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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

a Christian Magazine 
Christian Writing

rlp

 

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)

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."

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.

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!

What if you and I could sit across the table from each other tonight, under the stars? What would you say to me? Some people say, “I’ve read a lot of your writing, you know?”

“Yeah?” I say.

There’s not much to say after that. “Thanks” doesn’t seem to work. “That’s cool” sounds arrogant, like it’s somehow cool to have read things that I wrote. Mostly I just hold still until the moment passes.

“Is that weird?” people sometimes ask. “Is it weird to suddenly find out that some stranger knows a lot of personal stuff about you, and you don’t know anything about them?”

This really does happen to me. It happened to me last week, as a matter of fact. A guy named Gary at a coffee shop. Really great guy. English accent. We ended up talking for about two hours.

“No,” I say. “It’s not weird because I don’t think about it. It’s like it’s not happening.”

That’s the truth. It’s as if someone said, “I saw you naked two weeks ago.” Yeah? Well, you’re not seeing me naked now, so I guess it doesn’t bother me too much unless we keep talking about it.

Now if I could ask you something – anything – I would say, “Do you believe in things that we might want to be true, but for which there isn’t a lot of hard evidence, maybe no hard evidence at all?”

I’d be trying to ask if you are a faith person. Any kind of faith person. Maybe you believe in Buddha, or Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any number of other ideas about an eternal being or beings. And if it turned out you were a faith person, I’d like a follow-up question.

What kind of faith do you have?

Is it frightened faith? You need the comfort of believing in the stuff your parents taught you about God, and you’re scared shitless that someone is going to talk you out of it? That’s okay. I've been there myself. I’m just trying to figure you out.

Or is yours that kind of arrogant faith that says, “Everyone else must be a complete idiot not to have faith and believe what I believe.” I hope not, because you seem so nice. Plus, I probably don't believe what you believe, so now I'm stupid and how are we going to have a decent conversation once that's established?

Is it desperate faith? Are you trying to hold onto meaning in a world in which meaning is increasingly hard to find? Yeah, I get that. I feel you.

Is it stubborn faith, like mine? Are you just ornery enough to stare down an empty universe and say, “I DEMAND that there be meaning in these skies.” And then you stare real hard and angry right into the Milky Way. Then you laugh because of how small and silly you are. You laugh at yourself, but you keep staring. You ARE going to stare down the universe.

You know, I’d just kind of like to know what kind of faith is keeping you in the game these days.

Or.

If you’re really not a faith person – at least not so much in the obvious and traditional ways – then I’d be REALLY fascinated and want to know the whole story.

Are you the sort who has always seen the default human position as NOT believing in magic or gods or any of that stuff? In your mind the evidence would have to be pretty strong to push you away from your default position of unbelief. Maybe you’ve never been able to understand why so many see it the opposite way. Like believing in God is the default, and you’d better have a damn good reason for not believing.

See I would get that. I would so get that about you. Because I seem to see just about everything in ways that are the exact opposite of most people. I know what that’s like.

Are you a kind of arrogant, angry, “only idiots believe in God” sort of person? I hope not. Because if you are, then I’m stupid, and how are we going to have a conversation now that my stupidity is out on the table for everyone to see.

Ooh, are you one of those dreamy and courageous scientist types, who has such a rigorous epistemology that you just can’t violate it for mythic reality, no matter how beautiful the myth and no matter how old it is?

Yeah, see I find that to be romantic. I was almost you. Just…almost. Sometimes I fantasize about being you.

So when the conversation dies down and we are both left looking at the stars, wouldn’t it seem like there would be no way we could remain unchanged? For one thing it would be just the two of us sitting at our little table beneath an infinite dome of starry mystery. We’d be talking about all the possibilities of what might be. It seems like there would be no way we could avoid feeling like brothers or brother and sister, right? Two humans, pitting their minds, hearts, and souls against the sky and against the unfolding drama of knowledge and mystery?

It would be sad when we had to part ways, and I would probably say, “But we can still be friends, right?"

rlp

 

Note: this is rather lengthy and it is an update about things that are happening in my life. If you are interested in that sort of thing, read on.

Life doesn't change in gentle curves. What usually happens is that you move along in one direction, thinking things are going smoothly, then some event occurs that throws you off-course. Sometimes these events are things we choose. Sometimes not. There is grief and stress as you adjust, but soon things smooth out and it feels like your life is "on track." again.

Jeanene and I have experienced a fair amount of significant changes in our lives over the last half decade or so. And we're about to experience another major change. This one is pretty big. It has to do with that elusive but important thing which all adults must do. We call it, "Making a living."

A brief history of how we have made our living so far:

Jeanene and I came to San Antonio in the fall of 1989, fresh out of seminary. We went to seminary together, both receiving the standard seminary degree (Master of Divinity) in 1987. We spent about 18 months doing Clinical Pastoral Education, she at one hospital and me at another. We came to San Antonio because the Baptist Healthy Care System was hiring a woman chaplain. They chose Jeanene. I, on the other hand, had no job at all. Our only daughter was 7 months old, so I was a stay-at-home daddy for a time. Jeanene worked and made the money. I stayed home, vacuumed, changed diapers, and took care of Reiley.

It was the hardest job I've ever had. Hands down, nothing else comes close. Perhaps I'll write about that someday.

After some months, I got a part-time job at this new and very unusual (and in our minds very attractive) little church. Covenant Baptist Church was what they were calling it. This was sometime in 1990. Jeanene went to work at 6am and came home at 3pm. I did my work mostly after 3:00. We did a kind of tag-team thing with Reiley for a time. Another child came in 1992, and then a third in 1996. We both worked at jobs and at children. We got by - sometimes barely.

In the early 90s, having sold a G.I. Joe collection to buy my first computer, I became something of a computer geek. In 1995 I began fooling around on the Internet, which led to designing websites. To make a long story short, I ended up with a small web design business from 1996 until 2006. During those years I made half of my living from the church and half doing web design and hosting websites.

Real Live Preacher caught us both by surprise. I began my blog on a lark, as most of us bloggers do. I did not anticipate how important writing was going to become to me. Nor could I have possibly anticipated the popularity of this blog or that it would lead to other writing opportunities. There was an awkward two or three years where I had three jobs - minister, web designer, and writer. Of the three, writing did not pay. But I was unable not to write. I can't explain it beyond that. Once I started writing, there was no question of stopping.

I somehow managed a complex and difficult transition away from web designing and into professional writing. That transition would not have been possible without the help of dear friends. I'm still working that out, as most of you know. It is VERY hard to make a living as a writer. Indeed, I haven't yet figured out how to do that. But with a few people subscribing to Real Live Preacher and with writing relationships with the Christian Century and The High Calling, I manage.

And it was looking like that was going to be our lives for some time. Jeanene a chaplain. I a pastor and writer. We were okay with that life.

But some things have happened. Now everything is going to change.

Jeanene's hospital was purchased by a for profit corporation. I have nothing bad at all to say about them, but administrative requirements began to pile up. Jeanene has been a chaplain for many years, longer than any other chaplain in the system. She is an amazing professional, competent, knowledgeable about many facets of health care, and somehow she has retained a deep compassion for people. Truly, I'm in awe of the way she continues to walk right into the lives of traumatized people without fear. Even after 20 years, she cares deeply for them. But in recent years, her life has begun to look more like the life of a corporate executive and less like the life of a minister. She has stuck it out and tried heroically to find meaning in this new world of health care, but doing so has taken a toll on her soul. I've seen the light go out of her eyes over the last few years, and that is a terribly sad thing to see.

Around the same time, I began to think about the idea that a network of branded blogs could be of value to organizations, particularly organizations that increasingly depend on Internet traffic. I spoke about this concept to a number of organizations. Christian Century and The High Calling were both interested and ended up hiring me to oversee this kind of blog network for their organization.

This new possibility allows Jeanene to do something that she needs to do. She needs to leave the hospital. She announced her resignation on November 1st. Her last day is next week.

