Over two million people have watched Tim Harford TED talk in which he tells the story of Keith Jarrett arriving at the concert hall in Cologne, Germany, where the piano was completely unacceptable for performance. The pads were worn and harsh and the upper register was tinny. The pedals weren’t working properly. Worst of all, the piano was simply too small for the large hall. He had the concert promoter informed that the concert was off unless a new piano could be obtained. He couldn’t perform on such an unacceptable instrument.

As he waited outside in his car, the concert promoter tried to obtain a different piano. It was too late. There was no one who could move a new instrument in with such a late notice. The promoter, a teen ager who was staging her first concert, went out in the rain and pleaded with Jarrett to play that impossible piano. Somehow that wet and scared teenager convinced him to play.

The audience came, the concert began. Jarrett began playing in the middle registers of the piano and avoiding the harsher, higher tones. He also was trying to compensate for the size of the piano by pounding harder and harder on the base notes. He would repeat his bass riffs in order to emphasize them, straining to make the tones reach the back of the audience. The audience, in turn, moved forward in their seats to hear the music.

The piano was impossible. The situation was impossible. The piano was unplayable.

Within moments, it became clear, however, that something very special was happening. It is an electrifying performance that has incredible dynamic qualities. The audience loved it. And audiences continue to love it. The album that is the recording of that concert is the best selling piano album in history and the best selling jazz album.

Something about the challenge of impossible circumstances brought out the absolute best performance possible. In his book, Harford wrote of the concert, “Handed a mess, [he] embraced it, and soared.”

I try not to use my daily blog as a place to review books. If you’ve checked out my book blog, you’ll see that I’m months behind in writing my book reviews. As I write this morning there is a stack of read, but unreviewed books sitting on the floor next to my desk. What is more, I haven’t read Harford’s book yet.

I just love the title: “Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform our Lives.”

The book is, I have discerned from reviews, an exploration of disruption theory. The theory is that disruption inspires creative thinking. He defends the creative potential of the imperfect, incoherent, crude, cluttered, random, ambiguous, vague, difficult, diverse and even the dirty. I’m pretty sure that is a book for me.

One reviewer comments that in the book Harford cites a story which I’ve known for some time. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a studied and meticulous about his preparation for public speaking. He worked hard on his sermons and engaged in a lot of research. However, on the eve of his scheduled address to the March on Washington he couldn’t get his speech right. He worked late into the night and the speech remained unfinished. He continued to work on it up to the last minute, scribbling notes in the car, crossing out phrases and making changes right up to the moment when he approached the lectern. Then, partway into the speech, he abandoned his notes and began a verbal exposition on a theme that wasn’t even in the prepared notes. “I have a dream . . .” he declared and one of the greatest speeches in human history was delivered.

I can’t imagine how terrified Dr. King was. I can barely stand facing my own congregation when events have kept me from proper preparation of my sermon. I don’t sleep when I am unprepared.

I have, however, experienced first hand the power of disruption to spur the creative process. Some of my best writing has come from days when there were too many interruptions in my thinking. The phone kept ringing, people kept stopping by, conversations ensued which were unplanned and which I had tried to avoid.

I have discovered that my messy desk can be an inspiration for creative work. When it gets too messy, instead of sorting through the papers and books and putting things in the right order, I make piles of the things on my desk and begin to deal with them in the random order into which they fell. My goal is to deal with the contents each piece of paper so that it can be thrown into the trash when I’m finished. No filing. No putting things off into another pile. Complete the task and then move on. The result is that I begin to do tasks in a random order. I make a phone call, followed by filling out a form, followed by delegating a task to another person in the church, followed by getting a bill paid, followed by writing a thank you note followed by whatever task comes up next.

Invariably those days are among the most productive days of work. The disruption forces me to focus in a way that I am unable to achieve when I am working according to a precise and rational plan.

Obviously such conditions wouldn’t work for every person. We have two administrative colleagues who share the same desk and computer. Clutter would make it impossible for either to work effectively. I have colleagues who simply can’t work on a sermon when there are unanswered letters. I know others for whom my messiness is frustrating.

For me, however, there is something creative and empowering about working with a bit of mess. After all, I am a disciple of Jesus - God who comes into the messiness of human life to participate fully in human experience. Our theology is not based on completely neat and rational activities, but rather the most disruptive event in human history.

So, I think I should read Harford’s book. I probably will one day. However, I have vowed to not buy another book until I get through the pile of unread books sitting on top of my printer.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’ve been involved in several conversations recently where the tone of political speech has been criticized. The polarization of the country and the amount of angry rhetoric has been lamented by my friends and colleagues. Many of us are dismayed at the lack of respect and the abundance of personal attacks that are aimed at demonizing those who have different policies, beliefs or points of view. There seems to be a constant stream of angry speech spewing from television, social media and other outlets. I join in those conversations freely. I am as likely to be the one complaining as anyone else.

When I stop to think, however, I suspect that we are a bit quick to turn the blame on others for the dysfunction in our nation’s capital and the tone of media relations. After all, when we boil it down, we are no better at talking with those with whom we disagree than are the politicians. Like those in power, we also tend to surround us with those whose views are similar to our own and stay away from those who see things differently. We haven’t maintained diverse communities with good communication.

What if the dysfunction in Washington D.C. is a true reflection of the state of community in our nation today?

If we truly are people who value friendship, family, community, education and workplace, there is much that is required to maintain those relationships. I wonder if we are willing to make the investment that is required to make a change in how we relate to one another.

I am as guilty as the next person. I have filled my life with commitments and obligations and lists of things to do. I am way too busy to have what might be described as a contemplative lifestyle. I don’t give myself enough time to think. I am quick to blame others for my busyness, but the truth is that it is the result of decisions that I have made. I fill up my schedule with all kinds of things that are probably less important than just making time to talk with others, to get to know their deepest thoughts and desires, and to minister with them in reaching out to others. I like to think of myself as a person who is able to listen, but I don’t spend enough time really listening to others. I’m too busy thinking about the next meeting, the next appointment, the next obligation.

When I find myself longing for a day off, I know that I have no one but myself for my hectic schedule.

If I, whose vocation and calling is listening to others, don’t allow enough time, how can I expect politicians to do so?

When I take time to think, I know that I genuinely believe that we, who live our lives in community and consider ourselves to be the grass roots people, can have an impact on how our leaders behave. If we learned to really listen to those in our community with whom we disagree, we would have a lot more leverage when we ask our leaders in Washington DC to do the same. If we take time to discuss the urgent issues of the day with an eye towards seeking solutions instead of winning, we might induce our elected officials to do the same.

There is a simple concept that might be more valuable in our conversations than our constant complaining about others. We might instead focus on the common good. What ideas, policies and laws provide for the benefit or interests of all.

After all, we have much in common with those with whom we disagree. We are all human. We all need food, clothing and shelter. We all have a desire for the well being of our children. We all want safe and effective schools. I’m pretty sure that a list of the shared wishes of the majority of the people in this country would fill this blog and spill over several pages. But we get in the rut of focusing on our differences instead of pouring our energy into seeking the common good.

To put it another way, there are plenty of things for which I might advocate that are also good for my neighbor, that improve the quality of community and benefit all. We might disagree on methodology or which route is the best to achieve a shared goal, but there are many things upon which we can agree.

In a poem entitled “Councils” Marge Piercy suggests that perhaps we should sit down in the dark where we can’t see who is speaking to teach ourselves to focus on what is being said instead of who is talking. She also urges some of us to “dare to speak” while others must “bother to listen.” “Perhaps,” she writes, “we should talk in groups small enough for everyone to speak.” She also suggests that we start by speaking softly.

I long for those kinds of quality conversations. I also am in a perfect position to facilitate such talk. The church is a excellent arena for meaningful and respectful conversation.

Of course I must be careful not to just add one more meeting to my schedule. I must be respectful of the fact that the time of others is also a valuable commodity. But we have the opportunity to form and maintain genuine community despite the rhetoric of the media and the uncivil conversations of government. We have the power to make decisions about our own behavior and how we treat others.

In doing so we can change the style and mood of conversation in our community - in our state - in our nation.

I probably won’t stop complaining about the tone of political speech. I probably won’t stop whining about the thoughtlessness of media. But I hope that I can muster the discipline to spend more of my time facilitating genuine conversation and less of my time complaining. It would be a good start on an important task and a much wiser investment of my time.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There are moments in history that bring out the best in people. There are times when people rise to significant occasions demonstrating remarkable vision, clarity and insight. The founders of our American Democracy were participants in one of those dramatic and incredible moments of history. Every once in a while it makes sense to remember their words and contemplate their meanings.Our constitution begins with these words:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It think that is is possible that the words are even greater than the people who wrote them. Those colonies, established on a foreign continent, with abundant natural resources. were remarkably diverse. There were Catholics and Quakers and Congregationalists and Episcopalians. There were people who had left Europe as a form of religious protest and others who had been sentenced to expatriation because of crimes, both petty and large. There were adventurers and scoundrels. The phrase “We the people” included a lot of differences and was a grand vision.

But it was a case in which the words were greater than the authors. Those who penned the words, “We the people,” didn’t include the indigenous people who had inhabited the continent before the arrival of the settlers for the most part. They didn’t count as people African slaves who had been imported against their will to the colonies for 150 years before the writing of the Constitution. It took many decades for we the people to understand that phrase included more than just some of the people. Part of the genius of the constitution lies in its ability to self correct and be amended. Part of its genius lies in the creation of courts that could make an independent analysis of the laws to reveal an even greater meaning of those words.

We, who are the inheritors of both the words of our founders and the generations of their interpretation, would do well to return to the concept of “We the people.” That phrase does not mean “some of the people,” or “the people who agree with me,” or “the people who look like me.” It means all of the people.

Yes, there are a lot more of us than was the case when that document was written. Yes we are in many ways more diverse and have more differences than was the case in those days. The distance between the ultra-rich and the very poor is greater than at any point in the history of the globe. But we are still the people. And our government is based on all of us, not just some of us.

There are other words in that preamble that have inspired generations. Worthy of our contemplation is the goal, “in order to form a more perfect Union.”

You might get the impression, from listening to much of contemporary political debate that our country exists for the purpose of competing with China, or finding the best technological advances, or serving as the world’s police force, or amassing wealth. Our founders believed we formed ourselves as a nation “in order to form a more perfect Union.” Our purpose is to draw closer to one another - to form a community - to discover our purpose as a people.

At our core, each of us has been given the task of discovering what ti means to be truly human. When we take that task seriously we discover that being truly human has to do with forming relationships with other humans. We cannot achieve our purpose alone. We are made for each other. What is our purpose in this life? And what responsibilities come with the discovery of that purpose? These are questions which have been at the heart of religion for millennia. They are also questions at the heart of the American Democratic experiment.

I call it an experiment because we have a long ways to go before we can say that we have achieved the goals our founders set out before us. Perhaps it would be fair to say that after the Civil Rights Movement and some of the great court cases on human equality our union is “more perfect” than it was at our founding. But it would be ludicrous to argue that we have achieved the goal. We have a long ways to go before ours could be called a more perfect union.

Consider the election maps of red states and blue states. What does it mean to form a more perfect union? Consider the harsh rhetoric of political advertising and the tone of congressional debate. What does it mean to form a more perfect union? Consider the clear cases of elected officials to place partisan bickering above their responsibilities as elected officials. What does it mean to form a more perfect union?

A quick glance at social media will reveal that one of the popular modes of political rhetoric these days is blaming others for the ills we perceive. We keep looking for scapegoats and pointing the finger at others. In doing so, we miss the genius of the words of our founders. Ours is a nation of “We the people.” When we disagree with the actions of government, we must be willing to take responsibility for our role in those decisions. Just because our party lost the election doesn’t make us any less citizens. It doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility to work towards a more perfect union. When our leaders act, they do so, in part on my behalf. As citizen I need to be willing to stand up for my ideals, but also to take responsibility for my failure to convince a majority of my fellow citizens of those ideals. The actions of our government are the result, in part, of my action and/or inaction.

I’m no politician. I haven’t got the stomach for that arena. But I am a citizen. And, like all citizens, I am a part of “We the people” as we seek to form “a more perfect union.”

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’ve never been much of a royal watcher. I understand that the monarchy is a big deal in England and the royal family is carefully watched in other countries of the British Commonwealth. I have close Australian friends and I agree with them that Queen Elizabeth II is a remarkable woman. Crowned just before my birth, she has shown amazing grace and dignity throughout many decades of changes throughout her reign. There are a dozen countries that have become independent nations curing her reign, and in most of them, she is still revered as queen. Still, I confess that I really don’t understand the monarchy and why any country needs a royal family. I’m very comfortable living in a country where we have a President and former presidents, where the head of state changers on a regular basis regardless of how much I complain about the process of campaigning.

It seemed that the wold world was caught up in the spectacle of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the early ’80’s and their divorce in the mid 90’s. Diana’s death was a matter of international news and her funeral a huge media event. I sort of paid attention to some of the things, but never got into the scandal and rumors about others. It seemed to be a huge tragedy, but I didn’t feel enough association with them to cry.

I do, however, confess a wee bit of envy of the royals this week. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate and their two children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, are having what seems to me to be a dream vacation. They are spending eight days in one of the most gorgeous places in the world, British Columbia. Saturday they flew into Victoria on Vancouver Island. After a night’s rest the royal couple boarded a Harbor Air Twin Otter floatplane for the hop over to Vancouver where they visited the Immigration Services Society of British Columbia for an event to celebrate young leaders in Canadian arts, music, sports, charity, business and film. Later yesterday they got to visit the Kitsliano coastguard station.

I’ve been to Victoria and Vancouver. They are beautiful cities. I’ve sat on the waterfront in Victoria watching the floatplanes come and go. I’ve never had the opportunity to fly on one of them, but I’d sure love to. William, being a rescue pilot himself, must have really enjoyed the trip on the iconic twin-engine floatplane. The view has got to be spectacular and he would have been allowed to discuss the flight with the pilots.

I’m very interested in the multicultural climate of Canada. Canada has resettled 25,000 Syrian refugees since November of 2015 and the royal couple got to meet a couple who just came to Canada in August of this year. They got to speak to the couple about their children and the struggles they left behind in Syria.

And I’m sure that William had a good time visiting the Coast Guard lifesaving station. Accompanied by Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire, they had the opportunity to meet with the crews and view all of the high tech equipment used by the crews who patrol some very rugged and isolated coastline.

Today they get to fly up to Bella Bella in the Great Bear Rainforest. I’ve never been that far up the coast. We were limited by the end of the highway at Powell River when we made our trip there a decade ago. A visit to the Heiltsuk First Nations community would be a fascinating way to learn about the tribes who have lived for centuries in one of the largest temperate rainforests of the world. The giant spruce, hemlock and Douglas fir trees and the wide variety of ferns and fronds on the forest floor fascinate me. The culture of those who have lived there is amazing.

Tomorrow it is off to Kelowna, a city we have enjoyed visiting and a tour of the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, a site were we once attended a writers’ conference. They’ll tour Mission Hill Winery before flying up to Whitehorse to be greeted buy the Canadian Rangers. The next day they’ll visit the MacBride Museum and meet members of Whitehorse’s cultural community before traveling to Carcross as guests of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation people.

