Less than 20 years ago, when I was moving to South Dakota, I was still resisting getting a cell phone. Part of my argument against the devices was that I needed to have places in my life where the phone didn’t intrude. I found times of driving with members of my family to be good times for conversation and was hesitant to have the conversations interrupted. I knew that I needed times when I was away from work for recreation and refreshment. I knew that trying to be constantly connected was exhausting.

It wasn’t very long before I had a cell phone. Being a person whose job often takes me out of the office, it made it easier for the office administrator to get in touch with me when there were emergencies. It provided a safety feature when driving on the highway. I had a way to call for help in the event of a breakdown. I had a way to inform my family when I was delayed.

But there was a delicious time when I continued to go many places where the cell phone simply didn’t work. The hills provided shelter from cell phone signals. Cell phones didn’t use to work at our church camp. There were long stretches of highway in rural and isolated locations where there was no signal.

Once I got my hands on the device, however, I became a bit enamored with the technology. My first cell phones weren’t very reliable and it was a while before I found a model that would last more than a couple of years. I was already using a hand held digital assistant device and so I was eager to find one that had cell phone capacity so that I could have one mobile device instead of two. The early smart phones weren’t all that smart. They had poor battery performance and were prone to failing at moments when you had started to rely on them. It took a few generations of technology before I had a device like the phone I carry today, which I use for everything from reading books to surfing the web to sending and receiving e-mail to tracking all of my contacts to taking pictures and movies.

A lot has changed in less than 20 years. That makes me wonder what the future will hold.

I suppose that one possibility is that the rate of change in our mobile devices will slow down. It is hard to think of needing a device that will do more that the current generation of smart phones. I don’t think that I will need much more processor speed or capacity from my device. My battery life is good enough to power the device through all of my waking hours except on the days when I download or upload a great deal of data and on those days a quick plug in while driving my car or a connection to my computer while I work keeps the device charged. For the most part the device is plugged in while I sleep and I don’t think about battery life at all. My last phone lasted 4 years and it isn’t hard for me to imagine using this one for ten. After all other items we use in our lives once went through rapid changes and then design settled down. “New every two” used to be a car sales slogan. I’m completely happy driving a 15-year-old car and it really isn’t that much different from the previous one or a new one should I replace it.

Some people think that the future of mobile devices is wearable phones. That future doesn’t seem all that exciting to me. After all, how hard is it for me to lift my phone to my ear when I want to talk or to my eye when I want to take a picture? I don’t find that to be much of a problem. I already have a hands-free connection to my car’s radio for talking while I am driving. And you have to admit that Google Glass looks too geeky for anyone to wear. No wonder social media consultant Sarah Slocum warns against wearing Google Glass into a bar. Other patrons jeer and wonder what is being photographed. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m pretty sure it will take some adjustment for me to have people wearing glasses-mounted displays to church.

I still believe that there are sacred times and places. Even though I am “on call” 24 hours a day for about two weeks out of every month, I do not take my cell phone into the sanctuary when I am leading worship. I keep my phone on vibrate much of the day. And I don’t answer my phone if it signals me when I am visiting with another person or making a call. And I still regularly go to at least one place - visiting in the jail - where phone are still prohibited.

What I do expect over the next few years is for my phone to become connected to more and more devices. We already have wireless connections between our phones and our computers. I ended up replacing the radio in my car so that I would have one that instantly connects to my phone to play my podcasts and allow me to talk on my phone while driving without having to hold the phone in my hand. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think that my phone might be connected to my refrigerator to synchronize the shopping list, or that I might be able to connect with the alarm system at the church to monitor the building when I am not physically present. I have no need of such a device, but I have a niece who has a connection between her shoes and her phone to monitor her exercise and to offer her words of encouragement through the ear buds she wears to listen to music while she is jogging.

Some folks might be really excited about the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. I’m not all that enthused. I’ll let someone else be the first to get the new technology.

Copyright © 2014 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 been involved in working with survivors of suicide for many years now. The grief that accompanies a death by suicide is in many ways unique. Part of what makes the grief unique is the social stigma that is attached to mental illness and suicide in the community. There is often fear associated with things that we don’t understand. For generations, mental illness has had a hidden status in our culture. We didn’t talk about it openly. And we certainly didn’t understand it. Today with modern research into brain diseases, there is a growing field of evidence and information about how some diseases cause havoc with emotions and thought as they influence and at times control complex chemical and electrical reactions within the human brain. Great advances have been made in the treatment of mental illnesses. In well over 80% of cases where treatment is available, Depression can be treated successfully and the victim of the disease can live a productive life.

But there is much that remains unknown. Like many diseases, our understanding is incomplete and even though effective treatment is available for some diseases, it eludes us in other cases. With some diseases such as bipolar disorder, treatments that are effective for one person may not work at all for another. Treatments that are successful at one phase of a person’s life might stop working at another phase of the same person’s life.

Because of the fear associated with mental illness, it is difficult to secure funding for research that could lead to more effective treatment.

Our society continues to attach stigma to death by suicide. We speak of it as a “choice” as if the person who dies by suicide could have made a different choice and survived. Too often suicide is seen as a character flaw or a moral failing by those who don’t have much information about the nature of brain diseases.

A second factor that makes suicide grief unique is that significant evidence that might lead to understanding the death is destroyed by the death itself. Much of what we know about the nature of mental illness and its effect on its victims is the result of interviews with sufferers. Once a victim dies, there is no further opportunity to ask questions and receive answers. The ability to study the complex chemical and electrical reactions in the brain disappears with the death of the brain. Even a complex autopsy with a brain biopsy doesn’t provide much answer to the exact chain of events and processes that leads to death.

So one of the missions of my life has been to work to support scientific research and learning in brain disorders and diseases and to provide support, understanding and education for the public at large and for the families and friends who are left grieving when a suicide occurs.

There is another type of death that is often called suicide that I have avoided, however. I am not convinced that the mental and physical processes are directly related, but there are many documented cases of people, often young people, who willingly choose to died in defense of their comrades or a political idea. Is it different to sacrifice your life in pursuit of the defense of those you love or in defense of an ideal? Is there a higher level of choice and free will in operation in such a death? Frankly though I have briefly pondered these questions, I have avoided spending much time in research or thought about those who chose to die in defense of a political ideal. I think I have wanted to believe that it is a totally different category of thought and behavior. I have wanted to believe that fanaticism, while being labeled crazy, is not the same thing as a mental illness.

My thoughts were stirred recently when I read an article about Japan’s application to the United Nations for World Heritage status for a collection of letters written by kamikaze pilots who died during the Second World War. Tadamasa Itaitsu was himself a kamikaze pilot. He was scheduled for missions that would have resulted in his death twice. On the first mission, his plane experienced engine failure and he was forced to ditch in the ocean and was rescued. The second mission was scrubbed due to bad weather. He survived the war and now is 89 years old. It is one of the things that I noticed when I read the article. Kamikaze pilots were very young. Most were 17 to 20 years old. And they were volunteers. Although significant social pressure may have been applied it was possible to avoid being selected as a kamikaze.

I had believed that the young pilots were brainwashed. That they underwent an indoctrination process that made death into an honor and choosing to die for the emperor into something that was to be sought. But it appears, from the letters that Itaitsu has collected, that not all of the kamikaze pilots were of one mind. Many of the letters speak of honor and joy in death as one would suspect. They often appeal to family members not to grieve but to rejoice in a greater good that comes from the death. But one, written by a young lieutenant, Ryoji Uehara, shows a different perspective. Here is part of the translation:

“Tomorrow, one who believes in democracy will leave this world. He may look lonely but his heart is filled with satisfaction. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany have been defeated. Authoritarianism is like building a house with broken stones.”

The dynamics of this young man’s death are as complex and unfathomable as any other.

I guess that I will leave it to others to decide whether or not such letters deserve World Heritage status. But I do hope that they are preserved. When we encounter things that we don’t understand, it seems to always be a good idea to preserve evidence as best we are able. There might be information in those letters that will lead future generations to a more complete understanding.

For now it is a troubling mystery. And living with mysteries that we don’t understand is part of our lot in this life. As I have said many times to grieving families, “There are questions to which we will not find the answers, but you can live with the questions if you are honest about them. The questions that will cripple you are the ones that you pretend don’t exist.”

For now we live with the questions.

Copyright © 2014 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 we were children, my parents became friends with a student at Rocky Mountain College who was from Rhodesia. This was before the 1965 declaration of independence and the later reconstitution of the government into the modern nation of Zimbabwe. Despite efforts of the people of Rhodesia the British government was initially unwilling to grand independence. The student who came to the college was later to become one of the leaders in the independent country. Because of the great distance he had traveled for his education in the United States, unlike other college students, he wasn’t able to return home on holidays. Through other connections at the college, my folks befriended him and he visited in our home and shared some holidays with us. We found out about his family and our family wanted to provide support for them. I don’t remember all of the details, but I do remember that there was a high tax from one of the governments on exporting new goods from the United States to Rhodesia. So my parents helped us kids select toys to send as presents to the family. We then took the toys out of their original packages and gently played with them for a few minutes. My father took pictures of us playing so he could document that the toys were “used.” They were then packaged and sent to Rhodesia.

My parents worked with us in a lot of different ways to encourage us to learn the value of giving. We were encouraged to offer part of our weekly allowance at church. We kept coin banks for special offerings that the church held. We sorted through our toys each year for the Toys for Tots program back when that involved donations of used toys and volunteers who repaired and painted the toys before they were given to other children. My parents talked openly about their gifts to the church and about the missions and programs of the church.

But times have changed. We still recognize the value of giving. And we still want to teach the value of giving to our children, but often we confuse giving for the sake of feeling good with doing things that genuinely help others. And it is hard to find projects that go beyond just “feel good” projects.

In our town there are so many people with extra clothing that used clothing drives seem to be more about helping people who have too many clothes to clean out their closets than clothing those in need. Donation boxes have been installed at area stores and strip malls because people want convenience for their donations. One local group receives so many clothes donations that they have purchased a large baler so the clothing can be compressed into shipping bundles and sent to Central and South America. It is a little jarring to see all of the clothing with the logos of U.S.A. teams and corporations in remote parts of the world.

Recently a local girl with the highest of motivations got excited about providing new shoes for children who didn’t have good shoes. With the support of her parents, her church and others, she managed to collect over 200 pairs of new shoes for donation. I never did find out what kind of distribution system they developed to get the shoes on the right sized feet, but I assume that they found a way to partner with one of the organizations on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The idea started with the genuine generous impulses of a young girl. She asked her family that instead of giving her gifts for her birthday that they give a gift to children with more need than she. The result, however, was that the adults sort of took over the girl’s project and it became a situation where the girl provided the idea, but others provided all of the money and logistics. Missions are often like that - the person that originates the idea has to release control of that idea in order for it to blossom.

But it is getting harder and harder to find projects that are available for children and youth to become direct givers and stake holders.