In the meantime, yours truly is now a professional blogger. That's fine, but I've been trying to pastor, write, and setup two networks of blogs. I was doing pretty well until the whole thing with my book hit. So now I've been a pastor, a writer, a professional blogger, and a shipping clerk. Did I mention that I'm the one who gets our kids off to school and gets them home in the afternoon? Well, I do.

It's been an impossible situation, and my writing has suffered terribly. You can't do everything. I ought to know because I've tried many times. It doesn't work.

But next week everything changes. Jeanene will be at home and have primary care responsibilities for the children. Our oldest is now in college, but the other two are still in school and require all the things that school children must have. Jeanene is going to resume making her beautiful prayer beads and take some time to figure out what she will be doing with the second half of her life. She has worked hard for many years. This sabbatical time is needed, and she's going to take it slowly, I hope.

And what of me, dear readers? I will be set free to work. I don't ask much of life - I want to work and I want to write. And I want ample time to do a good job at both. With my schedule liberated (imagine a day expanding from 6 productive hours to as many as 12 if needed) I will have no problem being a pastor, running a couple of blog networks, and writing to my heart's content.

I doubt I'll get much writing done until next week. But after that, get out of my way, because rlp is going to explode!

One of the three who make it all worthwhile.

gordon

 

I'm sorry for the delay in reporting back to you about the final day of training. I got home Monday and was faced with a number of things that had to be done by Tuesday at lunch. And then I had to fly to Dallas for a 24 hour board meeting for the High Calling, a nonprofit organization in San Antonio. I write for them and do some Internet consultation. I'm now involved in setting up a network of blogs, as I mentioned a few days ago.

So, what happened on the final day of water purification training? First of all, the centerpieces were all clean, which I thought was pretty cute. Seeing them filled with dirty water and then fresh, clean water is an image that speaks at a gut-level.

We had a worship service on Sunday morning. A pastor from Costa Rica preached with an interpreter. Edge Outreach is a Christian organization, but what I like about them is that they are dedicated to their humanitarian efforts, and not in any way involved in evangelism. As a Christian, I think we have reached a time where the Church must prove her love for people. We must help people with NO STRINGS ATTACHED. Then, if someone wants to engage us with questions about our spiritual tradition, we would of course be happy to talk. That's the kind of thing that Edge does. I am confident that an atheist or agnostic person could have joined us this weekend and not been uncomfortable. That person could have attended the worship service, out of respect, or not.

Afterwards, our final session involved seeing a kind of "super purification unit" down by the lake. This system involves both types of purification. Filtering and chlorination. There is some debate among advocates of each system. Advocates of filtration systems point out that their systems are extremely simple and easy to use. Chlorination advocates note that the very specialized and high-tech filters can't be purchased by people in 3rd world countries. The chlorination system, on the other hand, works as long as a person can get their hands on a car battery and some salt.

The truth is, different systems work in different settings. You have to be flexible and bring a system that best helps the people you are serving. The system in the suitcase by the man in blue filters the water down to a half a micron. That's a pretty serious filtering job. The smallest bacteria are about a micron in size. A micron is millionth of a meter. A human hair is about 100 microns in diameter. The man in the black shirt is holding one of the ceramic filters.

After filtration, the lake water goes through the McGuire system and comes out cleaner than any municipal water system. CLEANER. You really don't need both of them, but this was kind of a super system.

After that the conference was over and everyone went home. I spent another night with Darrell and Alice Adams and went out for fancy beers with a couple of friends of theirs. To my surprise, both of them had read Real Live Preacher before. One man - Brent - had even sent me an email some years ago. I was glad that I had answered it. In the last couple of years I haven't been able to answer them all.

Then I flew home. That's it. I'll brush up on my knowledge over Christmas and begin getting ready to go to the Dominican Republic in January. We'll be installing a massive, 8-tank system in a hospital. I will take photos and blog my way through that trip. I hope you'll tune in then.

rlp

 

The setting for our training is certainly lovely. We're here in Louisville as Fall sets in. There are 84 of us at a retreat center learning how to setup water purifiers.

The centerpieces on the tables at dinner last night were interesting. Unappetizing, but interesting and appropriate, I guess.

Dirty water in a glass bowl

I've finished the second day of training. Yesterday we focused on education and preparation. We began this morning with a visit to a mock village where we had to interview the "local people" in preparation for a purification installation. In this particular village there was a chieftain who did not like the suggestion that the water from their lake was unclean. We had to offer a bribe to get him to agree to let us test the water. Apparently you run into that sort of thing in some places in the world.

The rest of the day was spent in training on the portable purification units. Edge Outreach uses the McGuire Purification system. It's portable, cheap, and it runs on table salt and a 12-volt battery. These items are easily obtained in almost every part of the world. Duvon McGuire, the inventor, was at the conference. He's a fascinating guy. His parents were missionaries, and as a child he caught a terrible disease from polluted water. He never forgot the experience, and as an adult he invented this very simple and affordable way of treating water. He hooked up with the Edge folks fairly soon after he came up with this idea, and they've put his purification units into action all over the world.

Duvon McGuire at the tent where I was being trained.

The system is pretty simple. The water is chlorinated to kill bacteria. The chlorine gas comes from table salt through the process of electrolysis. The idea is simple, but there is a fair amount of knowledge needed to set it all up. You have to be able to put together a system of PVC pipes and valves. The purification unit itself is pretty small; it fits into a plastic tub. Generally you bring this unit with you and buy the barrels, pipes, salt, and battery on location. Training a local person to run and maintain the equipment is the most important part of this whole thing.

Okay so tonight I saw Duvon sitting on a couch, and I asked him something I'd been wondering about? "Why go to all this trouble to create chlorine gas and infuse it into the water? Why not just drop in a few chlorine tablets, like you do in swimming pools?" Thirty minutes later I retreated from the conversation, my head reeling from the chemistry and physics in his answer. I'm so tired that I can hardly remember any of it. It comes down to this: his method is cheaper, better, cleaner, and it doesn't require anything that people can't get anywhere in the world. It's not easy to supply chlorine tablets to 3rd world countries. With the McGuire system, they just need table salt and a battery. As an interesting side note, one of the byproducts of the process is bleach, which can be used for further disinfecting needs. Very handy and nothing goes to waste.

Here's an astonishing thing: This same system that we setup today can handle a tank the size of a small house. It purifies water at a speed of about 55 gallons a minute. This simple thing can provide water for up to 10,000 people a day! The Edge Outreach people fly in and install this thing in a few days at no cost to the people. And all this is done with no tax money of any kind. Just people helping people.

Putting the pipe system together.

Installing the McGuire Purifier.

Checking chlorine levels.

And here is the machine my group assembled. It sets at an angle, but that's intentional. The angle helps the gas move through a permeable membrane of some kind. I've decided not to ask Duvon for a more detailed explanation.

They don't give out certification certificates, but I actually know how to install a McGuire Purifier in a 3rd world country, using local supplies. I'm pretty pumped about that. Tomorrow we finish up with some presentations on pumps and filtration.

Putting all the equipment and technology aside, I must say that it's pretty energizing to be around so many people who are passionate about the idea of going out into the world and helping others. And I mean helping them in a way that makes a huge impact in their lives almost immediately. Clean water is such a basic, human need. And if you don't have it, you suffer immediate and terrible consequences. As always, children in poor nations suffer the most and the worst.

These are good people. They give me hope, and just being around them is tonic for my own soul.

rlp

 

Due to weather problems, I arrived in Louisville KY at about 2:30am this morning instead of 8:45pm last night. I got about 3 hours sleep after spending 8 hours in the Chicago airport. The good news is I got to spend some serious time with my email inbox, reducing it from 180 emails down to 4.

Darrell had to be here early, so we left about 6:30 am this morning, arriving at the Edge Water Purification Training in time for him to help set up some things. It took me a good hour to finally come awake.

Of course I'm new to this whole "Let's bring fresh water to the world" movement. And like many people new to anything, I want to get right down to business. Show me these water purifiers, then send me out into the world to install them. I'll bring my own socket set.

