There are lots of ideas that come and go. Back in the 1970s and 1980s there was a process called values clarification. It was presented in different forms and was a predecessor to generational theory that later gained popularity. Morris Massey was a sought after motivational speaker for businesses who spoke on how different generations are motivated. He spoke specifically about the heroes around which people form their beliefs and views. Each person models his or her life after certain heroes who help to establish a sense of right and wrong, good and bad, normal and not normal. In an early training video he coined the phrase, “Who you are now is what you were when.”

In the early 1990s, William Strauss and Neil Howe published their book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. In the book they presented their theory of generational differences and presented an over-simplified analysis of American history and how different generations produced different qualities and quantities of leadership. The book was a best seller and Strauss and Howe made the rounds of conferences and symposiums speaking about their theory and observations.

Each of these different ways of explaining how the world is changing has some foundation in developmental psychology. And each theory reveals part of a bigger picture. They have value, but no one theory is complete for understanding what is going on. To state it simply, developmental psychology is a theory that says that human beings form meanings, attachments, values and behavior patterns in relationship to certain phases of development. At different ages, we grow and develop in different ways, responding to different psychological needs. Among the classic interpreters of developmental psychology is Erik Erikson, who charted eight stages of psychosocial development, each with a specific conflict.

Subsequent generations of study have revealed that the arrangement of psychosocial challenges into a chart is a bit misleading. We human beings are far less linear than Erikson’s chart. We don’t always complete our tasks in the same order. We don’t always do the same things at the same age. Still a developmental model is helpful in understanding why different things are meaningful to different people and useful in learning to motivate others.

Recently I have been thinking about psychology. I am more aware than I once was that I see the world differently now than I did 20 or 40 years ago. This reality is often demonstrated when I re-read a book that had made an impression me when I was a teen or in my twenties. Reading those books now, I understand things that I didn’t notice on my first reading. Sometimes it feels as if I didn’t understand a thing that I was reading back in those days. That is a bit unnerving simply because I was operating at a fairly high intellectual level in my twenties. I was reading a lot of books, processing a lot of information and engaged in a lot of learning. I use the skills and ideas that I developed in those days as a part of my everyday life and work. My academic degrees and my status as an ordained minister are accomplishments of my twenties. Now, looking back, I realize that although I was intelligent and capable of learning, there is an awful lot that I missed.

And there are many things that I would not have been able to understand back then.

I needed more life experiences to be able to process some of the complex thoughts and ideas of others. I didn’t have much time for fiction in my teens and twenties. Although I read the assigned fiction in high school and college, I was well into my thirties before I began to really explore fiction on my own. And I was probably into my fifties before I developed an appreciation for poetry, though I read poets and even dabbled in writing poetry at a much younger age.

It seems to me that I had a mind that was more capable of logical thought when I was younger. At least I was more capable of focusing and placing ideas into logical patterns. I learned that I could retain large amounts of information by recognizing the patterns in the thoughts of others and placing ideas and concepts into categories.

But I was less skilled in interpreting analogies and metaphors in those days. I wanted to assign a single meaning to a book or idea and move on. Now I recognize that meanings are layered depth upon depth and that one never can fully explore the multiple meanings that are contained in the simplest phrase or turn of words. I am no longer able to memorize easily, but I am proficient at pondering and delving. I can take an idea and wrestle with it for weeks and still have it unresolved. The way in which I learn is definitely different than was the case when I was younger.

I decided that I may no longer be brilliant, but I am definitely eclectic. Yesterday afternoon as I prepared to listen to a concert, I made a note to myself on a sheet of sticky paper and left it attached to the dashboard of my car to remind me of things I didn’t want to forget. I enjoyed a wonderful concert of classical and contemporary music by the Rawlins piano trio. After the concert and the reception and a bit of clean up, I locked the church and went to my car. As I sat behind the wheel I began to giggle. My note was a list with three items: groceries, Hammond B3, and Albert Camus. The first item is self-explanatory. I needed to pick up a few groceries on my way home. The other two items are just ideas that I want to think about. The Hammond B3 organ dates back to the 1960s. Combined with Leslie amplified speakers it has a distinctive sound that is still sought-after for jazz and gospel music. And I recently read a short biography of Albert Camus in the Smithsonian magazine that made be believe that I needed to re-read some of his works. I read The Stranger in English, but I read the Plague in French and I was probably too young to fully understand either book when I read them.

If you think my blogs are confusing and cover a wide range of topics, you should see the sticky notes around my desk!

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I can tell by the general stiffness in my shoulders this morning that I spend a few hours with a chainsaw yesterday. We’re working hard to get one of our wood piles cleaned up. We had two crews running splitters and we decided to use the chainsaw to cut up pieces that were too long for stove wood. There is a lot of wood in our churchyard at the moment and we need to start delivering it. October and November are our big months for deliveries, but we will continue deliveries as long as people need wood.



There is something about working together that creates connections between people. As we work we talk and joke and learn about each other’s families and lives. We feel more closely connected than we might had we spent our time in other ways. Of course there are a lot of ways to draw close to people in a church. Small groups such as bible studies often help to forge deep connections. Worshiping together creates shared experiences and shared memories. We meet at the table, whether it is sharing a snack after worship or a full meal. There are fellowship groups and craft groups and a lot of other opportunities for people to connect.

The church provides points of connection for people who might not otherwise meet. One of the places where this is fun to observe is with the youth of the church. Our town has two large high schools. Most of our youth go to one of those schools. There is also a Roman Catholic high school and a multi-denominational Christian high school as well as an alternate school that is part of the school district. Since the youth spend so much of their time at school it is natural that they form friendships with those who go to the same school as they do. However, the church provides an opportunity for students of different schools to connect, form friendships, and get to know one another.

We also provide connections between people who work in different places, belong to different service clubs, participate in different political parties and have different points of view. Because of the history and general organization of our particular congregation, we also gather together people with widely varying theologies and belief systems.

Providing a place and a context for people who are different from each other to connect is an important ministry that we offer. It sounds trite, but I think that it is very important – and very rare in today’s society.

There are plenty of opportunities for people to gather together with those who are similar to them. Sometimes it can be difficult to listen to ideas with which you disagree and it can be uncomfortable to be with people who are very different from you. Increasingly people watch only the cable channels or Internet videos with which they agree and avoid ideas and interpretations of events that are different from their own. Instead of this grand mixing bowl of different cultures, ideas and approaches that is the vision for our country, we divide into small sub-groups and surround ourselves with people who are similar to us. When we do so both the larger society and we are poorer for it.

When you are primarily associate with people with whom you agree and are similar you can quickly form an inaccurate picture of the culture. It begins to feel as if there are only two groupings of people: them and us. We often perceive others to be only one group, instead of the wonderfully diverse collection of ideas and attitudes that in reality it is. This kind of perception is common in politics. In the US, with only two major political parties, people tend to associate with one or the other. Then we tend to think that those who associate with the other party are all the same and all think alike. In reality there is a wide range of political beliefs and convictions within both of our political parties. It is likely that there is a person in the other party who is closer to our real convictions than are those at the extremes of our own party.

Unfortunately, our national legislature does not seem to be interested in looking for these connections. They seem unwilling to recognize the opportunities for compromise and the search for common ground. Winning the next election is far more important to many legislators than governing effectively. It is a sad reality of the current state of American politics.

So here is my solution. I think that we need to get a very large woodpile somewhere near the U.S. Capitol. Perhaps we could take part of the parking lot that is behind the building. People from all over could donate trees that have been cut down. The cost of transporting trees to the Capitol would be small in comparison to other costs generated by the legislative process. Then each Saturday morning the Senators and Representatives could gather to split wood together. There wouldn’t need to be any other agenda other than working side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder. The only rule is that we wouldn’t allow there to be Republican splitters or Democrat splitters. The legislators would be required to work together toward the common goal of getting the wood split. There would be no need of electing leaders. What leaders were required could emerge through hard work and dedication instead of being chosen by other means.



I’m thinking that splitting wood might be a good remedy for many different circumstances. Religious leaders, locked in ideological or theological differences, could be required to spend a half-day splitting wood together each week. Divorcing couples could be sentenced to the woodpile before splitting up households.

Of course this would generate an awful lot of firewood. But returning to heating our homes with firewood might generate less global warming than all of the hot air that is escaping form the halls of the legislature at the current moment of history.

It seems like it might be worth a try.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I went to hear Peter Rollins speak last night. Rollins, who is about 20 years younger than I, is an accomplished academic with a Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland. Although his degrees are in philosophy and political theory, he has made several studies of the organization and operation of the church. Growing up in Ireland during the troubles, it was natural for him to examine the violence that stems in part from religious difference. His own personal faith journey has taken him through many forms of Christianity including some of the church’s more evangelical and fundamentalist forms. His writing has led him to examine not only belief, but also doubt. Since about 2008, when he published a book entitled the Fidelity of Betrayal, he began to provide a critique of some of the beliefs and practices of the faith.

Although I don’t think that Rollins would describe himself as a part of the emerging church, he is certainly a darling of the emerging church movement. Many who are engaged in redefining the church and seeking new ways to live out their faith in settings that are less focused on building institutions have found Rollins work to be helpful in understanding and explaining their enterprise.

With his Irish accent and bright mind, Rollins is an engaging storyteller and easy to listen to as he weaves a bit of classical theology, a touch of bible reflection and personal experiences together.

I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but my reaction to the evening was a bit of disappointment. I think I had expected to learn something new, but for the most part the ideas that were shared were not new to me. While they might have sounded radical to some adherents of Christianity’s fundamentalist corner, I’m not sure that there were any of those folks in the gathering last night. As an academic, I’m relatively sure that Rollins knows where he stands in the long line of theologians and philosophers of religion, but most members of the audience last night were not academic theologians. I’m sure Rollins’ ideas were new to some of them.

It was an interesting crowd. I expected that I would be the oldster in a group of 30-somethings. But the crowd was almost as grey haired as our congregation when we gather on Sundays. The difference was that the hair was probably longer. There were a number of people who I might describe as aging hippies. They have an interest in counter-cultural happenings and aren’t likely to show up for mainline religious functions. They appreciated Rollins’ criticism of the institutional church.

As is often the case, I heard his criticism, but the institution he was criticizing bears little or no resemblance to the institution I serve, where I live and practice my faith. The one identifiable element in his portrait of the institutional church that I did recognize is music. We are a place of predominantly classical music. Although we probably have more musical diversity than a congregation that is strictly praise band or a smaller gathering that has access to only a few musicians, we do have a dominant genre to our worship music.

But our church isn’t a place that frowns on the expression of doubt. Our church isn’t a place that insists on conformity or consistency of belief. We do not require participants to agree on theology or interpretation of scripture. We make no claim to being possessors of the Truth. We are not focused on self-preservation or institutional survival only. We do not push away those who disagree. We have not forgotten Christ’s call to humble service of those at the margins of society.

Based on last night’s gathering, which probably isn’t typical, I would say that the every Sunday gathering of our congregation represents more diversity of thought and belief than the audiences that are drawn to hear Peter Rollins speak.

Rollins way of using classical theologians and thinkers such as Bonheoffer and Kierkegaard to provide a way of thinking about faith that does not claim exclusivity or certainty was somewhat new to me in my college years. But last night’s talk would have not have been considered radical or filled with new ideas to the people with whom I studied at seminary 35 to 40 years ago.

I might describe Rollins as an existentialist theologian who hasn’t yet caught up with liberation theology. That was a common way of thinking in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but there have been a lot of discussions held and books written since those days.

I don’t know what I expected from the evening. It was a pleasant gathering with friends in a comfortable atmosphere with a good speaker and good music. And the evening might have gone differently if I had taken the time to engage Rollins on some of the themes of mission, service, sacrifice and justice that come from Central American liberation theology of the end of the 20th century. It would be interesting to have time to show him our church and the ways in which we have restructured ourselves to be more responsive to emerging ministries and grass roots mission. I suspect that we would enjoy each other as thinkers and appreciate each other’s ideas.

But on a tired Friday evening after a long week filled with 12 and 14 hour days, I found myself wanting something that I could identify as a new idea or a fresh thought.

There was a huge emphasis on ecumenical cooperation in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. My mother participated in many such gatherings and conversations, especially around the area of Christian education. I remember that she used to come home from those meetings a bit disappointed. On more than one occasion she would ask, “Why do we have to go backwards and re-live the last 25 years in order to find common ground.” Sometimes I have a similar feeling when I hang out with some of my more fundamentalist friends. They are beginning to discover theological themes that were new to me decades ago, but my thinking has evolved in the intervening time. Sometimes it feels as if I have to go backwards in order to have a conversation with them.

Still it is a good enterprise to engage ideas with people who are different from me. It is good to look at myself through the eyes of people with a different perspective. I am grateful for the warm hospitality of our hosts and their passion for ideas. And I’m glad I got to hear Peter Rollins speak. His passion for the life of the mind is refreshing.

I just wish he would inspire a vision of the future instead of reminding me what I was like at his age.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There are some people in our town who didn’t sleep well last night. The parents and other family members to two children, one age 7 the other age 10, who are in the pediatric intensive care unit at the hospital are probably too filled with worry to sleep well. Just 24 hours ago they couldn’t have imagined that their life was going to take this turn.

There are also the parents of a child who was injured and treated and released from the hospital who are probably making special trips into the room to check on their sleeping child.

Elsewhere there is a 17-year-old who probably didn’t sleep well. And the parents of that teen had a rough night as well, I’m sure.

The investigation is not yet complete, and the closest I have to details is the press release from the Sheriff’s Office, so I don’t pretend to know exactly what happened, but the images from that news story are enough to make anyone cringe. A SUV, driven by a teen hit a stopped school bus head on. The force of the impact sent one child who was walking down the aisle of the bus flying, injuring her. The SUV then spun around after the initial impact and hit two children who were crossing the street to board the bus. Initial reports were that one of those children had life-threatening injuries. Last evening it was reported that hospital officials now believe that she is stable and heading toward recovery.

I don’t know if the teen was partially blinded by bright sun. I don’t know the speed at which the vehicle was being driven. I don’t know if the teen was distracted by a cell phone. There are plenty of things that I don’t know. What I do know is enough to make me shudder.

It is the kind of incident that is the stuff of nightmares.

It hasn’t been the best week in the story of our town. Tomorrow there will be two separate funerals for two unrelated people who died by suicide. Those families haven’t been doing much sleeping in the past few days, either. Their lives have become filled with nightmares.

I keep the lyrics of a hymn by Mary Nelson Keithahn close at hand in my office at the church. It was a hymn commissioned following the events of September 11, 2001. The hymn is very much in the tradition of the great laments of the Bible. The opening line is “When life becomes a nightmare that will not go away.” That phrase has come up frequently in the dozen years since I first sang the hymn. The accident in Rapid City yesterday was one of those nightmare moments for the people who were involved and those who witnessed the event and its results.

The hymn doesn’t end with the nightmare. Our faith doesn’t end there, either. One of the things about the hymn that attracts me is that it reminds me that ours is not the first generation to have experienced tragedy. This isn’t the fist time that teens have made life-altering mistakes. This isn’t the first time that innocent children have suffered. This isn’t the first time that a community has held its breath.

The key line in the hymn is not its beginning. For me, the key line is “We know our God is faithful.”

When times seem rough and things don’t turn out the way we want it is important to remember that we are not alone. Although the circumstances of each incident of suffering are unique, our people have been through pain before. Our people have known loss before. Our people have faced hard times before.

The relationship between the characters of the Hebrew Scriptures and land is an interesting story. Abram and Sarai set of from the land of their ancestors and leave ownership behind to discover that God is present in other lands and that the promises of God are fulfilled in God’s time and not always in a single generation. Later in the same story Abraham purchases the land for the burial of his wife and our people return to owning land as a memorial to the past. The people occupy the Promised Land only to lose it through corruption, mismanagement and unfaithfulness. With the city of Jerusalem surrounded and the enemies occupying the high country all around, the prophet Jeremiah purchases a field occupied by enemies as a sign that even in the face of defeat and exile the people have a future with God.

Again and again and again our story tells us of times when we were tempted to think that God is not in charge of this world. There were voices that cried that the forces of evil were stronger than God’s power to save. There were preachers who warned of doom and gloom and destruction. There were even proponents of switching religions and seeking false gods.