We use the concept charity in a wide variety of ways. At its core the concept grows out of a Christian theological concept: God’s love is unlimited. In gratitude for that unconditional love, Christians are enabled to offer love and kindness to others. Somehow from that concept, the idea of charity has turned into donating money. Benevolent giving is a positive value and one that should be encouraged. However, not all charity has resulted in helping people. Sometimes gifts are given with strings attached. Sometimes we have used the concept of charity to export our culture and impose it on others. Sometimes we have made others dependent and robbed them of their dignity through our gifts.

For several years our local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization had a program called “Bowl for Kids’ Sake” that encouraged youth to partner with the organization for a fun event that also raised funds for the programs of the organization. Over the years, however, the organization has discovered that adults raise more dollars than youth and the program has become less focused on the schedules and lives of youth. Youth participation has become less important for the success of the program. If the trend continues, we will need to find new opportunities for our youth to participate in giving.

So it caught my eye that students in the Beyond Books program at Rapid City High School are collecting used prom dresses for girls in need. On the surface it seems like a good idea. Prom dresses are very expensive one-time items and it makes more sense for them to be worn by someone else rather than sitting in a closet. On the other hand, prom dresses are pretty much luxury items.

I’ve no objection to the drive.

But I’d love to see a change in the culture to the point where it would be acceptable for a high school student to attend prom in a home-sewn dress and then see students engaged in helping one another make their own dresses for the occasion.

If they get to the point where they are having a drive to donate new shoes for girls in need to wear with their used prom dresses, I may try to find a different charity.

Copyright © 2014 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.

This is an obscure little literary argument that is probably only noticed by authors. Last week Lynn Shepherd, author of literary mysteries set in 19th Century England, wrote a commentary for the Huffington Post in which she said that the author J.K. Rowling should stick with children’s books and leave the area of adult fiction for other writers: “Rowling has no need of either the shelf space or the column inches, but other writers desperately do,” she wrote.

Now, I haven’t read any of Ms. Shepherd’s books and I haven’t read The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s adult novel. But it seems that it wasn’t among the most brilliant pieces of writing to argue that another author should stop writing, or limit the audiences for which she writes.

On the surface it seems as if Ms. Shepherd doesn’t quite understand writing.

Of course it is entirely possible that i don’t understand it, either. I haven't ever written a complete book. I have a few manuscripts badly in need of rewriting, but nothing that is ready to be published. The few things that I have published had not had any commercial success. You can still buy a small book that I wrote on amazon.com, but Amazon has dropped my author’s page. I am hardly one to have any expertise about they field of writing.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to give J.K. Rowling advice and I’m pretty sure she has no interest in my advice anyway.

I know that there are authors who make their living with the words that they write. And I know that publishing is a tough business with big risks and small profit margins. And I know that there are a lot of good authors who never get published and plenty of good writers who are published, but whose books never receive the acclaim and sales that they deserve. It is a tough business and there is much to the process of marketing and getting books sold that I do not understand.

Still, I find it hard to believe that the primary motivation for any author is seeking fame or fortune. I suspect that there are a lot of easier ways to become known and plenty of easier ways to earn money.

Big dollar authors like Rowling are few and far between. I’m sure that alongside her talent at writing stories that captivate children and adults alike, she had a modicum of good luck and a few lucky breaks along the way.

But I doubt if her motivation in writing a book aimed at a more adult audience was an attempt to corner more of the market.

I think that most writer write because we have to write. Notice how boldly I include myself in that category. But I do consider myself to be a writer despite any evidence of publishing success. The volume of words that I produce and the daily discipline of writing are not the product of a desire to become famous or to make money from my writing. I write because it is a way for me to sort out my reactions to the world. I write because it is a good mental discipline for me. I write because i have things to say and not every thought that I have needs to dominate my conversation with others.

So it is a mystery to me what motivated Lynn Shepherd to write the piece for Huffington Post. At the beginning of her piece she states that a friend told her not to write it. It is clear that it contains ideas that she had discussed with at least that friend and perhaps with others. And at least one friend cautioned her about taking ideas that were dancing in her head and putting them out into the world of blogs. Probably all of us who write blogs need that kind of advice from time to time. Not every idea we have is worth sharing with others.

It appears that is is not going to be a good career move for Shepherd in the short run. Her Amazon ratings are going down with scores of Rowling fans posting one star reviews of Shepherd’s books. Her books weren’t earning five star ratings in the first place. Three stars is more typical for the books she has written. But she has at least eight titles that are selling on Amazon.

She is getting press for her Huffington post. It is mostly negative, but they say that any publicity helps. After all I hadn’t ever heard of her or read any of her books before her post came out on Friday.

Maybe there is a small group of authors who agree with her sentiments. Maybe jealousy and resentment of successful authors is part of what writers feel. But it is a pretty ugly sentiment.

I believe that writing begets writing and reading leads to more reading. I don’t think anyone benefits from fewer books being written or published. I don’t think any author should hold back or refrain from writing or publishing any of their work. Of course there will be garbage that gets published. Of course there will be books that claim truths that are not true. But the marketplace of ideas has a way of sorting out the good from the bad.

I guess Shepherd just wrote what she had to write. It is probably as silly to advise her to refrain from writing her ideas in her blogs as it was for her to advise Rowling to stay away from a particular genre of literature.

I’m thinking, however, that people will remember the Harry Potter books for many years after this little controversy settle down. There are already far more people who know J.K. Rowling than have ever heard of Lynn Shepherd or her Huffington Post piece.

Probably there are more people who have read the Harry Potter books than will ever read the Huffington Post.

So writers will continue to write. Bloggers will continue to blog. And far more words will be forgotten than those that are remembered. I think the poets have it right. Say more with fewer words.

Then again, I’m no poet.

Copyright © 2014 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 am not an attorney. It is not something that I want to be. I am neither a politician nor a lobbyist. I have no aspirations for either profession. So when I get to talking about legislation and public policy, it must be understood that I am no expert. I have, however, been watching as a bill that would have repealed the death penalty in South Dakota made its way through the process. The bill was defeated on a 6 - 7 vote in committee Friday. The law in South Dakota will remain as it was before for now. But the close vote in the committee and the high emotions of the two hours of testimony before the committee on Friday speak about how we in South Dakota are wrestling with the issue.

Clearly we are not of one mind. There are passionate arguments on both sides of the issue. The dynamics of the the testimony were interesting. The parade of those testifying in favor of repeal included religious leaders from at least Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran and Episcopal communions. Powerful witness was given by Leonard Eberle whose son was abducted and murdered 30 years ago. Eberle said he originally wanted his son’s killer to be executed, but has now changed his mind. Two former attorneys general of South Dakota, Mark Meierhenry and Roger Tellinghuisen also testified that they once supported the death penalty and have since changed their minds.

It seems that people who think about it a lot do seem to change their minds. But that can take a long time.

Perhaps the most dramatic of those arguing for retaining the death penalty was Lynette Johnson. Her husband, Ronald, was a South Dakota State Penitentiary corrections officer who was brutally murdered by two inmates in a botched prison escape attempt.

South Dakota’s current attorney general Marty Jackley also testified in opposition to the repeal attempt. His argument included his belief that having the death penalty is useful in getting criminals to enter into plea bargains instead of going to full trial. He also made a brief argument that the bill might be used by one of the three inmates currently on death row to avoid the penalty now sentenced.

The arguments are often cloaked in a mask of rationality. But there were plenty of logical errors in the words given in testimony. It is an emotional issue and the arguments were more emotional than rational.

If the purpose of the death penalty is to provide for the safety of corrections officers, it would follow either that criminals who murder in prison have previously committed a murder or that criminals would refrain from certain crimes out of fear of the death penalty. Neither was the case in the brutal murder of Ronald Johnson. The death penalty was in place and those previously convicted of murder were not involved in his murder. Having the death penalty did not provide for his safety.

Providing for the safety of corrections officers is the responsibility of the state. And, for the most part, the state is pretty good at it. The prison where Johnson died is really very safe. There are no weapons in the facility. The only way that inmates might dream of escape is through obtaining a uniform and posing as a corrections officer. That was the motivation for the attack. The murders wanted that uniform and were at the moment willing to act without regard for the life of the officer in an attempt to get it. Their actions were not rational. They didn’t think through the consequences of their behavior. And it didn’t work. They didn’t escape.

But the argument is not based on logic. It is an emotional argument.

As such, arguments about the costs and benefits of having a death penalty law are largely ineffective. Opponents and proponents alike try to make financial arguments. There is no doubt that properly prosecuting a death penalty case is expensive. And many of those expenses fall upon county governments. The cost of running prisons is high as well. But there are costs that societies are willing to assume to assure the safety of citizens. Perhaps there are no absolute guarantees, but states are effective in keeping those in prison for murder from killing anyone else. The most common form of prison murder is inmate on inmate violence. Violence against corrections officers is far more likely to occur in areas of prisons where the inmates have been convicted of lesser crimes rather than maximum security areas.

Proponents of the death penalty will occasionally cite Exodus 21:24 and parallel passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Those passages of ancient legal code have their roots in the even more ancient Hammurabi’s Code. Those codes are subject to significant argument within the bible itself. In Matthew 5:38-39, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Clearly the testimony of Bishops and church leaders illustrates that there is a clear biblical argument against the death penalty.

The repeal has been defeated for this session of the legislature. But the conversation will continue. There are plenty of South Dakotans who are uncomfortable with the imposition of death by the state. There is significant question about the ability of the state to impose the death penalty fairly. We often hear the stories of those who are sitting on death row. What we don’t hear as often are the stories of those who committed equally brutal crimes and the death penalty was not imposed.

Most telling for me in all of the testimony was the effect of time. It has been less than three years since Lynnette Johnson’s husband was murdered. The grief she bears cannot be processed in such a short amount of time. Marty Jackley is the current attorney general and is involved in prosecuting current crimes. Their testimony was in stark contrast to that of Leonard Eberle, Mark Meierhenry and Roger Tellinghuisen, who have had more years to process their thoughts and ideas.

Maybe we ought to at least wait 30 years before imposing the death penalty. People do change their minds.

When you have executed someone it is too late to change your mind.

Copyright © 2014 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 people that we love are always with us.

One of the dimensions of loving another is a trace of fear of losing that person. I remember that sensation from early in the journey of being a parent. On several different occasions I would be rocking one of our children as a baby and watching the tiny one and a wave of emotion would sweep over me. I would think, “What would happen if something happened to this baby?” The thought was nearly unbearable and I would have to search for some other thought to try to displace the emotion. The feeling returned at various points in the lives of our children. When they were teens and young adults, the sensation was less a fear that they might be injured or die and more of a sense that they might move far away and live lives that were not recognizable from my point of view. The fear of losing children to value systems or ways of life that were very different than our own was, ast times, as intense as the fear of them being injured or killed.

Now I have never lost a child. I have not experienced the death of my spouse. So my expertise is limited to those experiences where I have walked the journey of grief with another. It has, on occasion, fallen to me to be the one to bring the news of the death of a child to a parent. I have had to knock on the door in the middle of the night and then deliver the news that probably was partially sensed simply by the urgency of our visit. It fell to me to be the one to tell our mother when my brother died suddenly of a heart attack.