Well, it turns out there is a little more to it. Showing up in technologically inexperienced cultures and dropping off machinery is not a good idea. We learned a lot about the cultures we will work with. We received a lot of basic nutrition information that we can pass on to the people who will have the water purifiers. The Edge folks have experience, and they have found that preparation and education are even more important than the technology. An advance team goes out (if possible) and does a lot of education about water issues and health. Sometimes the people don't even know that the water is the problem. Individuals from the area are recruited to receive special training to run the machinery. It's easy to run, but then again we are used to running all sorts of machines.

Sometimes a powerful person in a village might be tempted to take over the machine and try to sell water. In order to head-off this possibility, the leaders are told that the water must be free, but they can make ice, snowcones, and similar things which can be sold.

Only when they are ready will we actually install the water purifiers.

The first step is an evaluation of the existing water supply. Edge uses inexpensive bacterial water testers.

Fill the bag half full with water. Mix in one of the silver bags and seal it. If the water turns dark immediately, that's bad JuJu. If it turns dark overnight, that's still not good. Clean water will stay clear.

So all had to go out and test water that we found around the facility. Most people went straight to the pond.

I know what it looks like, but I got it out of the pond!

All the bags waiting overnight. We'll know how dangerous the water is tomorrow. Interestingly, the color is not that important. Some colored water might just have a little dirt in it. Dangerous water can be as clear as the water coming out of your sink. The bad little bugs are too small to be seen.

At lunch we heard from a man who is from Sierra Leon. He has been in the United States for about a decade. He went back recently, and he ran out of bottled water. He was forced to drink from a local hand-dug well that made him very sick. He will be leading a team going back to give the local people a water purification unit.

I found that almost 2 million people (95% children) will die this year from simple diarrhea. Nothing more than our children get, but they have no means to keep them hydrated, so they just die. So I'm wondering if when we install one of these, we can look at the children playing and say to ourselves, "Those children have a chance now."

To close the day we had a demonstration of the purifying units. We looked at the parts, the operation, and the assembly. The unit itself fits into a small box. You buy plastic tanks and pvc pipes in country. It's easier than shipping, and you support the local economy. The system works by creating Chlorine out of salt. More about that tomorrow.

The purifying unit simply hangs on a plastic drum with a spigot at the bottom.

 

Tomorrow: We go outside and have to put some of these bad boys together ourselves. Then they break them and we have to identify the problem and be able to fix them. Should be interesting!

rlp

 

I saw him hitchhiking on the shoulder of I-35 the other day. He was walking with his back to the traffic and with his left thumb stuck out. This was just north of San Antonio, right near the town of Selma where the old city hall is now a Hooters restaurant, and the only remaining residential street was cut in half rudely by the interstate in the late 60s, leaving a string of tattered houses on either side.

He was wearing black, of course. So melodramatic. I had to laugh.

I pulled onto the shoulder, driving slowly alongside him. He refused to acknowledge me. I stretched over as far as I could, with my left hand still on the wheel, and rolled down the passenger-side window.

“I know you see me. Why don’t you go ahead and get in. I’ll give you a ride to wherever the hell it is you think you’re going.”

He kept walking. I kept the car moving right alongside him. Finally he stopped, exhaled dramatically, and looked at me over the top of his glasses.

“You haven’t been returning my calls.”

I wasn’t much in the mood to take his shit.

“Yeah, well I’m the one who has three kids and a couple of REAL jobs. It’s not like I can just jump out of bed whenever you call and sit up all night writing everything down. I mean, we have to sleep. You people don’t seem to understand that.”

He stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout and mimed playing a violin while making a whiny noise. “Mi mi mi mi mi mi mi.”

I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself.

“So are you gonna get in or what?”

He looked far up the road, as if he was weighing his options. I groaned and laid my head back on the headrest, looking up at the headliner. He has no options. He has to get in the car. I know that. He knows that. Always with the drama, this guy.

“Okay, but I want French toast.”

He climbed into the car before I could reply.

“French toast? It’s like 1:30. I just ate lunch.”

“I have two words for you. French. Toast.”

I paused for a few moments, looking at him. He looked back, very confident. He knows I’m going to take him wherever he wants to go.

“Yeah, all right.”

“Go to Jim’s,” he said. “They have the good diet cokes in those classic coke-shaped glasses. And they have limes.”

I took the next exit and made a U-turn, heading back to town. We drove in silence for a bit. I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the first to speak. That’s his job. Finally he said something.

“Do you even remember any of them?”

“Sure, of course. Listen, I totally respect your work, man. It’s just I’m so tired. Seriously, sometimes I just can’t bring myself to get out of bed and get my notebook. But lately, you’ve done some amazing stuff.”

He smiled and fiddled with the radio knobs.

“Did you like Wednesday night’s?”

“Um, was that the one with the llama from Napoleon Dynamite, and I was like a sheriff or something?”

“No, that was last week. I’ll give you a hint. Waterrrrrr….”

“Oh yeah, the island dream!”

“Bingo. What did you think?”

“Oh, I loved it. That was nice. Very cool images. The island, that was from Perelandra, right? That’s how I pictured it while I was reading.”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. And that little city with the winding, medieval streets. That was from Matt’s book, Midwinter, right? The floating city.”

He nodded.

“Okay, so who is that woman anyway?”

“You know her. She’s your muse, your other voice, your anima, your inspiration, your…”

“Yeah, fine, right. I read Jung.”

“You really should listen to her, you know.”

“Well, she’s pretty pushy and…” I paused. “Between you and me, she can be pretty racy. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me. I wrote, produced, and directed all of them. Listen, we’re not held back by your prudish, Judeo-Christian so-called ethics. Paganism still rules on the dark side, my friend. Old school.”

“Whatever.”

I pulled into the Jim’s parking lot and we got out. My door slammed just a second before his. I held open the door for him and we sat across from each other in a booth. He picked up a menu and didn’t look up when the waitress arrived. She looked at him, then at me.

“He’ll have an order of French toast. No powdered sugar, but bring extra syrup. Link sausages and a diet coke with a lime in it.”

The waitress scribbled on her pad. “And for you?”

“I already ate. Just give me a diet coke. Also with a lime.”

She returned with our diet cokes a minute or two later. He peeled off the end of the paper wrapper on his straw, put the open end in his mouth, and shot the wrapper at me across the table. He always does that, and I never acknowledge it. I just close my eyes when it hits me in the face, then open them and go right on with the conversation.

He took a long pull from his straw and got right to it.

“Listen, who do you think you are?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I said. Just who do you think you are?”

“I don’t know how to answer that question.”

“Exactly! And that’s why I’m here today. Listen to me. I’m serious now. Listen.”

He leaned forward and motioned with his hand for me to lean forward as well. When he spoke, it was in a whisper.

“Your whole life has become like a house of cards. All masks. All roles, do you get me? Husband, father, preacher, pastor, writer, good Christian boy, friend to the needy, everything that everyone who meets you needs you to be. You can’t keep it up. Do you understand me? You’re going to get yourself into some serious trouble.”

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop being any of those things.”

“I know, that’s why I’m here. Just listen to me.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“Look, I’m all for your doctor and the little white pills. That’s fine, but that’s not the only thing that’s going on, okay? Don’t buy into that chemical, pharmacological, bullshit worldview. That stuff helps, but it’s not the only thing. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I nodded.

“Listen to her. Don’t disrespect her.”

“Ugh, I hate that.”

“What?”

“When people use disrespect as a verb. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard.”

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling, then back at me.

“Fine, don’t be disrespectful to her. I don’t care how you want to say it, but she’s speaking to you right now like never before. Every night. When you drive around and think about all that stuff and talk to yourself, that’s her speaking. You listen. And I don’t care about your sleep or any of that. Just listen to her.”

“Okay, but then what do I do?”

“You don’t need to know any of that. You just listen.”

The waitress returned with two fresh cokes and his French toast. She laid the plate in front of him and he dug right in. I caught her eye and said, “Thank you very much.”