In each verse of the story of our history, however, there have been a few voices who have reminded our people that God is always faithful. God is always calling us to the future, even when that future is not the way we imagined it, but rather a future created by God.

Ours is a story filled with struggle, pain, grief and injustice. But ours is also the story of God who works out a story of the salvation of the people over many generations. Indeed we do know that our God is faithful.

So today we surround the hurting families of our community with our prayers. We pray for all of the people involved. We pray for their futures even when we cannot quite imagine how those futures will unfold. We know our God is faithful. When we don’t have the right words for our prayers, God continues to listen and to answer prayers in God’s way and in God’s time.

We trust that better days are ahead. And we remember to give thanks for the goodness that we have seen, the mercy we have experienced, and the hope that breaks with the dawn.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Seven years ago, Kenny Putnam started a new business that focuses on high quality art prints, museum-quality photo restoration and printing and framing of images for individuals and families Kenny is a local artist and musician who is a member of our church. The name of the business is Image Up. The concept behind the name is to take images that are stored in boxes and drawers and get them up on the walls where they can be seen. A similar theme applies to artwork. Through his extensive computer skills, Kenny is able to match colors, print on media as varied as canvas and watercolor paper.



Another aspect of his work is the surprise and delight at how much information is still present in old photographs that appear to be sun faded, water damaged or aged in other ways. By using high-resolution scanners and carefully bringing out information that is still contained in the emulsion, he has enabled people to see details in photographs that they didn’t know existed. In some of his museum prints he makes enlargements that show details that were previously unknown.

Last night, Kenny’s business was the destination for our youth group’s Destination Unknown program. The program offers an event each month that involves traveling away from the church to some place that is a surprise to the youth. Parents can find out about destinations before the event, but destinations are kept for a surprise to the youth as they participate. Sometimes the destination is a visit to a mission project; sometimes it is an opportunity to connect with a different culture; and sometimes it is a visit to a local arts organization. Sometimes the youth are given the opportunity to learn about the work and passion of other members of the congregation.

The quest for vocation is as complex and confusing as it has ever been. Young people are confronted with a vast array of different ways to earn a living. There are new kinds of jobs in new areas springing up all the time. At the same time, there are lots of pressures on youth as they discern the direction for their lives. There is pressure to earn significant amounts of money created by parental expectations, the high cost of education and other factors. There is a desire for security and meaning in one’s life. Increasingly in modern society, there is an expectation that young adults establish a secure career path before marriage.

Visits to real people who are able to speak honestly about their lives and careers is one way for youth to begin to think about these complex issues. Doing so as a part of a church group provides a supportive environment and the opportunity to connect vocation and faith.

The youth were impressed with the advanced photographic and computer technology of Kenny’s business. They were amazed at the quality and high-resolution clarity of the work he does. They had fun with a drawing tablet and the palettes of Photoshop software. But they also heard the story of a man who has been able to pursue his passions throughout his adult life. After decades of making his living as a professional musician, traveling extensively, appearing on television and acquiring a bit of fame, Kenny started this particular business after he was 50 years old. For someone like me, a career change at 50 doesn’t seem at all surprising. For youth who expect that they will be able to find a single career path that leads to success, the concept of starting over at 50 seems strange. To them 50 is an advanced age. More than a few of them have heard stories of people like Google founder Sergey Brin who earned enough to effectively retire before he reached the age of 40. They are aware of the pressure to succeed early in their lives and careers. They don’t often think about what happens after mid life.

The evening included a brief bible study on creation and on the fact that all humans are created in the image of God and thus created to be creators as well. Over supper the youth talked about some of their own skills and ability to create. Several of the youth have already discovered artistic talent and found ways to express themselves. Others are still seeking to discover their gifts and talents. Some have a hard time naming things that they do well or gifts that they have.

Early in my career, I believed that youth ministry involved creating experiences for youth. I’ve been on lots of youth mission trips. I’ve taken youth on adventures from skiing to white water rafting and wind sailing. I’ve been to sleep-overs and lock-ins and camps. I’ve attended rallies and youth events all over the country. I’ve sat next to teens as they took their first airplane ride. I’ve driven the car as they left their home state for the first time. I’ve racked up a lot of miles driving vans filled with sleeping teenagers. These days, however, I am convinced that much of the best youth ministry doesn’t involve activities with large groups of youth. The best youth ministry is intergenerational. When youth get to know and experience adults other than immediate family members, their world is expanded. When they see faith at work in the lives of people who are different ages than them they grow in their own faith. Increasingly I seek opportunities for youth to work alongside adults.

A few weeks ago, a young man in our church thanked me for our church having a Woodchuck Society. He said that splitting wood with the group was one of the best parts of his summer. When we started the project, we thought briefly that it would become a youth ministry project. Soon, however, we were unable to find enough youth to accomplish the work. Over the years the program has been staffed primarily by retired people. We joke that we couldn’t run the church with out octogenarians. We really wouldn’t be the same without all of the volunteering done by people in their sixties and seventies and eighties. So the Woodchuck Society has become a ministry of some of the elders of the church. In making that change it has become great youth ministry. The young man who split wood had a more meaningful summer because he was working alongside elders than would have been the case if he had spent his summer with teens only.

Some of our best work occurs when we put people who might not otherwise meet each other into close contact and give them the opportunity to share their faith.

Like Image Up, we take things that might otherwise be hidden and display them for the world to see.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Since we have friends who are visiting in Australia as well as friends who live in Australia, it seems to be a good idea to report that today, in Australia, is National Punctuation Day. Of course, my friends in Australia are unlikely to read this blog today, since it will be after 9 p.m. there before I get this blog written and uploaded to the Internet.

Still, a national punctuation day seems like a good idea, especially to a guy who has been told by several editors that he uses too many commas. Did you notice that I was restrained and only used two in the previous sentence?

I suspect that we are in a phase in the usage of the English language where the rules about punctuation are rapidly changing. The practice of sending text messages and tweets from mobile devices encourages an economy of letters and the ignoring of punctuation all together. The result may be a shift in the way we use written language.

Now I know that the readers of this blog are not the leaders in the move to change the way we use punctuation in written language, so I can probably get away with a few rants about contemporary culture.

So listen up, all you people who send me text messages and who sometimes ask me to write reference letters for you and who leave me notes on my office door: Please use an apostrophe when you’re contracting a word – like the correct usage in this sentence. You are became you’re, not YOUR. If you won’t do it because you know it drives me up the wall, perhaps you’ll consider doing so in honor of the Australians on their National Punctuation Day.

While we’re on the subject of apostrophes, you don’t need to use an apostrophe when you are making a word plural. More than one boy becomes boys. More than one pencil becomes pencils. There is no need to add an apostrophe when making a word plural.

You do use an apostrophe to indicate ownership. Something belonging to the boy is the boy’s possession. That one gets a little tricky when the word ends with an s. Most of the time the apostrophe goes after the s at the end of the word. To write about the pets of a group of boys you would write the boys’ pets. To make things more tricky, you don’t use an apostrophe with pronouns of ownership. His, hers, its, ours and yours don’t use apostrophes when referring to ownership. The use of the apostrophe makes the word into a contraction. He’s means he is and it doesn’t denote that he has a possession.

If you haven’t given up on this blog with its rather obscure topic, you might have noticed my restraint in the use of quotation marks. According to the way I was taught quotation marks are to be reserved for quotes and not used to emphasize a word in a sentence. You see that mistake “all” the time. Please not the improper use of quotation marks in the previous sentence. The same thing goes for figures of speech. They don’t need quotation marks. I know. I’m really bad about that one. I think that I have been worse with that practice since I have been importing plain text into my blog. Italics don’t copy and have to be manually added, so it seemed easier to use quotation marks for emphasis rather than italics. That kind of laziness can contribute to a shift in the rules of grammar, though I doubt if I have enough readers to make an impact on the common usage of language.

I wonder why, in a culture that doesn’t seem to want to use commas or apostrophes, the exclamation mark has become so common. I’ve received text messages with a single word and a dozen exclamation marks. I know that exclamation marks are used to convey enthusiasm and excitement, but the overuse of the punctuation mark seems to delete its impact. Really! If you use it all the time it becomes useless! Do you see what I mean?!

While I’m on a rant, for the record, faces at the end of sentences are not proper punctuation. While it may be friendly or pretty, :) is not proper punctuation. Our culture loses something when people quit trying to show that they are nice through their choices of words. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an emoticon seems to be a poor substitute for a picture. Next time you’re tempted to end a message with an emoticon, try finding some nice words to write.

While I’m on the subject of punctuation, I might as well put in a few words for the humble colon and semicolon. A colon is used to introduce a list of things: words, objects, items, or other things that we might list. It also works to use a colon to introduce an explanation or a definition. Here’s how it works: I get upset when people misuse colons.

The semicolon is a punctuation mark that seems to be tailor made for an oral thinker like myself. When I speak, I use many run on sentences. I string them together like there is no tomorrow. So, when I write, I tend to do the same thing. A semicolon can be used to connect two phrases that could be independent sentences, but which the writer wants to connect because of a similar theme or a relationship between the two sentences. Here is an example: Chuck drives a Ram truck; Jim drives a Chevy.

So here’s the good news: I don’t live in Australia. If I were an Australian and we were officially recognizing National Punctuation Day in my home country, you would probably have to endure more than a mere thousand words on the topic. Since I’m writing from South Dakota, USA, however, I’ll just end with the words of a song that once you get it in your head you’ll be singing it all day long: Comma Comma Down Doobeie Dew Down Down . . . Please note that is not a series of periods, but rather an ellipsis.

Or you can sing it the way Neil Sedaka does: Down Doobie Do Down Down, Comma Comma Down. Or is that Down Dobbie-do Down Down Down, Comma Comma Down? I always get mixed up on the rules about hyphens and dashes.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is a first-rate engineering university located in our city. Mines students tend to be intense and focused and the university continues to attract leading faculty and students. There are a lot of different ways to sing the praise of the University. The sixteen departments work together and students are engaged in interdisciplinary projects that demand teamwork as well as academic excellence. By the standards of some universities, the school isn’t big. About 2,400 students attend the school, pursuing 16 different degree programs. The University is also a center of research and provides research for national agencies such as NASA, the Defense Department and other federal agencies.

SDSM&T draws some of the top students from around the world and the campus is an interesting and exciting place to visit. The Museum of Geology is located in a new building and is worth a visit for anyone interested in fossils, rocks or history.

In the last year, however, the school has pursued an advertising campaign that bothers me. I’m probably touchy and I suspect that most citizens of Rapid City are simply proud of the statistics that are boasted. However, the billboards bother me.

The advertisements report that in the annual PayScale, Inc. survey, graduates of SDSM&T earn higher starting salaries than graduates of Harvard. The facts reported are accurate. The average starting salary for Mines graduates is $62,400, up from $56,700 last year, compared with Harvard graduates’ average salary of $55,000. Starting salaries for Mines graduates are ranked at the 13th highest nationally. The study focuses on starting salaries and I have not read the actual study, only news reports and press releases from SDSM&T, but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of what is reported. Of course there are plenty of numbers not reported, such as average lifetime earnings and location of graduates’ jobs, both of which would give a more complete picture. I’m not particularly interested in researching these numbers.

What bothers me about the ads is that it is another buy-in to the popular notion that the purpose of education is financial. There are plenty of articles, mostly geared towards parents, that attempt to do a cost-benefit analysis of college education. With unemployment rates that are running high and plenty of anecdotal evidence of students who graduate with excessive debt, parents are rightly concerned about the financial aspects of education.

I’m all in favor of being responsible. I am alarmed at the amount of debt associated with obtaining an education. I think that the nation needs to carefully assess the excessive rate of increase in educational costs. But the principle value of education to individuals – and to the nation – cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Our forebears in the United Church of Christ believed in the value of education for the general improvement of society. They believed that education was essential for the advancement of enlightenment, solid citizenship and a deeper understanding of God. They started schools and academies and universities all across this nation and then made those institutions independent to pursue knowledge and truth without undue restrictions from a parent organization.

The pursuit of truth was a value that we have long embraced. It is simply a much higher goal than the pursuit of money.

The richest man in America is a Harvard dropout. If the goal is money alone, the case could be made for simply buying the ideas of others and remarketing them as opposed to generating new ideas and true innovation.

It grieves me that some people at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology are portraying the school as a path to wealth. Attempting to place a dollar value on an education might lead parents and students to pursue education as a financial investment instead of a quest for true vocation and for truth itself.

Here are some things that the study does not evaluate. It does not include students who graduate, but do not find a job. There are no “zeros” in their income statistics. It does not check in to see whether graduates are happy and fulfilled in their employment after they graduate or are burdened and do not enjoy their line of work. It does not mention how many graduates eventually seek a change in their career path or how many times graduates change jobs as they work their way up the career ladder. It doesn’t evaluate how many graduates donate time and money to charitable organizations. It doesn’t list whether or not students are happy or successful in marriage or whether or not they are good parents. It doesn’t measure how well-rounded graduates are in terms of life interests.

From my point of view, earnings and the amount of money one has are pretty low on the list of things that give meaning to life. To paraphrase Jesus: Is it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a School of Mines graduate to enter the kingdom of heaven?

I don’t think my “rant” is just sour grapes from one who pursued one of the most expensive educations available in order to live one of the lower-paid vocations. After all, I am blessed to have had a much happier life than those who have more wealth.

The billboards, of course, simply fail to tell the whole story. There is much more to Mines than the salaries of graduates. There are incredible moments of discovery and enlightenment. There are students engaged in serving the community. I have worked shoulder to shoulder with Mines students on Habitat for Humanity build sites. I have been delighted with the energy and enthusiasm they bring to the life of our church. I know that there are lifelong relationships that are formed at the University and that the quest for more knowledge is ignited and nurtured by thoughtful and passionate faculty. No university is right for every student, but South Dakota School of Mines and Technology has been just the right place for thousands of students over the years. The university has a vital mission and fulfills it well.

I’m a big fan of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I just wish they’d come up with a new theme for their billboards.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Here is a little story from BBC news that I didn’t see covered by other media. Irv Gordon, a retired science teacher from Long Island, New York was driving his 1966 P1800 Volvo coupe up Alaska’s Seward Highway last week when he passed another milestone. The car logged its three-millionth mile. Gordon bought the car new and has no plans to stop driving it. The car has been featured in the Guinness book of world records as the car with the most miles since 1998 when it had only 1,690,000 miles on it.

I’m pretty sure that I won’t be breaking that record. The car I drive has only a little over 219,000 miles on it and it is beginning to develop a few quirks. The main reason I will not come close to the record, however, is that I simply drive a whole lot less than Mr. Gordon does. I thought out usage of cars was relatively high. Many automobile leases surcharge for mileage in excess of 10,000 miles per year and quite a few car warranties are based on a similar level of driving. Living in Western South Dakota, we put on quite a few more miles than that. In the 14 years of its life, the car I drive has averaged 15,643 miles per year. But that is small in comparison with the 63,929 miles per year that Mr. Gordon’s Volvo has averaged.

It does bring up an interesting item of speculation, however. Which of the following scenarios consumes the least total resources: driving the most fuel efficient cars and replacing them as more efficient models become available or keeping a car a long time and purchasing less vehicles? Cars consume fuel and other resources not only by being driven, but also in the process of manufacturing. We haven’t gotten very good at knowing what to do with our vehicles after we no longer drive them. There are acres and acres of old vehicles in salvage yards around here. They do contribute a significant amount of parts to the market and some of the operators are good about finding ways to recycle the materials in vehicles. It does, however, seem that the process of recycling unused automobiles is a rather inefficient process. I see truckloads of crushed cars going by on the highway from time to time, but I have no idea how far they have to travel to a place where the usable metal can be extracted.

We invest a significant amount of energy in shipping automobiles from one place to another. Mr. Gordon’s car traveled from Sweden to the United States before it started to travel under its own power. My car made the trip from Japan to the U.S. It is not uncommon for a vehicle to have traveled by ship, train and truck before it reaches a dealership. I have heard that the process of importing vehicles and parts into the United States requires so much shipping capacity that shipping rates are much less expensive going the opposite direction because shippers have to discount the price in order to avoid having to run their ships empty on the return trip. There is far more capacity than demand going from the United States to Japan and China.

