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rlp

I ate a whole can of olives the other day. Is that bad? It doesn’t seem bad. They’re fruit, right? I’ve never heard anyone refer to olives as fruit, but they're plants and plants are generally good for you. They are very salty, which I think might not be good. Salt is one of those things they used to say was good for you and they even handed out salt tablets to athletes. But then I think they said it was bad for you and everyone was trying to cut down on salt. But now I don’t hear so much about salt anymore. I think its maybe bad but not as bad as, say, eating nothing but fast-food all the time. Compared to that, eating a can of olives might even be kind of good for you.

One would think so anyway.

I can’t keep up with this stuff, to tell you the truth. When I eat I have to look over at my wife and say, “Is this bad for me?” She seems to know about these things.

Take bread for example. Years ago bread was fattening and a thing you had to watch out for. But then everyone said it was red meat you had to avoid. Red meat would clog up your arteries. So bread wasn’t that bad. But then suddenly they said meat was okay as long as you avoided bread completely. And there were those diets where you ate no bread at all or anything even remotely resembling bread.

So bread has been sometimes good and sometimes bad for us. I don’t mean white bread, of course. I think white bread became bad for us sometime back in the 70s and has remained bad ever since. I think it has stayed bad the whole time. That’s okay because Jeanene got me used to wheat bread years ago, and now white bread gives me the creeps. The way you can roll it into little balls and it turns a kind of gray if your hands weren’t all that clean. I never liked that about white bread, even when I was a kid, even before it was bad for us.

Anyway, it seems to me that a guy ought to be able to eat a can of olives and it not be all that bad for him. Not with all the white bread and fast food and sweat shops overseas and the horrible stuff they’re putting all over the internet.

But none of this really matters because when I ate that can of olives, it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was going to be, so I probably won’t do that again anyway.

When it comes to food, I should probably just move my fork slowly toward things and watch Jeanene for cues. She could give me a nod or or a wince or a strong, stern shaking of the head. Then I would know what things are currently bad for me because, like I said, somehow she just seems to know this stuff.

I’ll tell you another thing I can’t keep straight is the Church. And I went to seminary and even graduated from it. I don’t know how you non-seminary folks are keeping up with what’s good and bad in church.

I remember when I was a kid and taking care of your Bible was a good thing. You got a Bible for a present or something and you wrote your name in it. And you never put things on top of it because that didn’t show respect. And you kept that Bible for a long time because that was YOUR Bible. You kept it for years and it would get all worn and everything, which you were sort of proud of because it showed you were reading it.

But then there were new translations coming out every month or so, and Bibles got cheap to buy and you can even get them in grocery stores now. And also some people said that if you were too devoted to one copy of the Bible it was its own kind of weird idolatry. So now people can pretty much do whatever they want to their Bibles. Toss them around. Lose them and just buy a new Bible. Whatever.

And I remember when all we sang in church were hymns, except at church camp where you could sing all these other cool songs with guitars around the campfire. And then some people started singing some of the campfire songs right in church, which seemed okay. But then others said it wasn’t good because those camp songs supposedly aren't as theological deep and sound as the old hymns. But then the people who liked the camp songs said that they are mostly made of words right out of the Bible, so you can’t exactly say they shouldn’t be sung in church. And then the hymn people grumbled, and the campfire people grumbled, and this is the truth - I don’t know what we should or shouldn’t be singing in church if anything.

To be honest, I don’t think anyone knows quite what to do in church anymore. For years church people told us that homosexuality was evil and not just a sin but a very bad sin. They had us all scared of homosexuals, that we might even become one or something if we were around them. And you just assumed that the Bible was chock-full of commandments about homosexuals and them even going to hell for being that. I mean, you just assumed that because the church people were so sure of themselves and talked about it like it was a fact.

But then some people started reading the Bible very carefully, all the parts people said were about homosexuality. And some of them said, “Oh shit! The Bible hardly says anything about homosexuality at all. And what it does say is pretty hard to understand.” So those people said we should just leave homosexuals alone and let them come to church and let their relationships be between them and God, like all relationships are.

But now, see, the ones who thought homosexuality was a really bad thing were getting tired of the changes. It seemed like you hardly heard a hymn in church anymore, and people were dressing sloppy on Sundays, and women were preaching, and you could hardly find a King James Bible anywhere. So I think they just decided to dig their heels in on this whole homosexuality thing. And it became like a religious war, and it’s gotten so bad that even the Episcopalians are fighting over it. And that’s scary because you expect the Baptists will make fools of themselves over stuff like this, but we’ve always counted on the Episcopalians to keep their wits about them and be careful and never ever allow themselves to get so divided over something that they might actually split their church in two.

I mean, the Episcopalians can be kind of stuffy and all, and who knows what the hell they’re doing with all the chants and walking up and down the aisles before church and what with the banners and all the different colors all the time. But my goodness, they’re the smartest ones of all of us, and if they can’t figure this homosexual thing out, what hope is there for the rest of us?

And all the while people who aren’t in the Church are just standing there watching it all, and they have no idea what all the fuss is about and neither do a lot of us who’ve been in the Church all of our lives. We don’t know either.

Maybe in a few years the Church will be all busted up and the only thing left will be people gathering in small groups here and there, and it might not be anything like it is now.

That’s what Jesus was saying with that stuff he said about the wineskins. How the truth about God cannot be held in old wineskins because they will just burst. And sometimes that’s what happens with the Church. It bursts like a dried-out wineskin and you have to find a new wineskin.

And it’s always hard for the church people who live in a time when the wineskins are bursting. It’s hard on that generation, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all but just wait and try to be as true as you can and keep your eyes open for what comes next.

rlp

Mark 2.22 - And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins."

There were two great, abiding mysteries in my life when I was a young boy; mysteries that I puzzled over for years but never solved. I discovered them while lying in bed trying to fall asleep. Bedtimes are convenient for adults but they may or may not align themselves with the sleep patterns of a child. I was an overactive boy who had a hard time convincing his cerebral cortex to shut down after a day of full-throttled activity.

Many nights I lay in bed, watching the shadows deepen on the walls and listening to Bible stories or music on a record player. Waiting for sleep was grueling work. Minutes slowly ticked away, and a single hour was an eternity. It was in these mysterious hours of waiting that I discovered two mysteries which I could not explain or understand.

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

or

Is There Anything Else That Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Note: I intend to conclude the water chronicles with a piece on cultural re-entry and a final summary of the trip which will be posted at ChristianCentury.org

But for now, the events of the last day

---------------

Unfortunately for me, there seems to be no end to the things I can and do forget. I’m the one who still gets lost in his own city. I’m the one who forgets what day it is; indeed, sometimes I forget what month it is. Occasionally I’ll be so lost in whatever it is I’m doing that I forget what SEASON it is.

Okay wait, is it like Fall and we’re moving toward Christmas, or is it sort of in the Spring and we’re moving toward Summer?

You think I’m exaggerating for effect with that last bit about the seasons, right? Think again. That happens to me at least twice a year.

So of course I’m going to leave a couple of things behind in Santo Domingo. Of course I am. That’s a given. The only question is, will the things I leave be important things?

In this case, they were.

For some reason I was the only one on our team flying out Monday. My flight was at 4 pm. The women from Murray State left on Sunday. The others were to leave on Tuesday.

I took a taxi to the airport, stopping along the way at a bank to get some money to pay for the ride. It was about an hour drive in traffic, and the driver told me it would be 1000 pesos - roughly $30. I went to the ATM machine and withdrew 1500 pesos. Foreign money is always interesting to look at, and Dominican money is very colorful, so I was pretty intrigued by it. A 1000 pesos bill and a 500 pesos bill, both with strange faces and markings on them. I was fascinated and walked away staring at the money.

Dominican Republic Pesos

I was so happy. I was happy to be going home and back to a culture that is familiar to me. Back to a place where I actually understand what is being said around me. The taxi driver spoke no English, but we managed to communicate a little bit. He bought us both a popsicle from a street vender, which was nice of him.

When we got to the airport, I tipped the driver 500 pesos. I mean, what was I going to do with 500 pesos? And he bought me that popsicle. There was that. He seemed pretty pleased with the tip and shook my hand vigorously.

This is the point where everything started going wrong.

The first person at the Delta line said, “Passaporta por favor.”

That’s when it hit me. I didn’t have my passport. We put our passports in a safe at YWAM when we first arrived, and I never gave it another thought.

If this was a movie, there would be a fast-motion camera replay of the taxi drive going backwards, ending with some sort of swooshing noise and a close-up of the door of the safe at YWAM.

Here is something you should know to fully comprehend my predicament. While in Santo Domingo, I never paid attention to the location of the YWAM house. While we were driving around, I was too busy looking at traffic and houses and people to worry about where we were. I was like a child in Santo Domingo. Other people were driving, so I felt free to just look at things. What can I say? I like looking at things and then writing about them later.

I didn’t know the address of the YWAM house. A lot of the streets didn’t even have names, so it never seemed important to me. I didn’t even know what part of town it was in. And I didn’t know their phone number either. I never had to call them.

I had nothing. I had no idea where I had been staying for the last 5 days. And I didn’t know enough Spanish even to explain to anyone that I didn’t know where I was.

Strangely enough I didn’t panic. I think this new reality was too shocking to accept. I just couldn’t emotionally comprehend the fact that I was in a foreign country, in an airport without my passport, and with no way of explaining to anyone where my passport was.

The only thing I could think of was that I needed to find a way to call YWAM and get them to send my passport with another taxi. There was no time for me to ride there and back again, and I wouldn’t know what to tell a taxi driver anyway, even if I could find one that spoke English.

I opened my wallet to get out my ATM card, knowing that I was going to have to pay for another taxi. No ATM card.

If this were a movie there would be another camera shot in fast motion, going back to the bank and wooshing up to the ATM machine. The camera would show a delighted Gordon, so amused by the pretty money that he walked away staring at the money and left his ATM card in the machine.

Now I panicked.