He flooded his French toast with syrup. I winced. He picked up one of the link sausages with his left hand and took a bite out of it. While he chewed he swabbed a piece of toast around in the syrup with his fork, then popped it neatly into his mouth between chews. He spoke with his mouth full of food.

Zuh Thying is, Sees got you, gyot a hode of you.”

He swallowed, pointed his fork at me, and continued.

“You gotta remember that all of us down below, we never lie. We tell the truth. It’s all we know how to do. You people up here...”  He waved his fork around, sending drops of syrup flying. “You people are all liars. You can’t help it, poor saps, but you lie to yourselves all the time.”

“So once again I’m to believe that you came all the way out here for my own good. Just because you care about me or love me or whatever.”

We stared at each other for a moment while he chewed and swallowed a massive bite. His head tilted a little to one side, then he reached out his hand and gently pressed his palm to my cheek.

“Of course I love you. Of all the loves you will experience in this life, mine is the most true. Because I know you inside and out, all the way to the bottom and back up. In and out, up and down, light and dark. You’re a little too preoccupied with yourself sometimes, but you’re precious. I adore you.”

I stared into the top of my diet coke, stirring the soggy lime wedge with my straw. I nodded.

“Okay, tell her I’m trying to listen. I am. I mean, I will."

"Good!" he said, snapping his head down quickly in one sharp nod before turning his full attention back to the French toast. "That's all we ask of you."

rlp

 

I love looking at old photographs; it's the closest thing to time travel that I know. I find myself staring at century-old black and white photos taken on the streets of large cities. I look at the people. I search their faces, wondering what was going on in their minds. Often they are turning toward the camera—an item that was much less common then—with a shocked expression. They seem as fascinated to be a part of the captured moment as I am to witness it.

Here's an odd question: How much time is captured in a still image? The shutter speeds of the earliest cameras were so slow that in some old photos you see the ghostly, blurred images of people who were walking by while the shutter was open. It's as if the camera was trying to show a full second of reality in a single image...

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

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

a Christian Magazine 
Christian Writing

rlp

 

I got word last week that Eerdmans is going to remainder my book. I didn't know what that meant, though I was pretty sure it wasn't a good thing. One of the people from Eerdmans had to explain it to me.

If a publisher has a quantity of books in its warehouse, and the books are either not selling or selling so slowly that they don't justify storage and all the costs (including taxes) that go along with that, they "remainder" the book. Yes, remainder is a verb as well as a noun. That means they get rid of it. It's better to unload it than to keep it in the warehouse. Obviously this also means any question of a second printing has been settled.

Perhaps you're feeling a little sorry for me right now. "Oh, Real Live Preacher's book didn't sell very well, and it's getting dumped by the publisher. Poor guy."

Don't feel bad. I sure don't. Yeah, it would have been fun if the book had sold a lot of copies and went into a second printing. But the hard reality is this: I am an unknown author of a book of funky, religious essays. Books of essays are the worst selling books in the world right now. And mine is full of f-bombs, meaning you don't want to give it to Aunt Petunia for Christmas. And, while Eerdmans treated me as well as they treat any of their authors, my only publicity was their catalog and this blog. And of course, if you're here, you can read read every essay I've ever written including about 42 of the 50 essays in the book.

This book is not exactly a marketer's dream, is it? It's really kind of a miracle that they took a chance and published this thing at all.

Now here is where the story gets kind of funny and surprisingly fortunate for me. Eerdmans sent me a letter some months ago, notifying me of their intention to remainder the book. They offered me a chance to buy the remaining stock (1300 of the original 5000) at an 80% discount. That would have been about $3600. Fortunately, I never got the letter. I admit that after the first year or so, I quit reading things Eerdmans sent to me. Not out of disrespect, but most of the time it was new catalogs and stuff that had nothing to do with me. I'm sure the letter came. I just never opened it. If I had, I would have tried to scrape together whatever money I could find to buy a few hundred copies.

Eerdmans took my lack of a response as a no and moved on to their next step. They offered the book to a series of closeout buyers at an EXTREMELY discounted price. A pennies-on-the-dollar kind of price.

There were no takers. None. I can imagine what the conversations were like.

"Real Live What? Preacher? Never heard of it or him or whatever. What's it about?"

"Eh, it's this guy in Texas. Allegedly an actual minister. Pretty good writer. Writes about tamales and stars and stuff you might find in your pockets. There's some religious stuff in there too. Kind of liberal. A lot of cussing. Sort of a weird mix. The editor who found him and brought him to our attention is no longer with the company. It does have a kind of interesting cover, though."

So after my book was refused by every closeout buyer who deals with Eerdmans, I got a last email from them. Since no one wanted it, they were just going to donate it to someone...anyone. Unless I wanted to buy the stock for $0.25 a copy. This was the first I heard of any of this. "Hell yes I want it!" I said. I did the math. It comes out to $325. The deal is done, and they are shipping me the the last 1300 copies of RealLivePreacher.com.

I'll tell you why this is so cool. First, I am now in complete control of this book. It's my book. All the rights to the essays have reverted back to me. The first thing I'm going to do is post the 8 or 9 essays from the book that have never been published online. Hey, it will give me some material to post here, and I can work harder on a little project I have in mind for our friend Foy Davis. (Don't ask. It's a secret)

Second, I don't have to give this book to anyone. I'm hoping Amazon.com will sell a copy and write me asking for one. I'm currently crafting my response to them. I want to find a really funny way to say, "Hell no, you incentive-crushing destroyer from the nether regions!"

Third, I get to have a lot of fun with this book. People still find this blog and want to buy the book sometimes. I'll have them all at my house. I might make a chair out of the cartons of books in my living room and watch Cowboys games from there. When someone buys one, it will be a big deal. I won't have pre-printed labels. Handwritten all the way. I'll have to find an envelope and dig though my wife's purse for stamps.

I'll probably write little notes on the inside cover to the people who buy them. Maybe like a little letter to them or something. Just to say hello and ask how they are doing. Maybe mention whatever's happening in my life at the time. I'll probably put a surprise between the pages. Maybe a pressed flower from my backyard or a ticket stub from a Spurs game.

Ooh, how cool would this be: Maybe there will be one copy that I give away for free, with the understanding that you have to mail it to the next person who writes me and asks for it. You sign it, date it, then mail it to the next person. They do the same. Maybe some day it would come back to me.

Who knows what I'll do? That's the point. I can do whatever I want. Do you get this? Do you get how fun this is? I can't wait for them to arrive.

My babies are coming home to me. I love every essay I wrote for that book. Each creation was like a birth. There was inspiration and pleasure then hard labor and delivery. This is where they should live anyway, don't you think? They belong with me. And if people want a copy of the book, I should be the one to hand it to them.

Doesn't that seem...absolutely right? The way it should be?

rlp

 

Covenant Baptist Church is a very mysterious place on Sunday mornings before dawn.

It's dark, but the stars are bright in the clean, morning air. Just before dawn you see the constellations that are below the horizon in the evening. The summer constellations are visible in the pre-dawn hours of winter and vice-versa. Orion is well up these days, and Leo the lion will be chasing him soon. Just before first light, you can see a navy blue glow of light above the black outline of the trees leading to the woods behind the church. It looks like an award-winning set at a fancy theater.

The birds begin to awake, then light seeps through our windows. If the clouds are just right, the light can be pink in the early mornings. There have been times when I went to the window just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. No, it is pink outside sometimes.

And on rare occasions, like last Sunday morning, the light is blue. Blue, I tell you, as blue as ancient ice. Blue like the bottles on your grandmother's shelves. Blue like rare diamonds. Blue as if the whole world was an aquarium and there you are, sitting inside a sanctuary of warmth.

Just when I think that I know the world, a splash of color on Sunday morning reminds me that I do not. I do not know anything, really. I'm only just learning to see.

Dawn at Covenant - September 16, 2007

rlp

 

In the late 90's, when we were planning our first building, we decided against pews, pulpits, and most of the things that mark usual places of worship. We were used to somewhat casual settings, having worshipped in a home, a daycare center, a fire station, a bar, and an elementary school. It's not that we didn't recognize the value of sacred spaces. We just had some different ideas about how sacred spaces might look.