It isn’t just automobiles that we import. Have you tried to purchase a pair of socks that were made in America recently? Even after last April’s fire in Bangladesh that claimed over 1,100 lives, millions of workers are putting in 19-hour shifts in dangerous conditions to make low-cost clothing for American and European stores. We will occasionally pay brief attention to the human cost of cheap Western clothing, but then our attention is distracted and things go back to normal. Even with the lower labor costs due to the nearly slavery conditions faced in some places, it is hard to understand that it is cost efficient to ship clothing half way around the world. It may be the case that we could save more energy by the decisions we make on what clothing to wear than we can by decisions about what vehicle to drive or how often to drive.

I have read that one can save more energy through food choices than through choices about vehicle use. Much of the food in our supermarkets has traveled more in the past month than we have. Try purchasing a tomato that was grown in our state, or an apricot that was grown on our continent. Check out the distance the watermelons in the grocery store have traveled. It is wonderful having all of the choice in our stores and low prices for food, but it seems that there are hidden costs to our way of life.

When traveling in Washington State in the fall a few years ago, we were surprised to discover that there are large areas devoted to growing alfalfa hay for export. Hay is loaded into shipping containers and exported to Japan and Korea from the west coast of the United States. It doesn’t make any sense at all in my way of thinking to raise cattle and other food animals so far from the sources of their feed. Shipping hay or nuts or citrus or even wine to another country is not just consuming precious fuel resources, it is also exporting precious water. You can’t grow that alfalfa without a lot of irrigation. Who would have thought that water pumped from an underground aquifer in eastern Washington would travel to Korea in alfalfa hay? Am I helping the drought conditions in Australia by sipping wine that contains the juice of grapes grown down under?

Life in a global market is confusing and it is difficult to know what is the best choice.

It is not just commodities that we import and export. Go to the hospital in Rapid City and you will have to deal with a billing department in Denver. Purchase a computer that was designed in California and it might be direct shipped to you from China. And when you need product support, you might be talking to someone in India on the phone.

So we continue to make imperfect decisions with incomplete information.

Maybe, with careful maintenance I can get another 150,000 miles on my old car. That would at least allow me to put off the decision about what to buy next for another decade.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

We do live in Western South Dakota. After writing about the advent of autumn yesterday, today is the first official day of fall and it is already over 60 degrees outside, heading for a high in the low 90’s. The forecast notes the possibility of thundershowers in the afternoon. Yesterday, after splitting wood with a group of church members in the morning I stopped in at the Pennington County jail staff’s annual picnic and the weather was perfect. The group was gathered at a shade shelter in one of the city’s parks and there were plenty of good times and food. The staff at the jail is relatively young, so there were lots of families with young children. It is kind of interesting being a grandpa in such a crowd, but as chaplain it also fits with my role pretty well.

The forecast calls for more sunny and warm days later this week, but tomorrow is supposed to be rainy and a bit cooler. We could definitely use the rain, so there will be no complaints from me. It will be a good week to get some of the tasks in the yard completed, and I have a long list of “to do” items for my day off tomorrow. A little rain won’t get in the way with most of the things that I have planned.

World news headlines are depressing, as the standoff in the shopping mall in Kenya appears to still not be totally over. At least 59 people have been killed and another 175 injured. The victims include old and young, nationals and foreigners. An uncertain number of people are still trapped or hiding in the shopping area. In Pakistan, a suicide attack claimed the lives of at least 55 people in one of the deadliest attacks on the country’s Christian minority in several years. Mass killings and attacks on innocents are becoming so common that we don’t have an opportunity to process one before news of the next one arrives. Often I just don’t know what to say. Each of these events is worthy of pondering and trying to figure out what can be learned to prevent the next one.

And it is still less than a week since twelve people were fatally shot at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. last Monday.

It is the lack of reaction to the Navy Yard shootings that has me concerned. The event has passed away from the headlines too quickly. The president called it “yet another mass shooting,” as if such events have become routine even for the president. After the terrible shootings in Newton, Connecticut there were at least some calls for making reforms and changing things. The complex issues of balancing freedoms and security were at least debated in state legislatures. Legislation was considered and then dropped in the legislative branch of the federal government, were dysfunction and inaction are what we expect. But after the Navy Yard shootings the reaction is an overwhelming silence.

Have we given up the hope of preventing such tragedies?

They did decide to postpone the baseball game scheduled for the Nationals stadium on Monday, but that appears to be mostly logistics because the command center for the Navy Yard shootings had been set up in the parking lot. By Tuesday, things were back to normal at the ballpark and they a doubleheader was played.

No one seems to be willing to talk about how we might make mental health care available to those who desperately need it. In fact there is a reasonable chance that the House and Senate will let the government be shut down in a last ditch attempt to repeal a law already passed that would decrease the price of mental health care. And this is after 40 attempts to repeal the law have already failed.

I have no doubt that the affordable health care act is a flawed bill. And it remains to be seen if it could make mental health services available to those who need them. But the bottom line is that there are plenty of folks who, for whatever reason, do not obtain the services that they need.

Part of the problem is the stigma that we attach to those who suffer from brain diseases and mental illnesses. Rather than reaching out with compassion and support to the victims of chronic illness, we shun them and isolate their families. A cancer diagnosis will result in special fund-raisers and pooled days off in the workplace. A diagnosis of a mental illness often leads to a quick dismissal. As a result, the victims of mental illness often hide their condition and the results of such hiddenness can be tragic. Among other dangers is the false perception that everyone who suffers from mental illness is dangerous because a tiny fraction of those who have mental illnesses get their hands on guns and cause violence.

Most of the victims of mental illness suffer in silence and never come anywhere near making a newspaper headline. Too many never obtain treatment that is available because they don’t know what can be done or worse because they cannot afford the treatment.

I am shocked to discover that we live in a time and place where a gunman can kill a dozen people in the heart of one of our most iconic cities and a week later everything has returned to normal. I keep looking for ribbons on the lapel or t-shirts emblazoned with “D.C. Strong.” It seems, however, that the nation is eager to simply get on with life as normal. But mass killings can never become normal for the families of the victims.

The grief in the families runs deep and will not go away.

I don’t ever want to become numb to the horror.

I don’t ever want to stop trying to come up with ways to prevent future tragedies.

That may be part of the reason I have started spending part of each week with the officers of the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office. We’re all in this together. An together we need to work to prevent future tragedies.

In the meantime, I for one, will not forget what has happened.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

According to the calendar, tomorrow is the first day of Autumn. And the season is definitely changing. I noticed a real change when I went paddling yesterday. Two things have changed. The days are getting shorter, which means that the sun is coming up later. Although I started well before sunrise, I took a leisurely paddle and by the time I got home and showered and got into the office it was 8:30 a.m. I just can’t launch onto the lake at 5:30 a.m. when the sun doesn’t come up until 6:30. Technically, I need lights on my boat to paddle after dark and before sunrise, but I know the lake very well and I am very careful about other boats, so I push the edges a little bit, but there are limits.

The second big change was the temperature. It was cold. It was 45 degrees when I left home, but it was 29 at the lake. There was frost on the grass as I carried my boat down to the lakeshore. It was my first day with my “winter” shoes and paddling pants, and I was beginning to wish I had worn long johns under the paddling pants. My feet were toasty warm, however, and you can paddle quite a bit if you keep your fingers and toes warm. Wrapped in my paddling jacket and gloves, I decided to paddle in a wool watch cap instead of my usual summer cap.

From the first paddle stroke, however, I was paddling in a wonderland. The full moon was setting and the lake was filled with fog. The combination made a beauty that is impossible to describe in words and the camera captures only imperfectly. Trust me, it was far more than the pictures capture. Fog can be a problem for boaters, but I go slowly and I have been on the lake more than 30 times in the past few months, so I was never disoriented. Things are, however, different in the fog. The geese have plenty of forward vision, but less vision below as they fly through the fog. They are in autumn mood and even a small group of birds will form a V as they fly. They passed overhead at about 10 feet above me. The first thing I notice when they come from behind is the sound of their wings flapping. With that sound, one can imagine what it might sound like to be in the midst of the flock as they make their long autumn journey.

All of the birds are starting to gather in groups. They are beginning to sense that it is time to travel. Like the snowbirds who travel in their RV’s the birds are trying to cram a few more provisions inside before they take off for the big trip.

The cattails are spreading the seed for next year’s plants. The banks that were brown and yellow in the spring have now gone through their lush green phase and now are back to brown and yellow, the puffy seeds spilling out remind me of the insulation that is blown into attics. It is hard to remind myself that it contains the stuff of life and that it soon will be saturated with water and will sink to the mud at the bottom of the lake and wait until next year’s warmth before germinating and producing new plants.

The beaver is grumpy most of the time and he likes to slap his tail in warning whenever I approach too closely. But in the foggy chill of yesterday morning he seemed less aggressive, his tail slaps almost a greeting instead of a warning. I know it is only my imagination, but it seems like he can sense that I belong to the surface and that like the water birds, I’ll be elsewhere when the ice begins to form at the edges of the lake. He’ll spend most of the winter in his lodge and under the ice, and won’t be entertaining human visitors once the lake freezes over.

He’ll have plenty of fish under there with him. The fish were amazing yesterday as I paddled. I would be moving along silently when suddenly the water would erupt with a great splash, as a fish would come 8 or 10 inches out of the water. It is a different kind of surfacing than when they are harvesting insects from above the lake surface. I’m not sure what it is all about, but I think that they may be feeding on minnows or small aquatic creatures that are swimming near the surface. As opposed to when they eat airborne insects and suddenly lurch to reach above the water. When hunting on the surface, they lurk in the deep water and with powerful strokes rush to reach peak speed as they gulp down their pray. They breach the surface of the water from momentum, not from a desire to get something that is above. A competent biologist might correct my theory, but no one would argue that the fish were being lethargic on the chilly and foggy morning. Of course the fish don’t feel the chill in the air. The water temperature is fairly consistent and at 29 degrees, the water is warmer than the air.

Sunrise in the fog is a display of miniature rainbows. The water droplets in the air serve as prisms to break the light up into colors. As the sun rises above the horizon, if you get the right angle, it looks as if it is surrounded by a full rainbow circle. Like the moon set, a camera in my amateur hands fails to produce a picture that looks like what my eyes and brain perceive. I think that everything is over exposed in order to make the image. Whatever happens, the colors are different and the depth of field is different. Still I keep taking pictures, convinced that if I make a small adjustment, I might come up with something better. The urge to capture the moment and take it home to share is strong.

I spent a bit too much time trying to make pictures on the lake as I paddled yesterday and had to rush to get the boat out of the water and onto the car and head back to town for work. By the parking lot, I was out of the fog and into the bright of a glorious Black Hills day.

The calm and peace of the lake stayed with me and served me well all day long.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed the tenth and final movement of the cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (BWV 147) sometime between 1716 and 1723. He was between the ages of 31 and 38. By that point in his life, he was recognized as a highly-respected organist and a sought-after performer at the console of the great Baroque organs of Europe.

That was nearly 300 years ago. It, of course, is considered to be ancient history by many in today’s church. And there are more than a few critics of church music who are quick to point out that the organ is a part of the church’s ancient past and that in order to keep up with modern times churches need synthesizers and digital instruments and lots of amplification.

Sometimes, when I feel like arguing I point out that the main circuit board of a computer is considered obsolete in 5 years and dysfunctional in 10 years, whereas an organ pipe can be expected to produce accurate pitches for at least 500 years. There are plenty of organs in Europe that are still making music by blowing air through the same pipes that Bach played. Such statistics don’t impress the critics of classical church music. On the other hand there have been faithful Christians who have predicted the end of the organ as an instrument for church music since the first Roman connected a bellows to a set of panpipes in the first century AD.

Yesterday afternoon, as I worked in my office, I could hear the organ in our sanctuary as it was being practiced. Music from Bach, Clarke and other composers rose from the room. The only persons to hear the music were the organist and I. And, well, of course, his mother, who drove him to the church. The organist is 15 years old and doesn’t have a driver’s license yet.

Something tells me that the predictions of the death of classical music are, once again, a bit premature.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to many different types of music in the church. The church of Jesus Christ is far too big and far too complex for a “one size fits all” approach to music. There is room in the church for rap and rock jazz and blues, hip-hop and other forms of music as well as the sound we call “classical.” When we declare, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” we mean everything. All music belongs to God. But I do cringe a little bit when someone tells me they are looking for a congregation that exclusively plays “contemporary” music.

I want to ask them what they think the 15 year old playing our organ is. If he isn’t contemporary, what is he: dead? You don’t get much more contemporary than a 15-year-old pouring his passion into an instrument that he loves.

I wonder how many weddings I have officiated at in which brides and grooms who are young from my perspective have chosen Trumpet Voluntary (The Prince of Denmark’s March) or Mendelssohn’s Wedding March or Richard Wagnere’s The "Bridal Chorus" "Treulich geführt", from the 1850 opera Lohengrin? When the time comes in their lives to make everlasting commitments, a little classical music seems to be in order.

I am well aware that the sounds that emanate from our congregation are different than what you will hear at other churches. I am only halfway joking when I say that if people pick churches like they pick radio stations, then we are definitely NPR: classical most of the time with a little jazz in the evenings. I don’t feel bad about that because in a saturated market, we have found our niche. There are nearly 200 churches and para-church organizations in Rapid City. At least three quarters of them have some kind of praise band. There are only a half dozen pipe organs with competent organists on the bench in our city. We are easy to distinguish from other congregations.

Without meaning to dismiss any of the music that is offered in praise of God, it does seem to me that it is entirely appropriate for us to use music that has survived the test of time and ben around for a while when offering our faith in a God of all time. Some of the latest music composed and arranged in our generation will survive the test of time. Some of it will be played and enjoyed hundreds of years from now. Some of it, just like some of the music played in churches 300 or 500 years ago, will fade from popularity and be forgotten.

The church is a multi-generational enterprise and what could be more multi-generational than a 15-year-old pouring his heart and soul into 300-year-old music? He and those of us who are fortunate enough to hear his playing are aware that we belong to something that is much bigger than us – much more expansive than our time on this earth.

The relationship of the church and music is complex.

Speaking of complex, so is the plotline of the opera Lohengrin. Fortunately for the couples who choose Wagner’s march, very few people know the story line. Suffice it to say that Elsa’s marriage to the knight in shining armor is short-lived and we never know for sure who is guilty and who is innocent, but a lot of people, including the bride die in the course of the drama. Whenever a couple chooses that particular piece of music, I silently pray that their marriage will bring them more happiness than is found in the strange story of Lohengrin.

We retain only part of the past. We remember our stories imperfectly. And the music we choose is neither the music of the spheres nor the sounds of heaven. It is a human endeavor undertaken in worship and praise and deep understanding that God is greater than we can imagine.

The greatness of God is immediately evident to me when I hear a 15-year-old practice the organ in our sanctuary.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

“I didn’t know this place even existed!” said one of the youth in our church’s fellowship group as we hiked the hillside west of the church Wednesday evening. It wasn’t a large expedition, just a quick walk up to a natural amphitheater that is nestled in the hills above our church. Rapid City is a unique place because of the way the hills weave their way through the heart of the city. A block away from our church, which is nestled in an urban residential neighborhood, there are undeveloped hills filled with deer, turkeys and even an occasional mountain lion. A couple of convenient trails lead up from the city to the skyline where there are commanding views of the plains and badlands to the east and the hills to the west. Last evening was a great time for a short hike, with the full moon rising and the air clear and warm. A gentle breeze was sufficient to keep us from getting too hot on the steep climb.

With parents who were pilots, I was born traveling. I can’t remember my first ride in an airplane. It was something that we always did. Family vacations took us to Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Chicago. When my father was moderator of the Montana Conference, he visited every congregation in the conference in a year and most of the visits were family trips. It wasn’t unusual to us to travel 250 miles to attend church and then get in the airplane and travel the same distance home.

As an adult, I have had the luxury of frequent travel and have been able to visit many distant locations. Summers have usually involved quite a bit of travel. I have attended many General Synods of the United Church of Christ in places such as Tampa, Hartford, Grand Rapids and other cities.

