Recently I had lunch with a friend. As is often the case with people our age, our conversation turned to retirement. This friend is planning to retire in a few months and since he is an active and involved person, I knew that he must have a few plans about what he will do with his time. He’s not the kind of person to sit around the house and watch television. His answer surprised me at first: he plans to run for public office. He has always participated in political activities as part of his live, but feels that running for office requires a full-time effort and now that he has the time, that seems to be something well worth doing.

Later that day, I found myself thinking about one of my brothers. He and I are close in age and, in many ways quite similar. But our lives have taken very different paths. No surprise there. That is often the case with brothers. Since I was thinking of him, I checked out his blog and recent posts on social networks. I remembered why lunch with my friend got me to thinking about my brother.

The two men have very little in common other than being a similar age. They have different careers, different family experiences and live in different parts of the country. I doubt if they would have reason to get to know one another.

Both, however, believe in the power of political action to bring good to the world. And both have invested considerable time and effort in pursuing politics. It isn’t a bad thing. They have both contributed to society and worked for social change. They both are concerned about other people and are willing to help. They both have the capacity to work hard for causes that are meaningful.

Their passion for politics is, I think, not uncommon for people our age. There are a lot of baby boomers who came through high school civics classes and grew up watching Walter Cronkite report on the latest Civil Rights actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There is a strong belief in the power of the vote and the importance of involvement in politics.

I, too, have felt passion for candidates and causes. I vote at every election. I make modest contributions to political campaigns from time to time. I pay attention to politics.

However, I don’t share the conviction that politics will save the world. Probably those words are a bit strong for my friend and my brother, but I think that what they have in common that I do not share, it a belief that the way to transform lives is through political action. I wouldn’t discourage either of them from their passions, but I can’t share it in the same way.

It isn’t that I don’t understand human dynamics, displays (and plays) of power, and the role of politics in other institutions. I’ve voted for officers in non-profit organizations and served on enough boards of directors. I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that the church has its own kind of politics. I’ve been to decades of church conference meetings and have been a delegate to our church’s General Synod, which is our national assembly. I’ve watched others try to line up the votes for their cause or resolution or candidate. I’ve even played the game. You don’t stay pastor of a congregation the size of ours by ignoring the politics.

It is just that I can’t convince myself that all of our problems could be solved by political action. I don’t really believe that all of our troubles would go away if the right candidates were elected and the right laws were passed. It isn’t that I don’t support candidates or have opinions on laws. It is that I think that even the best people will make compromises and that the pressures of politics, especially the role of big money, can lead good people to unwise actions. Politics is, in my opinion, always too short sighted to invest in the best interests of the people.

Consider yesterday’s grandstanding and showboating in the US Congress. At the last hour, congress came up with a one week extension for funding for the Department of Homeland Security. This isn’t some optional governmental function. We expect the government to provide security for its people. And we are guaranteed that the next week will be filled with the same kind of wrangling and speechifying and failure to focus on other problems. An essential government function and we can’t even come up with an annual budget. Seriously, does anybody believe that week-by-week funding is going to cost less? Doesn’t anybody else think that our security is threatened by the distraction of not knowing whether next week’s paycheck will be forthcoming?

The divisions in the House of Representatives are not merely partisan. The two parties don’t see eye-to-eye, to be sure, but the majority party can’t produce a majority vote. It isn’t like they get along with each other and work together for the common good within their own party.

Back in high school civics, we learned about the separation of powers. The courts, the executive administration and the legislature had distinct functions and responsibilities. Separating powers was a constitutional vision to deter the rise of a monarchy or a dictatorship. These days, from my point of view, we have a judiciary that seems to want to legislate, an executive branch that wants to legislate, and a congress that seems to want to assume executive governmental functions. And it looks like all of them are beholden to the huge campaign contributions that are required in order to get re-elected. In the midst of all of this it looks to me like a spectacular failure of leadership. Aren’t leaders supposed to be able to find common ground and forge agreements? There isn’t much of that going on in Congress these days.

It hardly seems like a scheme for salvation.

I’m glad that there are good people who remain interested in politics. And I try to be a good citizen and participate. But I don’t hold out much hope for the politicians to solve our problems.

My job can be frustrating some days. But it is filled with hope. It feels like we are a people on a journey with a positive destination. And, on our best days, we can look farther down the road than one week at a time.

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about money lately. It isn’t my strong suit. I’m not much of a money person. I’ve never had a desire for more money than is needed for the basics of life. I’ve never aspired to be rich. I don’t put much value in money in the bank or in investments. I like money for what it can do - feed hungry people, provide a place to worship, educate children and adults - things like that. When we had children in college, I was aware that some of my friends were complaining about the high cost of education. I was thinking that I’d rarely gotten as much pleasure out of spending money as I did at that time.

I’m not sad that I’ve been called to a vocation that doesn’t lead to wealth. Someone with my particular interests could make a big mess out of big money. I’m more suited to the resources that I have.

We will, however, be launching a family large (for us) capital funds drive at the church. We need to raise around $650,000 for a variety of projects, mostly maintenance required of a building like ours. Our building is 55 years old and needs a new roof and a new boiler. There are other projects as well - all in the range of maintaining the church in a state that allows us to serve the community. And it is important to me that we not become distracted from our mission and outreach by the need to spend a bit of money on our church home.

What I have found is that there are many different approaches to money. We have some people in our church who appear, on the surface, to be dispassionate about money. They see financial decisions as rational decisions. They understand investments and interest rates and know the best way to grow small amounts of money into larger amounts. It would be silly to argue with their success. They really do know what they are talking about. In general, they want to be presented with a rational argument: investing now will mean lower costs in the future. That argument, by the way, happens to be true in our case. Now is a very good time to do the projects we have in mind. They increase the energy efficiency of our building and mean lower operating costs in the future. The project also contains capital investments that have long lives and decrease the need for expensive repairs in the future. I understand the rational side of the argument.

But I’ve never been very rational when it comes to money and I know that there are folks in our church for whom a purely rational appeal isn’t the best approach. Consider feeding hungry children in Costa Rica, for example. I know in my rational mind that we are incapable of solving hunger in the immediate neighborhood of our sister church there. I know that our church is totally dependent upon the leadership of a pastor who is getting older every year and that the prospects for long-term institutional maintenance are grim. I know that the children we feed go on to become parents at very young ages and that there is an endless cycle of children having children producing more hungry children. I know that investing money in feeding children will do nothing to decrease the need in the future. I know all of these things. But when I go to Costa Rica, or these days when I think of Costa Rica, I feel moved to contribute. When I look at the pictures of the children sitting on the floor with their bowls of food and smiles on their faces, I think, “I’ve been in fancy restraints where people don’t get that kind of joy out of their food.” And I know how many meals for children can be purchased with the cost of a meal in a restaurant here in the US.

It isn’t just hungry children.

I’d rather have a canoe in the water than money in the bank. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife. I’m pretty sure that she’d report that I have too many canoes for me to put them all in the water at the same time anyway. A rational person would point out that paying rent on a storage unit to keep canoes that you use only part of the year is not a rational decision - it is wasting money that could do other things. And the rational person would be right.

I keep finding myself driven by passion.

That passion probably gets in the way of prudent retirement saving. It probably means that I’ve spent too much money on books and too little money on home maintenance. It probably means that the percentage of our family’s income that goes to charitable giving is irrationally high. But I have a really good answer to that one. Any fool can see that I’m not a very good money manager. And we have some of the best money managers in the church in our Department of Stewardship and Budget. Doesn’t it make sense to give the money to the church for them to manage? They do a better job with it than I would anyway.

So raising the funds that the church needs for this particular phase of its life requires different approaches for different people. There are some very generous people who will support the project out of rational thought. They will respond to good, well-developed presentations. And there are folk who will simply be generous out of their passion. They may even be irrationally generous. While it is critical that we not take advantage of anyone in the process, it is important that we make our appeals in the right way for each donor.

I may be irrational, but this much I know: I wouldn’t trade places with people who have a lot of money and a life of luxury. I have no need to possess wealth beyond my wildest imagination. I feel no desire to purchase a lottery ticket. I may be irrational and spendthrift and a poor manager when it comes to money, but I am a very fortunate person with a joyful life. I’m still giddy about the joy of investing in our kids education. I’d rather have them in my life than money in the bank any day.

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Something tells me that this blog is going to be a bit like one of the old “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” segments from the end of 60 minutes. Younger folks don’t remember them, but some of us watched them nearly every week. Rooney would choose random topics, often things that were a bit puzzling or strange and then rant for a few minutes on the topic. “Did you ever wonder why . . .” was a typical refrain of the segment.

So, I’ve been out and about in the middle of the night and that always gets me to thinking about things that normally aren’t part of my “normal” thought pattern.

First of all, there are several different routes from our home to the hospital. The shortest route isn’t the quickest, so it poses a dilemma. In the daytime, when there is no emergency, I usually choose the shortest route because I feel I already consume too much gas, and so try to conserve in whatever small ways I am able. But at night there is a problem with at route. A few years ago there was a terrible tragic accident not far from the corner of Jackson and West Main and after the accident, the city made it illegal to make a right turn on red at that corner. So there are big signs that say “No turn on red.” It works well in the day. But at 10 pm, the light automatically switches to a flashing light. It is flashing yellow for the folks on West Main. It is a series of flashing red arrows for the folks coming down Jackson. So, what to do? No right turn on red. There usually is little or no traffic at that time of night, so I wait until there is no one else in sight and then proceed. But how to proceed? Do you stop and start and then stop and start and stop and start, so you aren’t technically driving on the red, only in the times when the red light flashes off?

The problem was too complex for last night, so I took the other route which voices that corner. No problem, I actually beat the transport to the emergency room and had to wait for about 5 minutes.

As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of television, so it doesn’t make any sense to me why the emergency room waiting area needs even one television, let alone two sets that are about the size of a wall in my house. I may be exaggerating, but these televisions are REALLY big. And even if there is some reason they need to have the televisions, why are they on at night? It isn’t as if Rapid City residents are streaming to the emergency room waiting area to watch television. And nighttime programming is pretty strange.

And it isn’t clear why there were children in the play area of the waiting room, either. I guess their parents needed to go to the emergency room and had no one to babysit, so they took the kids with them. At any rate, they have a small table with coloring books and a few toys and some children’s books. That is all well and good, but the programs on the television were not exactly designed for children. And the children seemed to be the most awake of all of the people in the area. I tried to figure out how to turn one of the televisions off, but I guess you have to have the remote or know where the hidden switches are. I gave up and pretty soon, my attention was needed elsewhere in the hospital.

But just one more observance from the waiting room. I know that modern cars are way more reliable than they used to be, but I sure hope that there were no breakdowns or accidental sliding into the ditch for some of the people who were heading out from the waiting area. They were dressed for a cool summer evening, or perhaps a mild autumn day. It was colder than 10 degrees with blowing snow out there. I had a hat and gloves and a heavy jacket and hiking boots. And you should see all of the survival supplies I have in the car: fleece blanket, sleeping bag, etc. etc. Maybe those people wearing t-shirts and hoodies had survival equipment in their cars. I hope so. It’s pretty cold out there. Fortunately I have a very reliable all wheel drive car for my middle of the night wanderings.

So I spent about 3 1/2 hours in the hospital in the middle of the night. The nurses, of course, have a lot of charting to do and the place is not what I would call over-staffed, but they have a little more time for chatting than the day shift. I know it would be a challenge for me to have to pull an 11 to 7 shift, but the folks who do it regularly are remarkably chipper and alert and well prepared for the work that they have been given.

The patient with whom I was sitting was not being an “easy” patient. Maybe it was the result of the medications he received. Maybe it was some kind of a long-delayed result of trauma he endured as a front-line soldier in the Korean War. Maybe it was the kind of confusion that comes when you’ve had too many days and nights in the hospital and there are more than 8 decades of memories to get mixed up in your brain. Whatever, he was making each staff person earn their keep. I was wishing I had grabbed a bible or a prayer book. I was running out of scriptures that I have memorized and it didn’t seem quite appropriate to break into the Christmas story from Luke, but it was getting close to that.

So here is my “Did you ever wonder . . .” Did you ever wonder why it is so incredibly beautiful at times when there is no one out and about. A little before 2 am, driving home by myself, with no other cars in sight, the snow as so sparkly and gorgeous that I couldn’t help but wonder if all of that beauty was being wasted or if it was just for me. But I know it would have been just as beautiful if I had been home in bed.

I felt blessed to get to see it.

I took the long way home and drove slowly trying to remember how gorgeous it was.

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Albert Schweitzer had several careers. He is known as the 1952 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. His philosophy of reverence for life was expressed in his founding of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in what is now Gabon in west central Africa. His work as a doctor, however, was at least a second career for the German, who had already received acclaim for his theological work and his musical performances, including restoration and performances on historic pipe organs. He was into his thirties before he began medical school.

Schweitzer wrote in German, a language that I do not read, so I have been dependent upon translators for access to this works. 1906, When Schweitzer was 31 years old, seemed to be a banner year for his publications. It was that year that “The Art of Organ Building and Organ Playing in Germany in France” was published. That publication was critical in the development of the 20th Century organ movement which turned away from the romantic extremes and returned to a more classical form.

1906 was also the year of the publication of Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, which was translated by William Montgomery into English and published in 1910 as “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.” The book had a deep impact on New Testament scholarship and upon the study of theology in general. The basic premise is that the image of Jesus portrayed by the contemporary church, is layered with centuries of church tradition and practice and is, in many ways, strikingly different from the reports of the 1st Century Gospel writers and the man who taught and healed and walked the earth.

He attempts to interpret Jesus in the light of Jesus’ own convictions, extracted from the words of Jesus’ teachings, primarily those reported in the Gospel accounts.

It is a noble quest, although, I must confess, I believe it is a futile one. Too many years have passed. Too many traditions have developed. Too many layers of thinking have wrapped themselves around Jesus for us to presume that we might know who Jesus was before the church existed.

Schweitzer went on to firmly maintain his position as a preeminent New Testament scholar with his 1911 book, “The Psychiatric Study of Jesus” and two later studies of Paul, the second of which was published in 1930, when Schweitzer was in his mid-fifties.

As a pastor and a person of faith, I haven’t been too taken with the various attempts at discovering, recovering, or perhaps even re-inventing in some cases, of the historical Jesus. Anything beyond the bare minimums is very difficult to establish. Because of variations in calendars and changes in calendar systems, it is even difficult to establish the exact dates of Jesus’ life. We do know that the traditions about the time of year when Jesus was born are likely not rooted in historical accuracy, though the time of his death is easier to establish because of its connection with the celebration of Passover. Direct quotes of words that Jesus actually said are questionable at best, having been filtered through decades of oral tradition and centuries of pre-printing press written tradition. It is likely that some errors or changes in reporting have occurred over the huge amount of time between the first eye witnesses (or is that ear witnesses?) hear Jesus’ parables. Historically the oldest of the Gospels, Mark, is not as focused as are other Gospels with what Jesus said, choosing rather to focus on his deeds and especially upon his death. Mark powerfully established Jesus as a healer and a human who died by crucifixion.