Yes, a bar. It was the Duckblind Lounge, and I'll warrant we were the only Baptist church meeting in a bar at that time.

In the end we opted for a large room with moveable chairs and a fireplace at one end. We had in mind a kind of "retreat center" look and feel.

Click for a larger view

We did have a couple of actual fires in the fireplace during worship in the early days. The unwritten but understood rule was: "If you want a fire, bring wood and build one. But you have to clean up the fireplace afterwards."

That second part of the equation slowed down the fires quite a bit.

I don't remember when I put the candles in the fireplace, but it must have been sometime in 2001. I brought a candle rack and laid it on top of the heavy, iron bars that held the firewood. Since then we've had a fireplace full of candles. For years we bought matching sets of candles, and I must say that they looked very nice.

But recently I noticed that my candle cabinet was full of odds and ends. There were candle stubs from this season or that, unused candles, candles from weddings and parties, and some candles I'd never seen before. I don't even know how they got there. So I loaded up the fireplace with a variety of candles from our past. Different colors, different shapes, some kind of new and others almost used up.

I thought it looked rather nice, myself. It kind of reminded me of looking out into the congregation on a Sunday morning.

I few weeks ago I invited the children of our church to bring a candle from home and put it into the fireplace. "You could have your own candle," I said. So candles started appearing. The first was Madeline's candle. Madeline, who just turned four, has rather captured my heart these days. But then, I was a little vulnerable, having realized that there are no more little girls in my own home. Sloan brought the next candle, then Anna brought one.

Yes, this is the same Anna from my CC essay, "The Gospel According to Anna." You can view the actual manuscript of Anna's gospel here. Don't miss the footnotes.

Next appeared a candle that had been owned by Barbara, who died a couple of years ago. Then some candles from a wedding showed up. I added a pink candle stub from Advent 1997 that I had been saving in my office. With all of this new activity, I thought I'd better keep a photographic log.

Click for a larger view

Honestly, I had no theological reasons for putting candles in our fireplace. Like much that I do, I was just following a whim. BUT, as I am watching the fireplace change, it does occur to me that the candles in our fireplace make up a splendid symbol of our community. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some burn brightly, while others slowly flicker and die out. Each one appears in its own time and for its own reasons, and all of them contribute to the whole.

The body of Christ.

rlp

 

Part Three of "Queen's Gambit" was originally published here. All three parts have been combined into one, but I've left this file here to preserve the comments.

Part two of "Queen's Gambit" was originally published here. All three parts have been combined into one, but I've left this file here to preserve the comments.

This story was originally published in 3 parts. All three have been combined in this location. Parts 2 and 3 remain in their original location to preserve the comments.

If you were extremely wealthy, you could try to see everything. You could hop into a car and zoom across the United States, stopping in major cities and seeing the famous sites. You could pay a cabbie to wait for you while you hurried to the top of the Empire State Building for a quick look. Then you'd hop back in the cab and say, "To the Statue of Liberty, and step on it!"

You could bounce along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, stopping for a few moments at each viewing point before heading for Monument Valley. You could drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, snapping pictures and reading a brochure that tells you how many people have jumped off the bridge and how hard it is to keep it painted. You could move to Washington, D.C., and spend a year going through the Smithsonian Institute, taking notes and pictures of everything as you strolled through the buildings.

You could do these sorts of things for years and years, checking off each famous site in a little notebook before hopping a train to the next exciting destination. Eventually your notebook would be thick and full of notations that no one, including you, would ever read...

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

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

a Christian Magazine 
Christian Writing

rlp

 

My friend Milton posted this picture of the Hubble Deep Field Image the other day. The pretty little smudges are galaxies.

Click for larger image

In case you don’t know the story of this image, it represents a “keyhole” view of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope focused on one small patch of the sky for about 10 days, pulling in ancient light from across the universe. This image is only a speck in our sky. It’s about the size of a dime when viewed from 75 feet away.

And this little speck is absolutely filled with galaxies. About 1500 can be counted using an enlarged image. 1500 galaxies in a single dot of our night sky.

The universe is so large that it causes my mind to reboot whenever I try to think about it. You can’t really think about the size of the universe in any accurate way, of course. It's far too big to understand. But here’s a way you could try to think about it:

Our solar system exists on a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and contains between 200 billion and 400 billion stars. There is a star that is relatively close to us; Alpha Centauri is a mere 4.4 light years away. Given the size of our galaxy, we’re practically on top of each other.

Click for larger image

Voyager 1, launched in the late 1970s, has only recently left our solar system. The two Voyager spacecrafts are the fastest things humans have ever made. Currently they travel at a speed of about 1 million miles a day, which is pretty damn fast. Still, it took a good-sized chunk of your lifetime for the fastest thing we have to make it out of our own solar system.

The Voyager mission does not include traveling to Alpha Centauri, but if it did, it would take 70,000 years to get there at its current speed. So says a combination of Wikipedia and my calculator.

Chew on that for a moment. Our two stars, almost touching in the photo. Seventy Thousand Years.

When I consider the stars and the universe – or more accurately when I consider my inability to consider them – I experience a strange combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions.

First I feel a kind of mild vertigo, the sort of thing that you would expect to feel if you suddenly found yourself in the middle of a shaky rope bridge over a deep canyon. Our world normally feels so big and solid to me, and my place in this world seems entrenched and well-established after 45 years of living. But suddenly, I am a speck of dust in an instant of time so brief that it can’t be measured. My feet feel light, as if I might float off our spinning planet any second. I want to throw myself on the ground and grab two fistfuls of grass for good measure.

My mind reels. Everything seems to be shrinking.

Then I feel a sorrowful panic. Christianity has already shrunk in my lifetime from being the shining center of all truth and purpose to something less than that. Even looking at things from the inside, even willing to give the benefit of every doubt, Christianity seems like a bumbling, prosaic movement which is, as often as not, violent, anti-intellectual, and xenophobic.

But I love Christianity so much. Or at least I love what it could be. I want to hug it. I want to throw my arms around the beautiful language of salvation and redemption. I want to curl up in the warmth of my faith community, the people I love so deeply in this world. Truly they are like family to me. I feel I could get drunk on our ancient symbols, myths and stories, the ones that speak in luscious tones vibrating through a million voices across the centuries.

So first vertigo, then panic, then longing. After that I generally calm down a bit. My tiny mind and delicate emotions cannot bear even my small thoughts of the universe for more than a few minutes. I relax. Sometimes a shrinking reality can be a comfort. My sins, the things that I have done wrong and the ways that I cannot be what I should be, also shrink. I feel I can forgive myself for them, small man that I am. Why the hell not? Look at the size of the universe!

This forgiveness is the Grace that Christians speak of. The main story of our faith tells us that we must be forgiven and can be. Funny how it takes science to bring that reality to my guts.

For some reason, this experience always ends with a crazy happiness that I cannot easily explain. I become giddy with the knowledge that ultimate reality is so far beyond our grasp. This lets me off the hook, to a certain extent. We’ll never know reality. We’ll never even map our solar system, you and I. We’re small people, but we have grasped the idea of existence. We know love, seek knowledge, and recognize goodness and evil.

Our saintly scientists, single-minded and incredibly committed to the search for truth, draw down amazing pictures from the ancient light in the sky. These pictures help me to know that it is okay to be nothing more or less than what we are.

People. Human beings, strangely warped and trying to understand that. Trying to worship what cannot be known, trying to learn, trying to find our place in the Cosmos.

rlp

Learn about Voyager

 

I’ve been a part of the Christian Church all of my life. I’ve watched how things work within the faith, and I’ve been particularly fascinated by the ways we Christians use and abuse the New Testament.

The New Testament - the uniquely Christian part of the Bible - is a messy collection of books and letters. No one can be absolutely sure what parts are important and what parts are the cultural containers that hold the important parts. In First Timothy, Paul instructs Timothy to drink wine regularly to help with his stomach problems. It seems unlikely that this should be understood as a universal command for all Christians throughout the centuries. And I’m not aware of any church that treats that passage in such a way.