So the summer of 2013 was a bit different for me. For the most part we stayed home. We did take one trip to attend a family funeral in North Dakota and we had a wonderful vacation trip to the West Coast, but there were almost no trips for church meetings. I didn’t attend General Synod this year and didn’t even have a church meeting in Chamberlain or Sioux Falls during the summer.

One of the joys of the summer was the ability to go many times to the same place and see the subtle changes and nuances that occasional tourists miss. I have watched nearly 30 sunrises from the surface of Sheridan Lake this summer, sitting in hand-built canoes, kayaks and a rowboat I made. I have watched the birds and animals enough to be able to identify a specific beaver or great blue heron on different days. And there has been a bit more time to simply walk in our own back yard. It doesn’t take a major trip to be immersed in the beauty of the natural world. And, when you live where we do, it doesn’t take a lot of time. In less than ten minutes of walking from my home or from the church I can be in the midst of un-peopled nature.

But we often don’t take the time to look at what is near at hand. The youth who “didn’t know this place existed,” has lived in Rapid City all of his life. He is a fourth-generation child of our church. I officiated at his baptism. I laid my hands on him at his confirmation. He knows well where our church is located. But until last night, he didn’t know what the hillside behind the church was like. He is an outdoors kid. He has always loved being outdoors, observing the birds and animals, hiking and exploring. This summer he traveled to Alaska with his grandmother and the trip was one of the high points of his life. The excitement is still in his voice when he shows his pictures and tells the stories of seeing grizzlies, catching salmon and visiting remote places. But before last night he had never hiked the trails right next to the church. It was such a delight to be able to share the evening with him.

We didn’t have much time for our little walk. The light was fading and we needed to get back down the steep part of the trail before it got too dark to see where our feet were falling. Soon we were back in the church, sharing a snack and reporting on the adventures of the summer. The youth placed stars on a map to show the places they had visited during the summer and talked about their travels.

Susan had prepared a brief devotion for the group and asked how you know where you are in this world. The youth reflected on the knowledge that God is nearby even when you travel to a distant location. One youth observed that when you are feeling homesick it is good to remember that God is with you. I observed that that knowledge was a major breakthrough in our people’s understanding of God. The stories of Abraham and Sarah in our Bible tell of a major theological transition when our people discovered that God was present in every place and traveled with those who journey. Susan concluded the meditation by using the letters GPS as ways of finding ourselves in the world. Instead of using an electronic device with connections to a network of satellites, a faith GPS focuses attention on God, Prayer and Service. A person engaged with God, prayer and service is never lost in this life.

Outside of a few pictures taken with cell phones, the evening was free from electronic devices. We didn’t have any amazing high-powered program or a blast of rock music to attract a crowd of teens. Instead we offered a gentle walk in a nearby location and a fresh perspective on an age-old truth. Sharing the faith from generation to generation is much more presence than program – more who we are than what we do.

And with the guidance of our GPS, we continue to chart a course into the future.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I have a friend who is very successful and widely recognized as a community leader who is fond of saying, “hope is not a strategy.” I’m not sure that she knows her quote comes from a book about selling things by Rick Page or that it is a favorite quote of Mitt Romney. Her meaning is simple and clear. Saying, “I hope something happens,” is not the way to build success. The problem with the quote is that it uses the word hope to mean, “wish,” and there is a big difference between wishes and genuine hope. If I were to analyze the quote, I might even question the use of the word “strategy.” Her quote is merely an update of the traditional English proverb, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Success demands more than just wishing. Action is required.

But I would like to use my friend’s quite differently than she intends when she says it because I believe she is right. Hope is not a strategy.

Strategic planning has its roots in the military. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines strategy as “the science of planning and directing large-scale military operations, of maneuvering forces into the most advantageous position prior to actual engagement with the enemy.” Common usage, however, has most people thinking of strategic planning as part of business management. Various models for strategic planning for businesses were developed in the 1950’s and during the 1960’s and 1970’s it was popular for businesses to use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to analyze their practices and develop plans.

Non-profit organizations generally are slower to adopt business practices, and the fad of strategic planning swept through non-profits a few decades later. It was incredibly popular in educational institutions through the ‘70’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s. In universities and in other non-profit institutions strategic planning has not been more or less successful than in business. It has never been more than modestly successful in guiding institutions. The basic problem is that the process demands large amounts of time and requires a lot of reporting, analyzing and other processes. Businesses and non-profits that forgo the process often find that their administration and overhead is much smaller than those who invest heavily in planning processes. To modify my friend’s quote, “Planning is not doing.” Or to quote another friend, “I have no idea who thought that a university would be well served by using the same process that guided the Rand Corporation during the Vietnam War.”

In the highly competitive environment of American business, strategic planning has been replaced by other management and planning processes. Some of them have been fads as much as was strategic planning. Project management is a discipline that many different enterprises have adopted as a way of breaking down overall goals into temporary endeavors that can be well defined and accomplished in set time frames. A variation on the theme of project management is process improvement. Probably the most famous school of process improvement is known as Six Sigma (not to be confused with Sigma 6, the six-piece band that became Pink Floyd). Six Sigma was developed in Motorola Corporation in the 1980’s and was adopted by General Electric in the 1990’s. When applied to industry, Six Sigma seeks to identify things that cause variability in manufacturing and business, develops statistical models and puts into place quality management practices to decrease defects and errors. Largely due to the success of the process in General Electric, the Six Sigma process has been adopted by a large variety of different enterprises. In keeping with the trends of previous generations, non-profit organizations have been a bit slower than for-profit ventures in adopting Six Sigma, but it is now becoming a buzzword in the non-profit world.

In sharp contrast to the “schools” of planning and fads of management techniques, it is not uncommon for a business or enterprise to become highly successful without adopting the particular patterns of successful businesses of the past. It is often the case that success does not come from imitating the practices of others, but by developing practices that are appropriate to the situation. Some of the most successful of contemporary corporations have developed unique business practices that have served them well. Google corporation is often cited as a leader in innovation not only in technology but also in its business practices. Essentially what the company did was to take the energy, vision and enthusiasm of its young founders Lary Page and Sergey Brin and temper it with the experience of Eric Schmidt, who was brought in from Sun Microsystems. This multi-generational leadership team combined youthful energy and enthusiasm with a bit of experience and wisdom to achieve remarkable success. They didn’t follow the fads, they didn’t fall prey to the model of meeting upon meeting that often plagues large organizations.

Which brings us to my basic management principle. Mind you, it isn’t original. I didn’t invent it. And it is also important to remember that I don’t work within a large organization. Our church is largely a volunteer enterprise with a half dozen paid staff, mostly part-time. I have no idea how to run a big corporation. What is do know is that sometimes you simply have to just do the work. I’m not a fan of Larry the Cable Guy and I don’t think many would describe me as a redneck, but I like the phrase “Get ‘er done!” See a job and do it. In my position in the church that applies to everything we do from picking up litter in the parking lot to planning the funeral of a beloved grandmother of the church. Line up the tasks and do them. Don’t count the hours, just do the job. When we are hiring employees one of the most important characteristics I look for is the ability to identify what needs to be done and to do the work. We don’t have a lot of time for meetings and planning and developing strategies. We need to get the work done.

Which brings me back to my friend’s quote. I guess I have to say I disagree with her. Hope, in fact is our strategy. Hope is not idle wishing. It is, rather a strong and confident expectation. “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28). We look for and respond to God’s call for our personal lives and for the organization of the church. We are confident that when we are engaged in the work God calls us to do we are about an enterprise of deep meaning.

“And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 5:5)

More than a strategy, hope is our core business.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Human vision is unique in the particular depth of field and the colors that we see. Different animals have different structures in their eyes that result in the visual experience being different for those animals. For the most part, animals have adapted to the unique circumstances of their lives. The deer in our yards, for example have eyes that have more rods and fewer cones than human eyes. Rods are sensitive to low light but don’t’ register color. While we humans have limited night vision, the deer see much better in low light situations. They do not, however, have the same ability to distinguish color as we do. I don’t think that we fully understand how deer see. There are lots of articles in hunting magazines that claim to have a deeper understanding and the companies that market high end hunting clothing claim to have come up with products that are supposed to make humans invisible to deer. Whether or not these products work is debatable.

What we do know is that the world looks different to a deer than it does to our eyes.

The world looks different to the ducks, geese and herons on the lake as well. Birds see in color though their range of vision is probably a bit different on the spectrum than ours. Birds that are active at night, such as owls, can see more in the near ultraviolet range than humans. The water birds have a unique adaptation in their eyes that allows them to fix the horizon accurately as a reference point. Some birds also have brightly colored oil droplets in their eyes that serve as filters and allow them to see in a different way. Yellow oil droplets remove much of the blue from the sky and allow the bird to perceive more contrast between an object flying and the background of the sky. Some birds also have red droplets that remove green and allow for better vision against the background of plants and trees.

It is believed that beavers also can see in color, though the exact range of their color vision is probably different from ours. Because beavers spend much time in muddy water, it is assumed that they can see better in low light situations and, like deer, they may have less color sensitivity than humans.

All of this is to simply observe that the particular way a sunrise on the lake looks to human eyes is probably different than it looks to the eyes of the critters that live at the lake. Although the campgrounds still have quite a few campers and the summer cabin area has water until the end of September, there are mornings when I arrive at the lake early enough that it seems as if I am the only one who is looking at the beauty of the place. As autumn progresses and more and more boats are pulled from the lake and more and more campers head to warmer places, the feeling of having the lake to myself increases. Long before the lake freezes over, I will be able to have the lake to myself any day of the week.

Some of the birds will also leave for the winter, but the mammals, for the most part remain in their homes around the lake.

When I look at a sunrise from my boat on the lake, I am struck by the uniqueness of the moment. Each sunrise is different. The particular pattern of clouds, the angle of the sun, and a thousand different factors combine to make each sunrise a unique visual experience. And since my position on the lake affects what I see, there are many times when I am the only creature that can see what I see. It is glory with a single witness.

And when I do not go to the lake, there is beauty that is not witnessed.

This wonderful world does not withhold beauty simply because there is no one to behold it. It is a simple concept and yet it is one that has mystified poets and philosophers from the beginning of history. And there is significant evidence that human eyes have evolved significantly over the centuries. We probably don’t see the world exactly as did the residents of ancient Greece, for example. It is likely that we have less night vision and more color sensitivity than did people who lived thousands of years ago.

Another observation about the beauty and glory of the world is that it is not fully captured by photography. I take a camera with me when I paddle most of the time. I try and try to capture the beauty and glory that I see and am struck by the simple fact that looking at a photograph is not at all the same as experiencing the beauty. I experimented with a simple video camera this summer and had similar results. The camera captures only part of the experience. It records only some of the colors. It seems to lower the contrast between the brightness of the sunlight and the dark shadows. I’m sure that there are photographers who understand light and lenses and filters better than I who are able to capture more accurate images. But the images remain just that: images. They are not the reality.

Of course what we see and experience is just a small fraction of the immensity of the universe. We know so little compared with the vastness of time and space. Still, it seems significant that we are able to have some consciousness of the beauty that surrounds us. We do attempt to capture a bit of it in words and pictures. Our art does reflect a bit of the glory of the natural world.

On days like today when I won’t be going to the lake, I see a bit of the beauty of the world in the places that I do go and I remember the beauty that I have seen. Even without looking at the pictures that I have taken, I can recapture part of the experience by remembering. Some of the experience remains within me.

It is clear, however, that this world has far more beauty than we are able to perceive – and more glory than we can imagine.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I’m not a huge fan of television. We have a television and I do watch a few programs from time to time, but when people ask me if I am familiar with a particular program, I rarely have even watched an entire episode. There are lots of things that are part of the popular culture that I know mostly be people talking about them or by news reporting about the media rather than by watching television. It just doesn’t often capture my imagination. I turn on the television, find my mind wandering and soon leave the room to do something else. I think that is why prefer to listen to the radio. The radio is portable and it allows you to do something else while it is playing. It can move seamlessly from the foreground to the background without conscious effort. I know that there are people who can operate with the television in the background, but I find that to be a real challenge. When I visit a home where the television is continually on or, worse yet for me, go to a restaurant with several different televisions with different programs or sports events playing, I find the video to be distracting. I have trouble maintaining a reasonable conversation in such a setting because the television screens pull my attention away from the people.

So I’m no expert on television.

But I do know that it has a special role to play in the lives of many people. I still remember a conversation that we had in the early 1980’s as we prepared to resettle a refugee family coming to the United States. I had focused on what I thought were “essential” items for the small apartment: silverware, pots and pans, towels, sheets, a kitchen table and beds. The person we were working with at Church World Service suggested that we get a television set. My initial reaction was to say, “Is that necessary?” The response was, “Yes.” The television set provided one more way for the family new to our country to be immersed in our language and culture. It became a teacher of English as well as some of the nuances of our way of life.

Often, when I would visit the family, I would see Sesame Street on the television.

I was already familiar with Sesame Street. I think that it was the program that most sealed the deal when our family got our first set. I wanted our children to be able to watch the award-winning preschool program. And, frankly, I loved the puppets. I have never learned to be a puppeteer, but I sure like the puppets. And top on my list of loveable puppets was Cookie Monster. The puppet is essentially a mouth with a pair of googly eyes on the top of his head encased in blue fur. And he has a deep, gravely voice and a love of cookies. It wasn’t hard for me to learn some of his songs and routines and before long we had a cookie monster puppet in our home and I was reading stories and singing songs with our children that came from the television program.

I don’t know if you are a fan of Sesame Street, but the Sesame Workshop is a serious educational venture that pays attention to the needs of children. As a result of that attention, the character of Cookie Monster has been played down in recent years. Cookie has been making fewer appearances simply because we live ini a culture where eating to excess is not a good lesson to teach children. Cookie Monster’s love of cookies is amusing, but the writers and educators of the Workshop began to question if it was a good example. They tried to get Cookie to eat healthy snacks such as vegetables and fruit, but it didn’t really have much effect because Cookie is a Monster – he eats everything! I’ve seen him eat fish and meat, but also a bicycle and also a canoe.

The approach is different in this season of Sesame Street. Cookie is struggling to learn self-control. Assisted by the other characters on the program, he is developing strategies to reduce his desire to over eat. He is learning to take a breath and remember what good foods he should eat. He is learning to use his mind and imagination to help him eat fewer cookies. And for the season, while he will occasionally eat a cookie in his crumbly, monster fashion, he will be eating only one cookie at a time and then only after showing some restraint and self control.

Self-regulation is a very difficult thing to teach to preschoolers, but preschool is just the right age for the lesson. At 3 or 4 years of age, children begin to become aware of the ways they affect others and they begin to understand that others have feelings and experience some of the same emotions that they are experiencing. As children move from all limits being imposed from the outside to having the ability to set some of their own limits, the seeds of conscience are sown. Children who fail to learn self-regulation as preschoolers either have to learn it later in life or they go through life limited only by external rules and structures. Too often those who do not learn self-regulation end up in jail – a place where regulation is imposed in a severe manner.

I probably won’t watch Sesame Street on the television unless I happen to be in someone else’s home. I am, however, grateful to see that the program is allowing its characters to evolve and that it has the courage to address some really difficult issues of culture and of child development. For families where there is a lot of television in the home, I hope that Sesame Street is one of the programs that is watched by preschool children.

And it gets my attention as well. I’m beginning to wish I had a preschooler with whom to watch some of Cookie’s Crumbly Pictures. After all I hear that among the offerings this year will be “The Spy who Loved Cookies,” and “The Biscotti Kid.”

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Like many others, I have been watching the dramatic photographs coming out of Colorado. I don’t have too many friends who live in the Boulder area and the ones that I do have been able to contact me by e-mail to assure me that they are doing OK in the midst of all of that rainwater and mud rushing by in the creeks and streams. There are a lot of roads washed out and a lot of property damage, but so far only four people have lost their lives. Still, the use of the word “only” makes no sense to those who loved the ones who died. There grief is no less than the grief of people who lose loved ones in tragedies with bigger numbers.

