Photograph from wikimedia.org

One of my colleagues used to keep a large photograph of the tallest peak in North America on his office wall. The gorgeous snow-covered mountain rose brilliantly into a clear sky, lit by low light, perhaps at sunset, given the angle of the light on the mountain. Carefully drawn onto the photograph were several major routes of ascent taken by mountain climbers, mostly in black, with one route highlighted in red. The photograph was a natural discussion starter and most of us who visited that office at one time or another had a conversation with him about the mountain. I had several over the years. It was clear that he had studied that mountain in depth and had poured over that photograph, memorizing details. He had also read widely about expeditions to the mountain and different parties who had successfully summited the peak.

Here’s the rub. Although he had all of that expertise and an obvious love for the mountain, he had never seen the top of the mountain. I don’t just mean that he never successfully climbed the mountain, which is the case. I mean that his eyes never beheld the glory in person that is portrayed in the picture.

When he was finishing his college degree, he was an active outdoorsman and rock climber and had already been on several expeditions that summited mountains in the lower 48. It was on a trip to the top of the Grand Teton that he and his colleagues formulated their plan. They would obtain sponsorships for a summiting of Denali and when they completed that climb, they would have enough recognition to mount an expedition to Everest.

It was from my friend that I learned the word Denali. I had grown up with the English name, Mount McKinley. Denali is the name that is widely used by Alaska locals and the name means “High One” or “Great One.”

The story from that point, once you have understood his great reverence and respect for the mountain, is rather simple. When the climbing party, with all of their equipment reached Talkeetna, it was raining. They sat around for a couple of days before the weather opened up enough for the air taxi to ferry them to the glacier where they set up their base camp. As the plane took off and headed away, the wind picked up as well and the clouds moved back in. The very peak of the mountain was always in the clouds from the point of view of the climbers. As they struggled to set up their tents and sort their equipment, the wind picked up and it started to snow. By the next morning, they had to shovel out the entrances to the tents.

They waited for better weather. They waited for days. They did establish a higher base camp and shuttled most of their equipment to that camp, and they battled winds and whiteout conditions. It was no picnic on that mountain, though they ate their meals in haste, either in their tents our standing outside.

And still they had to wait. They might get a few moments of lifting weather and it would clear up enough to see across the glacier and down to the land below, but they never saw the very peak without clouds and wind blowing snow.

And then they ran out of time. The expedition never got a chance to do any serious climbing. There was a feeling of disappointment as they loaded their gear into the red ski plane to fly back down. Their only consolation was that they had been prudent and safe and no one of the party had experienced frostbite or been injured.

Plans were immediately made to return to the mountain. And then life intervened. One member of the party got married. Another started graduate school. Other climbers got jobs to support their passion for the outdoors. Scheduling became challenging and then impossible. Several members of the group summited the mountain a few years later. My friend was with his wife anticipating the birth of their son, born the same month as the climb.

I, too, have never seen Denali, but it has inhabited my dreams for years. I’ve watched the videos of the Grand Denali tour with a glacier landing offered by Talkeetna Air Taxi. I keep track of the price (currently $390 per person). I have frequently visited the web site of the Alaska Railroad Denali Star Train. I have a copy of the Milepost, the comprehensive guide to driving the Alaska Highway. I keep a map of the highway in our camper, just to inspire the camper and pull it out to study and dream from time to time.

I also know that we could make the best possible plans for a visit to Alaska and that our window of time might occur when the weather obscures the mountain and that I might never see it. It is good to have big dreams in life and to balance them with real experiences and to understand that not every whim of the imagination can become a reality. I know that I’m at an age where I will never gain the strength or skills to be a serious mountaineer. I know that I am capable of imagining trips that I cannot afford to take. I know that circumstances change and that plans that are made also have to change to respond to the realities of this life. Those are all important lessons.

Still, something stirred within me when I read that President Barak Obama announced that the name of the mountain has been officially changed from McKinley to Denali. The President is planning a trip to Alaska soon.

Alaskans have been trying for decades to get the federal designation of the mountain changed to the locally-preferred name. To date their efforts have been blocked. I think that folks in Ohio, McKinley’s home state, have not been thrilled by having his name removed from the maps and official documents. On the other hand it has been more than a century since the 25th President was assassinated and it seems clear that he will not be forgotten by historians. McKinley himself never set foot in Alaska. I have no idea whether or not it was a destination to which he aspired.

I don’t have a photograph on my office wall. But if you see me leaning back in my chair with my hands behind my head and a dreamy look in my eyes, it is possible that I’m having Denali dreams. Whether or not I ever see the mountain remains yet to be revealed.

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One evening, more than three decades ago, I stood on the deck of a home in the Black Hills. It had been a long day, with a drive from our home in North Dakota in a car with no air conditioning, a doctor’s appointment for our son and the usual trials of travel with two young children. We were staying with Susan’s aunt and uncle and would be heading back home across the dry plains of northwestern South Dakota the next morning. In the midst of all of that activity, there was a peaceful moment standing on the deck, listening to the whisper of a breeze in the pine trees, smelling the fresh air, and feeling the cool of the hills. I allowed my imagination to wander, thinking how nice it would be to live in such a place.

A year or so earlier, we were in Rapid City for the weekend and we went with Susan’s relatives to their church. I remember sitting in the middle of that large sanctuary, listening to the pipe organ. Once again I allowed my imagination to wander and thought how awesome it would be to be called as pastor of that congregation and to preach from that pulpit.

As is often true of moments of imagination, the times passed and we went on with our lives. From North Dakota, we received a call to serve a congregation in Boise, Idaho. We moved to a home right in the middle of the city, built a six foot privacy fence around our back yard and had a wonderful decade serving a growing and challenging congregation.

Last night I stepped out onto our deck in the evening and gazed up at the moon, just a day past full, and smelled the breeze blowing through the pine trees and felt the cool of the land. It has been an amazing year in the hills. It is nearly the end of August and the lawn is green and the garden is high and all of that is from natural water. We’ve barely watered anything this year.

It has been twenty years since we moved into this home. Our children have grown up and moved away. Our parents have come to the ends of their lives’ journeys. We have become older.

Standing on the deck last night, I remembered the dreams of a younger phase of my life and I realized that I have been living that dream. This morning I will be the first to arrive in that beautiful church and I’ll get a few moments of peace in that sanctuary to prepare for delivering yet another sermon. I’m nearing a thousand sermons delivered in that place. My job and my home have pretty much turned out the way I imagined them long ago. The reality has been richer and deeper than what I had imagined. In my younger days, I didn’t know how beautiful it would be to watch the sunrise from the surface of Sheridan Lake as I paddled a boat I had made with my own two hands. In those days my sermons were a bit academic and often somewhat disconnected from the everyday lives of the people I served. Often I was encountering situations and circumstances in the parish that were entirely new to me. I hadn’t been through conflict in the church and panicked when people disagreed with each other. I didn’t know that there are times in pastoral calls when silence is the better part and was always trying to come up with the right words to say. I hadn’t learned how to craft a funeral service from the words that grieving families express when I visit with them about their loved one.

It is not that I have somehow reached perfection - far from it. And this place is just one place where people can live in peace and happiness. While the hills have been a wonderful home for us, it isn’t the only place that we could live and there are some problems with living in this place.

As beautiful as has been this summer, I know that the air we breath has not always been healthy. The wildfires in the northwest have filled the skies with smoke and the smoke is hanging in a bubble over the hills. The air quality index for the central hills is in the “Very Unhealthy” category today and has been in that category for much of the last month. When the air is in this condition the entire population is likely to be affected. The sweet smell of the wind in the pine trees is not the same as the familiar smell of woodsmoke in the air. My eyes burn. I blow my nose repeatedly throughout the day without much relief. I long for the wind to clear the skies.

In my work, I have met people with challenging personalities. Not every idea and plan that I have had has worked out. Some suggestions that seem obvious to me take years to be adopted by the congregation. People have sometimes had difficulty reaching a common vision. I hear rumors of complaints from people who won’t express their concerns directly to me, but instead choose to talk behind my back. Our church, in short, is filled with regular people who behave like normal people and that means that we sometimes have to work through difficulties and differences.

South Dakota has made some poor political choices that have left us with schools that are grossly underfunded and falling apart. The school district has lost a lot of good teachers. Positions remain open without applicants because of low pay and poor working conditions. Our schools are at the bottom of the rankings in many national studies. Our incarceration rates are among the highest in the nation. Our suicide rate is more than double the national average.

I’m not one to dream of perfection. I have no desire to serve in a church where there are no problems and no need of leadership. I prefer to struggle amidst real people in real situations.

Instead, I am living my dream in a real world. Who knows? Some of the visions I have when I stand on my deck in the evening may come to pass in ways that will surprise me a few decades from now.

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I remember going through a phase in the beginning of my college career when I felt that there just wasn’t enough time for fiction. I had many serious books to read and the reading load of college life was, in general, a bit higher than I had previously experienced. So I focused. I read my textbooks carefully. I read the supplemental materials on reading lists assigned by my professors. I viewed reading fiction as recreational and thought I didn’t have time for such recreation when I had a full-time job of being a student. It was a rather narrow view of life. I was aware that there were serious students who studied literature. I was aware that there were important lessons to be learned from literature.

In my third year of college I took a class that was titled, “Christian Faith and Contemporary Literature.” At that point, I was taking most of the courses offered by a particular professor and signed up in part because I knew and trusted his instruction. I enjoyed the class and found it very easy to justify reading the fiction because it was a class assignment. I began to re-open the doors to reading fiction a little bit.

In my seminary years, I found the novels of Elie Wiesel. I was entranced. I began to read everything by Wiesel that I could get. In the introduction to Gates of the Forest he tells of an experience of meeting a Rabbi that he had known before the holocaust and the rabbi asking him if he was writing the truth. His response was, “Sometimes you have to tell a story to tell the truth.” It is, of course, true and a profound observation about the human condition. There are human experiences that cannot be captured in cold, rational, factual narrative. The numbers and statistics of the holocaust don’t tell the whole story. There is more to the impact of this event on the world than can be contained in the facts and figures.

Jesus, standing firmly in the Jewish educational tradition of parable teaching, understood this. When a man asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with a story of a Priest, a Levite and a Samaritan. The gospels are filled with Jesus’ parables. There are some sayings of Jesus that scholars debate about whether or not they are parables, but there more than forty of them. Some are similes: “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.” The use of “like” or “as” to paint a word picture by making a comparison is a poetic way of expanding language when the purpose is to point beyond the limitations of language. It is a time honored way of speaking and frequently employed by Jesus.

Sometimes Jesus employs extended metaphors with a host of different direct comparisons. The parable of the great banquet is such a story. Like a simile the referent is clear. The parable is speaking of the realm of God. Not all of the referents are quite as clear. Specifically, who are the ones invited who refuse to come? Exactly who Jesus is referring to in the story is open to interpretation and speculation.

Jesus also told allegorical stories such as the parable of the wicket tenants. The question posed by an allegory addresses the question of “what happens?” more than the question of “who?” Again direct referents are open to interpretation, but the story makes it clear that certain courses of action will bring predictable results - often punishment.

Often, however, Jesus doesn't stick to these three forms of story, but simply tells a good story, as is the case with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The stories help us to reach our own conclusions and point us toward universal truths that operate in different situations. Instead of learning about just one set of circumstances, stories invite us to look for the truth in other experiences and circumstances as well.

Joseph Campbell does a masterful job of analyzing how a single story can reach beyond telling a single truth to speaking of universal truth in his classic study, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” As I studied Jesus’ use of storytelling, I was led to examine the practice of storytelling and to work on my own skills as a story teller to enhance my preaching and the practice of ministry. I have learned to use illustrations and examples fairly well and occasionally find a simile or allegory that fits. But so far, I have fallen far short of predicting any significant fiction for others to read.

It isn’t that I haven’t tried. I have the beginnings of several novels on the hard drives of my computers. I’ve written quite a few short stories. But writing fiction is a skill that I have not begun to master, and one that I may never completely understand.

One of the biggest problems with the stories that I think I might tell is that I keep recognizing real people, real situations and real experiences in the stories that I tell. Being a pastor means that I have all kinds of stories and experiences that simply are not mine to tell. If, for example, I begin to tell a story about a fictional suicide, I recognize details of an actual suicide in my description. I know that the things I know about the actual situation are the result of privilege and my trusted position as a servant of those who are grieving. I also know that their story is not mine to tell. Part of recovery from traumatic events is knowing that there are people who can be trusted. I am called to be one of those people and that means keeping strict confidence. It may be that I simply hold too many stories in confidence to be good at telling stories. Still, I keep thinking that the universal truths that emerge from all of these experiences are worth sharing - they may even help to save a life.

So I read the stories of others. I seek to understand how they are structured and told. And I practice telling stories with great care.

Writing fiction may be a bit like writing poetry - a critical discipline that is mastered by very few.

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Yesterday my day began with a paddle in the rain. Being a fan of water, it was a very pleasant experience. I had on a waterproof jacket and the rain was gentle. There was almost no wind to blow the drops of water into my face. The lake is quiet when it is raining. Folks staying in the campgrounds hear the rain on the tent or camper and roll over and sleep in a bit. Those who had planned to go fishing at first light talk themselves out of it, preferring a warm dry location to sitting in a boat in the rain. A kayak is a very good vehicle for traveling in the rain. With a good rain skirt everything below your waist is in a warm, dry boat. When it is cold, I wear gloves and a jacket with a hood and only my face is sticking out in the weather.

The evening ended with a beautiful moonlight drive home after a delightful dinner and evening of conversation with friends. Filled with good food and good stories it was a pleasant drive through the hills to an inviting home.

Of course, between those two events, there were problems to be solved, work to be done, errands to run, plans to be made, and a list of chores that is perpetually longer than the amount of time it takes to do them. Being immersed in beauty and surrounded by a loving and caring community does not make us exempt from the realities of everyday life.

As I was preparing to slip my kayak into the water, employees of Virginia television WDBJ7 were observing a moment of silence in memory of two of their colleagues who died in an on-air attack the previous day. They and their viewers struggled to make sense of how seemingly senseless violence could so completely shatter their world.

As I was driving home in the evening, students, faculty and staff of Savannah State University in Georgia were just coming out of a campus lockdown after a junior from Atlanta died following a shooting during an altercation at the Student Union Building. People worked into the night to line up grief counselors and make a plan for the morning at the oldest public historically black college in Georgia.

There are plenty of people in this world whose days were so filled with trauma and grief and events beyond their control that they could not imagine the luxury of the day that I enjoyed. I suppose it might have been possible for me to have immersed myself in their loss and grief and trauma. I might have spent my morning and evening watching television reports of the events about which I know only the surface facts from reading headlines. I’m sure that there are others who were at work reporting their opinions and reactions to the tragedies on social media and through political action.

I am not insensitive to the need for change in our world. I am not unaware of the pain and grief that daily mark the journeys of our communities. And I know that the politically-active hard-working souls who form committees, launch demonstrations, lobby legislators, and circulate petitions do accomplish positive change. I know that words have deep power and that carefully worded statements can inspire people to head in new directions. But I also know that I have not been called to that particular mode of working in the world.

My life is, in part, a life of simple witness. I don’t put my head in the sand. I don’t avoid the news. I don’t live unaffected by the tragedies that make the headlines. I do, however, keep vigil to make sure that my reactions aren’t fueled by anger or fear.

Most weeks I receive one or more emails telling about various workshops or other opportunities to develop church security plans. With recent incidents of violence invading public spaces such as theaters and churches, I suppose that it is prudent to think of the awful possibilities and be prepared to provide for the safety of those who gather. Still, I resist the option of having our church become a fortress with guards trained to keep people out. Living as a community of welcome has its risks, but it seems a better choice than living as a community of fear, shrinking away from the community until it becomes so disconnected that it forgets its calling to serve.

I live in a world that is sometimes violent, but that doesn’t mean that I have to succumb and become violent myself.