Back in Victoria at the end of the week, there will be a children’s party on the grounds of Government House. On Friday they will fly up to the coastal island of Haida Gwaii, home of the Haida Nation for the opening of a new hospital. They’ll also have a few hours of fishing on Hecate Strait.

As I said, I’m not much of a royal watcher, but this week I’m paying attention. Talk about a dream vacation. There are a few luxuries enjoyed by the royal couple that are beyond my means at this moment. I don’t spend much energy envying other people, but you’ve got to admit that this is a great trip!

So far the weather looks pretty good for them as well. The aspens and birch should be right yellow with a sprinkling of red maple leaves in the more southern locations. As they fly into Kelowna, they’ll see the brilliance of the Tamaracks beginning to change color. The gorgeous mountains of the coastal range will have snow on their tops and they’ll get a few glimpses at the glaciers as well.

Not only will they see some beautiful country, they will be seeing a lot of the diversity of Canada’s people. They’ve already met new refugees and First Nations people and dedicated public servants. They will be meeting with additional First Nations tribes, youth, people who have suffered mental illnesses and their families, victims of domestic violence and those who provide wilderness medical services.

Checking out their official schedule, it would appear that they have access to some pretty first rate childcare during their trip as well. Not every activity such as wine tasting and ocean fishing are places for the children. Still, I’m thinking the kids will have a lifetime of wonderful memories from the trip.

I’ll probably never be able to replicate such an adventure. I am, however, hoping for a ride in a seaplane one of these years.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

A few days ago a friend asked me to give my take on the declines in church participation that have been shown in virtually every poll on religion in recent years. He wasn’t asking about our particular church, but rather about the national trends of shrinking churches and increasing numbers of people who express no religious preference. He noted that similar declines are occurring in other community organizations such as service clubs.

I don’t really have much information to add to such a discussion. His information appeared to be accurate and although I try to keep up with research, I don’t base my ministry on that kind of research. I spoke of a couple of different attempts that we have made at reaching out to those not involved in church and of my observation that young adults across the board, even those who are nominally members of churches, appear to be less involved. They attend less frequently and, in many cases, less regularly than did their parents. I reflected on events and activities that we have planned to bring young adults together in our church and the challenges of scheduling. Our conversation soon drifted off into observations about the choice of many people to live lives that are over scheduled and over committed.

I’ve been thinking about the conversation ever since. My worry for many people in today’s world is that they don’t have the strength of community backing them up that we have experienced in our lives. The failure to form community seems to be a hallmark of our society. I am reminded of the adages that I was taught about faith early in my life: “Faith is not for the good times, but for the hard times.” “Anyone can believe when things are going well, it is when disaster strikes that you need to have faith.” In general, we have it pretty easy in our society. The state of health care means that most young people don’t experience life-threatening illness. Although the economy isn’t growing at a rate that allows for upward mobility for many, there is a sense that the status quo can be maintained with a few adjustments and corrections. We live at a fairly high level of luxury when compared to previous generations. Many have not faced much hardship at this stage in their life’s journey.

All of that is fine until a crisis occurs. I wonder if today’s “nones” (people who profess no religious affiliation) have the systems of support that are required in difficult times.

My volunteer work with the Sheriff’s Office and our LOSS (Local Outreach to Survivors of Suicide) team has frequently placed me in the homes of people facing severe crises. I have witnessed the power of community as a person struggling with devastating grief is transformed into the center of care and concern by the arrival of friends and family. I have also sat with people who face devastating news in relative isolation and feel lost and alone as they struggle with the process of facing their grief and loss.

I remember sitting with a woman who had just received the news of the death of her teenage son. As the impact of the initial shock began to fade and she recovered her ability to speak, she began to question me about what she was going to do. I tried to guide here in setting forth a simple set of things that she might do that day, such as calling a clergy person, notifying family and friends, choosing a funeral home, She didn’t belong to a church. She didn’t know any minister or religious leader. The number of relatives and friends who needed to be notified was shockingly short and she was not eager to talk to any of them. She dreaded the thought of making phone calls to anyone. Her husband, who was not the father of the son who died, was present, but didn’t know how to assist to her. She asked me to recommend a funeral home. While I can list the funeral homes in our community, I am in no place to recommend one above another. Each of the tasks of the day was overwhelming to her and she was immobilized and unable to act. I moved to a more basic level, offering to get her a glass of water, asking if she needed a jacket or blanket, recommending a couple of things that she could do for self care. In time, we were able to formulate a basic plan for the rest of the evening.

That experience contrasts so starkly with some homes where I have visited as family and friends are already assembling, offering love and care and support and assistance. The doorbell rings and more food is taken into the kitchen. A pastor arrives and offers a prayer. People ask if they can help with phone calls. There is usually one or more people who simply pitch in and start cooking and cleaning. The suffering person is surrounded by a community of care and concern.

I am well aware that churches are not the only meaningful communities in people’s lives, but it does seem that there are more and more people in today’s world who do not have any community to back them up. Since my vocation has been the church, I think first of church as the place to build relationships and form community. I continue to be very attentive to nurturing community as a routine part of my job.

As I mull the conversation with my friend, I understand his concern that churches are losing members. I know that decreased membership means decreased donations and decreased budgets. I am well aware of cutbacks in various settings of the church. I have served my entire career in the climate of institutional decline. I understand the tragedy of churches losing members.

That tragedy pales in comparison to the tragedy of people losing their churches. The institution may decline, but it doesn’t experience the suffering of those who have no community.

We have plenty of work to do to help to build up community in the lives of those who have none.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

In his book, “Gone in a Heartbeat,” Neil Spector, M.D. describes an incident in which an advanced pacemaker device implanted in his chest failed and began to issue alert tones exactly as it was designed to do. He called his doctor, but got a nurse because it was after hours. He described the beeping sound he heard, expecting her to confirm that it was a low battery warning. The nurse proceeded to tell him it could have been anything other than the pacemaker beeping. She suggested all kinds of other devices that make tones such as a pager, a phone, a watch. She suggested that perhaps what he heard wasn’t a tone at all, but rather something generated by his imagination. Dr. Spector’s wife got on the phone to report that she also had heard the tone, but the nurse continued to reassure them that there was nothing wrong and nothing to worry about. Eventually the Spectors decided that there was nothing further that they could do and went back to bed. 12 hours later, the beeping recurred and this time Dr. Spector went to his cardiologist who checked and discovered that the pacemaker was not functioning properly. Fortunately, Dr. Spector’s heart was functioning well enough for him to survive the 12 hours without a properly-functioning pacemaker.

There are several incidents in the book where he reports having a hard time convincing medical professionals to take his symptoms seriously. He doesn’t offer any theory about why highly trained medical professionals do not believe patients when they describe their symptoms, but clearly it is an experience that happens to others as well as to him. And he and his wife are both medical professionals themselves. If the doctors and nurses discount the reports of a highly skilled and widely recognized physician scientist who reads all of the information about his devices and medicines, what chance does an average citizen have of being taken seriously in the world of health care?

I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Dr. Spector’s book, nor do I have a reason to focus my blog on the practice of medicine in today’s world. I do know that people in general aren’t very good at truly listening to one another. In fact, we have developed a great deal of skill at not listening to relevant information in critical situations. There are some good reasons for this. Eyewitness information can be inaccurate. People can be completely convinced that they are right when indeed they are wrong. A police officer responding to a critical incident has to trust his own senses and instincts and tune out some of the information that is being shouted by bystanders in order to discern exactly what is going on. A criminal will provide false and misleading information in an attempt to escape and that false information can be dangerous and even life-threatening.

However, as we have learned, sometimes bystander information is correct and could have been helpful if heeded. In the heat of the moment it is extremely difficult to know what to ignore and what to hear.

People often think of my job in terms of the public speaking that I do. Most people, even those who do not attend church on a regular basis, think of the job of a minister in terms of sermons delivered. Their sense is that the job is mostly preparing and delivering public addresses on religion. When they find out my profession, people often apologize for their language, fearing that I am judgmental about others’ speech. From my point of view, however, public speaking is a relatively minor part of the vocation to which I have been called. More important than delivering sermons is listening.

Yesterday I sat with a grieving family planning a funeral for their father. The death had come much sooner than expected and had caught his loved ones by surprise. As they were adjusting to the reality of their situation a host of decisions had to be made and the process had been overwhelming. Questions about which funeral home, which casket, which cemetery, what clothes, what music, what time and what place were coming at them one after another. They were feeling tired and at a loss for words. Into this mixture of emotions and sensations I came with a need to gather information that would assist in providing a meaningful funeral for their father.

I employed a technique that has proven successful in other similar situations. Instead of beginning with questions and leading an interview, I took a seat and got out my notebook. I informed them that sometimes I write quotes to remind myself of the tone of our conversation rather than to use them in the service. After determining a few specifics to find out what decisions had already been made, I invited them to just take a moment to sit and think. I informed them that I might have specific questions, but those could wait until the end of our time together. I thanked them for the privilege of being invited into this moment of grief in their lives and told them I would just listen while they took a moment to remember.

Then I sat quietly. Within a few moments they were talking with each other, remembering specific incidents and stories about their father. Some of the things they spoke of involved a bit of family short-hand, so I didn’t know the details and why a particular phrase would make them all smile. But the general flow of the conversation trended towards their good members of a beloved father. As my time of being with them ended, most of my questions were already answered. I knew which songs to use. I knew several appropriate scriptures. I had more than enough anecdotes to include in my funeral meditation. There will be some hours of crafting the service and preparing what I will say, but the important work of preparation is accomplished. It wasn’t a product of the questions I asked, but rather the stories they told. Having the right funeral service depends upon the quality of my listening.

Now, if we could just teach a politician to listen . . .

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

If you read the obituaries like I do, you will occasionally encounter the brief statement, “At . . . ’s request, no services will be held.” I have also participated in elaborate services with complex arrangements that have been dictated by the wishes of the deceased. Every family is different. Every situation is different. I know that there is no single way to grieve and that the time of a funeral is the wrong time for me to engage in extensive education of the family. My role is to listen carefully and assist in whatever ways I am able. One of the messages I try to communicate as we plan funerals is that the loss and grief affect a wider community. As much as a death is a life-transforming experience for the immediate family, they aren’t the only ones the funeral service serves. And, like every gathered community, there will be people in all different stages of grief and loss who gather. For some the experience of a funeral service will be new and unfamiliar. For others, the grief of this particular loss is layered upon many other losses and the grief is compound and complex. When I am given the privilege of officiating at a funeral, I try to keep all of the different people in mind and it is a balancing act. I need to serve the immediate family as well as the wider community. When it works well, we grow together and the family can feel the love and support of the community in their journey of grief.

Funerals seem to come in waves in our particular congregation. Yesterday as we prepared for a large funeral service the call came of another death in the congregation and the funeral home was trying to set the time for the second funeral while we were focused on the other one. I will meet with the grieving family today to work out the remainder of details and although the community is in no way recovered from the first loss, we will come together to offer our love and support for the second one as best as we are able.

It is something that this congregation does well. There is a great deal of understanding and compassion for grieving people and as a pastor it is a joy to be able to arrange for funeral lunches and music and ushers and other worship elements with just a simple phone call. I know I can count on the congregation to come through for those who are in need.

One of the dynamics of dying that often manifests itself early in the process of a disease is that the individual loses control. Different people react differently to this loss of control. Some seek to acquire as much control as they are able exerting their influence and control in areas where they can while experiencing the loss of control in some very basic areas of life, such as where they live and what they eat. Others assume a more submissive role while losing control. They accept with grace the limitations that are placed on them by disease and the natural process of dying. While each of us might try to predict how we would react in a similar situation, our imaginations probably aren’t accurate. It is hard to say how we would react, given the simple fact that our situation is different from others.

As a result, I don’t have a prescription for those who are facing their own death. I don’t possess the knowledge or expertise to tell another how to react. I do, however, have a brief word of caution for those who leave extensive instructions behind for their loved ones.

Communicating your wishes and desires can be helpful. Many times when I am planning a funeral service, I will ask a question about the deceased favorite scriptures or hymns. Often the family simply does not know because those things were never communicated. It can be helpful to grieving family members to have some sense of what the deceased person wanted. A modest level of prearrangement can be very comforting for a family faced with all of the complex decisions and arrangements that come with the loss of a loved one.

Expressing wishes, however, can easily become challenging and difficult requirements in the emotionally-charged environment of planning a family. Often a family member will say, “I wouldn’t have done it that way, but that is what . . . wanted.” Sometimes I am able to remind the family member that their loved one is in the loving and caring embrace of the eternal and that the service is for those who are left behind and grieving. But the sense of duty and obligation that comes with planning a funeral service is very present and powerful. I simply caution those who are making arrangements for their own funerals to be gentle and present suggestions instead of demands. As hard as it is, relinquishing control can be an act of grace for those who have to deal with their own grief while balancing the demands of the community and their sense of what the deceased would have wanted.

In virtually every case where we have been left precise instructions about a funeral service by the one who has died, there is some element of the service with which we are unable to comply. Perhaps a specific musician isn’t available or has suffered an illness or injury. Perhaps the list of music requested exceeds the time available. Perhaps the realities of travel and the availability of the funeral home require an adjustment in the time of day of the service. I can remember three occasions in my time as pastor when two families wanted a funeral in the church at the same time. There are so many variables in planning a funeral service that a certain flexibility is required.

I have tried to be clear in my communications with my family that I want to place no restrictions or requirements on whatever decisions need to be made at the time of my death. I don’t mind communicating a few of my favorite scriptures and songs, but the final choices should be made by those who are grieving in partnership with the one officiating. Suggestions I will make. Requirements I want to avoid. I pray that I will learn the grace of letting go as I experience the loss of control.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I am not completely sure, but when I write a blog post on the weather it might mean that I am a bit tired. At least it has been a busy time and the last couple of days have been pretty long by the time I got through my evening meetings. At any rate, I know that I am affected by the weather and that one of the joys of my life is living in a place that experiences all four seasons, so the equinox seems like a good tim to comment on the changing of seasons.

When we visit Costa Rica, which is close to the equator, the days and nights are equal in length. The sun rises at about 6 am and sets at about 6 pm. Days are approximately the same length summer and winter and the main indicators of the change of seasons is a change in the amount of precipitation. But it is different here in our home.

Today is the autumn equinox and we’ll see close to 12 hours of sunlight. The sun will rise at 6:41 am and set at 6:49 pm. It is a sign that summer is coming to an end and winter will follow in due course. But in between those seasons we have autumn, which generally is a glorious season here. You can really sense the changing of the seasons. The trees are beginning to turn color and a drive through the hills yields some pretty beautiful vistas with gold and red appearing amidst the green of the pine forest. And things are beginning to cool off a bit, though we’re still seeing daytime highs in the 60s and 70s. Today and tomorrow are the best chances in the next week or so for a bit of rain, with the forecast calling for likely thundershowers tomorrow.

Since we inhabit a place in the northern hemisphere, we remain fairly aware of the tilt of the the earth’s axis. But on the equinox, the sun lines up pretty well with the compass, rising almost due East and setting due West. It is a fun phenomenon because our home is aligned fairly well with the cardinal directions, facing north with our back death to the south. Most of the year, in part because of the alignment of the neighbors’ houses and the variations of the hills, we get ourselves a bit disoriented about directions. With the sun spending its time to the south in the summer (from our perspective) we tend to think that north is a bit east of its real location. On the equinox, however, we get our bearings straight and the house feels like it is lined up the way it should be. We’re not long on east-facing windows, but the room where I write has a window looking in that direction and that is the way I face when writing. Of course, it is still pretty dark as I have over a hour before sunrise as I write this morning.