There are some big numbers associated with the floods. Some have predicted that flood recovery could cost as much as a billion dollars. That is a lot of money. Some places got 18 inches of rain in three days – more than the average annual rainfall. That is a lot of water. Before too long people will start to count the number of vehicles, the number of houses destroyed, the number of buildings damaged, but repairable and on and on.

And there are still quite a few people who remember the flood of the Big Thompson in 1976 that still holds the record for the most fatalities in a flood event in the United States.

As usual, you don’t have to look far in this world to find crisis and tragedy. There are small business owners in New Jersey who are trying to figure out what the next steps will be after a fire ravaged a section of the boardwalk. After making a partial comeback from Superstorm Sandy, the boardwalk didn’t do as much business as had been the case in the past and then 50 or so businesses were destroyed or damaged by a huge fire that burned more than four blocks of the business district.

Hard times and tragedies leave people wondering how much they can take. It is not uncommon to hear people paraphrase 1 Corinthians 10:13 when others are facing trials. The most common paraphrase goes something like, “God will not give you more than you can handle.” The actual verse is a bit different: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” The problem with the text and with the paraphrases that come out if it is that we live in such an individualized culture that we think that we have to bear the burdens of this life alone. It doesn’t take much observation of the great tragedies of this world to come up with examples of people who have been crushed by tragedy. There are some very important elements in the letter to the Corinthians that provide a much different understanding of how God works in the midst of human tragedy.

If you read through the lamentations and stories of the dark times in the history of our people, you will find that even when Israel suffered political defeat, even when the people faced exile and the loss of loved ones, they discovered that God continued to be faithful. The words “God is faithful,” are critical in understanding the potential of being overcome. In the darkest moments of our story – in the times when it is hard to see God’s presence and purpose – God continues to be God. God continues to be faithful. Sometimes we can’t see it in the present moment and it is only visible from the advantage of looking back on events after they have passed. But God is always faithful in whatever circumstances we find ourselves.

Also key to understanding the text is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you have to bear temptation or suffering or loss alone. When people isolate themselves from community and try to take all of the burdens upon themselves, they can be crushed. Since we know that God is faithful, we don’t have to bear the full weight of tragedy alone. And God not only grants presence, but also surrounds us with community. In Colorado and in New Jersey, and in the places of tragedy, loss and suffering around the world, people learn to draw together and to help one another. Along with the stories of tragedy are stories of community – of people helping one another.

So today as we worship we will add our prayers to the prayers of others and remember our connections to those who suffer. And as the recovery continues we will look for the presence and faithfulness of God in the midst of tragedy and loss and hard times.

Once again yesterday we paused to remember a tragedy that occurred in our community a little more than two years ago. In the late summer of 2011, officers James McCandless and Nick Armstrong were killed in the line of duty. The community rallied around the families and friends of the fallen officers. We’ve had a couple of years for the healing process to work its way through the community, but it is a tragedy that will not be forgotten. So at the “Battle of the Badges” first responders’ softball tournament yesterday, we began with the families of the slain officers throwing out the ceremonial first pitches and we all paused to remember. It was a day of recreation for many of our community’s first responders. These are pretty competitive guys, so it made sense to organize a tournament that gave plenty of chances for them to compete. Some teams played as many as five games in the day as they worked their way through the tournament.

Here in Rapid City, we had a day of recreation and fun for officers and for their families. But we were not unaware of the events in other communities and the officers in other places who were working overtime, battling exhaustion and playing a vital role in communities facing tragedy.

In all of the places God is present. In all of these places, God is faithful.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

One of the things that amuse me is that there are a lot of people who have misperceptions about what a church is and what those of us who work at church do with our everyday lives. It makes sense to me that with all of the different expressions of Christianity in the world, someone who is outside of the church might have misperceptions about what we believe. Since I enjoy talking about faith, I don’t mind explaining who we are and what we believe. The stories of our denomination and our particular congregation are fun to tell and I’m always glad to talk about our grass roots mission programs and our services.

After 35 years in the ministry it no longer surprises me that there are people outside of the church who think that we are a wealthy institution engaged primarily in philanthropy. We are a non-profit that invests all of its resources in serving the community. But we get regular calls from people who think that the primary way that we engage in that mission is by giving away money. The call to ask for funding for a lot of different things, primarily for real and immediate needs such as grocery money, rent money, money to pay utility bills, etc. But we also get requests for money to buy cars, gas and other things. We try to help where we are able, but we are not rich and are not able to fund all of the needs of our community. In the span of my ministry, churches that I serve have been burglarized three times and there have been a couple of other minor break-ins. In every case, the cost to repair the damages made by the person or persons entering the building exceeded the value of the items lost. Churches, at least the ones I have served, are not places of wealth and they are not filled with items that can be stolen and easily pawned. The average home has more items that could be stolen. And despite the fact that we pass an offering plate in worship, most of our income comes to us in the form of checks, we bank our income regularly, and there is rarely any cash in the building.

A church as large and complex as ours also has lots of members who don’t know what we do all of the time. They are aware of the major worship services. They are aware of the programs in which they participate. But they don’t know of all of the activities that occupy our building. It is a common occurrence for a member of our congregation to stop by in the middle of the week and be surprised at all of the activity. Church members will sometimes plan a meeting or event at the church and neglect to check with the office to see what is going on. We hear all sorts of expressions of surprise that our rooms are scheduled for mid-week use and not always available without advance planning.

So I had the idea of writing a blog that would be a typical day in the life of our church and sort of tell the story of what goes on in our church. The problem is that there are no “typical” days. Each day is a new adventure. So, in place of that, here is a run down of some of the things that happened yesterday at 1st Congregational United Church of Christ in Rapid City.

There was no time during the day when there wasn’t someone in the building. I arrived at the church unusually late at about 7:45 a.m. The preschool teachers were already busy getting ready for the arrival of students. It still amazes me that there are regular and active members of our church who don’t understand the size of the preschool program. There are eighty 3 and 4-year-olds in the program this year. Their primary space is just three large classrooms in the west wing of the building and those classrooms are organized and in order. They are also used by the church for other programs on Sunday mornings.

There was a group of college students getting a little breakfast in the kitchen. They are traveling as part of a program of Elon University in North Carolina and are touring the hills before engaging in a service project at Pine Ridge. I can tell where the wireless Internet access ends in the hallways by where the students sit in the halls. They all have mobile devices and connect to the Internet to communicate with family and friends and to do some of the research that is part of their learning experiences. Their two professors also need the Internet to keep up with their responsibilities.

By 8:30, our church office was open and Ryan was preparing bulletins for Sunday worship, answering the phone, and helping with a dozen different tasks. Our office has a very good coffee maker and so people who come to the church for various duties stop by for a bit of coffee and conversation and the office is a hub of activity. During the day there were volunteers watering plants, delivering firewood, seeing to the supplies for our food-coupon sales, entering attendance into the computer and a variety of different tasks in the building.

In the morning the janitors came through the building, cleaned all of the restrooms, vacuumed all of the carpets, dust mopped the sanctuary and washed the glass in the entryway. I enjoyed brief conversations with the workers as they came to my office to empty trash and recycling bins and vacuumed the carpet.

There are always surprises to our work routine. Yesterday Susan had to spend extra time in front of her computer because a wedding at which she was slated to co-officiate became a wedding that she was handling solo as a colleague was stuck in Boulder, Colorado due to flooding in that area. She had to write the service and be prepared for a rehearsal.

The Stained Glass group met in the kitchen. The Watercolor group met in room 24. During the day I came and went with errands to run, hospital visits to make, and other activities that took place in other locations. At no time did we need to lock the building, because it was continually occupied by multiple groups.

After the wedding rehearsal, the dinner was held in our fellowship hall. The family and friends of the bride and groom had eaten and were settling into an evening of board games when I left the building. And that was just 12 hours after I arrived – only half of a 24-hour day. The college students were spending the night again and will be there when I arrive in the morning.

And that is just one day. It’s usually busy and it’s never boring.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Our attention was rightly focused on memories of a tragic day on September 11, so many may have missed a news conference that was held on that day in Alaska. Alaska lieutenant governor Mead Treadwell announced that Mount McKinley is 20,237 feet tall. That comes as a shock to those who have climbed to the summit and those who plan to one day do so. Since 1952 when the elevation of the mountain was measured using photogrammetry, the official height of McKinley has been listed as 20,320.

My first reaction was, “They’ve got some explaining to do in Alaska. You don’t just lose 83 feet of altitude and pretend it didn’t happen.”

The lieutenant governor says that the change in official records was the result of the Statewide Digital Mapping initiative in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey used more accurate techniques to determine the height of the mountain. A survey in 2012 used Intereferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar. If you ask me, all of this technological mumbo-jumbo doesn’t account for the fact that they decided to make their announcement on September 11. They didn’t want to make headlines and timed the announcement to garner as little press as possible. Heck, they didn’t even use the governor to make the announcement.

Of course all of this is said tongue in cheek. I have no doubt that there are now more accurate ways to measure the height of a mountain. And it isn’t hard to see how a mistake of 83 feet could have been made on a mountain that is shrouded in clouds more days than it is clear, that stands higher than the service ceiling of many of the airplanes that fly around it, where the winds buffet and make the air rough and instruments difficult to read to the nearest foot.

After all, even if the mountain were shrinking, there’d be a little over 99.6% of the thing left.

The Koyuk call the mountain Denali, which simply means “The High One.” As far as we know George Vancouver was the first non-indigenous visitor to see the mountain. He arrived in 1794. Europeans usually want to “conquer” high places by climbing, but it wasn’t until June of 1913 that an ascent of the mountain was verified. Earlier claims to have summited the mountain proved to be false. In 1951 Bradford Washington was the first to use the West Buttress route now considered to be the safest way to climb the mountain. These days all summer long there is a permanent base camp at 7,200 feet on the Kahiltna Glacier. Airplanes shuttle climbers and day tourists to the base camp whenever the weather is clear. From there, you walk. There is significant technical climbing involved in reaching the summit. A guided climb of the West Buttress route will run a little above $7,000 per climber. A little over half of those who attempt make it to the top.

I really don’t want to climb the mountain, though I would like to see it. If I were in Alaska and had the money, I’d love to fly around the mountain and perhaps even land on the glacier to experience a bit of base camp life. But I know that if I were in Alaska, the odds are that the mountain would be shrouded in clouds and the best I would be able to do would be to catch a short glimpse of the massive collection of peaks.

Now that it is 83 feet shorter than it used to be, I’d probably be looking too high in the sky when the clouds did part.

Mountains play an important role in the stories of people. The people of our faith, however, come from a place where things aren’t really all that high. There is some discussion about the location of the Biblical Mount Sinai, but the tallest point on the Sinai Peninsula is only 8668 feet above sea level. The territory of the Bible is sort of like the Black Hills and Badlands combined. Of course we don’t have any seas, but theirs aren’t as big as you might imagine. The Sea of Galilee isn’t exactly Lake Superior. Here in the hills the highest point is 7244 feet above sea level. Whether or not the observatory at the top of Harney Peak is tall depends on your perspective. If you compare it to the Rocky Mountains with plenty of peaks above tree line and lots of peaks above 14,000 feet, it isn’t exactly a mountain. On the other hand it is the tallest point west of the Rocky Mountains on the North American continent, making it higher than the Black Mountains, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Appalachians and other places. New Hampshire’s White Mountains are only 6288 at their highest point. Mt. Katahdin in Maine is only 5268. When you are standing on top of Harney Peak and looking east, it is pretty much all downhill from here.

But even the massive 14,000 peaks of Colorado are short when compared to Mt. McKinley. If we had a mountain that could afford to lose 83 feet, McKinley is probably the best candidate on the continent.

There have been times in our history when people believed that God preferred higher elevations. Moses went up on the mountain to talk to God. Most of the plains tribes sought out mountains for vision quests. Going into the mountains or climbing peaks has long been seen not only as a physical quest, but also a spiritual journey for many generations. Even though we know that God is not limited to any particular altitude, we still can experience closeness with the Creator when traveling in the mountains.

I expect that a view of Mount McKinley is a glimpse of glory. It is an experience that I someday will enjoy very much if the opportunity presents itself. I enjoy looking at pictures of the mountain and maps of the various climbing routes. I can live with the High One being 83 feet shorter.

The problem is with the math. I’ll never remember 20,237. There is a symmetry to 20,320 that made the number easy to memorize. Now I have to take 20,320 and subtract 83 to get the real height. On the other hand, I figure that if I’m within a hundred feet, that’s pretty good.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

We try to work ahead on worship planning. That means that there are many times when my head is filled with several different passages of scripture. Then, as Sunday approaches, I focus on the particular texts that form the focus for our worship each week. Sometimes, however, when we have picked a particular text as our weekly focus from the distance of a few months in advance, as the day approaches, I find myself thinking in a different direction than the worship plans seems to be leading me. I know this sounds confusing as I write it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that sometimes the scriptures lead me in a different direction than our plans.

I had planned to focus worship on part of Paul’s greeting to Timothy in the first chapter of 1st Timothy. I am reaching the stage in my life where I think that I might have a bit of advice to share with a young leader in the church. I am impressed with the faithfulness of some of the emerging church leaders and I am drawn to conversation with them and aware of what great gifts they have to offer to the church. I know little to nothing about the relationship between Paul and Timothy, but it seems that the letters come from Paul’s gradual acceptance of the fact that he is aging and new leadership is emerging.

However, the Gospel reading for this week has been dancing in the back of my mind all week. It is a very familiar text. There are two stories of finding lost things that precede the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15: the lost sheep and the lost coin. In most modern translations, Jesus begins the parable of the lost sheep with a question: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

I can easily imagine a scene in which I am part of a crowd listening to Jesus teaching and upon hearing the question I sheepishly (no pun intended) raise my hand. I think that I am the one who does not leave 99 sheep in the wilderness on the prospect of finding one who is lost. I mean doesn’t one have some responsibility to the 99 sheep? Doesn’t one consider the risk to the flock of being in the wilderness? If there were to be an attack from wolves, wouldn’t 99 left unprotected be likely to lose more than one?

I don’t mean to be crass, but people slip between the cracks all the time in real communities. We focus on the needs of a lot of people and sometimes an individual doesn’t show up or has something going on in his or her life and we aren’t aware of it. If we use the same odds as the parable of the lost sheep, at any given moment there are 6 people out of our 600-member church of whose circumstances we are unaware. Churches are dynamic organizations. People come and go. I don’t like the idea of a church losing members, but it is a reality that I have to accept in a world with very little institutional loyalty, and very complex family dynamics. When I don’t see someone for a few weeks, I often don’t know if it is illness, hurt feelings, or soccer. And I feel like I imagine the shepherd in the parable might feel. If he goes in search of the lost sheep, what guarantee does he have that three more won’t be missing as soon as he returns with the one? In a church, if I obsess about one person, there are likely to be a dozen who feel slighted because I’m not paying enough attention to them.

I find the lost sheep and the lost coin to have two very different odds. In the first, the shepherd is challenged to risk 99% of his flock in search of 1%. In the other, the woman doesn’t apparently risk the 90% of her wealth to look for the lost 10%. Of course you’d look carefully for the lost coin if you were the woman in that parable. The preferred course of action isn’t as clear in the first story.

It may be the result of over analysis. Maybe I’m just thinking about the story too much. The obvious meaning in the story is that there is much rejoicing when the lost is found. Jesus’ own conclusion in the parable is simple: “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

But even that conclusion is confusing to me. I’ve never found myself to be in need of no repentance. There is always something in my life that should and could be changed. I experience life as a series of corrections and changes. I’m sure that there are some people in this world who are far better than I. But I can’t quite imagine a crowd of “ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

It is helpful for me to remember the context of the parables. Luke reports: “the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” The story starts out with people complaining about the company that Jesus kept. That I can identify with. In a congregation the size of ours, there is always a bit of grumbling going on, and it is not uncommon for the grumbling to sound like: “the pastor spends too much time with others and not enough with me!”

I’m particularly vulnerable to that kind of criticism precisely because I am constantly questioning my own priorities in terms of time. Sometimes I do get distracted and spend a lot of time with an individual or a family. Sometimes I don’t spend enough time or give enough attention to someone who also deserves my time and attention. Sometimes people do “slip between the cracks.”