So I rise to new adventures this morning. I’m sure that the day will have me wandering in and out of public places, meeting strangers, and likely going into places that make some of my colleagues nervous. I never know in advance all of the nuances my day will bring. I’m “on call” for our local suicide response team and as a Sheriff’s chaplain. One vibration of my cell phone might lead me to adventures that I can’t presently imagine. I frequently go into neighborhoods and visit homes and situations that some of my colleagues have never experienced. My job is to bring a sense of calm and a presence of caring into places of grief and fear and anger. I am not able to fix the problems of this world. I am not gifted to heal the brokenness. I simply provide a presence that demonstrates that others do not have to face grief and anger and loneliness and emptiness alone. There are others who care. We are a community and we are all in this together.

I’ll leave the opinion giving and policy making to others. I won’t be fixing the world. I’ll just be sharing it with the members of my community.

But along the way, I vow to keep my eyes and ears wide open to the beauty and possibility of this place and these people.

Today, like yesterday, will be filled with grace and beauty if I take time to experience it.

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I headed off to college with a brand new typewriter and a brand new dictionary. The dictionary was the Webster’s Collegiate Edition. That book served me well through four years of undergraduate and four years of graduate work. The typewriter also performed well throughout those same years. Thirty years later, when our children headed off to college, there were new dictionaries for each. We also bought dictionaries as gifts for nieces and nephews. But the change was already in the air. Our children had new computers for their college careers and practically no one was using typewriters for anything anymore.

These days printed dictionaries can’t keep up with the changes in language use and spelling. The Oxford English Dictionary, hailed by scholars as the standard in language definition, is no longer available as a set of printed volumes. These days it is an online reference, frequently updated. OxfordDictionaries.com issues quarterly updates on current definitions of English words. New words are coming at us so fast, that it is easy to feel like you are being left behind and can’t keep up.

This quarter’s update article on the website begins as follows: “NBD, but are you ready to fangirl over our dictionary update? Abso-bloody-lutely. We’ve got some awesome sauce new words - no, rly - that will inform and entertain whether you’re hungry or it’s already wine o’clock. Mic drop.” It isn’t what one might expect from that stalwart bastion of proper English Usage with the motto, “Language matters.”

I turn to the Oxford Dictionary web site to check out the proper spelling and usage of words. It is also a helpful source on the differences between American English and British English. Spelling seems to be taking a bit of a different course in our countries. We write “color”; the Brits write “colour.” There are lots of other examples: theater/theatre, meter/metre/annex/annexe, draft/draught, maneuver/manoeuvre, plow/plough. A decade ago, when we were writing curriculum for a Canadian publisher, we learned that in addition to the differences between British and American usages of the language there are other, more subtle variations such as Canadian and Australian English. The decision of the publishers, no doubt biased by the physical location of their offices, was that Canadian English constituted a good version for an international audience. Their opinion wasn’t shared by the British Publisher of the print editions of an online resource we produced a few years back, who opted for American English for the books.

This language we speak is complex and fascinating.

Here are some examples from the list of new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its August, 2015 update:

Manspreading is “the practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport, adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat or seats.”

Although coined in 2012, Brexit (Britain + exit) and Grexit (Greece + exit), have been added to the dictionary to describe the possibilities of changes in the countries that use the euro as their national currency.

As long as we are using words with an x, The title “Mx” has been added to the dictionary. First used as far back as the 1970’s, this title took quite a bit of time to make it into official Oxford recognition. We’ve all adjusted to the addition of “Ms” to the list of Mr, Miss, and Mrs. While Ms. doesn’t disclose marital status and can be applied to both married and unmarried women, Mx isn’t specific in gender and can be applied to both male and female persons.

Beer o’clock and wine o’clock refer to the time of day when you have your first glass of your preferred alcoholic beverage. I guess you shouldn’t start drinking too much if you are hangry - a blend of the words hungry and angry, meaning “bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.” I guess if you are hangry, anything snackable will help.

Despite the official recognition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the spell checker on my word processor is having a tough time with these new words. I had to turn off the autocorrect feature in order to write the last paragraph.

Despite our use of terms such as Old English, the reality is that language has always been in transition. The invention of the printing press gave rise to the attempt to standardize language use and spelling during the sixteenth century - relatively recently in the wider span of history. Standardization of spelling and usage of American English as a distinct form of the language didn’t really gain traction until the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.

Back when Dictionaries were print books, one could count the number of words in the language. The Second Edition 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use and an additional 47,156 obsolete words. With the quarterly updates and additional technical and regional words now recognized by the OED, there might be as many as 750,000 recognized words in the English language.

That translates to a half million new words since I left for college with my new Webster’s dictionary in hand. If I had been disciplined to learn the Oxford English Dictionary’s word a day, which I have not, I might have been able to learn an additional 15,000 new words in that amount of time, leaving me with 485,000 new words yet to learn. I’m falling farther behind with each passing day!

Somehow, in the midst of this language revolution, we continue to maintain the ability to communicate, if rather imperfectly. I continue to use words not only in my blog, but also in sermons and in conversation with people. Given the possibilities, it shouldn’t surprise us if miscommunication occasionally occurs. Perhaps it is more surprising that we are able to communicate at all.

Having said that, I don’t think that all of the new entries in the dictionary will be around for very long. A few might stick and we’ll be using them decades from now.

I doubt, however, that I’ll be substituting awesomesauce for excellent anytime soon.

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Mohammed Fairouz is one of the most sought-after composers of the International classical music scene. The American composer has a catalog that includes opera, symphonies, vocal and choral settings, chamber and solo works. He is one of the most frequently performed composers working today. His fourth symphony, “In the Shadow of No Towers” was inspired by Art Spiegelman’s book of the same title about American life in the aftermath of 9/11.

He is only 29 years old. That’s younger than our children. His age struck me recently as I read an essay that he wrote about living in the age of cynicism. Earlier this month I wrote a blog post about my nephews who are 29 years old and what seems to be a sense of wandering among these young adults. Fairouz doesn’t seem to be wandering. He seems capable of incredible focus and creativity and amazing productivity.

In his essay, Fairouz speaks of how the age of anxiety has given way to the age of cynicism. He speaks of how cynicism is being celebrated and even equated with intelligence among young adults of his generation. The essay got me to thinking.

The current generation of young adults in the United States are among the most privileged people to have lived on this planet. Not every young adult comes from a wealthy family, but they have grown up in a culture with a great deal of luxury and privilege, especially when compared to young adults in other parts of the world or young adults from almost any previous generation. They have grown up taking mass communication for granted, experiencing television and Internet connections as “necessities.” The affluence and abundance that this particular group of young adults has seen is unparalleled anywhere else. It was not even imagined by my parents’ generation who thought of affluence in terms of secure housing and perhaps a bit of savings in the bank.

This affluence and privilege, however, does not seem to have produced security for these young people. Instead theirs seems to be a generation that is prone to fear and aimlessness. Were I to have the opportunity to sit and talk with Fairouz, I might even question his choice of the word cynicism to describe their world view. Perhaps nihilism might be closer to what I observe in too many of those who are on the border between their twenties and thirties.

It would be tempting here for me to turn back on my studies of the history of philosophy at this point and write extensively about the history of Greek philosophical and political parties, about the distinctions between cynics and skeptics and how those philosophical traditions have contributed to the shape of modern thought. I know, however, that such a digression would make the eyes of most of my readers roll and would be unappealing to today’s young adults, few, if any of whom read my blog in the first place.

Instead, I will just say that our modern understanding of cynicism has its roots in ancient thought. Greek cynics sought to live simple lives free from possessions and found their purpose in life to live in harmony with nature. This concept evolved gradually into a distrust of things that were of human origin and finally, in the 19th and 20th centuries into a philosophy that generally doesn’t trust the sincerity or goodness of other human beings. The modern meaning of cynicism is quite different from its historic roots.

That said, today’s young cynics seem to be reluctant to trust others and slow to see anything of value in developing deep relationships with other people.

Living, as I do, somewhere between the World War II generation and this new crop of cynics it seems to me striking that the deprivations of the Great Depression produced such an optimistic group of leaders while current levels of affluence seem to be producing young leaders who are distinctly short of hope about the future.

It may be that there is a connection between optimism and courage. At least optimism takes courage. Building a better future requires risk and assuming risk requires courage. If you decide to trust no one and to be cynical about all possibilities of hope, you can remain in your shell and you never have to face the possibility of failure. It may feel safe, but it looks like a lack of courage when viewed from the outside. Negativity and doubt are not particularly courageous positions.

Recently a young adult with whom I was visiting was using the words “blind trust” to describe my commitment to the church. I was a bit thrown by the description, because it seems to me that the years of study and the care with which I made certain choices regarding the following of my calling are anything but blind. I have not experienced trust as involving blindness. Daring, yes! Audacity, yes! But blindness, not really. My trust in the institutional church is based on years of study and careful consideration.

That doesn’t mean that trust won’t involve suffering. When one loves and trusts, one opens oneself up to the potential of being hurt. Meeting yesterday with a man whose wife just died after more than 50 years of marriage, I am deeply aware of how much pain loss can involve. Falling in love means that one risks great pain. Heartbreak involves real suffering.

But you would never get that man to say that it wasn’t worth it. You would never find cynicism in his belief that trusting another person and becoming married wasn’t the best course of life for him. Despite the pain, life is worth it.

I hope this cynicism that surrounds us is just a phase of life that will lead to the courage to trust and risk. I, for one, am not willing to judge an entire generation by some of its members actions and beliefs before they enter their 30’s. There is a lot of room for growth and maturity and wisdom to develop.

I guess I’m just taking their cynicism with a bit of skepticism, and I’ll spare them the lecture on the history of Greek philosophies.

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The Hebrew Scriptures that are often referred to as the Old Testament begin with these words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Those words are unique, but the concepts are found in the creation stories of many different religions and ethnic traditions.

Before there was land, there was water. Water is elemental. In nearly all stories of the beginnings of time water plays an important role. Archaeologists and biologists teach us that life on this planet began in the water. Before there were creatures that walked, there were creatures that paddled about in the water.

Before the wheel, there was the boat.

Think, if you will, of another part of our story - from a far more recent, yet still historic time: When the first restless Europeans came to this continent, they believed that they were bringing the wonders of the modern world to a new place. They had the worlds most sophisticated weapons systems of the time. They knew of gunpowder and firearms and had massive ships with multiple sails. They had some rudimentary skills at celestial navigation and a rough sense of direction, even though they lacked a full comprehension of the size of the planet. They saw themselves as explorers and discoverers and thought of they came from the height of civilization and were traveling to an uncivilized place.

When they arrived they discovered that the people of the land already had an elegant and sophisticated mode of transportation. While the Europeans struggled to row their skiffs and other landing craft facing rearward to get leverage on their oars, those welcoming them had sleek, fast and elegant canoes. They faced forward as they paddled and exerted much less effort to travel with great speed. I don’t know how many of the first explorers were aware of it, but those canoe-paddling people had neighbors to the north who had a marvelous craft called a kayak.

We live on a watery planet. We have been born with an urge to travel. That combination - the waters that surround us and the desire to go places - resulted in a nearly perfect device, made of skin and wood and sinew. Each was custom sized perfectly to the individual paddler and equipped with a stick carved to slice through the water and move it in a hydrodynamic motion like a propellor moves and airplane.

Watching these boats and their paddlers creates an almost instant desire to have one - to share the experience. European explorers were soon learning to make their own canoes and kayaks, though learning to pronounce the name of the craft resulted in a wide variety of spellings: kaiak, kick, kayak, kayak, qayaq. The name simply means “a person’s boat.” It is a custom craft, made for an individual.

I believe that the appeal of the craft in our world today stems from a few important qualities. The pace of the craft is perfect. One can paddle slowly with nearly no effort or more quickly. It is easy to discover a pace that can be sustained for long periods of time without injury or discomfort. In a world where the rate of change is accelerating, where the learning curve is so steep that we constantly feel that we are falling behind, it is a distinct joy to simply move at the pace of life - to travel at the same speed as you are thinking.

The boat takes us not only to interesting places in the physical world, it transports us to fascinating places of our minds. Although the peoples of central Australia are not people of the water and have no indigenous boats, they speak of the power of walking. They know that the pace is exactly right - the speed perfect - to transport one into dream time. If you travel at an appropriate speed, you are able to go to places that transcend the physical. Mixing the metaphor, it certainly feels like my kayak takes me to a dream space whether I paddle on the huge waters of the Pacific or in the quiet confines of a reservoir in the hills. When I am in my boat I relax from the anxieties of this sometimes crazy world and allow the waters that support me as I sit to float my spirit as well as my body.

Another quality of a good kayak is that they are long-lasting. So much so that unlike the cars we drive or other modes of transportation that we choose, they depreciate slower than inflation. That means that resale prices are often about the same as original purchase prices, making a kayak virtually free to own.

And if you think like I do, a factory-made boat is not ideal anyway. I fashion my boats out of scraps of wood. There is so much cutting and sanding involved in my particular style of building that the biggest byproduct of the process is sawdust. Cedar sawdust, however, is a very pleasant product, enriching the compost for the garden and helping with insect control when spread around the plants.

Like the pace of my paddling, I slow down when I am building a boat. It can take more than a year for me to produce a seaworthy craft. Some nights, like last night I only fit one or two pieces of wood to the craft. Some days I only look at the boat and think about how the next steps might go. It would be impossible for me to earn my living making boats. I go far too slowly. The number of boats I am capable of building is very small. And I enjoy paddling as much as I do building so when the weather is nice I’m more likely to be sitting in a boat than working on one.

As long as there are people on this planet, a few of us will choose to explore the planet with simple, human-powered boats that feel more like slipping on a garment than climbing into a craft. And as we paddle, our minds will wander and we will remember times long ago and dream of that which is yet to come.

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I haven’t gotten into Facebook as much as some of my friends. I have joined and I accept friend requests from people that I know and I will occasionally read the posts on my timeline, but I rarely post anything and other than happy birthday wishes don’t comment on much of what I read. I have the Facebook application on my phone and it sends me alerts when friends post on their timelines and I’ll check out those posts from time to time. It is nice to see pictures of folks and there are some friends that Facebook is our only avenue of communication.

We’re very busy at the church and, interestingly, that means that I have looked a bit more at Facebook in the last couple of days than usual. What happens is that when I go from meeting to meeting and occasion to occasion as I did yesterday, there are these small amounts of time when I am away from the office and away from home and I have a five or ten minute wait for the next event, which isn’t enough time to go home or do any work, so I take out my phone and check up on my e-mail and when that is done I’ll read a Facebook post or two.

As I result, I read a post from someone who might be a friend of a friend, or perhaps just someone whose post struck a chord with someone I know. The writer of the post is not someone I know, but obviously is someone who lives very close to the fires burning in Washington state. It is a very angry paragraph, lashing out at environmentalists and blaming people who romanticize the west but live in cities for the fires. As is true of many angry outbursts, it is difficult to follow the logic of the statement. Apparently the writer feels that the fires are the result of the collapse of the timber industry in the region and that the collapse of the timber industry was caused by environmentalists who sought to protect endangered species.

It is related to an argument that we often heard when we lived in Idaho. Although timber is a renewable resource and there are ways to manage forests in sustainable patterns, not all of those who sought to profit from extracting resources from public land have been interested in long term sustainability. When paper mills closed because they had become antiquated with ill-maintained equipment and no longer produced a profit, those who took the money and ran often would blame the environmental protection movement for their demise. The charges, largely unfounded, seemed to stick and people remain convinced that the loss of jobs was caused by environmental and safety regulations. It simply isn’t true, but it is hard to convince people who have been hurt that their anger is heading in the wrong direction.

Anger simply lashes out and when there is deep loss it is natural to seek someone to blame. We are blessed to live in a place that is experiencing a lovely year with adequate moisture, but we know how fragile our beautiful weather is. We know that there have been years when fires have threatened our forests and our neighborhoods. We know that such years will come again. This year the fires have been mostly to the north and west of us. We’ve had the smoke stinging our eyes and we can only imagine the hardships faced by those who live in the path of the flames and those brave firefighters who put their lives on the line to try to protect lives and property.

The Okanogan complex has exceeded 375 square miles and is only about 10 percent contained. In Washington State more than 920 square miles have burned. More than 200 homes have been destroyed. At one point last week I read an article that said that as many as 12,000 homes are threatened.

The fires have so taxed the resources that help has had to come from all over. We know one firefighter on the line in Washington and we’ve heard that firefighters from Australia and New Zealand are coming to help with the efforts. Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane is being set up as a staging area for the big water tankers and fire engines that are arriving daily from all across the west.

