went to bed around 1 or 2 a.m., full of adrenalin I thought more about the idea of persecution and risk. It comes in curious disguise.

Beaven and I are not risk takers. We don’t play the lottery or gamble or even pretend we care about the Dallas Cowboys anymore. We’ve always been hesitant to put bumper stickers on our cars, especially the political ones. You never know what someone will do to your car if other people don’t like your candidate. Dents in the parking lot, keys scraped across the paint of the car as someone walks past. Plus, I live in Texas. Here in Texas we always have to factor in a condition peculiar to our state: we have a number of folks who drive around with a loaded shotgun in the back window of their pickup. I’m serious here, folks.

It has its merits, sometimes. We have a lot less finger waving on the freeway because of all those shotguns in the cars. You might say we kind of police ourselves this way in Texas. But it certainly puts the damper on controversial bumper stickers.

When I asked the eight kids in our group what was important enough to them to risk their safety or security, I had to think about it myself. I don’t like it when people think bad things about me or act mean to me. Could I translate persecution into just plain old people not liking me for my beliefs?

I remembered one time somebody was trying to come up with a really bad thing to say about me. This was back in the late 60’s when civil right were still being established and a lot of people felt threatened by the idea. This woman stirred around in her bag of insults until she got to the very bottom and came up with the worst one she could think of. She called me nigger lover. I was immediately shocked and insulted, just as she intended.

However, after I thought about it, I realized what a compliment I had received; yes, an honor to be recognized as someone who loves others, even people that not everybody loves. And the more I thought about it the more proud I was of the title. In a decade past I might even have had a t-shirt printed with the title. But, of course, now you can’t get away with using the “n” word even in an instructional setting.

I’m coming to understand that’s what Jesus meant when he said I would be blessed when I was persecuted for standing up for the message he brought us. And that’s why I go to Synod Youth Workshop. I learn something new every time.

Oh, I also learned to never feed a gerbil Dr Pepper. It makes them explode.

Somos del Senor

I'm going to post early this week. My grandkids are about to hit the door and it will be chaos for a couple of days. Then, almost as soon as they leave, I'll go to Tulsa for the Synod Youth Workshop. I can't wait to get there--it's my favorite week of the year. It always provides me with a good time and a story or two. Give me a week off and when I get back I'll be here for a couple of months.


I said that my favorite thing about mission trips are the cool people you get to hang around with. A couple of really special people I met at the jobsite were college kids from the US who just wanted to spent some time volunteering around the world.

Ashley Abaie is from Arizona, I think, but she went to college in Virginia at William and Mary. She has been studying liguistics but decided to take a year off from school. She came up with an intinerary that includes Chile and South Africa after she leaves Mexico. When her year is over she expects to transfer to Berkley to study some sort of Environment Development –Save the Earth kind of thing. She’s raising the money for all of this by herself and said she’s basically self-supporting and always has been.


Elizabeth Ball and Ashley Abaie

But it was Chucho that gave me the best surprise. I never did get his real name. I think his first name was really Chuck. When I first saw him, I thought he was one of the teenagers with a big group from North Carolina who had arrived that morning. He couldn’t have been any taller than me and had a thick head of curly hair but the guy didn’t look old enough to shave. He came up to our group as we were mixing concrete and just picked up a shovel and started working. I noticed he wasn’t doing things the way Annette had told us so I said (in a very nice way, I’m sure) that he was doing it wrong. In a few minutes, Annette came up to greet him like a long lost friend and asked how his past year had been. She told us he knew what he was doing and to listen to him. He resumed doing things his way and, after giving us enough time to see that his way was ten times better, we followed his leadership. I was blown away by his strength and energy.

Well, he turned out to be not only older than high school by far but the strongest and most energetic young man I’ve ever seen. This was his second year to volunteer with Faith Ministries and I think he was planning a gap year like Ashley was doing. He was fluent in Spanish and totally relaxed in his skin. I never found out which college he goes to but I did find out that he graduated from Highland Park High School in Dallas. This put him in the wealthiest neighborhood in town with the bluest of blood in his background. I also never got his last name, though I asked about four times and he ignored me each time. If he was from Highland Park there is no telling who his parents are or how wealthy. Yet here he was in Mexico mixing concrete.

On most days when we crossed the border going back into the US to spend the night in McAllen we were just beat—dirty and beat. Damon would let everybody out of the van to walk through customs and he would drive through alone. This was probably a lot easier for the border guards and we were ready to get out a stretch a little. Only on the last day when we went back into Mexico for a little shopping did he let us stay in the van as we passed through customs.

Damon has a healthy respect for the fact that we’re crossing a national border and that everyone has lost their sense of humor since 9/11. These were the few moments of the week when joking was set aside. He told us that if people anticipated the questions that the border would ask and give the correct answers in a respectful way our chances of a smooth crossing would be better. So we began rehearsing a mantra of answers to the questions: Are you all US citizens? What were you doing in Mexico? Are you bringing any fruit into the US? Are you bringing any liquor? Damon also made it clear that we would obey all the laws and pay any taxes necessary. The legal age to buy liquor in Mexico is 18. So it was OK to bring tequila back but we wanted to make sure declared it and paid the taxes on it.

We turned into a chipper but ever so respectful bunch with our well-rehearsed answers, all issued in unison with smiles: “Yes sir, Just shopping, sir, No fruit, lots of booze.”

One evening I walked into the kitchen to find Annette and her sister-in-law, Sandra, looking through the kitchen pantry together. Last year Sandra, who is an attractive young Latina had brought the volunteers a meal one night during the week. She brought it from her home there in McAllen. After she got home that night she realized she had left the lid to the roasting pan in the kitchen at the church. But when she went back later the next week to pick it up, the ladies of the church told her it wasn’t there. Without making any attempt to find it, they simply stonewalled her and Sandra had to go home without her lid.