I know that deep estrangements occur in families. I have know people of good faith who have not spoken to a sibling in decades. I know stories of families where a child was cut off and no contact was made. In many of these situations I do not know all of the details and understanding of the dynamics eludes me. Sometimes one simply has to accept things that one does not understand.

In the life of the church, I have journeyed alongside widows and the parents who have lost children as they go through the rest of their lives. The ones we love do not disappear from memory. The sharpness of the pain of loss changes. The sense of shock and denial that are present in the early stages of grief fade. Anger often fades at a slower pace, but it too backs of as one moves on with life.

But the people that we love are always with us.

May father died over three decades ago. I have lived more than half of my life since he died. And yet there are objects in my home that bring him instantly to mind: tools in my tool box, a faded blue cap, a book, and the bible with his signature on the inscription. I can hear his voice in my mind when I think of certain topics or events. I feel his presence when I stroll the campus of a college where he served as trustee for a quarter of a century. I recognize him in some of the decisions I make, and in my style of being a husband, father and grandfather.

One of the ministries of the church is a ministry of memorial. We not only allow the memories of those who have died in our church, we encourage them. For some, a physical object aids with the memory. Just like the grip of an old Stanley wood plane in my hand brings a sense of closeness to my father, so too a memorial window or banner or other object in a sanctuary can bring a comforting sense of connection in a time of worship. For some plaques and things that bear the name are important to the memory.

But it is interesting that there are others for whom the objects are not the primary focus of memory. There is a widow whose husband’s name is not on any plaques or objects in our church building. His memorials were invested in scholarship funds and other places. Yet when she sits in the sanctuary there is always a little gap to her left, the side where he sat and when I look at her I not only sense his presence, but am fairly sure she does too. Church was something they always did together before his death and there is a strong sense of his presence in our church.

Another widow in our conjugation had a husband who didn’t spend much of his life inside of a church building. I don’t know the dynamics of her memory, but there is no less a sense that his life and their relationship shaped who she is than the one whose empty place in the pew has never been filled.

I have been thinking about memory and love quite a bit this week as we prepare for worship today. One of the dynamics of the day is the dedication of a collection of books in memory of a man who died almost two decades ago. He was a youth in our church and many watched him grow from adolescence to the discovery of a call to the ministry and a journey to attend theological seminary in Massachusetts, followed by his return and work in a sister congregation in our city. He died after rough journey of depression and mental illness and his death caught many in the community by surprise. Mental illness tends to remain hidden from sight and talked about in whispers. And death by suicide often caries with it a deep stigma for those who survive.

One of the gifts his death gave our congregation was the ability to talk openly about suicide and to engage actively in suicide prevention. The survivors of suicide support group that meets in our church, the founding of the Front Porch Coalition as a united front for suicide prevention, and the LOSS team that reaches out to survivors of suicide all are direct results of his death and ways in which we remember him.

But we need to remember not only the way he died, but also the way he lived. And so his books in our library are a tangible and fitting way for us to pass his memory and his story on to generations yet to come.

It took a long time to get to this place. Today feels like we are passing yet another milestone on the journey of grief.

Copyright © 2014 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.

OK, this is a blog. You can’t interrupt me if you’ve heard this one before. The best you can do is skip down a few paragraphs. Or, I guess you could skip the blog entirely, in which case you’ll never know how the blog ends.

If it weren’t for the rules of inheritance we might not ever have heard of William Penn, and if we had, we might think of him only as a philosopher and Quaker theologian. William Penn became the owner of a large piece of American land because of debt that King Charles II owed to Penn’s father. So, in 1681, he became the title holder to all of the land of what is today Pennsylvania and Delaware. He immediately sailed for the North American continent and arrived in 1682. He assembled the colonists who were already settled, mostly near the coast and had them pledge allegiance to him as their new proprietor. He pledged to put his Quaker beliefs to work in forming a fair and reasonable government and not long afterwards headed up the river to Philadelphia. The rest is history.

But wait! There’s more! Penn’s Quakerism wasn’t selling well with the Dutch, Swedish and English settlers in Delaware. They wanted to opt out of the new Pennsylvania assembly.Eventually three counties were allowed to form their own semi-autonomous colony of Lower Delaware. It worked to keep the peace, but it left Penn’s new colony a bit short of settlers. Penn began to send messages back to England encouraging the people he new to come as settlers. His contacts in England were mostly members of the Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers.

But wait! There’s more! Trying to form a new city in a new colony on a new continent basically turned the peace-loving Quaker philosopher into a land developer and real estate salesman. It was quite a turn around for a man who at the age of 22 had been homeless and cut out of his father’s will because of his conversion to Quakerism. Had the old admiral lived, the debt would have been paid to him and not his son and we would never have heard of William Penn.

But wait! There’s more! Penn wasn’t the only member of his family to convert. It seems that two of his aunts also converted. Similarly rejected by the Penn family back in England, they followed their nephew to his new home in what was to become Philadelphia. The sisters opened a bakery and soon had a prominent place in the new colony. Once established, however, a new controversy appeared. It seemed that some of the other settlers in Philadelphia felt that the pair had received undue privilege because of their relationship to the colony’s proprietor. They began to complain about the prices at the sisters’ bakery. Thus one of the early protests carried out by the settlers was all caused by the pie rates of Penn’s aunts!

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;a
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, (bothered for a rhyme)
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

It may well be the most famous of all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s songs. At any rate the patter song is certainly the most familiar from the wildly popular 1879 comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance.

Modern audiences probably don’t get all of the political satire and historical nuances. They laugh at Mabel’s calculation of the new date for Frederic’s fulfillment of his apprenticeship as 1940, but might not be laughing with quite the same perspective as would and 1879 audience.

At any rate, today’s audiences probably don’t get the obvious spoof of Sir Garnet Wolseley, a famous and highly-decorated Field Marshall of the British Army who served in Burma, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, China, throughout Africa and even spent some time in Canada. Wolseley had received his commission as an inheritance in recognition of his father’s service, not unlike Penn receiving land as an inheritance. (Yes that part of the story is true.) But the character of the Major General could easily, and perhaps more accurately have been a spoof of equally-famous General Henry Turner, uncle of the wife of Gilbert, who, unlike the progressive Wolseley, was definitely old school.

In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin",
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a Javelin,d
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat",
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery –
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy – (bothered for a rhyme)
You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee.e

Whatever stories you tell, the old comic opera holds up well 135 years after it’s first performance. Which, if you do the math, makes the play the same age as our congregation. Jokes about 1940 seem to have a different ring in our church these days than they might have had back in the time of our founders.

At any rate taking in the production of the show by the Black Hills Community Theatre last night was a delightful way to cap off another busy week. The unbridled silliness of the patter lyrics, the comic gestures and facial reactions and the delight of familiar local performers well-cast in a fun production combined to make for a delightful evening.

It was even better than some of my jokes!

Copyright © 2014 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.

Back when we lived in Idaho, the National Ski Patrol folks called it the “Picabo effect.” In the 1990’s, Picabo Street was a winning downhill ski racer. The story of her name is fun, just not the point of today’s blog. It’s probably enough to say that her brother’s name is Baba Jomo Street. At any rate, Picabo often trained at Sun Valley, the resort that is nearest to her home town. The mountain is called Bald Mountain, and the name is appropriate. There aren’t too many trees. The mountain offers a wide variety of terrain and excellent snow conditions, including plenty of powder most years once you get off of the groomed slopes. It is a destination resort and located near very expensive vacation homes, so the high prices on the hill keep it from getting too crowded. It is a fun hill for a wide variety of ski abilities. But the National Ski Patrol began to notice that skier injuries went up every time Picabo Street was on the hill. People would see her go whizzing by and begin to try to ski beyond their ability. After Picabo has earned national championships and Olympic medals, the ski patrol noted that skiing injuries went up all across the country when the Olympics were taking place. That inspiration that one gets from watching sometimes translates into reckless behavior on the hill.

I was thinking about the Picabo effect this week simply because I have two friends who have had skiing injuries this winter. A couple of injuries per year probably wouldn’t have gotten my notice when I was younger, but these days we are all a bit older and tend to exercise caution. So I noticed when a second friend near my age was injured. Skiing is a safe sport and with today’s equipment a person who maintains fitness can safely ski well into their eighties and beyond.

One of my friends’ accidents was caused by skiing beyond ability. He tacked a longer hill with a few more bumps than he was comfortable skiing and ended up twisting his back in such a way that he is now undergoing physical therapy as he recovers. The other accident was a bit less predictable. The conditions were good with fresh snow on the hill, but the groomers hadn’t been everywhere on the hill. A ski tip got down and so the fall was a twisting one that normally would have been just a cause to get up and brush off the snow. But the binding didn’t release and when it was all over there is a season lost to recovery from a bad compound fracture. Probably the binding should have been inspected before the day, but hindsight is always better than foresight.

In the days when I had a ski pass and skied more regularly, I used to ski with my bindings cranked up quite a bit in the spring. As the hill warmed the snow on the surface would thaw and then refreeze. On groomed slopes the corduroy quickly turned to slick ice. The last thing you want to happen when you are edging to slow on ice is to have a binding release when the skis are parallel and working just right for you. Then you forget about it when summer comes and the next fall, when you are at your rustiest you have your bindings set too stiff for your ability and the conditions.

I took a doozy of a fall on ice on the backside of Bogus Basin one spring. I knew that it would be icy, but it seemed worse than I expected. In those conditions, your uphill ski gets most of your weight and is doing most of the work. It needs to be edged into the hill, so most of both skis are just along for the ride. The uphill edge of the uphill ski is doing all of the work. But there is this moment in the turn when you shift weight from one ski to the other. At that particular moment, instead of leaning uphill, you are leaning down as you come around to lean the opposite way. If the ski that is going from being the downhill ski to the uphill ski can’t find anything to grip with its edge as it carves its way around and starts to slip then everything starts to slip. On this particular day I found myself lying on the hill in an almost perfect condition for one who is falling. I had both skis on. They were parallel and on the downhill side of my body. All you have to do is dig and an stop sliding. But somehow instead of it working the way it should, my uphill ski suddenly slid forward and then I have one ski pointed down the hill and the other sticking out straight where the tail of the ski caught, the binding released and I started to spin as I slid. It wasn’t long before the other ski released and I began to accelerate. In those days none of us wore helmets, but fortunately I was in the middle of a run and there were no trees nearby. I finally got rolled over on my stomach and was able to dig my boot toes into the ice enough to stop myself. I was sure glad my ski buddy was uphill from me. Without him picking up my gear, I’d have had to spend a lot of time hiking back up the hill.

It probably looked pretty funny to my partner. It was a reminder to me how quickly fun can become dangerous. I was lucky. No injuries occurred. I was 25 years younger than i am now. I’m thinking that if I did that to my body these days the ski patrol would be giving me a ride in their sled to the aid station where we would wait for the ambulance.

So be careful out there friends. The Picabo effect applies whenever you’ve been watching too much ski competition on TV. Enjoy the hill, but add an extra dose of caution and try to remember the last time you had your bindings adjusted. If it was before this season, or if you can’t remember at all, stop by the shop and have them checked out. It’s way less expensive than the co-pay on your insurance.