Part of what makes our planet such a good place for humans and other animals to inhabit is the relatively mild tilt of our axis. In our solar system, the nightmare planet is Uranus. Not only is it a long way away from the Sun and therefore a lot colder, its axis is tilted nearly 90 degrees. It takes Uranus 84 years to orbit around the sun. That means that the winters have incredibly short days and last 42 years! It wouldn’t be a good place for a person with seasonal affective disorder.

I don’t have much experience with places that have less sunlight.as I have lived all of my life in a fairly narrow range north to south. I do, however, pay attention to areas to the north and am wanting to travel to northern Canada and Alaska one of these years. Although I long to visit a place with consistent views of the Norther Lights, I think the season for a visit, at least a first visit, would be summer, when the days are very long and the nights quite short. The reverse, I think, might encourage a bit of lethargy. At least I know that I have a tendency to sleep a bit more in the winter than in the summer.

Autumn in our part of the world, however, means that spring is coming for our friends in the southern hemisphere. We have friends in Australia and South Africa where they are welcoming the warming season. I know, of course that the equinox is technically not an entire day, but rather a precise moment when the Sun crosses the celestial equator, but for all practical purposes today is the beginning of autumn for us and the beginning of spring for our southern friends.

The date of the equinox varies because our calendar isn’t precisely aligned with the orbit of the earth. We lose a roughly a quarter of a day each year and make that time up with a leap day every four years. Tis means that each September equinox occurs about 6 hours later than the previous year’s September Equinox. This eventually movers the date by a day. Then there is the variation of the time zones around the globe. The official equinox is measured by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is the official designation of the time we used to call “Greenwich Time.” It is six hours ahead of the time here in Rapid City. Then, to add to the confusion and entertainment, we play a game here called “Daylight Savings Time” that changes things by an hour, but only during part of the year. So I prefer to just think of the changing of the seasons in terms of the entire day rather than a specific moment. Google that and you are likely to end up looking at an advertisement for the model of Chevrolet Car known as the Equinox.

The indigenous people of this region counted the passing of time by counting seasons. A person’s age was reported as the number of winters that person had survived. By that measure, I’ve noticed that the winters don’t seem as far apart as they did when I was younger and I’m sensing the coming of another to add to the collection.

So enjoy the day. Even with the clouds in the sky it is an opportunity to reflect on the passage of time and the changing of seasons.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I have never shown very much athletic ability. I enjoy playing games and some activities such as biking and paddling, but I am not what one would consider to be a star athlete. As a child, I participated win most of the athletic programs in our relatively small town. I played a bit of little league baseball, but certainly was not the star of the team. I went out for track a couple of years of high school and I wrestled for a few years. I had some agility on the trampoline, but never participated in an organized competition or sport related to the trampoline. And I went out for basketball as a seventh-grader. In those days it was commonly accepted that each student to went out for junior high basketball was allowed to play. We did exercises and played scrimmages in the school gym and when we played against other schools in our district, we got to ride the bus and were called off of the bench and played in the game for a few minutes, even if we weren’t among the best players.

That is how I became the “manager” of our seventh and eighth grade basketball teams. I was recruited to take charge of the score book and a variety of other tasks to assist the coach. Before long, I wasn’t wearing a uniform at games and I wasn’t being sent into the game where it was easy for opponents to steal the ball from me and score additional points. I rather enjoyed the new role. I got to hang out with the basketball team. My mother knitted me a sweater in the school colors that I would wear and I sat on the bench next to the coach with a clipboard and pencil. I looked official, at least to myself. I had a list of chores that included handing out towels and collecting them after showers and making sure that they were put in the laundry, making sure that the team equipment was properly loaded on the bus when we traveled to games and put away upon our return.

It was also my job to make sure that the basketballs were properly inflated. We had a hand pump with and pressure gauge at the base. I suspect that it was simply a slightly-better-than-average bicycle pump. I can still remember that I was to make sure that basketballs were inflated to exactly 8 pounds per square inch of pressure. Because sports balls are inflated by inserting a needle through a rubber valve, a tiny about of air escapes when the needle is inserted and withdrawn. So I learned to add a couple of strokes to each ball each time it was checked and to slightly over-inflate the balls before withdrawing the needle. Mostly I got fairly competent at feeling the balls and gauging their bounce so that they were consistent.

So I have a certain amount of compassion for whoever had the job of inflating footballs for the A.F.C. championship game in January of 2015. You probably remember all of the hoopla surrounding “deflategate,” big controversy in which the New England Patriots were accused of intentionally under inflating game footballs that made it easier for star quarterback Tom Brady to complete passes.

There were a lot of arguments, including passionate declarations that it was part of a giant conspiracy that included specially training the quarterback to throw under-inflated balls accurately. Of course, we are rightly offended at the possibility of cheating in sports and there is a lot of pressure in American professional sports and the temptation to cheat is real.

The research into the situation continues. In the dry desert air of Phoenix, Arizona, there is a huge warehouse with a precisely controlled temperature chamber. They keep the temperature in the chamber at exactly 48 degrees - the same as it was for the playoff game in January in Foxborough, Mass. The floor of the chamber even has artificial turf like a football field. Scientists spent about three months in that chamber examining football inflation and deflation. They were searching for a plausible scientific explanation for why the Patriots’ balls were not fully inflated. They spent a lot of money on that research. After all, there is a lot of money riding on every NFL football game.

The results of the investigation was the Wells report. About half of the report was filled with circumstantial evidence of foul play. The other half was a wonky scientific document filled with equations, table and graphs, experimental methods and laws of physics. The release of the scientific report didn’t stop the controversy and there was even talk at one point of appealing the suspension of quarterback Brady to the Supreme Court of the United States. It didn’t go that fall, Brady accepted the league suspension of four games and we’re preparing to get on with the fall football season.

I have no particular opinion about whether or not there was cheating involved in the inflation of the footballs, but I do have some compassion for whoever had the job of checking the balls. I’ve had that job. In my case, the tools for measuring the pressure were far less sophisticated and less accurate than those employed by the scientists in their specially climate controlled research facility.

I was thinking about that topic a couple of days ago as I checked the tires of all of our wood-hauling trailers, adding air where necessary. I even checked all of the spare tires to make sure that things were proper. I’ve good a good air pressure gauge, but we’re not talking about the kind of tools that race car tire experts use. Fortunately in the business of trailer tires there is some room for error. Still, I don’t want to have tire failure caused by improper inflation.

I think that the language that was used in the report of the NFL footballs was that it was “more probable than not” that the deflation of the balls was intentional and that the quarterback knew about it.

For the record, I want it to known that it is more probable than not that the inflation of the tires of our woodchuck trailers was proper at the time I checked them the week of our first delivery. Frankly, that’s good enough for me. The good news is that the people with whom I work are more forgiving and more understanding of their pastor than they are of their football players.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We seem to have the ability to take the most profound and meaningful words and phrases and turn them into something less. I’m not sure what this says about human culture and identity, but I find that I am often trying to help recover meanings in expressions that have been rendered trite by popular culture.

Here is an example.

The Hebrew phrase הללו יה is spelled several different ways in English. Usually it is rendered “Alleluia” or “Hallelujah.” The contemporary word in English took a trip through Greek, Latin and Old English before being rendered as a word in common usage. In Hebrew, its literal meaning is “Praise ye Yah,” or “Praise Yah, you people.” Yah is a short form of Yahweh, the four Hebrew letters that traditionally have been interpreted as the personal name of God. In that same tradition, those letters are not pronounced out loud out of respect, so the word Adonai is substituted when those letters appear in the text of the Hebrew Scriptures are read out loud. The phrase, הללו יה, however, is pronounced since it doesn’t include all four of the consonants of Yahweh. If you are already confused by my explanation, hold on. It gets more confusing.

The word Alleluia has come to refer to a specific Christian liturgical chant. In an Alleluia, the word is combined with verses of scripture, usually from the Psalms and occasionally from songs that are reported in the Gospels such as the songs of Elizabeth, Zechariah and Mary. In a traditional liturgy, the Alleluia is sung before the proclamation of the Gospel except during the season of Lent, when no Alleluia is chanted.

If you want to do more research, however, be sure to “Google” Alleluia, not Hallelujah. A quick search of the latter will turn up hundreds of articles about the song written by Leonard Cohen. Before discussing that song, however, it is worth noting that it isn’t the first time a specific song has become associated with the term. In early January of 1940, Randall Thompson composed a four-part chorus. Later that year, in July, it was given its first public performance at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. The piece was written as a commission. Serge Koussevitzky, director of the Tanglewood Festival wanted a fanfare for voices to be performed at the opening celebration of the new Berkshire Music Center. Koussevitzky had in mind a joyous work. Thompson produced a quiet and introspective piece, moved by the war in Europe, the fall of France and other world events. Given the state of world politics, it seemed to Thompson that a more introspective piece was in order. The text is simply the word Alleluia repeated over and over again with an Amen at the end with the choir divided into seven parts. While we expect the word Alleluia to be a most joyous expression, the piece by Thompson is a very sad piece. It is probably Randall Thompson’s most popular composition. Choirs around the world have sung it on many occasions and it is frequently performed to this day.

Leonard Cohen’s “Halleljuah,” however is a different thing entirely. I don’t know much about the context in which the song was written, but if you listen to the words of the verses, it is difficult to even call it a song of faith. “I don’t know if there’s a God above” is one of the phrases. Another speaks of the gun of one that “out drew you.” It is hard to tell if it is a love ballad or a kind of personal statement about the trials of being a songwriter. But the chorus is catchy. It hangs in your mind and after you have heard the song, it easily becomes an “ear worm” that you can’t get out of your mind.

The song, however, has become so omnipresent that the composer himself once asked for a break from it. “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it,” he told the Guardian newspaper in 2009, agreeing with a critic who asked for “a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows.

I guess the producers of the Emmy Awards were unaware of that moratorium. The memoriam segment began with Tori Kelly’s guitar and the start of the first verse, “Well, I heard there was a secret chord.”

The song has been covered by musicians from Bob Dylan, Bono, Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, Paramore and Celine Dion. It’s been rendered in rock (Rolling Stones), punk (Bush Tetras) and jazz (Charlie Parker).

It has been a part of popular movies such as Shrek and television shows such as The West Wing. It seems almost blasphemy to have used in in Nicholas Cage’s movie, “Lord of War,” but it is there. It’s made appearances on “E.R., Scrubs, General Hospital, Trauma, and House.” I guess it has a penchant for hospital dramas.

One story is that Mr. Cohen drafted as many as 80 verses for the song while writing the original song. Adam Sandler came up with a few more for a concert for the relief efforts following Hurricane Sandy, including lyrics bout Mark Sanchez’s “butt fumble” and the loss of pornographic theaters in Times Square.”

The song showed up on American Idol, The X Factor, America’s God Talent and The Sing-Off. Apparently amateurs can remember the words to the chorus without too much effort. And if you are a fan of the genre, which I am not, I hear that the Dancing with the Stars version featured Michael Bolton singing the song surrounded by a children’s chorus and fog machines as he was raised up on a piece of theatrical equipment.

There’s not much we can do about our culture, but I think that it might make sense for people of faith to return to the practice of avoiding alleluias during the season of Lent. The idea is to take a six-week break from celebrations to practice the art of grief. To do so in our culture would mean taking a six-week break from movies and television.

Hmm . . . now there is a good idea. I think I’ll give it a try.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There is a story that our people have been telling for thousands of years. The formal version of the story is found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7, verses 36-50. The basic story is that Jesus goes to the house of a Pharisee for dinner and while he is there a woman, came with an alabaster jar of ointment and stood behind Jesus, She wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair and kissed his feet and anointed them. The Pharisee, begins to question Jesus’ moral authority, saying that surely he must know that this woman is a sinner. Jesus answers him with a parable. He also reminds the pharisee that when Jesus came to his house, the pharisee didn’t wash his feet. The woman however washed his feet with her tears.

Today’s blog, however, isn’t a sermon on this text. There are plenty of sermons out there. I just want to think for a moment about the process of washing someone’s feet with one’s tears.

A brief bit of background is in order. In Roman times, tear catchers were commonly used by those who were grieving. Mourners filled glass bottles with their tears. Some of the flasks were designed to be worn on a chain around one’s neck. the bottles were often ornamental and elaborately decorated. It was believed that the amount of tears collected in the bottles was a way of measuring respect for the deceased. The tear bottles had seals that allowed for a slower rate of evaporation than if the tears were left out in an open container. Nonetheless, they did evaporate. When the bottle was empty and the tears were gone, the period of mourning was over.

The custom of using tear bottles was revived in Britain during the Victorian era. The bottles used at that time were often decorated with silver and pewter.

Back to Jesus’ time and our story. The tears that were used to wash Jesus feet, might literally been the tears of grief of a mourning woman. We don’t know for sure, the Biblical record doesn’t provide precise details, but that is definitely one possibility. It seems unlikely that the woman could have produced sufficient moisture to wash Jesus feet by simply crying at the moment. The woman was turning her grief and mourning into a blessing by using her tears to comfort and sooth Jesus’ tired feet at the end of along day.

Now for a bit of science (just a little bit): Human bodies produce at least three different types of tears, each with a unique chemical signature. Basal tears are produced nearly constantly and keep the cornea lubricated and clear of dust. Some of the chemicals in basal tears also help to fight against bacterial infection as a part of the immune system. A healthy person produces somewhere between .75 and 1.1 grams of tears in a 24-hour period. Hmm. . . I don’t think the woman was washing Jesus’ feet with basal tears. It would have taken years to generate sufficient moisture.

The second type of tears are reflex tears. Reflex tears are produced when the eye is irritated by foreign particles or irritants. Those are the tears you cry when you cut onions or are exposed to tear gas or pepper spray. Bright lights can also cause this type of tears to be produced. They attempt to wash the foreign substance out of the eye and are produced in much larger quantities than basal tears. Perhaps the woman washing Jesus’ feet had an onion hidden somewhere to help her produce her tears.

The third type of tears are emotional tears, also known as psychic tears. We weep when we experience strong emotions such as emotional stress, anger, suffering, mourning or physical pain. Those tears are also produced by positive emotions such as laughter and pleasure. These tears are quite different in chemical composition than basal or reflex tears. they have more protein-based hormones. Production of emotional tears is sparked by the limbic system, specifically by the hypothalamus. These tears also contain Leu-enkephalin, a natural painkiller. Crying literally eases one’s suffering.

Generations of our people told the story of the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears without knowing the details of the chemical composition of tears. Even without this knowledge, however, they understood that it was an amazing event - a story worth telling over and over again. Something wonderful happened in that exchange and we have treasured the story for so many generations.

There have been several occasions in my life, usually associated with grief and loss, when it has felt like I have been cleansed by the process of crying. I make a pretty good effort at not crying in public, though I do think I’m becoming a bit more of a sentimental fool as I age. I try to be a stable leader and a steady speaker when I am leading worship. But there are things that can trigger my emotions and spark my tears. A week ago I looked up while preaching and my eye caught the eyes of a young man who has been away for a while and had returned home for a brief visit. I remember when I held him in my arms and baptized him. It hardly seems like there could have been enough years for him to become an adult who is living a long ways from home. Even though the experience of looking at him had little to do with the subject of the sermon, there was a catch in my throat as I spoke.