As she and Annette told me the story I realized that if the same thing had happened to me, with my gray hair and white skin, I would have been invited to roam their pantry at will and gone home with the lid to my roaster. Sandra didn’t have my age or my skin. I realized with a chill that prejudice is still alive in the Christian church in the 21st century--even in a congregation that regularly welcomes volunteer groups like ours. I felt like I was watching the last scene of Giant.

After lunch each day we would have a little worship service where we would sing some songs, pray for people, dedicate a house or two and praise God for everything.



Wednesday I found myself sitting next to a woman holding a six-month old boy named Carlito. After a while Carlito got restless and I reached out to stroke his head. I realized the kid was teething and I did what all the women in the world do in that case—I gave him my knuckle to chew on. I tried to remember what I had touched that day and decided a little concrete wouldn’t hurt anybody. So Carlito spent the rest of the service happily chewing on my finger. That particular day a huge Presbyterian church from Charlotte, North Carolina was with us and had brought their hand bell choir of about 40 teenagers. They played a magnificently ornate Easter hymn that literally rang out to the whole community. They couldn’t have asked for better acoustics than the brick walls and concrete floor. Each note resonated as though designed for that moment. After the handbells, the youth choir sang a couple of songs in the Presbyterian Hymnal that are in Spanish. I knew both of them but my favorite is always Pues Si Vivimos (When We Are Living-hymn #400). There I sat with Carlito gnawing on my knuckle, not sure which of us was enjoying it the most, Carlito or me, his substitute Abuela. Then the choir got to the second line in the song:

Through all our living, we our fruits must give.
Good works of service are for offering.
When we are giving, or when receiving,
We belong to God, we belong to God.

At that moment I felt such a bond with Carlitos that tears came to my eyes. I wasn’t really sure which of us was giving and which was receiving. I may not have been able to shovel concrete but I could love a baby. Somos del Senor. We belong to God.

Concrete

One of the reasons I love to go on mission trips is that I just love to spend time with the other people who go on the trips. It must be something about “kindred souls.” I find the people willing to take a week out of their routine and leave the comforts of home behind are the kind of people I want to spend my time with. They’re invariably a low-maintenance and relaxing bunch to be around. They are the kind of folks who don’t mind sleeping on the floor surrounded by about 10 other people. Who don’t mind waking up at 5 am to drive for an hour just so they can wear their bodies out in a hundred degrees of vicious sun. These are people who don’t get upset if it rains on you at the beach because, hey, you were planning on getting wet anyway, weren’t you?

The group I went to Mexico with last week was an unusually good group of people to hang around with. They were a hearty lot. I think it helped that Damon got his bluff in early with this group when he told the story of the year he shaved the eyebrows off a boy who kept sleeping late.

Only about half of us were from my church. The rest were personal friends of the trip leaders, Damon and Annette Renaud.

Annette’s father, Diantin Guerra, started Faith Ministries after working for another Presbyterian group Puentes de Cristo.

Diantin is a former presbytery moderator and an elder. He had a sporting goods store in Brownsville when Annette was growing up until the peso was devalued and he had to shut the doors. Then Puentes de Cristo needed a bi-lingual administrator and ask him to come work for them. Like Faith Ministry, they build houses for the poor. But they eventually went from building houses to building bigger buildings like hospitals and churches. It became harder to get volunteers because it’s just more fun to build a house for someone you’ve met and worked with. So, in 1994 he started Minesterio de Fe, Faith Ministries, and took with him the contacts he had made with churches throughout the PCUSA.

The complex we worked on is the third town Diantin has worked in. He would go into a poor town and look for the town dump. That’s where the poorest of the poor lived, the people who survived off the food and materials they found in the garbage. Ministerio de Fe would build a small cement-block house next to the one made of cardboard and tin. This work is perfect for volunteers: you can build an entire house in one week and the skills needed are minimal. When the house was finished, they would have a dedication ceremony of sorts back at the church and the family could move into the house and either tear down the old one or use it for storage.

The great thing that usually happens after Faith Ministry starts working in a town is that the town officials will take notice and start paving the roads in the area and putting in utilities. Then the group starts building a complex of church sanctuary, dormitories for volunteers, clinic and community center. We worked on the third complex outside of Reynosa, Mexico.

Not all the roads in the town are paved—far from it. The potholes there have potholes. They are deep. I expected to find a lost animal inside one. When it rained and filled them you never knew what to expect when you drove through one. Several times the axle of the van hit hard enough to scare us that major damage had been done. Write this number down: 283153. If you ever rent a fifteen passenger van from Capps Rental in Garland, make sure you don’t get this one.

Damon and Annette have been going every summer since Annette’s father started in 1994. They brought friends who haven’t missed a year since. The young adults I met this year must have been in junior high when they started out and now they’re seasoned veterans who know exactly what to do once they get the shovel in their hands.



Concrete work is hard. Can I make it more clear than that? It’s heavy and wet and caustic. When it’s mixed, it has a milkshake consistency that oozes down into your shoes and rubs between your socks and your skin. More than one person left the first day with nasty sores on their ankles. Some had blisters on their hands. And that was just the first day. The second day everybody went in with appropriate bandages that almost immediately got soaked with another wave of wet concrete. So, one of the benefits of the trip to South Padre Island on the last day is for the healing properties the salt waters offer.




Every day but one we would break for lunch around 11. The sandwiches had all been made the night before and kept cool until lunch. Everybody got two sandwiches with the understanding that if you didn’t want your second one you gave it away to the Mexican volunteers who were working there. At Noon we would go across town to the First Presbyterian church (built by Faith Ministries) for a short worship service. There was lots of singing and visiting with old friends (mostly people whose house you may have worked on years before .)