It is not difficult to see how people are being threatened by the fires. It is not difficult to understand that they are hurt and angry.

Fortunately, however, as misplaced as some of the blame has been, it is also true that some of the rumors about the effects of the fires is also based in mistaken assumptions. The angry Facebook post speaks of “sterilized” soil where every living organism has been killed by the intense heat. I remember when similar words were used to describe some of the hillsides near West Yellowstone after the 1988 fires. The good news is that the land wasn’t actually sterilized. The recovery was much quicker and much more dramatic than we could have believed when we toured the region in the aftermath of the fires. This planet is more resilient than we might believe.

I’m saddened that the anger has turned to vitriol and attacks at some of the people who actually do care about the land and the people who live on it. I’m saddened that people who might be allies are being separated by the anger. But I do understand the anger. And I hope that those who disagree with the writer will pause, take a deep breath, and cut the writer some slack. The fires are terrifying. The loss is real. The anger is understandable if not justified.

Today is not a day for answering anger with anger. It is a time to pray for rain, to pray for the safety of the firefighters and to offer what support we are able to the victims and to those who are daily breathing the smoke.

After the winter snows come and the earth begins its process of healing there will be time to talk about policy, to make changes, and to work on healing the relationships strained by the tensions of the moment. Then we can demonstrate that not everyone who lives in cities is evil and not all of the people who seek to protect the diversity of the ecosystem are out to drive people off of the land.

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My father in law grew beautiful roses. He was a good vegetable gardener as well, but his front lawn was filled with roses and every few years he’d ad a few more rose bushes. He would often fertilize and water the bushes individually and he knew how to prune them properly so that the next year’s results would be glorious. He frequently said that he grew roses because they were easy and didn’t take much labor.

I, however, haven’t had much luck with roses. If we grow them in our yard, the deer eat the buds before they bloom. If we plant them in the vegetable garden, from which the deer are fenced, they need to be carefully mulched in order to keep them from winter killing. I lost the roses in our vegetable garden last winter from not properly preparing them. We had a very mild winter, with no snow, and the roses apparently needed more insulation from the cold when they didn’t have the snowpack surrounding them.

Truth be told, I’m not much of a gardener at all. I often neglect garden chores, allowing the weeds to get too big before giving them my attention, failing to water sufficiently, and planting according to my schedule and not the weather of the year.

As a result, roses are definitely not my flower. What I can grow is sunflowers. I often quote a line that I once heard from someone else, but whose origin I have forgotten, “I plant sunflowers every year because I can’t afford a Van Gough.” The truth is that I grow sunflowers because I can. They seem to thrive on my style of neglect. Basically all you have to do is to put the seeds into the ground. Some years the birds miss enough seeds that there are nearly as many volunteer plants as the ones I plant. This has been a good summer for the sunflowers. I have some giant blossoms that top plants that are over 8’ tall. There are a few weeds growing around the bases of the sunflowers, but the plants have outgrown the weeds and rise high above the competition.

I plant my sunflowers in the vegetable garden, safe from the deer, but I leave the blossoms for the birds. Many years the piñon jays will swoop down in mass for a couple of days of feeding frenzy and harvest all of the seeds in a short amount of time.

There are a couple of areas in our back yard that I devote to wild flowers. I purchase the wildflower seeds that are sold in the store and scatter them liberally on the ground. I make a little effort to weed the areas, pulling out the thistles and trying to keep the grass from dominating, but other than that, those areas are left to their natural path. That means that they are favorite feeding places for the deer and the plants that the deer love the best tend to decrease over time. Daisies, however seem to thrive. When a deer takes a chomp from the plant, it just grows back. So I might add daisies to the list of flowers that I have some hand in growing.

I believe, however, that my style of gardening, haphazard as it is, has a close relationship to the work and the results of true gardeners. A real gardener soon realizes that we humans don’t make plants grow. We can create conditions, prepare beds, plant carefully, pull out weeds, and fertilize, but the plants grow by their own internal processes, cared for by the wider processes of creation. There are lean years and abundant years. The greenness of the hills this year are the result not of superior lawn growers, but of the moist and relatively cool summer we have enjoyed. The lushness and productivity of the land comes from a complex relationship of weather and soil with a little bit of luck tossed in.

I’m aware of the contrasts because we have just returned from a trip to Washington where the land is wracked by drought and the wildfires are burning without limits. That country is normally lush and producing abundant crops, but not this year. Those who garden and farm in that place will need to wait for another year to show record yields.

Gardening and farming require a commitment to the land over the long haul. Those who go for short term gains often find that the cost is deep. Some forms of farming produce wonderful yields for a few years but are unsustainable over the long haul.

I’ve witnessed many homes that have been professionally landscaped and look so beautiful when the landscapers finish their work only to require so much maintenance that they quickly get ahead of the homeowners. I’ve grown suspicious of hiring others to make your yard look good not only because of the cost, but also because you make yourself dependent upon hired labor to maintain the beauty.

So we keep it simple around here. We share our yard with the deer and turkeys and other birds. They eat some of what we grow and we try not to complain about their appetites, even when they seem to go for the plants we’d love to leave growing. I mow the lawn and try to maintain a green space around the house, but when we have dry years, I allow much of the grass to go dormant and wait for the next spring’s rains. We plant a few things, including some new trees and try to care for them, but we don’t worry too much if not every plant grows the way we’d envisioned.

My neighbors don’t accuse me of being a master gardener, but they usually don’t complain about the condition of our property, either.

And I allow myself to be surprised and amazed at what the soil will produce. The giant sunflowers delight me as much this year as they did the first year I planted them.

Perhaps I’ll try roses again next year.

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Yesterday a friend who is also a member of our congregation and I had lunch in a restaurant near the School of Mines in downtown Rapid City. The restaurant features Sushi and other Japanese foods. I enjoy eating sushi and am delighted that there are several restaurants in our town that serve the rolls. I have learned a little bit about making sushi at home and have several recipes and have limited success making the delicacy.

In our town there are a lot of opportunities to eat food from a wide variety of different cultures and places. There are restaurants featuring the food of India, Nepal, Greece, Italy, various regions of China, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and many other places. Of course the foods served in these places are not exactly the same as the food served in other countries, but rather dishes that have been adapted to foods commonly available in the United States and catering to the appetites of American customers.

I recently read that there is a long history of the role of Chinese-American restaurants in the story of immigration of people from China to the U.S. The restaurants provide jobs for new immigrants as they gain language skills and adapt to the culture of their newly-adopted country.

It isn’t just food where cultures mix and adapt. Artists and musicians are often inspired by the art and music of other places and cultures and adopt and adapt rhythms, patterns and other aspects of those places in their works. Picasso and Matisse were inspired by African art. Puccini wrote operas inspired by stories of travel to the Orient.

I confess to doing a lot of appropriation of other cultures. Eating sushi is one example. I have never been to Japan. Though we hosted exchange students from Japan and both of our children participated in student exchanges in Japan, Susan and I have no Japanese heritage of which we are aware. Still we regularly eat from rice bowls and cups and use chopsticks that were gifts of Japanese friends and we enjoy eating food that we learned to like through our association with people from Japan.

I also appropriate ideas. I am not a Native American. As far as I know my ancestors all came to this continent in the last three centuries. I did not grow up on a reservation and I have no claim to tribal culture. But I have good friends who are indigenous and I have listened carefully to their stories. I frequently use examples from their culture and use a few Lakota and Crow words from time to time when I want to express a complex idea. My thoughts have been influenced by the people I have known and the experiences I have living near reservations for most of my life.

The story of Christianity is a story of appropriation of other cultures and other languages. When Abraham and Sarah went forth from the land of their ancestors, they had to learn the ways of other people. Their people intermarried with the natives of the lands where they traveled. Our scriptures are filled with stories of people of other cultures who were adopted into our story line. Ruth, for example, married into our people and remained after she was widowed. Her story is a key element in the treasured scriptural record.

The Acts of the Apostles report the day of Pentecost as a time of rich diversity of language, culture and practice and celebrate it as the beginnings of the Christian Church. Although the church grew out of Judaism, it was, from the beginning, made up of many different cultures and traditions. The distinction between Jew and Greek was noted, and may even have been a source of controversy in the early church, but our scriptures uphold, time and time again, the importance of inclusion and minimize the differences that are a part of our stories.

There has always been room for converts and new members in the church and each time we have received new members the church itself has been changed. Traveling across the U.S. we have experienced wide diversity in the practices of our own United Church of Christ. Years ago we were delighted to participate in the chartering of a new Filipino congregation in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The church was in Canada, was a member congregation of the United Church of Christ USA, had a Filipino pastor and a predominantly Filipino congregation, and was meeting in the building of an historic German congregation. Our church is always being influenced by other cultures and traditions while we continue to seek faithfulness to the historic roots of our church in the culture and languages of the Middle East.

Our Bible itself is a reflection of this wide cultural diversity. We read our scriptures in English, often in versions that were heavily influenced by British culture and the structure of the monarchy. Those English translations were deeply influenced by the 1200 years that our scriptures were circulated predominantly in Latin, though the original languages are Hebrew and Greek. It is a challenging and often daunting task to seek the original meaning of scriptures in their original context. One has to study not only the languages themselves, but the cultural appropriations that took place in the transitions. Jesus himself didn’t speak any of these languages in common conversation. His native language was Aramaic though we have stories of him reading Hebrew scriptures in public and it seems likely that he had at least a working knowledge of Latin, the language of the Roman government. It was also common for people in the region at that time to speak some Greek, the language of scholars in the region at the time. The New Testament was originally penned in Greek.

People who claim to have a pure cultural tradition are probably mistaken. Pow Wows, fry bread, and star quilts were not a part of Lakota Culture 500 years ago. In fact, they didn’t become common until the 20th century in our area. But it would be inaccurate to say that these are not important Lakota cultural traditions.

So I end up disagreeing with those who seek some kind of cultural purity. I think we all appropriate in art, literature and clothing and I enjoy the rich mixture of traditions in which we live and worship.

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Much of my life has involved active engagement in practices that are intended to focus my attention. The ancient practices of stillness, including centering prayer, come from deep within the traditions of our people. And we learn, from the Biblical record and other places that these are difficult and challenging. Abraham was especially gifted at discerning God’s call, but he got it wrong on several occasions. He convinced himself that God would find it acceptable for him to lie to Pharaoh about his wife, introducing her as his sister. He was wrong. He convinced himself that God was asking him to sacrifice Isaac. He was wrong. We learned that one has to be very attentive when listening to God’s call and the capacity to discern God’s call from our own desires is not simple.

The practice of centering prayer involves carefully turning one’s thoughts to God. You sit in silence and allow what ever thoughts or feelings come to you to rise to your consciousness. Then, one by one, you dismiss those thoughts and feelings so that you can focus on God. A variation on this practice is a breathing prayer, where you focus on your breath, dismissing all other thoughts and feelings one by one until you think only of your breath, which is God’s spirit flowing into you and flowing through you into the world.

Moses was said to be close to God and to know God’s voice, but he mistakenly convinced himself that God would allow him to live forever and to enter the promised land. He didn’t get that part right. Saul was anointed king by God, but passing his leadership to his son was not to be. David was a mighty king, but he got it all wrong in the disastrous and murderous affair with Bathsheba.

It requires hard work and discipline to focus on God’s call for your life.

As I began to study more and learn more about the practices of listening to God, I learned about Lectio divina, a practice of praying the scriptures and loving-kindness meditation. In seminary I studied contemplative practices and the arts and ways to focus attention through artistic and musical interpretation. Through my life in the church, I have learned the power and importance of bearing witness for justice and work and volunteering as spiritual practices.

I have studied deep listening and storytelling as ways to connect with others around a focused story.

I have explored the contemplative practices of movement including walking meditation and labyrinth.

All of this has been part of my role as an ordained leader of the sacraments of the church, where we join together to focus our attention.

I have learned and believed that focus is an important part of a spiritual life and an important part of remaining open to God’s presence and call.

Still, I am aware that I am often anything but focused. Scan the topics of my blogs. I speak about the process of vacation, about my grandchildren, about traveling, about fires in the west, about returning to work — all in a single week. The list of topics for a year almost defies categorization. The years of blogs posted on my website are disorganized and difficult to search for any common thread of meaning. There are, of course, themes, but they take some real attention to discern.

Before I was writing the blog, I was equally disorganized about my journal writing. I would write about the weather, about my health, about my family, about being a pastor, about my career, and a thousand other things. I was anything but centered.

Over the years my sideline interests have also been varied and diverse. I have flown airplanes, worked in broadcast radio, driven a school bus, sailed, pursued photography, worked in small town newspapers, built boats, hiked and backpacked, ridden bicycles, built boats, paddled canoes and kayaks, rowed, and engaged in hundreds of other interests and activities. Focus would not describe my recreational life at all.

Perhaps it is just self-justification, but I have come to the conclusion that there is another type of spiritual practice that is not contemplation and not centering. There is a type of spiritual practice that is not based in focus, but rather in expanding the field of vision.

It is also a legitimate spiritual practice to try a bit of this and then try a bit of that as you explore the wide diversity of God’s world.

In photography, focus is not just about getting a crystal clear image across the range of the photo. A computer can do that-in many cases a computer can do it better than a person. Take a photo with a point-and-shoot camera or with a smart phone. You are likely to get good, high-definition results with uniform clarity and sharpness across the image.

The problem is that uniform focus is not the way our eyes see. We are used to having some things in our range of vision less focused than other things. The periphery of our vision is often out of focus. Distant items are less focused than close items.

A photographer uses depth of field and focus to create an image that tells a story. A carefully focused athlete with a blurred background conveys the image of speed and action. A single drop of water suspended in the air with an out-of-focus background tells of the power of moving water. Photography is an art of balancing focus and out-of-focus.

Like photography, not everything in life should be focused. There are times for single-minded contemplation of God and God alone. There are times when such focus prevents seeing the vastness of God’s activities and creation. Sometimes being less focused allows one to recognize that God is present in everything - in every thought - in every activity - in every feeling. Seeing God, recognizing the divine presence may require focusing on a single thing for a while, but sometimes is is just the right thing to use the widest field possible and expect to be surprised by God’s presence.

Spiritual maturity requires both centering and widening.

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Our home in the hills has a feature that we take for granted, but I realize from our two weeks of vacation is quite uncommon. As I lay in my bed last night I was struck by the quietness of the place where we live. Granted, it wasn’t quiet two weeks ago during the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally. Last night, however, I lay in bed and listened to the quiet. There was an occasional car on the road behind the house that I could hear. That was about all. The neighborhood dogs were quiet for the night. There were no coyotes singing in the area. There is no stream with the music of water. Just quiet.

Quiet is a valuable thing in this often-noisy world.

That said, there is a difference between the natural sounds of this world and those made by humans. I know from my own experience that I have no trouble sleeping with the sounds of a river rushing by. Even a wild mountain stream rushing over rocks is a pleasant sound. Waking to bird calls is a wonderful way to begin a day. The songs of the coyotes is reassuring, not threatening.

The sounds made by humans have different qualities for us. The sounds of loved ones breathing is a joy and a gift. The sounds of children playing is an inspiration and delight. I’m sure that it isn’t everyone’s pleasure, but I grew up listening for the sounds of my father’s airplanes and I still enjoy hearing a light airplane fly overhead. I know that sounds of different engine and propellor combinations and the sounds of the old planes, with radial engines always gets my attention.

I’m sure that there are people who grew up loving the sound of trains. I think I have a neighbor who loves the sound of his motorcycle. People can become attached and acclimated to all kinds of sounds.

But quiet is a wonderful thing and much appreciated.

I know that it is one of the reasons that I rise early in the morning. Early is a time of quiet. There are few creatures stirring and the rush of the community is stilled. In quiet times I am able to think more clearly. And reflection and calm are important to the work that I do. Perhaps it is a bit of wisdom creeping into my life, or perhaps it is just what happens, but I’m a bit slower to spring into action these days. I need to think things through and get a sense of what is best before acting. It isn’t that I don’t trust my instincts and emotions, I just need to check them and make sure that they aren’t misleading me.