To know who Jesus was, independent of the traditions and teachings of the institutional church, however, seems to be not possible. Furthermore, from my limited perspective, the question of why the church kept and treasured certain stories and images is more intriguing than the question of what might have happened had the church not been formed. You can’t roll time backwards. You can’t re-create a new history. What did happen was that the church was formed and that the fledgling community that formed in the wake of Jesus’ death and resurrection became institutionalized and grew from a tiny sect persecuted by the power of the Roman Government to a mainstream religion practiced, promoted, and, in some cases, violently imposed by the state. This church went through schisms and reformations and additional reconfigurations and has produced a wide variety of institutions, a rather small strain of which is my church home - the United Church of Christ in the United States. We make no claim to be the most authentic or the most righteous expression of the faith, but we do seek to be faithful in our call to service to others in the name of Jesus Christ.

It does seem, however, that in each generation there are a few scholars who attempt to cut through the layers of tradition and practice to come up with their own version of Jesus before the institutional church. The current mood of postmodern deconstructionism has a decidedly anti-institutional flavor and lends itself to such efforts almost as if they feel that the institutional church has somehow masked or hidden the “true” Jesus through evil design or attempts at ill-gotten power and influence.

I just read one such essay, written by Cameron Freeman, a brilliant young Australian scholar. It is not a good idea to dismiss such work because it has much to offer those of us who seek to be faithful in this generation. We need to recognize the parts of our image of Christ that come from centuries of tradition and from the practices of the modern church and that have little or no connection to the teachings of Jesus. We need to continually seek to cut through the extraneous material to discover the reality that is at the core of Christianity. But we also need to recognize that there is no guarantee that contemporary speculation about the historical Jesus is more authentic than the traditions of the church.

My calling is to be a pastor and not a New Testament scholar. The works of the scholars, however, inhabit a portion of my thinking and, I am sure, influence my work as a pastor. Perhaps, some days, my actions and words reflect that which is genuinely of Jesus.

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There has been talk of the death of God around all of my life. The phrase dates back at least to the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and perhaps even farther. There was a rise in interest in existentialist philosophies in the 1960s and when I attended seminary in the 1970s it was expected that academic theologians and philosophers have at least a basic understanding of the concepts. The phrase “God is dead” is often misunderstood and used in contexts that are very different from the meanings discussed by philosophers. Nietzsche didn’t mean a literal death or end of God. Rather Nietzsche was afraid that the decline of religion and the rise of atheism would result in an absence of a higher moral authority and lead the world towards chaos. His fears have been partially realized in the incredible violence of the 20th and 21st centuries. I suspect that his analysis is a bit simplistic - the factors surrounding the wars of the 20th Century are complex and the role of religion - or the lack of religion - in those conflicts is only one of many factors.

The reason I mention death of God theology is that some younger deconstructionist writers pick up the topic as if they were the first to encounter the idea. Most of what is being written on the topic these days is a reflection of ideas that have been around for more than a century. I prefer the term deconstructionist to describe this way of thinking as opposed to its other popular name: postmodernism. While I understand the concept of a post-modern era, I think it is a bit misleading to recycle old ideas and bill them as the product of a new era. Such deconstructionism is really a modern thought and not postmodern.

That discussion, however, is pretty much one for philosophers and rather boring to most people. So I would like to reflect on an idea that is even older this morning.

In the cycle of readings that we follow, the Revised Common Lectionary, this is year B. Year B is the year of reading Mark. I’ve been through this cycle many times in the span of my career - at least a dozen - and I have discovered that the different years have different moods. Year A - the year of Matthew’s Gospel - has a flavor of outreach and extending the gospel to the world. Year C - the year of Luke - focuses on Jesus words and sayings. Between those years we have Mark - which is a short gospel obsessed with the death of Jesus and John - a very theological and philosophical gospel.

Mark is the shortest of the gospels - driven with a rapid pace and the love of the word, “suddenly.” Although contemporary church life doesn’t often encourage reading books of the bible in their entirety, Mark invites sitting down with the story. I can be read in less than two hours. Although his meaning is significantly different from the worldly philosophers’ death of God theology, Mark has no fear of talking about death. The mortality that all humans share is not unknown or foreign to God. The death of Jesus drives the gospel.

It is a surprisingly strong contrast to the way that many people - and many churches - think of God.

I’ve read the arguments of those who don’t believe in a supernatural God so many times. Students of the scientific method sometimes react negatively to the concepts that come from the prescientific era. The read stories that were told to explain the identity of tribal people as if they were scientific treatises and point out logical inconsistencies that matter little to people who have been sharing those stories for thousands of years. They react to moments in the story when amazing and miraculous events occurred as if those were times when God has broken the “rules” of science. They reject the notion that God is somehow outside of the universe - outside of nature - supernatural. And often they do so without understanding that the god they are rejecting isn’t the God in which faithful people believe.

Mark’s gospel presents a very different view of God. Yes, there are miracle stories. Yes, there are events of amazing healing. Yes, Mark sees God’s power and glory in everyday events. But Mark gives us Christ crucified. Jesus humbled and accepting the limits of human existence. Christ offering his body not as some bloody sacrifice for the sins of the faithful, but as a supreme act of trust in the human capacity to carry the message of love and justice beyond the span of a single human life.

After reading Mark’s gospel we are left with the realization that we who follow and believe are now Christ’s body. We are called to provide the hands and feet on earth to do the work of love and justice in our generation. Ours are the voices through which God’s message of compassion and kindness is conveyed. Just as God was fully embodied in the life of Jesus, those who follow are endowed with the call to provide the touch, the smile, the listening ear - to embody God’s love for the world. Mark sends us forth - filled with the spirit - into the world.

Death - even the cruel death by crucifixion of Jesus - is not the end of God’s presence in the earth. Jesus’ death is not the end. More than the act of supreme sacrifice, it is the act of supreme trust. God trusts the community to carry the message in each generation. God is fully present in each generation, but God does not end with the passing of generations. Fully human and fully divine - a doctrine of the church that has arisen from the experience of many generations of faith.

I love the contemporary deconstructionists for their questions. The questions they raise invite honesty from our institution that has a tendency to focus on institutional maintenance instead of sacrificial service. They remind us that we don’t need to preserve tradition or power. Those are fleeting.

Mark’s gospel, however, gives me an entirely different message: A resurrection people need not fear the talk of death and we need not fear death itself.

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When I lived in North Dakota we were unapologetic about the fact that we talked about the weather nearly every day. Like everyplace else that I lived, the weather was never normal. We lived in North Dakota for seven year and the locals, who have lived there for generations, would assure me, no matter what the weather, that “it usually isn’t like this.” If we’d get a run of below zero days, they’d say, “most years it doesn’t get this cold.” Then they’d add “but I remember when . . .” and launch into a tale of a time when it was much colder for much longer. Once, when I was shoveling out from a spring blizzard, my neighbor commended me for shoveling all of the snow from the driveway to the east and all of the snow from the walks to the south saying, “We never get wind from that direction in the winter.” That night the winds started howling and I awoke to my driveway and sidewalks completely covered in snow again in the face of a strong wind from the southeast. In the summer it was, “It usually doesn’t get this hot,” or “We usually have rain by now.”

There is something about the weather that makes it seem like what is happening to us must be a bit out of the ordinary. This winter in Rapid City is starting to feel like it is a little short on precipitation. January and February aren’t our wettest months around here - average is less than an inch of precipitation for the two months combined. But we haven’t had much - maybe a third of an inch in a few skiffs of snow and a couple of inches of the dry stuff, which doesn’t translate to much moisture in the ground. April and May are our wettest months, with July through September often seeing amounts in excess of an inch each month. Our average is only about 17 inches a year, so it isn’t like those cities on the coast of Australia that saw 11 inches in a single storm.

Meanwhile, the east coast, especially the northeast, lies buried in snow with more in the forecast. Now that our grocery stories have tomatoes, citrus, apples, fresh lettuce, and bananas year round, it wouldn’t surprise me to have someone in New York or Boston get the big idea of exporting snow. Semi loads of the stuff might start arriving any day now. OK, I know a semi-load of snow isn’t much. And it is likely that the stuff would command a higher price in Dubai than around here. We’re known for being a bit on the tightfisted side when it comes to spending money.

And at the same time, out on the west coast it is even dryer. In Oregon, Mount Hood Meadows is experiencing a year of much lighter than average snow. They’re hoping for more at the end of the week, but day after day of sunny weather hasn’t done much to keep the skiers happy. Groomed snow every day is more like springtime than winter conditions. The Pacific Northwest has had a an unusually dry winter, sending most of their precipitation to other parts of the globe this winter.

The Colorado ski reports are reporting excellent conditions, with a good snowstorm yesterday. Steamboat is reporting 10 inches and Vail about 6 with more falling. Of course you need to be there to enjoy the skiing. About 180 flights were cancelled at the Denver airport yesterday and despite a fleet of over 600 snow plows, the Colorado Department of Transportation couldn’t keep up, closing Interstate 25 north of Denver. They were running periodic holds in Interstate 70 up into the front range so cars wouldn’t get stuck heading up to the tunnels. That is, I think, normal for Colorado at this time of the year, though. It is just that we were in Denver two weeks ago and enjoyed highs in the 60’s and dry roads for our entire drive home.

It isn’t this month that is worrisome for us. We keep looking forward to the summer around here. If we don’t get our winter and spring moisture the woods can get really dry and with all of the bug killed standing timber in the forest, we’re primed for a fire season. It could be a long summer. Along with the possibility of a dry and hot summer, locals around here are trying to get our minds wrapped around predictions of a million guests coming to the hills during the first week of August for the 75th Anniversary Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. That puts us at about ten motorcycles for every car and the promise of ten days of heavy traffic for people who get cranky when they have to wait for a couple of minutes at a traffic light doesn’t make the imagination soar to heights of joy.

These days I try to say something sensible when the conversation moves to the topic of weather, but the truth is that I know very little about the weather. The book of common prayer, in the extended pastoral prayer, has a line about praying for good weather and good crops. When we lived in rural North Dakota it seemed like I tried to always put a line about rain into a prayer, because we were always praying for rain. Eleven inches a year has to be well timed for there to be any profit in dryland wheat or sunflowers. My congregation these days is less agriculture-dependent. We probably are more dependent upon the summer tourists, including those who ride motorcycles, than we are on the success or failure of crops. The problem is that they have a pastor that knows far more about herding sheep than advertising for tourist trade.

I watch the weather. I make a few comments. And I know in my heart of hearts that I can do little to change it. My prayers about weather are more for the strength and grace to endure what comes than for some divine intervention to change it. One thing for sure, you don’t want me in charge of the weather. I might make a mistake and in trying to get a bit more snow for Oregon skiers, end up leaving South Carolina a desert. Trust me, even though the weather is a bit strange, it would be worse if you put a fool like me in charge.

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I have written before about the pace of contemporary life. I watch as families fill their days and nights with all kinds of schedule demands. We’ve had many years, now, of most adults having work outside of the home. Mothers have always worked, and the work of being a mother is significant, but our society now has the expectation that women as well as men have jobs that produce income for families. Add to that busy pace the increased and increasing expectations that children be involved in organized activities - in part caused by the simple fact that there is often no adult at home during the day - and the schedules begin to get complex.

Filling up the time when children are awake but not in school usually involves a lot of different activities, many of which require extra practices and significant investments of time not only for the children, but also for their parents, who race from work to serve as a coach or chaperone at their children’s activities.

It is frustrating, and sometimes amusing, to schedule events and activities at the church. Our congregation is starting to adjust to busy families and children who are not able to be in worship every week. We’ve learned to understand that soccer games and out of town tournaments and sheer exhaustion are all parts of those busy lives and there are some Sundays when families just don’t make it to church. We have also learned that our families with children often don’t have extra time for committee meetings and other administrative chores. There is incredible leadership among our younger adults, but it is not always expressed in the usual meetings and planning sessions. For many families one trip to the church each week is all they can manage. We tend to schedule more activities and meetings adjacent to our regular Sunday worship services in order to respond to the needs of the families and the result is that sometimes Sunday mornings are hectic with meetings and classes and activities that might otherwise have been offered on other days.

Our teens frequently do not know their own schedules. Despite that they all have smart phones with excellent calendar applications, they often are not the managers of their own schedules. They defer to their parents’ well-honed sense of organization. By the time children become teens, one or both parents have become very efficient at managing multiple schedules at the same time. As a result, we ask teens when we might have a specific activity and then have to check with parents because the teen will say, “Yes! That’s a good time.” Then on the day of the activity, the teen will be elsewhere doing something else. As I said, it is frustrating and sometimes amusing.

There is, however, at least one societal event that breaks through all of the schedules and busy activities. When death occurs in a family, they have no choice but to drop everything and take time to grieve. It is often tragic when these events come to the lives of young people. Even if the family death is a grandparent or elder who had lived a long life, it is a totally new and unique situation for the youth. We have families in our church with children who have become adults, parents who have made it to their fifties and yet there has never been a death in the immediate family. The grandparents are still alive.

Grief and loss are major disrupting life events and they often catch families unprepared. We are not practiced at facing the reality of our mortality.

Lent gives us the opportunity every year to take a look at the simple fact that grief and death are real parts of our human reality. Rather than treating death and grief as enemies and strangers, our faith is honest about our human condition. The story of the death of Jesus is a central tenet of our faith. Mark’s Gospel, especially, seems to focus on telling that story.

Knowing that grief and loss will come to every person in our community, it just makes sense to take some time each year for a little bit of practice for those inevitable events. One way to practice is to set aside a bit of time for sabbath in each week. We try to offer meaningful experiences for our congregation of how they might invest a bit of time going slower. This year we are adding a weekly contemplative service. During Holy Week we offer opportunities for worship every day. We are careful to offer these as options and gifts, not as requirements, however. For some people, having one more thing to do will break the schedule, making life more hectic, not more peaceful. For others, however, taking time to turn off the electronic devices, to sit quietly, and to breathe deeply is a much-appreciated gift.

I frequently am allowed to witness and participate in family events when a death occurs. The family takes a week, and sometimes more, away from work and their normal hectic schedules. They have more time together. They eat more meals together. They sometimes just sit and share the space together. Often the television and the computer and the tablets and smartphones are turned off or set aside for a little while. The present and often painful reality of the moment gets their full attention. Just being fully present and paying attention in the moment is becoming rare in our time. When I am meeting with a family to plan a funeral we all share a common focus.