Different people on our team would introduce me to a child they were sponsoring in school. There’s no public school and poor people don’t have the $400 tuition so many volunteers end up sponsoring a kid. I met a set of twins, Paula and Paulina, that have different sponsors right now but someone said there has been a set of twins volunteer this year who want to sponsor them for the next school year.

Our group this year was smaller than usual. So, instead of building a house for a family like this group usually does, they told us we were going to level and pour the foundation for the church sanctuary. Sounded kind of cool to me: laying the foundation for a church. After a day in the sun and not making much progress (Hey, it’s a big sanctuary.) the church people decided we should instead pour the finishing layer of concrete on the floor of one of the dormitories. The dorm building is two story and divided into two sections on each floor. I guess the two sections are to separate the sexes but when I went into the section where “hombres” was written on the door I saw that the bathroom was marked “mujers.” Maybe they got a little confused. But what it amounted to was mixing and pouring about one or two inches of concrete on a floor that I measured to be about 20X25 feet.

We started out mixing the concrete right there in the room. They rigged up a pulley system so we could haul up buckets and buckets of sand. Then someone would carry a one hundred pound sack of cement up the stairs. And when I say “someone” I’m meaning either sex. One of the things I learned on this trip is that girls are every bit as strong as boys. Some of the best concrete mixers were the chicks. It didn’t seem to follow a particular body style, either. The most petite and fragile looking girl out of the bunch could out-shovel some of the tallest and sturdiest men. It does matter, however, how old you are. I took one confident scoop of concrete and went to lift it and the muscle just wasn’t there. It send me an “on vacation” message. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. And I wanted to do the work so bad. It made a beautiful ballet when the crew was scooping, turning and tapping the shovel on the mix to test its consistency, all working in rhythm together.

We started pouring the finished concrete, bucket by bucket, in the far corner and worked our way toward the door. By the time they got the floor done they had only the spot by the door. Everybody was out of the room by this time and it became a one person job, especially since the balcony in front of the door was only about 2 feet wide.

A song had been going through my mind all day, “The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ Our Lord.” I asked if anybody had their pocket cross and wanted to put it into the concrete; it would make for a small touch of rebar but would leave a little piece of us in the floor. Beaven produced his right there on the spot. A couple of days later we did the other half of the second story and Katy Pearson offered hers. I promised her I would make sure she got another one. The cross sunk into the concrete and no one will ever know it’s there except us. But, like I told Katy, there’s a piece of herself now left in Mexico.

The Nerd Family Does Disney

The year Six Flags Over Texas opened for its first season I was about 14 years old. That summer my Daddy took my best friend and me to spend the day at the park. Years later, when I grew up, it occurred to me how boring it must have been for a middle-aged widower to spend the day driving his daughter and her friend to an amusement park then hanging around until they were ready to go home. When I asked him about it he told me, “You have no idea how much fun it can be to just watch your child have fun.”

That’s what we enjoyed in our visit to Disney World last week—watching our kids have fun. It was hot and humid and crowded and we walked about six miles each day. But we had a blast watching our grandkids, and sometimes even our kids, have fun. It was a week of just plain old fun. No more and no less.

Well, we did get a lot more out of it than just plain old fun. It was bonding at its best. We experienced the good and the bad equally and, best of all, together. From the first melt-down Essie experienced at being told "no" to the triumph she and Sarah both had when they got all six “Discovery” stamps at the Animal Kingdom, we were all part of the experience. Don’t ask me about the damned stamps. They were more trouble than you can imagine.

Our first bonding challenge was when I realized our entire family was traveling on one plane and all of our wills were made to benefit each other. If that plane went down everything would go to the state. A quick visit with a lawyer, practically on our way to the airport, dealt with that detail and we traveled with peace of mind. This peace of mind was further enhanced by an entire bag of Disney DVDs and a portable player for the flight.

We had been keeping this trip secret ever since we first conceived it over a year ago. So you can imagine how excited we were to wake the girls on Saturday morning. Everyone gathered at Emily and Steve’s house. They woke fairly easily especially since they seldom have five adults standing in their room at 4 am. I asked Sarah if she remembered the night a couple of weeks ago when she and I lay looking up at the sky and watched a plane fly overhead. I had asked her that night if she could go on a plane anywhere she wanted where would she want to go. I reminded her of that wish…..did she remember where she wished to go?
Still a little sleepy and bewildered, she answered, “Ohio?”
A long silence hung over the bedroom. “Wrong answer,” said Steve.
“Guess again, “ her mother suggested. She looked up at us and Beaven asked her if she would like to go to Disney World. She and her sister were out of the bed faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket. And the adventure began. That same evening we watched fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle.



By the time we got to Orlando Essie had read the Children’s Guidebook until it was dog-eared and limp.



We had about 37 Disney guide books but nobody had read them ahead of time so there was a lot of cramming on the plane. Aunt Elizabeth was still reading a guide book when we headed out for our first visit as soon as we got settled into the hotel.

“It says here that the first Saturday in June is traditionally “Gay Day” at the Magic Kingdom,” she read. And all the gay customers that day wear red shirts to announce their orientation or wear their pride or get better seats on the tram or whatever. So we were prepared for the many matching red shirts we saw. But it was still a little shocking. Emily declared it a very educational experience when she saw a lot of male couples who looked more like professional wrestlers than hairdressers. Then as night arrived and we watched the fireworks over the park I spotted a few couples who held hands and generally relaxed at their ability to be who they are in public.