I’m not sure what direction I’ll be going with my sermon this week, but it is clear to me that I don’t have the wisdom of Paul. Perhaps I’m not yet ready to be writing “sage advice” to young leaders. When I really look at the church these days, it often seems that the emerging leaders have more wisdom than I. It is a hopeful possibility.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The United Church Youth group at our church doesn’t meet regularly during the summer. We have a lot of summer programming for children and youth, but it takes a different shape during the school year than it does during the summer vacation. Big programs like Vacation Bible School and summer camps are designed around the school break. Now that the youth are back in school, we resume regular Wednesday evening programs. Tonight is the first meeting of the fall of the fellowship group that will meet Wednesdays until the end of the school year in May. Like many other ministries of the church, there is an element of presence in what we do. We agree with the youth that we will be there for them, every week, even when we know that the attendance of most of the youth will be much less regular.

There is symbolism in the fact that the first meeting this year falls on September 11. This year’s sixth graders are the youngest children who were alive when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. Next year we will have 6th graders who were born after the attack. For the youth in our group, however, there are very few memories of the world before those attacks. Only the oldest of our high school youth have active memories of what the world was like before the attacks.

Most of us adults see the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon along with the crash of United Fight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania as a turning point in our experience. It is one of those “I remember where I was when . . .” events. Most people over the age of 20 can tell a story about that day.

But none of us can stop the passage of time. Our stories are less passionate, our memories less palpable, than was the case in the first days, weeks and years following the attacks. For an increasing number of children and youth, the attacks of September 11, 2001 are an item of history, not of the present.

Many of the youth in our group have no conscious memories of a time when the United States wasn’t engaged in a war in a foreign land. Receiving the news of deployment of troops, and death of US troops in foreign lands is simply a way of life for them. For them, the concept of a war between two nations is something that happened in former times. Their experience of war is that the enemy is far more difficult to define. The war on terror involves direct military action in foreign countries, but it also includes forays into the lands of allies, the use of drones in a far wider range of territory than a single nation, and a continual re-definition of who the enemy is and how that enemy is pursued.

Because there are so many threats in the world, it is uncertain if we will know when the war on terror is over. Some have proposed that the war on terror is perpetual and never fully over.

The children we are raising today will never know the kind of victory celebrations that VE Day and VJ Day for their great-grandparents.

Not all of the changes in the world have equal value, but it is important for us to remember that experiences we take for granted are not a part of the stories of our youth. There are things we have seen and known that exist only in the stories of others for them.

Not only can they not remember phones with dials, they can’t remember phones with cords attached to them. Not only can they not remember a time before personal computers, they cannot remember a time before handheld devices were in common use.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Apartheid in South Africa, the wall in Germany – all are relegated to the history books for these youth.

They have no memory of a time when divorce was rare. They don’t know a world where most families attended church every week. They have no experience of homes with only one television, and a daily newspaper is not the way news gets into their homes.

Of course change has always been a part of our world. In a sense there is nothing new about recognizing that our youth will face a different world than the one we have known. In the days when I was a youth member of my church, popular culture spoke of the generation gap and there were songs and slogans urging youth to not trust anyone over 30. It’s too late for that in my case. I don’t even have children under the age of 30 anymore.

This evening, as we meet with the youth, there will be a special prayer in memory of the events of September 11, 2001. I have prayed special prayers for 9-11 each year since those attacks. These days I have a collection of more than a dozen such prayers. Each year, however, deserves a fresh prayer – a new expression of how faith interacts with the events of daily lives.

Our people have always been shaped by the stories of what brought us to this place in time and space. The most ancient of our scriptures tell of how our forebears left the land of their ancestors in quest of a new place and in the process discovered that God is not limited to a particular place. For generations we have taught our children the stories of the escape from slavery in Egypt and the quest for a new home in the midst of the wilderness. We have steadfastly maintained that we are shaped by events that occurred long before our births. We belong to a people that did not begin in this generation. Those lessons are still relevant to the children and youth of today, even as we are aware that the chain of stories is longer and the events we deem important more numerous than ever before.

So we tell our stories first hand and face to face. The journey of faith continues and what we teach our children and youth is as important as it has been for every generation of our people.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

My weather predictions yesterday were all wrong. There was no fog at the lake and it was a beautiful clear morning. I paddled in short sleeves and enjoyed getting close to a beaver who swam right under my little boat and splashed his tail three different times as he tried to move me from his corner of the lake. I finally complied, but only after having a good show from the rodent.

The last few years, I have been growing sunflowers in my garden. I tell people that I grow sunflowers because I can’t afford to own a Van Gough painting. It is true that I can’t afford to own an artistic masterpiece. But there is a bit more to the story than that. To begin with, sunflowers are easy to grow once you have fenced out the deer so that they have the opportunity to produce flowers before being eaten. One of their qualities that is important for someone like me is that they are very weed resistant. They compete with the weeds well and tower above the weeds that are missed in my rather casual style of gardening. As long as they have a little water and plenty of sunshine they seem to do well.

Last year I took all of the sunflower seeds that I could find in my shed and mixed them together. That was so successful that I did a similar thing this year, adding in a few new seeds from the store. I think that there are probably some dynamics of plant genetics that I don’t understand. When I harvest seeds from my own plants, the yield is lower and the plants are a bit smaller. In order to get the really tall plants with the giant blooms I need to add a few fresh seeds from commercial growers each year. At any rate, I mix the varieties and plant a couple of rows of seeds and when things start to grow, I allow the volunteers to come up as well. Because I allow the pinion jays and other birds to harvest the sunflowers each year, a certain amount of seeds come up on their own. So some of my weeds are actually the plants that I was intending to grow in the first place. It works out well for me.

I’m not much of a gardener. I’m too busy or too lazy to do all of the work of having a perfectly manicured lawn and an orderly garden. But I like to grow a few things. I have a few rose bushes and each year we grow a few tomatoes. Other plants vary year by year. Most years I grow a little lettuce and a few carrots. Some years there are peas and spinach and a few other crops as well. We’ve grown potatoes and corn in our little garden. We don’t garden to replace shopping for groceries and we consume far more produce from the farmer’s market than from our own garden.

There are two kinds of flowers with which I am quite successful. I grow daisies. We started growing daisies in part because our daughter likes them. Daisies are perennials and once you get them established they come up each year. I’ve found a couple of places in the yard where they thrive and in the back where I have scattered wildflower seeds, the daisies are well established. Daisies are summer flowers and last for quite a long time. These days the daisies remind me of our daughter’s wedding where there were plenty of daisies.

My second flower crop consists of the sunflowers in the vegetable garden. They don’t produce food for humans, though I’m sure that there is nutritional value in the seeds and they could be gathered, dried and roasted. I just don’t bother. I like the day when the jays discover them each fall and we have a huge hoard of jays all around our yard for a few hours. In the symmetry of life, our son was married in the fall and their wedding featured sunflowers, so I have flowers each year to remind me of two very happy occasions in our family’s story.

Another happy thing about the sunflowers is that although the blossoms track the sunlight, the location of our garden and the amount of shade on the other side of the yard means that most of the time the sunflowers are facing the neighbors. We don’t really have the best view of the sunflowers from our home. We have to go out and walk around the garden to see all of the blossoms. I think it is kind of nice that I have a bit of beauty to share with the neighbors. We don’t live in an area with too much of the competitive gardening that is found in some neighborhoods, but we have neighbors who do a really nice job of taking care of their yards and sometimes our lawn features dry spots and our garden features weeds. It is nice to have something of beauty to share with the neighbors.

I was talking with friends the other day about how a beautiful lawn can be a real chore. In some cases, the harder you work to make you yard beautiful, the more work it takes to maintain it. For some people that can be a real joy and each year you notice a few new features and a few more additions to the yard. For others, who prefer other activities to yard work, the effort to have a beautiful yard can be a frustration. There are a few things that can be accomplished with minimal maintenance, but the truth is that the beautiful lawns are the product of weeding, fertilizing, watering, planning, planting and then more weeding. There are a few homes in town where they spend a fortune to have professional landscapers come in to design and plant beautiful yards and then the work of maintenance gets ahead of the homeowners. Things go downhill until they spend the money to have the professionals come back in and do it over again.

We tend toward the simple. A little grass, a few trees, some daisies and a few sunflowers are sufficient to make us happy in our home and give me time to go to the lake to paddle.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

We had a line of thundershowers move through last evening again. There was a lot of lightning, but it seemed to be striking far from our place as we watched the rain fall out our windows. I don’t know how much rain we got, but at this point in the year every drop helps. The hills are remarkably green for September, but there are plenty of signs of drying. We’ve had quite a bit of dust and other things blowing around. People who don’t have many allergies are blowing their noses and rubbing their eyes. But everything smells wonderful this morning. A little water on the pine trees makes the world smell fresh.

I checked the weather on the Internet. The showers have moved off and there is no significant precipitation in the area right now. There is a scattered layer of clouds at about 12,000 feet and another layer at 4700 feet. It is that lower layer that could make my morning interesting. I’m going to head to the lake in a few minutes and Sheridan Lake sits at 4624 feet, which should make it very misty and ethereal at the lake.

I love the different moods of the lake, and one of the moods that I enjoy is when the mist is rising from the water and it is a bit like launching my boat into the fog. The difference, of course, is that I’m not launching my boat into a large ocean where I could easily become confused and lost. At the lake, I can simply paddle along a very familiar shore and know where I am at all times. But the mist and the fog change the way that distances look and they affect the behavior of the animals as well.

I don’t think that the ospreys enjoy fishing in the fog. They have wonderful vision, but I don’t think that they can see the fish through the fog. The fish are often rising in the fog, though I can’t see what they are finding. There don’t seem to be any insects flying over the surface of the water, but there must be something to attract the fish to the surface.

When it is foggy, the lake becomes very quiet. Even the geese, who are perpetual complainers and seems to be enamored at their ability to raise a ruckus, will quiet down and settle down when it is foggy. A lone duck may make his presence known if I paddle too closely, but usually he’ll just paddle away from me without making much noise. The shore birds are quieter in the fog as well. The red-winged and yellow-headed black birds that nest in the cattails normally raise plenty of noise, but they seem to respect the quiet of the morning as well.

The fog changes the colors that you see as well. Each drop of water suspended in the air serves as a prism. There is rarely enough light penetrating the fog in the early morning for there to be much of a rainbow effect, but at the surface of the water where I paddle my boat things appear to be a bit more blue and reds and yellows are a bit subdued.

They used to make fog lamps on cars with amber lenses, believing that somehow the amber light penetrated the fog better. But that isn’t really true. If anything, the amber lights worked a bit better because less of the light reflected back to the driver. The trick with fog lights is to have them pointing down at the road surface and not so far ahead. Less light reflects back into the driver’s eyes. But the angle of the light also means that you are not able to see as far down the road as when driving with regular lights. There’s no substitute for simply slowing down when driving in the fog.

My canoes and kayaks travel at slow speeds in the first place, so I have no fear of colliding with things as I paddle, even on a foggy day. I suppose that there is a small chance that someone in a motorboat would fail to see me, but I wear a bright paddling jacket and my life vest has reflector strips on it. And, frankly, the motor boaters don’t like to be out on Sheridan Lake in the fog, so I have the lake to myself.

Perhaps there is a hint of autumn in the air this morning. Its only about 55 degrees which is pleasant and normal. The warmer temperatures that we saw last week are really higher than typical for this time of year. And here in the hills we know that if it gets hot in September, there will be cool days to follow. We are unlikely to find ourselves in a lasting heat spell this late in the year. Our autumns are beautiful and we’ve got months of outdoor activities ahead of us, but there will be enough cool nights to remind us that summer is a fleeting season and change is on the wind.

Winter, however, is a long way off for us. Although we’ve certainly seen snow in October, that snow rarely lasts and the hills are great for melting off our autumn snows and rewarding us with more beautiful days. There are many years when we don’t see much snow before February. And the biggest snowfalls of the year are usually the spring blizzards when we get a full melt off between storms.

So today is a day to enjoy. The “to do” list is really long so I can’t linger at the lake, but there is time to stretch the muscles and explore the shoreline. And the hills are interesting enough that I could be surprised about the fog. Nothing is certain when it comes to our weather. There might be a patch of clear skies at the lake. I won’t know until I get there. It is the surprise that keeps me attracted to my morning paddle.

And this world is not short of ability to surprise me and fill me with wonder.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

We’ve got a busy morning at the church. As I prepare for the day, I’m not sure that I am remembering all of the things that we have got going on. Let’s see . . . it is “Bring a Friend to Church Sunday.” In a more traditional congregation like ours, we get out of practice at the simple skill of inviting others to join us. The statistics are clear: church growth depends on individual invitations by members. But it takes some effort to make that invitation and our church is a comfortable size. So a couple of times a year, we make a special effort to encourage our people to make the invitations to their friends and neighbors.

Today is the “blessing of the backpacks.” There are a lot of churches that have a form of this practice of highlighting the return of children to school each fall. The children bring their backpacks to church and we offer a special time of prayer and blessing for the children. It isn’t so much that we bless the backpacks as we bless the children. We pray for a successful and safe school year for all.

Today is “September Fair.” It is our version of a church school carnival. There are special events and activities for children as we kick off another year of weekly church school. This is an event that is largely influenced by an imitation of other churches. Other churches rent bounce houses for their fall kickoff events. We do too. Other churches advertise lots of fun events for children. We do too. Sometimes the planning sessions for our fall events are mostly conversations about what other churches do. I wonder if it really has much impact on the learning of the children or the numbers of children who become involved in our programs. But I am no expert in advertising and I don’t fully understand the dynamics of family decision-making in regards to church and other priorities.

We are having a potluck lunch after church. Potlucks at our church, as other churches, are largely successful. People bring lots of good food to share. The fellowship of having a meal together is a good way for people to get to know each other and to develop relationships.

Our church participates in “40 Days of Prayer for Children” each year. Individual sign up to offer prayers each day for 40 days as we think and pray for the children of the world. Children are often the innocent and defenseless victims of wars and displacements and many other world events. And they often lack a voice in political processes. Our prayers help to remind us of the needs of children. As we raise awareness in our community, we also can become more effective advocates for children and their needs.

It seems to me that there is a trend in the church to move towards more big events. I sometimes describe some of the ministries of the church as “event based.” It is unlikely that we will have very many families that are willing to make a commitment to attend church every Sunday. Our weekly programs have to be designed as “stand alone” programs that are not dependent on the same children participating week to week. We delight in the presence of children, but know that we will see them less often than we’d like. It seems to be the reality of busy contemporary families. They have a lot of activities that demand their time and attention. And, for many families, church is just one among many organizations and events in their lives. We no longer enjoy a privileged position of being a higher priority for the family than other organizations and activities. When there is a soccer tournament on a Sunday morning, the family is drawn away from church. When the pressures of busy living are at their greatest, church is one thing that can be skipped. So instead of thinking in terms of regular, weekly programs, we tend to plan in terms of events. There is some thinking that if we make our events big enough, the people will come. We plan big events in the hopes that we can compete with other events and gain the attention of our families.

In the midst of all of the busyness, activities, and events, I believe that we are also called to be a presence in our community. We need to be available every week so that people can come to us when they have a need. We need to offer our prayers every week and not just the weeks when there are big events planned.

Presence isn’t measured in numbers. Endurance doesn’t come from making the biggest splash. Our life as a church isn’t just about the festival Sundays and big events that we plan. It is also about the day-to-day persistence and resilience that keeps us available for the people of our community. Families who live busy and hectic lives need to know that we are there every Sunday, even when they are elsewhere. Our community needs regular prayers, even when its attention is distracted – maybe especially when its attention is distracted.

The sermon will be short today. There is a lot of other activity in our busy life together. I hope that it is meaningful and well crafted. The impact of sermons is not a product of how many minutes they consume. And the purpose of preaching is to proclaim the good news of the Gospel, not to draw attention to the preacher. It isn’t a goal to have people going away from church impressed with the preacher. Our goal is to have people going away from church with the spiritual resources for their lives. I don’t care if they remember the sermon, but I hope they remember the scriptures. And I hope that they remember that we are there for them every day.

And to be present every day we need to remember not just the big events, but also the day-to-day business of visiting, praying, teaching, planning, studying and being a church.