In our corner of the Christian church, we don’t focus too much on giving up things for Lent. But I hope that we have helped our people to learn to make a little space for lent. Rather than denying oneself pleasure or a food that is enjoyed, we invite people to give themselves a gift of quiet reflection and focused attention on God’s action in their lives.

Today is the first of the six Sundays of Lent. May each week of this season give our people time and space to reflect.

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I think about God a lot. In a way, it is what I do for a living. I know that I spend my time planning and leading worship, administering an institution, calling on and serving people, and attending meetings. But I think it is fair to say that My life is dedicated to listening for and responding to God’s call.

As a person who think about God a lot, I have formed images of God. I have a sense of who God is and who God isn’t. My image of God is informed by the images that have been shared by a lot of others. I study ancient scriptures and try to understand how our forebears understood God. I read the words of theologians and philosophers and look for similarities and differences in the ways that God is understood.

In all of this one of the things that I have come to know about God is that God is beyond our capacity to understand. I know that there are many people out there who believe that God is a simple notion. Most often I hear those kinds of arguments from those who are trying to persuade others not to believe in God. They dismiss God as a simple human construct, and idea we have formed in our minds with no external reality. The problem with that conversation is that I don’t believe in the god that they don’t believe in, either. What I mean is that when I talk about God, I’m talking about something entirely different reality than what seems to me to be a rather simplistic notion of some human projection. If we are talking merely about a human invention, we aren’t talking about the God in which I believe.

Being beyond human knowing also means that our language fails us when we talk about God. We can use analogy - and we do - a lot. God is like a loving father. God is like a nurturing mother. God is like a lot of things. But an analogy only points us in a direction - it does not fully describe that which is beyond description.

In classical theology, which is, of course, a human invention, albeit one that has taken many generations to develop, the trinity is a concept that attempts to provide a pattern for understanding that God is at once close and personal and at the same time beyond our ability to fully grasp. In Jesus we discover a real, living, breathing human being who relates to us as we relate to one another, who lives and loves and, yes, who dies in the way that all humans do. In God the Creator we encounter aspects of God that are beyond our human conception of time and space. God is literally everywhere and every time all at once. And God is the creative energy that brought forth all that is. But, of course, God is more. By being Jesus and God the Creator at once, God is continually in relationship. God is relationship. It has been described as a divine conversation. And God is more. Often we use the words Holy Spirit to describe that aspect of God that is always beyond - always more - always undefinable and uncapturable. We glimpse God the Spirit. We experience God the Spirit. And yet we never fully understand God the Spirit. The theologians also remind us that it is impossible to discuss or understand one of the “persons” of the trinity without the other two. Of course it is impossible to fully understand God.

As a student I struggled with systematic theology. This may be in part because my way of thinking is less systematic and less organized than others. You can sense that if you read several of my blogs. I cover a different topic every day and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why a particular topic comes up when it does. My mind is not, by its nature, very systematic. When I try to organize - and believe me I do - I find myself with many different possible patterns but no single design. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to index the blogs or even select a group of “the best of the blog.” So far I’ve failed each time.

There is, however, another reason why systematic theology remains so challenging for me. When I read a particularly complete systematic theology such as Paul Tillich’s amazing three-volume work or Karl Barth’s Theology fo the Reformed Confessions I find myself at once amazed at how thorough their thinking is and yet how much is left out. You could read nothing but theology for a lifetime and you still would easily be able to point out aspects of God that have not been covered. What we are able to systematize is only a small corner of our own understanding. There is far more in this vast universe that we haven’t fitted into the patterns of our thinking.

This is abundantly true when on reads various theologies of spirit. The 20th Century Pentecostal movement talked about the spirit a lot, but wasn’t marked by serious academic thought. The books are inconsistent, full of logical errors and hardly systematic. It is the challenge of writing, or even talking, about the spirit. It is not an easy task.

It is critically important that we continually remind ourselves that all of these books and all of our ideas are only our understanding of God - our image of God. They are not God. Because when we confuse our image of God with the reality of God we being to think that what happens to us should be somehow universally applied. Everyone ought to see what I see! Everyone ought to believe what I believe! Those thoughts are literally dangerous. Too much violence in this world has come from people who thought that their ideas about God were God. They then tried to impose those ideas on others in ways that were violent and destructive. God is not the source of the violence - the inability to understand God can be.

It is critically important for me to remind myself and others that I don’t fully understand God. I don’t possess God. My image is far short of the reality. I am a student who is continuing to learn. As our forebear John Robinson declared, God has “more truth and light yet to break forth from the Holy Word.”

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The change in computers in my lifetime has been nothing short of amazing. In my college years, computers consumed whole buildings and had power to process simple numbers and organize small databases. These days, I have more processing capability in my cell phone than in those monstrous computing rooms of the past. The laptop on which I write my blog each morning has multiple processors and applications for everything from word processing to video editing and much, much more. I remember a time, early in my career, when we used a manual typewriter at home and had just purchased an electric typewriter for the church, going to a church event and seeing a Kaypro II word processor. The suitcase-sided metal box weighed about 30#. You undid two industrial buckles to allow the keyboard to hinge down, revealing a couple of large floppy drives and a 6” screen that displayed green letters on a dark background. The person demonstrating the machine showed how you could edit text on screen (if you could remember all of the keyboard commands) and then produce a printed document with a very noisy dot-matrix printer. One floppy drive was used for the operating system of the computer, the other was available to hold your personal data. A single 5 1/4 floppy disk could hold 512 kilobytes of information - nearly a file drawer’s worth of information.

I was impressed.

These days my cell phone hold 64 gigabytes and my laptop has a terabyte - all in motion-free digital memory storage - no hard drive, just chips.

Back in the seventies, Susan worked for a short time at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago (NORC). They had rooms full of computers that allowed them to process the information from opinion polls and do studies of what people thought. It was an impressive operation. I remember that the copy machine took up an entire room in the facility. They weren’t quite paperless in those days.

One of the results of this rapid increase in our abilities to process data is that certain parts of our society we’ve run rampant with studies. I received a survey from my car dealership about my “experience” with the last time I had the oil changed. I could fill it out on paper, online, or over the phone. I frequently receive calls on my home phone asking me to participate in political surveys. The receipt from the grocery store contains a code to participate in a survey. It seems like everyone is taking a survey every time I turn around.

Our United Church of Christ, despite shrinking budgets and reduced staff in our national setting, still maintains a research office. In fact the full-time staff person for research began her career in the UCC by taking a poll of congregations’ faith formation and Christian education programs. Now she works full time. Yesterday I spent a little over an hour filling out the latest multiple-page online survey of congregations. A huge amount of the data on the survey was information that the church already has. Worship attendance is reported in our annual reports. Racial and ethnic backgrounds of membership has already been reported. A full-page of the survey was a direct duplication of information we provided in the Christian Education survey.

But I took the time to fill out the survey because I know that the results will be incomplete. The busiest and most vital of our congregations will not be included in the survey because their pastors are too busy to fill out another set of forms for the church’s research office. These surveys are always skewed toward the bored and discontented. Those are the people who take time to fill them out.

Not that inaccurate information is a problem. It will take months and months of full time work for the research staff to prepare their report. The huge document will contain all kinds of statistics and committees will “ooh” and “awe” over them for several meetings. The surveys will then be put away and in a few years someone will say, “this data is all old and irrelevant” and throw the reports in the waste basket.

This isn’t the first survey I’ve seen in my time as a pastor.

The point is that all of this computing power enables us to collect not only useful information that can help us be more efficient in our ministries and serve our people better, but also data that is irrelevant and has no value. And it now takes a computer to separate the useful information from that which is useless.

Recently, in an informal conversation with a very dedicated and loyal church member, it was suggested that we might have an in-depth survey of our members to see what their concerns and needs were. The person proposed an anonymous survey that asked questions about what people want and how they envision the future of the church unfolding. My initial response was, “or, instead, we could just talk to people.”

I don’t put much faith in surveys. I have very little confidence in anonymous surveys. When people aren’t even willing to have their name associated with their opinion, their opinion must not mean much to them. What I didn’t say in the conversation is that I feel like we already know our congregation. I think common sense will tell us what is most important in most cases. Furthermore, the congregation is constantly changing. The average year sees enough funerals and enough new members to change the character of the congregation and the needs for programs and services.

The good news is that in addition to these amazing computers, we have human brains and human hearts to hold the prayers and concerns of our congregation. And we have a heritage of faith that teaches us that the best way to raise a concern or ask for a service is to “take it to God in prayer.”

I’ll probably fill out survey forms from time to time again. But when it comes to seeking direction for the future of the church, I’ll still put my faith in a gathering of people who talk to each other and pray together.

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When I was a college student, I enjoyed studying philosophy, earning enough credits to have a minor in the subject. Dr. Cliff Murphy and Dr. Helen Bross ignited my interest in not only reading the works of philosophers but also in the history of philosophy and patterns of rational thought. I’ve never been much of a mathematician but our college required that all students have a rounded education, so courses in the sciences and in mathematics were required. The “match” for me and math was logic. I really connected with the study of patterns of thought and how errors in thinking could lead to inaccurate conclusions. I guess there has long been a part of me that enjoys a debate. But when I use that term, it has nothing to do with the processes demonstrated by contemporary legislative bodies, where speechifying is all about outshouting your opponent, engaging in parliamentary tricks and nobody listens to the speeches, having already made up their mind. I am far more interested in forms of presentation that have at least some chance of changing the thoughts of the others. The truth isn’t established by which side has the most money. There are some patterns of thinking that are more rational - that make more sense - than others.

As I result, I continue to pick up essays and books by philosophers and enjoy reading them in part because of the joy of examining their patterns of thinking and looking for flaws in their reasoning that might reveal weaknesses in their arguments.

This week, I’ve been dabbling in philosophy again. Friends of mine just released a book of essays and a few poems. The cornerstone of the book is an extended essay by John Caputo. Because my friends were involved in the production of the book, I pre-ordered a copy and got mine just 24 hours after it was released. I’m looking forward, most of all, to reading the responses to Caputo’s paper, but to read those intelligently, I need to wade through the original paper. And philosophy doesn’t read quickly. I can read all kinds of things as I’m drifting off to sleep in the evening. But complex thoughts require a bit more focus, so it took me a couple of days to wade through the essay with all of the other activities in my life.

This is not a response to the book, but a reflection that was sparked by Caputo’s essay. At this point in my life, I am bored with arguments about the existence (or non existence) of God. I don’t mind reading them from time to time, but it seems to me like very little that is truly new about the topic has come out of our generation. I’ve read lots of classical arguments. I understand the various sides to them. In essence, however, there is little that seems new in the conversation.

The 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida developed what has been healed by some as a new form of analysis called deconstruction. He gathered a group of disciples who were intrigued by his way of thinking and John Caputo is definitely in that camp. Caputo, in turn has had a big influence on the thinking of Peter Rollins, who earns his living traveling around the country speaking to mostly young adult audiences who haven’t heard these ideas before and are experiencing what seem to me to be quite tired old arguments as new ideas. I’m sure I would share their enthusiasm were I younger.

The bottom line is that no argument in words, no matter how eloquent or how well-constructed in terms of logic, will banish the notion of God from this world. The idea of God, which is not the same as the independent reality of God, has genuine staying power in human societies. People have been talking about and believing in God for millennia and they will continue to do so long after our generation has passed back into the dust of the earth.

Caputo recognizes this. He doesn’t try to deny the existence of the idea of God, though sometimes one is uncertain about his concept of the reality of God. Reading him reminded me of Moses’ conversation with God before he went to Pharaoh for the first time to argue for the freedom of the people of Israel. Moses askes, “Who shall I say has sent me?” His question is a deeply philosophical question. It wasn’t that Moses lacked belief in God. Moses has had a first-hand personal experience with God that no logic would dissuade. But Moses is aware that Pharaoh has a completely different theological understanding. Pharaoh has a belief system that has many different small gods, none of whom have complete authority. Pharaoh himself is a type of god, having a limited sphere of influence and authority. Moses wrestles, in his conversation with God, about how to introduce the concept of a single God, creator and ruler of the entire universe who was embraced by the ancestors of the people Pharaoh has under him as slaves. How do you even talk with Pharaoh about God, when Pharaoh doesn’t believe in God?

God responds, “Tell Pharaoh, ‘I am who I am.’” “Tell him ‘I am’ has sent you.

Moses learns to start his argument with the assumption that God exists. There is no need, even in his exchanges with Pharaoh, to even have a conversation about whether or not God exists.

I find myself in that camp. I approach every conversation with the existence of God engrained in my core identity. I try to have patience with arguments about the existence of God. I try to listen carefully to the arguments of those who try to dissuade others from believing in God. But none of those arguments would make God cease to exist for me. None of those arguments would make my being capable of existing without God. I simply start every conversation from the core reality that God is.

I realize that this is a difference between John Caputo and me, just as it was a difference between Pharaoh and Moses. The bottom line, in that story, however, is that Pharaoh didn’t need to believe in God for the people to gain their freedom from God. Moses didn’t have to win the argument. The freedom of the people was sufficient.

I continue to enjoy reading philosophy. I have no need to convince the philosophers of anything. And they, in turn, can wrestle with God’s existence all they want. God, in the meantime, will continue to lead people to freedom.

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Let me tell you briefly part of the stories of two men. One was a highly successful professional. At his prime, he was at the top of his career, both in terms or recognition and in terms of income. He traveled around the country in his private airplane, always had a full appointment book, was recognized by professional organizations for his contributions and served generations of families. He was recognized at civic and cultural events and was sought after as a member of prestigious boards of directors. He and his second wife built a large country estate with many luxuries and a commanding view. They entertained lavishly and invitations to their events were treasured. He had a fleet of vehicles from which to choose and often his automobile was the center of attention in a parking lot. From many different perspectives he was a highly successful man.

The other man was a dedicated small business owner. He worked long hours and reinvested wisely in his growing business. He commanded a specific niche in the market and garnered favor with his customers. He was very civic minded. For decades he served in almost every office available in his service club and in his church. He was a well-known figure not only in his own community, but around the state for his service. He attended state and national conventions and was often the first name on the list of nominating committees. He never achieved the level of income of the first man, but he lived wisely within his income. He didn’t need to be showy in his choice of home or transportation. He, too, was considered to be a success.

Both now live in a nursing home, requiring around-the-clock care. They are no longer able to take care of their own physical needs. They no longer can manage their own business affairs. Family members had to step in and obtain powers of attorney. Care had to be purchased at a very high cost. Family resources have gone to a slow process of decline. One by one their friends passed away or slipped away. Their family members have moved to other zip codes. The majority of their days they have no visitors and when a visitor comes, it is for an hour in an otherwise very long week.

For both men it is hard to determine their state of mind at this point. Their memories don’t work as well as once was the case. Though the afflictions from which they suffer have different names and medical professionals have different names for the causes of their inability to care for themselves, their stories are both stories of aging. They once were on top of their game. They once were on top of the world. They grew old. And their disabilities mounted. And they lost control of things over which they once were masters.