The rest of the trip was simply a blur of lines, heat and tired feet. Yeah, we had a lot of fun on a few rides and watching some shows and certainly eating ourselves into the gutter. But the main experience of the whole week was learning to live together. We were constantly checking around us for the girls to make sure they didn’t get separated from us. With seven people we could span a good fifty feet while we walked. We didn’t put a lot of thought into it; it simply happened. Each one would watch for the person in front and behind them. It made traveling through the crowds a lot easier. Every adult had a cell phone and we kept in constant communication even when we were apart. We used three different hotel rooms and someone came up with the idea of texting the others as we woke up in lieu of a loud telephone ring. We deepened our respect for each other’s comfort. After we realized how much we enjoyed our first “sleep in” morning we decided we didn’t really have to get there when the park opened.

We went to a character lunch where you had to reserve seats months in advance. We were rewarded for this effort when we got to see a full array of Princesses. Every princess Disney ever used in a movie came by our table to meet the girls. They were mesmerized. I never put much thought into how to tell the difference between Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty but an eight year girl can ID them a mile off. Plus Jasmine, Belle and Ariel. I know my princesses now. And I’ll bet if you asked any little girl exactly what a princess is, the answer would have nothing to do with monarchy or systems of government.

We found out that a box of popcorn could feed four people in about five minutes. It was my kind of eating, more like grazing. A little taste here and there. By the fourth day we gave up on “meals” and just snacked constantly. We let our appearance go and found ourselves hanging things around our necks for each other. Somehow Beaven ended up with somebody’s sunglasses to keep track of.



There’s not much more to report. We went. We had every bit as much fun as we expected.



Now Beaven and I are packing for a mission trip to Mexico. We’ll be gone next Wednesday and maybe that trip will provide interesting stories. In the meantime, I’m thinking of changing my name to Trixie again.

And for those of you who weren't reading when I tried to change my name to Trixie the first time, you can read about it in my posting dated March 28, 2006. It should be in the blog archives.

Slip Sliding Away

So, here I am Memorial Day weekend with the whole family here. We had a wonderful time filled with food and laughter. We had too much food, for sure. You can never get too much laughter.

May is birthday month. Essie was born on the 3rd. Sarah on the 31th. So we just celebrate all month long. Sarah got a Slip and Slide for her birthday and the fun began. Nobody was sliding correctly so Granny had to show them. I grew up with the Slip and Slide. I think my generation even invented them. I know my Slip and Slide. I pawed the ground; turned to Emily and told her to be sure to get it on camera for study purposes.

I took a running start, flew through the air and landed with a deep thud and not an inch of slide. Not a centimeter, not a molecule of forward movement. It was as though I had been deposited straight to earth directly from the sky. I was as astonished as I was embarrassed. In fact, I laid there for over a minute or two before Emily could stop laughing long enough to take this picture. I ended up looking like a beached whale. Everything on me hurts today. It's probably a miracle I didn't break something.

So, you're gonna have to cut me some slack today.

Besides our Mega-Birthday May we're planning a trip to Disney World next week. We leave the morning after school is out. It's a top secret project and we're planning it right under their noses. It's code name is "the big trip to Wal-Mart." The very name of that store is used so many times in a day around here that we feel safe that the kids tune us out the minute they hear the word 'Wal-Mart.'

We've orchestrated it right down to the minute we wake the girls up to tell them we've decided to hold our annual Grandmother Camp in Orlando, Florida this year. We've got airline and van reservations,reservations for lunch with an assortment of princesses, we've booked the hotels and packed and re-packed. I won't go into detail here but our planning makes D-Day look like an impromtu stroll on the beach in comparison.

What I've got to do now is avoid breaking any bones by slip sliding away.....To quote Paul Simon:

"you know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away."

I only hope the second grade teacher doesn't start a unit on blogs during the last few days of school and Sarah volunteers to look this one up.

That's got to be our story for today. I need to go update my packing list I've got on an excel spreadsheet. Give me a week off and I'll be back with more stories.

Miscelllaneous

I don't have much for you today. Our cat went missing for almost a week. A neighbor had seen a bobcat a few days before so we suspected the worst. Murphy had recently been expanding his territory and would sometimes accompany me on walks that stretched so far that he would be out of breath once we got home. He's not the most graceful cat we've ever had so we could picture him getting himself into a jam that took his life. I visited with a neighbor who claims she's had an indoor/outdoor cat for over eleven years and the cat has never caused her to worry. Not so Murphy. We were plenty worried and finally we decided we'd never see him again. I was about to take up his food bowl when he sauntered through his cat door Sunday afternoon. Not a hair out of place. Not a word of explanation. He looked totally fine except a little disoriented.

I'm actually busy this week writing other things and don't want to spend a lot of time on this blog today. I think I have written a book so I've been using all my brain power editing and assembling my mission reports.

I do have one other thing, though. A friend of mine always asks for book suggestions before she goes on her summer vacation. Then she sends around a compliation of what everybody she contacted has told her to read. Many times there is an overlap. This summer the books getting the most recommendations are on my list: Eat, Pray,Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Animal, Vegetable and Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

But the real bonus this summer was that she sent me the summer reading list for the Hockaday School. She not only works there but her daughter attends Hockaday, as well.

I have long had a theory that you can get close to the same education by going into a college bookstore and just buying the books they have their students read for the classes. I've done this every time I was in a town with a college. This includes Harvard, MIT and Smith. I may not have attended any classroom lectures but I could say I've read the books. So I intend to really look at the books on this list. Hockaday is requiring their students to read at least one book out of their four-page list. It's a very predictible list and some of them I've already read. But, besides the multiple choice of picking one from the list, Hockaday is requiring their entire student body to read one book I've never heard of: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.

Beaven and I have a busy summer coming up. Between reading Hockaday's list and writing a book, I have a healthy calendar of travelling. We're going to Disney World and Mexico and I'll be in Oklahoma for Synod Youth Workshop. We'll host Grandmother Camp for one week, maybe more. I intend to continue my weekly postings as much as I can but will let you know if I have to skip a week.