The big events of today will soon be over. But the presence of our church in the community continues long beyond the span of our time on this earth.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

A few years ago I was reading through some of my blog posts and realized that I was writing about the antics of our cats a bit too often. It was fairly natural. Among the inspirations for the blog were the photographs that I had taken. The cats were ready subjects for the camera. In the midst of my busy life the cats seemed to always be available when I had time to take a picture. So I vowed to quit writing about the cats for a while.

A quick look through recent blogs indicates that I’ve about exhausted the subject of paddling. With the good weather that we are enjoying, paddling has been my main form of exercise and it is easy to grab a camera as I head out to the lake in the wee hours of the morning. Often when I sit down to write the blog the next day I find that the only pictures I have taken are of the lake, the sunrise and the bow of my canoe.

So it might be time to put some effort into other topics for a while. The problem is that I’m not sure what topics would be best. They say that a writer should write what one knows and I know Sheridan Lake, its creatures and the different moods of the water and weather.

There are plenty of things about which I know very little. Today’s election in Australia is making world news. Since it is already tomorrow in Australia, the results are in and Tony Abbott is set to become the new Prime Minister of Australia. The victory of the Coalition over Labor turned into a landslide, which was a wider margin that predicted by the pundits. But I don’t really know much about the dynamics of Australian politics. I do envy the Australians the relatively short election season. I’ve read a couple of columns about how Australians are weary after a campaign that lasted 35 days. Wow! They should come to the United States where presidential campaigns are multiple-year adventures. Kevin Rudd’s extensive use of social media didn’t garner him a win. With more than 1.3 million followers, he is one of the world’s most popular elected leaders on Twitter. But it wasn’t enough to garner him the 400,000-vote margin he predicted. I guess having a new youth health policy and the name “Rudd dog” on Reddit just wasn’t enough to win the election.

If I don’t blog about Australian politics, perhaps I should give some attention to World Beard Day. Held on the first Saturday of September each year, observances go back centuries. The Vikings in Denmark had a special day marking the glory of beards bas as far as 800 AD. I think the original celebrations included the ransacking of neighboring towns, villages and countries by large groups of heavily-armed and heavily-bearded men. In southern Spain, there is a tradition of a boxing match between a bearded man and a beardless boy. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a fair match to me. I guess I would be OK to visit the Swedish village of Donskborg, where anyone without a beard is banished from the town and forced to spend twenty-four hours in a nearby forest. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to live there. I like my clean-shaved friends and wouldn’t like to see them banned from my town. One article I read stated that shaving on world beard day is seen as highly disrespectful. Since I wear a trimmed beard, I shave parts of my cheeks and neck almost every day, but I can take a day off from the razor in honor of the world celebration. On the other hand, even though I’ve not been clean-shaven for 40 years, I don’t think I’d win any beard competitions. Most of the winners seem to have more than a half-inch of fuzz on their chins. Caring for such a beard seems like more work than this lazy guy is in for.

So that leaves me the topic of boats. We have a wonderful older Subaru with more than 218,000 miles on it that is a very good car for hauling boats. When I have my wooden canoes on the car, it seems to look just right. Having the boats on a newer car might detract attention away from the boats. And the car is faithful and dependable and always ready for a trip to the lake. Since I have more boats than cars, it frequently sports different looks. At the moment it has two creek boats on the roof. The creek boats are the only boats I have that are not wooden and they are shapes that I couldn’t easily make from wood. Furthermore they are often paddled in places where there are lots of rocks. They show the marks of having rubbed on the rocks in shallow areas of rivers and creeks. They were designed to take a beating and I haven’t been gentle with them. They aren’t ideal boats for the lake. They are designed to turn quickly and be very responsive, but they don’t track well for long-distance paddles.

I have the creek boats on the car because I need to spend some time practicing the skills of paddling on edge, spinning, balancing while I’m leaned way forward or way backward, etc. The skills and the muscles used to control the boats in the creek disappear without practice and I don’t want to let the summer go by without some good workouts with the short boats. I rarely paddle in rivers or creeks alone, however. Safety demands partners and a reasonable rescue plan for that kind of paddling. But I can take the boats out on the lake and do a little water dance and go through warmup exercises. I’m sure it looks a little silly seeing me spinning and paddling backwards and forwards on the edge of the boat, but it feels good to know that I haven’t completely lost the skills of that kind of paddling.

I’m sure that my neighbors, if they notice at all, are struck by the extravagance of one who owns more boats than any one person could possibly need. But then, again, I am struck by the extravagance of neighbors who trade cars way more often than seems reasonable and are always driving new and fancy vehicles. I can’t quite catch the desire for the motorcycles, jet skis, four-wheelers and snowmobiles that clutter the garages and storage units of my neighbors. I’m sure they don’t understand all of my boats.

Unlike the folks who chase the beardless ones from town on International Beard Day, I prefer to live among people who are different from me. I think it would be boring if all of my neighbors were as obsessed with boats as I.

I guess I’ll take my beard and boats to the lake.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

My office is filled with an eclectic assortment of items and memorabilia. There is an elaborately carved table from India that was a gift from a widely-traveled church member. I have a didgeridoo from Australia, a shofar made of a ram’s horn from Israel, a small hand labyrinth, Lakota drums, candles, a buffalo tail, a rock from the shores of Lake Superior, stained glass, a photograph of a Bible and communion set from the church we served in Idaho, and a whole lot of other items. Given the general state of clutter in my office, a couple of canoe paddles fit right in. The paddles that are temporarily in my office, however, are very unique and garner my attention each time I look at them.

They are hand carved and the blades are pointed at the ends in a fashion reminiscent of the paddles of Pacific Northwest Tribes such as the Tlingit, Salish, Samish or Taimshian. The T-handles are secured by two nails each, and are carefully fitted to the handles. Other than the T-handles, the rest of the paddles are carved from a single piece of wood. The paddles are very well balanced with half of the weight in the blade and the other half in the handles.

And the paddles are very long compared to the paddles I use. In fact, I don’t think I have the height or arm length to use the paddles kneeling or sitting. From the first glance that I had of them, I assumed that they were designed to be used in a standing position. I don’t know of any Pacific tribes that stood in their canoes, but the larger canoes, with 10 – 12 paddlers, were steered by a single paddler seated in the stern with a larger paddle. The paddle was used primarily as a rudder and occasionally sweeps, pries or braces were employed to control the craft. The stern paddler used a larger and longer paddle than the others. These large canoes were paddled from a seating position, but the seats were higher than in a solo or tandem canoe due to the size of the boats, thus longer paddles were used.

I do know part of the story of the paddles. They are in my office because retired judge Michael O’Connor brought them by for me to see. He obtained them from a school he attended in Santa Clara, California. The school got them from the collection of The Reverend Bernard Hubbard, S.J. Father Hubbard was quite a character.

The Reverend Bernard R. Hubbard, S.J. lived from 1888 until 1962. For many years he served as the head of the Department of Geology at the University of Santa Clara, California. He was known as a geologist, volcanologist, ichthyologist, oceanographer and paleontologist. His area of expertise was the arctic, and he earned his nickname, “The Glacier Priest” by climbing the Austrian Alps. Over the course of his career, he led 31 scientific expeditions into Alaska and the Arctic.

Part of the legacy of Father Hubbard is a collection of thousands of photographs, movies and sound recordings. He was the author of three books. He published articles in the National Geographic and the Saturday Evening Post. Over the course of his life and the many scientific expeditions that he led, he acquired a great amount of memorabilia. At one time the two paddles that are temporarily residing in my office were part of his collection.

Given that his area of expertise was the Arctic and that he led expeditions to Alaska, I’m sure that the paddles have their origins in the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Given the culture of those tribes, I am sure that the paddles were at one time honor gifts presented to Father Hubbard, not so much that he might paddle a canoe, but rather that he be gifted with valuable personal possessions. The canoes were tribally owned, but individuals possessed paddles and the paddles that were well balanced and easy to use were prized possessions and very valuable gifts.

I have no idea whether or not Father Hubbard actually used the paddles for water travel, but his famous 1931 expedition included a trip down the Yukon River, visiting missions along his way. He would have had many opportunities to visit with indigenous leaders and the paddles might date to that trip. If so, they may even have been used during part of the expedition. Before he got to the Yukon on that trip he traveled by dog sled from Nenana to Unalakleet and on to the Holy Cross mission on the Yukon where he began his river travel at ice break up in the spring.

One of the realities of life is that no archive is able to keep everything. It is likely that Father Hubbard also had gift paddles that were painted with the unique designs of the Alaskan tribes. Probably the archive decided that a couple of plain paddles weren’t representative enough of Father Hubbard’s travels to warrant keeping them in the archive. Fancy painted paddles, however, would have been used in ceremonies, but not actually used to travel by canoe. The paddles in my office may have been actually used for travel.

I imagine that there would be tales of great adventures that the paddles could report, were they able to tell the story of their journeys. But the roles of these particular paddles have been lost to the passage of time. Still, having them in my office affords me the luxury of dreaming about Alaska, the people who live in that huge land, and the ways that a legacy of paddling has been handed down from generation to generation throughout the centuries. A little bit of that story is on loan to me and temporarily residing in my office.

I have photographed the paddles and I have imagined what it might be like to actually use them. They would have great authority for sculling or bracing, but using such long paddles would be a stretch for me. My favorite paddle is a Racine model, carved by Shaw and Tenny in Orono, Maine. It is 58 ½ inches long. I don’t know exactly what to do with a paddle that is a foot longer. The giant blade would move a lot of water, but would require a lot of strength to pull.

So I won’t be paddling with Father Hubbard’s paddles. Still it is fun to look at them and imagine another minister who did some of his traveling in canoes.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I don’t think there was much hoopla surrounding an anniversary last spring. At least the anniversary didn’t make the headlines around here. But Easter was the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon in what we now call Florida. There are a couple of things about the date that are of interest. First of all, the United States is a relatively new country, so a quincentennial is rare around here. The spell checker on my computer doesn’t even know the word “quincentennial.” But the day of the arrival has lasting impact on the way we speak. You see, Easter Sunday is known in much of the Spanish-speaking world as the “feast of the flowers.” That’s “Pascua Florida” in Spanish. So the explorer decided to name the place where he landed “Florida” in honor of the day. The name stuck and for the last 500 years we have been referring to that place with that name.

I am fascinated by place names. Around South Dakota, we have places that have names from the indigenous Dakota, Nakota and Lakota languages. We also have names from the settlers who came to the area over the last couple of centuries. Because most of the settlers came from Europe, there are plenty of French, English,, Norwegian and German names around here. Then there are the hybrid names. Belle Fourche, for example, retains the French spelling but the pronunciation is uniquely South Dakota. Ditto for Pierre. We westerners like to have a few place names that fit into the “if you aren’t from around here you can’t pronounce it” category. In Nebraska, Kearney is a place name that separates the locals from the tourists. Montana is full of such places. Helena, Valier, Havre and Butte are great names used to test one’s native status. Some of those Montana place names also point to the role of the railroad in naming places. Across the Great Northern route, place names were selected by spinning the globe and planting a finger. There isn’t much connection between Havre Montana and Le Havre, France. The citizens of Moscow, Idaho don’t have many relatives in Moscow, Russia, either.

Then there are the translated place names. In some cases indigenous place names were adopted as is. In others, attempts were made at translation into English. Sometimes the translations were fairly good, sometimes they were less so. Whoever did the translation of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota spiritual places, didn’t understand the concept of Spirit in the native religions. So they used the name “Devil,” When the Devil was a foreign notion to the spirituality of the indigenous people. Spirit Lake became “Devil’s Lake.” The Dakota people saw the rising and falling of the water levels in the lake as part of the work of the creator. The place was special because it was unique. There are lots of legends about things that occurred to the ancients in that lake. But they had no concept of an evil supernatural being such as the devil. Europeans just didn’t understand the faith of the Dakota. Devil’s Tower similarly gained a name that doesn’t have much link to Lakota tradition or language. Actually the Lakota name for that place is “Mato Tipi” or home of the bear. It is particularly interesting that the contemporary name for that place is “Devil’s Tower,” while the not-so-far-away Bear Butte has an almost literal translation of the Lakota, “PaHa Mato” (Bear Mountain).

Place names in South Dakota made the news earlier this year when our state tried to change the names of 5 geographic features. The five are part of a total of 18 sites that have the word “squaw” or “Negro” in their names. The names are offensive to many people and the legislature thought it was time for a change in names. However, some obscure federal agency called the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. You’d think that a state could change the name of “Negro Creek” to “Medicine Mountain Creek” without much trouble, but that change has yet to receive approval from the federal body. The federal board says that names should center on local history, folklore, events or natural aspects of the area. They also look for duplicate names. Something tells me that this board wasn’t active when “blue lake” or “green river” or similar names started showing up. There are enough duplicates in place names to confuse most people. Another Spanish explorer, Christopher Columbus has so many places named after him that when you refer to the town, you have to use the state as well. 32 states have cities or towns named “Columbus.” I grew up on the banks of the Boulder River in Montana but since there are two Boulder Rivers in that state, you still can’t be sure where I come from. I’m not buying that the commission does a good job preventing duplicate place names.

At any rate, the project seems to have faded from the news and I’m not sure whether or not the official names of places have been changed yet. And it takes years for an official name change to take place. When I was growing up, we called the town where the Crow government was centered “Crow Agency.” It still is the most common name used for the place that has been officially renamed “Beaxuwuashe.” Beaxuwuashe is the Apsaalooke word for “grain mill” or “grinding mill.” The place gets its name from the mill that used to be there. The town was started as an Indian Agency Town, so there was no need to name the place before the Agency arrived. Local lore is that Beaxuwuashe really means “people who grew up speaking English can’t pronounce this word.” For what it is worth, we’re pretty good at mispronouncing “Apsaalooke” as well. Our name, “Crow” probably refers to the wrong bird as well. The Apsaalooke are the “children of the large-beaked bird.”

The names of places are fascinating and they change with time. Who knows what future generations will call the peaks of the hills. I’m sort of hoping we find a new name for Harney Peak. General William Harney may have distinguished himself during the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, but he was a brutal oppressor of Lakota People responsible for the deaths of many innocents, including women and children. The hills are the wrong place to name something after him. In a way I find that place name to be more offensive than “Negro Wool Ridge.”

But I’m OK with sticking with the name “Florida.” It sounds pretty on the tongue. It reminds one of the beautiful flowers grown in the state. And thinking of Easter as the feast of the flowers is not a bad idea, either. Ponce de Leon never did find the fountain of youth, but the name he gave the state has hung around for half a millennia. Happy quincentennial, Florida!

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It’s that time of the year. The spring blizzards are blowing in, depositing their loads of snow and trapping those who are unaware, unprepared, or just plain used to getting trapped in the high country. According to new reports there are at least 317 people trapped at the Mt. Hutt ski area. They had to close the mountain at about 11:30 in the morning after blowing and drifting snow made it impossible to see. The low visibility extended to the upper section of the access road. With wind gusts up to 45 mph, it was a complete white out. A few cars made it down the road, but finally it was too dangerous to allow any more people to attempt it. The good news is that those stranded are at a ski resort. Manager James McKenzie said, “We’ve got plenty of food, hot drinks and space up here in the base building, so if we do have to hunker down, our guest will be warm, dry and well looked after.”

A quick walk outside, however, and you’ll know that we aren’t at Mt. Hutt. In fact, we aren’t even in the same hemisphere as Mt. Hutt, New Zealand. Here, the weather is more August than September at the moment. I don’t think it got below 70 degrees last night. That’s strange for us. We’re used to the nights getting cold by this time of the year. There were several days in early and mid August when there was a chill when I got up and a mist on the lake. The last few days around here, however, have been hot and dry.

Thank goodness for ceiling fans. They are a truly marvelous invention for a home like ours. That fan quietly turning over the bed makes sleeping conditions very comfortable and allows for a good night of rest even when it isn’t as cold as I’d like. I guess I’m just not a warm weather person. I’m sure that if I lived in another climate, I’d learn to adjust, but I like the cool weather and don’t even mind the cold. By this time of the year, I’m getting tired of mowing the lawn and the last few days’ dust have gotten me sneezing. I don’t really have many allergies that bother me, but I do seem to have a head full of dust these days. My eyes are dry and seem to need a few extra drops and I’m ready for fall weather to set in.