Copyright © 2014 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 was a century ago this month that Carl Sandburg penned the most iconic of his Chicago poems. People all across the world, even if they are not familiar with Sandburg or his poetry, probably know what city is being referred to with the lines that open poem:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

The description is reworked and some of the key phrases are used again to end the poem:

“Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

Of course Chicago has changed a lot in a hundred years.

The closing of the Union Stock Yards was fresh news when we moved to Chicago in 1978. The official closing had occurred in 1971 after decades of decline and decentralization in the meatpacking industry. There was still a lot of empty land and old corrals in the area of Halstead and 47th Street when we arrived. The Back of the Yards neighborhood was filled with housing occupied by recent immigrants and a few refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia were beginning to arrive. But the stockyards no longer offered the jobs they once had for unskilled workers.

The decline of the stockyards had begun decades before, with the advanced technology that emerged following the Second World War. Once you have refrigerated rail cars, the need to ship live animals and sloughier them in population centers goes away.

The famous stockyards that literally defined the city in the late 19th century, powered by railroad money, and in the teens when Sandburg wrote his poem were the largest stockyards in the world and the focus of international companies. The Chicago Board of Trade was the largest commodity market in the world at one point. By the mid 1920’s more meat was being processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.

“Hog butcher for the world” wasn’t an exaggeration. It was a description.

And Sandburg wasn’t gentle in his description of the rough American city. In the center of the poem, he listed the sins of the city:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I      have seen your painted women under the gas lamps      luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it      is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to      kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the      faces of women and children I have seen the marks      of wanton hunger.
But his defense of the city was a sure as his acknowledgment of its flaws:

And having answered so I turn once more to those who      sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer      and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing      so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Sandburg, of course was a genius and his poem helped shape the identity of the city whose wider metropolitan area is now home to 2.7 million people. It is the largest city in the center of our nation.

Big cities don’t tend to be located in the center of nations. They tend to be found on the coasts.

And I was a resident of Chicago for only four years. My story is not really a Chicago story at all.

But no one has written the iconic poem of the town of my birth:
Wool shipper of the west
Fly fisher, gunsmith,
Playground of the wealthy and rancher of dudes
Cattle rancher staring down sheepherder
The biggest wind of the Big Sky Country.

And no one has written the iconic poem of the city where I have lived more years than any other:

Motorcycle destination of the world
Hospital, bankers for ranches
Resting place for supersonic bombers and the crews that support them
Bearer of floods, builder of green space
Show us a mountain and we’ll improve it by carving.

But I am no poet.
And I am no Sandburg
And I cannot begin to find the right words.

I would admit the flaws of my city. We sometimes live as if we have forgotten that long before the settlers arrived this land was known to be sacred and holy and sometimes we fail to show the respect for this land that it deserves.

I have visited the men sleeping under the bridge and served meals to hungry folks at the mission. I have witnessed the suspicion and tension between law enforcement personnel and native residents on our city’s north side, and felt the tensions rise in council meetings. I have seen the strength in the lives of flood survivors and those who came a bit too close to Wounded Knee II back in the seventies and I have also know their suspicion for newcomers. I know that we have favored and funded prisons more lavishly than our schools and how we raise our children to leave the state in search of their vocations.

But I would challenge any who would criticize my town to show me another with people who are more generous or quicker to help a neighbor. Show me another town where people rally to support the families of fallen police officers and stand behind those who serve us. Find another where community theatre flourishes and public artwork is privately funded beyond expectation. There is no other place already home to incredible outdoor sculpture that would commission a major sculpture at the heart of a new city square. There are no other cities with finer high school orchestras or drama departments.

We are not perfect. But we are real.

And I can feel great pride in my city.

But then again, until the council makes it annexation vote later this year, I still live out of town.

And then again, I am no Sandburg.

I’m not even a poet.

But if I were, I would write a poem about Rapid City.

Copyright © 2014 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.

At one time we had a vision of developing a computer lab at the church. The thought was that we could get a few older computers, equip them with learning software and allow children and youth to use the computers. Computer-based teaching and learning were just getting started and there were a few decent computer games that promoted learning about faith and the Bible. A soon as we let it become known that we had the interest, old computers started to show up at the church. In the end, we never used any of those donated computers and we had to stop receiving them because we couldn’t find a way to use them. We weren’t even able to sell them on the church rummage sale. At one point, the mission shop with whom we partner to keep unsold rummage sale items from ending up in the landfill even quit taking computer monitors.

Still, we have a bit of a problem with excess technology at the church. We have a bin of functional components from an old sound system that we have no use for, but don’t know how to responsibly dispose. There is an old laptop with a non-functioning display, several old routers and various computer components that we once used in our office, but that are now no longer in service.

We try to make our technology investments last as long as possible. The laptop that I use for my work computer is now over 7 years old and we have one desktop computer in our system that is over 8 years old. At one point we were told by a technician that the older computer was worthless and that it should be replaced. We decided to work with it as long as we could. Although the technicians won’t work on it any longer, we have been able to keep it running and serving our needs. But one day it will fail and we will have another piece of technology without a disposal plan.

So I was delighted to read about WoeLab, a community group based in Togo, West Africa. The group salvages parts and pieces from discarded computers and phones and remanufactures them into new devices. Recently at the African Innovation Summit held in Cape Verde, they demonstrated a 3D printer that was bult almost entirely from e-waste.

Worldwide, consumers discard over 50 million tones of electrical and electronic products. It isn’t just computers and cell phones. We have electrical components in everything from kitchen appliances to electric toothbrushes. And this products contain materials that are potentially harmful. Buried in landfills they threaten to leach lead and other harmful materials into the groundwater supply. Burned in incinerators they pose a health risk with the toxic chemicals that are released into the air. China is responsible for 20 tons of e-waste each year. The United States contributes about 10 tons.

At the same time, there is an enormous hunger for electronic devices around the world. Electronic waste is not just a problem of rich and developed countries. As cell phones and other electronic devices become tools of liberation and development in less-developed countries, the demand increases. Relatively inexpensive devices find a ready market in less developed places. The less expensive devices tend to have shorter useful lives and contribute to increasing waste problems. And there is another problem, one that we experienced on a small scale in the church. People in developed countries, as they replace their computers and phones, like the idea of donating old but still functional equipment to someone in need. So used and only partially useful PCs and phones are being shipped to less developed countries. It is estimated that by the year 2017, the total number of obsolete PCs and phones in developing regions will exceed that of developed regions.

When devices fail, however, many of their components continue to function properly. In the current market, it is less expensive to manufacture new components than to recycle components from existing devices. The problem of the waste, however, is giving rise to a new economy that supports the recycling of components primarily because of the need to keep the used components out of landfills and incinerators.

The WoeLab printer project didn’t start as a recycling project. They did set out with the goal of creating something of great value out of local materials with local expertise. The WoeLab team of about 20 persons in clouding students, engineers and people from other walks of life modeled their printer after the Prusa Mendel, a self-build 3D printer kit sold in the US and Europe.

The WoeLab team has been building other items out of recycled computer parts. They now have constructed four working computers from old computer components. Using old jerry cans designed to transport fuel as computer cases they are hoping to have a line of computers available to those who don’t currently have access to computers. They estimate that one of their Jerry DIT computers will sell for around $100.

Elsewhere in Africa, FairPhone, a company that makes phones from recycled components and conflict-free minerals, is hoping to turn one of Ghana’s biggest digital dumping grounds into a source of parts. They are also teaming up with repair shops to harvest and recycle components for the repair of phones when they cease to function properly.

Harvesting usable components from the mountains of e-waste will not solve the waste problem. The life span of modern electronic devices is simply too short. We go through too many devices in a lifetime and some of the components cannot be reused. Other components are damaged or destroyed by the ways that we store and discpose of waste. But it is the beginning of something that will be an important part of the future economy. As we consume more and more of the earth’s resources in the form of our electronic devices, we will need to find new sources of raw materials.

The piles of discarded electronic items is a good place to look for materials to build the next generation of electronic components.

Copyright © 2014 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 joys of life in the church is that we are an enterprise with a long history. We have a deep sense of being a part of something that stretches far beyond a single generation. This liberates us from a sense of having to have the latest, most cutting edge and advanced procedures. That is a good thing, because we have a tendency to stay perpetually behind the curve when it comes to organizational style and management philosophy.

For much of the second half of the twentieth century mainline protestant denominations experienced a gradual decline that accelerated as the dawn of the 21st century arrived. The decline was expressed in the counted numbers of members and in the amount of money that was available to organize the church for its state and national ministries. We have been through several generations of “downsizing.” The number of staff people serving in our national church setting is dramatically decreased from where it was in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This is not unique to the United Church of Christ, but it is perhaps a bit more dramatic in our denomination than in some other denominations because we weren’t all that big to begin with.

As we went through the process, buzzwords were flying all around the church. We spoke of “best practices,” of “unified governance,” and of “nimble” operating procedures. Of course we weren’t engaging in best practices, we weren’t unified and were are far from nimble. The reality and the catchphrases are a long ways apart.

And we tend to stay decades behind the most progressive operational practices. Although the business world was enamored with consultants, certificate programs and coaching twenty and thirty years ago, it took us a while to catch up.

These days, the Center for Progressive Renewal is a darling of the church’s national setting. I don’t know how much money flows from our national structures into the private center, but it is no small amount.

I have no doubt that I will live to see a different fad arise during my career. Sometimes we just have to chase the fads to give ourselves the illusion that we are accomplishing something.

The reality, however, is that consulting, certificate programs and coaching all are based on the assumption that the expertise that the church needs is somehow outside of the church.

I operate with an entirely different perspective. I believe that the experience and vision to lead the church into the next century and beyond will come from within the church, not from outside sources. We already know about grass roots mission. We already have leaders who are investing in building the church. We already have structures that are the right size for our congregations.

It is my observation that churches that hire consultants generally do not benefit from the consulting and coaching. Successful congregations, like the one I am privileged to serve, look within themselves for the vision and strength to build the future.

Imitation never works well for churches.

It is, I believe, at the core of our theology. Since we believe in incarnation - that is God become embodied - we understand that God comes to us and that Christ lives within us. The church is the body of Christ and as such it is complete. It doesn’t need to import ideas, structures, or practices from outside of itself.

The Center for Progressive Renewal, like many other consulting firms, is staffed by people who have great educational credentials. They have some experience within the church, though it is rare to find a church consultant who has served a single congregation for a decade. The truth is that they like being consultants much better than they liked being pastors. And that is fine.

It is simply that I have experienced the renewal of the church to be born of long term commitments by people who are willing to slog it out “in the trenches” without need for the high salaries and constant recognition on which the consultants thrive.

Having said, that I have a lot of years of working as a consultant under my belt. I have consulted with congregations across the United States as they work to build more effective faith formation programs. I carried the title “Educational Consultant” for nearly two decades. I still so some consulting work with United Church of Christ and Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, congregations in Nebraska. I have been guilty of the very practices of which I accuse others.