I know that I’m headed for a lot of intense emotion today. There have been two deaths in the congregation recently and I will be working with two families planning funeral services. Emotions run high in the rush of grief and every family is filled with complex relationships. The loss is real and each loss is unique. In the midst of grief people need support and understanding. My role is not to get emotionally engaged and create more complexity and chaos. On the other hand it is not to be distant and aloof, either. There is a balance of appropriate care and concern that can be helpful to the families that I serve.

One of the wonderful things about the church is that life goes on when I am on vacation. The church continues to serve people. Decisions continue to be made. Committees meet and decide. There is much about the life of the church that does not require my presence and participation. On the other hand, I have a unique role and perspective in the church and there are plenty of people who notice when I am gone.

There is a sense in which the covenant between pastor and congregation is constantly shifting and changing. Although my role is clearly defined - I will be preaching the sermon on Sunday - I am called to encourage the development of leadership in others, not provide all of the leadership that is needed. Sometimes I get that balance right, sometimes we need to make adjustments.

Having been gone also requires a certain amount of storytelling to reenter the community. There were lots of activities that occurred while I was gone. I will need to hear about the rummage sale. I will need to get reports about the lives of people in the community. I will need to hear about worship in my absence. I will need to hear about families and the adventures of their lives. And I will need to share some of my own experiences and stories as well.

These things require time and energy. Part of vacation is rest and preparation for the energy demands of returning to the regular work week. It won’t be long and we will be back full-swing into the routines of fall and church school and preparation for the coming of Advent. Time goes by quickly and there are plenty of things to occupy the time that we have.

So the quiet is doubly important. I can’t do everything. I can’t be everywhere. I need to maintain balance and make priorities. I need to be fully present to others for much of the day. And to do so I need to have taken time to be quiet with God. Listening is a critical skill. At this stage of my life I realize that listening to the quiet is also important.

I have lived a life of words. I am often the one to give the words to quiet moments. I pray out loud on occasions where there are no other words that can be said. I recite and read scripture when people have no words for the situations of their lives. I write and speak and make sense through the manipulation of words.

But in the balance of silence and speaking, silence is often the better part. Perhaps it is the silence that gives the power to the speaking.

I am grateful for the quiet.

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I wake this morning to the sound of Rock Creek rushing by. We are not far from the little creeks and rivulets that are coming off of the snow pack high in the mountains that form the source of the creek. By the time it gets to this town, it is a formidable force. Were you to try to wade across the stream, it would knock you down and roll you against the boulders that give the stream its name. Farther downstream it is more placid even though there are more creeks that join it and more water in the river. It will join the Yellowstone, the nation’s longest river that still flows in its own natural bed without any dams or obstructions. The Yellowstone flows into the Missouri near the North Dakota border and the Missouri into the Mississippi downstream in Missouri. The Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans. But when the water that is flowing by as we begin the last day of our vacation finally reaches the ocean, its journey will not be ended. Some water will journey on ocean currents and be swept out into the Atlantic. Some will lie next to the surface and be evaporated into the clouds where it will be blown by the Jet Stream to distant locations to fall as rain or hail or snow and begin flowing down stream once again.

Ending our vacation - returning to the place we call home for now - is only part of our story. And our journey is not about the destination, but rather about the process of traveling together. The stories of our people have always been the stories of those with whom we travel. Abram and Sarai left the home of their parents and grandparents to journey to the land that God was going to show them. They took with them some of their possessions and some of the people that they had known in the old country. They had a son born to them later in the journey. That son was the father of two sons and his son was the father of twelve. And our people began to tell our story be telling of the other people with whom we journey.

We have been called, for this season of our lives, to journey with a particular people who form a congregation in Rapid City, South Dakota. Though we vacation, we know that we are still called to make our journey with these folk. We’ve been with them long enough to have celebrated many, many baptisms and confirmations and weddings. We have been with them long enough to have officiated at many funerals. Our church has welcomed hundreds of new members, some of whom have remained with us for the rest of their lives, others who have journeyed with us for a little while and then go on to other communities and other expressions of faith. The journey of our congregation is not primarily a journey through space, though we live on a traveling planet that is constantly in motion. Ours is a journey of history-making through time. The decades have passed and we continue to serve the people of our community. We celebrate anniversaries and can count 137 years that we have been around.

But like the creek flowing by our camping place, there is more to the story.

For we also share the journey with classmates and colleagues who serve in Australia and England and South Africa and Indonesia and many other countries. We share the journey with classmates and colleagues who serve in different states and regions of this nation. Some of those people serve in different denominations and different expressions of our shared Christian faith. Some no longer serve as pastors but now are lawyers and doctors and teachers and writers and work in other vocations. Each serves in accord to a call from God.

And we are no less engaged in God’s work than are our children: Isaac working at the hospital, Rachel caring for children at the Child Development Center.

The journey has never been about a particular destination. Although tomorrow I will rise early and head to 1200 Clark Street in Rapid City to greet my office and the people who come there, the journey has never been about an address.

The journey is always about the people with whom we travel. I’ll need to catch up on their stories. There are stories of new families learning in wonder to raise children, stories of illness changing the course of lives, of healing making new possibilities open. I’ll need to find out how one person’s addiction recovery goes and how another has gotten along with the care of a grandchild. I’ll want to hear of how the congregation gathered for a rummage sale and how worship went in our absence. I’ll need to read the minutes of meetings that happened in our absence and decisions that were made as we traveled. There will be many correspondences requiring response and much to learn. There will be a pile of paper on my desk that needs to be sorted and responses that need to be made. There is a bulletin to prepare and people to call.

The journey continues, whether or not I am in the office. And that is as it should be. The journey is not mine alone and never has. The journey will continue after the time of my service to this particular congregation.

But for now, I have a place and a people that I call home even as I remember the words of the Psalmist, “Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” Even that place we call home - or in my case the many places I call home - is not our true dwelling. Our true dwelling is a relationship with God. We live and grow and breathe in the hands of God who is love.

Soon we’ll be on the road again and hundreds more miles will fall behind. We’ll sleep in our home in the hills with its familiar sounds and neighbors.

And the journey will continue.

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There has been a lot of research in recent decades about the ways in which the weather can affect mental health. The diagnostic category, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), refers to a type of depression that seems to be set off by the weather patterns. It was first discovered in people who get depressed in the winter, when days are short and there is less sunlight. For some people, living in a place where it rains a lot and there are few sunny days during certain seasons, this can turn into a form of depression that interferes with their ability to work and function in their lives.

I’ve lived most of my life in pretty sunny places and haven’t felt the affects of the disorder, but I can tell when a perfectly beautiful day has lifted my spirits a bit, so I have a hint of what might be happening for those who suffer from the condition.

More challenging for me personally, I think, would be living in constantly smoky conditions. The northwest is filled with smoke this summer. Normally beautiful places have so much smoke that you can scarcely see the color of the sky. I know that the smoke comes and goes and that the wind can clear things up, but we had almost a whole day of driving in the smoke yesterday.

Being unused to traffic, we checked with locals and found that if we didn’t leave before 7 am, it probably made sense to wait until after 9. Leaving at 8 would get us through Seattle traffic at about the same time as leaving at 9. We took the advice and headed out at about 9:15 and had no problems with the traffic.

As we started down the east slope of the Cascades, we could see the smoke. By the time we hit the high desert at Ellensburg, it was very smoky. We drove across the Columbia Basin in the smoke, which persisted even after we got to Spokane and returned to the mountains. In Idaho there was an active fire quite close to the Interstate. At one point there was a hotshot crew working the fire from the road and there were signs telling us not to call 911 if we saw the fire - they are already working it. There is a very large fire camp at Wallace.

The smoke started to clear as we climbed up Lookout Pass into Montana, but there was still a bit of smoke in the air as we camped for the night in Western Montana. The entire states of Washington, Idaho and Montana are under complete burn bans. All of the campgrounds have signs about no campfires and urging campers to be especially careful with all fires and flames.

The camera normally cuts through the smoke. Smoke that is clearly visible to the human eye often isn’t recorded by cameras. It isn’t hard to photograph a plume of smoke, but a smoky sky often comes off as blue in a photograph. Still, when I snapped a photo of a wind farm with my cell phone as we ate our lunch, the smoke shows. It was even thicker than it appears in the photograph.

The calm conditions that allow the smoke to linger are rare in this part of the country. The Columbia Basin is often so windy that you notice it as you drive. Yesterday there were no problems with the wind. There was a kind of eerie feeling to the air. It was fairly warm, with temperatures in the high 80’s and 90’s as we drove across. But the lack of wind allowed the smoke and the field dust from the combines and other machines working the area to linger.

Crops don’t look so good in the basin. The grains are short and though harvest is mostly completed in the small grains, there are a few fields where they are swathing and picking up the grain to get what they can. The potatoes look pretty stunted for this time of the year and the field corn is short. The one crop that seems to be booming is alfalfa hay. That seems to be the big cash crop in the irrigated fields. There are huge warehouses of hay and most of the giant stacks are covered with tarps in that part of the country. Much of the hay is grown for export, filling empty shipping containers and providing feed for dairy cattle in Japan and China. It is a strange economy that allows for profit from shipping hay such long distances, but somehow it works out for the farms and for the importers.

The simple truth is that there are a lot of miles between our grandchildren and our home. A long day yesterday will be followed by a medium day today as we head for Red Lodge for a brief overnight visit with Susan’s sister before heading home tomorrow. It is a trip we’ve made many times before. When our son was a college student in Oregon, we made the trip at least twice each year and now that he is launched in his career we make a trip every year. With family in Montana, we usually stop to see my sisters one way and Susan’s the other, but there are variations on the trip. We’ve driven across Washington State on all of the major east-west routes: WA 20, US 2, Interstate 90 and US 12. Although we rarely stick to the Interstate on vacation, it turned out to be the practical way to make the miles yesterday.

A good night’s rest in a very comfortable campground, accompanied by our usual sounds of the highway and the railroad, and we’ll be able to get going early today. Part of the travel back home is making the mental adjustment from a vacation lifestyle to our work mode. There will be plenty of tasks to accomplish in the next few days to be ready for worship on Sunday and a return to our home life. It’s been a good trip and we need to pace ourselves to keep the energy to apply to the tasks at home.

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I first met my friend Tony in the fall of 1974 when I walked into my first class at theological seminary. Within the first week, I had at least been introduced to his wife and children. Over the course of our first month, as we fell into the routine of reading, research, writing and discussion that is essential to that form of intense learning, we became friends. Our friendship deepened as we journeyed through our educational process and shared break times together. His family came home to Montana with us on two occasions over the next couple of years. Our second year of seminary our families lived in the same house with a shared kitchen and dining room. After two years of study, it was time for Tony to return to his home country of Australia for his ordination and his life of service in the Uniting Church of Australia. We had two more years of seminary before our ordinations and first call. That summer we drove across the United States together, camping along the way. Tony’s family visited our families in Montana and made a brief visit to the church camp where we were serving for the summer. Then it was time for us to say good bye as they drove on to California, and then traveled on to Australia. It wasn’t easy, but we said good bye.

That was 37 years ago. Over those years we have had the opportunity to get together on a few occasions, mostly when Tony has had long service leaves and his family has traveled to the U.S. In 2006, we were able to visit them in their home in Australia. We have plans to get together in 2016 when he and his wife will be celebrating 50 years of marriage and retirement after a long and successful career. And, after that visit we will have to say good bye again.

Our relationship, however, isn’t limited by the fact that we live in different places and have had different paths of service. Each time we get together it is as if we hadn’t been apart. We pick up with our conversations. We love to discuss theology and the work of the church. We love to talk about family and the loved ones in our lives. We have shared some intense times of grief and loss in our lives and there are many memories of family members who have died that we enjoy sharing. And we talk about our dreams for the future - what we might do with the next stage of our lives. We know that our parting will come all too soon. Most of our lives will be intense times of a week or two together followed by long periods of living in different places - on two different continents.

Each time we are together, we know that we will have to say good by all too soon.

Today is a day of saying good bye to our grandchildren. We have had a wonderful visit. We’ve gone on a lot of adventures for a visit that was just over a week. We’ve ridden bikes and paddled boats and visited the ocean together. We’ve taken walks and played games and our grandson has had five sleepovers at our camper. We’ve shared meals and sung silly songs and laughed together. We really enjoy each other and love the opportunities to be together. And, for now, we have to say good bye.

It isn’t easy. There is a part of me that would like to move closer to these grandchildren and see them more often. There is a part of me that would love to be in the same town as our son and watch him develop his career and grow his family. I remember the fall when we took him to his first year of college and said good bye, leaving him there in the dormitory and headed back to South Dakota. It seemed like a sad day all day long. We were glad that he had found a college. We were excited that he was pursuing a career and developing a life. But we were sad to say good bye. It changed our lives not to have the same kind of physical presence of a son who had been born to us and grown up in our home.

This morning, when we say good bye to our grandchildren, we will be helping with an important part of their education and journey toward adulthood and maturity. They will be learning that saying good bye is not the end of a relationship. They will be learning that you can remain close to someone even when the physical distance is great. They will be learning to say good bye.

Saying good bye is one of the important lessons of life. It is a hard lesson to learn, often accompanied with tears and a feeling of sadness. It is, however, a necessary lesson. We want our children and grandchildren to grow into lives that reach beyond our own. We want them to have experiences that are beyond our reach. We want them to develop independence and the ability to form their own relationships and explore the vastness of God’s universe. And for them to grow beyond our sphere we need to teach them to say good bye.

Then we need to teach them that good bye isn’t the end. By being present in their lives through whatever means we have we teach them that we can be emotionally close even when large physical distances separate us. They can be free to live their lives knowing that our love and support isn’t limited to a single address or a single state. Wherever they go, we are with them.

It was a lesson that our people had a hard time learning. The stories of Abraham and Sarah leaving the home of their ancestors have been told by our people for four millennia. And we will be telling them for many more because they are fundamental to our identity as people. We are mobile. We travel. We explore the world. And we take our faith and values with us when we travel. God is bigger than the distances we travel. And God is love. And nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.

It’s that simple. And it’s that complex. And it is hard to say good bye. In doing so, however, we step out in faith and we teach our children and grandchildren to do the same. As they head to their next adventures our love goes with them no matter what.

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Words alone cannot express the joy I feel for this time of being immersed in the world of our grandchildren. It has long been the belief that vacations enable pastors to become better pastors. Experiences away from the pulpit and the parish provide perspective. Recreation provides renewal. It is important to the long-term relationship between the pastor and parish for there to be occasional breaks and time away. Like people in other vocations, we tend to immerse ourselves in our work, putting in long days and not always being attentive to days off. We work on weekends, so do not have the same kind of schedules with “long weekends” that are a part of some other jobs. So vacations are important to maintain balance and energy for the long haul.

We have had some wonderful vacations over the years - traveling to beautiful places, visiting national parks, enabling our children to visit some of America’s great cities, and more. It seems, however, that the experience of being with our grandchildren is one of life’s greatest pleasures and most wonderful adventures.

I’m learning that there are some very important lessons that grandfathers learn best when taught by grandchildren.

For example, I had to be reminded that a puddle is not an obstacle to be avoided, but an opportunity to be seized. It turns out that grandfathers are every bit as waterproof as little boys and that riding bikes through puddles is as much fun when you are 62 as they are when you are 4. But there are many 62-year-olds who have forgotten this. We take great pain to keep clean and to avoid getting wet. We ride around the puddles and when we can’t avoid them, we slow down to minimize the splash. I have fenders on my bike to keep my clothes clean when riding. I had forgotten the joy of a stripe on the back of my shirt from the mud and water along the way. In general, it isn’t that big of a deal to change your clothes and start fresh. Some days take more changes than others.

A similar rule applies to bumps and cracks in the pavement, sticks that have fallen onto the roadway, wide places where you can ride in a circle, paths through the grass alongside the pavement and other possibilities of riding a bicycle in ways that are different from just going straight down the road. And looking for all of these opportunities means that you don’t always look straight ahead.

The bike ride, after all, isn’t about reaching a destination. It is about enjoying the trip.

The same applies to travel in a canoe. I had forgotten that paddles are incredibly great devices for making splashes. And with the leverage of a paddle, you can make a really big splash. A double paddle allows for splashing on both sides of the boat. I’ve spent years working on my technique for efficient paddling. I know how and when to apply a forward stroke, a draw, a brace, a pry. I can execute a J-stroke all day long and I can paddle silently through calm waters when photographing birds. I had forgotten how much fun it is to make a big splash and to just enjoy the water flying.