Along with the stories we have told, our people have reminded ourselves in each generation that the process of grieving is a healthy and necessary process. We ought not fear our tears, but rather embrace them as signs of healing and growth. We need not fear the times of mourning, but rather embrace them as avenues for new life.

So let us lay aside our fear of weeping. It’s just good Biblical interpretation. And it is good science as well.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

One of the joys of living in community is that other people bring fresh perspectives to conversations. Different people perceive the same situation in different ways. Being a part of a community opens one to looking at things from a different point of view.

Recently, I realized how differently two people can look at things through a conversation with a loyal and dedicated church member. This is someone I have known for a long time, who is very active in our congregation and a dedicated volunteer who invests many hours in church activities and events. It is a person with a heart for mission who believes in serving others and embraces many of our congregation’s programs. It is a person whose values are fairly similar to mine. We were having a conversation during a break from a work project and talking about our congregation’s firewood project.

I’ve written quite a bit about that project. Basically we obtain wood from people who are thinning their trees or have to cut down trees for a variety of reasons. We cut the logs to fireplace length and split them, stacking the wood in the church yard. Then we deliver the firewood to partners on the Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations who distribute it for home heating. We ask only that the firewood not be sold, but given away. The project began without any budget or need for funding. We used what people gave us. When we needed a mechanical splitter, a donor came forward with a machine. Later a second splitter was obtained through gifts from multiple donors. An appeal for a heavy duty trailer resulted in a donation. Other trailers are borrowed from church members. The pickups to deliver the firewood belong to the members of our congregation who also donate the fuel for deliveries. One of our basic operating principles is that we will use what we have and do without what we don’t have. There have been no fund-raising events, and no committee meetings. We simply invite whoever is available to work and we get done what we are able.

The project has been fantastically successful. We deliver nearly 100 cords of wood a year. We have the joy of working together almost every week. People have participated in a wide variety of ways from baking cookies for the crews to providing childcare for workers to donating wood to working on crews and dozens of other tasks.

As a pastor, one of the things I appreciate about the project is that it is completely worry free. I don’t have to do anything except be a member of the team. I work when I am able and feel no guilt when other duties keep me away from work days. Others make the arrangements and phone calls and keep the work flowing.

So we were talking about the project and some of the deliveries we will be making this year. As usual, there are some changes. One of our big partners on the Cheyenne River Reservation passed away last year and we don’t have his home as a place for distribution this year. That particular delivery has been a big event for many years. We know we’ll find other partners with whom to work, but things are a bit less settled this year than in previous years. My friend was looking around the wood lot which has a lot of wood, but only about a day’s worth of wood that is unspilt. We will need to find more wood to split or we won’t have work for regular work days. I mentioned a few people who have said that they have wood to donate. My friend, however, expressed worry that we won’t have enough enough wood to deliver this year.

As we returned to work, I was puzzled by his worry. As I have said, I don’t worry about the project at all. What people give us we will give to others. What we don’t have, we won’t worry about. There have been years, in the past, when we delivered far less wood than we already have split and stacked for delivery this year. I’m sure that things will work out.

Then I was granted a bit of insight into my friend. He is thinking of the project in terms of resource distribution. He sees firewood as a resource. Like other resources, there is a finite supply of firewood. He has spent his active career managing resources and making sure that they are sufficient to meet needs. From that perspective, it would be a significant problem to run out of resources.

I see the ministry in terms of relationships. I am grateful for the ways in which it builds relationships between people. I’m overjoyed to have my reservation friends get to know my friends from our congregation and vice versa. I have been delighted to occasionally work with a son or daughter of an elder as we begin to forge relationships with a second generation of partners. I respond to request for firewood because I see opportunities to build relationships with people.

And I can see nothing wrong with delivering all of the firewood and running out. If that happens, we will just have to find some more and split it. After all, I can remember when we had no firewood in the back yard of the church and made deliveries directly from the homes of firewood donors. From my point of view, running out of firewood would be an expression of a job well done and would be easy to explain to our partners. “What happened to all the firewood?” “We gave it away.” After all isn’t that the reason for the project?

It is a good thing that we are both involved in the enterprise. Our different perspectives is one of the gifts the ministry has been granted. His caution helps us be prudent with our deliveries. My desire for relationships gives us new opportunities to serve.

I just wish my friend didn’t have to worry. I think things are going to work out just fine.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Lets start today with a bit of the history of philosophy. Don’t worry, it’s just a LITTLE bit: In Apology, Plato reports of the trial of Socrates, in which he was given the choice of exile or death. Plato quotes Socrates as responding by choosing death with these words: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” From our perspective all of these centuries later it is probably impossible to know for sure what Socrates actually said and which words Plato attributed to Socrates. For the purposes of today’s blog, it probably doesn’t matter who first said those words. The dictum has become a part of our contemporary understanding and is often quoted and occasionally misquoted.

If it is the truth, however, I don’t think that many are achieving much examining of their lives. We are simply too busy.

I know I can easily fall into a sense of busyness. Because they know of my love of paddling, people frequently ask me about it: “Have you been doing any paddling lately?” The truth is that I have not. I haven’t gotten out a boat since they were put away at the end of our vacation. Tomorrow is my third Sunday back and I haven’t gone out once. It seems that I am too busy. And I have a “to do” list that keeps getting longer and longer. I could name all of the tasks I’ve set ahead of myself, but frankly it is probably boring.

It is not just me. I frequently ask the members of our congregation how things are going, how their families are. The most common answer I hear is something like, “We’re just so busy. I’m so busy. There is so much going on.” The people in my congregation are tired, exacerbated and overwhelmed with the pace of their schedules.

Duke University professor Omid Safi recently wrote about visiting with one of his neighbors and asking if their daughter and his daughter could get together to play. The mother reached for her cell phone and opened up the calendar application. She scrolled . . . and scrolled . . . and scrolled . . . and finally said, “She has a 45-minute opening two and a half weeks from now. The rest of the time its gymnastics, piano and voice lessons. She’s just . . . so busy.” His report of the interchange immediately reminded me of the struggles we have been having planning events for our youth group and children programs at the church. Even when we establish regular meeting times, attendance is very spotty. There isn’t much room in the schedules of the children and youth for church activities. After a career of participating in weekly youth group meetings, I have to admit that it might not be possible to get that kind of commitment from today’s youth.

It is a big change for me because I grew up in a world where children got muddy, dirty, messy and made up our own games. I grew up in a world where we sometimes complained of being bored because our small town didn’t have many organized activities for children. I’m having trouble adjusting to a world in which parents consistently overschedule their children, making them as stressed and busy as the parents.

The result, I fear, is that we are raising a generation of children who have their priorities skewed. They find it normal to have very little time for leisure, very little time for reflection and very little time for community.

Which is why I began with the Socratic quote. It is time to examine our way of living before living becomes meaningless. If time were taken for examination, we would once again discover a truth that the ancients knew: People who do not allow enough time for leisure are not free. This is serious business. Becoming a slave to one’s schedule is just the beginning. Our entire way of life is based on people making time for leisure, reflection and community.

It is no mistake that the ten commandments, basic advise on living as free people, devote the most words to the commandment about Sabbath. People who think they are too busy to take a day off are placing themselves above God, not a good practice if you would be a free people.

Our system of democracy assumes that people will take time to reflect and make choices that are not only in their own best interests, but in the best interests of the entire community. The wisdom of the whole assumes that individuals will consider the value of community. Thoughtless voting without allowing any time for contemplation yields disastrous results. Abdicating one’s responsibility to the crafters of television advertising is neither responsible nor wise for the long-term health of a democracy. Democracy assumes that people will take time to examine and choose wisely.

If we were to examine, we would discover that we’ve become so busy in part because we have become enslaved to our technology. Consider that mother, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. There probably could have been five more minutes for her child just in that single interchange. The mother spends so much time keeping the schedule in her phone updated that she doesn’t have time for her child.

I frequently find myself caught in a similar bind. I struggle daily with an avalanche of email. I was an early adopter of computer-aided communication. I like the idea of being able to keep in touch. But these days I am constantly buried under hundreds and hundreds of emails and I have no idea how to get out from under the burden. My inbox is filled with personal emails, business emails, hybrid emails. And people expect a response. A few years ago, I weathered a scathing verbal attack because I decided not to respond to work emails while on vacation. Even though an associate was responding to those emails, the lack of a personal response from me was seen as a dereliction of duty by a member of the congregation. These days I plan email response time into every vacation. The tool that was designed to save time is consuming time.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I am teaching myself and, hopefully the people I serve, the importance of face-to-face connections. Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. I’ll do the same for you.

And if you don’t get an instant response from the email you sent me, consider it a gift of leisure in a world that is far too busy. Use the time to examine your busy life. Waiting can be a blessing.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

As a child, the word “sanctuary” meant a specific room. It was the place we worshipped at 1st Congregational Church in Big Timber, Montana. It was two blocks from my home and my family walked to church every Sunday. I don’t remember ever having a family conversation about church attendance. It was simply something that we did. The church had two parts: the original building housed the sanctuary and the pastor’s office. The addition had Sunday School rooms upstairs and a large fellowship hall downstairs. The sanctuary was remodeled sometime in my early teens, but as a child what I remember most are the hard wooden pews that had so many layers of furniture wax on them that you could fill your fingernails by just scratching the edge of the bench and the fact that our pastor wore a black robe.

As I grew towards adulthood, I realized that other churches had sanctuaries. I visited those of the Lutheran, Episcopal, Brethren and Church of God in our town and one year, when my father was moderator of the conference, we toured the other congregational churches in our state, traveling by car or airplane. I sat in a lot of sanctuaries that year.

Towards the end of my time in high school, I learned to broaden my concept of sanctuary to include the outdoor worship space at our church camp, where I participated in several very meaningful worship experiences. As my appreciation for outdoor spaces continued to grow, I found sanctuary in a number of spectacular vistas of the mountains of Montana. We would strap on our backpacks and hike away from other people and view gorgeous scenery. I could sense that “surely God is in this place” as I looked in awe and wonder.

In college my primary worship space was the church I attended on Sundays, but I also found sanctuary in the basement room where a college fellowship group, “The Rocky Road Scholars” met weekly. That group took occasional tours of congregations near the college, singing songs and offering prayers and liturgies, so I visited other sanctuaries.

Moving to Chicago was a bit of a cultural shock for me. I found the traffic and the constant crush of so many people to be a bit intimidating. I wasn’t a fan of all of the locks that separated our tiny apartment from the street and the apartment itself felt too small and tight for my sensibilities. Our seminary had a small chapel as well as a very large chapel with a pipe organ and soaring gothic ceilings. Both had spectacular stained glass windows with bright colored light streaming into the rooms. Both offered a sense of sanctuary from the activities of the city outside. And there were many other sanctuaries in my seminary years. Just across the street from our seminary was Rockefeller Chapel, a gothic revival chapel with a 200’ bell tower and soaring stone ceilings, a massive pipe organ and a carillon that could be heard from our apartment. I served as janitor at University Christian Church and we frequented the chapel of the University of Chicago Divinity School. I served multiple internships at Union Church of Hinsdale and spent time in both its main sanctuary and the smaller wedding chapel.

The summer we completed our seminary degrees, my parents took us on a trip to Europe that we dubbed the “cathedrals and castles tour” as we stopped to tour cathedrals nearly every day of our travels. I took hundreds of photographs of cathedral exteriors and interiors, as well as photos of details such as baptismal fonts, gargoyles, pulpits and pipe organs. I still have several carousels of 35mm slides from that trip.

As pastor, I have found great solace in the worship spaces of the congregations I have served. One of our first two churches, In Hettinger, North Dakota has been preserved by the community as “Centennial Chapel,” and looks exactly as it did when we were pastors there, right down to the same carpet on the floor. Our church in Boise had a sanctuary that was too small for the congregation in the days we served there and was remodeled and expanded the year we moved away, but it is still recognizable as the room where we shared a decade worth of worship. The sanctuary of our church here in Rapid City is an architectural masterpiece of simplicity and incredible acoustics. In addition to sharing congregational worship in that space, I have been privileged to spend countless hours in private prayer and meditation in that room. It is my custom to arrive early on Sundays and go to the room alone as I visualize the upcoming worship service and think about the lives of the people who will attend.

There have been many wonderful physical sanctuaries in my life, but perhaps the most valuable lesson of the years has been the discovery that sanctuary doesn’t have to be a particular location or a specific architecture. Sanctuary is any place where I open myself to God’s presence. God is indeed everywhere and there is no place that cannot be a sanctuary.

I have experienced the sacred in patient care rooms of the hospital more often than in the formal chapel hidden behind the reception desk off of the hospital lobby. I have recognized and acknowledged God’s presence in the emergency room, the intensive care area, the pediatrics wing and the cancer care center. I’ve even glimpsed God in the board room and administrative offices. Some of the most earnest prayers I’ve experienced have been offered from the room where families wait while their loved ones are in surgery.

I have experienced the sacred in the homes to which we are dispatched by the Sheriff to respond to emergencies, often tragedies. Sudden and traumatic loss is always a life-altering circumstance. If I set aside my fear and enter into the experiences of others, God’s presence is revealed in surprising ways as we wrestle with the tragedies of pain and grief and loss.

Any space is a sanctuary when I open my eyes and my spirit to God’s presence. Remembering that helps me read the Psalms in a whole new way. Praise God in the sanctuary!

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

After the attention that was given to the Olympics this summer, it seems a bit unfair that there hasn’t been much news coverage of another international sporting event. The World Nomad Games are begin held in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan. There has been plenty of pomp and ceremony and hoopla, but so far I haven’t seen anything in the sports section of our local newspaper about the event.

The opening ceremonies alone were pretty spectacular. Held at the hippodrome, the ceremonies featured dancers and bright costumes and special lighting.and a guest appearance by actor Steven Seagal riding a horse. Impressive about the opening ceremonies were the nomads who set themselves aflame and galloped around on horses. That drew a pretty good response from the crowd. The horses had special blankets to protect them from the heat of the flames. The riders also were wearing protective clothing, but the whole show still seemed pretty scary. People are willing to go to great lengths for art and entertainment, however.

The World Nomad Games featured events not seen at the Olympics as well. As you might expect of nomads, there were horse races and even camel races, but that was pretty tame compared to some of the events. There were also high wire walking and arm wrestling competitions and fox hunting with eagles. Apparently the sacrifice of foxes for the sake of sport was deemed acceptable. After all, foxes weren’t the only animals sacrificed for the games.

The contest that caught my attention is kok-boru. It was described by one competitor as “rugby on horses,” but there is no boring football-like object to throw into the taikazan or goals. Instead they use a 70-pound, freshly decapitated goat. The game is also known as buzkashi or ogle tarts. Apparently it isn’t the strongest game for the team of American nomads. The U.S. placed seventh out of eight teams. Kyrgyzstan won gold, followed by Kazakhstan and then China. Apparently there is quite a thrill involved in riding galloping horses while carrying a goat caracas while your opponents attempt to steal it from you. It is not something that an old sheepherder from Montana understands very well. But then, I didn’t grow up living in a yurt and hunting with a golden eagle, either.