Not that a glass of wine at night isn’t a splendid idea and something I might like to suggest for some of my more “intense” brothers and sisters.

So from the start, we have a collection of documents that is unclear and can be difficult to interpret and understand. That’s a good thing to know before we go any further.

From what I’ve seen, only very serious Christians take the time to actually read the New Testament for themselves. This collection of sacred writings taxes scholars, so it is certainly a challenge for everyday people. We do the best we can, but no one can understand all of the New Testament. And even those who have read the whole thing will have forgotten most of it by the following Tuesday. The New Testament is too much to hold in your mind.

What most Christians do is read selections of the New Testament, usually in a haphazard manner over a period of years. They pick out the parts that seem important or relevant to them and focus mainly on those selected scriptures. Most people get guidance in this selection process from whatever Christian tradition they follow. Pentecostals from Georgia find some parts of the New Testament particularly compelling. Episcopalians in Boston might focus on other parts.

But we all share this in common: we pick and choose scriptures, cobbling together something we call a theology. The word theology literally means “God words,” and a theology is a series of belief statements about God and Jesus and how Christians ought to live.

Now it is true that a few extraordinary Christians over the years have tried to understand and organize everything in the New Testament. Some have created great, hulking volumes of systematic theology that no normal person could ever read or understand. But trying to create a systematic theology is rather like a physicist trying to come up with a unified theory of everything. It’s a great idea, but so far no one has been able to pull it off in a way that satisfies everyone

If what I’ve written makes you angry, please note that I’m being descriptive. I’m simply describing what I have seen. If you know of a monk-like person who sat on a pillar for 40 years, can quote the entire New Testament from memory, and has now perfectly integrated all of it into his theology and life, then your exception is duly noted. Good for you, and good for your monk friend.

So our little slanted, incomplete, biased, and selective theologies are the best we can do. Given how our theologies are formed, it’s a constant wonder to me that people are surprised and even angered when they meet someone whose ideas about God differ from their own. I’d be more surprised if I met someone who shared my own beliefs, point by point, all the way to the end. Now that would be strange.

Oh, and there is one other thing. There are parts of the New Testament that are just embarrassing and otherwise inconvenient to our modern lives. We just ignore those parts and go on about the business of creating little theological systems that suit us.

That last paragraph is going to get me at least 20 scorching emails. Tut, tut, please settle down. I’m only telling you what I’ve observed. In my experience, people either ignore or conveniently avoid reading parts of the New Testament that are inconvenient for them.

Again, the exception of your monk friend is duly noted.

Now this is important to remember: all that I’ve described so far is what the best and most serious Christians do. Your average Christian might never read the New Testament at all. He or she likely doesn’t even know the names of the 27 writings that comprise our canon of scripture. These people show up at church now and again. They listen to what the minister behind the pulpit is saying and take that as gospel truth without asking any significant questions. Ironically, these are the people who are often the most dogmatic and outspoken about Christianity. Oftentimes it is these people you see waving Bibles around, shouting and screaming about how every blessed word of the Bible sprang straight from the lips of the Almighty.

Anyone who has actually slugged it out with the New Testament, reading it carefully and trying to piece together the truth about God, Jesus, and how we should live, will be so filled with humility and grace that they will probably never yell at anyone about anything, much less the Bible.

Now I’m fine with this whole process. I mean, it’s not like we have a choice. This is the best we can do. So I’ve made my peace with the reality of the situation. And that’s probably why I’m less dogmatic and picky about the details than some.

But what truly amazes me is what happens when two Christians find themselves in a dispute over some doctrinal issue or passage of scripture. Suddenly they forget how messy the New Testament is, how contradictory and convoluted parts of it can be. They forget that their own theology is a product of very selective reading.

Forgetting these things, they run back to their studies in search of verses of scripture that support their position. They pull out books and commentaries; they scan denominational pamphlets or find help online in locating these verses.

Suddenly, single verses are seen to support whole theologies. Some verse from First John now has the power to shore up an entire worldview. Some obscure phrase from Jude is thought to have the final answer on how men and women should relate to each other. And some phrase that Jesus used in a parable now means that people who disagree with you and your ideas about God will roast slowly over an open fire in the pits of hell throughout all of eternity.

These furious exchanges of quotations are like people lobbing mortar shots at each other from trenches. Those involved only get angrier and more entrenched. I guess eventually they get tired and stop. One or perhaps both camps claim victory. No one generally learns anything constructive from these battles.

How do I know so much about this? Because I used to be right in the middle of those fights. In college and seminary, I stood on street corners, arguing and fighting with fundamentalist street preachers. I remember once dragging the Greek New Testament (I had all of one semester of Greek under my belt) down to the street corner to show a sweating, shouting evangelist an aorist verb.

He stared at the Bible for a moment, then looked back at me. Then he shouted, “Your pride will be your downfall, and you will burn forever in the LAKE OF FIIIIIRE!!!!!

I mean, what can you say to that?  "Nu-uh!"

So now I’m gently sliding into middle age. I’m tired of fighting over the Bible. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about most fine points of theology. I know a little too much about how the New Testament was formed, and I know a little too much about what’s in there and how hard it is to keep it straight.

I have much simpler questions for people now.

“You reading the New Testament? Trying your best to understand it?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you trying to follow Jesus as a disciple, trying to understand what he said and live the way he did, where possible?”

“Yeah, I’m trying.”

“MY BROTHER!”

rlp

 

My youngest daughter is a big fan of the Nintendo game, Animal Crossing. It's a virtual world for kids. She plays it on a small, Nintendo DS with her best friend Rachel. When the two of them are together, their Nintendo DS units connect by infrared, and they can visit each other's virtual houses and interact in the Animal Crossing world.

It's a fairly standard fantasy-world game. Lillian has a character that interacts with other characters in her virtual town. She earns money and adds rooms and furniture to her virtual house that is now practically a mansion. It would be hard to overstate just how invested she and Rachel are in the Animal Crossing world. They love their characters and collect treasured items which they store in their houses. All of the characters except Lillian (and Rachel if their DS units are connected) are simple computer bots that respond to conversation with wooden, predictable answers. But these computer characters have rudimentary personalities, and I've noticed that Lillian's character makes "friends" with some of them and doesn't like others. Sometimes she'll say something like, "Bob the squirrel is SO irritating."

A few weeks ago Lillian announced that she had won the prize for having the best flower garden in her Animal Crossing town. Apparently there is a garden-of-the-month contest. The game system has a calendar and operates in real-time, so a garden-of-the-month contest takes place, literally, every month. I get a little tired of hearing about the Animal Crossing world, but I try to be nice, so I said, "Oh, good. Did you buy a bunch of nice flowers and plant them around your house?"

"No," she said. "I win the flower contest every month. It's no big deal."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the night before the contest, I go around to all the houses in town and stomp on everyone's flowers. So I always win."

Now this got my attention. My first reaction was pretty negative. I looked at her quizzically, like I couldn't believe what she had said. She noticed my look and said, "Dad, they're not real people. It's just a computer game."

"Well, yeah," I said. "I suppose so. But I don't know, don't you feel a little bad about doing that?"

She didn't even look up from the game. "No. Why should I?"

I must admit that I have no idea how to respond to her. Something about it strikes me as wrong. On the other hand, I once played a computer game where I was a soldier and had to shoot a bunch of people. I hate to admit it, but I enjoyed it. I don't know what that says about me, but whatever it says is true, I guess.

There is no shortage of science fiction movies and books dealing with the ethical questions surrounding artificial intelligence. We are nowhere near developing anything remotely close to A.I., and we may never get there. Artificial Intelligence may turn out to be beyond our abilities as a species. But if we developed artificially intelligent machines, I suppose a whole new area of ethics would open up. How exactly should we treat these computer beings?

But I'm wondering what we do with the limited, virtual realities of our own day. If you have a Second Life character, for example, should you bring your spiritual values with you into that game? Should your Second Life character be a practicing Christian or Buddhist if you are one of those in real life?