In my wallet were 100 pesos - about $3 - and a $20 bill. Not even enough for a one-way taxi drive, even if I knew where I was going. I have to tell you, I’m not sure I remember a time in my adult life when I felt more helpless and vulnerable.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for a little good news. There was one bit of saving grace in this story. When I got out of the taxi, I noticed one of the YWAM staff, a man named Ony (pronounced like only but without the L), who was there with a group of medical missionaries who were also flying out on Monday.

All I could think of was, “Find Ony!”

I ran through the terminal, praying that I would find him before he said goodbye to the team and headed back to YWAM. If this were a movie, the camera would circle around my panicked face, surrounded by a blur of airport people going every direction.

I went back to where I had seen Ony, but he wasn’t there. I looked all around and had just given up when Ony saw ME. He ran up to me and said my name in his rough, Dominican way. “Gorrrrdown.”

I could have hugged him. He doesn’t speak much English, but he understood “No have passport. Passport at YWAM.” His response was one I heard many times in Santo Domingo. It is a colorful phrase with many meanings.

“Ay yi yi!”

The crazy thing is, everything worked out very quickly once I found Ony. It’s amazing how easily things work if you speak the language and know your address and phone number. He called YWAM and they immediately dispatched a taxi with my passport. A quick international call to Jeanene from the airport cost 12 pesos. She cancelled the debit card. Ony stayed with me until the taxi arrived. I bought a Diet Coke and a cup of coffee for Ony with my last 100 pesos, gave him a huge hug, and got to my flight with about 5 minutes to spare.

Ay yi yi!

The last thing I said to Ony was. "SO glad I found you." He pointed to the sky and said, "Es El Señor," which is the delightful Spanish way of saying, "It was the Lord."

I did not argue with his theology.

It’s amazing how an experience like this can change your perspective. When I got to San Antonio, Delta had lost my luggage. I went to the luggage counter to report it, but who can worry about lost luggage when you’ve been a lost man in a foreign land?

The woman behind the counter was speaking a language I understood, and I was home. I had to have been the nicest person she had ever dealt with. She told me the luggage was probably somewhere between Santo Domingo and Atlanta.

“So what happens next,” I asked. “You’ll call me when you find it?”

“Yes sir. We’ll find it and deliver it to your home.”

“Really? Thanks, you guys are great!”

I walked off whistling, with no luggage and not a care in the world.

Taxi driver and popsickle.

Ony (right), his two friends, and me waiting in the airport.

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Saturday Afternoon, January 12, 2008

This entry was meant to be posted Sunday, but Internet outages made that impossible.

As usual, I have pictures with captions posted from Saturday afternoon and evening at Flickr. Pictures here, slideshow here.

One of the most important things Edge Outreach does is sanitation education and training. It’s well and good to setup some kind of purification system, but if people don’t know how to use it or if something goes wrong with it, they can be worse off than they were before. They could be trusting water that isn’t clean.

Saturday afternoon half of us went to the home of a man that everyone here calls pastor Antonio. He lives in a very poor part of town, and though he is confined to a wheelchair, he works and ministers in this little community. 80 to 100 people come to his house to get clean water from an Edge system that was put in a few months ago.

Pastor Antonio's house. This room and two small bedrooms.

The system is on his tiny back porch. One tank for purifying, two on the roof for storage. He purifies three or four tanks of water, two days a week for the community.

On this day pastor Antonio found a group of children from the area to come and learn about water cleanliness and general sanitation issues. There were a number of adults that showed up as well, though the presentation was definitely geared toward children.

Edge has a set education program for children in other countries, based on pictures. All you need is children, the pictures, and a translator.

This was about as poor a neighborhood as I’ve seen here in Santo Domingo. There is a vacant lot next to the pastor’s home where they meet for church services if it is not raining. That vacant lot is also, apparently, the local trash dump. There was a smoldering stump no more than 5 yards from the stage.

And yet the children were spotless and dressed in their finest clothes. Truly, these families take great pride in their children.

I suppose the teaching would seem rather obvious and simple to many, but the fact is, great numbers of people in poorer areas do not know that bacteria in water cannot be seen. Just because water is clear does not mean it is safe.

In one part of the training, the team uses a little wooden doll, jokingly referred to privately as Diarrhea Debbie. Her stomach is a clear baggie of clean water. Something dark is introduced, clouding the water and making Debbie sick. The bag is punctured and she loses her water. At this point the team talks about the necessity of hydration if you have diarrhea.

Well, Debbie’s bag got punctured in the wrong place on this day, and she sprayed water sideways on Amber and all over the stage.

The children were delighted. Howls of laughter!

But apart from that, things went very well. We broke out some balloons at the end and got mobbed by the children. I made as many balloon sombreros as I could before we had to get on the bus.

At this point, all of our work was done. Both purification systems were in place, and we had visited this previous installation to check on it and do further education.

Saturday evening, we went out to eat at a Dominican restaurant, treating ourselves, our driver, and our interpreters to a fine meal. Not wanting to miss out on the experience of Dominican food, I ordered a lot and then shared it with anyone who wanted to try things. I had boiled Yuca (pronounced “Jooka” here), fried plantains, rice and beans Dominican Republic style, and skewered chicken. It was all delicious. The plantains were not sweet at all, more like fried potatoes.

Click for larger view

Sunday morning, the women from Murray State fly out. The rest of us will attend church with our hosts and do a couple of final things. Monday morning I'll try to post some final pictures and thoughts from the trip. As always, internet access is irregular. I'll post when I can.

Sunday night: Internet very spotty tonight. I have reports for Saturday along with many pictures. I also have four slide shows with music I'm trying to get online at Google video. Will be working on this for three hours Monday morning, IF the Internet cooperates.

check back.

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Saturday, January 12, 2008

Yesterday half of our team came very close to completing the purification installation at Cure Hospital in Santo Domingo. If you'd like to see the hospital using Google Earth, plug the following coordinate string into the search box that says "fly to."

18°28'30.14"N 69°54'26.27"W

I have pictures from yesterday's work at the hospital online at Flickr here. Slideshow here. There are a fair number of pictures with captions and explanations of the work that was done.

Today we're at the hospital finishing up some electrical work and preparing to train the hospital engineer in the use of the system. The system is easy, but constant testing of the chlorine levels is essential. You have to carefully test each batch of purified water. Obviously, if you do not, you're worse off than you were before. You're trusting the water from the tap and it isn't clean. But the engineer is clearly an intelligent and educated man, so it will be no problem for him.

The original pump house

Working on the pump house

The new pump house

Our team in the tank enclosure

Later today half of our team is going to an previous installation to continue health training. I'll be with that group and will report on that tonight or tomorrow morning.

Mustard Seed Thoughts

This whole situation reminds me of something Jesus once said. We'll leave soon, and the hospital will have a continuous supply of clean water. Someone from Edge will return in time to see how things are going. Edge is committed to following up all of its installations. This one is unusual because there is an engineer here who is capable of fixing the system. They will probably be fine. In any case, most of us will never come back. Children will come and go in this place. Some lives will be saved because of the clean water. Other lives will be enriched. Suffering from infections, etc. will be lessened. None of us can look into the future to see what will come.

Jesus once said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it is planted, it grows into a large tree and the birds of the air nest in its branches." So it is with goodness and with evil. Seeds are planted, either in selfishness or in goodness and service. What grows from those seeds is only known to those who are there. The ones who planted the seeds often never know what good or evil comes of their actions. Further, the idea of sin suggests that all of us have planted seeds of evil from time to time. I know that I have. Grace is being forgiven for the evil I have begun in this world. Redemption involves the changing of my heart and life, so that I can be a part of goodness.

Pretty simple deal really. I don't know why we Christians have made it so complex.

rlp

Friday, January 11th, 2007

Our team was split for the entire day today. One part went back to the hospital. They didn't get back until late, so I'll not be able to tell you about their work until tomorrow. The other team was the five women from Murray State University who were in charge of the YWAM installation, which is the one we paid for here at rlp.

Hooray for us!

I was hanging out with the young women, helping some and taking pictures too. It was a basic installation. Two tanks in a pumphouse, chlorinating the water and providing access at a spigot. It's not fancy, but instead of buying 5-gallon bottles of water, they can fill them up themselves at their pumphouse.

This installation was done almost entirely by these young women, lead by Courtney. We were all so proud of them. And I thought you'd like to see some pictures of the water purifier you made possible with your gifts. I have a lot of pictures up at Flickr, but I'll include a few here as well.

Courtney working on a water line.

Amanda working on the external spigot.

Putting together the Purifier

The finished system!

The team that put in YOUR purifier!

The hospital team ran into some...issues. So we're a little behind there, but I'm sure we'll catch up tomorrow. The whole team is going to the hospital, then the Murray State women and I are going to a previous installation to do some continued water health training.

Please do check out the Flickr photos. They show you more detail about the YWAM installation. Pictures here. Slideshow here.

I've got a couple of free minutes here, so how about some personal stuff?

1. Dominican Driving - Driving here in the Dominican Republic is unlike anything I've ever seen. At first I was terrified. People pull in front of each other with the smallest amount of space. Motorcycles weave in and out of cars. Two cars will merge into the same lane, barely missing each other, horns blaring. And yet, we saw no accidents. My theory is that there are several elements going on.

First, all traffic boils down to official rules and unofficial morays. In the Dominican Republic, it's more morays than rules. Everyone understands that if a person can pull in front of you, they will. And it's your responsibility to watch out for that. Everyone knows there will be motorcycles weaving around and people walking in the street selling things. The whole thing forces you into a constant state of defensive driving. You can't eat a sandwich or talk on the phone and drive here. You have to be watching because on every trip, at least 5 or 6 people are going to cut you off and pull in front of you or edge you over in your lane.

In the United States, we drive according to strict rules and expect others to follow them. This leads to us being on auto-pilot. Then when someone makes a mistake and pulls in front of us, we might not notice it because we aren't expecting such a thing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that there are less accidents in the D.R. than in the U.S., though I have no figures to support that.