Years ago, when these men were being installed as officers in prestigious organizations and their peers were drinking to their health, no one was thinking of the day when they would need someone to help them eat or get dressed. In those days no one was thinking of the indignity of incontinence and disposable underwear.

Although their stories are unique and distinct to their individual experiences, their present lives could feature in the stories of many other people. It is possible to outlive your friends and experience a kind of loneliness that escapes others. It is possible for even the most physically capable person to become disabled and dependent.

Today is Ash Wednesday. Each year, for one day, some of us are reminded of our own mortality. Time is passing and things will not remain the way that they are. The words are simple: “Remember that you have come from dust and to dust you will return.” We are all made of the same stuff. This human experience is temporary. We are born. We live. We die.

This reminder of our mortality, however, is not morbid for us. While we do not deny the reality of our lives, we live with the understanding that there is more to the story. Often our words fail us when we try to speak of the bigger picture, but we turn to the stories of our people to remind us that while each generation has unique experiences, we all belong to a story that did not begin with our birth. Long before we were born our people lived and died. They experienced pain and triumph, tragedy and success. They experienced the fleeting nature of recognition and honor. They endured the trials of decline and disability. They suffered the crushing weight of grief and loss.

And their story is not over.

We belong to a story that not only began long before our birth, but will continue after our time on this earth has reached its conclusion. None of us gets to choose the timing or manner of our death, but we all will die. And when we do, the incredible love story of God and the people of God will continue. Tales of the nursing home is not the theme of our lives.

One of the things that Ash Wednesday does is to teach us to treasure the time we have been given. In this life we are given love and community and the opportunities for deep relationship with others. Sometimes we are distracted by visions of success - of financial reward, of personal glory, of recognition and acclaim. Sometimes we are tempted to pursue goals that lead us away from life’s real treasures of lasting love and deep commitment. Sometimes we are drawn away from true community in pursuit of perceived glory.

So we need the reminder. Every year we need to be reminded. We are mortal. Our time is limited. How we invest that time is important.

Whether or not your forehead sports ashes today, I pray that you will be reminded that you are beloved of God and you were born to live in love with others.

The ashes are an external sign. They will wash off. It is what goes on in the inside that matters.

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The forecast calls for continued light snow, tapering off as the day progresses and a high in the high twenties. It’s a typical forecast for a February day. And the forecast in New York City is about the same as it is here in Rapid City. Well, if you don’t figure in the forecast for increasing winds throughout the day. We’re going to see the snow that has been falling blowing around quite a bit before the day is over.

Out here in Countryside, we’re adjusting to being part of the City. After being annexed in December, our snow plowing was transferred to the City. Whereas our previous plowing was done by the County and we were plowed every time there was any snow accumulation, we are not a plowing priority for the city. We get plowed only when there are 6” or more of snow and then only after the arterials and school routes are plowed. In other words our neighborhood was high on the county’s snow plowing priority list, and we now are in the lowest rank for city plowing. We’re trying to be good citizens and not complain. It isn’t as if we are stuck in our homes, though whoever decided that we are an area with level streets when the city made its snowplow route hasn’t driven up our road. They probably haven’t operated a snowplow on our hill, either.

The city has good advice for us on their web site:

• Brush up on your winter driving skills.
• Keep your vehicles in top condition.
• Allow more time for travel during winter months.

I’m pretty sure that we’d get ignored if we lived in New York City, too.

But in New York it is fashion week! I’m sure that people all over the country are checking out my blog with baited breath for my comments on the nation’s latest fashion trends. Let’s see. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. I think I’ll go for black boots and black slacks, a black shirt and a black jacket. Oh, yes, it’s not going to be all that warm. With a projected high of 34 degrees and me participating in an outdoor service at noon, I’ll likely wear my top coat as well. It is black.

As you might have suspected, I’ll be in Rapid City. They haven’t asked me to walk the runway in New York City.

That’s good. I can’t imagine wearing some of the things that they are trying to pass off as clothing in the Big Apple. Maybe the fashion designers haven’t looked outside. At least we know they aren’t from he Northwest Territories in Canada. That much exposed skin would be fatal in Yellowknife.

There was a piece in the Sunday Times about layering being in fashion. It is a wonder I caught the article. I have less, not more, time for reading newspapers on Sunday. Even though there is no paper involved, the Sunday editions of the online newspapers are bigger than the dailies. Still it is good to know that I’m ahead of the curve on that particular fashion trend.

I’ve been known to put on my long johns and a long-sleeved t-shirt covered by a par of jeans and a worksheet with a pair of insulated bib overalls and a parka over all of that. I have an insulated sweatshirt that could be worn between the parka and my bibs, if necessary. I don’t think it’s ever gotten that cold around here. Most of the time my parka is too heavy for any serious work and I wear the sweatshirt instead. Still I do wear layers.
And they are all coordinated in variations of denim blue and Carhartt tan. Now that they’ve expanded the Runnings Farm Store to include clothing, I don’t really have a reason to go to the mall any more. I guess I still have to go to Penneys for dress clothes from time to time, but they are located at the end of the mall so I don’t actually have to walk down the mall itself. I’ve never figured out why people who are perfectly happy to park way across a huge parking lot and then walk a couple of city blocks inside of the mall will complain about downtown parking. Sometimes I have to walk a half of a block when I go some place down town. Heck I’ll park a block away to avoid a parking meter.

So, what I am saying is that fashion week isn’t having a big impact on my life. I’m not tempted to purchase an airline ticket and head for the city to watch the models go by. I’m pretty sure that you have to have tickets to go to the fashion shows anyway and even though the Tommy Hilfiger company constructed their catwalk in the form of a football field, it just isn’t the kind of event that is likely to sell me tickets.

Back at home it is Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, another holiday that doesn’t receive much attention in our home. We observe Lent and we take time to give special attention to our spiritual disciplines and faith practices during this season, but the change isn’t a really radical one. We don’t have all that much fat in our usual diet, so going through the house to clean out the luxury foods doesn’t yield much of a feast. Our freezer and pantry are full of the staples that we eat every day and our tastes don’t range towards the luxury items to begin with. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure that most of the chocolate in our house has been consumed already.

It won’t be fashion and it won’t be food that signal the change from Epiphany to Lent in our home. Lent, for me, is about making permanent changes - about orienting my life toward God and God’s call to serve others. I’ll leave the temporary changes to someone else.

And fashion week seems to get along just fine without me.

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I try to remember that age is not an indicator of brilliance, or success, or of anything else. I am the age that I am simply because I have survived this long. I have been free from major illness. I have escaped dangerous accidents. I am here and doing the things I am not because of some kind of special ability or intellectual superiority. I am here at least partly because of luck.

Inc. Magazine recently ran an article about 40 people who became millionaires before they were 20. There is a particular type of brilliance that is possessed by young people that is awe-inspiring. These young people not only had brilliant ideas - they also worked really hard to turn ideas into reality.

Of course there are some things that people do to become rich that I have been unwilling to do. I could never have sacrificed my time with my marriage or my family in exchange for more profit. I’m sure that these young entrepreneurs have skills and abilities that I lack, but they also made some choices that are different from the choices I have made.

Nonetheless, it is clear that there is incredible brilliance among young people. Having said that, there are some things that one gains through age and experience. I am made aware of this every time I get a hair cut.

The place where I get my hair cut employs a lot of people, mostly women, in their twenties. They look like they are much younger to me, but that is just a particular kind of amblyopia that affects old men. We look at young people in a kind of way that puts them all into the same category. These days almost everyone under the age of 30 seems like a teenager to me. The young women who work in the place where I get my hair cut are all successful in their own way. They have finished their education and they know about cutting hair and how to manage their own financial resources. They have managed sometimes complex lives outside of their work environment. They are capable and most of them are well suited to their vocation.

They do sport some pretty interesting hair styles and many of them have quite a bit of body art including piercings and tattoos that, in addition to age, would distinguish them from someone like me in a crowd. I’ve never sported hair of any color other than the way it grows. The different colors my hair has had over the years have all been natural. I have no objection to others coloring their hair, but I’m never sure whether or not it is appropriate to stare when hair is the color of a blue raspberry popsicle or a “my little pony” toy. Is it rude to ask whether or not it glows in the dark? I mean, didn’t the person color their hair that way in order to be noticed? Since I don’t know the answers to these and other questions, I generally don’t make the hair of my stylist the topic of our conversation.

Which brings up another topic. Apparently the place where I go doesn’t have barbers any more. They are all stylists. That’s fine with me, but I don’t expect to emerge from a haircut with any more style than I had when I entered the shop. They might create great art with someone who has a great head of hair, but in my case, we need to be satisfied with making me just a little bit more socially acceptable.

One question that I always get when I get my hair cut is, “Are you sure you want your beard trimmed that short?” I think they are surprised at how fast my beard grows. I know I am. It didn’t grow that fast when I was in my 20’s and trying to look like I was a bit older. These days I add inches in a few weeks. Since I know it will grow back out, there seems to be little risk in cutting it too short.

After the hair is trimmed - which points out another mystery of the art - we get onto other questions. Before that, back to the mystery: Why does it take longer to cut my hair now that I have so little of it? There was a time when I sported a rather full head of hair. These days the bald spot in the center of my head is inching toward the receding hairline. I’m thinking that the poor stylist has to cut my hairs one at a time up there. There seems to be a lot more fussing and snipping than was the case when I had more hair.

But I digress. After my hair is cut and my beard is trimmed, you’d think I’d be done, but there are still more questions. “Would you like me to trim your eyebrows while we are at it?” is a question that 30-year-olds have never heard. I have to say, “Yes” every time I get my hair cut. I don’t know why my eyebrows have decided to grow at lightning speed these days. I just know that if someone doesn’t trim them it will look like I’m providing nesting ground for a couple of wooly caterpillars on my forehead. And it is really hard for me to trim my own eyebrows. Scissors and mirrors and I don’t get along well at all.

The same goes for trimming the hair in my ears. I’m not sure that hair even grew in my ears when I was younger. At least I never had to get it trimmed. Now if I go too many days without getting my ears trimmed I start to look like a character in a fantasy fiction movie. And I’m not talking about the cute characters, either.

So I tip a lot more for a haircut than would have occurred to me when I was younger. It seems if the stylist has to ask all of these embarrassing questions she deserves a bit extra for her efforts. And perhaps her younger clients can’t afford to tip as much.

Then again, her younger clients might all be millionaires who have a whole lot more money than I.

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Yesterday was pretty much a black and white day. Heavy fog blanketed the hills for most of the day, coating the trees with ice and leaving a kind of magical, mystical appearance. It was a little cold to do much outdoors. I ran a few errands and did a little work in the garage, but found little energy for tackling anything big. I could have taken out my camera and gone on a photo adventure top capture the beauty of the light in the trees and the stark contrasts of the day, but sometimes I just look at the world and realize that even if I were to get a few really good photographs, I would be far from capturing the world. So I just looked at the world and today you get words with no pictures.

At Christmas, Susan gave me two books of poems by Mary Oliver. I hadn’t previously discovered her. Many of her poems are simple expressions of gratitude for the beauty of the world. There are a few about challenging relationships. There are a few about the passage of time. There are a lot about birds - she has a special place in her heart for mockingbirds.

One really resonates:

Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every Day
   I see or hear
      something
         that more or less

kills me
   with delight,
      that leaves me
         like a needle

in the haystack
   of light.
      It is what I was born for—
         to look, to listen,

to lose myself
   inside this soft world—
      to instruct myself
         over and over

in joy,
   and acclamation.
      Nor am I talking
         about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
   the very extravagant—
      but of the ordinary,
         the common, the very drab

the daily presentations.
   Oh, good scholar,
      I say to myself,
         how can you help

but grow wise
   with such teachings
      as these—
         the untrimmable light

of the world,
   the ocean's shine,
      the prayers that are made
         out of grass?

I think that yesterday was a day of discovering delight in the ordinary, the common, the very drab. It was a typical day. It was typical weather for February in the hills. The fog and ice and somewhat slippery roads are par for the course around here.

500 miles to our west, the Tetons were putting on a really unusual show yesterday. Strong wind, with plenty of moisture was blowing over the high peaks. The Grand, the tallest of the peaks is nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. Lenticular clouds - those shaped by the wind blowing over the uneven terrain - are common in the mountains, but on occasion the bottoms of the clouds and the tops of the mountains line up perfectly and the clouds look almost as if they are being painted in the sky by the mountains. Yesterday, it seems, there was a huge lenticular cloud right over the grand that looked almost like it mirrored the shape of the mountain. Clouds, of course, don’t hold still. Lenticular clouds are often formed by high winds. So the image undulated and shifted in shapes in a way that was mesmerizing. Teton Park officials said people were simply stopping their cars in the middle of the highway to look at the clouds.

I wasn’t there to see it, though I know the phenomena. I have trouble keeping my eyes on the road any time I drive by the Tetons. They are simply gorgeous mountains. The drive from the south entrance of Yellowstone to Jackson is a delight in any kind of weather. With the mountains to the west, there are some really dramatic sunsets in that stretch of the world.

It is possible that there were some lenticular clouds formed by the hills yesterday as well. After all, we are downwind from the Tetons and even with the high country of central Wyoming and the Big Horns between us and the Tetons, the winds aloft can move quickly and the airflow over the Tetons is high enough to clear the Big Horns and the Black Hills without any trouble.

We wouldn’t have noticed. We were down below, in the fog, looking at the ice crystals on the pine needles. It was pretty down here, but our world was one of muted colors and light filtered through moisture-filled air. You could get wet just walking across the yard. The clouds never found the energy to rise up off of the ground around here yesterday.

Mary Oliver’s question seemed to be apt for yesterday:

Oh, good scholar,
      I say to myself,
         how can you help

but grow wise
   with such teachings
      as these—
         the untrimmable light

of the world,
   the ocean's shine,
      the prayers that are made
         out of grass?

Our prayers yesterday were made out of fog and ice and grass. Each blade was coated with its own crystals. The normally drab mid-winter dormant grass of the yard isn’t particularly attractive. It is waiting for summer to come, and, most likely, for another layer of snow to over it up with a different kind of beauty as it waits for the warming of another season of growth.

I don’t mind winter. I’m grateful that I live in a place where i don’t have to mow the lawn year round. I am content doing little tasks in my garage as my mind wanders off to the coming sermon and the business of the church. I like the view out my window of fog and crystal.

But I wonder if I am really learning from the gifts of each day. I wonder if I am growing wiser or simply older.

Mary Oliver reminds me:

to instruct myself
         over and over
in joy,
   and acclamation.

I have been given everything that I need to be a person of joy and acclimation. I am witness to an amazing world filled with amazing people doing amazing things. The beauty that surrounds me is literally beyond words.