As I stated previously, it turns out that grandpas are as waterproof as boys.

Laughing and giggling are fun to do just because they are fun. You don’t need a reason to laugh. the pleasure of the experience is sufficient. It turns out that grandfathers enjoy laughing as much as one-year-old granddaughters. Making silly faces is a lot of fun if it makes you - or someone else laugh. A hand puppet can provide great entertainment for a car trip if someone else is taking care of the driving. In my sometimes too busy life, I forget how important it is to just express joy. I forget how good it is for the people around you. Just giggling is a very pleasant way to invest some of your time.

Another lesson. It is wonderful to be an upright creature that walks and sees things from a vertical perspective, but it is also a good thing to get down on the floor and look up. Or to lie in the grass gazing at the trees. Or to crawl on all fours to see what is under the table. People are made for walking, it is true, but we are also made for rolling about on the ground and wrestling with one another. Gentle touch is fun and looking at things from new perspectives is enlightening.

You can discover things you’d forgotten about if you get down to look for a small rubber ball that tends to roll into the most obscure places.

Operating at the edge of control means that there will be spills and falls. Bruises occur from time to time. Avoiding injury isn’t the only goal in life. Riding bikes fast is fun because it feels fun to take a little risk. Climbing high in trees is fun because you can check out the edge of danger. Safety is important. We wear helmets and always remember to buckle our seat belts. But living fully is equally important. And you can’t live fully without taking a few reasonable risks. We’re pretty resilient creatures. And when we get old a few aches remind us that we are alive.

One last note. I have taken hundreds of photographs of our grandchildren on this trip. I have thousands of each. I especially enjoy the full-face shots that capture their expressions. However, I am careful with our grandchildren and with all of the children we meet, not to be the creator of their Internet presence. Their images are not mine to publish. While I like to capture the mood of our experiences, I shy away from printing pictures that show too many identifying features. They will grow up in a social network world and create their own Internet presence in their own time. Perhaps I am a bit paranoid. No worries, protecting the little ones is part of our responsibility. Ask me to see pictures of my grandchildren when we are together face-to-face.

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Our grandson has quite a collection of teddy bears. One, named “Baby Polar Bear” was especially reassuring to him and he used it as part of his bedtime routine each evening for a couple of years. That toy was lost on a family trip and has been replaced with another. There are other bears in his bed at home and each time he has a sleepover with Grandma and Grandpa, we have a bear that stays in our camper that joins him in his bed. Since he enjoys playing with the bears, it is only natural that Grandpa tells him some stories about encounters with real bears.

One story that has long amused me came from when I was a young adult and newly wed. Susan and I were serving as summer managers of Camp Mimanagish, a UCC camp located deep in the Main Boulder valley south of Big Timber, MT. In those days the telephone line was still 20 or so miles short of the camp and access was by a slow gravel and dirt road. We needed to be fairly self sufficient. Most weeks we were able to get by with a single trip to town for groceries and supplies even though we routinely hosted 60 to 150 campers.

The camp pickup was on its last legs and was burning more an more oil. About mid-way through our second season at camp, the pickup was parked and I began to use a Chevy Carry-All that had been our family car. Since it was carrying food and other supplies each week, we were pretty careful to make sure that it was fully unloaded after every trip. We had seen a black bear several times during the summer and we were used to taking bear precautions. We hauled food garbage to a place a half mile from the campers and put it into a bear-proof container after each meal. We made sure that all food supplies were kept secure and we didn’t allow campers to keep any snacks or other food stuffs in their cabins. Mostly the bear would just wander through camp and go on, looking for food elsewhere. We did get a few scratches in our car when the bear climbed up onto the roof, but the damage was minimal and we didn’t see that particular visit.

One night, after a long day that included a trip to town for additional supplies, we had unloaded everything from the car except for a single bag of patching concrete. I guess I must have gotten careless and left the top half of the rear tailgate open. I’m sure that there were some food smells left inside of the vehicle because it was used to haul food all the time.

The next morning we discovered that the concrete had been spread, rather evenly, all around the interior of the vehicle. The bag had been shredded and there was concrete dust everywhere. When you turned on the defroster, dust blew out of the vents. When you pounded the seats, dust flew into the air. It was a mess. We had previously removed all except the front bench seat from the vehicle in order to haul our supplies and it was a basic model without cloth liner in the back of the vehicle. It appears that the bear never actually got into the front seat, but simply went into the back and shook the torn concrete bag all around.

The next night I saw the offending bear. He looked rather gray with dust still clinging to his coat. We’ve laughed about that bear for decades.

Of course one has to be careful when telling bear stories to remind people that bears can be dangerous. It is important to give them their distance. There are plenty of stories of people who have been seriously injured or killed by bears. I’ve never had a frightening experience with a bear. We use caution, but we have been able to visit bear country without problems many times.

There is something very special about bears. I guess it would be true of any hibernating animal, but because a bear is similar in size to a person, it seems like a very interesting thing that the bear can spend the entire summer binge eating, making itself as fat as possible and then, in the late fall, when the snows come to the mountains, find a secure place to bed down and sleep through the entire winter. It almost appears as if they have died, but they are very much alive. The cubs are born during hibernation. Then, when spring returns, they shake off the slumber and find their way to the outside world and begin to look for food once again.

If you scan a hillside with a pair of binoculars in the early spring you might be able to find a bear den by looking for a hole with lots of mud around the entrance. The bears track the snowmelt around the entrance to their dens like children with muddy feet coming in from a rainstorm.

Black bears tend to find holes or places lower on the mountain, often at the base of a tree or an indention in the rocks. The grizzlies tend to seek places higher up. My grandfather knew of several places where black bears returned year after year to den. He was accomplished at taking visitors out to see the cubs in the spring.

It isn’t the same as resurrection, but the bear’s emergence from its hibernation den is a kind of symbol for me. We live in a world that is filled with cycles. The bear sleeps through much of the year. It is only in the warm weather that it wakes and is fully alive. Each year it spends months being unconscious. Of course we don’t know how much consciousness a bear has. It operates largely by instinct. But if you see a bear hibernating, it isn’t hard to believe that it is only fully alive in the summer.

Our lives, too, have their cycles. Kids become parents and then become grandparents. Some of our memories are forgotten soon after the event. Some of our stories linger beyond the span of our lives. We take our place in a long line of history-making that began long before our birth and will continue far into the future.

Grandpa isn’t dangerous like a bear. And he doesn’t sleep all winter long. But there is a part of him that is inspired by his experiences with bears and he loves to tell a good bear story from time to time.

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Many years ago I was chaperoning a delegation of youth from the Central Pacific Conference who were attending a General Synod of the United Church of Christ in Ft. Worth Texas. We had flown to Texas together and were staying in a hotel a couple of blocks from the convention center where the meeting was being held. While we were there, the thunderheads began to roll in and the sky got dark for a real thundershower. The youth in my delegation were mesmerized by the dark storm clouds and they all wanted to go outside to look at the storm. It wasn’t easy to get a good look at the clouds because we were in the midst of a city, but if they stood in front of the hotel, under the awning, they could get a pretty good look to the west down the street. I was encouraging them to come inside the building. It was easier to keep track of the youth inside andI was a bit worried that they’d get wet and be uncomfortable in the storm. It wasn’t easy to convince them to come in until the clouds opened up and the rain began to fall. Then they were mesmerized by the amount of rain that fell in such a short time. At least they were watching from inside the hotel at this point.

These were kids from Oregon and Idaho. At least the Oregon kids were used to seeing rain. But they had never before seen anything like a prairie thunderstorm.

I had forgotten the incident until this morning. We’re having a little thundershower here as I rise to begin my day.

It isn’t anything like the storms we are used to having at home.

And I remember the 10 years we lived in Boise. Boise is at the northern end of what has been called the great American desert. It is in a basin with high mountains to the north. The terrain rises so steeply that it wasn’t at all uncommon for me to mow my lawn and then drive less than 30 miles to ski in the same day. In that protected basin there was very little wind. When a thunderstorm did occur, it was a small event. A few flashes of lighting high in the clouds, usually striking somewhere in the mountains, or perhaps a bit of cloud to cloud lightning. The thunder was muted and sounded far away. The wind might blow a little, but not much - perhaps 25 mph gusts. And it would rain a few drops. That was it. I used to say that we had the wimpiest thunderstorms in the world in Boise. No worries, however, our trees weren’t used to any wind at all. 25 mph winds would make branches fall out of them. It takes 60 - 70 mph to make the branches fall where we live now. People would talk about the storms we had and I, having lived in North Dakota, didn’t think that we’d had a storm at all.

Things are really dry in Washington this year. The grass has gone dormant and the highway ditches are all filled with yellow grass. Some of the trees are turning color and it feel like early autumn. There are burn bans everywhere and people are working hard to conserve water. I’m sure that the small amount of rain that has fallen this morning is welcome. It probably will have a refreshing effect on the woods, though I haven’t yet even peeked my head out of the camper. I can smell the fresh air through the open window, however. It is nice. And it was pleasant to wake to the sound of raindrops on the roof of the camper.

I had to listen carefully, however, to know it was a thunderstorm. After a while I did hear a few rumbles and I saw the sky briefly illuminated by a distant flash of lightning. I don’t think that the thunder and lightning would have awakened me had I not been already awake.

By our standards, it isn’t much of a storm. The giant trees around our camper are completely still. Perhaps there is a little bit of movement in some of the needles high in the trees, but they aren’t swaying. In fact it is hard to imagine these forest giants swaying back and forth the way that the pine trees do at home. Probably you can’t have the giant trees that grow here in a place with the winds that we get back home.

I didn’t know, prior to moving to Boise, that you could miss the wind. I had always previously lived in places known for their wind. Big Timber, Montana, has a reputation for some of the highest winds in the state. When we were young, we used to watch for the windspeed instrument to register 0 during a storm. That meant that the wind had exceeded 100 mph and broken the meter again. It happened several times a year. They didn’t make meters that could handle our winds in those days. After college I moved to Chicago, which has a reputation as the windy city. I didn’t find anything particularly unusual about the wind in Chicago, but there usually was plenty of it and I was grateful because the wind refreshed the city. Without the wind it could get stale really quickly. There was too much car exhaust and other air pollution to make the place comfortable unless the wind was blowing. When it blew, we shared our dirty air with the folks downwind. From Chicago we moved to North Dakota where there are real thunderstorms and real blizzards as well.

When we lived in Boise I missed the wind.

I might miss it if we were to live in this place as well, though I know that all you have to do is to head for the coast where the wind does blow almost constantly and I felt a good breeze a day or so ago when we were rowing on an area lake.

So we’ve got a bit of rain. We could use a bit more. Maybe our best blessings are like that. A little, but not so much that you get tired of it.

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The West coast of the United States, like most coastlines around the world, is pretty heavily populated. The Seattle urban area now stretches from near the Canadian border most of the way down the coast to Vancouver, which is really part of the Portland, OR, metro area. Here in Olympia, Interstate 5 is a six to eight land thoroughfare that has heavy traffic around the clock. The towns in Thurston County alongside the highway run into each other. From Lacy to Olympia to Tumwater one has the sense of being in a continuous city without rural areas separating the towns.

Still, there are some pockets of less populated and less built up space in the midst of the gigantic urban sprawl. The Chehalis Western trail was once the site of the Chehalis-Western Railroad that primarily carried logs from the forests of Washington to the Puget Sound for flotation to the lumber mills of Tacoma. The trail is now a walking and bike trail that wanders through the urban area and provides a beautiful place to enjoy the natural beauty of the area. The trail is now connected to other urban trails to form a network of nature in the midst of the city.

The campground where we are staying is not overly developed. Located in a grove of large trees, there are 70 or more campsites, each with sufficient space to feel like you have your own little clearing in the forest. It has the usual amenities of a developed campground: electricity, water and sewer hookups. It doesn’t offer some of the things that are now common at resort campgrounds such as cable television, camp cabins, and wireless Internet throughout the campground.

What makes both the trail and the campground good places to get away from all of the urban areas is the presence of trees. The Washington Coast is part of a huge zone of temperate rain forest, with trees that grow well above 100 feet tall. One wonderful effect of the trees is to dampen sounds. Even though there is a major Interstate corridor less than a half mile from the campground, you aren’t aware of it in most of the campsites. The trees also shelter the campground from the constant light that surrounds the greater urban area. Although there is enough light pollution and the tree canopy is dense enough to make it a poor place for star gazing, it does get dark at night in the campground - something that those of us from more rural and isolated parts of the globe appreciate.

When I visit places like this I find myself wondering about the stories of the people that surround me. The campground alone is probably bustling with stories. There are quite a few folks who appear to be retirement age. Some have very large motorhomes or trailers with lots of amenities. Others travel more modestly. This campground has everything from a few tent campers to half-million dollar motor coaches towing vehicles for short excursions. Our camper, which is luxurious by our standards, is modest amongst the really fancy units with lights under their awnings, carpets set out alongside the campers and a host of lawn furniture and decorations set up.

On the other hand, our hand-made boats on our pickup are distinctive and provide a topic of conversation with almost everyone we meet. It seems that I am always having conversations with people who admire the boats. Many speak of their desire to one day build a wooden boat and I’m quick to encourage them. On this trip I have a boat that cost just a couple of hundred dollars plus a year’s spare time to make. That kind of project is quite accessible to folks with limited budgets.

Another part of our story that is shared with a lot of other folks in the campground comes from having our grandson staying with us. We are close enough to his home that he can go back and forth, staying with us a couple of nights and then staying in his own home for a night. Having a four-year-old who pedals his own bicycle without any training wheels is a point of conversation around the campground. This year I ride my bike to keep up with him. He’s too fast to chase walking or jogging. Like his father and grandfather and great grandfather before him, he is confident and enjoys striking up conversations with strangers. The other day I got a real joy out of watching him admire the motorcycles of four men on their way home from the Sturgis rally as he showed off his bicycle to them. They were quick to admire his bike and his skills as a rider. He was quite impressed with their cycles as well.

As is often the case, we know only little pieces of the stories of the people that surround us. Last night I watched as a relatively young man backed a large fifth-wheel trailer into a campsite. It appeared to have all kinds of amenities for extended traveling. The driver of the truck seemed to be traveling alone. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with him, as he was busy setting up and I was busy following a four-year-old bicyclist around the campground, but it would be interesting to know where he is from and where he is going. I wonder if traveling alone is his usual style, or if he has family with whom he usually travels. I don’t know if he is passing through, staying just for one night or if he is here on business and will be staying for a while.

It seems like it would be interesting to interview the folks who stay in the campground to learn their stories, though many of them probably have no interest in being interviewed. Outside of the campground are literally hundreds of thousands of other people, each with stories of their own.

Maybe that is why I feel more at home in the rural and more isolated parts of this country - I get to know the stories of my neighbors, at least in part. I get to understand the dynamics of their lives. Still, it is fun to visit this place and wonder about stories that I will never know.

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I’ve been reading Elias Chacour’s memoir, “Blood Brothers,” during this vacation. Chacour is a Palestinian Christian minister. He was a young boy during the first seizures of Palestinian land by Israel in the 1940’s. When it was time for him to enter theological seminary, he couldn’t obtain permission to go to seminary in Jerusalem, so ended up studying in Paris. When he was ordained he came back to the small villages of his childhood and began to serve. He was admitted to graduate study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was there during the six day war.

He got to see the birth of the modern state of Israel from a Palestinian perspective. His father’s fig orchard was confiscated. His home town was at first seized by the Israeli army and then destroyed when they won the court battle to have the land returned. The church of his childhood was literally blown apart by fire from an Israeli tank.

The events of his life, remarkable as they are, are not, however, what makes his story so compelling. What makes the story so engaging is that somehow, in the midst of incredible injustice and violence he has been able to maintain his quest for peace and engage in work for reconciliation between Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land. He started many schools in the rural villages of displaced Palestinians, and made the showing of “The Diary of Anne Frank” a part of the curriculum so that children could grow up knowing that the people who are seen by Palestinians as oppressors have a story of being the victims of gross injustice. He has arranged peace marches with thousands of participants where Jews, Christians and Muslims walk side by side through the streets of Jerusalem and camp out on the steps of the Knesset.