2. Cold Showers - There is no hot water where we are staying. None. At first this seemed like a terrible inconvenience. "How in the world am I supposed to take a cold shower?" I wondered. Well, guess what - If you are dirty and tired, you'll take any shower you can get. That's the first thing to remember.

I don't have much experience with this, but there seems to be two theories to surviving the cold shower. The first involves sticking your head under the water and getting it wet, the pulling away, shampooing, and sticking it back under to rinse. You basically do this with your whole body. Quick wetting, soap without the cold water hitting you, then grit your teeth for the rinse.

The other option is to suck-it-up and stand under the cold water until you get somewhat used to it. Then shower as usual. It never feels comfortable, but you do get so that it doesn't bother you as much. I recommend the second method, but then I've only been at this for 4 days.

rlp

Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Note: Rolling blackouts caused an internet outage yesterday. As I said in the beginning, if you don't see a fresh post from me every night, there was an internet problem. Here is Thursday's posting:

Pictures of our day along with captions and explanations can be found at Flickr. Read this but don't miss the pictures. They give more details about the work we are doing.

Click here for a complete list of pictures and captions. Click here to view them as a slideshow. (Note: clicking a picture in the slideshow displays the captions. Clicking again hides them.)

We actually began work on the hospital filtration system today. We placed three large, 400-liter tanks on a platform right above the existing pump for the hospital cistern. We’ve dropped a pipe into the cistern that will pump the water through our chlorination system and into the tanks. Then a pipe will go from the tanks back into the main hospital pump, allowing clean water to be pumped throughout the building. In a short time, even the pipes will be cleaned by the chlorinated water.

There were several little glitches here and there, nothing that Kurtis couldn’t figure out. We had to drill a hole for new pipes into the back of the concrete housing for the existing pumping system. Most of the morning was spent getting the tanks positioned and busting a hole through 6 inches of concrete into the pump housing. During a slow time, some of the team folded bandages and helped sort medical hardware in the pharmacy.

At 2 pm, our team split in two. Half of us continued working on the water system at the hospital. By the end of the day they had run pipes from all three tanks to a central location where the purification unit will be housed in a box of its own.

The other half (I and the 5 women from Murray State University) went to visit an orphanage in a very poor area of town. The place was spotless on the inside, but very simple and poor. There didn’t seem to be any area for the children to play outside, as far as I could see. When we arrived they were lined up waiting for us. A fair number of these children have disabilities of one kind or another.

The street outside the orphanage

They sang us a couple of prepared songs, which made me really uncomfortable. I don’t think children like this should be made into a dog-and-pony show. But this is their world and their country, and I wasn't the one making those calls. So I listened to their sweet voices and clapped appropriately.

We brought balloons and candy and crayons and coloring paper. You’d have thought Santa arrived in person and gave them the whole world. We sang and played and hugged and made balloon hats and flowers and swords. I took pictures of the kids with my digital camera, then turned it around and showed them their pictures. They were delighted by this and crowded around, wanting me to take more pictures. Courtney got attached to a young child and held her in her arms most of the time. We connected with this crowd of children in a whirlwind hour of delightful chaos.

We just visited them and played. No big deal, right?

Well, it was obviously a big deal to them. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking, “Yeah, but what are we doing for these kids, really?” And one answer to that is - not much. They need money and food and clothing and parents. And we came with our resources and time dedicated toward our two water projects. This was a quick side-trip that we put together because we had some spare time and we were asked to go. I mean, what can you do? Not go because you’re not going to make a full commitment?

So for this day, there was nothing we could do except love them and play with them. And trust that when you love and play with a child, it is a goodness that requires no explanation and no justification. You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone.

Two sisters caught my eye, both in wheelchairs, both terribly small for their ages. Stephanie is 11, the same age as my youngest daughter Lillian. But she has the body of a two-year-old. Her older sister Clara is not much bigger, though she is 15. That’s the age of Shelby, my practically grown and healthy middle child. In very crude Spanish I tried to tell them that my own children were the same age.

“Uh...Me Nina es (I tried to think of the word for 11 but couldn't) eleven... tambien?"  I’m really embarrassed that I live in Texas and don’t know Spanish well enough to get out such a simple sentence. That’s not correct, but maybe the idea got across.

Stephanie and Clara and Pauline each colored a picture of Jesus, signed their names on them in crayon, and gave them to me to keep.

Gave them to me to keep. Gave them to me to keep. For a moment, it seemed like the whole world narrowed to that instant in time. Gave them to me to keep.

Okay, just stop for moment. Stop your busy life and think about this with me. What did it matter that we visited an orphanage today? And what will it mean, ultimately, in the lives of these children? What will this hour of fun mean to them? And what am I to do with these cheap, coloring book pictures of Jesus? What value would you place upon them? Or what would you give me in return for them? Wouldn’t you agree that in the eyes of God, these pictures are worth more than the Mona Lisa?

Do I really believe that? Yes, I think so. What am I to do with the pictures? I don’t know. It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it? I can’t treat them like ordinary pieces of paper, right? I can’t throw them away - God forbid. And if I take them home and tack them to the wall of my office at our church, what does that mean? Does that mean I’ve committed something to these little girls? Will I look at these drawings sometimes and tell people, “Oh, those are from two little girls in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic that I visited once upon a time." Will people who see these pictures think I'm a nice guy because I spent an hour in an orphanage one afternoon?

See, there’s no good answer to this. I ask you, what am I going to do with these pictures?

Hurting children have a way of doing this to you. Their presence demands some kind of response. I wish I could give them enough to care for them for the rest of their lives. But I’m pretty used up these days. Long on ideas and feelings but short on time and strength and money. And my oldest daughter is talking about a trip to Moldova this December that will likely end with our family making a commitment to a child or two for the next decade or so. That’s the problem with the depth of the need in the world. It is endless.

But listen to me now. You just CANNOT let that get you down. Or at least you cannot let is stop you from giving yourself to every small act of goodness that you can. Don’t worry about the big picture. Just find something good to do for someone, and DO IT.

If enough of us commit ourselves to small acts of goodness, the world really does begin to be a better place.

And if not, well, then the hell with the world. Live in your small moments of goodness. Just live there and let that be your highest reality.

Okay back to those pictures. I truly do not know what to do with them. I've placed them carefully in my backpack with my computer, in a place where they cannot be harmed. I'm going to carry them back to San Antonio. And then, I'm going to figure out what to do with them. Something about these pictures is bothering me. I can't figure out a decent response to their obvious value and meaning. Maybe you'll have some suggestions. Think about it, will you?

Oh, and I finally figured out what this day of play with these children means.

It means everything.

rlp

Wednesday night
January 9, 2007

It's so hard for me to write without a lot of planning. I'd like to put the events of the day into a nice, linear package for you. But I can't. I'm tired and it's very late. And I'm still in culture shock. Shocked by the poverty, shocked by the crowds of people, shocked by the lack of privacy, shocked by the loss of control.

Other people feed us. I don't even have any Dominican money on me. I just eat what our hosts provide. It's sort of nice to let go of the job of getting food, but I don't think I realized how much the simple freedom to eat whenever you want is something I take for granted.

Tonight I put together a rather extensive Flickr collection of photos, all with descriptions. You can follow along the day by viewing them.

The collection is here. Or you can view it as a slideshow here.

Today we learned about what Edge calls, "fluidity." You have to stay fluid when you are overseas. It would be easy to let today become frustrating, but it didn't. We had hoped to get started with the two installations, but we had troubles getting materials in both places. The details are unimportant - it just turned out to take the entire day to gather the tanks and make some rather complex plans for the hospital. The hospital was supposed to have gotten supplies ahead of time but didn't because an engineer wanted to talk about it first. Apparently it didn't occur to him that we were going to be on a tight schedule. We ended up buying exactly the things we asked them to pick up for us. We lost a day. No big deal. Kurtis is sure we'll make it up.

We did get to see the hospital, and I was once again touched and surprised. Touched by the good that they do and surprised by the primitive nature of the facility. It is a Care Hospital; there are a number of them around the world. Their water system is horrible, but it's not their fault. The entire city of Santo Domingo has a water problem. You can't get clean water from the tap. You just can't. Everyone uses bottled water. This is extremely expensive for the hospital. They use a fair amount of water, as you can imagine.

Their specialty is pediatric surgery for children with birth defects. 

Half our team worked with Kurtis and an engineer from the hospital to plan our rather complex system. Our three tanks of purified water will tie right into the plumbing of the hospital. Usually our water systems are suited to people coming up to the tanks and drawing water off of them. While some of us went out into town to buy supplies, the other half of our team folded bandages.

That's right. They don't buy pre-packaged bandages here. They buy bulk bandage material and fold them by hand.

Care Hospital Santo Domingo is a 6-story building

The Cistern at Care Hospital. The water is clear, but not safe. Full of bacteria.

Typical traffic in Santo Domingo. One of the reasons it took all day to gather supplies.

We were also able to get the supplies we will need for the YWAM headquarters install, the one you guys payed for.

Let me mention YWAM. I didn't know anything about Youth With A Mission, and I still don't know much. It seems to be a movement started by American Christians that spread this way and has become an indigenous expression of faith. This facility is run by Domincans for Dominicans. I can tell that they are a very conservative group of Christians. Much more conservative than I, certainly. And yet, here they are working amongst the poorest people. And we are in their country. I'm called to be as respectful as if I was dealing with Muslims in Iran or Buddhists in China. Their Christianity is now an indigenous movement among these people. They tend toward charismatic expression and are absolutely passionate about their faith.

Tomorrow night we might go to a worship service. I hear we might have two hours of singing BEFORE the sermon. I'll let you know how that goes.

And there is this. These guys take trips to Africa to help people less fortunate than themselves. They who don't even have clean water in their own facility. That seals the deal for me. So you guys are going to make it possible for them to drink their tap water instead of buying water, which they do for the hundreds of volunteer teams of all denominations who stay here from time to time. Not too many Americans, I wouldn't think. We're too spoiled and the accomodations are too rough. But I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad I've experienced it.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I can testify that you who donated money would be happy to be giving clean water to these people. Absolutely.