The church is like that. We are an institution of people who make mistakes, find ourselves in need of forgiveness, and rely on God’s grace to take the next steps.

I am struck, however, by the irony of the name of the Center for Progressive Renewal. It is, it seems to me, by its very nature and core values, unable to be progressive. No matter how I look at the organization, or how often I read the course descriptions or page through the lists of consultants and coaches, I can’t find within that institution much that excites me about the future. It seems to be all about business as usual.

Progressive renewal comes from within.

What excites me about the church is the ability of grass roots ministries to arise from within a congregation. When a congregation is able to respond to the projects and suggestions of its members, wonderful new projects arise. From our Costa Rica ministry to the Woodchuck Society, to the Prayer Shawl Ministry to Love, INC., the newest and most exciting ministries of our church have all arisen out of the concerns and passions of our members.

You might expect that an institution with thousands of years of experience and history might not be so short sighted when it comes to thinking about the future. If I were called into the consult with the Center for Progressive Renewal, I would ask them to ask their staff to pick a local congregation and make a commitment.

As long as they keep moving on from congregation to congregation they are missing some of the deepest joys of life in the church.

Of this much I am sure: Our church has been around for 135 years and we will be around for more than a century after everyone has forgotten the Center for Progressive Renewal.

I’m not sure how they define progress.

Copyright © 2014 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 read that the Lego movie was a box office success over the weekend. February is not noted for blockbuster movies, and children’s movies don’t always fare well at the awards ceremonies, but perhaps this one will set a new trend. Actually, I haven’t seen the movie. I watched the trailer, so I have a bit of a sense of what the movie might look like. Using computer animations to move the mouths and make other facial changes to the minifigures seems clever. And any movie with both Batman and Superman is bound to appeal to a certain demographic.

The truth is that I don’t know much about movies at all. I rarely watch them. I prefer reading to looking at things. All of that visual and sound stimulation just seems too tense to make the experience a truly relaxing scenario for me. I probably would have been perfectly happy living in a generation before movies were invented.

But I do know a little bit about Lego.

Lego wasn’t popular in the United States until after I had already moved from American Bricks (a definitely inferior product) to Erector sets. So I never had any Lego of my own. My brother who is 2 1/2 years younger, however, was the Lego kid in our family, so I got to play with the bricks when I was growing up.

But I didn’t really understand Lego until I became the dad of a Lego kid. So if you aren’t really into Lego, I guess I should start with a little bit of vocabulary so that you can grasp a bit of the culture.

First of all, the plural of Lego is Lego. For serious aficionados of the toy, saying “Legos” is definitely a faux pas.

Individual Lego pieces are called bricks. If you call them blocks you are making reference to toys that don’t interlock in the clever way that Lego pieces are designed to stay together until you are ready to take them apart.

Lego characters are called minifigures. Perhaps Playmobile has people, but Leog has minifigures. And it is all one word, despite what your spell checker tries to do when you write it.

Duplo is the name for the bricks that are exactly twice as long and twice as high as the corresponding Lego. Duplo is designed for younger children, but you can use Duplo and Lego together in the same construction.

A couple of cultural realities in the Lego world: First of all, there are all kinds of buckets, bins and cases designed to store Lego. All are fine for putting the bricks away, but the only real way to find the exact brick that you want when you want it is to dump out the entire container. Sorry, dads who hate the painful sensation of stepping son a brick. Sorry, moms who hate the sound of a brick caught in the vacuum cleaner brushes. That’s just the way it is. We ended up making a 4’ x 8’ Lego table for our son with edges on it so that the bricks didn’t easily spill over onto the floor. It helped, but wasn’t a perfect solution. Lego creations can’t be contained to a single room. After you finish making it, the creation needs to be transported around the house and shown off. That means that there is always the risk of a brick ending up in a different room.

Secondly, you never outgrow Lego. The Lego Architecture series are kits specifically designed for adults. You can create a model of the White House, The Empire State Building, The Seattle Space Needle or the Leaning Tower of Pisa Those kits range from $20 and up. If you want to go above $100, how about making a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater? It isn’t that expensive when you compare it with actually owning an architectural landmark. If you aren’t into buildings, you could try the Lego Volkswagen T1 Camper Van.

If you are really into Lego, now is the time to start planning for you vacation to Legoland, Denmark’s most famous amusement park. If that is too pricy for you, a real Lego fan won’t be disappointed with the Lego store in the Mall of America. It features two wonderful levels with lots of bricks and baseplates to play with while you are considering which sets to purchase and take home.

Now about the movie. The plot begins with an evil mastermind bent on destroying the world. There is, however, a prophecy about a chosen one who will save the world. Somehow Emmet, who is in reality just another average Lego minifigure in the big Lego city going about his average Lego day, gets mistaken for the chosen one. And that is where the adventure begins. But to enjoy the movie, you have to understand a little bit about Lego laws of physics. When you ride a horse its legs stay frozen even at a gallop. Your head can spin all the way around - even around and around and around again. And, don’t forget this basic principle: Krazy Glue spells immobilizing doom!

There is a law enforcement pair: The Good Cop and the Bad Cop, but I think that they are really the same character with two voices. There is a size Lego wizard for those who still love the castle Lego sets and, of course, Badman, who in the movie is, I hear, a bit self-absorbed. Probably not as cheesy as the old Batman television series, however.

I bet it is a really good movie. What’s not to like about a 3D animated Lego movie?

But the truth is that I probably won’t go to the movie. That is, unless I can go with my son. Now that would be an adventure worth having. He is the real Lego expert in our house.

When you go to a movie, it is always good to have someone with you who can explain the jokes that you don’t get.

Copyright © 2014 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.

Winter is giving us a bit of a break. Yesterday’s high was nearly 50 degrees. The snow is melting and it seemed to me that it would be a good day to take a little walk in the woods. I’ve been wondering about the beaver at the lake and though the lake is still covered in ice, it seemed like there might be a chance of getting a glimpse if I could figure out where he has his hole in the ice. This particular beaver built his lodge late in the summer, after spending much of the summer cruising around the lake. I think that he is a young one, and that summer was his first out of the lodge of his birth. I got so I could identify him. When I paddle a wooden boat, I can approach quite near to him before the tail splashes and he dives. When his tail splashes didn’t turn me around, he would swim under my boat. It is much easier to see a beaver than it is to feet a photograph of him.

I kept my record of not getting a good photograph of the beaver yesterday as well. I was a bit concerned that he might abandon his lodge, but the new lodge is definitely occupied. There was the area of open water, neatly cleared not far from the lodge. There were not footprints of human fishermen in the area, so I knew that the beaver had been the one to make and maintain the hole in the ice.

However, the beaver didn’t make an appearance above the ice while I was checking on his place. I’ll probably have to wait until the ice is out of the lake before I see him. I’m eager to know if he has a mate and whether or not there will be kits in the lodge this spring.

I think he is going to discover that he has made a mistake in the location of his lodge. He is a long way from where the creek runs into the lake and the little cove where he has put his home provides a few willows and other plants, but perhaps not enough for a small colony of beavers. The big thing, however, is that once the tourists return to the campground, his home is simply to easily accessed by way too many people. The beaver is a bit of a recluse and I don’t think he is going to like all of the attention. And his peaceful cove is home to motor boats and jet skis during the height of the summer. I suppose it is possible that he will adapt, but I am thinking that it is more likely that he will decide to move.

Deer adapt to their human neighbors quite readily. As we walked through the woods we sighted some deer that were flighty and easily stirred. They raised their tails and ran from us. It reminded me of the way the deer in our neighborhood behaved when we first moved in 18 years ago. We would occasionally get a glimpse of a deer. Sometimes there would be a couple of them in the yard. But hey would run if we turned on our porch light and they would leave the yard if we ventured outside. As the years have gone by the population has increased and so has the boldness of the animals. These day our deer are definitely urban deer. They don’t bolt when they turn on the neighbor’s motion-sensitive light. In fact they seem to enjoy eating in the lighted area between the houses. They don’t leave the yard when I go out for my paper in the morning. They will let me walk to within 20 feet before lifting their tails and then they might run across the street or just a little bit away from my route of travel. They don’t leave the front yard when I drive into the driveway. They seem to know which dogs are leashed and which might actually chase them.

I like having deer for neighbors and I enjoy having them in our yard. Most springs we have a couple of fawns that are born in the neighbor’s high grass and make their first ventures out onto our lawn. We get to know individual animals as we watch them over the weeks. Still, it was fun to spend some time observing deer that are not so used to people yesterday. It is a bit of a challenge to photograph them because they are wary and not interested in sticking around and posing.

Mostly it was just good to get outside and take a walk in the woods. When the weather is cold, we tend to hibernate. Well, we don’t really hibernate, but we do stay inside more and tend to be a bit more sedentary. But our legs were meant for walking and our lungs were designed to be filled with fresh air from outdoors. And there is so much beauty that is so close that all it takes is making time to walk and look and explore.

Our trip to the lake was capped by a pair of bald eagles who make their appearance in the trees above us. There is something very special about seeing that shadow pass directly across me as the bird soars overhead. I tried to get a picture, but that was not to be yesterday. The birds were in more of a flying mode than a hunting mode and so they quickly ascended to heights that reached beyond my skill and equipment as a photographer.

That’s the thing about spending time in the outdoors. There is far more that can be seen than can be photographed. There is far more that can be experienced than can be described. The reality is much more interesting and engaging than the report.

So I rise this morning with a deep sense of gratitude for the experiences of yesterday and I’m already thinking of opportunities to take advantage of the warm weather that will be around for a couple of weeks to experience more of the joy of being outdoors.

Copyright © 2014 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 considerable effort to bring a didgeridoo home from Australia. I’m not sure that others in my family were eager to have me come into possession of the instrument and then there was considerable speculation as to how best for it to travel. We left Australia with my didgeridoo as a carry on. It fit easily into the overhead compartments for the flight to Los Angeles. But in Los Angeles, I discovered that I would not be allowed to carry it on for the trip home on the airlines. I guess Qantas airlines is a bit less fearful of the instrument than US domestic airlines. I hastily wrapped it and checked it for the flight home and it arrived without any damage.

I am a trumpet player and understand the concept of embouchure. I even knew about circular breathing before I traveled to Australia. But I have not become accomplished with the instrument in the eight years that I have owned it. I’m sure that is due in part to the lack of practice. The techniques are quite different from those required to play the trumpet. First of all, the opening of the instrument is much wider than any brass mouthpiece. A trumpet player buzzes the lips. For the didgeridoo, one has to nearly flop them. When learning to play brass instruments, one learns to have strong diaphragm support and sufficient air pressure. The amount of air for a didgeridoo is actually less despite the length of the instrument. It is a process of blowing lightly and allowing the lips to flap in the breeze as it were. I know I am not describing it well here. But then again, I don’t really play the instrument.

And then there is the fact that the sound made by the instrument is an acquired taste. Not everyone likes the sound. I think that finding a place to practice the didgeridoo is similar to what I might imagine for those who play the bagpipes. But since we have a bagpipe player who practices at the church because the sound of the instrument threatens to disrupt his peaceful home, I am not without a place to practice. After hours, when the church is empty it is unlikely that I would bother anyone with the sounds of practice.