Chacour never formally studied with Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr., but he certainly embodies the principles of nonviolence. He has the ability to speak truth to power in ways that communicate not threat, but rather hope.

And the region where he lives has been rather short on hope for most of his lifetime.

Reading his story has gotten me to thinking about the process of ideas and communication. I’m a big fan of ideas. I try to think clearly every day and to wrestle with concepts that are big. I try to learn as many facts as possible and to use those facts in a quest for the truth. I enjoy engaging with others who study ideas and who want to discuss and debate concepts. I really enjoyed my times of academic study and found the university to be a stimulating and empowering setting. I read a lot of books and I try to write ideas every day.

But I know that ideas alone do not solve the problems of the world.

Having the right idea - even being able to win an argument - is insufficient in the face of deeply entrenched conflict. And ideas alone do not provide the pathway to the future for people who are caught in cycles of violence and injustice.

At a fundamental level, there are conflicts in the world where people can’t even agree on what is. The history of Israel looks different from a Palestinian perspective than it does from the perspective of a Jewish immigrant from Europe. Some people see freedom fighters. Others see terrorists. Some feel that security requires walls and fences. Others find the walls and fences to decrease the security of the people. And, like another modern democracy, the people of Israel do not all agree on the actions that their government should take.

And if we are unable to agree about what is, getting to a common vision of what should be is even more difficult. It has often seemed impossible in the really entrenched conflicts of our world.

We ask questions: “Can Israel live peacefully with its neighbors?” “Is a two state solution viable?” “Do the lands have to be divided by religion?” But our questions don’t really get and the long history of conflict and violence and they don’t provide a way for Jew, Christian and Muslim to live side by side in peace in a part of the world with a rapidly-growing population and limited resources. Issues of water rights and distribution of food, of jobs and currency, of investment funds and schools and health care all complicate the process of discovering solutions.

And in the midst of the struggle, people are capable of senseless violence and have the power to inflict permanent pain on one another.

Chacour has found the inner strength to live as a peacemaker in the midst of this incredible turmoil. Somehow he has not allowed the experiences of his life - even experiences of injustice and prejudice - to shape his world view or to dim his hope.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

Of course all of the people of Palestine and Israel are children of God. They are children of God regardless of their religious affiliation or their rejection of religion. Their lives, however, have put them in a position where they are unable to see that their neighbors are also children of God. They see people with whom they disagree as problems to be solved or even eliminated instead of as gifts of God.

I’m not yet mature enough to recognize the challenges and problems I encounter - the resistance to change, the inability to share, the pettiness, the gossip - as gifts of God. I keep wanting to use my ideas to eliminate conflicting ideas. I keep wanting to win the argument.

Instead of identifying the source of our conflict, Chacour invites us to discover the place where we can meet - the commonness we share as humans and the possibilities of hope for a different future. More than the incredible witness of this remarkable man, perhaps his greatest gift is his ability to inspire others to also become peacemakers.

His story has touched me deeply and reminds me of my calling in the place where I serve.

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In my everyday life, the most common place for me to paddle is Sheridan Lake. I paddle there because it is close and convenient. The lake is big enough to enjoy. At about 375 acres, there are plenty of little coves and inlets to make the shoreline interesting. The center of the lake is large enough to develop a few waves when the wind is blowing, without being threatening to small craft. I tell people that my motto is, “If your lake is to small, get a smaller boat.” When I’m paddling in my little boats, the lake is just fine. Because I paddle there a lot, I know the lake very well. I can paddle the entire shoreline in a couple of hours and I often paddle across the lake one way and around it on the way back. I like to check out the inlet and paddle upstream past the bridge to the campground from time to time. There are plenty of familiar sights to which I like to return, such as the beaver dams or waterfowl nesting areas.

Over the years I have paddled my boats in many different places. My experience, however, remains mostly in small waters.

When I come out here, however, I dabble in the big waters. Of course, I’m not equipped or experienced enough to go any distance from shore without a guide and I need to stay off of the big waters when the weather is threatening, but I can paddle along the shore in many different places.

There is really no way to compare the Puget Sound with my little lake. (OK, I know that Sheridan Lake isn’t really “mine,” it’s just familiar to me.)

From Olympia, where I usually launch at Percival Landing, right in the downtown, the sound stretches 100 miles north to Deception Pass. There is one major and two minor connections to the open Pacific Ocean. Admiralty Inlet is the major connection, and Deception Pass and Swinomish Channel are the minor connections. I could paddle my canoe through either of those connections, as long as I was aware of the currents in those places. A few years ago we were up north and I watched the kayakers in Deception Pass and realized that you have to have some experience and local knowledge to be able to make progress in the swift current up there.

Another way to think of the size of the Puget Sound is to think of depth. Sheridan Lake Dam is 134 feet high. The average water depth in the Puget Sound is 450 feet. It is over 900 feet deep at its deepest point. The main basin, between Whidbey Island and Taoma is 600 feet deep. By any standard, that’s a lot of water.

I know that my skill and my small boats are no match for this gigantic body of water, so I am careful to only paddle along the shore in protected places.

Still, there is a sense that comes from paddling on big water that makes an impression. For one thing, there are some gigantic boats in this water. I watch the loading and unloading of ocean-going vessels at the Port of Olympia. There is an ongoing log loading process there. There is a huge area filled with logs that are transported by giant machines and loaded with multiple cranes for each ship. The ships are so big that they need to wait for high tide to head out when loaded. The amount that they settle into the water when loaded is impressive.

Even the pleasure craft that are at the Olympia Yacht Club marina are big by our standards. Any boat under 30’ long looks small in that arena. There are private vessels with a couple of masts stretching skyward, and lots of large motor cruisers that probably have accommodations that make our travel trailer appear small by comparison. During the week when there is less activity at the marina, I paddle up and down the rows, looking at all of the gorgeous boats. There are a few wooden boats that appear to have been around for a while and plenty of sleek fiberglass models as well as aluminum and steel craft. Mostly I am looking at them from the waterline and often get to see only the transom at the stern of the craft. I read their home ports - mostly places around the sound, but there are always a few vessels from Portland, OR, various places in California and British Columbia. Occasionally I’ll see a craft from Alaska, and sometimes there will be a world cruiser from a long away port. I’ve seen a couple of boats with home ports on the East Coast. No matter how they traveled, it is a long way from Boston to Olympia WA.

My little boats travel smaller distances. I paddle a couple of miles and then I return and load my boats back onto the truck. On the other hand, they are 1300 miles from home and so will have made 2600 miles on the highway by the time we get home next week.

Compared to the sailors of old, who headed out in comparatively small craft to explore the oceans and discover points previously unknown to their people, my little explorations of the coastline of the Puget Sound are minor excursions. But I have the feel of an explorer as I head out. The places I visit are previously unknown to me and I have a tendency to stretch out and cover a bit more space each day that I am able to paddle on the big waters of the sound.

I’ll never be a big water sailor and I’ll never go very far in my boats, but the boats give me a sense of freedom and adventure that are appropriately sized to my age and level of skill as a mariner. As long as my imagination continues to soar, the water is far too big for me to ever become bored with my adventures.

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We’ve been traveling to the Pacific Northwest for many years. Back in the 1980’s my sister moved to Portland, Oregon, and a brother to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound. We would come when we were able to visit family and to experience the life of a region of the country that was very different from our own. Living in North Dakota and then in Boise, Idaho, we would come from dry places to visit the lush temperate rain forest of the coastal region. The giant trees amazed us. The Douglas Fir, Cedar and Hemlock trees grow to 150’ high. The undergrowth of ferns and other plants is lush and rich.

Our son went to college in Forest Grove, Oregon and, after graduate school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, moved to Olympia Washington, where his family has lived since. We try to make a trip to Olympia once each year to visit his family and to share in their activities. They live very close to the Puget Sound, for paddling an rowing. They live right next to the Chehalis Trail for walking and biking. The wider area of Olympia, Tacoma and Seattle is filled with all kinds of museums and other very interesting things to visit and see. And the seacoast is less than an hour’s drive away.

Back in the days when we lived in Boise, I began to collect kites. I have numerous controlled kites. Some are flown with two lines, some with four. By manipulating the lines, I can control the direction of the kite, climbing and falling, turning left and right. Sometimes I fly multiple kites in trains.

This year, however, our trip is very different than any other year that I can remember. First of all, after a very dry winter in the hills, we have a very wet May and June. Our Mother’s Day Blizzard was the start of a month of snow or rain almost every day. There were flash floods and the reservoirs of the hills all filled to capacity. Throughout the summer there have been additional showers and the hills have remained very green. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen them so green in August. Even with the now drying conditions and the start of a season of small fires, predominantly lightning-started, we know that this will be a good year of growth for most of the plants in the hills.

Driving through southeast Montana was pretty impressive, with lots of green left in the rolling hills. The hay crop in the dryland was impressive, with the second cutting being baled and the combines were in the field for what appeared to be a bumper wheat crop.

After we crossed the continental divide, however, it was a different world. Eastern Washington was dry and the grain was stunted and short. It looked to be a short harvest and they were late getting the combines into the field. There were some places where it looked like they might not even bother to pull the combines into the barley. The short grain makes nutritious winter pasture for cattle and it might be the most cost effective not to spend the money on harvesting such a small yield.

The Cascades, normally lush and green, were dry. There was plenty of evidence of recent fires and the grass was tinder dry. There were no burn regulations posted in every campsite and the people were nervous about additional fires.

Here in Olympia it looks like an early autumn. The grasses are all dry and yellowed and even the trees are starting to turn color. The normally lush undergrowth is dry and crackles as you walk through it.

I can’t remember ever paying a visit to the Pacific region when it was greener back home than it is here.

This world with its massive weather patterns and cycles of wet and dry is full of surprises even for the most trained and astute of observers. Of course our observations are based on very short amounts of time spent in this area. It is not our home. We come for a visit for one or two weeks a year, often in the summer. We don’t really know the weather patterns. Next to the camper are trees that have been around for more than a century. They have seen dry seasons and wet seasons and have developed the ability to survive huge swings in temperature and moisture levels. They will survive this drought and live to see another wet season.

The earth is more resilient than we might think. Changes in climate have produced dramatic shifts in life and activities on the planet over the eons. Those who study geological history and archaeology know of times of global warming and cooling, of wetter and dryer years in certain places, and of dramatic shifts in climate that have taken place over the long haul. Our lives are too short to give us a long-term perspective on the forces that shape the weather.

Having said that, the human impact on the planet has been dramatic, especially considering the shortness of time that we have been around. We are consuming fossil fuels at a rate that is way faster than they can be produced. Our current rate of consumption of these items is not sustainable. Our population is growing at such a rate that some areas of the planet are nearing capacity and food distribution is a problem. More shifts in the climate most likely will result in major food shortages in some areas.

There is much of the world and its dynamics that I don’t understand. But I do notice some changes.

Back when we lived in North Dakota, it seemed like whatever the weather, the locals would report that it was unusual. If it was hot they would say, “It usually isn’t this hot her.” If it was cold, “It usually doesn’t get this cold.” The same for rain or dry weather. Every bit of weather we experienced was unusual. Perhaps they got it right.

Each bit of weather is a bit of a surprise. And surprise can bring delight. May we continue to be surprised and delighted by the gifts of this earth.

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I remember the summer that I turned 6 years old. I had just finished kindergarten and I had been campaigning for months for a two-wheeled bicycle for my birthday. Sometimes, when I wanted a really big gift, I looked through the Sears or the Montgomery Ward catalogues to find exactly what I wanted, but in the case of the bicycle, I knew exactly what I wanted. It was in the window of Gamble’s Hardware. We had two hardware stores in our town. Coast to Coast was closest to our house. To get to Gamble’s, you had to go down main street and across the highway. And there in the front window of the store was just what I wanted. It was just what I needed.

Let me explain for just a moment. I knew the difference between “want” and “need.” My father had explained it to me many times. “Want” is something that you would like to have, but you could live without. “Need” is something that you have to have in order to stay alive. You might want an electric train, but no one every died from not having an electric train. On the other hand you could die if you didn’t eat enough food. Food was a need. Electric trains were a want. But I NEEDED a bicycle.

Her is why: In my family there were only sisters before me. By the time I was six, I had a younger brother, but he was too little to ride a bike. My sisters were older and they already had their own bikes. So I learned to ride my sister’s bicycle. It was blue, and it was OK for learning to ride, but it was a GIRL’s bike. You know with the bar low in the middle. And when I rode it down the alley, Eddie, who lived a block down the alley yelled after me, “Girly girly girly, look who’s riding a girl’s bike.” And Eddie lived only one block down the alley and I had to ride two blocks down the alley to get to Dave’s place.

So I NEEDED a bicycle. I NEEDED the red bicycle that was in the window of Gamble’s Hardware Store. And I made sure that I explained to my mother and to my father how much I needed that bike.

I got that bike for my birthday. I may have gotten other things, too. Probably I did. I usually got new jeans and a cowboy shirt for my birthday so that I would have new clothes to wear for the Rodeo Parade. It was the only Sunday of the year that we were allowed to wear jeans to church. And it came just after my birthday each year. But I don’t remember any of the other gifts - only that shiny new red bicycle that I rode and rode and rode. I rode it to my father’s shop the first day. I rode it past Eddie’s house at least a dozen times that day, just to show him that I didn’t have to ride a girl’s bike any more. It was the only bike I ever owned that I didn’t buy with money that I had earned myself, but my pride of ownership was as high as with any thing I’ve ever owned.

The bicycle gave me speed. It gave me freedom. It helped me stretch out the boundaries of my world. In years to come I would be able to ride it all the way to 8-mile bridge and later all the way to McLeod, which was 16 miles up the boulder road and 16 miles down hill home.

I was thinking of that red bicycle yesterday because our grandson got his first pedal bike. There were many differences. He is only 4 years old. And he learned to ride his bike in one day. It was his first time on a pedal bike and by the end of the day he was making miles around the campground at a pace too fast for me to run. I had to ride my bicycle in order to keep up with him.

So here is an unashamed endorsement for Strider - the pedal-less bike. Our grandson got a Strider when he was two years old. He picked out a red one from the Strider retail store at the factory in Rapid City. That day he rode that little bike until he collapsed with exhaustion. It was winter and it was icy outside, but that didn’t deter him a bit. He just kept going and going and going.

It happened again yesterday. It took a couple of times around the block for him to master the basics of starting and stopping. But as soon as he got going he could ride independently. In less than an hour of riding the bike, he was able to ride without any assistance, even starting and stopping. From there, it was hop on your bike, grandpa! I had to ride to keep up. I have a speedometer that also records the miles ridden, but we didn’t take time for me to get it out of the pickup and put it on the bike. He was going full speed ahead as soon as he got on his bike. There is an old go cart track at the campground where we are staying. He rode around and around that track. I counted the laps after supper: 27 laps with no assistance from me with his riding. I just rode chase to be there if he needed me. He didn’t need me.

We raise our children to be free and independent. We want them to learn to do new things and to go beyond the limits that we were never able to overcome. But it is also a bit frightening to see them going so fast at such a young age. Freedom to ride, however, is just what he needs. Of course he needs to learn the rules of the road. He already is conscious of other bike riders and courteous to them. He has good pedestrian skills and is aware of cars. But the bike is a big step forward in his freedom. Fortunately they live in a bicycle-friendly town with many opportunities and places to ride safely.

“Wow! Grandpa! I can ride really, really fast!” Indeed he can. Indeed he can. Of course I know that he can also ride very far and one day he will go farther than I am able to follow. In the meantime, however, I’m enjoying the ride.

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I can barely remember my maternal grandfather. I was 2 years old when he died, but I do have an image of him that was reinforced by a photograph and a lot of stories that were told. My mother was one of five girls born to their family. One died before I was born, but he four remaining sisters were very close and the network of cousins was a big part of my life. When the sisters were together there were more stories of Pop and he was always spoken of with love and respect. He was an attorney and very active in the Methodist church. He helped the church with legal transactions such as land purchases and assisted pastors with the preparation of their wills and other matters. He attended state Conference meetings many times and was also a delegate to national gatherings of Methodists. One of the treasures of which I am custodian is his bible. It is a fairly small leather-covered edition with its own special cedar box.