And, all too often I don't stop to look at what is before my eyes - to learn - “to instruct myself over and over in joy and acclimation.”

May I go through today with my eyes wide open.

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Many years ago, my sister got into running. She ran a lot of 5K and 10K races and even several marathons, including one finish of the Chicago Marathon. In those days she got our mother, who was an avid bicycler, into wearing New Balance shoes. I’ve never been much of a runner, though I did complete a few 10K runs when I was younger. I never did get into collecting equipment for running. I’ve been known to make fun of all of the name-brand clothing that young people wear. It seems that they are willing to pay extra to wear an advertisement for a sports company on their clothing. It isn’t that I don’t understand the desire to own sports equipment. I have quite a collection of canoe and kayak paddles and no small amount of specialized clothing for paddling. My dry suit has the NRS logo on both the pants and top, though if they offered a version without the logo, I’d likely buy that one.

But I recognize that slanted NB of the new balance logo because both my sister and mother wore that brand of shoes. When she was older, we helped my mom get New Balance shoes not because she was running, but because she could get a good comfortable fit for her feet and they helped her to walk steadily and safely as she experienced a bit of disability due to neuropathy.

The New Balance Athletic Shoe company is based in a suburb of Boston, home of the famous Boston Marathon. Although many athletic shoes made by companies with their headquarters in the United States are actually manufactured in other places, US companies have done well in the athletic shoe business. Nike, perhaps the biggest in the field, started out in Beaverton, Oregon. Their Jordans sell enough to rank as another brand when it comes to basketball shoes. Of course, the name we all knew from our teenage years when it comes to basketball shoes is Converse, another Boston-area company.

If the sport is Soccer, called football by most of the rest of the world, you might expect to see Adidas or Puma, German companies of England’s Reebok, maybe even Fila from Korea.

So it came as a surprise to me this morning, when I was looking at the headlines to see the New Balance logo, of all places, on a Cricket bat. Trust me, the only people in Boston who follow Cricket weren’t born in Boston. I mean, seriously, have you been following the Cricket World Cup? I suppose that if you are a big fan, you weren’t surprised that Australia beat England. After all, most Cricket fans expect Australia to take it all this year. But to win by 111 runs? That’s crazy!

At least I think it is. I have no idea how cricket is scored. It looks vaguely like a weird form of baseball with a funky bat and teams the size of football teams. There is some sort of rule about a “twelfth man,” but I never did get that part straight. The players, except the twelfth man have to play the entire game, which is two innings. The length of the inning is determined by how long it takes for the teams to bowl each other out, whatever that means. Basically it takes forever. Teams can be up by more than 200 runs at some points in the game, which then affects who gets to, or has to, bat.

I’m sure you’ve got the basic idea: Americans don’t get this game.

If you think baseball can get a bit boring on television, you haven’t watched a five-day cricket match.

And so, sports fans, you do have to enjoy basketball. High school basketball is generally played with four 8-minute quarters. Throw in a half time and a few free throws and there is even time for a bit of overtime in a couple of hours.There are plenty of high school games that don’t last an hour.

It probably seemed like a lot more than an hour for the Fairfield (Montana) girls basketball team on Thursday when they went down 50-38 to their Class B rival, Choteau. The victory was probably sweet for the Choteau girls, who hadn’t won a game against Fairfield since the 2005-06 season. No one had, the Fairfield girls were sitting on top of the nation’s basketball winning streak record. They went 120 games without a defeat before Thursday’s loss. 120 isn’t bad. Duncanville Texas holds the all time record with 134 games from 1987 to 1991.

Now I know that you don’t read this blog to get the latest sports news. And some of you may expect that I’ll still make some theological reference here at the end of the blog. After all, I’m the guy who wrote the blog on the theology of c-clamps a few years ago. But I don’t have a deep theological conclusion for this blog - or even much theological reflection for this day. Sometimes I am just surprised and amused by the news headlines that I glance over. Sometimes it is just an amazing thing to live in this world. And I do have a rather strange sense of humor. It is not at all uncommon for me to find myself laughing over things that everyone else is taking very seriously. It isn’t uncommon for me to sit at the back of a meeting giggling when everyone else is filled with passion about the decisions being made and the speeches being delivered.

I do have a few friends in Australia who read this blog from time to time. And they probably find nothing amusing about my lack of understanding of the game of cricket. Luckily, they’re unlikely to read today’s blog. They’re probably too busy celebrating Australia’s amazing defeat of England in the opening round of the world cup.

At least I think it was amazing. I really don’t understand the game at all.

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Our son earned his masters degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He was married in Chapel Hill. He and his young wife lived in a small apartment building there. We were fortunate to be able to visit them a few times in that short period of their lives, helping them with the move down, going down for their wedding, and making another trip by renting a car and driving to Chapel Hill as part of a trip to attend a meeting in Atlanta. As proud parents we also made a trip there to attend our son’s graduation. Chapel Hill isn’t a bad place for a young couple to start out their lives. It is a university community, with plenty of rental housing. It is a diverse community with all kinds of different churches and religious institutions. Our son and his wife were able to find a United Church of Christ congregation that welcomed them and provided a place for their wedding and reception as well as some listening ears and home-like fellowship for them as they lived far from the places where they grew up and attended college.

One small incident stands out from their time in Chapel Hill. On the morning of our son’s graduation ceremony they woke to find the window of their car smashed. Apparently it was a kind of robbery attempt. The glove compartment and other areas in the car had their contents scattered around the car’s interior. Being college students, however, they had nothing in the car to steal. The car was insured and a glass company was able to send out a mobile unit to replace the window. It was just one of those things that happens. You get over it and move on.

I don’t know why, but I thought of that broken car window and the senselessness of that crime this week when I read the story of the murders of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, her husband Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister Razan. The three young adults, aged 19 to 23, were all shot in the head and killed.

The police investigation into the murders is on-going, but apparently there is little question about who committed the crime. Craig Stephen Hicks has been arrested. He turned himself in after the deaths and has been charged. Apparently, shortly after 5 pm on Tuesday he went to his neighbors’ apartment and shot the three people inside. They all died.

What is less clear is why he did it. One police report stated that it was the continuation of a dispute over parking. The family of the victims and many who have posted responses to news stories and participate in social media believe that the crime was a response to the religion of the victims. All three were Muslims of Arab descent. The women were religious and wore head scarves when they went out in public. It was easy to identify their religion by their appearance.

Those who knew Hicks said he had a hatred of all religion.His wife described him as a person who would not have killed three people because of their religion. His ex-wife described him as a man with a dangerous temper and confrontational behavior who lacked compassion. She described him watching the film “Falling Down” in which a disgruntled employee goes on a shooting rampage over and over again. He thought the movie was funny. Even if the start of the rage had something to do with parking, killing three people over a parking dispute is way outside of the normal range of behavior. The attorney of his wife suggested that mental illness was a factor in the shooting.

I am not confident that we will learn what happened from the news. It is hard to piece together the facts of what happened. Figuring out the motivation is even more complex. Press reports are sensationalist and the public interest will fade long before investigators have collected all of the evidence. Even thought, the key piece of evidence - eyewitnesses to the shooting - is forever lost. And the mental state of the shooter may never be fully known.

What I read this morning, however, did open my eyes a bit. Story Corps, an oral history project that records conversations between people all over the United States, recorded a conversation between Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha last summer. The project has recorded tens of thousands of interviews, kept by those who participated on CDs and archived in the Library of Congress. North Carolina public radio station WUNC published Abu-Salha’s Story Corps interview.

“Although in some ways I do stand out, such as the hijab I wear on my head, the head covering, there are still so many ways I feel embedded in the fabric that is our culture. It’s so beautiful to see people of different areas interacting and being family, being community.”

The interview took place before Abu-Salha’s marriage. She and her husband were married in December, just over a month before their deaths.

The StoryCorps interview is less than 10 minutes long. In it Abu-Salha asked her teacher what she would say if she had the whole world’s attention. The answer was, “Live in peace, that’s what I would say. Make this world a place where everybody has the right to live and we don’t fight over our differences but learn to accept our differences.”

OK teacher. You’ve got our attention. I live 1,700 miles from Chapel Hill. (I know I drove the round-trip journey twice.) And I have heard your words. And I know the truth of what you have said.

This world is not yet a place where everybody has the right to live. Three bullets into the heads of three victims has robbed them of their right to live. I, for one, have decided not to focus my attention on their murderer. I’ll trust the law enforcement officials and court system and penal system to deal with him.

My job is to tell the story of the victims and proclaim the message of the teacher of one of them. “Live in peace. Make this world a place where everybody has the right to live and we don’t fight over our differences but learn to accept our differences.”

It is a good message for those of us who live in Rapid City, South Dakota today. It is a good message for the world.

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Nearly a decade ago now, we had the opportunity to study at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Center in Beausejour, Manitoba. The center is unique in its educational model, offering theological education that is rigorous and recognized by the accredited University of Manitoba, but offered in the teaching and learning styles of aboriginal Canadians. Although specifically tailored for indigenous designated lay ministers, Learning Circle Courses are expanded to include non-native learners on occasion. In our time at the Center, Rev. Stanley McKay served as elder for the circle. Stan is a very modest man who has made deep contributions to Canadian culture and education. The recipient of the Canadian National Aboriginal Achievement Award grew up on the Fisher River Reserve on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg before the community was accessible by road.

Stan told us of the time before electricity came to the community. Isolated from the rest of the world most of the year, people traveled and traded by canoe in the summer and over the ice in the winter. He grew up listening to the stories of the elders, who told of a time of even more isolation - the time before airplanes and snowmobiles - the time before people learned to read books.

In those days, the stories of the people were passed down through long evenings, often with stories being repeated multiple times in an evening and multiple evenings in a row. It wasn’t just that they became familiar - they became so deeply ingrained in the listeners that they could be recalled and told with word-for-word accuracy at a moment’s notice.

The world doesn’t work that way any more. Yes, there are still isolated communities in the north country where there are no roads to provide access. The only access is by airplane in the summer and over the ice roads in the winter. But those communities now have electricity and television and Internet access and the problems of the outside community including drug and alcohol addiction, family violence, and oppressive poverty.

The north is no longer isolated. You can now book a 20-day cruise through the northwest passage on a ship with continuous satellite communication with the outside world. Remote villages such as Niaquornat in Greenland, Beechey Island and Cambridge Bay in Nunavut now have tourists arriving each year.

Whatever else we might say about this world, no amount of nostalgia or idealism will allow us to turn the clock back to simpler times when the primary entertainment was telling stories around the campfire. The world just isn’t that way any more.

One of the costs of this modern way of life that we have adopted is a perpetual busyness. We speak of being “always on” and never truly getting away from our work. Recently Susan and I took a trip for some continuing education. I checked my e-mail multiple times each day, remained in contact with a cell phone and wrote the blog each morning as usual.

The very technology that is supposed to make our lives more efficient often clutters them with all kinds of additional demands and tasks. It seems that overtime technology promises to simplify my life, it ends up making it more complex with profuse password prompts, inboxes brimming with hundreds of emails each day and interconnected applications that share data without my understanding. Why do I need to sign on to a website using Facebook or Twitter? Why does a shopping website need to remember what I look at? Why does an activity that used to seem relaxing, such as browsing the web or looking at a video on YouTube now turn into something that is way more like work that recreation?

Simply managing everyday life is unnecessarily complex and filled with stress.

I find myself longing for evenings around the campfire without any media and connections to the wider world.

But, as I said, we don’t get to turn the clock back.

Living a balanced life, however, does demand that I create spaces that are free of the technology. And the process has to be intentional. I can remember when I would launch my canoe on the lake knowing that the cell phone stashed in the car wouldn’t work in the remote location and couldn’t withstand the wet environment of the lake. These days the tallest tree on the horizon is really a cell phone tower assuring excellent reception all around the lake and the phone has a waterproof case that floats. The fact that I still leave the phone in the car is a conscious choice. I know that I need the space away from the technology, but sometimes it isn’t as simple as taking a walk or lifting a paddle.

These days I have to work harder to create complexity-free zones where I am mindful and present. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t constantly check email. I don’t leave my email program open on my desk and I don’t respond to all of the alerts on my phone. I set aside times during the day for email, try to deal with it in a timely fashion and reserve the rest of the day for other activities. I keep my phone on “vibrate” much of the day and I don’t answer it if I am talking to someone else. I trust those who really need to get in touch with me to leave a voicemail and wait for my response.

Recently I read an online article on mindfulness that was published on the BBC website. At the end of the article it said: To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Then there was an invitation to sign up for the morning email from BBC news. I resisted both invitations. Instead, I closed my eyes and spent a couple of minutes meditating.

I am not sure how I will get the old stories from the recesses of my memory into the lives of my grandchildren, but something tells me that instant communication isn’t the solution.

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I suppose that as long as people have experienced disease and illness, they have sought appropriate names for their conditions. Because of the devastating effects of diseases, some names of illnesses bring fear to our hearts. I suspect that it is extremely difficult for a doctor to bring news of a cancer diagnosis because of the fear generated in the patient and family even though there are many different types of cancer, some with very positive survival rates. Just hearing the word brings to mind the many people we have known who have suffered and died with that devastating illness.

Other diseases are pretty good descriptors of the actual condition. Heart disease is self-explanatory. People know how important our hearts are to our lives and disease in that important organ is life-threatening.

And there are diseases with technical names that are not in our common vocabulary. These diseases send us to the dictionary or the Internet in search of some kind of explanation. Unless you have a family member or friend who has suffered from Fibromyalgia, for example, you are unlikely to know that such a diagnosis means. That disease is a challenge for doctors to obtain an accurate diagnosis because many of the symptoms are shared with other conditions and diseases. Things like muscle ache, fatigue, sleep disruptions, memory and mood issues often aren’t identified with major illnesses. We’ve been known to blame the victim of such symptoms as being lazy instead of seeking to understand their very real condition.

Then there are the diseases whose names carry social stigma. This is true of many brain diseases. It is almost assumed that such illnesses are signs of character weakness or some kind of self-induced flaw. Victims of mental illnesses and their families often have real difficulty enabling others to understand the serious nature of their diseases. These diseases don’t get the visibility or the funding afforded to certain other illnesses, even though they cause great pain and suffering and can result in the death of the victim.

Our attitudes towards disease aren’t caused by the names chosen for the conditions, but sometimes the names don’t help better understanding.

Over the past several months I have had a colleague in another city who has been disabled by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Plenty of us have had phases in our lives when we have suffered from a lack of sleep. Perhaps we were caring for young children or aging seniors and had our sleep interrupted frequently. Perhaps we became over committed in our work life and weren’t devoting enough time to sleep. There are several different ways in which we might experience fatigue. We were vaguely aware that our situation was at least in part caused by factors that we could control. Doctors, being busy like the rest of us, might be tempted to gloss over and not take seriously complaints of fatigue. But this disabling disease is more than just being tired.