I guess this won’t be my last chance to watch the games. After the success of the first World Nomad Games in 2014, the 2016 competition was so successful that they are already talking about the 2018 games.

All of that is not to say that life around here has been boring. On Tuesday evening, we noticed water running down the street not far from our home. It turned out that the source of the leak was a broken water pipe that runs from the water main to our curb stop. It is buried in the same trench as our neighbor’s water line and it was determined that both are leaking. the solution was to excavate the water line and turn off water to both houses. I spent most of the day yesterday calling and meeting with contractors and making arrangements to get the line excavated and replaced. The backhoe is parked out front of the house and work is slated to begin at 7:30 this morning. Meanwhile, we’ve been washing up and flushing toilets with water hauled from the neighbors. If there were more of a delay, we’d probably hook up a hose from the neighbor’s home, but it appears that we’ll be back to normal by sometime around noon today. It will make me appreciate my shower a bit more.

It’s too bad we don’t live in New York City. In that place, you can purchase a season membership in the Guggenheim Museum for just $75. That means for just $150 per year my wife and I could visit the museum whenever we wanted. Of course we’d have to observe museum hours, but that admission ticket would give us equal access, along with other museum patrons, some of whom paid the $18 single admission price, to a one-person, unisex restroom that is also an exhibit. Inside of the private chamber is a fully functional 18-carat gold lavatory, titled “America,” by the Italian artist and sculptor Maurizio Cattelan. The museum bills it as an “interactive exhibit.” According to the museum, “its participatory nature, in which viewers are invited to make use of the fixture individually and privately, allows for an experience of unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.” Ahem. I guess that New Yorkers haven’t paid so much attention to a fixture since Marcel Duchamp’s avant-garde “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal, was exhibited in New York in 1917. I guess that caused a sensation in the art world.

I don’t know how the museum is avoiding the constant ringing of the pun, “You’d have to be pretty flush to purchase that toilet.” Perhaps the docents are just getting used to it.

Not being an expert on fine art, it seems to me that despite the temporary inconvenience of having no running water in my house, I probably don’t need to put any effort into visiting that exhibit.

Crazy news stories from around the world, however, help me to put my own week in perspective. With a higher-than-expected truck repair bill on Monday, having the water to our home turned off on Tuesday, having a crown on a front tooth come loose on Wednesday and Thursday being the deadline for our quarterly federal income and self employment taxes, Friday promises to be the high point of the week. Life is bound to be getting better by Sunday for sure.

The Guggenheim museum says its exhibit is aimed at “making available to the public an extravagant luxury product seemingly intended for the 1 percent.” It is pretty clear that I’m a member of the 99 percent. I’ve no interest in shopping for such a fixture. Going a couple of days without running water gives me new appreciation for those who live in such circumstances every day. Even when I feel like complaining, I don’t have it that rough. And, like I say, it seems that I have a weekend coming that is gong to be pretty great.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Things have cooled off a bit in the hills. Yesterday the high was only in the 50’s. Overnight lows have been in the high forties for a couple of nights. We finally gave in and turned on a bit of heat in our home last evening. But you have to be careful in the hills. Our weather is highly variable and just when you think that the season has changed, the weather can surprise you. The forecast calls for highs win the seventies by today and it may make it to 80 by the weekend. Since we haven’t had any frost here at our home, it is just what the tomatoes need for that final push to vine ripeness. Its looking like I’ll be mowing the lawn again before summer has completely lost its grip on us.

I was thinking about the weather yesterday as I drove into the church from home. Our outdoor thermometer was broken this summer and I haven’t replaced it. We have outside air temperature gauges in one of our cars, but the one I drive doesn’t have such a device. However, there is a weather station that is just a little ways away reports on the Internet, so I’m assuming that the temperature at home was 49 degrees.

By the time I made it to Calvary Lutheran church, which has a digital time and temperature display on their sign it was 51 degrees. I’m not exactly sure why churches think that time and temperature is vital information for people to get from their signs, but there are at least a couple of churches in town that provide this service. And I can understand it being a bit warmer at the Lutheran Church. You know, the warmth of hospitality and all of that. Being Lutherans, they probably don’t go in for much hellfire and brimstone preaching so the temperature rise is modest. It might be interesting to have a pentecostal church next door with a time and temperature sign so we could compare temperatures, but we don’t have such a thing in our town - at least not on the path I normally drive to work.

At the credit union the temperature was up to 53 degrees, which also makes sense. At least I get a little nervous and a bit warm under the collar when I have to fill out a loan application. I appreciate all of the banking services of the Credit Union, but doing business there isn’t my most enjoyable task. I probably would be a bit more calm and cool sitting in the pew at the Lutheran Church than transacting business at the Credit Union.

There is one business, however, that stand out. At the Jackson Car Wash the sing was reporting a temperature of 266 degrees. That’s hot! I’m not sure why they’ve got the temperature cranked up so high there. 266 degrees is too hot for a car wash. It might loosen some of the adhesives used in the car. It definitely would remove protective wax from the car’s surface. I contemplated that the high heat might be for the espresso kiosk that stands in the parking lot, but if that is the case, I don’t think I would stop by for any of their coffee. Anything over 150 degrees might result in a McDonald’s style lawsuit. And when the temperature is over 180 degrees it can leave the coffee tasting burnt. I know people who routinely make coffee with boiling water, but even that isn’t 266 degrees. The carwash/espresso business added a new venture to their parking lot this year. It is now home to a pest extermination business and there are often 4 or 5 pest vehicles parked in the lot. But I don’t think that high temperatures are how they get rid of ants and mice, either. The high temperature remains a mystery to me. I know the sign has been reading 266 degrees for several weeks, now, but I haven’t stopped in. It just seems too hot for my comfort.

The fact that I notice such things, however, points out to the effectiveness of the signs. It is quite possible that were the sign to display a normal temperature, perhaps one close to the credit union across and down the street, I wouldn’t even notice it. After all, as I drive down the street I should be paying attention to the traffic, pedestrians and other things required to drive safely. Checking out the signs ought to be a low priority. The one exception, I assume is the body shop on the same street that displays birthday greetings to all of its customers. Not only is it fun to see whose birthday it is, but you can also see who has been giving business to the body shop by reading that sign. And, if it does distract you and you end up running into the car in front of you, you can take your car to the body shop and get your name on their birthday list.

Rapid City does have a sign ordinance and their is some regulation of outdoor advertising, but the ordinance is less restrictive than most cities. When we host out of town guests they frequently comment on how many signs there are everywhere they look in the hills. It is true. When we visit other areas popular among tourists, the view has far less advertising signs.

Being someone who doesn’t watch much television, I find the large full-color moving displays to be especially distracting. We have several large billboards in our city with displays that change frequently and have different video effects that really make them stand out. Knowing the price of room full of furniture or the credit terms for obtaining such a thing is not exactly necessary information for my commute to and from work. I can even keep up with the Sheriff’s most wanted characters and the tally of the number of drunk driving arrests if I want to.

So, I’m looking forward to a warming trend this week. It may be time for me to get outside and go for a walk - preferably some place with fewer signs.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

It seems like it has come up quickly, but “back to school” is in full swing. August 31 was the first day for students in our local school district, so they’ve had a couple of weeks to adjust to their schedules and get into the routine. The bus that waits on the corner as I’m driving to work has the same driver as last year, so we started out waving to each other on the first day.

Cinnamon Hill, the preschool that occupies our building, has added a second session on Tuesdays and Thursdays, bringing total enrollment to 99 3- and 4-year old students. There were a few tears as students experienced being left by parents last week, but those quickly fade to the gentle sounds of children learning and playing together. I take great delight in working in the building with the children. Their presence adds a gentle and powerful reminder why we do the work that we do. From time to time I get to listen to exchanges between students and teachers as I walk around the building. The brilliant minds and quick thinking of the preschoolers usually brings a smile to my face.

Out in Washington, yesterday was the first day of school for our grandson who is enrolled in a five-day-a-week, “all day” kindergarten this year. Our daughter-in-law sent pictures of him boarding the school bus for his first day of school with a wave and no look back over his shoulder. He is ready for this new experience and his parents did an excellent job of preparing him.

From my perspective, his school is big. My kindergarten might have had 15 or 16 students. We had no public kindergarten in our town and many children didn’t participate in the program. The private kindergarten met in the morning only. Our grandson’s school is at full capacity, with five kindergarten classes of 25 students each. That’s 125 5-year-olds to keep sorted out and heading in the right direction. First day must have been a workout for the adults who meet the buses and keep the kid traffic flowing in the right directions. They were well prepared with color-coded name tags issued in advance of the first day.

The “full day” program isn’t as long a day as older students study. Our grandson is finished with class at 2:30 pm and home shortly afterward, so there is some time for him to unwind and play with his sister before dinner and bedtime routines.His parents have some flexibility in their work schedules and have arranged them so that he is able to leave from and return to home rather than having to go to day care after school.

I was a bit surprised how emotional his going off to school was for me. I’m sure that if I had been his father, watching him climb up the steps into the big yellow bus would have left a lump in my throat. Just looking at the pictures had its impact. When our kids were that age, we lived within easy walking distance of the school and the departure into the building was pretty direct. We saw them in the hands of their teachers before we had to say good bye and we were there when they emerged from the building.

Our grandson is a veteran of two years of public school pre-school programs, so is not intimidated by the crush of other children and busyness of the school building. This year’s classes are at a different campus than his previous years, but having a new school is just part of the excitement for him.

His two-year-old sister isn’t old enough for preschool yet, but she is well into the business of imitation. She donned a backpack to walk him to the bus stop for his first day of school. She will be ready when her turn comes.

The work of our schools is critical to our society and culture. It sometimes surprises me how little support our schools and teachers receive. Listening to political rhetoric, you might believe that school rank pretty low on the priority list of policy makers. The funding of prisons seems to take precedence over schools in the South Dakota legislature most years. Some politicians are so opposed to taxes that they speak as if every tax is a burden and should be eliminated. I know it sounds a bit counter-cultural, but I think there is joy is some of the things that our taxes do and education is one of those sources of joy. I spend plenty of money in each year that yields little pleasure or joy of acquisition. I pay to have the oil changed in my car. I have a car before and I have the same car afterward. There is little joy of ownership in an oil change. I buy groceries and then eat them and buy some more. But our school yield intelligent, caring and well-adjusted children who bring hope and idealism to the entire community. I look at the high school graduates each year with a sense of awe. Their education is a far better use of funds than some of the discretionary purchases I make. I have a shoe box filled with charging devices for electronic gear that I once really wanted and now no longer use. Most of those devices became obsolete within a few years of their purchase. (I know I should just throw those things away, but that is a different blog entirely.) I don’t have the same emotional attachment to those devices as I have for the youth who have grown up in our church and graduate from high school each year. I’ll be paying attention to where they are going long after my electronic devices have been recycled and a new generation has replaced them.

I wish legislators could learn to speak of school as investments instead of expenses. The right investment would help them with the prison costs down the road.

So be careful folks, school is open, allow a little extra time for your drive to work and be careful. As for me, I’m adding a special prayer for the schools and teachers each day. They are a blessing for which I am grateful.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We enjoy keeping track of the youth we know as they go off to college or the military and begin their adult lives. Two stories of current college students bear a striking similarity although the two have never met and have always lived ion different states. Adam headed off to college planning to study physics. He was an excellent student in high school and math and science were easy subjects. It seems he had a gift for physics and it made sense for him to pursue that field. Now, as he begins his second year in college he has switched his major to the study of philosophy and religion and is animated about his new field of study.

Ben headed to college planning to become an engineer. He has had, since he was a young boy, a talent for understanding how things work. When he didn’t understand how something worked, he carefully disassembled it and found out. Engineering seemed like a very good match for his talents and abilities. Now, beginning his third year of college, his major is philosophy and he is delighted with the books he is reading and the classes he is pursuing.

Both of these young men have caused a bit of a stir in their families. Although they have very supportive families, a few eyebrows have been raised at their choice of college major. There is so much pressure on parents and students these days to choose fields of study that will provide jobs that will offset the costs of higher education. Although neither of these young men have that particular pressure, there are plenty of parents and grandparents who “helicopter” over their college students, involving themselves in their decisions about which courses to take and what to study with a careful eye on the cost effectiveness of each educational decision.

Without further comment on the two young men we know, I have a message for those who are evaluating college performance solely in terms of its ability to produce income to offset the expense: “Get over it.” Allow me to elaborate. The entire world of employment is changing so rapidly that there is no one who can predict much about the future of jobs and employment. Who can even say what jobs will exist 20 or 25 years from now? The current push for students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), is producing a glut of similarly-educated young adults competing for jobs, some of which are lucrative and others that are less so. Although there is evidence that initial salaries for STEM graduates are higher than those who have studied the humanities, life-long income is not as divergent. Furthermore, all of those studies report what has happened, not what is going to happen in the lives of today’s college students.

Here is what can be predicted: There are all kinds of indications that millions and millions of jobs will be eliminated by advancing technology. The production of more and more artificial intelligence will make machines more capable and reliable than humans for many employers. Tasks of design and computation and engineering are already incredibly dependent upon computing. As more and more sophisticated computers and software take over the field, fewer and fewer humans will be required to conduct research, design machines and do other tasks. We are already seeing many areas where computers are simply more accurate and reliable than humans. In the next decade the role of machines in medicine will expand greatly. As the use of those machines expands, many jobs will be rendered obsolete.

In the next couple of decades there will be both a shortage of philosophers and an increasing demand for them. Here is one example: Google and Tesla and several other firms are working on autonomous cars. These self-driving vehicles hold the promise of safer and more reliable transportation. Driverless cars, however, need to have some very important philosophical choices designed into their algorithms. One small example. imagine a car driving down the highway. Five people suddenly step out into the roadway. The braking system is inadequate to avoid striking them. The only way to avoid hitting them is to steer the car off of the road where it will collide with a concrete barricade and kill the passenger in the car. There is only one passenger in the car. What should the autonomous system do? This decision needs to be programmed into the car before the event occurs. Failure to do so will cause accidents that will be second judged and may disrupt the production of future autonomous vehicles. The makers of autonomous vehicles might try to base their programming on the judgment of the majority of a group of people, but there is a problem with this: people do not respond in the situation the way they think they will. They can have clear convictions about hypothetical situations such as I have presented, but when confronted with the reality of a difficult choice will often make a different choice than they would have predicted.

This is not a new problem for philosophy. Philosophers have been contemplating exactly this kind of problem for over 4,000 years. And that is just one example out of a myriad of philosophical challenges that technology companies face. Google and Tesla and Uber and hundreds of other companies may not know it yet, but they are going to need philosophers to guide their algorithms.

Some technology companies are already beginning to realize this. They have discovered that graduates of traditional engineering programs don’t have the skills they need. The highly competitive nature of many top engineering schools produces graduates that are technically competent, but who have little or no skills for working with others. The big technology companies don’t have any projects or problems that can be done by one person working alone. Collaboration is essential. Teaching employees to work together is far more difficult and expensive than teaching them the basic skills of engineering. One group of technology companies is paying entrepreneurial students to pursue their interests outside of school believing that real world experience is more valuable than a college education.