The didgeridoo is an ancient instrument developed by indigenous Australians. I think that it emerged in Northern Australia long before Europeans had visited the continent. If you know where to look, didgeridoos occur naturally. Termites hollow out the interior of the branches of eucalyptus trees, leaving a hollow tube. Most didgeridoos are about a meter or a little bit longer. Some can be as longs three times that amount. An experienced player can make a tone on the branch just as it is found in the bush. Most, however, take a bit of beeswax and form a flexible mouthpiece that adjusts to the lips of the player. This makes it gentler on the face and provides a better seal so that the air goes through the tube and doesn’t leak out around the lips.

I suppose that it should be noted that the name we use for the instrument, didgeridoo, is nowhere as ancient as the instrument. it is a kind of onomatopoeic word in English invented to describe the instrument after English settlers arrived in Australia. Different tribes have different names, but there is no single indigenous name for the instrument. The Anindiyakwa people call the instrument ngarrriraakpwina, but most English speakers can’t pronounce the word properly. The Waray people along the Adelade River call it bambu, which sounds like it is spelled in English. It is also known as Yirtakki, Yiraka, Mako, Kurmur and Mandapui in various parts of the Australian continent.

Its sound is unmistakable. When you are in the place where it is played, you feel it as much as you hear it. In that way it is similar to the pedal pipes of a good pipe organ.

Like a few other wind instruments, it is possible to create an underlying bass tone and to vary the upper harmonics as you play. Didgeridoo players punctuate the sounds with various clicks, yelps, barks, squawks and whooshing sounds. Some of the sounds are made with the lips and tongue and others are created by tapping the outside of the instrument with fingers or a stick. One of the instruction books on the didgeridoo that I brought home from Australia suggests that one practice by getting the lips flopping and then pronouncing words without interrupting the flopping. The same book suggests that one practice circular breathing by drinking from a glass of water while inhaling through the nose. Both exercises are easier said than done. The water glass exercise, however, resulted in a bigger mess for me to clean up.

Like any other instrument, it takes a gifted artist to make the hollow branch sing. William Barton, who is currently touring the eastern part of the US is one of those artists. At 32 years old he has spent nearly half of his life performing with symphony orchestras and chamber groups. He has selected instruments that are pitched to traditional musical keys and he can play them in tune. Barton is a one-person movement to expand the acceptance of the instrument into western classical music. He has played at Carneige Hall, The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Pompidou Center in Paris and, of course, the iconic Sydney Opera House. The artistic directors of orchestras around the world seek him out for bookings to play with their ensembles.

I’m certainly not opposed to the sounds of Australia blending with western symphonic sounds. But for me there will always be something about the sound of the didgeridoo that speaks of the flat red desert of the center of Australia. There is no concert hall finer for the instrument than the open spaces around Uluru where the sounds can bounce off the giant rock. The tone seems to mimic the lay of the land and blend into the otherworldly scenery that defies description.

So I picked up my didgeridoo yesterday and made a few sounds.

I think I still need more practice.

Copyright © 2014 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.

These days almost nobody ever names their child Valentinus. The name, derived from the root, valens means worthy, strong, and powerful. It was a very popular name in late antiquity. At one point there were at least eleven saints commemorated by the Roman Catholic Church with the name Valentine. The Eastern Orthodox Church has another list of Saint Valentines. The lists name several dates as the date of death for the various saints. A priest from Viterbo died on November 3. A bishop from Raetia died on January 7. A fifth-century priest and hermit died on July 4. A Spanish hermit died on October 25. The list goes on and on. In a sense there are a lot of different days that might be considered to be St. Valentine’s Day.

There are, however, a number of saints named Valentine who are said to have died on February 14. The day of commemoration of a saint is the day on which that saint died. It isn’t a morbid tradition, but rather a celebration of the entry of the saint into the realm of heaven.

There are two saints named Valentine whose stories are often mixed and combined in the mythology of the day on which we celebrate romantic love. Valentine, a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudis II, was arrested and imprisoned because he was caught marrying Christian couples and otherwise aiding Christians during the time that Christianity was banned and Christians were being persecuted by Claudius in Rome. The story is that Claudius took a liking to the priest and the priest tried to convert Claudius to Christianity which resulted in the priest being beaten with clubs and stones and then beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate. The date of his death has been reported at various times in 267, 270 and even as late as 273.

Another Valentine, the bishop of Terni in central Italy is credited with the miraculous healing of the blindness of the daughter of his judge. He was arrested for his faith in Jesus multiple times and eventually was sent to Rome where he met Claudius and tried to convert Claudius to Christianity whereupon he was beaten and beheaded in much the same manner as the priest. The date of the bishop’s death is recorded as February 14, 269

Apparently Claudius didn’t take kindly to attempts to convert him to Christianity.

There isn’t a lot known about the particulars of the origins of the celebration of romantic love that is associated with the day other than the stories of the priest who continued to perform marriages for couples for home marriage was deemed to be illegal.

The Roman Catholic Church did little to ease the confusion when, in 1969, it revised its list of saints for universal liturgical veneration. I am always mixed up as to who did and did not get included on the revised list, but I think that it is the bishop of Terni who remains on the list and therefore February 14 remains an official saint’s day recognized by liturgical churches. Or maybe it was the other Valentine. At any rate it is recognized as an official feast day in the Roman Catholic and Anglican communions as well as the Lutheran Church and a number of other churches that celebrate specific saint’s day.

Mostly, it is a secular holiday these days, however. It is a good day for the sales of cards, flowers, candy and other gifts for one’s love. Romance is in the air and there are more than a few couples who plan the evening as a time for a romantic date. The day landing on a Friday this year has increased the number of special opportunities for romantic encounters. Restaurants and hotels have been selling romantic getaway packages for months now. Reservations are tight in many area restaurants.

We do seem to enjoy an opportunity to remind ourselves that romantic love is a good thing - a gift of God that is worthy of a celebration. It doesn’t require a complete and accurate knowledge of third century Rome to know that love is worthy of recognition and celebration.

Unfortunately for the sellers of flowers and chocolates across much of the eastern seaboard of the United States, the weather is not cooperating with the biggest day for sales and deliveries. The florists’ vans are all snowed in in Washington DC, New York and a host of other major cities across the region and when the flowers don’t get delivered, the florists don’t make any money.

The projection has been that Americans would spend about $2 billion on Valentines flowers this year. Nobody knows how big the impact of the day-before-Valentine’s blizzard will be on those sales, but on the day that was projected to be the busiest of the year for florists, the Washington Post reported that more than two-thirds of the area’s flower shops were closed and the fleet of delivery trucks was virtually grounded.Estimates range from 15 to 50 percent drop in sales due to the blizzard.

Hopefully some of the customers who placed flower orders will understand the impact of the blizzard and will still be pleased with flowers that arrive a day or two late.

The weather is bound to keep some of the restaurant and hotel business at home as well.

On the other hand, it does seem that home is a good place to celebrate Christian love. Maybe we’ve become confused in our thinking if we believe that romance requires a special night away ini order to flourish. Perhaps the love that the saints celebrated and sought to foster is the everyday love that couples live in the small events and gestures as much as it is the special occasion and gifts.

Perhaps a blizzard gives the opportunity for some couples to recognize that the real gift is the gift of each other. Special recognitions with candy and flowers are nice, but the real gift of love is the depth of relationship that is shared.

So we don’t know which saint, really. And we aren’t sure about the day. And the flowers might not get delivered on time. But love is a good thing to celebrate everyday.

Happy Valentine’s Day! May you discover and appreciate the love that is a gift of God.

Copyright © 2014 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 lead story on the BBC news website this morning is headlined, “Winter storm brings havoc to US east.” It speaks of a winter storm of “historical proportions.” Yesterday was a hard day to be commuting in Atlanta, Georgia or Raleigh, North Carolina. The ice was coating everything and the roads came to a standstill. And the storm is big. It stretches from Texas to Maine, with a lot of clouds and precipitation.

But it isn’t quite as big news her in the US, yet. Although it isn’t the lead story on the Washington Post website, it is front and center with a headline only a little bit smaller than the article on Health exchanges exceeding targets. The Post calls it the “worst storm of the season.”

The New York Times, sometimes prone to exaggeration, had a lot of other news to report. Articles on Iraqi prison breaks, winter olympics, the Comcast purchase of Time Warner Cable, college costs and congressional action on the debt ceiling all were put ahead of the article on the storm. According to the Times, “Another Major Snowstorm Rolls Through New York.” In New York the public schools are open today even though the storm is expected to dump as much as a foot of snow in the region.

The Bangor Daily News in Maine buried the story about the storm in the midst of lots of other articles, headlining: “Nor’easter expected to dump up to 18 inches of snow on part of Maine.” A foot and a half of snow doesn’t get the folks in Bangor too uptight. As far as I can tell from the website, the Great Maine Outdoor Weekend, scheduled to begin tomorrow is still on with over 100 events scheduled across the State of Maine and designed to get folks outdoors and off on adventures.

I suspect that there will be some elements to the winter of 2013-14 that will go down in the record books. After all, it is the first winter that I was aware that they were naming winter storms. And we kicked it off with a doozie - Winter Storm Atlas had us snowed in from Friday until Sunday, much of the time without power. The rest of the storms have left our roads passable and although caution is always a good rule in the winter, we haven’t been inconvenienced much.

People have complained about the number of snow days taken by the Rapid City Public Schools, but I’m sure that the schools in Washington, DC have taken a lot more.

It does seem to me that weather forecasters have been more accurate in recent years. We have friends who live in the Washington, D.C. area who had planned on taking a road trip this week and cancelled based on the forecast. I’m pretty sure that they are thinking that they made a wise decision with all of the pictures of cars in the ditches and traffic snarled by the slippery roads.

We grew up paying attention to the weather. In the flying business, weather is very important. We had airplanes that were capable of flying in instrument weather conditions, but we never had any with de-icing systems for flight into known icing conditions and, for the most part, our operation was based on fair weather flying. So we paid attention as closely as we could. In those days, the FAA operated Flight Service Stations all across the U.S., so there were lots of reporting stations to see what the weather was like in another place. We studied the weather maps for information on temperature, pressure and other factors that could indicate where the storms might be lurking.

Advanced weather radar changed all of that. Today we can look up the doppler radar on a home computer and take a look at the actual conditions in a different part of the country. The radar can be animated, so we can see the progress of storms. And in more than a few places that I frequent, the weather channel, with its nonstop reporting of weather disasters, is on the television entertaining (or frightening) the folks. One of my pet pieces is the overuse of the weather channel in area nursing homes. When you are struggling to stay focused with a touch of dementia, constant reporting of weather disasters in other places doesn’t make it any easier. Most of those folks would do better to look out the windows instead of watching television.