On a personal note: The food was very good today. There was something for breakfast that I never did identify. Some kind of pasty, grits-ish, puddingesque thing. Sort of sweet and sort of like Oatmeal. Whatever, I ate every bite. Lunch at the hospital was fun and delicious. Traditional Dominican food. (Pictures of both meals at the Flickr site) We put in a full day, and I'm ready for bed. Check out the flickr photos I mentioned. They tell the story.

Tomorrow we begin the installation work in both places. One of our teams is also going to spend some time taking care of children in a local orphanage. We feel the YWAM install will be so easy that we can spare the time. And the hospital has a solar water heating system that was installed incorrectly. Kurtis the magic man feels we might be able to fix that for them while we're there.

These Edge folks are INTENSE. I kid you not. Do not try to stop them or get in their way. They will find a way to get things done. And if something prevents them from doing one thing, they'll find some other acts of goodness to fill the day.

Tomorrow I'll show you the work we do and introduce you to the team in more detail. I can't wait to show you a picture of Kurtis.

peace,

rlp

January 8th, 2007 - Tuesday

Note: I'm likely not going to have a lot of time for editing on this trip, so you're going to get this stuff pretty much right out of my head. I'll have to grab whatever time I can to write.

They say it is always disorienting when you enter a new culture. I know this in my head but have had few occasions to experience it at the level I did today. Santo Domingo left me speechless.

Our team flew into the airport during the afternoon at different times. There are 5 young women from Murray State. One of them - Courtney - is a highly trained Edge intern. She's 19 and fully capable of installing complex water systems in primitive settings and doing water education. The other four are friends of hers who have recently undergone the same training that I did back in October.

Curtis is our team leader. He and Stuart are experienced Edge trainers. Which is good because we'd be lost without them. Then there is Marcia and Rick and I.

Courtney and I

Most of us had arrived by about 5:30. We loaded the equipment in a small bus and left for the YWAM (Youth with a Mission) headquarters here in Santo Domingo. More on YWAM tomorrow. This is a Christian organization that has no connection with Edge Outreach but is allowing us to stay in their headquarters.

Purification Equipment

Curtis

There is no way I can describe the hour and a half journey through the heart of Santo Domingo. This is the stuff you don't see in the tourist areas. The streets were packed with vehicles and bicycles of every kind. The entire center of the city looks poverty stricken, from my point of view. But my point of view is meaningless here. There were so many people. There seem to be almost no traffic laws; cars and buses and bikes and pedestrians weave in and out following some set of rules that they understand but I do not. I wish I could have taken pictures, but it was already dark.

The YWAM headquarters is an abandoned hotel in a very poor neighborhood. I wondered why an official organization with a name and everything would need fresh water, but that just shows how little I understand this world. We are staying in the nicest accomodations available here. There's no hot water and no one can drink from the tap. Everyone drinks bottled water purchased nearby.

Our bedroom

Dinner - unidentifiable hot dogs and huge buns.
Hey, you eat what they give you here.

We are staying with some amazing people. Alberto just got back from the Sahara where he worked with "the poor and underpriviledged." I tried to imagine what kind of people Alberto would consider poor. Again I am having to come to grips with how out of touch with reality my views of comfort and poverty are.

The money you gave is going to install a purification system here at YWAM. Curtis and Courtney scouted the facility looking for the best place to install one. These pictures will give you some idea of the kind of place we are staying at. It's probably the best place in the neighborhood.

Alberto shows us a lower room, one possible location.

We settled on a corner of the kitchen, always a nice place for fresh water.

Tomorrow we have to go to a local hardware store and buy materials for the YWAM install and the larger system we will install at a local hospital. Curtis told me that the hospital's water situation is more primitive than they have here. (Note: The Edge purifiers come with us, but the tanks and pipes and everything else is bought "in country.")

Confession time: 

Okay, I'm not proud of what follows, but it is the truth. It's important for me to admit it because, well, it's the truth. I don't really know how I'm going to sleep here tonight. I have a top bunk with one sheet and no covers. I won't get to shower until tomorrow, maybe. Tonight I'll brush my teeth with a cup of bottled water. Windows are open to the outside, so I don't know what kind of bugs I'll encounter during the night. And to be honest, I had a hard time eating that hot dog. I could only finish about half of it. I have no idea where it was purchased and how long it was on that table. So I'm hungry, and I really don't know when I'll eat next. I hear they are serving us breakfast in the morning, and I'm afraid to see what it will be.

And I'm ashamed of myself because this is as good as it gets here. Our hosts welcomed us and were so delighted that we have come. They've given us their best.

And to think when I arrived at the airport I took this picture because I thought it was going to be a struggle dealing with the fact that you can't get real Diet Coke here. You get Coke Light, which tastes like straight Coke. At the airport, that actually seemed like an issue to me.

What a difference a couple of hours can make.

I'll write more tomorrow. Tomorrow we actually get started.

rlp

I know I've been scarce lately. Well, actually totally absent. I'm not sure I remember a time when I went this long without posting. I promised the family that I would stay away from the blog for the holidays, and I have. And it's been good for me.

Truthfully, I've been in a less productive season with writing, mostly due to some pretty major transitions in my life. I will tell you that a serious writing season is coming after I get back from the Domincan Republic. I feel it inside. I know when a writing burst is coming.

Speaking of the D.R., I leave tomorrow morning at 5:45 am. I'll Fly to Atlanta and then on to Santo Domingo. It is my intention to document our project in pictures and words. I will post every day while there. I might end up staying up late at night, but every day gets a post. If there isn't a post, assume I had problems with internet access and will post that day as soon as I can.

Worse case scenario: Internet access is completely unavailable. If that happens, I'll write my daily entries all the same and post them all when I get to someplace with Internet.

Over 100 of you donated to help with this water installation. We raised just a little over our $4500 goal. That means the second water install we do was made possible by you, bloggers and readers of real live preacher. This is our project, you might say. That's why I'm so dedicated to documenting it for you.

Next time you hear from me should be Tuesday night.

peace,

rlp

ps - If you don't have Google Earth installed, you might want to. I'll be including longitide and latitude coordinates.

Tim writing from Jethro again with another minor technical update.

We are in the process of cleaning this site up so we can archive it and switch to the brand new rlp website we are building.

First congratulations and a huge Thank You is in order.
The rlp AntiSpam Squad deleted / removed over 130,000 spam comments. Thats amazing.

There is another minor job to do. 850 blog posts need to be checked for internal links and edited. I need some volunteers for this one as well. Please comment below this asking for access and then go to the instructions.
I will give you access as soon as possible after seeing your comment.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Tim

Just a quick note. Our family chose not to exchange presents this year. Instead we're taking a trip together. We'll be back January 4th. I'm not planning on doing any serious writing while we are gone, though I might post something here or there. Christian Century has two of my essays. I put a lot of time into them, and I'm anxious to post them here. But I'm waiting for them. One of them has to go in the magazine before I can put it online. The other is waiting for final edits. If one goes online, I'll post a link to it.

One of the nice things that happens if you are the pastor of a church for a long time is you get to watch children grow up. One family came to our church in 1990 with a 10th grader, an 8th grader, and a 5th grader. I have now married all three of them, and been there for the birth of three grandchildren. This is the kind of stuff you miss with the giant, "come and try us and if you don't like it try somewhere else" churches. They miss real intimacy. But real intimacy is hard, and it hurts when people leave. Maybe most people don't want that.

Chloe has been going to our church since before she was in school. She's like another daughter to me. She's kind of quirky and interesting and I love that about her. I've written about Chloe once seriously, and mentioned her in a few other posts.

Here's what Chloe and I look like now. We rang Salvation Army bells together this year at our local Walmart. She's growing so tall. I can't believe how she has grown

She's gotten big, our little Chloe. Hard to believe. Here's what I'm hoping for Chloe and all of the kids who grow up at our church. They know what it is like to be loved. Not just by their parents, but by a community of people who know them by name and let them have their own personality and ways. Chloe prays out loud for Gypsies every Sunday. That's her thing to do, and we take it seriously. And it has led to our children sending money off to India on a regular basis.

So Merry Christmas Chloe. You and your sister Brittney are like sisters 4 and 5. We love you both.

gordon (I'm not rlp to them)

There has been a fantastic response to the rlp AntiSpam Squad. The settings are all in place for you now to start "sweeping out the temple".
If you have commented in the rlp AntiSpam Squad post requesting your user name to be added to the list, then you should have access to the instructions.
Happy hunting.

Offline Advice
We will also be taking the site offline for some preliminary upgrade analysis and server checks Sunday morning AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) for about 3-4 hours. The site will return errors in that time as this old version of Drupal does not contain a nice "in maintenance mode".

Tim

Hi - Tim from Jethro here, sorry to hijack rlp for a technical thing, but I guess rlp has already started that with the previous post about this site.

First I want to thank all the rlp readers who have been commenting, and emailing Gordon with ideas. We are reviewing them all and who knows something may be just what we need! Keep them coming.

As Gordon mentioned this site is built on Drupal. Unfortunately a very old version - we hope just "young" enough that we can upgrade it. Drupal has some fantastic spam control in new versions so while we appreciate comments about fixing the spam problem, that is mostly in hand. The real issue is what to do about the existing comments.

We really don't want to just delete them all, though that is our fall back position. The rlp community obviously values the comments for the continued conversations sparked by rlp writing. There are some techie ways we can try and delete just the spam comments (involving mySQL and PHP queries) but we are not sure that we can make that work entirely successfully.

I want to throw an idea to you. It's crazy enough that rlp might have thought of it himself, though the credit falls to me.

I know there’s 3,000 odd of you readers on any given day, and there's over 1,000 of you who have created user accounts. The way I figure it is if even half of those people, say 500, could delete 100 spam comments each they would all be gone.
So here’s the plan.