I’m no better at predicting the future than anyone else. But I do know that people who pay attention to what is most meaningful to them and what fields of study captures their passion are more successful in life. And I know that life is far more than the size of your paycheck.

I’m cheering for the young philosophers. I know we need them.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There are several different ways to think about today’s anniversary. On the one hand, one might say, “It has been fifteen years since the attacks of September 11, 2001,” and express amazement at how quickly time has passed. There are images that are fresh in our minds and the dedication to never forget remains constant. A slight shift in vocal emphasis, however, renders the same statement as one that expresses the length of time and the distance from the emotions and experiences of that day.

They say that time heals all wounds, but there is little comfort in that phrase for those who lost a loved one in the attacks. In fact, in my work with the victims of sudden and traumatic loss, I have come to believe that there are wounds that never heal. You don’t get over the loss of a loved one - you get through it, but not over it. You survive. The loss remains forever. I think that any competent grief counselor would understand that there is an intensity of emotion for those who were close to the events of that day that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. For them fifteen years is nothing. And yet, for them, the simple fact that the world has gone on for another fifteen years must be a source of some amazement. For fifteen years they have grieved.

One area of interest for me is the process of passing on the information and emotions of the event to a new generation. Fifteen years means that all of the children in our elementary and middle schools were born after those events. Very few high school students today have any direct memories of that day. They know of the events from the stories of parents and the lessons of teachers. For them 9-11 is already a second-hand event.

It is the dilemma of every generation. The intensity of the present has a different quality than the telling of the story. The world pledged to never forget the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and the extermination of six million Jews in an attempt at total genocide, but each year there are fewer and fewer original eyewitnesses. This morning I read that Greta Zimmer, the woman kissed by a sailor in the iconic photograph marking the end of World War Two has died at the age of 92. She was 21 when that picture was taken. Within a few years, none of the veterans who served in that conflict will still be alive.

I don’t expect the world to forget. Still, I have intense memories of first-hand reports of that war that my grandchildren will not share. They will never meet those people or hear those stories the ways that I did.

Pledging to never forget makes an assumption about the quality of our memories that is probably inaccurate. We have relatively little understanding of the kinds of brain disorders that result in memory loss. We are surrounded by people who suffer from different forms of dementia that rob them of their most cherished memories. We can pledge to remember, but we cannot prevent ourselves from forgetting.

There is a unique echo to the attacks of September 11, 2001, however. Our country has responded to those events by engaging in a war on terror that has been, in part, wars in specific countries against specific governments as well as attacks against individuals in other countries. On October 7, 2001, the United States went to war in Afghanistan. Although technically US combat operations in that country ended in 2014, there remains a residual force in that country that is supposed to be withdrawn by the end of this year. then, on March 20, 2003, a “shock and awe” bombing campaign overwhelmed Iraq and U.S. forces swept through that country. The last of U.S. combat troops were withdrawn from that war in 2011, but for the people of Iraq, the conflict and hardships are far from over.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars produced a huge number of severely injured veterans. Survivors bear permanent brain injuries, amputation of limbs, and other permanent life-altering injuries. Like other wars, these wars will leave deep scars and lives deviated by psychological injuries as well. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, roughly 22 veterans have died by suicide per day. We lose our veterans to suicide at the rate of about one an hour.

The deaths, the injuries, the pain, the grief - these are not over. They did not stop when the attacks ceased and the dust cleared.

The families of the initial victims of 9-11 have a memorial, located on the sites of the two towers that were destroyed. Opened to the public five years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the memorial features two voids that have the same dimensions as the destroyed towers. Each void is framed by walls of water that cascade into pools below street level, vanishing. The voids never fill with water. Bronze panels contain the names of those killed on September 11, 2001 and those who were killed in the first attack on the towers February 26, 1993. A grove of 400 swamp white oak trees complete the landscape. Two years ago, a companion museum was opened beneath the memorial plaza.

We will remember, but the intensity of our memories will not be constant. The impact of the events of one day will remain with us, but they will be only part of a long line of other days, some of which are equally or more intense for some individuals. For families who did not lose a loved one on 9-11, but lost a loved one in the wars that followed, there are unique days and anniversaries that bear tremendous impact.

So we note the anniversary today. And we know that time will pass. Before long we will notice the 25th anniversary and more to come. In time, we will be forced to trust the second generation with remembering. And, when all of the eyewitnesses have come to the end of their lives, the story will remain.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I have blogged before about trying to discern, from several native Lakota speakers, the nuances of various words in that language. Takini can be translated “survivor.” It can also mean “barely surviving.” But it also can have a more triumphant interpretation: “Despite attempts to destroy us, we are still here.” Language is like that. Our human words express part of the realities of our lives, but often carry meanings that only some of us recognize. Two persons can use the same word and have different meanings.

In English we have chosen the word “survivor” for those who have lost a close friend or relative to suicide. Our Survivors of Suicide Support Group has been holding regular meetings at our church for two decades and there are still new members at nearly every meeting. The word “survivor” sometimes has other associations for people, however. I was told, recently, by someone that that person had assumed that Survivors of Suicide were people who had attempted suicide but somehow lived. I understand how the words can be confusing.

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. It always brings mixed feelings for me. Our Suicide Survivors Day event will run from 10 am to 2 pm at the church. There are some parts of the program to which I am looking forward. Most of all there are some people that I want to see. I guess that is the thing about being a survivor. Being seen means that you are still alive. That you have survived.

When it comes to suicide, that is no small feat. Having a close friend or family member die by suicide leaves those who are left behind at a higher risk for dying by suicide themselves. It is a cruel twist of fate, but those who have experienced the loss of a loved one to suicide are roughly twice as likely to die by suicide themselves than the general population. An event that cannot be controlled - a decision made by another person - puts these individuals in a place of higher risk.

It is painfully obvious to me this year. Last month the daughter of a man who died by suicide a couple of years ago herself died by suicide. She was a very vocal spokesperson for suicide prevention. She said things like, “I don’t know how he could have done this to us!” and “How could anyone do such a thing?” And now she is dead and there is a whole new cluster of survivors who are left behind trying to make sense out of a senseless act.

I wish she could come walking into the room. I know she will not.

Those of us who are involved in work with survivors of suicide have been educated in the importance of providing support and resources to those who have experienced the loss of a loved one. “Postvention is prevention” is a slogan that we often hear in training and continuing education events. Responding with support to a suicide event helps to prevent future suicides. We know the statistics in our minds.

But there are times when it seems that it is not working. It has been five years since we have seen a significant decrease in the number of suicides in our county. 2011 was a year in which we experienced a drop in the number of suicides, but the decrease did not last. There was a record number of deaths by suicide in our county in 2012. And every indicator leads us to believe that we will set a new record for the number of suicide deaths this year. It is a statistic that I wish we could change.It isn’t just our county. More people in the world die from suicide than by war and murder combined.

We used to hold our local survivors day in November. We would gather at the hospital to participate in an international teleconference and hear speakers talking about the latest research and efforts in suicide prevention. Those conferences were valuable, and I still make sure that I watch the conference each year. But we learned that the most important part of our gatherings was the process of being together - seeing the people who are surviving and listening to the stories of those who have survived for five or ten or more years. For those who are wondering how they will get through the next week, hearing the story of someone who has survived for a decade is an inspiration.

These days we have moved our event to September because it is the month that has been set aside as national suicide prevention month. Our goal has never been to clutter the lives of survivors with too many events or to dredge up painful feelings too frequently. Combining our survivors event with prevention events just made sense to us.

So I look forward to seeing people.

But I also know that there will be moments in the day which will be painful. We will have a service of remembrance. With pictures and candles and names spoken out loud we will remember those who have died. We will recall the joyful memories. We will give thanks for the lives that touched ours, even if that touch was all too brief. That is the thing about grief. Even though it is a painful process you never regret having know the person whose death you mourn. Despite the pain, the love remains.

Part of being a survivor is learning that you can endure pain. You can’t live your life focusing on avoiding pain at all costs. There are days when facing the pain is the best way to deal with it. Today is one of those days.

We never know how many people will participate. Some years we are surprised at the numbers. The feelings associated with grief are often unpredictable and those who are grieving often can’t predict whether or not they will be able to participate in an event. Although we encourage pre-registration for the event, we know that the number of people who say they are coming won’t match the number of people who do come. So there will be some surprises this year as there are every year.

Then, tomorrow evening, as National Suicide Prevention Week ends, I will stick close to my phone as I will be on call for the next seven days ready to respond if another suicide occurs.

And, as always the case, I will pray that the phone doesn’t ring.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

One of the dynamics of being a pastor in the same congregation for several years is that the events in the lives of the people I serve continue to surprise me. You might think that four decades of experience, half of it in the same congregation, would give me some insight into what to expect, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Unseen and unpredicted illnesses crop up. Some people have long and healthy lives while others face a shortened span. Major illnesses occur in some lives and take years and years to run their course, while others are sick for very short periods of time before facing death. I’m sure that there are patterns of disease that are understood by medical researchers, but predictability is not part of the experience of a pastor.

It isn’t just illness. Some people discover a burst of enthusiasm for the church and become leaders whose impact remains for decades. They volunteer for many different positions and serve in many different ways. Others show a similar enthusiasm and then the enthusiasm fades. They participate for a period of time and then move on to other activities. Some of the every Sunday worshipers will be similarly involved years from now and others will be absent from the congregation a few months down the road. Couples whose marriages seem secure will experience divorce. Other couples, who seem to have more tenuous relationships will be married decades from now.

From my perspective, there is no predicting and when I do attempt to predict, I am often wrong. It is one of the joys of being a pastor. The congregation continues to surprise me. Life is never boring.

When I was much younger, I was passionate about my beliefs and convictions. I had studied a good deal of theology and understood some of how my beliefs fit into the thoughts of others and felt that I had a handle on classical theology and biblical interpretation. I considered myself to be a somewhat of an expert. I could be dismissive of those who had less education. I experienced a sense of certainty about some aspects of my faith. As I age, I have found that there is less certainty and more mystery. Things that seemed black and white years ago no longer appear to be that clear.

This reality requires a shift in my expectations. I think when I was younger that I thought that life would be a journey of moving closer to God. As I aged, I thought, I would grow in maturity and understanding until at the time of my death I would be nearly certain about the nature of God and secure in my relationship with God. In my experience, however, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Life’s journey certainly isn’t a straight road. The dance of faith and doubt doesn’t weigh in a single direction, but rather weaves and bobs and darts. It isn’t that I have less faith than was the case at some other point in my life. It is that my journey continues to require a great deal of faith. Faith never becomes certainty.

I am, however, a bit more comfortable with uncertainty than was the case when I was younger. Perhaps I am learning to trust. When I was young I was eager to convince others of my point of view. I spoke out and I tried to get others to change their minds. I saw certain interpretations of religion as dangers to be avoided and was quick to argue. I still am not shy about offering my opinion, but I’ve learned to be a bit better at listening more carefully to the opinions of others.

I am no longer certain that I know exactly what I believe and why I hold those beliefs. It seems that belief is a living entity, growing and changing as I travel through this life’s journey.

As I write a colleague of mine lies close to death. For many years we worked closely together striving to craft worship for our congregation. We didn’t always agree, but the differences of perspective helped us to produce better experiences than we might have produced working separately. We each freely offered our gifts and together with others framed and formed worship each week. Our life together was not without tensions. Sometimes I was not as articulate in expressing my gratitude for the contributions of my colleague as that person desired. Feelings were sometimes hurt when decisions went in a different direction than was desired. Sometimes the tensions bubbled up in ways that seemed inappropriate. We weren’t always the best at communicating with each other. Now, as this transition of life approaches, I have a few regrets. I wish I had been better at saying “thank you.” I wish I could have found ways to bring more attention to the contributions of my colleague.

Regardless of my personal feelings, my colleague has never been absent from my prayers. I have wished the best for this person and I have prayed for peace and release from suffering. I am grateful that my colleague is in God’s hands. I’m way beyond wishing to shape that person’s faith to be more similar to mine. I hope and believe that my colleague possesses faith sufficient for the present journey.

The situation will leave unanswered questions in my mind. Not everything in life can be wrapped into a neat package.

In “Thoughts in Solitude” Thomas Merton offers a prayer that seems appropriate for my colleague. It also seems appropriate for me. Perhaps it is a prayer that anyone could pray:

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I watched part of the keynote of the Apple product launch yesterday. I have been watching the computer company for many years and have been a fan of some of their products, though I am less enthusiastic now that they seem to be at the top of the sales charts than I was when apple users were a minority and the company was seen as a purveyor of “alternative” products. The presentation yesterday was, like previous Apple product announcements, carefully designed and crafted to evoke enthusiasm about Apple’s products and a positive impression of the future of the company. These announcements are aimed both at customers and at shareholders.

The part of the presentation that I watched was demonstrating some of the features of the Apple Watch. The device was being portrayed as a partner in increased health and fitness. It can be used as a monitor of certain body functions, a way to record exercise and even a motivator of healthy lifestyle choices. I don’t own an Apple Watch and I doubt that I’m a potential customer at least in the short term, so I wasn’t exactly thinking of the device as something I would wear. What struck me about the segment that I watched was an application that was highlighted a couple of times. The application interrupts whatever else the wearing is doing and reminds that person to take a deep breath. It even provides a graphic to illustrate the pace of breathing that is recommended.

I’m all in favor of breathing deeply. I have been employing breath prayers for decades as a part of my personal spiritual discipline. For thousands of years religious people have sensed the connection between breathing and spirituality. The word spirit is etymologically related to words for breath and breathing. In both Hebrew and Greek, the same word is used for spirit and for breath. However, it has never occurred to me to look at my watch when engaging in deep breathing. The process involves paying attention to my internal clock, not an external one. The timing of a breath is a natural function to be observed, not regulated. If I were to think of the things required for a healthy spiritual discipline, I wouldn’t count a watch as one of those requirements.

Of course the people at Apple and its software developers are trying to make the point that the watch is more than a timepiece.

Modern computers aside, there is a dimension to spirituality that involves a process of developing internal regulation of one’s life. A mature spirituality isn’t about following external rules and regulators, but rather developing an internal sense that guides ones thoughts and behavior. There is a reason we use the word “discipline” when speaking of spiritual practices. Prayer is not something that is imposed from the outside, like a set of commandments, but rather something that comes from within.

A careful observer can see the process of internalization by watching preschool children. Often, when they come to the preschool that meets at our church, young children look to adults for the standards and norms of behavior. Regulation of their behavior comes from the words of the adults around them. They determine “right” and “wrong” by what is told them. Participating in the program, however, they begin to sense that there are other clues to their behavior. They develop empathy and can understand that other people have feelings. A child can learn that hitting causes pain. They begin to internalize a sense of what to do and what not to do. The controls on their behavior begin to be internalized. When this process fails, the person involved has trouble functioning in society. If a person’s behavior is controlled only by outside forces, they become sociopaths and the outside forces increase until a behavior lands them in jail. It is a delightful process to see the awareness come alive in a young child and to witness that child begin to self-regulate their behavior.

It is similar with the growth of a spiritual discipline. We might begin a practice because we learned it from others. Then, over time as we repeat the practice, it becomes a part of our identity. I don’t have to think about beginning my day with a gratitude prayer. It is something that I always do. I’ve done it so long and repeated the process so often that it is part of my internal identity.