It even has a serious medical name: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. That’s a mouthful and not really helpful for those who want to understand what is going on. And that is part of the problem. The disorder hasn’t received the attention and the funding necessary for a clear understanding of the disease. It is not uncommon for sufferers of the disease to go years without a proper diagnosis.

Lets be clear. This is a disabling disease. Patients suffering from this disease experience profound and persistent fatigue. Even a simple task like getting dressed to go out can put a sufferer in bed for days. Memory loss and other symptoms can strike fear in the hearts of those who suffer.

Diagnosis is difficult. There is no simple medical test to determine whether or not someone has the disease. And there is no treatment regimen that is accepted by panels of doctors. There has been insufficient government-funded research for doctors to understand and treat the illness.

It has been estimated that anywhere from 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. And they still haven’t come up with a name that even elevates that condition from a “syndrome” to a “disease.”

A condition that leaves its victims bedridden seems to me to be a disease. A new name has been proposed: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease, or SEID. I’m not sure that name is much of an improvement. All of the scary diseases have one or two-word names: Cancer, Arthritis, Heart Disease, Plague, Rabies, Anthrax, Smallpox, Influenza, Ebola, Typhoid, Dengue, Hepatitis,Whooping Cough. Maybe we don’t take diseases with complex scientific names seriously.

Whenever I donate blood, the screener asks if I or anyone in my family has ever suffered from Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. I don’t even know what Creutzfeld-Jakob disease is, but it has a name that takes a bit of practice to pronounce. If one got that disease, heaven forbid, at least you’d remember the name of your condition. And, I’m pretty sure, you’d be deferred from giving blood.

Meanwhile, my colleague, and many others, suffer and are disabled by a disease that is not garnering much public attention, funding for research, and in general is not understood by doctors.

Laura Hillenbrand, author of many best-sellers including “Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” has suffered for years from the illness. She reported that at one point, over a two-year time she was unable to leave her home because she wasn’t strong enough to walk to the car. Despite her disabling condition, she continues to write and produce books. Imagine what we might be able to read if there was an effective treatment for here condition.

Our lack of understanding can only be addressed by solid research. And research often is not inexpensive. In the meantime, victims of the disease will continue to be disabled and resources will need to be provided to support them in their suffering. Treated or untreated, understood or misunderstood, the disease has a devastating effect on our society. We miss productivity and witness suffering.

While they are at it, I hope they can come up with a better name for the illness.

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The weather has given us a little break from winter here in the hills. We know that there can still be much more cold ahead, but it is nice to feel the warmth and have the snow melt around us. Still, it has not been a particularly wet winter and the forest is dry. We could use a wet spring to help us prepare for summer.

It isn’t really spring here. We know better than that. It’s still winter, with a bit of springtime weather thrown in. But we do notice that the days are lengthening. In just over a week, Lent will begin. The name of the season is taken from the lengthening of the days. The traditional Latin name for the season, Quadragesimal, never really caught on among English speakers. Somehow it doesn’t roll off our tongues that easily.

The meaning and practice of the season has shifted in my life as I have grown through different experiences. Early in my career, it was a time of personal piety. The prayer, penance, and self-denial were kinds of spiritual corrections to some of the excesses of other seasons of my life. I needed to focus more on my spirituality and less on the material. Lent was an opportunity to practice personal disciplines and re-focus my faith.

These days, I see Lent as an opportunity for the community and individual members of the church to practice grief. Grief is a reality in a life. And for those of us who have lived a few years and collected a few losses, grief seems to layer itself with depth upon depth. One loss reminds us of another. Things we thought we had gotten over are still present in our lives.

Since we all experience grief it makes sense that we might learn more about the journey of grief and engage in practices that give us skills for the grief that lies ahead. Maybe you can never prepare for the really big losses in life. Maybe there is no way to practice for the unimaginable. Still there are skills that help in a time of crisis and we turn to what is familiar when we don’t know where else to turn.

I don’t know if it is the somewhat puritanical roots of our particular corner of the church, or my family’s particular observances, or my personality type, but the season of the traditional church year that I barely observe is the one we are in now. The Latin is Septuagesima. More familiar is Shrovetide. Sometimes it is also called pre-Lent.

I’m not sure how you prepare for a season of preparing for Easter. In some traditions, this is the time of parties and excesses. If we will be giving something up for Lent, the reasoning goes, we might as well indulge ourselves before giving it up. The logic of that kind of thinking escapes me. I guess my mind just doesn’t work that way. In my way of thinking if what I want to do is to make corrections in my life, there is no need to exaggerate the things I want to correct before making the changes.

The name “Shrove” comes from the word shrive, meaning “confess.” Shrovetide is a season of intentionally collecting sins to confess in some traditions. The practice of Shrove Tuesday - Mardi Gras in French - is to eat all of the rich, fatty foods that will be denied during the season of Lent.

Although I recognize the value of fasting as a spiritual discipline, I think it is best as a private practice and not as an item of public display. Attempts at making it a communal ritual have ended up in some strange practices over the centuries. The ritual fasting of meatless Fridays promoted by the Roman Catholic church doesn’t really produce much reduction in the amount of food consumed. By substituting fish for other meat products, it is possible to consume the same number of calories and engage in a “fast” without any real self-denial or even much awareness that one is doing anything differently.

In general, faith doesn’t lend itself to mass production. It is, after all, all about our relationship with God. And relationships are built one-on-one.

I don’t intend to do anything much differently in this week of preparation for Lent. There will be a slight uptick in the work level at the church, because there is a lot of planning and thought that needs to go into the activities of the season. Holy Week is an intense time for us and there are lots of arrangements to be made.

The youth will host a pancake supper before our Ash Wednesday worship. It is a time to get together for a meal and to celebrate the joy of being together. The youth also raise a little money for a mission project to being the season in the spirit of service.

In London, Shrove Tuesday is the day for the annual Parliamentary Pancake Race. Teams from the House of Commons and the House of Lords participate in relay races to raise funds and awareness of the work of Rehab, which provides services for persons with disabilities and others who lack access to health care, training education and employment services. I’m not exactly sure what a pancake race is, but I guess it involves carrying the pan and perhaps flipping the pancake as you run. It is another tradition that doesn’t seem to have caught on in our corner of the world.

Mostly, these next few days are an opportunity to poke our heads out of doors, to breathe the fresh air and to be reminded that we are connected to this sweet earth in ways that are beyond our understanding. Its too early to begin working in the garden or getting serious about springtime chores. There is still plenty of ice in the lakes. Maybe it is a good time to just take a walk and do a little thinking.

Like life, this season is in part a time to look back and also look ahead. There is much more to be learned and much more to be revealed in the days to come.

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When we were living in Chicago, friends from other parts of the United States would occasionally tease me about my home state’s motto: “Big Sky Country.” The would say, how can the sky be big or little? It is just the sky. I would try to describe how the air and sky felt different when I was home in Montana from the way it felt in Chicago. My words simply didn’t convey any of the sense of Montana to them. I ended up saying, “The only way for you to know that that slogan means is for you to come to Montana.” Some of my friends did. They get it. The sky does seem bigger when the air is clear and you are in a place whether there are few buildings and you can see horizon to horizon.

I’m pretty sure that when our chorus teacher, Mr. Nelson, had us memorize all of the verses to “America the Beautiful,” his reason had to do with musicality and the need of choir members to look at their director when singing so that the ensemble sang together. I doubt that he even knew the story of the poem, which was first published in “The Congregationalist,” a publication of my church, in 1895. The words were slightly revised in subsequent versions, but the poem remained essentially the same.

It is likely that the church, though not the Congregational church, had something to do with the choice of the tune for Katharine Lee Bates. Samuel A. Ward, credited with composing the tune was organist and choirmaster at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey. The tune, however, soon became popular among Congregationalists. The missionaries used that tune for the school song at the University of Shanghai.

I was thinking about Bates’ poem last weekend because I was in Colorado. We didn’t got up into the mountains, but if you make it to the top of Pikes Peak, either by the cog wheel railroad or the rather steep gravel road, or hiking the Barr Trail, you will see a plaque with the words to the poem on it.

The story, as best as I know it is that Bates, who was an English professor at Wellesley College, took a train trip west to teach the summer session at Colorado College. On her way to Colorado, she stopped over at the Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair being held in Chicago. Chicago was a place of great construction and architecture already, with the huge job of rebuilding after the great Chicago fire. The occasion of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the North American continent, was an occasion to invite the world to Chicago. Great architects such as Daniel Burnahm, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Louis Sullivan designed buildings in the neoclassical style. Funded, in part by huge investments from wealth business leaders of the time, such as J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Waldorf Astor, the magnificent white buildings were lighted by electricity and an amazing sight for the time.

From Chicago the train took Bates to St. Louis, Kansas City, and across the plains of Kansas to Denver. By the time she got to Colorado, she had seen a lot. The story is that she wrote the poem after making it to the top of Pikes Peak.

So the first verse of the poem makes sense, knowing the trip Bates had taken:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Having grown up on the eastern slope of the Rockies, I thought that “purple mountains” was a bit of poetic license, since Bates made her trip in the summer and purple is really a winter color in the mountains, but I could pretty much understand the rest, especially amber waves of grain. I knew how a wheat field looked when it was ready for harvest. OK, there is very little fruit grown in the part of the world that Bates traveled, but you have to allow for a bit of poetic licenses and “fruited” is way better than the original version which called it an “enameled” plain, whatever that meant.

The middle two verses might take a particular perspective on history, but then, so did the Columbian Exposition. The roles of indigenous people weren’t exactly celebrated in either event. The times were different in those days and we still had much to learn about the full history of this land. Still, I grew up Congregationalist. I got the bit about stern impassioned stress and the call to self-control.

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

We were the children of the World War II generation and we had heard, from our earliest days about sacrifice and putting others ahead of one’s own health or safety. And, as an adult, I have become grateful to Mr. Nelson for having us memorize the words. There have been many times when the need for mercy and continual refinement of the vision have been apparent.

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

But when you memorize, you push for the home stretch - the fourth verse:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Somehow, I knew that the alabaster city was Chicago. I had visited Chicago once, when I was six years old. I remembered the elevated trains and Buckingham fountain, but little else. So when I moved to Chicago, I was expecting to see some of that Alabaster. Of course the buildings of the Columbian Exposition weren’t really alabaster. They were marble. And by the time I arrived, those that remained, such as the Museum of Science and Industry and the relocated Field Museum, were no longer white at all. They were soot stained and gray.

Still, it is a great poem. One worthy of remembering. Like other great poems, it probably exaggerates a bit. It makes a pretty good song. These days when I sing it, I remember high school choir, but I can also hear Ray Charles’ version as well. That’s probably a good thing.

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Around the conference, the term “nones” has a meaning. It was probably coined by researchers of the sociology of religion, perhaps even some of the people who work at the Pew Research Center, source of most of the statistics that get quoted in religious circles. “Nones” are people who indicate no religious affiliation. It used to be a very small and insignificant number, but it is now the fastest-growing segment on the religious spectrum in our country.

Part of the problem when a group of religious leaders get together to discuss this phenomena is that we really don’t know what we are talking about. We spend our time in the church. We are most in contact with those who have a religious affiliation - in fact we spend most of our time working with those who are deeply committed and are in leadership positions in their churches. And most of the time when we talk about those with no religious affiliation, we have no idea what we are talking about.

The researchers tell us that a major factor in the growth of adults with no religious affiliation is young adults. People between the ages of 19 and 32 are the largest age cohort in the “nones.” When I think of the young adults that I know, I realize that most of them are people who grew up with some involvement in the church, participating in local congregations, attending camps and youth events, or having some other connection with the church. In many cases, they weren’t as involved in the church as I was, attending weekly and participating in multiple other church events, but that would be true of adults of other ages that I know as well.

But we know that there is a significant population of young adults who grew up with little or no real participation in the church. They may have attended on a special occasion with grandparents or other family members, but regular church participation wasn’t the pattern of their households. I am well aware that there are plenty of young adults who have had such an experience, I just don’t happen to know very many. Most of the young adults I know are either involved in the church now or were involved when they were teens.

The researchers are telling us that there are plenty of other young adults.

It seems that any group of people, or segment of the population, who have no significant experience in the church, is a mission field. If we take seriously Jesus’ invitation to take the gospel to the whole world - our reach has to be wider than just those who come to us. I’m no fan of forced conversion - or of any kind of pressure. But I do know that if there are people who have no significant experience in the church, we have much to offer to them and failing to share the deep meaning and rich community of the church is more than a tragedy. It is a sin.

Having been parked solidly in the midst of the church for my whole life, I’m not sure where to begin. I have invested most of my life responding to and forming community with people who come to us. I’ve never been the kind of evangelist who goes out to others. And what little I have read about significant outreach and community building among those who have no religious experience have been stories of ministers who themselves were young adults making peer-to-peer connections. I’m a little old for that style.

A few months ago, I did quite a bit of reading about pioneer missionaries in the early days of settlement of the American West. There seemed to be two categories of these pioneering ministers. One group was essentially taking their Christianity to those who already considered themselves to be Christian. Church planters and circuit riders found settlers who were Christian, but who had left their churches behind when they moved west. These people were eager to have churches in their community and quick to respond to the traveling missionaries. The second type of missionary went to indigenous populations to spread the Gospel. These tended to be spreading a good deal more than their religion. They were spreading their system of education, their understandings of health care and nutrition, their way of organizing government and a whole lot more of culture and society. They saw the people they went to convert as uneducated and uncivilized. They never sought to understand the cultural, educational and religious traditions of the indigenous people. And they were not beyond the use of violence, including robbing people of their food supplies, as a technique for their work of exporting culture.

I’ve also read plenty about the long-lasting effects of this particular form of cultural genocide.

Were I to pick one of those categories, I guess I’d have to go with spreading the gospel among those who have already heard the gospel.

Neither of those models, however, serve the church’s current reality. There is a growing population in our own communities of people who don’t really know what the church and life in a close religious community is all about. And, if my limited experience can be trusted, most of them have a notion of what religion is about that is far from the reality of the church that I know. I don’t experience the church as harsh and judgmental, scattering fear of future punishment to manipulate and control people. I don’t experience ministers as money-grubbing hypocrites who say one thing and live their life in a totally different manner. I don’t experience the church as unaccepting of those who don’t fit a strict and narrow version of morality. I don’t experience religion as an ignorant anti-science group who want to live in some kind of world of make believe.

I experience the church as a center of love and support - a place of people who walk with me in the times of grief, who share one another burdens. I experience the church as a place where we can talk about the things that are most important in our lives and share our doubts as well as our convictions. I experience the church as a place filled with awe and wonder, mystery and fresh learning.