Remembering Our Baptismal Vows

Our pastor started her sermon last Sunday with the observation that her son seemed to be AWOL. She is raising him alone with the help of her sister who lives with them. Most Sundays her sister is the one who wakes Austen up and gets him motivated to dress, eat and walk the short distance to church. But on Mother’s Day, Rev Sister was out of town. And you know how teenage boys are. “Happy Mother’s Day, Anne!,” somebody called out. Happy Mothers Day, indeed. Everybody knows how fifteen year old boys are. Not quite a man, not a child, either. They are starved for adequate sleep and utterly incorrigible.

I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Stephen Cottingham, one of our college kids, quietly slipped out of the sanctuary. And I knew what would happen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We had a baptism Sunday. A baptism on Mothers Day. How cool is that? Everybody loves a baptism. In the Presbyterian church we like to do it to babies. We’ll take them up to the chancel when they’re about a month or two old. We like infant baptism because it shows that no one can do this on their own. Humans are never the ones to begin a relationship with God. Everything starts with God and baptism is merely a sign of something God has already done.

Presbyterians have been on a kick lately to "Remember your Baptism." But how are you supposed to do this if it happened when you were a baby? I decided it was my job to remember it for them. The congregation takes a vow, too, just like the parents do in a baptism. I promise to love the child (the easy part) and teach him Sunday School, Confirmation Class and Vacation Bible School. Definitely the hard part.

After the baptism the preacher walks around the congregation for a bit with the baby, introducing the newest member to his or her new godparents. It’s a child’s entrance into the family of faith. Around the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church in Garland we take this event seriously.

I love sitting next to children at baptisms, and Sunday I had my eight year old granddaughter with me. I told Sarah that this baby would be her responsibility. There would be some things she could teach this baby that I couldn’t. It would be up to her to help him when he felt left out or scared. She would have to stop little Jack when she saw him doing something dangerous like running in the hall. Children seldom see ways they can contribute to the life of a congregation. But bossing around a toddler is right up their alley. Years later, down the road, there will be things Sarah can say to this new person that he could never hear from an old fossil like me; but would be able to take it from somebody just a few years older.

Anne was almost finished with the baptism and was walking the baby around the sanctuary when the woman sitting next to me nudged me in the ribs, “Looks like Austen finally showed up.” I didn’t need to look for Austen. I looked for Stephen and there he was back in his regular seat listening intently like he had never been gone. I smiled when I pictured it in my mind; something like a loud banging on the back door followed by “Yo, dude! Get your butt out of bed!”

Steven wasn’t in the sanctuary the day Austen was baptized. But anytime we witness a baptism we vow to do the same to any child we encounter. We promise to love them and teach them. “Yo, dude! Get your butt outta bed and get to church!” is a lesson Austen will probably never forget. And only Stephen could have taught him that.

Trying for Two Worlds

I find myself caught between two very different styles of living and I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to have them both.

On one hand, I am trying to keep pace with all the modern options and technologies we have available today. Some have been so easy for me to embrace it’s silly: cell phones, e-mail, Amazon.com, Netflix, Tivo, and iTunes.

iTunes has been a special blessing and one I’m most proud of. Why, just to start with, did you ever think you could begin a sentence with a non-capitalized word? But the service is hilariously easy to use and fall in love with. For a mere 99 cents I can have the single of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, and not the spastic version Diana Ross did as a solo….no, the original song by the Supremes and the Temptations. It’s that kind of niche that iTunes offers me. I can get lost on many delicious side roads with it. Just this morning I decided to check into “Finlandia”. Did you know there are over a hundred versions of that song available on iTunes? And there's even one in Finnish, or whatever language they speak in Finland, just in case you have somebody from Finland over for dinner and want them to feel at home.

Tivo’s been another pleasant surprise. It didn’t take that long to figure out how to use it and now I can’t imagine life without it. I can watch The View at night and Larry King in the morning if I want to. And I can postpone watching either of them until Beaven is safely out of the house if he wants me to.

But I still need a little help with a couple of the new cutting edge applications. I don’t have the hang of Power Point yet, which is one reason I’ll have to cut this short today. I’m supposed to make a Power Point presentation tonight and I’m not really sure I know what I’m doing. And I need to understand My Space by July when it’s the theme of this year’s Youth Workshop at church. I’ll be living and breathing My Space for a solid week and I don’t know the first thing about it at this point. In little over a month I need to have my own My Space set up and be able to discuss it with great authority. So, I would be grateful for any help you can give me.

But all of these technologies all bring me to the balancing act I am longing to perfect. Because, in the midst of this cornucopia of technology, I truly long to simplify my life.

I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver again. Last week it was “Small Wonder” and this week I got her newest book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (brought to my mailbox with no effort on my part through Amazon by the way.) Both of these books are about the simple pleasures in life-- listening to the birds, feeling the wind against your cheek, tasting an apple, planting a garden and living off what it provides. Turning off the TV is a major step I’ve made. It's slowly been getting easier and easier. We are developing the knack for just sitting quietly and reading.

So, here I am living in the East Texas version of paradise. It’s spring and everything is gorgeous. The grass is green everywhere I look. This is actually a very unusual sight in Texas. Come July the heat will kill everything off into a dusty brown hue and it will likely stay that way until around October. (We usually have a brief "spring" if it rains in October and the grass greens up for a couple of months.) But for now there are new calves and colts in the pastures I pass on my way to the store. I have lettuce and spinach growing in our garden and I’ve even had a few salads from it. I’ve made a couple of batches of pesto from the basil I planted. The tomato plants look promising. We have a farm just up the road from us offering blackberries and peaches when they ripen.