I knew my paternal grandfather better. He lived until I was in college and we always lived less than 100 miles away. During my childhood summers when I was able to go on fire patrol with my father we would often land in their town on our way home and hike down the hill to their house. There were many family gatherings at their home over the years. He was a farmer who then became a service station owner and operator. The service station he owned for the last years before retirement was in a tourist town at the base of the Cook City Highway and he always did a good business there. After he retired he got into making rag rungs. His basement was full of rags, all sorted by color and cut into strips which he braided into cords that were looped and sewn together into rugs. He made rugs of all sizes. There was a big pile of small rungs to wipe your feet on coming and going through a door and several large rugs - big enough for a living room. We all had rugs made by grandpa in our homes.

Our children, too, grew up with one grandfather. My father lived long enough to know that we were expecting a son, but died before he was born. My father-in-law, however, lived into our children’s adulthood and was an important person in their lives. He retired when our children were 2 and 4 and invested much of his retirement in helping others. He was an electrician during his working years and did a lot of repairs and re-wiring in our home. He was active at our church camp and after he retired served on the camp committee helping to keep the facility strong and well attended. He also volunteered to mow the church lawn and keep its sprinkler system operating properly, to run the sound system in the sanctuary, and served on a number of boards and committees. He was an active volunteer in several different organizations. But there was always time for his grandchildren - both to come to visit them in their home and to welcome them when we came to visit.

My life is filled with excellent examples of what it means to be a grandparent. I am aware that being a grandparent isn’t natural for all people and that some grandparents aren’t very present in the lives of their grandchildren, but those type of people weren’t present at the core of my life. I have known wonderful, loving, kind and active grandparents.

It seems like I have always known that I would enjoy being a grandpa. Even before we had children, we would talk about what happens when we grow old and I would talk of being a grandpa who would make and repair toys. There are some things that one looks forward to and somehow the image of myself as a grandfather was one of the images that was very attractive to me.

Now that I have two grandchildren I have to say that it is even better than I imagined. There are no words to describe the feeling of being rushed by our four-year-old as he runs to greet us when we arrive. There is so much intense joy in listening to him tell of his day and playing with him as he builds out of legos or plays with his cars. I love it when he asks me to read him a story and sing his special good night song.

When it comes to our granddaughter, I am completely smitten. She is a real charmer. She laughs when I make faces and do silly things. Yesterday she got the giggles from putting clean laundry on my head. She is the fastest crawler I’ve ever seen. She can zip from room to room about their house so fast that you have to pay attention to know where she has gone. She loves to play ball and seems joyful about almost every part of her life. When she sits up in her high chair to eat, she offers bits of her food to whoever is sitting next to her.

What is amazing to me about all of this is that it is the most natural thing in the world. I guess you don’t need special training or instructions to know how to be a grandparent - at least if you have grown up the way that I did. When we were parents we would sometimes have long discussions about what choices to make, how to solve problems, and what would be the best thing to do for our children. As grandparents we seem to just know our role. We can love and play with our grandchildren without restrictions. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the generosity of our son and daughter-in-law who welcome our visits and give us such complete access to our grandchildren.

As soon as we got the camper set up in the campground our grandson was planning a sleepover and we were allowed to host him the first night of our visit. And today we plan to go shopping for a new bicycle. As he says, “It’s going to be the best day ever!”

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I know that there is a relationship between my inner landscape and the landscape that surrounds me. I have had the good fortune to have lived my life in beautiful places, surrounded by hills and mountains and abundant water. I have been treated to more beautiful sunrises than most people. And there is so much more beauty that I get from the land.

I was thinking about those experiences because I have lived most of my life with either mountains or hills close at hand. I love the variation of terrain, I enjoy having deer and other animals for neighbors. I am addicted to walking in the woods and paddling on mountain ponds.

When we were called to serve churches in North Dakota I had my doubts about living in such a place. North Dakota as a state is rather devoid of mountains. Although they call some rather disappointing hills the Killdeer Mountains and the Turtle Mountains and a few other features get the title Mount, the truth is that there are no mountains in North Dakota. Where we lived was rolling prairie on the edge of badlands. I had lived in Chicago for four years and I was definitely yearning for a place with a few less people, but I was skeptical.

Chicago’s redeeming feature for me was the lakeshore. There I could literally turn my back on the city and reconnect with the glory of the natural world.

North Dakota, however, was a surprise and a revelation for me. I was immediately drawn to the empty spaces. I would be driving my car and reach the top of a rise and stop to just look around because the vastness of the space would take my breath away. I saw prairie thunderstorms that were unlike anything I had ever before watched. I could watch a hawk circling overhead for a long time as I breathed in the fresh air of the open spaces.

Boise was the driest place we lived. Were it not for the abundant irrigation from the Snake River, the Boise Valley would be desert. I have heard plenty about the beauty of the desert, but wasn’t sure about how it would be to live there. Boise seemed OK because it is where the desert meets the mountains. Drive a half hour north of town and you are in the mountains. Drive a half hour the other direction and you are in the desert.

And now our home in the hills surrounded by pine trees seems like such a haven in this world.

What I am saying is that I have been shaped by the landscapes in which I live.

Yesterday we drove through a landscape that is less familiar to me. Western Washington is high plains desert and it is especially dry this year. Records have been set for the lowest amount of precipitation ever. What wheat is unharvested is shorter and I suspect that the yield is significantly lower than some years. The amazing thing about driving across Western Washington is that right in the middle of this great desert is a mighty river. The Columbia surprises you with the amount of water that is flowing right by the dry and parched hills above. Down in the bottom they grow fruit. We stopped just before Wenatchee and bought plums and nectarines and peaches and apples to much upon. We even bought local peanuts. Who knew that they grew peanuts in Washington?

These people also are shaped by the landscape - especially by the river. Up on the high plains the houses are few and far between. Down alongside the river the homes cluster in clumps and groups and the amount of land per family is much smaller. The amount of labor to tend a small orchard is as much as the amount required to farm thousands of acres of dryland wheat.

We drove on into the western slopes of the Cascades. Tonight we are camped alongside the Wenatchee River just past the point where the Icicle adds its stream. The river is low, but there is plenty of flow. The name icicle is appropriate because the water temperature is about two degrees warmer than solid I think. Wade in and you won’t stay long. But on an 80 degree day after driving through the desert it feels good for a few minutes.

I think of the stories of my life like the streams of water that flow across the land. I grew up alongside a roaring mountain river where we could hear the boulders rolling in the high water seasons. I spend my teenage summers alongside the mighty Missouri as it headed from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico, draining a continent and providing rich soils for farming. I live farther from the creek in the hills, but I miss the sound of running water in the night and each time I camp next to a river I am reminded how much that sound makes me feel at home. I can name the sleeps of this trip by the rivers - Boulder, Blackfoot, Wenatchee - a song of waters that shape the land and reconnect me to the largeness of this universe.

Today we go to where the rivers meet the ocean. At Olympia, where the Puget Sound flows in and out with the tides, we will put our boats into salt water for the first time in more than a year. It probably isn’t normal to haul boats so many miles, but the attractive power of grandchildren is great and will inspire a person to do things that might not normally be done.

I think of my life as a river that runs down to the sea. The thing we call death isn’t as different from life as we might think. Like a river running into the sea we discover that we are the same - and all part of something much bigger than we were able to imagine as we flowed along in our own bed traveling our own unique path.

My inner landscape is continually being shaped by the outer landscape. As the land feeds my spirit, may my spirit discover its connections with the larger bodies of life to which I belong.

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It just happens that we have two nephews who are 29 years old this year. We also have a niece whose husband is 29. That’s a bit younger than our children, but it is an age that I can clearly remember from my own life. Since we’ve visited two of the three on this trip, it gives me an opportunity to reflect on what things have changed and what things remain the same one generation later.

Like the two that we have visited on this trip, I was a new father when I was 29. Both of these young men have daughters that are amazing and wonderful. I need only spend a few minutes with them to be reminded of the incredible wonder that comes with the first year of the first child in a family. The time is intense. You probably are sleeping a bit less than you are used to doing. But the time is also incredibly meaningful. You want to keep your eyes open because so much change is happening in such a short amount of time. And all of that change that you are witnessing in your child gives you the opportunity to think about a few changes in your own life as well. It is time to become a bit more responsible; to settle down a little bit; to be reminded that your life is about more than just your own needs and desires.

All three of the 29 year-old nephews in our family are still exploring their careers. Two of the three are in school, working on degrees. The third has graduated from college and is working to support himself, but changes jobs frequently and hasn’t yet found work in his chosen field. I’m not certain, but I think that it may be harder to establish a career these days than was the case when I was their age. I finished graduate school at 25 very confident of finding a job in my field. In fact, we had the job and our new employer paid our moving expenses from our graduate apartment to our first parsonage upon graduation. That seems to be pretty rare these days. Seeking that first job seems to be the first full-time job for most young adults upon graduation.

I have served four congregations in three calls in my life. That works out to seven years serving the first two congregations, ten years at our second call and twenty years at our current call. Though we did make changes of congregations, our basic career and job remained the same. I first felt called to the ministry in my late teens or early twenties. I went through the schooling and internships to prepare and then I have remained in that vocation for my working career. It is highly unlikely that any of these three young men will have such an experience. They are likely to make major changes in career direction - changing their field of employment and the type of work they do - multiple times in their working life. Probably one or more of the three will have a job in their lifetime that doesn’t exist now. One is studying an area of computer data analysis that didn’t exist when I went to school.

Their world is already different from mine and it will continue to change dramatically. It isn’t completely clear where all of the changes will take place, but it is fun to think about those changes. For our parents, one of the areas of rapid change was transportation. They grew up at the dawn of the era of the automobile, when trains and steamships were the preferred mode of long-distance travel and saw great changes in airline transportation during their lives. The technology of transportation, with a few changes in computer guidance and navigation, is essentially the same today as was the case at my birth. People travel in jet airliners to go big distances. Some of the individual airliners in the fleet have been flying since I was the age of these young men.

Where our generation saw changes was the development of computers. I can remember the first hand-held calculator. I hadn’t used a cell phone when I was 29 years old. There was no computer in the car we were driving at that time. We had a manual typewriter at home and had just gotten an electric typewriter at our office. These days I spend hours each day sitting at the keyboard of a computer. I carry a smart phone in my pocket with more computing power than was used to launch the first trip to the moon. I was answering questions about our office computer system over the phone while I was driving yesterday.

Although there will be advances in computing in their lifetime, I think that these young men will always take computers for granted. They all use their cell phones as their only phones. They don’t have land lines. They don’t think of wires when they think of telephones at all. Their homes are filled with battery chargers for a wide array of devices.

I don’t know and I guess can’t imagine what will be the area of dramatic change in their lifetimes. Perhaps it won’t be in the arena of technology. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we humans were to make this generation the generation of real advances in the humanities. It is technically possible, in their generation, to end world hunger, to have all wars cease, to provide health care and education as basic human rights. Those seem like impossible changes right now. But we’ve already seen the impossible become reality.

The world is changing. Watching these young men is inspiring for me. I realize that our generation may have created more problems than we solved, but we are passing the mantle of leadership to a generation with incredible resiliency, imagination and energy. I feel fortunate that our time of life overlaps so that I can witness part of their time of leadership.

Now we head toward some time with our grandchildren. Imagine a world two generations on!

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I started off yesterday’s blog with an observation about common sense. I’m not sure that you should trust a source such as me for any information about common sense because apparently I lack even the smallest amount of that particular commodity. At least thats how it seems. I can’t come up for any other reason why a normally healthy, apparently sane human being would do what I did yesterday. After a morning appointment and a couple of trips to the church to catch up with some last minute details, we got into our pickup and headed off on our vacation. Without much thought, I took a route that I often take, heading into town, past Baken Park to Omaha and then out Deadwood Avenue to the Interstate.

I knew about the rally. I know where Black Hills Harley Davidson is located. I knew about what they are calling “The Rally at Exit 55.” I just wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking about heading west to see our grandchildren.

As a reward for my momentary thoughtlessness, I was given the gift of an opportunity to practice the spiritual art of patience. Patience is, after all, a virtue. There were semi trucks trying to make left turns out of the Windmill truck stop towards the Interstate. There were hundreds of motorcycles at the Windmill. There were thousands of motorcycles trying to get to or from Black Hills Harley Davidson. The Interstate off ramps were backed up onto the main lanes of the highway. Some people were losing patience, and some motorcycles were pushing the limits of the lights (that is going through red lights to squeeze into the line of bikes heading towards the rally venue). There was plenty of cutting into lines and weaving in and out of the very dense traffic. At one point an entire lane of traffic was blocked by a semi that got stranded in the middle of the street trying to make a left turn. The area became totally gridlocked.

It took a half hour to get from the Windmill Truck Stop to the westbound on ramp of the highway. All the while, I was thinking of the many alternative routes I could have taken.

I might have thought, but didn’t say out loud, some of the words we commonly use in prayers. I entertained a few less than kind thoughts about some of the people who were displaying less than polite behaviors. In exchange, I was given the gift of an exercise in patience. I am, after all, on vacation. I do, after all, have time. I wasn’t, after all, in any danger.

And, after we got through that traffic mess, the general flow of traffic at about 60 mph on the Interstate heading west seemed like real speed. I was ready for the bikes that cut us off by passing and then pulling into our lane too close to our truck. I was ready for the thousands of bikes exiting at Spearfish. I was ready for the stream of bikes through Belle Fourche.

I was even driving under the 45 mph speed limit when we got to Colony, WY, where the patrol was waiting to pull over the 5 motorcycles who where speeding up behind me.

OK, I was impressed and surprised by more than a thousand bikes at the bar in Alzada, MT. I don’t remember ever seeing more than three or four vehicles at that bar. And I drive by the Alzada bar quite a bit. Normally they don’t need three volunteers to direct traffic in Alzada. Normally the sheriff doesn’t need two deputies with him to do traffic control in Alzada. It isn’t one of the really big towns.

Ah, but we are on vacation. The trip went smoothly and the route across the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations was familiar and peaceful and beautiful. In a way that is common for that stretch of road, we had a bit of every kind of weather: bright sun and temperatures in the mid nineties; a bit of rain and a sudden cooling to the mid sixties; a stretch of bright sunlight and enough grasshoppers on the windshield to make washing it a chore when we stopped for gas at Hardin; and a glorious view of the Krazy Mountains as we came out of the Yellowstone River Crossing at Reed Point. The view of those mountains always brings me a world of emotions. I grew up in their shadow. Despite decades of living elsewhere they still say “home” whenever they come into sight. The sun growing low behind them and streaking the clouds with brilliant rays made them seem so close and so magnificent.

There were only a handful of motorcycles on main street in my home town and they appeared to be clustered at the Grand, a wonderful hotel for weary travelers. We had supper at the Timber, a bar with a more local flavor and lower prices - not to mention more local food. It is hard to get a good lamb burger in Rapid City, and that’s what I had.

I grew up with parents who didn’t drink and who didn’t even go into the bars. I didn’t know anything of bar culture even though I lived in a town with more bars than churches. There were a half dozen bars in a two block stretch of main street. Sheepmen and cattlemen don’t always mix well and they need their separate bars. The members of the Moose Lodge had to have their own place and a few of the old guys preferred a tiny hole in the wall with a single bartender. We simply didn’t go into any of them. I was an adult and had lived out of town for more than a decade before I discovered that the food was really pretty good at our town’s mainstream institution, the Timber. As I sipped my ice tea and chomped my burger I marveled that it took me so long to find out that you don’t have to drink alcohol to go to a bar.

And our vacation has begun. Time to relax a little. Time to head for those grandchildren whose attraction is so strong. Time to enjoy the rich and diverse culture of this great land. Time to practice patience. It is, after all, a virtue.