You might think these ethical questions are mostly hypothetical, but I read that England has proposed that computer-generated child pornography should be illegal, reasoning that obscene images are obscene, whether the characters are real or virtual. The pornographer's counter-claim is roughly the same one that Lillian made. If the characters aren't real and no one is getting hurt, why is it illegal?

I think human life has always been ethically complicated. I normally shy away from the idea that modern life is so much harder or more evil than in days past. You always hear people complaining about how hard things are these days. But I wonder if the complexity of the post-modern, information-driven world is introducing an ethical complexity that we are not ready to handle.

rlp

 

First, thank you for your kind comments after my last post. I have strong but mixed feelings about writing in such a way about myself. I don't think anyone has yet figured out exactly what blogs are or what they should be. In my case I think of Real Live Preacher, first of all, as the place where I post/publish very serious works of writing. My essays are precious to me, and I put everything I have into them. Writing is the only area of my life where I can truthfully say I've done my dead-level best. I can't write them any better.

But RLP is also a blog, and another part of my writing here is less polished and more personal. I also venture into the journal side of blogging, which is cool in its own way. I write specifically about my life, and I try to be honest about myself and my own struggles. That doesn't mean my struggles are easier or harder than anyone else's, of course. And sometimes I struggle with things that other people don't even understand. The point for me is seeking honesty, both in writing and about myself and in the place where those intersect.

So now I've opened my life to a lot of people, and some of them have begun to truly care about me, which is a precious and incredibly generous gift for them to give me. But that opens up a whole new level of complexity doesn't it? Ideally, honest, personal writing would have a nice separation between the writer and the reader. In order to write without worrying about the reaction I might get, I enter a state of denial. I write as if no one is going to read my words until after I'm dead. That really is how I think about it, or maybe how I don't think about it.

But of course we all know that I'm not dead, and since you care about me, you want to leave comments and encourage me. Again, that's incredibly kind of you. What a gift! But there are so many of you...yikes! And truly my problems are such run-of-the-mill, normal, human kinds of problems. I don't mean to suggest that I need a telethon or anything. Yesterday I saw a blog entry that just said, "RLP is in pain. Pray for him!" It had a link to my last post.

And I was like, "No, no, no!" Then I felt bad because it was such a kind thing to write, so then I was like, "Well, okay, sure, thanks, but why don't we put whatever compassionate energy we have into some hungry children or something like that, you know?"

You get this, right? So it's okay. There is a tension here, but I can live with it if you can. I can write honestly about myself if I know that we all understand that a blog is the story of one person's life, told imperfectly and awkwardly at times, but in the way that seemed right in the moment. It's weird, I almost don't think of Real Live Preacher as my life. It's just a life. Just someone's life chosen at random. Don't you think this has got to be inducing some kind of serious schizophrenia in me? I don't know. What do I know? I just write stuff as it comes to me.

Okay, but wait, because there is another, more serious, complicating issue that comes with this. And this is actually the harder issue for me. See, almost everyone I know in real life - I mean the people who know Gordon Atkinson - now are aware of Real Live Preacher and read this blog at least occasionally. And that's fine with me. Mostly I just write stuff and then never speak of it around my friends unless they bring it up, and then I try to change the subject. But reading a posting on a blog is an awkward, crummy way for people to find out that a friend is sick or hurt or depressed or got fired or whatever. So I always know that when I write about a personal struggle, my mom will probably call me, worried. My sister will get worried. People in the church won't know what they should or shouldn't say. And I start feeling like a lousy friend, brother, son, husband, father, pastor, whatever. I mean, don't the people in your life deserve to hear stuff straight from you?

And I think that using a blog to send messages to people in your life is a VERY unhealthy thing to do. It's creating a dysfunctional communication triangle with two people and a blog. That's not straight, honest communication. I try never to do that. I never consciously use Real Live Preacher to send a message to anyone. Only I guess it probably seems like I do to my friends and family. I'm really sorry for that, but I can't call everyone I know and tell them what I'm going to write ahead of time. And even if I could it would be such a grandiose, self-absorbed kind of thing to do.

Let's face it. Here is a hard truth:

There is no good way to write about yourself with any depth and honesty if people who know you and care about you are reading your words while you are still alive. There is no way to do this without causing problems. At least I haven't figured out a way yet.

So here's what I've come up with...for now. For those of you who only know me through my writing, you can do whatever you want. Send comments, pray for me, whatever feels right to you. I don't care if it's one comment or a hundred. I'm going to try not to be embarrassed and to accept that this is a unique situation we're in. I understand your compassion, and if I were you I'd probably leave comments and send email to me. You go right ahead. I'll read them all, and they do matter to me. I love you for that.

For those of you who are my friends (in real life) and family and especially those of you who are a part of my faith community, I'm sorry if my writing makes things a little awkward between us. I'm trying to push the edges but also not go too far. I'm trying to write about one man's life, and mine is the only life I know well enough to write about. If I write about something and don't bring it up when we talk, I'd love it if we could both just let it go and not worry about it. If I need to talk about it, you know I will. But if you are worried about me, having read something at Real Live Preacher, feel free to ask me about it if you want to. If I write about it, you can ask about it. That's only fair.

I can't think of any physical or social thing - no amount of possessions or wealth or power - that is as important as relationships. Our relationships are our most important treasures. I want mine to be straight and honest and healthy.

You probably didn't need to read any of this. But I needed to write it, so that I can try to keep it straight in my mind. Ironically, I'm probably the most confused person in the weird, online world of Real Live Preacher.

Thanks for listening,

gordon

 

My love was born at my mother’s breast and in my father’s strong arms. It was a sucking, insatiable, infantile love. I was happily curled in the warm embrace of pure need.

My love was shaped in early days by my need to perform. I worked hard at home, in sports, and at school. I had a first-born child's natural sense that people would love me if I excelled.

My love turned inward and became hidden and personal with a series of best friends. Michael and Mickey and Lance and Steve and Mark and Kenny. We claimed the rights to our own lives and our own loves. We stood together against the world with our secret clubs and inside jokes.

My love thrashed against my arm like a tethered falcon when I discovered the beauty of ponytails and freckled smiles. A series of little girls first turned my head and then turned my guts into jelly. The falcon burst its tether and screeched, circling and diving, causing me to throw myself to the ground in a panic. Bonnie and Carmen and Kathy and Tracy and Diane and Laura and Julie and Elma. How I ached and longed and cried and failed and watched from afar. Waves of feeling rose up in my chest and cast me face-down upon my bed. There was no end to it and no relief because it felt so good and it hurt so bad.

In time I learned the proper words to coax the falcon back to my arm. I slipped the tether around its foot and paraded it about for a few years with an imagined sophistication. Oh yes, I had it all figured out for a time.

And then I went to college and met a woman with a swinging ponytail and brown eyes that were tender and crinkly when she smiled. She sat across from me at the Baylor cafeteria, and when she talked she revealed a certain, indescribable spark of personality that proved irresistible to me. My falcon took one look at her, snapped its tether, and disappeared over the horizon, never to return.

I became foolish again, like a small boy. She carried a basket instead of a backpack. Suddenly I loved baskets, the weave and feel and smell of them. She had pale skin, so pale skin became the loveliest skin in the world as far as I was concerned. Once I was able to pick her out of a crowd of young women in shorts because I recognized her knees. She had a smile that could light up my heart and brown eyes that were too beautiful and powerful for me to understand. I wanted to keep her. I wanted her to be mine. I wanted to hold her and defend her with my life against anything in the world that would harm her.

I had her for a few months, and then I lost her. I was inconsolable and fell into a time of loneliness. I could not feel love for any other woman. I worked. I paid my bills. I prepared to go to seminary.

Then an unexpected letter arrived, causing my heart to thrash about in my chest. There was a near-collision in a supermarket aisle, and then we were sitting on the floor of her apartment, both frightened. She of hurting me and I of being hurt. But our hands moved across the carpet like small creatures with wills of their own. Our fingers entwined, and all the powers of joy and fear and pain and love came together in that moment.