But sometimes it just seems a little schizophrenic to have both of these lifestyles available to me. The blackberry farm even has their own website. Is that legal? Should I worry? I don’t think there’s any going back. Certainly ipods and cell phones are here to stay. Now that I think of it, though, they may even be obsolete in a few years after they’re replaced by an even newer technology.
……………
OK, here’s something interesting. Just now when I got to this exact place in writing today’s posting I was interrupted by an incoming e-mail. It was from a guy in our church who was suggesting a My Space account for our church.

How weird is that? The oldest institution around is meeting the latest technology. And I was worried that it would conflict with my tomatoes. I guess if Jesus is getting a My Space account it’s OK.

I can stop writing now and go figure out Power Point. Then maybe Bob can teach me how to do My Space.

Soft

If anyone asks me what the best day of my life has been so far I immediately have an answer. It was the day my second granddaughter, Elisabeth, was born.

The second? Not the first? Not the day my own daughters were born? Maybe the day I got married? Not by a long shot.

The second grandchild brings far less stress and far more excitement. We knew Emily and the baby were healthy. We knew Emily and Steve were great parents. There was no uncertainty about anything. Everything was glorious: we would love this child and she would love us back. We would have great family times full of laughter and love. There was nothing but promise in the soft morning air.

Emily and Steve were living about two blocks from us at the time. They called us around 2 am and asked us to come stay with two year-old Sarah while they went to meet her new sister. We drove the two blocks to their house and went back to sleep in the guest room. About 2 hours later they called and said we could come meet Elisabeth. I will never forget the feel of the air that spring morning. It was so soft and full of promise. As we loaded our sleepy granddaughter into the car seat and headed off to the hospital there was nothing but lighthearted excitement in my heart. It was the same feeling I had when I was little and my parents woke me early in the morning to start a vacation: a little sleepy but a lot excited.

I was reminded of all this by two recent events. First, Elisabeth’s sixth birthday is coming up this week. However, she has long since become Essie to us. Essie, as in ‘Elisabeth with an ‘S’, is what we tell people. Our family is covered up in Elizabeths and it can get confusing at times. When she entered Kindergarten she made a solemn decree that she would now be known as Elisabeth. When she found how long it took her to write her full name and she was back to Essie within a week.

The second event that reminded me of that soft morning was a birthday party I took Sarah to last weekend. For some reason that only the mental health people could explain, Sarah’s friend’s family had invited 20 other little 8 year–old girls to a Build a Bear workshop to celebrate Makayla’s birthday. You can imagine what the inside of the shop was like, especially when I tell you that these 20 girls were only one party out of three that Build a Bear was hosting that morning.

What you need to know about Build a Bear is that you get to create your own customized teddy bear. You get to pick the style, the color, the fur, the clothes, the eyes and everything. You can even choose how you want the bear stuffed. You can have it stuffed firmly or softly, I guess. Sarah knows more about these matters than I do. I watched her ponder this decision carefully. She became the calm center of this hectic store. The lady in charge of stuffing the bear waited patiently until Sarah finally decreed in a very quiet and shy voice: “Soft.”

Doesn’t everybody want their teddy bear soft? Don’t we all wish for more softness in our lives? My four year-old friend, Anita, takes her stuffed doggie with her everywhere she goes. He is limp with age and his fur has rubbed bare in some places. Her parents tell her she won’t be able to take him with her to Kindergarten next year but that’s not an option in her mind. Doggie is soft in the way good friends and good parents are and Anita has chosen to take this softness with her everywhere and forever.

When does the world get so hard for us? If I could give Essie anything in the world for her sixth birthday I would prefer to give her a soft world to live in. I would wrap her up in soft clothes, give her a soft bed at night and never let anyone say or do a mean thing to her.

The world doesn’t work that way, I know. But how did we get this way? We all start out as children wishing for tenderness for ourselves and then later wishing it for our children and grandchildren. When do children get the urge to act hateful to each other? Where did this war come from? We were not made this way by our Creator.


A few weeks ago we had a bird build a nest under the overhang of our front porch. It seemed the perfect place to build a nest. It was protected from rain. The porch light attracted plenty of juicy bugs. Beaven and I are great landlords. The only drawback was that we have three dogs and a very macho cat. But she not only built her nest here, she laid five eggs. I watched with trepidation. The eggs hatched. Motherbird stayed busy flying in and out with food for them. They never uttered a single peep. I figured Mama had warned them about the feisty dogs and cat.

Last week, though, as I was going out the front door, I noticed the five babies had grown so big they were literally sitting on top of each other there in the nest. I stood there at the door and told Beaven how worried I was about them learning to fly with the dogs and cat around. I knew they would make a fascinating toy or, worse, a handy snack for any of our pets. As we discussed how to keep them away from the front porch, right there while I was watching, there was a general flutter and I watched as all five of them swooped out of the nest, into the front yard and up into the tall trees. There were no training flights, no “school”, they just did it. It was a marvel to watch. They looked like they had been flying for years. How on earth can instinct be so accomplished? I don’t think they had really watched their mother fly. They just knew how to do it.

Then this morning, there was another couple of birds building a nest right in front of my kitchen window. I don’t know if it’s the same mother. I know she is building the same kind of nest and using the same materials—soft moss.

Everybody gets to start out with soft. Something changes along the way and things get harder. On most days, this is a hard world when I wish for a soft one. Then nature shows me that she knows exactly what she’s doing and I should stop worrying. But I still don’t like the war part.

A New Commandment

I want to say something today about Maundy Thursday and the best explanation I've ever come up with has been what I wrote back in 2007 while I was working at a volunteer village for the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance in Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina.  I had been staying at the camp as a solo volunteer when I wrote this essay. Later I went back to manage the camp for over four months.  This was the night I came to understand Maundy Thursday for the first time.