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Friends, we leave on a two-week trip today. Although we expect to have access to the Internet for most of our trip, we will be on vacation and visiting with our grandchildren. I expect my routine to be disrupted and I may not write at the same time each day. Don’t worry if my blog post doesn’t appear first thing in the morning or if there are days when it doesn’t show up. I’ll get it published eventually. Thanks for your patience. Having said that, here are some rather esoteric thoughts:

Common sense gets its name from the fact that many people share the same opinion. Common means that many people hold that particular bit of wisdom. The problem with it is that just being held by a lot of people doesn’t make something the truth. In general, I’m a big fan of common sense. I learn a lot from listening to what other people think and believe. But there are times when we need to break out of the box and think differently. Sometimes a different opinion or a different way of looking at a problem can lead to the discovery of a deeper wisdom.

Take, for example, our way of thinking about time. People have not always thought about time the way that we do. Our language has a whole host of tenses - ways to use words to indicate nuances of time, but we are unlikely to think of time in its perfect, pluperfect, conditional or subjunctive sense. We think primarily in three categories: past, present and future. It is a concept that our language inherited from Latin, which appropriated it from Greek. Those Greek thinkers had an incredible impact on much of modern thought. But their way of thinking about time wasn’t the only way that people have thought about time. In Biblical Hebrew there are only two tenses, roughly corresponding to things that are finished and things that are on-going. People lived, thought, spoke, and developed significant intellectual ideas by thinking of time in just two ways. The concept of monotheism grew out of that two tense language. The stories of our people were told for millennia in that two tense language. People were able to communicate and think without a need for three tenses.

Modern scientific research bears out the notion of two tenses rather than three. Stick with me here. This is not an easy concept. When you look at an object, it takes 13 milliseconds for your brain to process that image. Now a millisecond isn’t much time - 1/1000th of a second - but it is long enough to be measured. That means that what you experience as the present is actually the past. By the time your brain can process an experience time has moved on. From this perspective there is no actual present, only past and future.

Think of it this way. When you look at the edge of a body of water, say a lake with a sand beach, you see the water and the sand and you see what looks like a line dividing the two elements. In reality, however, there is no line. There is only sand and water. In reality, there is no present, only past and future. The present is a projection to help delineate between the two types of time.

Using this two tense way of thinking it is clear that there is a big distinction between past and future. The past can be observed. It has been experienced. There is a sense in which we can claim knowledge of the past. The future, however, cannot be observed. Our attempts at prediction, based on our experience of the past, are merely speculation.

It doesn’t matter if you are a theologian or physicist, when you begin to speak of the future, you are engaging in speculation, not observation. No amount of bluster or over confidence will change that simple fact. The future remains unknown until it has become the past.

Of course there is plenty of the past that we cannot observe because of the limits of the span of a single human life and the inaccuracies of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Although modern science has given us some marvelous tools for learning about the nature of the universe and things that have happened, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. When it comes to talking about the ancient past, such as the time when light now visible first left a very distant star, there is nearly as much speculation involved as when we try to speak of the future.

We develop theories in an attempt to explain what we can’t observe. Sometimes our theories appear to be right, other times we can disprove them. The problem with most theories is that they can’t be proven outright, only disproven. Old theories are often replaced with new ones simply because they appear not to be the best explanations for observed phenomena.

Theologians and some religious thinkers that are less academic than theologians will from time to time speak of the future as if they had some special insight and understanding of things to come. They will confidently declare what they “know” about things to come. History has shown that those who do so are often wrong and that their predictions are less than accurate. This has resulted in no small amount of criticism of religion by members of the scientific community.

With all due respect, theoretical physicists engage in a similar style of bold speculation about things that they do not understand. They observe inconsistencies in the physics of this world such as how the measurement of time is altered by speed or the existence of gravitational pull where there is no observable mass and then offer their theories to explain these phenomena. The growth in the popularity of quantum physics in the end of the 20th century is an example of a set of ideas commonly held to explain a physical phenomena that so far only offers a partial explanation and gives no reliable information about the future.

Physicists and theologians agree that there is more to this universe than what we can observe. And it is the quest for that which lies beyond that fuels their passion. None of us knows what we will discover in the future.

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Nearly 40 years ago, when we went off to seminary, I met a remarkable man. Rick was one of our classmates and I was immediately drawn to his thoughtful manner and his keen intellect. I, however, was challenged in our early conversations. Rick had, from a young age had a problem with stammering and stuttering. I had never spent very much time with such a person. As I got to know Rick and wanted to talk to him more and more, I also discovered that we thought a lot alike and often I knew what Rick was trying to say before the words came out of his mouth. Wanting to help him and wanting to keep the conversation flowing, I would occasionally complete his sentences for him, saying the word that he was struggling to say.

I had to learn that this was not helpful. It turned out that all Rick needed to completely express his thoughts was a little patience from me. When he struggled with a word, the right thing was to allow him to struggle and to wait for a moment to hear the end of the idea. The communication problem wasn’t caused by Rick’s speech. It was caused by my listening. Once I learned to listen, our conversation became the foundation of a life-long friendship.

A decade or so ago, when I was serving on the Corporate Board of Local Church Ministries and Rick was serving on the Executive Council, we used to request each other as roommates when we had meetings at the same time. Rick would fly in from his home and I from mine. During the days we’d attend our separate meetings and in the evenings, we would talk and catch up on our churches and ministries, our families and other topics.

Rick is a very effective preacher and his stammering shows up only very rarely when he preaches. He has a beautiful tenor voice and sings without any problems. Our friendship has endured long enough for me to apologize for my earlier impatience and for me to thank him for teaching me how to listen. I’m sure I’m not the only classmate of ours whose ministry has been more effective because of some of the lessons learned from Rick. His patience as a teacher definitely has made a world of difference for a lot of people.

There are many things in our culture that work to increase the challenge of truly listening. I don’t know much about television, but in my limited experience it seems to be filled with loud voices demanding our attention, nearly shouting the things that the television producers want us to think or believe. It is not a medium that is in the business of teaching people to listen carefully and discern nuances of emotion and complexity of concepts.

While our culture seems to reward snap judgments and quick decisions, it does little to encourage quiet contemplation, careful listening and measured thought. In this, I believe that we in the church are called to become counter-cultural, practicing our faith in spite of the cultural trends. Our faith lends itself to very careful listening.

One of the illustrations of this reality comes when I encounter people who don’t know me. They might ask what I do for a living and when I answer, they make all kinds of assumptions about what it means to be a minister. They might even make assumptions about specific beliefs that I hold. I often find myself to be misunderstood by people who think that I am the same as a television preacher or a fundamentalist big box minister.

Is isn’t much fun to be misunderstood and I often find the assumptions that others make about me to be unfair. That sense of not being understood reminds me of the times when I don’t take time to really listen to another person - to receive their thoughts and words into myself in such a way that they can become truly known. I, too, have found myself making assumptions that may or may not be accurate when I meet a new person.

It is at moments of awareness like that that I am so grateful for the lessons my friend Rick taught me when I was a young adult: slow down, don’t be impatient, listen carefully, allow the person to tell you what they want to say, don’t assume that you know.

Some lessons have to be learned over and over again. Some lessons take a lifetime to master.

When we take the time to truly listen we are authenticating the other and giving that person a safe place in the midst of a violent world. When we take time to truly listen we validate another’s existence. We participate in the meaning that they are discovering.

All of that would be acceptable, but there is more. These days I encounter more and more people who aren’t only not practiced as really listening to others. I encounter folks who don’t even know how to truly listen to themselves. When given the opportunity to wrestle with some of the big questions of life they discover that they don’t know themselves all that well.

Among the questions that seem to encourage such listening are: How would you like to be remembered? What is your most deeply-held belief? What would you like me to know about you that I may not know? And also, Is there something that you want to make sure that I remember about you?

Not every conversation that I have with others takes the form of an interview. Often when I ask a single question the following conversation is sufficient for the time that is available. Too many questions might even imply that I’m not taking the answers seriously. But an occasional genuinely-felt question can move the conversation to a deeper and more meaningful level.

Perhaps, like Rick, I will learn not only to be a good listener, but also how to encourage such behavior in others.

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It was President Grover Cleveland who signed the proclamation establishing the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. The order demanded that the Nez Perce move from their home in the Wallowa Valley in what is today Oregon to a reduced area in the Lapwai region of northern Idaho. Joseph, known as Chief Joseph to most of the country, led a group of the Palouse tribe out of the area, seeking political asylum in Canada with the people of Sitting Bull. General Howard pursued them over 1,100 miles across Idaho and Montana. By the time they were forced to surrender, 150 Nez Perce had been killed or wounded. From the point of their capture they were taken to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and from there to Oklahoma where they were forced to remain for seven years, many dying of epidemic diseases. When they were allowed to return to the northwest, some were allowed to settle on reservation land around Kooskia, Idaho and others were forced to live on the Colvill Indian Reservation in northern Washington.

The stories of Joseph and his people have been well told in other places and are easily available. This blog is not really about their journeys or the military actions taken against them.

By the time we lived in Idaho in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the stories of Joseph and the Nez Perce were on historical markers and signs along us highway 95, the major north-south road in that state with a narrow northern panhandle and a huge wilderness at its center. Alongside the highway is a place known as Camas Prairie. These days the prairie is mostly private farmland, but the northern section of the prairie is part of the Nez Perce Indian Reservation and has been left as it was centuries ago when it was a traditional gathering place for the Nez Perce. They came together in the early summer each year to harvest camas roots. It was a series of incidents that occurred in that area as the Nez Perce were gathering camas on their way to their newly assigned reservation that touched off the flight and running battle in which Joseph and the Palouse evaded General Howard.

Camas is a plant common in many meadows across the west. The flowers are generally purple, but can range from white to light violet to blue-purple, depending on soil conditions and other factors. Camas stems have lots of little blossoms growing at the top. They can grow as high as two or three feet when the prairie is lush in the spring. The bulbs of the plants are nutritious and were a staple of the native diet for thousands of years before settlers arrived. They have to be harvested in the spring or early summer when the plants are in bloom because there is another plant that looks similar, but has a pure white flower, that is toxic. Sometimes called deathcamas, the bulbs of the two plants are very similar.

Camas is also known as wild hyacinth and camas lily. They are not hyacinths, nor are they lilies, but rather a member of the asparagus family. The name lily, however, seems appropriate if you happen to catch the meadows when the camas are all in bloom.

It is Camas Prairie that I think of when I read Jesus words, “Consider the lilies of the field.” I can picture the slender stalks with their six-pedaled violet flowers rising above the shorter leaves and other grasses of the prairie, opening to the endless blue of the sky above. There is something about the scene that makes you want to walk out to the meadow and lie down to look up at the flowers and sky above. Those beautiful flowers were simply a way to identify the edible bulbs beneath the surface, which were ground into flour for cooking and baking by native people. But I can’t help but reflect that they must have also sensed the deep beauty of the plants and seen what I see when I look out across the prairie.

When you see the prairie in bloom, you can easily believe that the purpose of the camas is not primarily food, but beauty itself. Food is a kind of byproduct of the beauty that exists. And you can imagine that the beauty existed long before it was even recognized by humans. The field is beautiful whether or not we visit and witness its beauty. The beauty is independent of the food value of the plant.

It is worthy of our consideration.

Because we often think of the practical when we think of the value of an object or of a life. We think that nutrition trumps beauty when we consider the value of something. And we often think that our doing - our producing - is more important than our being. We bury our lives in plans and papers, appointments and meetings, spreadsheets and budgets as if we have value only if we produce some tangible product - usually measured by the amount of money that we have earned.

Jesus invites us to consider the value of just being.

Through the power of love we have worth and value that goes far beyond what we produce. The work we do is only part of the story of the people that we are. Through the power of love we begin to recognize that even when we are doing nothing we have lives that matter. Even when we sleep we have value.

And, when our life journey reaches its conclusion what matters will not be our ability to produce, but rather our ability to love.

I need to be reminded of this truth constantly these days as I become more and more aware that time and age have placed some restrictions on my ability to produce. I work slower than once was the case. There are weeks when I produce less than previously. It is time to learn (or re-learn) what is most important in my life.

Perhaps it is time to revisit Camas Prairie and be reminded once again: “Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

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Sometimes I have experiences that don’t readily translate into blog posts. Of course there are plenty of experiences that I have that involve stories that are not mine to tell. The life of a pastor is rich and varied and occasionally involves being invited into private arenas. The trust that I am awarded is indeed gratifying and I strive to always be worthy of that trust.

This week has, however, been typical and as I reflect on it, there are a few stories worth telling that are very short indeed. So today’s blog isn’t a single story, but rather a few brief scenes from a week in a pastor’s life.

There is a communion hymn that is often sung to the same tune as “Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing,” called “Jesus, Lord, We Know Thee Present.” It begins like this:

Jesus, Lord, we know Thee present
At thy table freshly spread.
Seated at Thy priceless banquet
With Thy banner overhead.
Precious moments at Thy table,
From all fear and doubt set free;
Here to rest, so sweetly able,
Occupied alone with Thee.
—composer unknown, sometimes attributed to Mrs. Thompson

The theme of the hymn is that Jesus doesn’t belong to some long and distant past, but is present in the moments of our lives. I was thinking of that hymn as I drove away from the hospital after visiting with an elder of our congregation who is being treated there. Her short term memory is almost non existent. A conversation has threads that repeat over and over. She can’t remember whether a visit from her husband was an hour ago or a week ago. She won’t remember if asked whether or not I visited. But the moments we shared were delightful in the present. We talked of old times, of shared experiences and mutual friends. She was bright and cheerful and made my day. Sometimes, when the memory fails and the past is difficult to recall the present is enough. While her doctors see her as a problem to be solved and her family see her as a sometimes frustrating image of her former self, I was treated to the delight of her present self and we shared Christ’s presence as surely as any other encounter. Visiting her is a sacrament.

"I was there to hear your borning cry,
I'll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
to see your life unfold.
I was there when you were but a child,
with a faith to suit you well;
In a blaze of light you wandered off
to find where demons dwell."
—John Ylvisaker

We had lunch with a young man who leaves in a week for his Marine Corps basic training. I was there to hear his borning cry. I officiated at his parents’ wedding. I officiated at his baptism. I held him when he was an infant. He played the baby Jesus in a Christmas pageant in the first year of his life. Now he is an adult. And he is aware that part of what he needs to complete the transition into adulthood is to live in another city - to experience the wideness of the world - to challenge himself - to move out of his comfort zone and see what he is made of when he stands on his own two feet. I couldn’t help but feel immensely proud of him. He seems to be so young and so inexperienced and yet at the same time so mature and so wise. I’m really going to miss him when he goes away, but I think he is right. Going away is what he needs to do.

Community of Christ,
look past the Church’s door
and see the refugee, the hungry,
and the poor.
Take hands with the oppressed,
the jobless in your street,
take towel and water, that you wash
your neighbor’s feet.
—Shirley Erena Murray

Last night we served the evening meal at Cornerstone Rescue Mission. The people were in a good mood. It seemed refreshing for them to come from a hot day outdoors into a cool basement with warm fellowship and good food. I always enjoy the banter with the guests at the meal, talking with them about their day, commenting on their caps and t shirts, and hearing about what they have been doing. Last night, I felt so delighted with the warm spirit and great conversation among those serving the meal. We really have some wonderful people in our church with a wide variety of fascinating experiences. I was among world travelers and people who had successful careers who were at home and delighted to just be serving dinner to a crowd of hungry people. “What a fellowship, what a joy divine!”

Good news, Chariot's comin'
Good news, Chariot's comin'
Good news, Chariot's comin'
And I don't want it to leave me behind
—traditional, sometimes credited to Louis Gottlieb

We’ve been pushing a lot of paper in our office this week. Newsletter week is always a rush to get articles written, edited, do layout, think in terms of a printed document, and an online document. This is the first issue of our new distribution scheme. As we scrambled to get all of the work done in the midst of our usual tasks of planning worship and producing a bulletin, keeping up with correspondence, writing thank you notes, and the like, I was amazed at how many people contribute to an issue of our church newsletter. The lead article was written by someone who is one of the busiest people in our congregation, edited by another who is an entrepreneur and small businessman, then submitted to a committee for their review. That alone is a complex and brave maneuver. Then it was placed in our newsletter by another person, edited by another, and the document was assembled by volunteers. Sometimes we think of things with many different voices as being hard to understand, but this document is more clear and more precise than it would have been if it had been just whipped off and sent out. Kudos to all who helped make a very difficult topic appear simple and effortless.

There are far too many other stories that deserve to be told.

The week has left me singing of God’s glory.

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