I used to lead worship at an area nursing home where the television was constantly tuned to the weather channel. I would turn off the set when I arrived and one of the residents would ask me over and over what the weather was like outside. No matter what answer I gave, I heard a report of much more severe weather than we were experiencing. One day, when asked, I responded with, “Let’s take a look,” and directed the person’s attention to the window. For the next 20 minutes or so I kept hearing, “Well, the weather isn’t as bad as they said it would be.” I hope she is still looking out of the window from time to time, but I suspect that her attention has once again been redirected to the television.

The weather gives us a point of connection - something to talk about that is important in our lives, but unlikely to spawn controversy or disagreement. It is a safe topic when you don’t know people very well. However, like other small talk, such conversations run the risk of stating the obvious and wasting time without increasing knowledge or connection.

So I still keep paying attention to the weather. Back home in my Montana home town, they’ve got a good Chinook blowing. The temperature is nearly 40 already, but the winds are really whipping. Regular wind is at about 25 mph. It is supposed to pick up to about 40 with gusts over 60 by this afternoon. That’s a pretty good blow, even for a place that knows wind.

It gives us something to talk about.

Copyright © 2014 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.

February is a month of orientation and change in our church. At the end of January we elect new officers and members of our departments. During February we have the first round of meetings with the various departments and the church board. Over the years we have tried various ways of helping people become oriented to their tasks. We have had leadership retreats, prepared notebooks, handouts and tried other ways of helping people become involved.

The basic problem is that people don’t join churches in order to attend meetings. They join churches to worship, to become involved in mission and service, and to learn and grow in their faith. Although there are a few people who enjoy meetings, most of the folks who are attracted to the church see meetings as events to avoid or as necessary, but not that much fun.

Nearly 50 years ago, Phil Anderson wrote a book titled “Church Meetings that Matter.” The premise was simple. People will participate in meetings that make a difference. They resent having their time wasted with unnecessary protocols and repetitive conversations, but they are generous with their time when they feel that their time is invested in moving the ministry of the church forward.

I attend a lot of meetings. And I go to my share of meetings that accomplish nothing. The problems of meetings that are without focus isn’t unique to the church.

There are, in our church, a few areas of service that operate well without meetings per se. The Woodchuck Society gets together to work. If there are decisions to be made, they can be made around the work. Conversations flow naturally when people work together. Since the main focus of the group is cutting, hauling, splitting and delivering firewood, the tasks are pretty clear. It takes a bit of organization to arrange delivery days and to set the days when we work, but that can be accomplished quickly. Since the organizing principle of the group is that you give what time you can and don’t feel a need to make excuses when you are not able to help, there is no pressure on participants. In such a setting, with such an organization, people are amazingly generous with their time and support. I am continually amazed by the amount of work that gets accomplished.

Some other groups in the church also accomplish their work without formal meetings. Craft groups such as the quilters or the stained glass group do not need formal organizational structures. They simply go about their work when they gather. They don’t need officers and budgets and minutes to do their work. They can do the things they need to do without annual reports and spreadsheets and speeches.

However, the management of an organization the size of our congregation does require a few meetings. We manage enough money that it is very important that the money is tracked and that decisions about spending priorities are checked with others. Donors want their gifts to go to the causes in which they believe and it is our responsibility to make sure that their wishes are respected. Churches the size of ours that operate with more streamlined structures tend to be a bitt autocratic with power too centralized for the comfort of our congregation that likes to have a say in how things are run.

Meetings are a way in which the voices of the people in the pews can be heard and their ideas respected.

So we have meetings. And some are well-organized, get their business done and allow the people to get on with their lives. Others drone on and on with all kinds of extraneous storytelling, conversation, and repeated discussion. It is hard to predict which kind of meeting you might encounter on any given evening.

The training we’ve designed for this February attempts to respect the time of the participants and to enable groups to meet efficiently. We’ve prepared a one-page sheet on the structure of the church, an additional one-page description of the function of the particular group and another document that gives outlines of our communications process. We’ve tried to allow for e-mail and other communication to keep people informed when face-to-face gatherings are not required.

But we have also tried to infuse our gatherings with opportunities for prayer and paying attention to the needs of participants. A church isn’t a corporation. Efficiency isn’t always our primary goal. We need to organize our work in such a manner that we never forget the individuals who are giving freely of their time to make our institution viable.

Since I serve on boards and committees of other nonprofit organizations, I know that the struggle for balance that we experience isn’t unique to the church. There seems to be no shortage of meetings that fail to accomplish the work that was intended and end up with frustrated participants. I find a meeting where nothing is accomplished to be much more tiring than one where assignments are given and taken, work progresses and the importance of the meeting is easy to discern.

A group of us were visiting and joking recently. I suggested that in heaven there would be no meetings. A colleague questioned my vision of heaven, reminding me that there are some people who thrive on meetings and for whom the absence of meetings would be a punishment, not a reward. I suggested that perhaps in heaven, only the people who love meetings would have to attend them, to which my colleague responded that such a scenario would mean that “they” would be in charge. I observed that it would be a bit like US legislative bodies - the good people never get elected because they are unwilling to expose themselves to the ridiculous process. We both agreed that congressional gridlock was most unlike heaven.

So, in this life, we continue to deal with a less-than-perfect scenario. Knowing that gives us a special responsibility to try new ways to shorten the meetings and enable people to become involved in the ministry.

In the meantime, I’ve got more meetings today.

Copyright © 2014 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.

Back in 1977, I was an intern at the Wholistic Health Care Center in Hinsdale, Illinois. Among my duties at the center, I began to teach Stress Management courses. I trained with Bill Peterson, who had developed the curriculum and outline for the courses. Most of the courses were offered through churches and our clients were people who lived in the western suburbs of Chicago. Many of them worked in downtown Chicago and I met several who were traders on the Chicago Board of Trade. They had fast-paced and quite stressful jobs.

We taught about the physiological and psychological effects of stress, the process of grief, coping skills, and other topics. Much of our work was based on previous work by Granger Westberg, who was the founder of the Wholistic Health Care Centers.

So I have been teaching stress management courses for 37 years. I have taught courses in at least six different states and in a wide variety of settings.

The process of teaching such courses involves research and continuing education because there is continuing research into the nature of stress. Among the interesting frontiers in stress research is more information about how the central nervous system works and the role of nerves in communicating stress reactions.

It was primarily because I am familiar with the topic and preparing a course would be less work for me than offering a course on other topics that I proposed teaching a course in stress management to officers of the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office when the training lieutenant asked the chaplains what courses we might be able to offer as continuing education for the officers.

The topic was of interest to the Sheriff and to the training officials of the office, so I worked with the other chaplains to develop an outline and a two-hour stress management workshop for the department. We offered the course for the first time tomorrow. I’ll be teaching again this morning and a couple more times in the next week as the chaplains offer the course to seven different groups of officers.

As is often the case when one is working with something that is familiar, it is easy to forget that some of this information can be new to the people who are taking the class. Stress management is built into pastoral training and required as a part of clinical pastoral education and other parts of a regular pastoral career.

I guess it would be fair to say that our jobs are stressful and that stress management is important. But it doesn’t seem to me that our profession is any more stressful than law enforcement. I can think of dozens of stressors that are unique to officers.

Officers face threats to their own health and safety on a fairly regular basis. They have jobs that involve a certain amount of boredom, which can be suddenly interrupted with a need for complete alertness and a burst of energy. They are responsible for the lives and safety of others. They are exposed to distress and angry outbursts on a regular basis. They have to control their own emotions in order to do their jobs. They deal with a gun both on and off duty. Their work is often broken up with a case opened and then the follow-up provided by another. They rarely see a single case through from beginning to end. Law enforcement officers have a unique blend of expectations. Part of their work is organized like the military. Part of their work demands that they behave like professionals.

The list of stressors that are unique to police and other law enforcement officers could go on and on.

So it surprises me that there is so little in terms of stress management training for law enforcement officers. Our Sheriff’s office may be unique, but I don’t think that this is the case. The bottom line is that we haven’t been doing a good job of training our officers to deal with the stress of their work.

And the price for not managing stress well is high. The department probably is experiencing higher turnover than would be the case if officers were trained in stress management. There is likely a higher rate of stress-related illness and perhaps even stress-related disability among members of the Sheriff’s office than the general public. Certainly the rate of illness and disability is greater than it would be if all officers were adequately trained and practiced in stress management techniques.

There are many parts of the work of a professional law enforcement officer that demand discipline and training. But if we are sending officer out without the basics of stress management, we are sending them into harm’s way without all of the protection that we are able to offer.

I am interested to see how the week of training goes. And I am interested to see how this training might be incorporated into the Sheriff’s Office so that it is made available to all officers both as initial and as recurrent training. It just makes sense to have law enforcement officers well trained in ways to remain healthy and take care of themselves.

This has gotten me to thinking about the need for stress management among the general public. I quit offering stress management courses as a part of church life several years ago because I was of the impression that people were receiving such training through their workplaces and that perhaps we had offered the course enough. Perhaps, however, it is time to offer a course through the church. The church has the ability to form support groups that reach beyond specific professions. Having people in different professions as a part of one’s network of support is important in managing stress. The church is uniquely cross generational and involves people from all walks of life.

It is worth considering. But first I need to get through the demands of this week with the extra work that I am doing with the Sheriff’s office. Perhaps I need to pay attention to my stress levels and my coping skills as I navigate through the busy times of the next few days.

Copyright © 2014 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.

OK, it is still cold in South Dakota. But the forecast calls for warming temperatures this week. We’ll see the snow melt by the end of the week if the forecasts are accurate. Meanwhile in my home town, they’re hunkering down for another blizzard. Winds are expected to exceed 50 mph this afternoon and evening with visibilities reduced to complete whiteout overnight. It is a good night to keep off the roads and stay where you are back there.

A quick glance at the headlines from around the world reveals that we don’t have much to complain about in the weather department. Over in England, thousands of homes along the River Thames are threatened with flooding. Sixteen severe flood warnings are in place. At Marlow, much of the cemetery is underwater. At Burrowbridge on the Sommerset Levels, the water is deep enough to submerge cars and trucks. The Worcester city center is flooded and could be closed for a week or more. They are building up earthen banks and piling up sandbags, but it is clear that there will be more problems before this is over. The ground is so saturated that it cannot absorb any more water and the groundwater is causing problems, undermining rail tracks, roads and other structures. There are many delays and cancellations in rail service. It could be relatively dry today, but the rest of the week will bring more rain and raise the Thames even more by the weekend.

On the other side of the globe, the Australians sure would like to see some rain, but none is in sight for Victoria, where dangerous fires are raging out of control. Many rural roads are closed due to the bush fires and thousands have been evacuated from their homes and are anxiously and eagerly awaiting news. For many, the news is not going to be good. Yesterday’s fire north of Melbourne left blackened earth and destroyed homes in its wake. As many as 12 of the wildfires have been started by arsonists. Not only is the dry and windy weather a problem, a wave of criminal activity has threatened the lives of firefighters and homeowners alike. Forecasters aren’t predicting any relief from the conditions anytime soon.