Sharing that experience with the “nones” seems worthy of a lifetime of commitment and dedication and I don’t have a lifetime ahead of me. Still, the time and health that I do have is not insignificant. Perhaps the call to repent - to turn in a new direction - is a call that I need to be taking seriously. It is worthy of prayer and discernment.

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I’ve been going to conferences and church events long enough to know that even the very best-planned events will be mixed in terms of what I can use. I’m usually suspicious of workshops. Most of what happens in a workshop is someone sharing an idea that has been successful in their location without having really done the work to understand the complex dynamic of other locations and settings. Their “success” is often not replicable in another setting and so the “workshop” is less about what might be done in the future an more about what has been done in the past. Add in a couple dozen ministers, who have no problems with their egos and it turns into a kind of bragging event. I used to enjoy the bragging, but it gets old after a few years.

The presentations by the leaders of our church’s national ministries used to be a high point of events for me. When I was a new minister it was incredibly stimulating to hear about the programs and projects of our church. These days, however, I don’t have much expectations for national church leaders. The budgets of our church’s national setting have been declining and the people who are attracted to that work no longer seem to be on the “cutting edge” of church growth. Stewards of decline have a different perspective than is helpful for the very alive congregations that I have been called to serve. Additionally, there was a time when the leaders of our church’s national setting had more experience than I and I looked up to them for wisdom and guidance. After 37 years in the ministry, I’ve collected a lot of experience. In most cases I have a lot more experience than our national ministry setting employees. I am often more familiar with church resources and the history of those resources than those we have called to be involved to carry resources to the churches. No surprises there. I’m getting older.

I come to events like this, however, for the keynote speakers and the worship. On that score, Congregations Alive 2 has exceeded expectations. Maren Tiribassi has woven together powerful worship and has engaged our senses with singing, movement, scripture and poetry. Our worship has been rich with elements that I will use in planning worship back in our home church.

In this event yesterday’s keynote presentation by Dr. Rodger Nishioka was worth the entire trip. He drew a challenging time slot for his opening keynote. 24-hours into the conference, he was the speaker after lunch. We had already experienced three workshops and a presentation by a church official. We’d had a really nice lunch and some of us might have been inclined to doze off. There was no dozing, however, during Dr. Nishioka’s stirring three-hour interactive presentation. He kept us spellbound with his exciting first-hand presentations of church growth and development. His understanding of the patterns of decline in the church was complete, but he didn’t dwell with the statistics. He helped us to understand and move on. He also helped us to understand what is working in congregations - how growth occurs and what we can do.

There is no surprise that all of the major studies of churches show that people don’t come to churches because of clever advertising campaigns. While well-done ads do make people who are already in the church feel better about themselves. People who aren’t in the church come because of invitations from others they know and trust. A church grows because its members invite others to participate. And when visitors come, they judge a church and decide whether or not to become involved based on the warmth of their reception. Churches that are warmly welcoming grow. Because people join churches for the sense of belonging, they often are inattentive to the needs of newcomers. They get together because they enjoy being together, not because they want to extend the effort to welcome a newcomer.

That information, however, can easily be gained from reading. What was exciting about yesterday’s presentation was that he engaged us in forming community around the scripture. He had us reading and studying the second chapter of Acts together. We were a large group, mostly sitting eight to a table. In most cases we didn’t know the others at our table well at all, but his guidance and style had us encountering the scripture and looking carefully at how that scripture might inform the life of the contemporary church.

At the same time as I was enjoying the experience and marveling at the gifts of our truly exceptional leader, I was aware that much of what he was leading us to do was replicable in our church. We can have similarly stimulating bible study an discussion in our setting.

Time goes quickly when you are fully engaged. I was amazed at how much we packed into a three-hour session and I was amazed at how quickly it was over.

We have one more keynote from Dr. Nishioka this morning and I am eagerly looking forward to it. It is good to feel the excitement that I used to find and to feel my love for the church and its people overcome the cynicism that I sometimes bring to events of the wider church. I’m quite convinced that God didn’t call me into the church to be a cynic and a critic. When I find myself sinking into that mode and role, I know it is a time for a change of direction. It is one of the ways that I know that I am called to serve the church in a local congregation. I love and am excited about what our church is doing. I feel grateful to be a part of our plans and dreams for the future. I have an entirely different attitude when I attend national church events and activities. I’m not well-suited for ministry in those settings.

Time moves on and soon it will be time to go back home and put to use what we are learning. Today, however, there is a strong sense of anticipation of what lies ahead. There is still much to learn.

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Our home faces north with ample windows on the north and south sides of the home. We have a garage on the west end of the home, so there are no windows facing that direction. On the east we have windows only on the lower level, which is where my library is located. My usual place to sit and write my blog is facing east with the window before me and above my computer monitor. Since I am an early riser and I write the blog upon rising, I get to watch the sunrise during the summer. In winter I usually have the blog finished before the pre-dawn light is gracing the horizon.

We’ve lived in this house for twenty years now, and I have a strong sense of direction wherever I go in my house or yard. For a decade before that we lived in a home in Boise, Idaho with roughly the same orientation in regards to the compass.

When I was a boy scout, we were taught to look for moss and lichens growing on trees. Because the sun passes from east to west along a southern alignment in the summer here in the northern hemisphere, the north side of the tree is the shadiest side and therefore more likely to grow moss. It was an interesting bit of trivia, but I never remember having to use it to discover direction. I grew up near the mountains and we did most of our hiking and exploring either alongside the river or up in the mountains. In either location directional orientation is easy. The river always runs down hill and we knew which direction we had come from home and which direction to follow the river to get back home. In the mountains, we’d usually start our hikes in a rather steep valley and altitude was a good indicator of direction. Again, the brooks and creeks ran downhill so they could be followed to the river.

When we lived in North Dakota people would often give directions in terms of the compass: “Head east of town three miles and take the county road north for 2 miles.” In the areas where the land was flat, roads tended to be built on section lines and we learned that it was easy to find a home or a ranch by following the directions. That way of finding things was more reliable for us than the other common method in the country: “Go a mile past the old Johnson place.” When I informed the person giving directions, that I didn’t know where the old Johnson place was, they might respond. “You know, it was Olson’s before the Johnsons bought it.” That rarely helped me, either.

When I’m in a city, getting my directions is more of a challenge. We used to go into the Marshall Fields store in Chicago, a building that occupies an entire city block. When we’d come out, especially if we exited by another door than the one we used to enter, I would be all mixed up about directions, often getting things reversed. I’d be heading south believing I was going north. Susan has always been better at getting oriented within buildings and I’ve learned to trust her sense of direction when we are in cities.

Denver is pretty simple, really. The mountains are on the west of the entire city. Look for the mountains and you can tell which direction you are going. I sometimes have to think for a second, however, because I lived for ten years in Boise, where the mountains are to the north of town.

Our room here faces west and we’re up high enough to take advantage of the moonset in the morning. I’m sure there are some good sunsets from this vantage point, but we have not yet been in our room at that time of day to take a look. The headboard of the bed where we are sleeping is on the south end of the bed. At home we sleep with the headboard on the east. It is silly how such a change can leave me a bit disoriented when I wake. I have the urge to go to the window and have a good look out to figure out which way is which.

When the Interstate Highway came to my home town, there was a home that had to be moved to make way for a new bridge. The homeowner had lived in that house for years and owned land nearby, so decided to have the house moved to his nearby lot. In the process, in order to make the driveway line up with the garage, the house was turned exactly 180 degrees and moved to the opposite side of the street. My brothers used to get a big kick out of watching the homeowner in the morning as he’d pull his car out of the garage, back down the driveway to the street, turn and head the wrong direction and drive to the intersection to turn around and go the right way. I’m thinking he learned which way to go after a while.

But I understand his disorientation. I’m pretty sure it would have mixed me up as well.

I think that we are more affected by directions than we are aware. Recently I heard a study by German and Czech scientists about the behavior of dogs. It seems that when they are off leash and left to themselves, most dogs align themselves with the north-south axis of the compass before doing their business. The researchers observed thousands of dogs and found the results to be very consistent. I don’t think that they have solved why this is the case, or even whether or not it is conscious on the part of the dogs. Do they sense the magnetic field and “know” which direction is which, or is it more instinctual?

Of course it also raises the question of what induced the scientists to invest so much energy in observing dogs doing what might as well be a rather more private activity.

Perhaps all of us have, somewhere deep in our DNA, a sense of direction. I don’t think, however, that the owners of the motel would take kindly to my moving the bed to face another direction. I guess I’ll just wait until I get home to figure out which way is which.

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I grew up in a small town. We claimed 1,200 residents, but that probably was a slight exaggeration. From there, I moved to Billings, MT, which had a population of 100,000 in those days. I remember honing my “city” skills in those days, learning to look up and find addresses, driving on streets with more than one lane of traffic in each direction, parking in parking lots, figuring out where to find goods and services, and using the Yellow Pages in the phone book. Next, Susan and I moved to Chicago.

I remember driving into Chicago for the first time. I was alone, on an advance trip to take move our household goods. I had a borrowed short box pickup. We didn’t have all that many things in those days. It was late afternoon. A friend had suggested that I tune the radio to a particular station to get the road reports. I did so and found out there was a traffic delay on my planned route. The problem was that I didn’t know any alternate routes. So I drove right into the thick traffic. Eventually I found the University of Chicago campus and our apartment building. It was dark by the time I found someone to give me access to the storage area, got unloaded, and headed back towards home.

By the time I returned with my wife and our own car, I had driven to the campus once. I still didn’t know any alternate routes, but was able to drive right to our new home.

We got lucky and were assigned an apartment on the alley side of the building. Our apartment building was on Woodlawn Avenue, just a block east of University Avenue, in the 5700 block, which was the main route for the fire trucks which were dispatched from 53rd street and most often headed past 64th into the area just south of the University. It seemed like there were sirens and trucks coming and going all night long. We could hear the sirens on our side of the building, but it wasn’t as loud as the other side.

After four years in Chicago, I felt like we had developed some pretty good urban skills. I had learned to lock the car without locking the keys inside. I also had learned to get into the car when I did lock the keys inside. I had learned to drive in city traffic and to find addresses in a much larger and more complex city. I had learned about suburbs and exurbs and how to find the goods and services we needed. I had learned to ride busses and trains and go to places where parking would have been next to impossible. I had developed a taste for museums, galleries and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

From there we moved to a small town in rural North Dakota. I hadn’t forgotten my small town skills. I was at home with farm machinery on the streets, a post office that you walked to, a cafe where people gathered for coffee in the morning, and the quiet and peace of the countryside.

Having collected both urban and rural skills has served me well in this life. I’m not intimidated by a visit to a city. I’ve driven in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Cleveland, Washington DC and a host of other cities. I’ve figured out public transportation in cities around the world. But I am also very much at home on the gravel roads in the heart of the Reservation or the empty, open spaces of the prairies. I can drive on narrow mountain roads and love the peace and quiet of being alone in a remote location.

Our current home is a pretty good mix. Rapid City doesn’t really have traffic but there are a few moments each day that bring out the worst in driving skills and demand patience for other drivers. And we have enough urban amenities that give us access to good music, good theatre and an occasional art show worth remembering. We’ve got a decent library and plenty of interesting places to go out to eat. Still, our home is on the outskirts of town without street lights and other nuisances that keep you from seeing the stars at night or hearing the coyotes sing through your open bedroom window. We’ve got deer and turkeys as well as people for neighbors and we seem to get along pretty well.

Once in a while, however, events bring us back to the city. Last night, as I prepared to go to sleep, I stared out the window of our 10th floor motel room at the lights of Denver that seemed to stretch as far as I could see. There were streets filled with cars without any sign of the traffic letting up. There were so many lights that you couldn’t see the stars in the sky. Even up fairly high, we could hear the sounds of traffic and a fair amount of sirens as the city went about its business.

When I lay in the bed I realized that I had been carrying tension in my shoulders from driving in all of the traffic. Navigating in a city is a lot easier with GPS than it was back in our seminary days, but it still takes planning and attention to what I am doing. Being able to see the motel wasn’t the same thing as getting there. It took a trip around the block to find the narrow entrance to the parking garage. Walking to the grocery store across the street required finding the right button to get a “walk” light and then walking briskly across the street to make it in the allotted time, while watching for cars making right turns against the red light.

We realize that we aren’t by nature city people. While most of the world’s population live in cities and the majority of the people have learned to thrive in such environments, we are a bit less than comfortable. We like the quiet of isolation. We like the dark of night. We know how to deal with the critters with whom we share the forest. We don’t get lost in the woods in the same way that we get lost in large buildings and city streets.

It’s good to get some city time. We don’t mind it. It reminds us of why we are happy with a little distance between us and the city.

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I don’t think that the word “patient” has often been used to describe me. For much of my life I have been annoyed with delays, frustrated with having to wait, and impatient with those who can’t or don’t meet deadlines. Although I’m not prone to yelling at others, I have raised my voice and expressed my frustrations. And, of course, family members have seen a bit more of this frustration than I display in public.

Aging, however, has granted me a modest amount of grace about such things. Perhaps patience is a gift of having survived multiple decades of this life. More likely it is a skill that requires more than a small amount of practice.

We’ve been rushing around to get ready to attend a conference this week. Leaving town always requires a bit of hectic preparation. There are certain things that are parts of our job that we simply need to do. When we travel or take vacations, what doesn’t get done before our departure needs to be accomplished when we return. So we sort of double up on some chores. There are other jobs that can be delegated, but delegating jobs involves making sure that the person who is covering for you has what is required to get the job done. And, in our technological world, there are e-mail auto-replies and voice mail messages to be put in place so that people get appropriate responses to their communications.

So yesterday was an appropriately busy day. In the midst of working my way through a somewhat longer than usual to-do list, I had the usual meetings and appointments. Early in the day I had an appointment related to my volunteer work as a Sheriff’s Chaplain. The person I was to meet was running late and I took a seat in a waiting room. As I sat, I sorted through a few e-mail messages on my phone and then realized that I had nothing to do while I waited. I remembered that the person whom I was scheduled to meet had tried to get our meeting scheduled a half hour later, but that I had insisted on the earlier time because I had another meeting at the later time. It occurred to me that the person was rushing precisely because of the inflexibility of my schedule. I waited about 10 minutes.

Later in the day I was rushing a bit to get to another appointment only to discover that they were running late. Another ten minutes - this time in a room that was filled with magazines, though I admit there were none that I would subscribe to or that particularly held my interest.

Both times, however, instead of getting irritated, I simply accepted the gift of a few minutes of quiet for reflection in the midst of a very busy day. When we get too busy, we often shortcut silence and meditation. We are often less thoughtful about our actions - and about our relationships with others. When, as was the case in both places, the person I was to meet apologized for being late, I was able to say that it was no problem. And I was able to genuinely mean it.