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During my two weeks in mission I had the opportunity to wa3tch an extraordinary church in action. The First Presbyterian Church, Germantown in Philadelphia is one of only 2% of congregations in our denomination that is both diverse and stable. In other words, it’s racially mixed but people are OK with that and aren’t leaving the church in droves. This is my kind of church. I’m sure this is where Jesus would choose to spend His time. Actually, He probably does. If folks are paying any attention, this church should be not be just stable but growing by leaps and bounds.

The Associate Pastor, Kevin Porter, came with a team of about 15 youth. Another staff member came and her title tells us where the heart of the church lies: Eileen Jones is the Director of Urban Ministries. I just love it. Even though they had so many of their youth, I didn’t get to see as much of them as I would have liked. There is a slightly controversial but understandable ruling that you have to be over 18 to stay in the PDA camp; insurance and legal mumbo jumbo, etc. So their kids ate dinner and had evening devotions with us but then went off for their own work project and slept at a different camp run by different people who I guess don’t worry about legal mumbo jumbo. At the same time, a couple of their adult ladies had social work experience so instead of rebuilding a house they went on a “listening project.” I didn’t get to hear nearly as many of their stories as I wanted.

But the best part of the week was Maundy Thursday. The South Carolina church designed the liturgy for the evening since they were assigned the devotional for the evening. But it was Kevin of the Germantown church who led the worship service.

It was also Neighbor Night. Every Thursday in the camp we are encouraged to invite the homeowners whose houses we’re working on plus anybody else we want to include. So, for Maundy Thursday we had Johnnie and Evelyn Dawsey, their daughter and granddaughter. I already knew them from helping with the siding on their house in October. It’s finished outside now and waiting for the flooring. Shirley Thompson came with her mother, Miss Annie. We also had the Hosty family who I got to meet the following week when I went to their house to work. And Miss Dorothy came. She’s the lady who presided over the kitchen where we ate lunch every day. It was a true neighbor night and everyone enjoyed spending time eating and talking with their new friends.

Our instructions were to sit with someone we didn’t know. I got to sit between Sarah Watermulden, a seminary student and intern at the Germantown church on one side of me with the whole Dawsey family on the other side.

It was a very moving candle-lit service. Kevin offered some words about the new commandment Jesus gave us on the Thursday before he was crucified, the new maundatum. The scripture reads:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35 (NIV)

Then Kevin moved into the communion service and did the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen a minister do: he did nothing. After he blessed the communion elements and sent them around the table he sat down and waited. I’ll bet he didn’t say anything as a minister for maybe 20 minutes. In that time we gradually lapsed into quiet conversation with our neighbors. I don’t know if Kevin did this on purpose or by accident. Possibly he got to talking with someone and forgot what we were doing. I like to think he orchestrated this because it created the most phenomenal tone to our gathering. I talked a bit with Sarah about going to Guatemala. I talked with Evelyn about her house and her family. She told me she “had always known her neighbors’ names before the storm but had never really talked to them before.”

When Kevin finally stood and ended the worship service with the prayer after communion, I realized that all this time, our conversation had taken place within the bonds of the sacrament of communion.

I’ve been a Presbyterian all my life. I’ve attended worship for the last thirty years at the same church, through three pastors and two interims. And every Maundy Thursday has the same feel to it. We come in and have a solemn service, and then we leave in silence. The bulletin even tells us to do it that way.

But I’ve decided the way we did Maundy Thursday in Mississippi is closer to the way Jesus meant for us to act. Quietly and respectfully, for sure, but in community-- as friends, as people who love one another and appreciate that bond.

I’ve been to Neighbor Night at camp many times before. People usually eat, visit and leave. They go home to their FEMA trailers and we go back into our tents. This time, on Maundy Thursday, people lingered outside the dining tent for over an hour. We had become more than neighbors. We were brothers and sisters now.

I learned something else that night.

The same evening Jesus gave us the communion service He also washed the disciples feet. John 13:14 sums it all up:

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet

Foot washing has had a place in my imagination for years. I’ve often wondered how we could incorporate this practice into our worship in the starched and white bread atmosphere of Sunday worship. The truth, of course, is that you can’t. Nobody wants a whole congregation of barefoot, stinky feet. But once in a while you can try it at a very informal gathering. I tried it once with high school youth then again with middle school youth. Our pastor tried it at a women’s retreat. While it was an effective way to encourage openness and acceptance within the group there is always the element of having someone hold your foot, see your toes, discover your corns, and notice how clean or dirty your feet are. You’re showing a body part that is usually hidden and no matter how you are coached on the subject, you’re still uncomfortable with the intimacy. So I’ve spent a lot of thought trying to find the modern day equivalent to the ancient practice so everyone could follow Christ’s teaching in a comfortable way that they could relate to.

That night in Mississippi, living the new maundatum, I realized what we had been doing all week was foot washing. I remembered the first time I visited the Gulf coast after Katrina. We mucked out a house for a mother and son named Linda and Charles. Their husband and father had died only a couple of years ago. Their house had been filled with four feet of water for a week. As we were pulling soggy and moldy sheetrock from the back bedroom walls I spotted a section of the wall where someone had written telephone numbers. I wondered if I should write the numbers down in case I was taking away the only copy of these numbers. Would I destroy a personal directory if I continued to pull the wall down? Later that same day I took a black but beautiful minister’s robe from a temporary closet they had set up in the carport. I found out this robe had belonged to Charles’ father who had been a Baptist preacher. All their pictures of him were lost in the flood. This robe was all they had left of him. I realized in horror I had gotten sheetrock dust all over the robe in moving it. I felt that I was manhandling something sacred. And not just because it was a minister’s robe—it was all Linda and Charles had left of a man they loved. I felt like such an intruder moving around their house, tearing things apart.