My love became our love. I felt like I had arrived, but the story of my love was only getting started. I now understand that we knew almost nothing of love at that time. For our love had not yet faced the 12 labors of Hercules.

We had to survive financial crisis and the slow loss of the passion of youth. We had to survive the exhaustion of work and responsibilities. And then there came three children, three sucking vortices of need. We had to cling to each other, blue eyes locked on brown, swearing before the heavens that we weren’t going to let these three angelic demons take everything from us. For it is the nature of children to take everything and the duty of parents not to let them.

Years passed, and we aged together. We learned to love our softening bodies with their new demands and needs. Sometimes, when we were very tired, we would say that it was the two of us against the whole world. Friends would change, the children would leave, but our secret club was forever.

Then a tragedy happened. I woke up in a bathtub filled with ice. There were stitches on the left side of my chest and a note that said, “Sorry, but we needed your heart.” I arose, dripping cold water on the floor. I had the face and the look of Gordon, but there was something absent from my eyes. My trademark silliness was gone. And I could not feel any of the happy things. I couldn't feel love or joy. I was numb inside and sometimes angry for no reason.

I carried on by the powers of obligation, duty, and shame. I put one foot in front of the other. I smiled at home and at church. I said the right things to the children. I tried to force myself to be myself, but that never really works. Jeanene learned to live with the zombie version of Gordon, which is its own kind of tragedy.

The doctor called it depression, and he gave me pills. They worked pretty well for a long time. I was happy and my boyish silliness returned. Jeanene and I began reconnecting. Our hands had to crawl across a carpet of fear to find each other, but they did and things were good.

This is so hard to write, but I fear something is wrong again. I’ve slowly lost the ability to feel happiness or love. Once again I have all of the words and none of the feeling. My need to be alone is becoming overpowering. I come home and want to go to bed or sit in a corner. The idea of interacting with people is painful even to think about. Jeanene and the three sisters obviously know something is wrong.

Damn it! I don’t want to do this again. I’m going to have to go back to the doctor and start the process over again. I hate the idea of medication. I hate thinking of myself being dependant on medication.

“Did you remember to pick up your medication?”

“Has anyone seen my medication?”

“Did I take my medicine yet today?”

Medication medication medication medication. Fucking medication. MY medication. Like it’s some treasured personal possession. Like it’s now an essential part of me, like a leg or something.

But I'm going to the doctor. Yes sir. I'm not hesitating this time. I already have the appointment. And I'm going to do whatever he tells me to do. If he gives me pills (and he will) I’ll smile and say, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"

Because this is the story of my love. Do you understand what I'm saying? This is my love. My love for God and for ideas and for truth and for our church and for writing and for my friends and for the three sisters.

And for Jeanene. It's her love too. I have to remember that. I owe her my best effort to be the man she married.

If I am allowed to live a full live, then half of the story of my love is yet to be told. And I definitely want to be present and alert for part two.

rlp

 

In his book "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time," Marcus Borg describes the confusion and trauma that occurred when his childish images of Jesus collided with the scientific worldview of our culture. As I read his words, I felt like he was telling my own story. How well I remember when that collision began.

The year was 1969. I watched the moon landing that July in our living room in El Paso, Texas. My parents made me watch it. They said, “Someday you’ll be glad you saw this.” I saw a stark, black horizon and a man with a strange bounce coming down a ladder. I was mildly interested, but not old enough to appreciate the changes that science was bringing to my world.

At the end of the summer we moved into a small home in Forth Worth, so that my father could do some post-graduate work at the Baptist seminary in town. I began second grade that fall at Hubbard Heights Elementary, which was about half a mile away. My best friend Mickey and I walked to school together every day. I admired Mickey because he had to pack his own lunch. Usually it consisted of ketchup sandwiches and candy bars.

Hubbard Heights Elementary

I got the G.I. Joe Astronaut with space capsule that Christmas, which was a huge thrill for me. Space toys were replacing Cowboy toys. Roy Rogers was out, and Apollo was in. I played little league baseball for the first time that Spring. It was my first experience with organized sports. I was the catcher for our team, but I didn’t have a catcher’s mitt, which bothered me greatly.

Mickey and I both fell in love with the same girl at school. I don’t remember her name, but she had brown hair and wore it in pigtails. I was too shy even to wave at her and was standing around wondering how to proceed when Mickey, showing a surprising streak of romantic sophistication, swooped in and gave her a small bottle of perfume. Somehow that sealed the deal, and the two of them walked around the playground whispering for a week or so. I was annoyed but at the same time impressed with his savoir faire. He knew you should give a girl perfume, AND he knew how and where to get perfume. He was completely out of my league.

Our family went to Gambrell Street Baptist Church, which was across from the seminary and a fairly well-known Baptist church in that city. Martin Estep, whose father was a famous Baptist historian and professor at the seminary, was in my Sunday school class. He had leukemia, and we were told quietly that someday soon he would die. The idea of a child dying was so far outside my view of the world that I didn’t know how to receive the information. I just filed it away and forgot about it.

Martin loved dinosaurs and was allowed to bring toy dinosaurs to church, which was against standard policy, but no one made an issue of it, perhaps because his situation was so grim. Many Sundays Martin and I played together with his extensive collection of plastic and rubber dinosaurs.

Years later, long after Martin had died, I attended that seminary and had his father for a number of history classes. I told him I remembered Martin and his dinosaurs. He looked off in the distance and said, "Yes, Martin did love his dinosaurs."

I knew about dinosaurs, of course, but had never considered how they fit into the story of creation that I heard at church. Up until that time, the only story of the origin of the earth I knew was the one found in Genesis. God had created the world in six days, resting on the 7^th. He had created human beings on one of those days, but there was some kind of a glitch, and then Adam and Eve were on the outs with God. That’s why Jesus had to come to the world.

Children have a capacity to hold many thoughts and views at once. Truly, we all have this capacity but it is particularly pronounced in children. So I played dinosaurs with Martin, thoroughly believing that they existed millions and millions of years ago, while at the same time holding to the simple view of creation taught to me at church.

And then one day at school, I discovered a strange book, a book filled with new information and stories I had never heard before.

In second grade I had just discovered the joy of reading. The first book that thrilled me was Matt Christopher’s “Catcher With A Glass Arm,” the story of a boy who was a catcher, like me, only he had a real mitt. Sadly, his arm was a bit lacking, and this created the drama of the story. I also read my mother’s old copy of “The Bobbsey Twins” by Laura Lee Hope, falling in love with it immediately. I read that book 15 or 20 times over the years, even when I was in high school.

My second grade teacher had a collection of books in the corner of the room, which we were allowed to browse and read if we finished our work. One day I pulled out an ancient looking book from behind the others. My memories of this book are very dim. It had an old, cloth cover. I suspect that it was published in the first half of the 20^th century, but it might have been published at the turn of the century. The book was about ancient humans - cavemen and cavewomen, as they were called at the time.

According to this book, many thousands of years ago, people lived in caves and wore clothing made from animal skins. They made their own tools and arrow points, and they lived before modern technology, even before Jesus and the people of the Bible. I remember being absolutely fascinated by the book's theory of how cooking began. The author theorized that a tree might have burst into flames after a lightning strike, cooking a squirrel or some animal in the trunk. Primitive humans chanced upon this tree and found that they liked the flavor of cooked meat. This is a ridiculously simplistic view of how human technology develops, but at the time it made perfect sense to me.

I don't know why, but I became obsessed with this book for many months. Every chance I got I pulled it from the shelves and sat on a little carpet in the corner of the classroom, poring over it. I believed every word of it with the same level of innocent trust that I had given to my Sunday school teachers.

This simple book didn't address the incredibly complex questions of human prehistory or evolution, but it suggested a history of the world and humanity that was different from what was in the Bible. And these new ideas seemed to make sense to me, even then.

That was the moment the collision began. It was the moment that my Biblical worldview first collided with the modern worldview of science. The violence of this collision wasn’t immediately apparent. It was more like two galaxies slowly passing through each other.

But when galaxies collide, nothing stays the same.

rlp