When a colleague was a bit late for a meeting, I didn’t feel angry or inconvenienced at all. It simply is a part of life that not everything can be timed to the exact minute.

You can look at a delay as a nuisance or as a gift of a few minutes of quiet. It is a perspective that I simply didn’t possess a couple of decades ago.

It is an interesting effect. On the one hand, it seems like time is more precious now that I am aware that I’m long past the midpoint of my life. I have only so many more years left. Although I have no idea of the span of my life, it is short enough that I know how precious my time in this life is. And it is a finite commodity. I won’t go on forever. There is an awareness of this that I don’t remember from the days when I was in my twenties, for example. In those days death was something reserved for people who were older, or less careful, or less lucky than I. I didn’t think about my own death and I’m not sure that I even really believed that I was mortal. I focused on what I could do, not on my limits.

Life is different now. Time is precious.

Still, I think I am more patient and more able to wait than I was when I was younger. Perhaps it is because I have learned the value of a few minutes to sit quietly and reflect on what is happening. Perhaps it is because I have learned that getting upset about things I cannot control is a supreme waste of time. I raise my blood pressure and get nothing for my performance except more stress.

Sometimes I wish I had learned to wait a bit earlier in my life. Then again life lessons aren’t something that can be rushed. Perhaps I simply had to wait to learn the things that come only from experience.

I’m heading into a few days of meetings and workshops and large group sessions. Some of the leaders and presenters will be inspiring and have new information to share. Some will be re-hashing old information that I’ve heard many times before. Some will be inexperienced enough to not realize that their exciting new idea isn’t new at all and that some of us have been aware of it for decades. What I take from these meetings and workshops will be dependent, in a large part, upon the attitude I take to them. I plan to approach them with openness, a sense of participation, and, hopefully, the grace to accept the time for what it is - a break from the usual, a chance to reflect, and an opportunity to share with colleagues.

Sometimes I’ve prayed the serenity prayer without being able to get much past “God grant me the patience!” Perhaps this week I’ve learned not only to ask for the patience, but to express my gratitude for the moments that have required that patience.

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The organization of any large group of people is a challenge. In the days before public address systems, radios and other forms of mass communication, the limits of the human voice were soon evident. A single voice doesn’t carry to thousands or more assembled, especially if they are engaged in the routine business of preparing meals, caring for equipment and the like. Add in a few horses and other animals and it is clear that a system has to be developed to create order.

From deep in the history of large military operations, a system of bugle calls was developed to communicate essential information to the troops. A bugle call is a simple tune, composed of very few notes. Technically, the call contains notes from a single overtone series. Thus it can be played on an instrument without valves, such as a bugle, or on a valved instrument, such as a trumpet, without changing the valves.

Drums and other loud musical instruments have also been used for communication in the noise and confusion of a battlefield. Bugle calls were also used in naval warfare situations as a signal to supplement signal flags to communicate between different ships.

Bugle calls were developed to signal the changes in a normal day as well as to issue commands in battle. There were signals to wake the troops in the morning, to call them to assemble, to warn them of the visit of a senior officer, to give directions to turn left or right or stay put.

There are a few bugle calls that have made their way into civilian use and are clearly recognized when used in a particular context. For example, “First Call,” the signal that personnel should prepare to assemble for a formation, is used at the start of horse races, where it is known as “Call to the Post.”

In the evening, when it was time to go to bed, bugle calls were used to signal the end of the day. “Sunset,” which is very close to “Retreat” was used to signal the end of the official day. It meant that it was time to prepare to sleep. The call is written into the musical score of “The damnation of Faust” by Hector Berlioz.

When all is done and it is time to extinguish all lights and go to sleep, the buler sounds “Taps.” The four tones of the song, with its repetition before rising to a single high note, echoed by the starting notes, is known around the world.

We, of course, have another association with the bugle call. I know. I played the trumpet as a youth and continue to play it today. I’ve raised my instrument and sounded taps at many a graveside. I’ve called taps for veterans of the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Th Korean War, The Vietnam War, and for those who served in times of peace as well. I’ve heard it played at dozens of other funerals that I have attended as a mourner or an officiant.

I know the power of the simple tune to bring tears to the eyes of those who are grieving. I know the power of the tune to bring memories to mind that were once forgotten.

Music has power to communicate when other means fail us.

And, as has been famously known since the burial of President John F. Kennedy, a bugler can play with the tears streaming down his or her cheeks.

Last night I heard taps played in a different, though obviously related, context. We were attending the opening performance of “Crisis” the latest original one-act play in a series of award-winning dramas produced by the staff and students of Central High School. “Crisis” explores the complex and world-changing events of the 1960’s with characterizations of four iconic American heroes: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gus Grissom. Although those events, and those deaths, were separated in context, they all were a part of the American psyche of the decade.

It would be a disservice to try to describe the play, which is complex and powerful and beautiful and inspiring all at once. I simply want to reflect on a simple aspect of the performance.

The young man who stood at stage center and played taps flawlessly on an instrument that he didn’t have time to warm up or prepare was not born in the 1960’s, or the ’70’s or the ’90’s. He probably has very few conscious memories of any events in the 20th century. He is a child of this new century. But that is true of the entire cast. They know these figures, who were the heros of my childhood only by studying them in history books - or, more likely, though the use of the Internet and Wikipedia.

They don’t know that there used to be moments when the President went live on all three networks at once, which meant that every channel on the television had the same program at the same time. They don’t remember how we got up early in the morning to watch the liftoff of a Mercury Capsules atop a Redstone Rocket. Gus Grissom was the second US citizen to go to space. We watched the coverage of that entire 15-minute flight, from liftoff to splashdown. The craft flooded and became too heavy for the helicopter to lift it to the deck of the waiting ship. Grissom nearly drowned before he was rescued. We were invested in this astronaut from that time on until he died in the accidental fire in an Apollo capsule during a pre-launch test six years later.

What those young actors don’t know is what it was like to have lived through the story that they were telling. Even the directors and teachers who assisted the students in their dramatic presentation are too young to have lived through that remarkable decade in the history of this nation and the world.

But they told the story in a way that assured me that it has not lost - that it will not be lost even when taps is played for the last of those of us who did live in those days. Their idealism was shining through the presentation. Their vision of a world at peace was as bright as ours once was.

When I was their age, we were living through the days they portrayed. Now they take their place as the leaders. Something tells me that we are in good hands.

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We lived in Chicago for four years during the 1970’s. But we didn’t live there in 1979, a year remembered by Chicagoans for the big blizzard. That winter, the snow overwhelmed the city’s crews. But we were there for a couple of memorable storms. Sometimes Lake Michigan creates a huge barrier that holds the snow storms in place and gives plenty of moisture to evaporate into the clouds. The winds off of the lake can be really severe and if you are close to the lakeshore, the 15- to 20-foot waves are truly impressive. And it’s fresh water. When the waves splash onto Lakeshore Drive, they freeze in place and the ice can build up to more than a foot.

There are a few things about snowstorms in cities that are different than what we experience out here. When all of the land is built up, there is no place to put the snow when it is plowed. The snowplows run down the center of the streets, burying the cars that are parked on either side of the street. The car owners shovel out their cars, tossing the snow back into the street. In many cases, crews need to use front end loaders and trucks to haul the snow out of the city. Chicago at least has a big lake on its eastern edge which is a fairly close place to dump the snow.

Another thing that happens in cities is that when travel becomes difficult, people don’t know what to do with their cars. During one blizzard when we lived in Chicago, I put the chains on my car and was able to get around just fine. The problem is that there were many people who didn’t have chains and whose cars became stuck and were abandoned where they became disabled. Driving down the freeway was a giant slalom course of randomly abandoned cars. Sometimes it was difficult to find a path through the abandoned cars. We later saw pictures in the newspaper of fleets of tow trucks clearing the freeways ahead of the snowplows. A similar phenomenon occurs in residential neighborhoods. People can’t find any place to park their car and end up leaving it in a very inconvenient and awkward place where it has to be moved to allow for the street to be cleared.

Life is a bit simpler around here. Although our annexation into the city has changed our snowplowing services and we don’t yet know what the new routine will be, my neighbors all understand that if a car blocks the street, the snowplow can’t get through. As a result, when someone gets stuck in a snowstorm, we all put on our boots, get out our shovels and go to work until that car is off of the street. I live near the top of a hill. The place cars most often get stuck is at the bottom. I’ve walked down there many times over the years to help extract cars so the snowplow can get up to our place.

While it isn’t anything like the 1979 blizzard, Chicagoans are buttoning up and staying in this morning. The schools are closed. A district with 400,000 students makes news when classes are cancelled. Add in a few suburban school districts and there are a lot of lives disrupted. It is still snowing in Chicago and many places have more than a foot on the ground already. The blizzard warning went into effect Sunday morning as people were getting ready to go to church. More than a thousand flights have been cancelled at O’Hare International Airport.

Of course there is always something amusing about a blizzard in a city - at least for someone like me with a bit of a twisted sense of humor. According to the Chicago Tribune, my main source of news about Chicago, The Disney on Ice presentation of “Frozen” scheduled for the United Center was canceled. “How do you know it’s snowing in Chicago?” “When it really gets bad, they cancel Frozen!”

Police have asked people to refrain from travel, Amtrak has cancelled runs. Some area highways and streets have been closed.

But you can be sure that Chicagoans didn’t let a blizzard get in the way of their Super Bowl parties yesterday. Chicagoans are huge sports fans. After all Chicago is home to the Cubs. Seriously, anyone can cheer for a winner. It takes a real fan to back the Cubs year after year after year.

And, unlike the landscape around here, almost everyone in Chicago has a pub within walking distance. And pubs seem to be gathering places when the weather outside is fierce. So the parties gathered to watch the game as usual yesterday.

Back in the hills, freezing rain on Saturday did slow travel for some folks and quite a few opted to stay at home yesterday morning, fearing slippery conditions. Although the city crews were out and travel wasn’t much of a problem, attendance at church was the lowest of this winter. Timing is everything with the weather, but attitude is also a big factor. The weather affects different people in different ways. Several of our oldest seniors, using walkers to get around, found ways to make it to church yesterday while folks much younger who navigate much easier found it a good day to stay home.

Reporters are calling this week’s blizzard one of the 10 biggest storms ever to hit the city. I guess it is about time for one of the really big storms. After all, you have to be 40 or so to remember the blizzard of ’79. Maybe the blizzard of ’15 will give people something new to recall when they tell stories of the weather they have endured. I know we like to tell the stories of the big storms around here and folks in Chicago are no different.

So, bundle up when you head out and be careful. As the North Dakota saying goes, “We count you as you head out and we count you again when you come in.”

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One of my occasional rants is about higher wages. I’m not a member of the Chamber of Commerce and I am not a small business owner, though a church does often operate in some ways like small businesses. Our employees are all motivated by faith and our wages tend to be low because we are a nonprofit organization without much extra money. A church, like ours, that is blessed with abundant generosity of the members has to make choices and we often choose mission and outreach rather than increasing institutional operational costs. What I am trying to say is that while I believe that workers should be fairly paid for their time, I know it is a complex issue.

Having said that, I have been known to be a bit vocal about South Dakota’s consistently low wages for almost all of its vocations. With some notable exceptions, South Dakotans tend to earn the lowest wages for their work. We consistently lead the nation with low teacher pay and governor after governor touts their work to attract new jobs to the state as they woo out of state businesses with promises of low wages. The result is that there are plenty of jobs in South Dakota where the workers don’t earn enough to pay rent and buy groceries. We did, as a state, vote to raise our minimum wage last year, but the new minimum wage is insufficient for a lone wage earner to provide for even a modest lifestyle for a family.

So with all of my talk, I feel it is important for me to back it up with generosity when I go out to eat. Having had family members who worked as restaurant servers, I was schooled early on about the need to tip a minimum of 15%. In most cases, when I go out to eat, I tip 20%. That tip amount, however, is for sit-down service. All around town, however, there are tip jars and other suggestions that we leave a gratuity for servers in fast-food and counter-serve restaurants. I know that those jobs aren’t inherently better than the jobs at other businesses, but at the same time I struggle with knowing what is appropriate for a tip. First of all there is the problem of not knowing who gets the tip. With a generic tip jar, all of the people working behind the counter ought to share the tip. The person operating the cash register isn’t somehow serving me more than the one who prepares a sandwich. But I don’t know how those countertop tip jars work. In a coffee shop, where I am already paying a very high price for a product that is very inexpensive to prepare, the percentage of profit on my purchase is much higher than some other businesses I frequent. Is the person who makes custom coffee beverages somehow more deserving of a tip than the retail clerk working for minimum wage in a convenience store?

I don’t often ride in a cab, and when I do it is in a city far away from home. I’ve heard that if you ride a cab in New York City these days and pay with a credit card, the screen gives you the choice of a 20-, 25-, or 30-percent tip. Thirty percent on top of a service that seems to me to be already over priced is not an option I’m likely to choose.

I’ve not experienced it yet myself, but I have heard of those who have dined in fancy restaurants where the credit card statement now has a line for a tip for the server and another line for a tip for the kitchen workers.

I think there is a bit of tip inflation going on. In the 1940’s a 10% tip was standard. Now we’ve increased the percentage, and we are steadily increasing the number of people we tip. When we stay in a motel there is usually an envelope encouraging tipping of the cleaning staff. What about those who clean other public buildings we frequent?

When we traveled in Europe, we found many establishments where the tip was included in the price. It solves the dilemma for the purchaser. You either decided to buy or not to buy the product, and you don’t have to think about the tip.

I’m well aware that higher wages for workers means higher prices for some of the things we purchase. The money has to come from some place and it is unlikely that consumers will have much say about wages for management or the margins of profit for owners. The concept of equal pay for equal work is nice in theory, but we are so far from it in application that a practical way to make changes isn’t clear to me.

We are planning a trip this week to a conference about faith formation and church vitality. We will be staying in a motel that was chosen by conference planners and is more upscale, and more expensive, than our usual. We’ll also eat a lot more meals in restaurants than typical. So we already know that we’ll be spending more than usual. And we are traveling out of state, so the workers we’ll be supporting with tips are likely better paid than the workers at home. Still, we will at least consider percentages in our tips - the higher the cost, the bigger the top. I’m not sure that quite translates to higher wages, higher tips, but I suspect there is a relationship there as well. We don’t make the system more fair by giving more to those who already earn more. Still, I don’t know how to reinvent the system and I suspect that there are plenty of workers in the places we will visit who could certainly use a little more income for their families.

I remember being a bit embarrassed when, as he got older, my father steadfastly kept to his standard 10% tip in a restaurant. I would sometimes sneak a few more dollars under my plate as I left. However, my children may have the same reaction to me. I’m ready to cap tips at 20%, even if the “industry standard” creeps up to 30%.

After all, I’m not exactly in the high wage category myself.

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