The work we do in Mississippi and Louisiana is both practical and intimate, just like what Jesus did with the disciples. I have seen the insides of Shirley Thompson’s toilet, for goodness sakes. We sat on the edge of her bathtub and talked. I know where her hand lands when she reaches for toilet paper. You can’t get much more intimate than that.

And for Shirley, it was the same intimacy. I’m sure it was a stretch for her to open herself to our tramping around her house talking about the placement of her plumbing. When I asked her about all this she told me she’s normally a very private person but she was open to our work because she saw we were working out of love.

Christ calls us to be intimate with each other. We are to love one another with a love that calls us to muck out houses after a hurricane and to treat each other with love and respect. That same love allows others to accept strangers into their half-built homes, trusting us to put the house back together again.

We cannot leave Maundy Thursday in silence unless we hold each other’s hand. The new maundatum calls us to a divine connection between ordinary people.

Easter in Pearlington

Everybody survived the great Chicken Pox Experience but I’m afraid they wouldn’t let me take pictures. It was a fairly quiet time with two adults who felt generally horrible. No stories there.

But I’ve returned from Mississippi, the great state that takes forever to type, not to mention the little song I have to sing while I’m typing, so in order to save time, I will avoid typing the state’s name from this point.

I had a really great time and I’ve decided that I am a sort of “turtle” person. I simply love to travel around taking my home with me as I go. Almost the minute I got home from You Know Where, I started mentally packing for my next trip.

Because I was a mission “team” of one, I got to have a tent all to myself and I took advantage of it. I spread out and made shelves out of the other two cots. By a stroke of luck I scored the special mattress I had the last time. It had been left in camp long ago and I’m sure I’m not the only grateful recipient of whatever tent it’s left in. I think it’s a Tempurpedic or something very close because it made the metal camping cot into a heavenly cloud of sweet dreams. That is, until the night the cheap watch I bought for $4.84 at Wal-Mart went off. Somehow the alarm got set to go off in the middle of the night and rang every five minutes and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. I finally stepped out of my tent and threw it as far as I could into the drainage ditch that ran beside my tent. After that, I slept as good as at home.

I figured out if you have four lanterns you can shine them on the white ceiling and have enough light to read by at night. I also brought our portable DVD player so most nights I watched a few episodes of Boston Legal in my cot at night.

I was in camp when two shifts of church teams came and went. Before Easter I shared the camp with a church from South Carolina and a couple of churches from Philadelphia. After Easter weekend two groups came in from San Francisco and Los Angeles. The South Carolina people were so friendly that I felt like I’d known them forever. I partnered up with them mostly because they worked on Shirley Thompson’s house. Shirley and I were old friends and it was special for me to continue working on her house. I helped moved the twelve-foot sheets of wallboard into Shirley’s house back in October when she barely had walls. Now we were installing her cabinets and bathroom utilities.

You get a real proprietary feeling once you’ve put up sheetrock in someone’s house. I took pictures of the closet Emily put up in October to show her that the wall was still there and what it looked like painted. And I must say it was a magnificent closet even if it was my daughter who did it.

And I got to see my first completed house. Unless you’ve done this work you can’t imagine how great it feels to see Ron and Beverly Sims actually living in their house.






They had invited the PDA staff to their house for Easter afternoon. I was thrilled when Ron remembered me, especially when he remembered the work I did in January and took me to see ‘my” closet that I dry-walled by myself. It looked as good as Emily’s.

At Shirley’s house with the South Carolina team, one group laid the hard wood floor in her back room while another installed the electrical and plumbing fixtures. It’s a lot of fun to work with electricity and plumbing in a house that’s not connected to electricity or water. We didn’t have to worry about getting electrocuted or having water leak everywhere. And there was no way to test our work so we just told ourselves that we’d done it correctly.

And I discovered a natural talent I possess that I’d always thought was my greatest flaw. When you are installing a new toilet and need as much weight as you can get to properly set it on the wax ring, that’s when someone with a lot of weight around their sitting area comes in handy. I wonder if I could use talent this on American Idol or something.




Here I am with Diane Lodge, a physical therapist from South Carolina. She is just about the strongest women I know and could lift a toilet by herself and with ease. Between her strong back and my fat butt we made a great toilet installation team.



It was a real treat to see Shirley Thompson and be able to work on her house. Every time we completed an installation of a cabinet or mirror we called her in to see what we had done. She spent time with us while we put in the bathroom vanity and lighting...even the toilet paper holder. Not many people have a custom installation of their toilet paper holder, but we had her sit and stretch out her hand so we could put it exactly where she wanted it. You couldn’t ask for a more customized house than that.



Here we are sitting on the side of her bathtub.

I had been wondering where I would celebrate Easter. I have to admit that one of the many reasons I went back to Pearlington over Easter was to avoid church back home where I knew I would be expected to wear something nice on Easter Sunday, preferably something new, and, at the very least, something that fit me. Just thinking about it made me tired. So I escaped to a work trip where paint splattered blue jeans were the expected attire. I figured I could get away with wearing nice slacks if I was in the middle of a mission/camping trip.

So when Shirley invited me to worship at her church on Easter I accepted. Then she invited me to have Easter lunch with her. Wow, I thought to myself, a good old-fashioned Southern style Easter supper! How was I supposed to know when I accepted with gusto that she took her mother out to a Chinese buffet every Easter? One thing you can say for going to a Chinese restaurant on Easter in Mississippi is that it’s not crowded.

I have a few more words on spending Easter week in mission. In fact, I had a major theological breakthrough. But I’ll close now and begin writing for next Wednesday. I want to give myself a week to write about it and make sure the words line up in just the right order.