Of course we are used to beautiful autumns here in the hills. We get a few cool days and then the weather perks up and we have pleasant weather for looking at the changing colors.

At least that is the way it goes most years.

This year is a bit unusual. They were releasing school students early last week as high temperatures hovered near 100 degrees. It is supposed to be a bit cooler this week with highs in the ‘90’s, but that can be pretty hot in buildings without air conditioning. The Rapid City School District has both schools that do have air conditioning and those that do not. Some of the older buildings can get very hot when temperatures outside soar.

It probably isn’t as hot here as the Nevada desert where they are cleaning up after another huge Burning Man festival. The annual Labor Day arts festival, counter-culture festival, party, rock music festival, mostly beyond description event has been going on in one form or another since they burned an eight-foot-tall improvised wooden figure at Baker Beach near San Francisco. By 1990, the figure had grown to 40 feet tall and the festival had moved to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Crowds were approaching 1,000 people. Last year more than 50,000 people attended and the 40-foot figure was atop a 50-foot pavilion. I’ve never been seized with a desire to attend the event, but I read about it in the news. What once was a rather spontaneous celebration now is an institution with organization, corporate structure, budgets, and the infrastructure necessary to provide for the giant crowds. My basic hunch is that it is a bit like our Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Some people really get into it. Some of us prefer to watch it from afar. Some people, doubtless, attend both of the events.

I’m dreaming of getting snowed in at Mt. Hutt.

I know a few ski bums who have taken a year to follow winter around the globe. The ones I know found skiing in the South American mountains to be excellent and the altitudes sufficient to make it possible to ski year round on only two continents. It is not a lifestyle for families with young children, and it takes a pretty fat wallet to sustain skiing around the calendar. I suppose a few of the people who show up in Warren Miller ski films can made a living skiing, but most of the ski bums I know have to spend their summers fighting fires to have the cash to support their lifestyles. I used to know a few who spent their summers as river rats, guiding on the Salmon and Snake rivers, but that is a young person’s game and most give it up after a few seasons.

So I will be looking for cool spots closer to home. The lake always provides a respite from the heat and if it gets too warm, it is a good idea to practice rolling a kayak, which requires and supplies a cool head. I also have a sailing canoe, which in the hands of an inexperienced sailor like me is an adventure in getting wet.

And we live in the hills. We know that the weather will be changing. Hot or cold, our weather doesn’t last for weeks on end. And we have had a remarkable year. We expected a long, hot and very dry summer with way too many fires, but the spring snows and summer rain came in such a way that the high country is still pretty green. Even around here, where things have been drying out quickly, we got a good rain shower last week and it would be reasonable to expect more rain this week.

And I know the cool weather is just around the corner.

But my friends, who notice me being distracted can’t tell whether I’m daydreaming about heading to the lake with a canoe or skiing down Mt. Hutt in New Zealand. My fantasies aren’t limited by budget. I do have a good life.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I’ve written about Diana Nyad in this blog before. But just in case you didn’t get the news in the midst of all of the other things that are going on in the world, Diana completed the over-100-mile swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage yesterday. It was the 64-year-old woman’s fifth attempt. She’s been stung by jelly fish, buffeted by unfavorable winds, exhausted by conditions and had more reasons to give up than the average athlete.

Her persistence is inspirational and then some.

I suppose that it is natural for me to be inspired by someone who is roughly in the same age group as I who is still pursuing really big and challenging dreams. I know of others who have accomplished big things in their 60’s. There are writers and artists who’s first notable creations came from that decade in their lives. There are some qualities that are honed by experience that can pay off when facing extreme challenges.

But experience, in general, is not an especially highly rated commodity in today’s society. Many businesses have discovered that it costs less to replace an experienced worker with one who has less experience. Sometimes youthful enthusiasm and energy can almost make up for a lack of wisdom and experience. Furthermore, there are plenty of workplace skills at which no one has very much experience. The ability to operate the latest high-tech gadgets can’t’ come from years of experience. The devices haven’t been around enough for anyone to have experience. Decades of working with computers don’t mean that the next operating system will be consistent with the systems that have preceded it. And I have observed that even young computer technicians with fresh educations often are not solving computer problems from their knowledge and experience base. More often they try a series of procedures and then start replacing components in a memorized pattern. If all else fails, they simply replace the entire computer. Removing one computer and replacing it with another doesn’t really require a lot of experience.

Despite the lack of appreciation for age, experience and wisdom in the popular culture, people continue to age. Although it may just be a sign of my own age, I believe that there are still many lessons to be learned from our elders.

Physically, it probably isn’t accurate to call Diana Nyad an elder. Her physical conditioning has brought her to peak condition and she as more strength and endurance than many people who are decades younger. I am impressed that she completed the 112-mile swim. I am even more impressed that she didn’t give up after the first attempt, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. In her case it was the fifth attempt that was the charm. It was 35 years between her first attempt and her success. As she stood and walked to shore she proclaimed to well-wishers: “Never give up. Never, ever, ever give up!”

She knows things today that she didn’t know 35 years ago. Among other things, she didn’t know for sure, internally, that she would succeed. There are far too many variables to control in such an audacious attempt. She is an incredibly strong swimmer and she had great capacity for endurance. But the spiritual and mental toughness to endure pain and discomfort and exhaustion were not developed without experiences of frustration and failure.

Others who are more eloquent than I will sing Diana’s praises and write about her accomplishments.

I think she possesses a quality that will be needed by succeeding generations.

Much attention has been given to the term “sustainability” in recent years. It is clear that we have engaged in some practices as individuals and as a society that cannot be sustained over the long haul. Consuming resources at a rate that is beyond our ability to produce can be done for a short time, but cannot be sustained over the long haul. Spending more than our income will last for a little while, but not forever. And I think it is wise for us to consider sustainability and to adopt practices that can be sustained.

Future generations, however, will experience some forms of collapse. Some of the practices of our culture cannot be sustained and even though we will try to persist, we may not be able to give up our destructive ways until we are forced to do so. It is at the point of collapse – on the other side of failure – that sustainability is insufficient. At that point we will need resilience in order to survive. Resilience is the capacity to recover from difficulties and even from failure. It is a quality that will be demanded of future generations.

Systems will fail. Some practices are not sustainable. The way of life that we currently enjoy is not the way of life for all time. Future generations will discover new ways to live and will adapt to the conditions and demands of their time. But those changes will not be accomplished without considerable experiences of pain and loss and even failure.

I hope that the story of Diana Nyad’s swim will be told for many generations. I believe that the story has the power to inspire. I celebrate her success, but I am even more impressed that she didn’t accept failure when the world would not have judged her harshly for giving up. I pray that in the telling of the story, we don’t linger too long on the success. The failures are as critical to the understanding of the story as is the moment of glory she rightly enjoyed yesterday.

Diana Nyad has been using the word “onward” a lot lately. The 2013 Diana Nyad t-shirts have that single word on the back. She isn’t the only 60-something who uses that word. It was also made famous by Howard Schultz, who just celebrated his 60th birthday. It is the title of his book and the way he signs his e-mails. Schultz is best known as the CEO of Starbucks and former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. It is arguable that his best work wasn’t in the founding of Starbucks or the owning of a sports team, but rather the way he came back and re-invented Starbucks after it started a decline following his first attempt at retirement.

Our world needs resilience. And perhaps it is a contribution that those of us who have a few years experience under our belt can make to those who are just beginning their careers.

I know it is something they will need.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

When sailors from Europe first reached North America there was an encounter of cultures and technologies that must have been amazing. I know of no historical records that report how the participants felt upon seeing the technologies of the others, but I have often imagined what it might have been like.

Norse sailors became adept in sailing the North Atlantic in Snekkja and Skei. Both types of ships fall into the category of “lonbgships” and were powered both by sail and by oars. Norse explorers made it to Greenland as early as the 10th Century and had permanent colonies in Greenland for about 500 years. Various explorers discovered lands to the west of Greenland as well. Bjami was blown off course and sighted land to the west of Greenland. His reports to Leif Eiriksson inspired Leif to explort the land and both Leif and his brother Thorvald spent winters in Newfoundland with their crews as part of their travels.

Prior to the visits of the Norsemen, Greenlanders had developed skin-on-frame kayaks. The craft were long and narrow and nimble for paddling in the choppy seas of the North Atlantic. They had reasonable cargo capacity and could be used to transport game from distant locations, primarily fish and sea mammals that were harvested for food. The craft, designed for solo paddlers were nimble and maneuverable. The Norse Visitors, in contrast arrived in comparably huge ships that were 50 to 100 feet long. The larger craft had as many as 30 rowing benches and carried large crews. A Snekkja carried 40 rowers and a captain or coxswain. The Skei could carry as many as 80 rowers. Both craft were also outfitted with large sails used primarily for sailing on downwind points of sail.

I imagine that the Norsemen were surprised and amazed at that the tiny and nimble Greenland kayaks could handle the wild and heavy seas. I imagine that the Greenlanders were surprised at the size and heft of the mighty Norse ships.

Later, when sailors from Spain, England and other European countries visited North America they had ships with complex sail plans and towering masts with standing rigging. They had smaller rowing craft that were used to travel from the deep draft ships at anchor to the shore. These beamy craft carried two or four rowers with their oars secured by pins or oarlocks. The seating positions were secured in a way that allowed the rowers to put their weight into the pulling of the oars and the small craft were fairly nimble and maneuverable in the surf as they approached shore.

Those somewhat “clunky” rowboats, however were no match for the nimble bark canoes of the North American natives. The canoes, carrying from one to four persons were narrow and quick, highly maneuverable, and propelled by paddles that, in contrast to the heavy hardwood oars of the Europeans, were light and easy to handle.

It would be interesting to know what the people thought of each other and how they reacted to the technology of the others.

For much of my adult life, I have been a paddler. I know a little about sailing and have done a bit of light craft sailing on inland lakes, but most of my boating has been in canoes. I have built three canoes and restored a couple of others. I enjoy paddling and use my canoes as much as I can during the summer months. I also have gotten into kayaking and have built two different kayaks for different types of paddling. I also own a couple of creek kayaks made out of plastic or composite materials. I am fairly competent with either a single or double paddle at least on lakes and rivers. I don’t do class 5 or 5+ rapids and haven’t been tempted to paddle over waterfalls, but most of the rest of streams and rivers are fun for me to paddle.

A couple of years ago, however, I decided to switch technologies of propulsion. Wanting a very stable craft for our young grandson, I built a small rowing yawl. The boat is beamy by the standards of a canoeist, but still rather narrow and at 17 feet long is long enough to be relatively quick ini the water. It has a flat section at the bottom and a skeg at the back to track and to make the boat very stable on the water. I can stand and walk around the little boat with no fear of capsize. It is propelled by a pair of oars. I built the boat with three rowing stations, so it can also be tandem rowed, but one set of oars is sufficient for the way we use the boat at present.

It is a bit of an adjustment for a paddler to switch to rowing. I enjoy facing forward when I paddle and I am used to choosing a destination and a reasonably straight line to reach that location. In the rowboat, I navigate by looking at the shore I am departing and glancing over my shoulder. I sometimes make a bit of a zig zag as I wander through the water. I do better when I have a forward-facing passenger to guide me. Compared to my canoe paddles, the 7 ½ foot oars seem giant and a bit heavy. I have a good rowing seat and footrest and have learned to lean into the oars and usually don’t make too much of a splash as I row, but it is an acquired technique that could use some more practice in order to be as smooth as I imagine seasoned rowers move their craft.

I really have no clue as to which technology, rowing or paddling, is superior. I can see advantages to both. I enjoy the temporary luxury of having both kinds of boats. It is fun to sit in the rowboat and enjoy a picnic on the water. It is great to take my grandson for a boat ride in the boat with his name on its transom. But I’m not ready to give up my canoes, yet. In fact, I suspect that simply because of the weight of the boats and the amount of work to handle them, I’ll be paddling after I’m forced to give up rowing.

And sometimes, when I am paddling or rowing I imagine what it might have been like for the ancients who witnessed the first contact between the two technologies. I think both must have been fascinated by the other’s way of getting around on the water.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I don’t spend much time thinking about dying. It wouldn’t be difficult to do so. I officiate at funerals on a regular basis. I meet with families who have lost loved ones. I am called to the bedside of dying people and have sat with them as they passed from this life. But I would never describe my job as being about death. I am constantly working with the living. Funeral services are, in reality, a process of working with those who are living as they make their journey through grief. There is no need for my words, or even the rites of the church to assist the one who has recently died. That person has already completed a transition and is able to move on to what lies next.

A couple of stories in the headlines this morning, however, sparked my imagination about dying and got me to thinking once again. Nelson Mandela has gone home from the hospital again. He has spent more time in the hospital than out for months, but periodically he is able to return to his home. This time, however, seems a bit different. His condition is listed as serious. He still needs intensive treatment for the chronic lung condition that has laid him low for many months. This last hospitalization lasted for more than two months. Doctors have not said that he is recovering, only that he can receive the care he needs at home. They came short of saying this, but the news reports sound almost as if he has been sent home to die.

Mandela is a great man. He is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He was the first democratically elected leader of South Africa. He overcame the hardship of having been imprisoned for 27 years to lead his nation to a process of peace and reconciliation. But he is not a young man. He turned 95 in July. And he has suffered from chronic lung infections that are due, in part to having contracted tuberculosis while in prison. He has been pretty sick for several years. His last big public appearance was in 2010, when South Africa hosted the World Cup soccer competition.

It seems that his passage from this life will be in slow motion, with many hospitalizations, complex treatments and a long vigil for his family, the nation he led, and the world that has witnessed his greatness.

In stark contrast to the way that Nelson Mandela is living the last years and months of his life, BBC news has reported that Sir Davidd Frost, broadcaster, writer and humorist, died suddenly of a heart attack while aboard a cruise ship. Sir Frost was giving a speech aboard the Queen Elizabeth last night when he collapsed and died. No one was expecting his death to come so soon.

I have a friend, whose active live was invested in a career as a physician, who is skeptical of the various devices and techniques that have been developed to revive heart attack victims. While acknowledging that CPR and automatic heart defibrillators have saved some from premature death, he also notes that in some cases they merely prolong the process of dying. The victim who might have died quickly, is revived to an extended process of medical treatments that can include surgery, extended stays in the intensive care unit, drugs that have personality-altering side effects, and, in many cases lingering disability and a slow death. My friend once said, “A heart attack is one of the few ways that a person can leave this life with a bit of dignity intact. It seems sad that they would take that away from those who have lived good and meaningful lives.”

I suppose that, given the opportunity to choose, many would choose a sudden death like Sir Frost over a slow and lingering illness leading to death as has been the experience for Nelson Mandela and his family.

But that is the point, it seems to me: we don’t get to choose. Death is not a process of maintaining control. It is, rather a process of surrendering control. In the grand scheme of things the way we die, and even the timing of our death, is not the most important part of the process. Far more important than the way a person dies is the way that person lives. Both Nelson Mandela and Sir David Frost appear to have lived without much fear. They have gone about the process of being contributing citizens to their communities, countries and the world. They have lived with honesty and integrity. And they have not been unduly influenced by fear – not even by the fear of death.

I think that it is best not to know the timing of my dying. And I am comfortable not knowing the way in which I will die. It is likely that, like the majority of people, I will experience some level of disability in advance of dying. I have worked with people who live with disabilities enough to know that there is much they can do and that they have much to contribute in the midst of disability. Although I would not choose disability, I do not fear it. Focusing on the abilities that remain and learning to live as fully as possible in the midst of the realities of life can be an important exercise in living and a way to discover more fully all that life has to offer. I know that my life is richer because of the relationships I have with persons with disabilities. Perhaps I could lend richness to another life were I to become disabled.

We know so little of the true nature of timing. I’ve been with families whose loved ones lived many decades and whose death came with a long warning. They have no less a sense of loss than those who lost loved ones suddenly and unexpectedly. A human life is no less complete if it spans a small number of years. It is not a matter of how much time we are granted, but rather what we do with the time that we have.

So I don’t think I will spend much time thinking about death. The process of living consumes all of the energy that I have.

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