If you want to help, and that’s a big if, only if you can spare maybe half an hour of your time, then create an account and add a comment here with your user name (or existing user name) offering to help.
I will give you access to delete comments, and some easy instructions. As a bonus, you will gain access to the rlp subscription area for a period as well. You will be known as the "rlp antispam squad".

If you want to go nuts, I will even ask the preacher to formally recognize the person who deletes the most spam comments.

Thanks for helping - and being part of this community. Personally, I see this like sweeping up the playground in your street after vandals have trashed it. That’s what a community does.

Peace.
Tim

One small act at a time

Last night around 10pm I posted an update about various things. Among them the fact that I had found myself suddenly in need of $950 in order to go on my January trip to the Dominican Republic to help install a water purification system. I really didn't know what was going to happen. I was pretty uncomfortable asking, but I didn't have much choice, and it seemed right to me. So I asked. I thought there was a pretty good chance enough of you would want to be a part of this project that I might be able to raise the entire amount by early January. I thought, "Well, even if I get close, that would help. If I get close I can surely scrape together a few hundred dollars between now and then."

One hour after I posted, I checked the donation page, just out of curiosity. I was hoping there might be a few dollars in there. You know, it was so soon. It was really more a compulsive thing. I didn't really expect there to be anything in there.

$650 had been donated. In one hour. By the time I went to bed it was close to $800. This morning when I woke it was exactly $950. Obviously the last person donated just the right amount at that point. $950 in 9 hours. I was absolutely speechless and filled with awe. I have no idea how many people read this blog. I know several thousand come each day. I try not to think about that when I write. As I've said before, I like to think of you as roughly 50 people. But however many of you there are, some of you have come to care for me even though we have never met in person. Your generosity is a powerful affirmation of this one act of goodness that is happening in January.

Most of you don't know each other, of course, though I'm aware of a number of friendships and even a romance or two that has happened between people "talking" in the comments and chatroom. But doesn't it feel like we're in this together? It does to me. I don't know. Do you think we have something going on here? Something we might call a community of some kind? What do I know? But I do know that the total is $1310 at the time of this posting and rising. Whatever I think is happening here, some proper stewardship on my part is in order. I've spent the night thinking about this. I feel like you're telling me this project is important to you, and you'd like to be a part of it.

I talked with the folks at Edge today. Here's what you and I can do with any additional funds we raise. Our team will be staying at the headquarters of Youth With A Mission in Santo Domingo. This particular YWAM group is also involved in water projects around the world. In fact, YWAM in Santo Domingo has a team in the Sahara right now installing purifiers. The guy leading that project was in training with me in October.  But they don't have clean water even in their own headquarters in Santo Domingo. They have to drink bottled water.

That's pretty stunning. They are in the Sahara installing a better water system than they have in their own headquarters.

So if we get enough money together - you and I - then when I go to the Dominican Republic in January, the team I'm on will also install a purifying system at the YWAM headquarters. That way they will have clean water and so will teams like mine that are staying there for various service projects. AND (this is the cool part) Edge can use that place as a training center to teach local groups about water purification and health issues. You need a purification system in place if you are going to teach people how to install and use them.

So if you can get the big picture - this trip could make possible local efforts in Santo Domingo to bring clean water to this part of the world. And local efforts are always the best kind of efforts. It's the whole "teaching a man to fish" thing.* The total cost of a basic system is $3500. What's nice is, there would be no extra travel expenses since we'll already be there.

I don't know if there are enough of us to put together another $3500. That doesn't really matter right now. You can't see this as me asking for more money. This is me trying to figure out a way to bless and affirm the money you are giving without me asking. If we come up short, I promise the money will be used in some way to bring fresh, clean water to people who need it. The simplest human need beyond air. Clean water. But if we get $3500 by early January, then Real Live Preacher readers will officially have sponsored our own act of goodness in the world.

Of course I will blog about the trip as it is happening. Which will be very cool since you'll be able to see it.

Let's just see what happens. This isn't something to worry about or stress over or wish about or even try to control. This is one of those things that are bigger than any of us. We simply respond as things unfold.

Thank you,

Gordon (your real live preacher)

If you want to be a part of this - donate here

* Proverb: "If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day. If you teach him to fish you feed him for a lifetime."

Hello there,

I have a number of things to tell you about. I’ll take them in order of importance.

My trip to the Dominican Republic

Back in October I went to Louisville to learn how to install water purifiers. I wrote about this while I was there. At the time I mentioned that I planned to go with Edge to the Dominican Republic in January on a team that will be installing a very large purification system in a hospital.

I thought I had all the details down regarding this trip. Trips overseas are expensive, whether you are going on vacation or for a project. The short version is that I just found out that this trip is going to cost $950 more than I anticipated. I’m sure the fault is mine. It almost always is with things like this. (Remember the church sign?)

Um...okay I’ll just say it. I need $950 pretty quickly. I can’t cancel Christmas at the Atkinson house. I wouldn’t do that, but it’s a moot point. Whatever Jeanene and I are doing for the girls and each other is already paid for anyway.

If you would like to sponsor me on this trip, I’d appreciate it. Edge created a page for donations to help me raise this money. There’s even a little counter so you can see how much has been donated. Hopefully the total will get to $950. Hey, even $10 would help. I just need 95 people do do that.

One of my jobs on the team, along with the installation work, will be documenting the trip in pictures and posting daily at Real Live Preacher. You’ll be able to watch the installation as it happens.

So...let’s move on because there are few things more awkward and uncomfortable than asking for donations and I really hate that I’m in this situation...

RLP software upgrade & spam

This site is uses Drupal, an open source content management program. It was rather state-of-the-art when Matt Sturges built it a few years ago. I went with Drupal because it has a lot of modules and things that I thought would be nice. In the years since, Typepad and Wordpress have gotten pretty sophisticated. If I was designing the site now I’d probably go with one of those.

But...I have users and subscribes, etc. The archived content of this site is pretty complex, and recreating it would be a lot of work. So I don’t want to leave Drupal. But comment spam is so bad that I’m forced to do something about it. A lot of my writing in the archives is littered with the most unbelievably filthy comments. Really awful stuff.

Comment spammers have gotten pretty sophisticated. They don’t hit the stuff on the front page where I would notice it immediately. It all gets posted on old things buried back in the archives.

Drupal has great comment spam tools now, but my old version can’t use them. Grrr. So I have to upgrade. But working with Drupal is beyond me.

Enter Tim Miller and his company, Jethro. Tim lives in Australia and has been reading my blog for a long time.  He has a blog of his own that is a part of the High Calling Blog network that I helped setup. His company also happens to specialize in Drupal. We were emailing back and forth, and he offered to let Jethro take over the software management of this site, leaving me free to write the content and not worry about it anymore. They are doing this at no charge. This gives Jethro a chance to showcase their mad Drupal skills on a site with decent traffic.

It’s one of those times when two needs come together and everyone is happy.

The very day I handed over the keys to RLP (administrative access to the site), Drupal broke. I mean it just stopped working. So it was a little embarrassing - "Thanks for taking over the site. It's broken, so can you fix it?" Tim had to figure out what was wrong, which he did quickly. His techie Rohan had no trouble putting things right. Whew. Talk about good timing! Needless to say, I’m very thankful for the folks at Jethro right now.

So why am I telling you all of this?

I’ll be getting a new version of Drupal with spam protection, but there is a problem. Tim estimates that there are 50,000 spam comments in my archives. There is no easy way to get rid of them. Going through and manually deleting them is obviously out of the question. We could just delete all the old comments, but I’m not going to do that. The comments are one of the ways you participate in Real Live Preacher, and that’s important.

I notice a number of you have had suggestions for the folks at Jethro in dealing with this. If you know something or have any ideas about how to get rid of all that old spam, let us know.

Before I leave this subject, let me say that Rohan would like your prayers. His newborn daughter Caitlyn has a rare disorder and is blind. You can visit her website here. Prayers for his family are appreciated.

I've asked for prayers a few times over the years. So many readers of rlp are not particularly religious - a thing I like. I've always been impressed by the response. Those whose spiritual discipline calls them to pray do so. Others leave respectful comments. I can feel those of you who do not pray looking on with a gentle respect for our traditions. For we are called to pray for each other, we Christians. It's not a matter of understanding what happens when we pray. It's something we do because we are called by Christ to do so. So yes, I stopped today and prayed for Caitlyn and her family. In that moment, in some mysterious way, I was connected to this family on the other side of the world.

I don't understand it. I just do it.

The Sign Saga

If you don't know about the sign, read this.

Well, Reggie saved the day. As usual. He found a very smart way to extend the sign so that it fit between the poles. Admittedly, there is now a line and some extra space to the right and left of the lettering, but given how messed up this whole thing was, I'm thankful that we have any sign at all. And I think it's amazing how good it looks. Here's the sign:

Click for an enlarged view

And here's a close-up so you can see how he did it. The sign fits into a slot on each pole. Reggie used three pieces of plywood and sandwiched the sign cleverly between them. Amazing.

Click for an enlarged view

It feels like I have a lot going on right now.

rlp

Hey everyone. Tim Miller is the new guy in charge of the technical end of things here at rlp. I'll write a little more about him tomorrow. We met by chance, but he came along just in time.

I have two pieces being considered by the Christian Century and am working on a third serious piece which will go there or here. This one is tentatively called "Let's Put the X Back in Xmas."

While I finish that, I have a number of things to tell you about tomorrow:

1. Reggie Regan saved the day on the sign. I have pics.

2. A new RLP will roll out soon. Same basic look but new Drupal and probably some new stuff. I have a hard decision to make regarding the old comments and a plague of comment spam. I want to ask you what you think I should do about that.

3. I just found out that my trip to install water purifiers in the Dominican Republic in January costs more than I thought. I'm going to humbly ask for a little help. Tell you about that tomorrow as well.

For now, I'm thankful for Tim Miller getting the site back running.

Until tomorrow...

rlp

The blog is behaving kind of wonky. Someone on my shared server did something that messed things up somehow. That's all I know. Apparently most people can't see any images.

I'm in the process of turning this blog over to a serious IT guy, but we're just getting started. Anyway, I'm sure I'll get it figured out soon.