It is not dissimilar with deep breathing. I don’t need a watch to remind me to stop and take a breath. It is true that my discipline is imperfect and that I have, on many occasions appreciated a human partner who reminds me to “Calm down. Take a breath.”

I suppose that if I were at a different phase of my life, I might embrace this new technology and try to develop applications that would partner with human teachers to assist those who are seeking in finding the practices that are most helpful for them. There probably is a role for devices to play in developing and deepening spiritual disciplines. But from my present perspective, it seems like the gift I can give some of the people I know is to remind them to set aside their devices.

A few years ago a colleague was nearing exhaustion as she directed a major conference and balanced all of the details of the event. She was constantly being interrupted by her cell phone and losing her focus on the people who were around her. At one point I simply grabbed her phone and walked away from her. I promised her I would return it after dinner. When a text message came in on her phone, I ignored it. She could respond to it later. When it rang, I let it go to voice mail. She had a very pleasant dinner. No crises arose because she waited until after dinner to deal with her messages. She has thanked me over an over for that gesture since that occurred.

So I don’t think I’ll place an order for a new technological device this week. I won’t even watch all of the keynote message. And, for now, I’ll be setting aside my devices when I practice my spiritual disciplines.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

You know that feeling you get on the eve of a deadline? It is a sense of near panic, assessing the amount of work to be done and wondering if there is enough time to do it. I get that feeling significantly in advance of the actual deadline. In college, I would complete assignments a week ahead of the deadline. I would hand in papers days before they were due. I would prepare for tests and then have to wait for the test with a bit too much free time on my hands.

I think that I have moderated some over the years, but I still tend to try to beat deadlines. I pretty much have my sermon in mind by Wednesday although I don’t actually deliver it until Sunday. I depart home early for meetings. I arrive at the church long before others. Although they know me well, I still kind of drive my family up the wall with my penchant for getting things done early.

There are some people that are so chronically late that you begin to tell them an earlier time than you want to meet. According to my wife, she has learned that when I state a desired time to depart, she needs to be ready about 15 minutes earlier than I stated because I am more comfortable leaving earlier than is necessary.

There is a name for this. Pre-crastination has been featured recently in articles in Scientific American, The Atlantic and Psychology Today.. Although those of us who exhibit the symptoms of pre-crastination think of it as a virtue, there are several aspects of this tendency that make it a less than desirable quality. Studies have shown that people who consistently beat deadlines and complete work earlier than their colleagues tend to be less creative. We tend to go with our first thought and don’t open ourselves to the wider range of possibilities. We justify ourselves by the fact that extreme procrastinators tend to be less creative as well. They finally complete the work in a panic that excludes many options.

What makes us annoying to our peers is that we have a certain smugness, especially about those who procrastinate. I remember this most clearly in relationship to one of my college roommates, who never did any work until the last minute. His all-night panic sessions disrupted my sleep. I simply thought of him as poorly organized and felt that he just didn’t approach his college studies with the required seriousness. I dismissed him and sought out a new roommate.

More importantly for those of us who want to understand the phenomenon, it is important to distinguish the things about which we pre-crastinate from those that we don’t. We aren’t consistent. I panic about preaching and complete sermon preparation in advance. That means that I take time away from other chores. In fact there are aspects of my work, such as cleaning my desk an dealing with my mail about which I procrastinate. I’m not better with deadlines than others, I simply choose which things about which to panic and which to ignore. It is possible that I simply modify deadlines for certain things in my life.

Like so many other things in life, attitudes towards deadlines require a sense of balance. Ignoring every deadline is not a good social skill, but neither is panic in advance of normal deadlines. The same studies that show that pre-crastination results in decreased creativity show that peak creativity comes somewhere in the middle of the scale, possessed by those who don’t panic too early, but also who don’t completely ignore the deadline.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. The legend is that it took Leonardo d Vinci 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa. After four years of waiting for the portrait of his third wife, Lisa Gherardini, Francesco del Giocondo got tired of waiting and refused to pay for the work. It was eventually sold to the king of France. Meanwhile da Vinci berated himself in his journals and expressed all kinds of doubts and guilt over his inability to finish the work. The painting, however, seems to have been a success in terms of its eventual fame and popularity. The anguish and delays seem to have resulted in a work of amazing creativity and longevity.

Aging, I hope, is partly about gaining maturity. I am trying to revise my attitude towards all sorts of things as I move into the next phase of my life. One of the things I’m seeking to conquer is my pre-crastination. I don’t want to become a procrastinator, I simply don’t want to get too worried too far in advance of deadlines. I don’t need to show up early for every meeting. I don’t need to start running late, either, but I could benefit from learning to relax and allowing myself to adjust my schedule when normal delays occur.

I’’ve got a long way to go to become that mature. Recently, when on vacation, I decided that I would not set the alarm clock. “After all,” I reasoned, “I’m on vacation, I deserve to sleep in as much as I want.” However, in the middle of the night, sometimes as early as 1 am, I would wake worried that I might not have time to write my blog before others were waking and wanting breakfast. As a result, I would get up and write the blog earlier than normal, usually in plenty of time to go back to bed and sleep for a few hours. I wrote my blogs earlier in the day while I was on vacation than I do in my normal routine. That isn’t just pre-crastination, It is pure craziness. The deadline for writing the blog is completely self-imposed. No one is telling me I need to do this every day. Normal people would take a break from writing for a vacation. Normal people don’t wake their wives in the middle of the night with the obsession about writing.

One of these days I’m going to wait to write my blog until the afternoon.

But then I’m not quite ready for that yet.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Yesterday, on the fifth of September, I mowed the lawn. It is lush and green, as is sometimes the case in late May and early June. There were even a few dandelions popping up their yellow flowers, something we don’t usually see in September. It is especially surprising because there was a giant heat wave in June this year that sent all of our grass except a few areas that we watered around the house and garden into dormancy. Around the first of July, I had resigned myself to a brown summer with the grass waiting until another year to don its green. Then the thundershowers that we normally expect in June came in July and continued into August.The thundershowers brought much-needed rain and turned the grass green once again.

It isn’t just the grass that is surprising us. Our garden was flattened by hail on July 30. Thirty minutes of pea-sized hail left only stems of most of the plants. Even the hardy sunflowers were looking sad with big holes in the leaves. The tomato plants were only stalks in their cages and the few tomatoes that remained on the vines had the tops all bruised. As those tomatoes ripened, only about half of each fruit was usable. But tomatoes love hot weather, and we’ve had plenty of that this summer. With daytime temperatures holding in the 90’s throughout most of August, the plants came back and now are filled with ripening fruit. Looking at the plants yesterday, it was difficult to remember how sad they had looked on the morning of July 16.

It is one of the endearing features of the natural world that it is so able to surprise us.

I’m no master gardener. I am able to grow only plants that are easy and hardy and resist a bit of neglect. I’m not the kind of person who is out in the garden every day. That means that I’ve always been able to produce prodigious crops of weeds and there are many years when the garden is more of a source of amusement than a source of food. I always imagine that I can produce more food than actually grows. My one crop that seems to succeed each year is sunflowers. I plant them for the sheer joy of looking at the large yellow and orange flowers. We don’t attempt to harvest the seeds other than shaking a few out of the heads to keep for next year’s planting. Most years I have to add purchased seeds in order to replant. Sunflower seeds are natural bird feeders and in our neighborhood the pinion jays can strip all of the seeds out of the garden in a single day. Watching the birds feast on the seeds is, however, satisfying in its own way.

In my imagination we carry in baskets of nutritious food from our garden each year. There are plenty of folks who can do that with smaller garden spaces than we have. The best time of the year for my style of gardening is early spring, before the first tilling of the garden soil. That used to be the season of seed catalogues, but the seed companies have moved digital these days. You can sign up for a digital newsletter from Burpee and other companies, but it isn’t the same as the old seed catalogues.

The web sites are, however, pretty tempting. The photographs of luscious blueberries and the reminder that fall is a good time to plant berry plants. It is also the season for planting bulbs for next spring.

I know, however, that there are plenty of things to distract me from gardening. I have a busy work schedule and I like to head for the lake when I have a few minutes of extra time. Given the choice between paddling and pulling weeds, I’m likely to go for the former. My life doesn’t really need more chores than the list of undone tasks that are a part of my everyday existence.

We’ve settled for a rather simple garden. There is something about the flavor of a home-grown tomato that is worth the effort to produce a few each year even if our production is far less than our consumption. We aren’t likely to see a drop in our household food budget caused by gardening miracles, but an occasional treat from the garden is worth a small investment of time and energy. I suppose that if I kept track of the amount of water we use, the costs of seed and other garden products, the occasional garden tool purchased and a few other factors, we don’t save much money on our style of gardening. Still, it seems like something that is well worth the time and effort invested.

There are plenty of things in life that aren’t well measured by money. What is the value of being able to pick a fresh tomato and bring it inside to slice for lunchtime sandwiches? What is the value of watching the birds feed on the sunflowers after having enjoyed their sunny colors for several weeks? What is the value of getting a little dirt underneath of your fingernails and breathing fresh air instead of sitting inside on a spring day?

So I’ll continue our somewhat chaotic form of gardening, with a few too many weeds and a limited harvest of edible crops. I’ll continue to plant sunflowers each year and enjoy watching the birds. I probably won’t ever develop the berry beds and fruit trees that I can imagine when I am looking at the seed web sites. We’ll still remain dependent upon the successes of more dedicated farmers and gardeners when planning our meals.

Two wonderful things about gardening remain. The first is that there is always next year. No matter how poorly the garden does in a single growing season, there is always the promise of a better year next year. The second is that the garden holds a wonderful capacity to surprise. Indeed this year has been amazing. Next might be equally surprising.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We have a nephew who has a degree in journalism. After graduating from college he traveled the wold for several years teaching English as a second language then returned to college where he earned a masters in education and obtained his certificate as a teacher. He is an energetic and engaged teacher and the school district where he serves is lucky to have him working with their students. His is only one path among many for journalism students these days, but most of those paths are distinctly different than was the case decades ago when we were students. Most journalism students of my generation spent at least a few years working at newspapers. In those days newspapers were the primary employers of journalists and working at a newspaper was an excellent way to hone one’s skills of reporting, writing and editing. The field was referred to as “the craft” and honing one’s craft was a normal part of maturing as a journalist.

These days, there simply are not enough newspaper jobs for the students who are graduating from college with journalism degrees. Our local newspaper has decreased the number of people involved in its production to the point where it no longer needs the space formerly occupied by its newsroom.

The fact that we still receive a daily newspaper in our home is a quaint practice that seems strange to our grandchildren, who have never lived in a home that collects piles of newsprint for weekly recycling.

A few years ago The American Society of Newspaper changed its name to The American Society of News. This week at its annual meeting The Newspaper Association of America, the trade group that has represented the interests of major newspaper publishers in one form or another since 1887, is going to drop from its name the word that once defined it: “Newspaper.” The new name will be the News Media Alliance.

Newspapers are disappearing from our culture. The association’s membership has dropped to about 2000 from 2700 in 2008. The big news outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones still have newspapers, but printed papers are small fractions of their enterprises these days.

While the number of newspapers continues to decline, there is a rise in the number of digital news organizations that are not associated with print editions. BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review are organizations that do not print newspapers yet are major providers of the news to people.

Change is the way of the world. People of my generation don’t miss the horse and buggy era. We can remember the time before televisions, computer displays and smart phones dominated our lives, and even wax nostalgic about those days, but we know that the world is not going to go back to the way it once was.

A couple of decades ago when we moved into our home nearly every house in our subdivision had a box out front for the newspaper. These days, those boxes are anomalies. I watch the delivery person making one stop on our street before getting to our house then heading up to the top of the hill for a third delivery before going on to the next street.

Frankly, it isn’t going to be too long before ours is one of the houses that doesn’t receive the delivery. It will take some adjustment because we’ve received a daily newspaper since we graduated from school and reading the paper over breakfast has become such a habit that when our delivery is missed or we are on vacation our morning routine is disrupted.

Newspapers have rarely been financed by subscriptions, however. What drives newspapers has long been advertising. Advertising rates, however, are based on circulation. As circulation drops, so does ad revenue. Although our daily paper still seems to be filled with advertisements, many advertisers are coming to the conclusion that newspaper advertising is a less effective means of getting to potential customers than online media. There are nearly 200 church and para church organizations in our city. Saturday’s issue of the newspaper contained ads for three of them.That is a big change from 20 years ago when there were fewer churches but the Saturday edition of the paper had a half page of church ads.

It is concerning, however, that along with the shift to digital news sources is a shift away from human editors and writers to digital media’s use of algorithms to determine what stories to tell. Instead of discerning what is truly news, the computer formulas track what is “trending,” that is what topics are most popular at the moment. The result can be the dissemination of false stories. Print papers, however, are not immune from these trends. As the number of people involved in production declines, print newspapers, like their digital cousins, rely increasingly on automated systems to gather the news. We have noticed articles in our print newspaper that contain confusing information, draw false conclusions and even report items that did not happen. Such stories are usually the result of the paper taking stories from other sources and including them in the printed copy.

The bottom line is that the newspaper, as we have known it, is dying. How long it takes to completely disappear is unclear. I suspect that some form of weekly paper, perhaps the Sunday edition, will persist for many years. However, it won’t be long before the daily edition will simply cease production because it doesn’t make financial sense to distribute information in that manner. It seems likely that we will cease subscribing before papers disappear entirely. The information in the print edition is simply too obsolete. We already obtain that information from other sources before it can be delivered to our home.

There was a time when we kept an unabridged dictionary near our dining table for reference during mealtime discussions. We’ve already learned to reach for our computers instead of the dictionary. The reach for a tablet instead of the newspaper isn’t that much of a stretch for our household.

And we won’t have trouble finding something to do with the time we currently invest in delivering old papers to the recycling bin.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

On several occasions, my mother told me, “I don’t want to have a bed that is too comfortable. If I get too attached to my bed, I might not want to travel.” Whatever else happened in here life, mother never lost her desire to travel. Even after she was suffering from brittle diabetes and congestive heart failure, she would talk of the places that she would like to visit. She would, however, comment regularly during the final couple of years of her life about how much she enjoyed her bed and how comfortable it was.

There was nothing special about that particular bed. It wasn’t the same bed that she had moved from Montana to Oregon when she give up the house in which we were raised. It was an antique slightly less than full size bed that we inherited from my wife’s side of the family and fits in the rather small bedroom that was mom’s when she lived in our home.

I have been thinking about beds a bit because we’ve been doing a bit of moving around in the past few weeks. In order to accommodate six extra people in our home when our Australian guests and our daughter and son-in-law arrived on the same day, we slept in a basement bedroom while others slept in the bedroom we usually occupy. Then we moved into our camper for two weeks’ vacation. Now we’re back in our regular bedroom. I can’t say I notice much difference in the way the beds feel. I guess there must be some differences. Three different mattresses can’t be all the same, but I slept equally well in all three settings.

What I did notice was the difference in sounds. Our bedroom is at the northeast corner of our house and I enjoy sleeping with the windows open. Most of the sounds coming from the outside of the house are natural sounds: wind, birds, an occasional turkey call. We do hear the neighbors on occasion and can hear other sounds, but the loudest human-caused sound is the refrigerator in the kitchen. Down in the basement, we were isolated from the outdoor sounds and treated to a few rumblings from our home’s plumbing. I was unaware of how much water runs when the water softener cycles until sleeping next door to it. Then, in our camper, we parked in several different locations. In a few we had the sounds of neighbors in other campers. Some were delightfully quiet. One had a delightful little river dancing over the rocks to lull us to sleep. The different sounds seem as critical to the quality of sleep as does the surface upon which we are lying.