The big one, not those other two

Everyone makes mistakes now and again. Mostly you hope that your mistakes will be little and not cost money and not put people out or hurt them in any way. But yeah, we all make mistakes.

I had jury duty today. It's the third time I've had it since moving to San Antonio in 1989. The first time I got questioned a couple of times but ended up sitting around reading the whole day. The second time I was excused because I had primary childcare responsibilities for small children.

Today I spent 9 hours in a pool of potential jurors for one trial. In the end I was selected to serve on the jury. I can't speak about this case at all, but I will say that a person's life rests in our hands. This isn't some small thing. For reasons I can't discuss, the case will definitely be done by Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning.

I didn't want to do this. I was hoping they wouldn't take me. I knew Monday would be lost, and I didn't want to lose more days in my week. I need to be writing. Our family rather depends on that these days. I confess that I was thinking of answering the questions, well, honestly but using any angle I could to get dismissed.

Then I watched the sacred manner in which the judge and lawyers treated the jury pool. They stood respectfully each time we entered the room. I looked at the defendant, who isn't the sort of person that anyone would like. And I realized that being on a jury is a sacred calling. You follow the letter of the law because it is larger than you are. Sort of like saluting a superior officer out of respect for the rank, regardless of what you think of the person. So I said this little prayer and I told God that I didn't want to do this, but that I would answer every question with absolute honesty. If chosen, I would consider the task to be a sacred one, a holy calling. If chosen, then this task would become the most important thing in my life for a period of time. That seems only right, given how critical a trial can be for those involved.

There were 60 potential jurors, and I was one of the 12 they selected. The lawyers and judge stood as we left the crowd of 60 and filed silently into our 12 seats. The judge spoke gravely to us about what we were about to do. This was at the very end of the day. The bailiff said "All rise for the jury," and everyone in the room stood up again while we left the room. The whole thing was done with such care and dignity. I feel a huge weight on my shoulders tonight, for tomorrow I will be one of 12 who will decide the fate of another human being. Comfort comes in being willing to treat the task seriously, being prayerful if that's your thing, and following the instructions of the court with absolute care and precision.

So I'll be out until at least Wednesday sometime. I know there will be much to write about in this experience

rlp

I finally did it. I bought a Mac. A MacBook Pro, to be specific. I've been a PC guy since 1990. So how did this happen?

I remember I wanted a Mac back in the late 1980s. The interface was cool. (Remember those blue monochrome screens on those first generation Macs?) And I remember thinking the mouse was a cool idea as well. But Macs were expensive, and I didn't have much money. So I sold a bunch of stuff and bought my first computer in 1990, a little XT with an amber monochrome monitor and a 20 megabyte hard drive. No Windows back then. I was running...I think Dos 3.3. I got a disk that taught me DOS commands. I made my own little menu out of batch files and ran Word Perfect.

After that I just moved up over the years. 386, 486, Pentium, and so on. Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, and XP. During that time I amassed a lot of software and thousands of documents. Consider this: I have every document I've produced for our church in the last 10 years in Microsoft Publisher. I've been using FrontPage since 1997. You get sort of stuck in a system. And for someone like me, who has no problem doing whatever I need to do with a PC, there had to be a compelling reason to change. Because you KNOW a change will be painful.

You know, the Mac's got the same shit we got over here, but it's the little differences.

So what tipped the scale?

First, I'm sick of Microsoft. I'm sick of Windows. I'm sick of installing the latest version of Windows and watching it slow to a crawl 6 months later, because it's full of spyware and patches and stranded temporary files from the scores of times I had to shut it down by turning off the power because it was hung up. I'm sick of looking down and seeing my system tray full of stuff using my resources, and I don't even know how some of it got there. I'm sick of little windows popping open every 30 minutes telling me I need to update this or that or install a security patch of some kind.

I'm tired of Windows. It seems bloated and inefficient and ridiculous. What is Windows XP doing for me, substantively, that Windows 95 wasn't doing? What is Word 2003 doing for me that Word 97 wasn't doing? I have computers that are so much more powerful than the ones I ran in the 90s, but I'm doing the same old stuff. And still dragging along.

Yeah.

So I needed a new computer anyway. My old notebook is 2.5 years old, and when you have as much critical data on a computer as I do, it's not a bad idea to consider buying a new one every few years. Do I want Vista on my new computer? The problems are probably exaggerated, but I think it's clear Vista isn't any cleaner and less cumbersome. The answer to that is NO. So I decided I was going to bite the bullet and transition to a clean operating system. For me that meant Linux Ubuntu or Macintosh. I looked long and hard at this. Ubuntu is apparently wonderful. Runs like a Olympic sprinter on 1 gig of RAM. But Ubuntu is the sort of thing serious techies can run. I'd be stuck with mainly open source software, and let's face it - open source software gets the job done, but the interface isn't always as friendly. I'm sorry nerds, Gimp is no substitute for Photoshop if you've been using Photoshop for 7 or 8 years.

Even so, I was about to go Ubuntu because I could get a $1600 notebook and put Ubuntu on it and go gangbusters, or so they say.

Then I saw Mac OS X Leopard and Parallels. I can run Windows XP inside a window on a Mac? I can run Publisher in there so that I don't have to convert the 1500 church documents I have nicely laid out? I can still run Frontpage? And what did you say? I can copy and paste back and forth from Windows to the Mac?

Game over. I'm now an uber-cool, smug Mac user. I hate PCs now. I don't even want to handle them unless I have to. I rather resent seeing XP come up on my beautiful Leopard desktop. I'm watching those "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials and just laughing, shaking my head at poor old pathetic PC. I'm even considering revising my own personal computer history. What was probably happening was that I was just a spy for Macintosh all those years. Yeah, that's what it was. I was undercover or something. Deep undercover. I'll work out the details of the story later.

In the meantime, here's a picture my Macintosh took of me this morning. She (of course my Mac is a she) suggested 4-up sepia, shadowed on a gray background. I was sleepy so I said, "Just do whatever you want, sweetheart."

rlp

ps - I will post a listing of all the difficult transitions, and there are a number of them. Give me a couple of weeks. Oh, and if you plan to run Parallels, you better get as much processor as you can and 2 gig of Ram. I mean, you are running to complete operating systems and software to help them play nice.

Some of you may remember that my wife Jeanene makes jewelry and prayer beads. Last year she sold some online. She had a great time, but there was no time to keep it going. Every piece she makes is a unique creation. It's not like this is mass marketing stuff. Now that Jeanene has left the hospital, she's getting back into making jewelry and prayer beads. She now makes both Anglican and Catholic rosaries, as well as necklaces. She has 9 new pieces for sale, all one-of-a-kind things. We're looking for ways to make a living, so this will be one piece of the puzzle.

This time around she has some crosses and bead selections online, so you can look through her gallery and if you see something she once made, you could choose a cross and some colors and she'll make something custom for you.

Here's three of her new things:

Turquoise Cross Necklace $65

Crown of Thorns Anglican Rosary/Necklace $80

San Damiano Cross Anglican Rosary or Necklace $50

There is a retail store here in town that wants to carry her stuff. But the markup will be huge. So our first choice would be online where it's probably 50% cheaper than it will be in the store.

rlp

ps - you've got to check out the "about" link. There's a precious picture of Jeanene as a girl in Colorado. That's where she first fell in love with the rocks she now uses in her jewelry. Cutest picture EVER.

When we built our church facility back in 1999, our general contractor installed industrial-quality, Corbin Russwin automatic door closers on every door in the place. These things are fascinating. When you push on a door to open it, there is resistance because that action is forcing a plunger into a cylinder, compressing the air inside it. Energy from your body is being transferred in some mysterious way to the cylinder, which then holds that energy in a potential form. When you let go of the door, the plunger is forced out of the cylinder, which then closes the door by means of a system of connected rods.

Here’s another way to think about it: because the cylinder makes the door harder to open, you are forced to use additional energy to open it, but that energy is then stored and used to close the door automatically when you let go of it.

The whole thing is quite clever.

These heavy-duty, door closing units are pretty sophisticated and cost about $100 each. We have 20 doors in our building, so we have about $2000 invested in automatic door closing, which is a pity since as it turns out, only the external doors and the restroom doors have any need for this luxury. In fact, a door that always closes automatically can be a pain-in-the-ass. I got tired of trying to hold doors open with my rear end when my hands were full of boxes or books or whatever.

So a few months after we moved into our building, I arrived one morning with 20 door-holding-open machines, commonly known as stoppers. These particular stoppers are metal pegs with rubber feet. You attach them to the bottom of the door. Then you can flip the peg down with your foot when you want to prop the door open. They were $11 a piece.

As I understand it, the stoppers increase the inertia of the door to a point where the air pressure in the cylinder is not sufficient to close it. But that’s just fancy talk. They keep the doors open; that’s the important thing.

And so it was that we came to this ridiculous place: on the top of each door is a $100 machine that converts human energy into potential energy that is constantly pushing against the door, wanting to close it. At the bottom of each door is a simpler, but no less effective, $11 machine that makes the door so hard to close that the top machine is unable to do the job it was designed for and for which we paid good money for it to do.

It was four years before I saw this absurdity for what it was. It hit me like a flash of enlightenment one summer day while I was looking at one of the doors. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I saw things as they were. I laughed out loud at the sight of a $100 door closer straining as hard as it could to close a door held open by an $11 stopper.

“This is insane,” I said to myself. “All of this work, worry, and energy serves to create a state of affairs that we could have had if we had never installed closers or stoppers at all. We have set energy against inertia, all to maintain a kind of doorway deadlock. We could have had immobility if we had done nothing at all.”

I got up from my chair and wandered around the church, looking at all the door closers and their corresponding stoppers. One of these doors, the door to the kitchen, had been held open since the previous summer. I think I was the last one to open it, which means that energy from the breakfast taco I had that morning ended up being stored inside this cylinder for more than a year.

I reached up and touched the cylinder. For some reason I expected it to be warm. Warm from the exertion of pushing against a door for a solid year. But of course the energy inside is potential. It’s somehow real but not real until the door is released. Don’t you think that when the air whooshed out of the cylinder, it should have smelled like tacos?

It didn’t, but that would have been cool, right?

I decided to do something about this situation. I brought my drill to church along with a set of screwdriver bits. I removed 6 or 7 screws and took down the Corbin Russwin door closing machine. Then I knelt and removed the four screws holding the door stopper in place. Once liberated from these opposing forces, the kitchen door swung easily on its hinges. I can now open the door with one finger. I can move it to any position between open and closed and there it sits happily until someone moves it. I’m working with inertia now, instead of fighting against it. It’s an amazingly efficient way to do things.

The only thing more absurd than the whole situation was how excited I was about the newly liberated door. I had to tell the very next person who came down the hall.

“Hey, check this out.”

I swung the door open and shut.

“Open, shut, or anywhere in between. The door does whatever I want. Isn’t that cool?”

I don’t remember who it was, but she was understandably perplexed by my enthusiasm. Come to think of it, she might have been this woman who left the church around that time. She probably had the idea that the pastor should be working on sermons or visiting the sick or something like that instead of doing junior physics experiments with the door hardware. And I must admit, she’s probably right. Thank goodness I’m alone at the church most of the time so nobody knows what the hell I’m up to.

Anyway, this whole thing with doors got me thinking that deadlock is such a tiring way to stand still and do nothing. All of that straining and grunting. Losing a little ground, then gritting your teeth and pushing harder against whatever force is opposing you.

But we humans love to grapple. We like to lock arms and growl and push each other around. We like the feeling of one force moving another. We like power, and we like to use power. And if you look around the world, a lot of things that appear to be stationary are not moving because they are pushing hard against something that is immovable. You see this all the time. Especially at family reunions.

We set power against power and force against inertia. It’s what we like to do. We move things around our world and it makes us so happy. And there are times when force and power and moving things around is the right thing. There are times for that.

But there are also times when it is so much better to stop pushing against things and let them be. There are times when the doors should swing freely. Let them be open or closed. Just let them be. There are times to walk gently on our planet and see if it is possible that you pass on your way and leave not one stone overturned or one tender branch bent.

There are times.

Times to get out of the way and let people or plants grow as they will.

Times to let go of someone and allow them to live their life for better or for worse.

Times to sit quietly around the fire with mother myth and all the other earth children. Just listen to the story, child. Let it be.

Times to let the children eat when they are hungry and go to bed when they are sleepy. Perhaps not every night, but there are times.

There are these times. And if you can learn to see them and embrace them, you will begin to develop the soul of an artist and a saint.

rlp

Maybe you noticed I was gone for a few days. I had some pretty important stuff going on, and I just didn’t have any energy to write. I’m going to tell you what happened to us. I could have written this without so much detail, but I think the details might be important for someone who is in the same situation.

Four days ago Jeanene and I were looking at the real possibility of our entire family being medically uninsured. No insurance of any kind for us or our children.

Jeanene quit her job, as I’ve mentioned. After 20 years of chaplaincy, 20 years of being on-call for emergencies, she was through. I could see it in her eyes. Some essential part of Jeanene  was gone. Used up. And our children, particularly our middle daughter, really need a parent at home right now.

She had to stop. An opportunity for me to do some blogging work with The Christian Century and The High Calling gave us a chance to let her retire from being a chaplain. We're taking a significant pay cut, so it's risky. And there is no guarantee the blog networks I work with will continue. This was an important decision for us and we agonized over it. But sometimes in life you take a leap of faith. The faith we have is not a faith that God will rescue us physically and make sure that everything is okay. The Creator of the Universe has obviously made peace with the idea of mostly letting things unfold here according to our choices and the natural movement of the planet.

The faith we have comes with believing that it was the right thing for her to leave. The right thing for her health and our family. We felt peace about it. So we held hands and jumped.

---

About 6 years ago, when Jeanene was laid off for a period of two years, we called Blue Cross Blue Shield and had health insurance for our entire family in a matter of days. We thought we’d be able to do that again.

We were wrong.

Our middle daughter has had some emotional traumas in the last couple of years. She’s told me that I could write about our journey through all of that, but it hasn’t felt right yet so I haven’t. With a lot of help and with two serious medications, she’s doing well. She’s been doing very well since the Spring.

Unfortunately, those two drugs and something she went through in January make her untouchable. There isn’t an insurance company in America that will take her. Even if we release the insurance company from all mental health benefit obligations. Even if, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, they don’t cover any mental health benefits anyway. Even so, no one will take her. She’s tainted because of something that happened to her. It’s strictly an emotional thing. She has no physical problems.

As it turns out, no one will take me either. Why? Because I’ve been taking Wellbutrin for 2 years. It works beautifully. It’s given me back my life. If you read my pieces on depression you know how much I HATED to admit that I needed help with a drug. But I obviously did.

But that’s it for me. I was turned down by Blue Cross Blue Shield even though they don’t pay for any mental heath issues anyway. I was even turned down by the insurance provider for Texas Baptist ministers who serve small churches without benefits. I thought they would listen and give us a chance. Nope.

I’m a bad risk now. That’s the thing. Good heart. No cancer. No high blood pressure. Low cholesterol. I’ve never even had surgery. I don’t smoke. I’ve only missed two Sundays in 17 years as a pastor for illness. I’m a healthy guy, and I’m used to being treated like a healthy guy.

But I take Wellbutrin, so there must be something wrong with me, right?

Actually, it’s not quite as personal as someone looking you in the eye and saying, “You're a bad risk.” The health insurance industry is too big for that. They have computer-generated statistics that tell them people who take drugs for mental health reasons are bad risks - period. I am a clear exception to that rule, but that’s the rule.

Congress passed a law called COBRA in 1986 that requires employers to allow you to keep your insurance if you leave their company. They don't have to help you pay for it anymore, but they have to carry you - at your own expense - for at least 18 months. We went online and discovered that it was going to cost us $1600 a month to keep our insurance. And of course, that's only for 18 months. 18 Months from now we would be in the same position.

We can’t afford that, so it’s really no option for us. Please! That’s more than our house payment. Technically the hospital has fulfilled the obligation of the law, but I don’t know too many families who can afford $1600 a month for health insurance.

Texas has a state-subsidized health insurance pool for people who can’t get health insurance. Shelby and I could go into the state pool, leaving Jeanene and the other two girls to get their insurance in a more traditional way. But now COBRA really comes back to bite you. The State insurance pool won’t take you if you have any other options. Even if your only option isn’t really an option because you don’t have $1600 a month.

We were falling into a crack in the system. We can’t afford what the insurance company grudgingly offers ex-employees at an insane price. And we don’t quality for the State insurance pool because they did offer us something.

By Tuesday we had admitted defeat.

---

I’m going to tell you right now that this story has a happy ending. But it could have gone the other way. Very easily could have gone the other way.

We found a man in town who is a kind of independent health insurance broker. He knows the system, and he can figure out ways for you to get insurance. It’s not always great insurance, but he can find something. He’s really good at what he does. I wouldn’t assume that many people can find someone like him.

What if we hadn’t found out about him? Or what if we lived in some other city and couldn't find someone like this? I keep thinking about that. What if?

But we did find him. He came to our house on Wednesday and got right to work. He pulled Shelby out of our family, as far as insurance is concerned. Jeanene’s company has to cover her for 18 months because of the COBRA law. If it is just her, the cost of COBRA drops to $300 a month. In 18 months that benefit will run out and she can go into the Texas pool for the uninsured. Even this specialist admits that no one will ever cover Shelby for anything as long as she is on the medication that is making her well and keeping her from harming herself. Ironic, huh?

He knew of an insurance company - a good one - that will take someone like me, someone who takes Wellbutrin or some other drug for depression. They won’t cover me for mental health benefits - that’s over for me - but they will at least cover me for regular medical coverage. And it’s affordable.

You put the whole thing together and it comes out to about $900 a month. That figure includes my medication, which I will have to pay for myself from now on. That’s double what we were paying through Jeanene’s work, but we can swing that. It’s going to be hard but we can do it. So the story has a happy ending. Or at least a tolerable one.

So why am I telling you all of this? Because this is what people are going through in our country. Jeanene and I work hard. We’ve never been unemployed. In fact, for the last decade, we’ve had three jobs between us. We don’t smoke and we don’t take risks. We’ve never had a single major medical incident. You’d think a company would want to insure us.

No. And we came just that close to being uninsured.

For many people this is never an issue because they work for companies with insurance plans. If our church were large enough to have a plan, we could have moved from Jeanene’s plan to my church’s plan. With group insurance they have to take you if you currently have coverage.

That’s great for families with that option. But what about families that only have one person working for a company with insurance? If that person loses their job or can no longer work for any reason, you have to get individual coverage. And with individual coverage, they can turn you down for any reason they want.

You want to know something else? If you apply for insurance and get turned down two or three times, that goes on your record. Every time you get denied, other companies become even more unwilling to consider you. With two or three rejections in your history (for any reason), you can become uninsurable pretty quickly.

What I’m saying to you is, hard-working people who are physically healthy sometimes can’t get health insurance. It almost happened to us. If we hadn’t found this man and our insurance had lapsed for more than 60 days, then we would really have been in trouble. Because being uninsured is yet another big mark against you in the system.

People - it’s time we admit that the system isn’t working. We are going to have to have some kind of a national health care program. It won’t be perfect, but it will be better than what we have now. We need it, and we need it quickly.

rlp

The first pastor of our church left rather suddenly in 1992, five years after the church was formed. I was 31 years old, and when the church asked if I would take his place I was happy to do so, though I did not anticipate the troubles that would come with that transition. It's always hard when a beloved pastor leaves a church. There is the grief that comes from the loss of that relationship. And everyone knows that things will likely change with a new minister. It’s a hard time for a church, a time of uncertainty.