I agree with my mother. I don’t ever want to lose the joy of traveling. I don’t want to become so attached to one place that I am unwilling to make a change. I rather enjoyed the change in perspective of moving around inside of our own house and sleeping in a different room. Our house has two bedrooms on the top floor. I don’t think I’ve ever slept in either one of them. Perhaps I’ll have to try it out some time.

For now we’re trying to get back to some of our routines. The first week back at work is filled with tasks that had been set aside in order to be gone for two weeks. The ministry isn’t in the first place a vocation of repetition and sameness. There are always new challenges and crises to which a minister must respond. People’s lives take unforeseen twists and turns and part of what we do is to journey with the people that we serve. A minister needs to be prepared to go from planning a wedding to a bereavement call within minutes. With all of that going on it helps to have a few routines in your life such as a comfortable place to sleep. So we’re back to our usual bed in our usual room. It does make it a bit easier to find my socks in the morning.

It is important for me to remind myself of how much luxury and privilege is reflected in the simple fact that I have choices about where to sleep at night. There are plenty of people in the world who don’t know where they will be sleeping each night. At the end of 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were 65.3 million refugees, an increase of 5.8 million over the year before. To put that in perspective, of all of the world’s people about one in eleven is homeless. Millions and millions of children and adults sleep in temporary accommodations every night. Some refugees spend as much as 20 or more years living in temporary camps. They don’t get to compare mattresses or choose the color of their bedding. They don’t get to think about whether the room on the north is more comfortable than the room on the south side of the house. They aren’t afforded the level of privacy that we take for granted.

It is appropriate to say a little prayer of gratitude as I slip beneath the sheets for the blessing of a comfortable bed and a secure place to sleep. Saying such a prayer helps on those rare nights when the phone rings and I have to get up to help someone else when I’d rather be sleeping. One thing about being on call is that no matter how much of a struggle it is to get myself up and going, I know that my life is not as disrupted or as uncomfortable as the people I am going to meet.

So, I hope I don’t become too attached to my bed. I enjoy good sleep as much as anyone else, but I know that the joys of being awake and being involved in the lie of my community are even greater than a quiet snooze.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We laid to rest one of the saints of our church yesterday. The funeral was more celebration than sadness. Though we will miss her, we admired the way in which she lived her life and faced her death. There is a sense of triumph in thinking about her life and her leadership in the church.

My mind, however, is prone to wandering. During the funeral I was drawn to the latin phrase that was printed on the funeral flyer. Our colleague, who was officiating at the funeral, said, towards the end of the ceremony, that placing the phrase in the flyer was a request of the woman we were honoring and that she also requested that no English translation of the phrase be included. She then proceeded to give us an English translation.

I am not a Latin scholar. I took two years of Latin in high school and I occasionally have the opportunity to use my meager Latin skills when researching scripture or church history.

The phrase that was printed was this: Quantum in me Fuit. I was and remain puzzled by the capitalization of the final word, but that isn’t important. I would translate the phrase like this: “As much as was in me.” It is a popular motto and appears in many different places. I recently saw it as a part of an advertisement for an outdoor adventure company. The popular translation is “I gave it my best.”

In the funeral service, the translation that was given was “I tried my best.”

I began to speculate on the contemporary uses of Latin phrases and how they might come across to people who spoke Latin as their native language. Latin mottos are nowhere near as popular as they were during the 19th century. Actually for many centuries after the middle ages, the use of Latin in scholarly settings was common. It was the language of the Christian Church and persisted in the Roman Catholic Church well into the 1960’s. Educational institutions were fond of having Latin mottos and posting them on their crests and logos. Such practice has faded in recent decades, but there is something about having a Latin motto that seems to make on distinguished.

But what words would one get if one asked someone who spoke Latin to translate a favorite phrase. Mind you, Latin is officially a dead language. There are no living native speakers of the language. It remains only as a written language. Still, translation remains tricky and there are many options when one is making translations.

A literal translation of “I tried my best” would be, I believe, “Ego contuse meos.” I don’t think that would roll of the tongue of an ancient Latin speaker, however. I think that more likely, the phrase used would be something like “Optimum quod facere poteram:” The best I could do, or perhaps as much as I was capable of.” In common usage, however, Latin, like other languages offers shortcuts. so if it were to be used as a motto, it might well be shortened to optimum quod poteram or even quantum poteram, which isn’t all that far from quantum in me fuit.

Mottos are tricky. Recently when traveling in Montana with friends from Australia, they commented that they saw a lot of materials promoting the state with the slogan, “The Treasure State.” They remembered the nickname “Big Sky Country” from the 1970’s and asked why the state had changed its motto. I responded that actually the state had not officially changed its motto. “Big Sky Country” and “The Treasure State” have long been used as nicknames for the state. Probably “The Treasure State” has a more long-standing history than “Big Sky Country.” The official motto of the state, which appears on the state seal and the state flag is a Spanish phrase, “Oro y Plata.” It means simply “Gold and Silver.” The state was organized around the mining industry. In the middle of the 1800’s substantial deposits of both gold and silver were discovered in the mountains of Montana and fortunes were made by those whose luck and timing came together in the right combination.

My adopted state, South Dakota has its motto in English: “Under God the People Rule.” Our nickname is “Mount Rushmore State.” It probably makes sense that our state motto isn’t in another language since we are one of the states that has officially adopted English as our state language. If we were to be completely honest, however, we would admit that the name of our state, Dakota, doesn’t come from English, but rather the indigenous language of the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota nation. Then again our state bird, the ring-necked pheasant, isn’t native. It is an immigrant from China.

Language is a strange thing. It has great power to shape our thinking. Remembering the gracious woman with whom this blog began, if she chose Quantum in me Fuit as her motto and believed that it meant “I tried my best” that was certainly true of how she lived her life. It was an appropriate motto for her. She certainly always did try her best. She gave her best to the many tasks and challenges she accepted. It turned out to be a great motto for her,

I don’t think I have a motto. If I discover one, I don’t think I’ll go for Latin. I suppose if I wanted to be presumptuous, I could go for one of the languages of the Christian bible, Hebrew or Greek, but both of those languages sport alphabets that aren’t common to my computer. I can write both on the computer, but it takes a bit of extra effort. Besides, I’m no good at Greek at all. I can barely decode and am a long ways from being able to translate that language.

Perhaps my motto might be something like, “I overthink everything,” or “I can make any idea seem more complex.”

Then again, perhaps it is best for me to go without a motto.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Friends, please note that although the following stories are about people that I know, they aren’t exactly stories that are mine to tell. As a result, I have changed the names. If you think you know to whom I’m referring in the story, you may be right or you may be wrong. Making assumptions is likely to be misleading.

Max spends his days in a second-floor office facing two large computer screens. On the screens he can display market trends and track the performance of stocks and bonds. He has some elaborate programs that tracks dividends and capital gains and predict trends. His job is to manage the investments of other people. They trust him with their retirement funds and other funds and he uses those funds to by and sell shares on their behalf. He tracks their investments and gives them advice on when to buy or sell. He understands the difference between realized and unrealized gains. He is a professional. He is well trained and well respected in his work. People trust him with enormous amounts of money. Of course Max doesn’t really manage money. He rarely handles currency. His work is done in a virtual reality of electronic transfers and numbers displayed on computer screens. The story upon which his life is based is capitalism. Money invested over time grows. As long as you have time, growth continues. Like all good stories, it is a myth. It only exists because people believe it exists. In 2008, when the Federal Reserve was keeping banks from failing, over a trillion dollars were created by changing entries in computers. Nothing was exchanged to get those dollars. They exist and are a part of our economy because we believe in our economy. When the myth of growth stops working, people intervene to change the story. Max has a good life and he feels he offers a genuine service to people. He cares about his clients.

Javier rises early in the morning and spends his days working in the fruit orchards. He knows exactly when to pick the ripe fruit. He knows how to graft branches onto trees. He knows how to properly trim trees. He knows about tree diseases and pests that limit the production of fruit. He lives in a 1981 mobile home that has rotting wood in the floor of the bathroom and holes in the exterior siding. The windows leak when the wind blows, which it does a lot. Javier doesn’t own the mobile home. It belongs to his boss. So does the pickup he drives. So do most of the tools he uses in the orchard. Of course Javier doesn’t really give the boss more time. His time isn’t really worth a different amount than the time of the land owner. His work is done in a virtual reality based on a story that people who hold title to the land somehow own it while those who spend their lives working the land are only migrants who come and go. Javier’s family has been working this orchard for six generations. The owner of the orchard inherited it from his father who bought it from another landowner. The story upon which his life is based is private property. Like all good stories it is based on a myth. Land can’t really be owned. It is possessed temporarily. All people die and land titles are meaningless in the grave. Javier has a good life and he knows he is honest and earns every dollar in his small paycheck.

Matthew is a dedicated teacher, but his real passion is research. The research projects that intrigue him most are huge collaborative projects with many different universities and individuals involved. They are enormously expensive and search for proof of theories that have been defined and refined by generations of researchers. His work doesn’t involve going to the places where actual experiments take place, but rather using computers to go through mountains of data from those experiments, looking for anomalies that might indicate the discovery of a previously undetected change in the circumstances. If a discovery is made, Matthew won’t be the only one who receives the credit. He won’t even be able to claim that the discovery is his exclusively because others will need to verify each of his discoveries. At best his name will appear with others as co-authors of a paper published in a scientific journal. That name placement will be part of his quest for tenure and job security at the university. His work is done in a virtual reality. It is based on the story that mathematics is more than a human system invented to measure and explain observations, but rather a force that is inherent in the universe. Like all good stories it is a myth. Time and distance are not constants, but rather vary with perspective. Even something that seems constant like the laws of physics and the rules of mathematics are subject to changes in interpretation and understanding. Matthew has a good life and trusts the power of his research to produce good for other people.

Whoever he has time, Daniel pulls out his phone and plays Pokemon Go, Using the phone’s GPS capability, he locates, captures, battles and trains virtual creatures who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as Daniel. Because he can play the game for short or long periods of time and because the game captures his attention he doesn’t really know how much of his time is spent on the game. It provides an alternative to his studies which, though engaging, have not yet produced a clear career path for him. In one of his worlds he is seen as unsuccessful. He can’t focus or choose one thing that will produce an income and enable his independence. In another he is hugely successful, having mastered multiple levels of the game and continues to pile success upon success. He is aware that all people live in virtual worlds - projections of human imagination driven by stories that are all myths. He is uncertain about which world is virtual and which is real. He imagines that in the future, as robots do more and more of the jobs now done by humans, an economy of virtual reality will be necessary to keep people occupied. 50 years from now will he be judged negatively for his understanding of virtual reality or will he be seen as a pioneer who opened new realities for human activity? Daniel is a good person. It remains to be seen whether or not he will have a good life.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We arrived home from our travels to discover that our yard needs to be mowed. Considering the length of our trip, things look pretty good and we’ll be back in the office and working today. I don’t remember my lawn looking this good at the beginning of September any of the other years that we have lived in Rapid City. After a very dry spring and early summer, things recovered in the second half of the summer. It is, as they say, an unusual year. But then again, every year is “unusual” in some way or another.

The vacation we just completed was unusual for us. The part about going to visit our grandchildren wasn’t unique. We make that trip as often as we can figure out how to do so. We enjoy having our camper and a couple of boats to share a couple of our favorite things with our grandchildren. What made this particular vacation unique was the size of the expedition at the beginning. We were entertaining four guests from Australia and our daughter and son in law in our home prior to the trip. That meant that the departure had to include transportation for six additional people. We took our camper and a canoe and a kayak for the Washington portion of our trip and two small creek boats to paddle in Montana. We had a portable barbecue grill and propane to cook for the large numbers of people. We departed with both our car and our loaded pickup pulling our camper. In Montana we met our son and grandson who flew in for a couple of days, expanding our group to ten. We hosted a barbecue for extended family in Montana. It was a good thing we took the portable grill.

The second part of our vacation was a bit trimmed back. We left our car, the creek boats, the portable grill and a stack of bedding in Montana when we headed west.

Returning home yesterday, with the car and all of the extra things was a pleasant trip, not too rushed with a few breaks to talk and snack.

We put over 3200 miles on our pickup and nearly 1000 on our car. We towed our camper nearly 3000 of those miles. We experienced temperatures that were significantly above normal, which meant operating air conditioners for much of the driving. Both times we crossed the continental divide it was over 90 degrees at the summit. High temperatures combined with the steep climb for problems for some other motorists and we saw a number of tire and over heating problems along the way.

We, however, had a remarkably easy trip without any mechanical break downs or big problems. I monitored tire air pressures carefully and tried not to over stress the vehicles, but we worked them hard and were glad they performed so well.

Our first evening at home preparing for the backlog of work that will greet us at the office today was filled with the usual post-travel chores. After unloading the vehicles and the camper and wiping down the refrigerator and other interior surfaces in the camper, the camper had to be washed on the outside. You can imagine the number of insects that a trailer collects on such travel through agricultural country in late August. Scrubbing the bugs off of the end cap of the camper was a chore, but the cool overspray from the hose felt kind of good in the early evening heat.

Boat had to be unloaded and put away, paddles stowed, life jackets and other equipment stored. The washer was running full time all evening and soon the dryer was operating as well. There were sheets to change on beds and clothes to put away. The refrigerator that was nearly empty in our absence was filled with the things from the camper and we began a shopping list for items that we’ll need to pick up today.

Fortunately today has relatively few meetings, with a funeral at the church tomorrow and a wedding rehearsal on Saturday, worship and a wedding on Sunday and the newsletter to get out next week, we’re going to be busy. I’ve been away from email since Sunday so that chore alone will take extra time. Then there is the regular mail, phone voice mail and the stack of notes from church leaders who have been working hard in our absence.

We won’t be bored this week.

Then again we’re seldom bored. There are always plenty of things that need to be done.

I’m never quite sure how to answer when people ask me about our vacation. It was wonderful and spending time with family was great. It involved a lot of work, frankly, but it was work that was freely chosen and things that we wanted to do. We didn’t exactly return rested. It simply wasn’t that type of a trip. But we did have a wonderful change of pace.

Earlier in my career, I would have found this type of vacation daunting. Our work is so intensely focused on people and relationships, that I often wanted to get away as much as possible. My ideal vacation was to go off into the mountains or to the sea shore and just be alone. Being with my family involves many of the same activities that being a pastor requires. I have to listen carefully to the wants and needs of others, be sensitive to feelings that occasionally get hurt, respond to others in a positive way. I spent a great deal of this vacation doing what I do everyday, serving others and focusing my attention on what they want and need. Somehow, that doesn’t bother me in the way that it once did. I think that because I am able to have work that is what I choose, enjoy and love, the fact that vacation is similar to work isn’t such a problem. My life is filled with the things I think are most important and worthy of my time. In that I am a very fortunate person.

So it is back to work, but not back to the usual. There is no usual in my routines. Today will be exciting just like the days of our vacation.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.