When our first pastor left, a number of families left with him. I think we lost about a third of our church in a matter of weeks. That was not a good sign, and I knew it. It was a sign that we had been too dependent on his personality for our identity. I tried not to take the people leaving personally, but I was young and took everything personally. I wondered if their departure might be a sign that they were uncertain about me. I was worried and for good reason. New churches are fragile things. If a new church begins a downward spiral, things can fall apart rather quickly. Some new churches don’t survive because they couldn’t weather their first major crisis. I became anxious and found myself trying hard to keep the remaining families happy so they wouldn’t leave as well.

In truth we were in a difficult spot, but giving in to that kind of anxiety is always a bad move for a minister. However, I was young and doing the best that I could at the time.

All of this happened about the same time that I met rabbi Jonah and his friend Robert in a computer store. I overheard Jonah talking about some kind of Hebrew program. I was interested and asked some questions about it myself. Before I knew it the three of us were having coffee together.

Jonah and Robert were both bound to wheelchairs, Jonah because of polio and Robert because of muscular dystrophy. For the next year or so, I would go to visit them, load them into their van – which was equipped with a wheelchair lift – and drive them around town. We talked about theology, the scriptures, and the relationship between our respective faith traditions. I liked them. Jonah could be a bit overbearing at times, and he was certainly manipulative. I was aware of how he always managed to talk me into doing things for them even as I was letting him get away with it. I had never had friends in wheelchairs before, and I was rather over-anxious to please them and be nice. And, as I said before, I was young and fairly naïve about a number of things.

That Spring I thought it would be nice for our church to have a Passover Seder together. The Passover meal is strictly a Jewish observance, but many Christian churches - recognizing our obvious historical and theological dependency on Judaism - will sometimes have a Seder meal as a kind of religious education exercise.

And, I thought, who better to lead us in this sacred meal than my own rabbi friend, Jonah? When I asked him, Jonah was obviously pleased and readily agreed. At the time Jonah was not serving a congregation, so I thought this would be nice for him. And I thought our church would benefit from the cultural and spiritual exchange. I admit that I was also hoping something like this would help solidify our sense of community as we continued to adjust to the loss of our pastor and the families who left with him. It was all good in my mind. There were no downsides that I could see.

As the time for the Seder grew close, Jonah provided us with a list of supplies and detailed recipes for the various dishes involved in the ceremony. A number of women in our church took the recipes and prepared the food according to his instructions. We had about 30 people planning to attend, which was roughly half of our church at the time. The afternoon before the meal, we setup tables in a church member’s home and made ready for Jonah and Robert’s arrival.

When I got to their house, Jonah and Robert were dressed in their finest clothes and were both wearing ceremonial yarmulkes. We chatted excitedly on the way, and when we arrived everyone crowded around them both, making them feel welcome. The people of our church sort of felt like they knew Jonah because I had mentioned him and the things he had taught me about Judaism in several sermons.

The meal began and Jonah carefully explained the meaning behind all of the symbols and dishes. The Passover Seder is an allegorical meal that commemorates God leading the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Each dish has a specific meaning. The whole thing was fascinating for about 45 minutes. Then the food was gone and Jonah began speaking on a variety of topics, apparently whatever was coming to his mind. Things began to drag a bit. Jonah kept talking. He got lost in what he was saying and wasn’t paying attention to what was happening around him. I noticed people reaching the limits of their attention spans and disconnecting. Children were getting fussy and fidgety. People began to rest their heads in their hands and look around the room. Being ultimately responsible for what happens at church events like this, I began to be very uncomfortable about the deterioration of interest in the room.

Jonah, on the other hand, seemed to have no awareness whatsoever of the feedback their body language was giving him. He was lost in the beauty of his tradition and spoke on and on, his eyes partially closed and his voice a grinding monotone. Twenty minutes turned into thirty minutes and then to forty-five. I kept looking for an opening so that I could break in and draw this thing to a close, but there were no pauses and I couldn’t catch Jonah’s eye.

Finally, just when I thought the people in the room couldn’t stand it any longer, Jonah paused and took a deep breath. Apparently he had reached the end of his long discourse. When everyone sensed he was coming to a close, they reconnected with him. There was no ill will in the group. After all, he was rather elderly and our guest. But still, I could tell that everyone was happy this was finally coming to an end. And so was I.

Jonah looked around the room very deliberately, as if taking measure of the people. Then - and I will never forget this moment if I live to be a hundred - he carefully pressed the fingertips of his two hands together in front of him, and said, “Now, let me explain to you why it is simply not possible that Jesus could be the messiah.”

Having relaxed a bit as he seemed to be coming to a close, these words hit me like a sledgehammer. I felt a rush of panic. I looked around the room to see mouths dropping open. Children were looking curiously at their parents. “Mommy, what’s that man saying about Jesus?” One or two people looked a little angry. A man named Steve, one of our few new members, crossed his arms and looked like someone had suggested to him that our church take up communism and maybe devil worship while we were at it.

If this happened now, I would have stopped him. I would have simply stood up and said, “Jonah, thank you for coming. Time is late and we’d better bring this to a close. Blah blah blah.” No problem. But I was young and nice and anxious, and I had not imagined myself in this position. So Jonah spoke for five or six minutes and explained to us all the reasons why a central truth of Christianity simply could not be true.

I really don’t remember anything that he said. I was too busy looking at the faces of the people and wondering how many of them might not come back. It was one of the most awkward and uncomfortable things I’ve ever sat through. When Jonah finished his diatribe, the evening was over. I felt absolutely miserable. I was the new pastor of this small, still-grieving church, supposedly a gatekeeper of the content of our worship, and I had set this whole thing up. I wondered if there might be an emergency business meeting later that night which would result in me being asked to leave.

I loaded the two of them into their van in the darkness. I didn’t know what to say. I was hurt and angry that he would put me in such an awkward position. I stared straight ahead as I pulled the lever that lifted their chairs up into the van. As I pulled out of the driveway, Jonah said, “Well, I think that went pretty well, don’t you?” I said nothing. I just drove them home.

Apparently it never occurred to Jonah that it might be somewhat offensive to show up as a guest at a Christian church, be given a platform, then say such difficult and frightening things in a group of families with children. I really don't think he had any idea that what he had said was painful for the group. He was lost in the beauty of his tradition and blundered clumsily through ours without thinking much about it.

As it turned out, almost everyone thought it was rather funny. Some saw how bad I felt about the whole thing and felt badly for me. Nothing came of it. Well, Steve and his family left the church, but they were probably going to leave anyway. And honestly, I really didn't mind seeing them go. Steve was a pretty angry guy. Something or other would have eventually pissed him off anyway.

Nothing like that ever happened again with Jonah. He and Robert and I remained friends. I never said anything to him about the event. Maybe I should have, but I don't know what that conversation would have done for anyone.

And maybe it was a good thing for us to have experienced after all. Because Christianity is the dominant religious expression in our culture, Christians are usually on the other side of these situations. We are often the ones who pray at gatherings of Christians, Jews, and others and use the name of Jesus in ways that must make our friends uncomfortable. At every turn, the words and symbols of Christianity blare out of radios and shout from the street corners. Secular people and those of other faiths are often left to stand in silence while our words of faith swirl uncomfortably around them.

Having once been on the painful side of a collision between religious traditions, my suggestion is for all of us is to cultivate a healthy sense of humor and a deliberate tolerance in mixed companies. Our philosophies, theologies, and religious practices are bound to collide sometimes. It's going to happen. And sometimes when it happens, no one meant any harm. Most of us are guilty of mental lapses now and then. Our continued good will and the cultivating of cooperation between religions is far more important than any theological point you might want to make.

And if perchance someone from another tradition says something that rubs you the wrong way, remember that they have no power over you and your faith. Let the event be something that we learn from and not something that tears us apart.

rlp

Note: I first wrote about Jonah and Robert in this story. Later I wrote this. When Jonah died, I wrote about that too.

Passover Seder

So we've all been hearing about Web 2.0. It's sort of like the word postmodern. People say it - you even say it - but the meaning behind it is slippery.

I've had an intuitive "feel" for Web 2.0 for a long time. That's what brought me to blogging, strangely enough. I wanted to write and "felt" that this was a good way to do it. I'm rather stuck between traditional media and social media. I did write a book, but it didn't sell that well, and I don't care enough to try to do anything about that. I do write for a magazine, but I send them traffic with my blog. Where do I fit in all this?

Once traditional media sources were the gatekeepers, the lords of information. And we needed these experts. We still need them, but we need them in different ways. In the new world of information, millions of people write and tag information either formally with tagging systems, or informally by linking to something they like. Good, reliable information rises to the top through a fascinating system of trust and reputation. Break that trust and you'll find your links disappearing quickly and your traffic dwindling.

We need experts to help tag information and create the links and the networks. You won't be as much of a star as a columnist or anchor-person, but you will be in the game. You probably won't be in the game if you can't let go of traditional media ideas.

Write well. Write about true things. Write responsibly and use the best information you can gather. People will read you and tag you and link to you. Good information has a way of rising to the top. Not all good information rises to the top, but that's always been the case. Not every good writer was published in the old system either. Occasionally some junk gets through, but that's always been the case as well. Trust me on this: if you are a writer, you have a better chance in this new world. More good writers will be read in our new world of networked information.

If these changes threaten or anger you, join in the conversation. But PLEASE resist the juvenile urge to find some single perceived flaw with the Internet and trumpet it loudly and with glee. e.g. the Wikipedia critics who keep telling us that bad information could get in. GASP! REALLY? I'll keep that in mind as I weigh the benefits of this massive and constantly updating information network against my 2001 Encyclopedia Britannica.

This developing information system isn't perfect. No system is. Would you like us to list the flaws inherent in newspapers and television news? Do you really want to compare the amount and quality of information that a motivated person could gather 25 years ago with the information an experienced internet veteran can gather in 20 minutes today?

Check out this video. It tells the story pretty well.

Hat tip to TGIS.

rlp

sup ya'll.
this is rlp's homie g.
first star on the belt.
word.
no thoughts going on in this tank.
go see martian child.
kissies!