Since we don’t have the power to do anything to change the weather, it makes sense to adapt. For the most part, I find myself dressed in cold weather gear that I’ve had around for years. I’m not worried about fashion when I step outdoors, just keeping warm. But there are plenty of folks who could benefit from a trip to a farm supply store for a pair of insulated coveralls or at least some good, warm boots. I am amazed at the number of teens we see at church and around the schools who are inappropriately dressed. Their lack of adequate clothing probably only causes mild discomfort, but the threat is real. If a car were to break down and they were to need to walk a few blocks, that discomfort could turn to danger in a short time.

Since today’s youth are so entranced with gadgets, maybe instead of basic layers of warm clothing, they would be inspired by technological devices to ward of the cold.

A good pair of insulated gloves are good enough for me, but I know that there are battery powered heated gloves for those who want to shell out the money. With the new high-tech insulations available and extended life batteries, these can put out high heat for a couple of hours and lower levels of heat for as much as 12 hours between recharges. They make heated gloves that recharge through a regular outlet or by plugging into the USB port on a computer.

Or how about an electric shoulder warmer. Like a mini electric blanket, this device that you wear across your shoulders uses infrared heat to keep you warm. You plug it into the USB port on your computer for power.

Actually there are a whole bunch of heated devices that plug into USB ports. You can get a heated mouse to keep your hand warm. I’m not sure what you do with the other hand. I’m no good at running a mouse precisely with my left hand. I guess you can stick that hand in your pocket. There are also USB powered heated footrests for cold toes.

If you have to leave the house or go out without a computer equipped with a USB port, battery-powered seems to be the way to go. How about a pair of foot-warmer insoles. Once you have these babies charged up, you can control the temperature with a remote control.

Maybe the shivering teens would go for a headphone stocking cap. It has an internal wiring system with detachable speakers. There is a built-in pocket to hold your iPod or other MP3 player. There are also stereo headphones that are covered with ear warmers to look like very fashionable ear muffs.

In New York City, folks are having to turn to their computers to shop for winter boots. The stores have simply run out as demand exceeded supply and finding a pair of warm waterproof shoes in a shoe store in New York City isn’t going to happen anytime soon. I’m glad I already own warm boots. After reading about the shortage of boots in New York City, I decided to check out amazon.com just for the fun of it and found out that Sorels in my size are out of stock. I’m sure online purchasers can find some warm boots, but it does look like even the online sellers were caught a bit off guard by the cold weather and the high demand.

So we don’t have it bad. We’ve got plenty of warm weather gear. The pantry is stocked and the cars are in good running order. Things aren’t too bad around Rapid City and we’ll probably have a pretty normal week. And you don’t have to look too far to find folks who are having a worse time with the weather.

Copyright © 2014 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.

Folks who know me know that I tend to rant from time to time, so here is a rant to begin the morning:

Yesterday we drove home from Red Lodge, Montana. There were about 3 inches of new snow in Red Lodge and it was snowing as we left. Visibility was reduced due to falling and blowing snow for the first 60 or so miles of our trip. At Billings, there were a couple of inches of new snow. It kept snowing as we drove down through Hardin, past the Little Bighorn Battlefield site and across the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations. The snow had stopped by the time we stopped for lunch at Broadus. After lunch, we continued across the northwestern corner of Wyoming and into Belle Fourche. There was perhaps a half inch of snow as we got to Spearfish, where we encountered our first dangerously slippery roads of the trip. It was a slow drive from Spearfish to Rapid City, where the streets were slick and slushy. The warmest weather we encountered in the day was about 12 degrees F.

That’s right. It was way too cold for slush on the road. The slippery, dangerous conditions were caused by the salt that the highway department put on the roads.

After having driven several hundred miles on snow packed and sanded roads, it was very difficult for me to understand why South Dakotans choose to make their roads so hard to drive by comparison.

If I had my way, they would require every South Dakota Road engineer to make a driving trip across Montana once every winter. They really ought to know how hard they make it to drive.

It wasn’t hard to notice that while driving in Montana, we didn’t need to use windshield washer fluid to wash the snow off of our windshield. We also noticed that the cars were clean and free from salt on the exterior. Our salty South Dakota car really stood out in a Montana parking lot or at a gas station.

I have heard that the reason that so much salt is used in South Dakota is that it costs less to use than sand. While that seems incredible to me, I’m pretty sure they are not factoring in the salt damage to all of the cars. And I know from reading the newspaper that the city has to spend funds defending itself form lawsuits over trees killed by the salt that is applied to the roads. One wonders how much less expensive it really is. All too often spending the least amount of money today can lead to spending more over a period of several years. It is only by not counting the total costs that the illusion of cost savings appears.

End of rant. Sorry for those who have heard it all before.

Here is what is more interesting than the above rant.

Despite my complaints, we were able to have a wonderful trip in the middle of the winter and do so safely. We drove a little over 900 miles, most of it on US highways (not Interstate) starting out in -13 weather and driving when it was as cold as -18. Overnight temperatures the first night were in the -25 range. Our car started easily and dependably without having to be plugged in. Our travel was comfortable. Even though we thought that we would never need heated seats, they are a wonderful luxury in a cold car on a below-zero day.

The freedom of travel that we have enjoyed during our adult lives is known to only a small portion of the world’s citizens and was largely unknown to our grandparents’ generation. There are plenty of folks who would find the kind of travel that we just did to be an impossible challenge. And the truth is that we have multiple vehicles that could make such a trip safely.

My complaints about the little things fade in the face of the tremendous luxury of travel that we experience.

The trip was to attend the opening of an art show featuring work by Susan’s sister. She is an accomplished artist who does a lot of batik and has an incredible eye and technique for the ways of dying cloth in beautiful patterns. There were also acrylic paintings that she had done. The gallery also had a small area where artwork by her son was displayed. It was a wonderful event and Susan was able to be with her sisters for the day on Friday and celebrate her birthday over breakfast yesterday morning.

All that and we are home for church today. As I say, not bad!

When we first began our ministry in a small town in North Dakota, I used to say that we had to leave town to get a day off. That is a little less true here in Rapid City, where our home is 10 miles from the church and in another 10 miles I can be out on the lake when temperatures are higher or hiking, and cross country skiing when the weather conditions are different. It is really quite possible to get a day off here without leaving town. But I’m not very disciplined about taking my day off. There are all sorts of work-related items that are easy to do and not dependent upon what day of the week they occur. So I will do a few work-related tasks on my day off. Maintaining a rigid boundary between work and home isn’t always desirable. And there are good reasons to work on a day off. The schedule of members of a grieving family when arranging a funeral is far more important than which day I take off each week. The opportunity to visit someone who is in the hospital or who is facing a life-changing event doesn’t always present itself with respect for pre-arranged days off.

So it is good, from time to time, to plan for a little break. Our trip this week was just that. A treat in the middle of a busy season in the life of the church. We visited friends and family and renewed our spirits for the challenges that lie ahead.

Life is good and we are indeed fortunate. Thanks be to God!

Copyright © 2014 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 experience in this life has been mostly with places with similar climates. I think that it is fair to call the part of the world where I live temperate, but I’ve always lived where there is a bit of winter. I like the snow and over the years I’ve had some great times with winter sports and activities. But nearly two decades in the hills have dulled my memory of what it is like in the high country. In the hills we get snow and then it melts off. We had a big blizzard in October this year. But the snow was gone a week later. Even in the winter when we get colder temperatures, the snow doesn’t seem to linger for months.

In the high country, however, that first layer of snow is still there, under a lot of other layers, when spring rolls around. The people who live in the high country get used to the snow. They know how to drive on snow, how to walk on snow and how to go on with their lives. They equipment to move the snow around so that they can go on with their lives.

We are in Red Lodge, Montana, preparing to head back home today. We’ll have a bit of driving in the snow. Red Lodge is supposed to get 3 to 5 inches today and other places along the way have forecasts of snow flurries and showers during the day. The roads were all dry when we drove up here, so we aren’t expecting much trouble getting home. However, when you travel in this country in the winter, you always have to have a “plan B” so we’ve got things covered at home if we encounter a delay.

When we were growing up we lived in an area that was on the edge of different weather systems. We could drive a few miles up the valley and be in the high country. The road was plowed 16 miles from town and later another 6 or 8 more, but there were plenty of summer cabins that could be reached only by snowmobile once the winter really set in. Most of the cabins were winterized, with the water shut off, and sat dormant until the spring thaws, but there were a few hardy souls who would venture up to a cabin for a winter weekend.

Our shop experimented with snow machines in the early days before there were many machines that were commercially available. Our first machine looked like a crawler tractor and was very heavy by today’s standards. It was steered like a crawler with two levers, one controlling each side of the machine. With one lever all the way forward and the other all the way back, it would spin around in a small space. But the machine was slow. That wasn’t much of a problem because we didn’t have to go very far with it. It was used a few years to do snow depth checks at various locations up the road. They were all places where one could drive with a jeep in the summer. After that we had a series of other snow machines and so we sort of watched the development of modern snowmobiles as each winter brought an improvement on last year’s machines. The strange thing about the newer snow machines is that they were fast. We found ourselves going 45 miles per hour on roads that were 25 to 25 mph in the summer with a car. I grew up, went off to college and other than an occasional winter break visit, I wasn’t part of the regular trips up into the high country to check the snow depths.

I did develop a love of skiing and so I’ve spent plenty of time in places where the snow gets deep. Red Lodge mountain, easily visible from the town, is a good hill with plenty of powder most years. Today’s snow should make skiing up there ideal. Folks who can take tomorrow off should be in for a treat after a week with temperatures ranging in the -30 range. Skiing isn’t much fun when it is below zero and the places that cater to skiers notice the drop in business when the weather gets cold.

I had forgotten many of the dynamics of life in snow country. I forgot how on street parking soon disappears when there is heavy snow. The plows will make passes through the city streets from time to time and the snow piled up along the edges keeps getting deeper and deeper. People will shovel or have a skid steer clear out places in front of their houses for themselves to park, but providing extra parking for others is a lot of work, so they don’t overdo it. You have to do a bit of planning about parking.

Snow may be light and fluffy when it is falling, but the stuff at the bottom of the pile is hard and compacted. There are plenty of places where we were walking yesterday that were a foot or more above the level of the ground when the snow is all gone. The snow gets as hard as rock on the streets where it is compacted by all of the traffic. And the snow in the big piles at the intersections and edges of parking lots is very hard. You’ll do serious damage to a car if you run into one of those piles.

The folks who live here, of course, are used to all of that. It is normal for them and they don’t get too anxious about that until March or April when they are ready for spring and able to endure the short season of mud on the way to the glories of summer.

It is a fun place to visit. I haven’t had to shovel or lift any snow since I arrived. But I know that it is a hard place to live. There is plenty of shoveling that needs to be done and some of the locals aren’t too excited about another 5 inches to move after today.

I’ll try to remember them when I’m shoveling my own driveway during the rest of the winter. We really do have it easy and are lucky to live in a place where the weather helps with the chores.

Copyright © 2014 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.

February is a month of birthdays in our family. I have a nephew whose birthday is today. My wife’s birthday is tomorrow. Our grandson’s birthday is Sunday. And there are other birthdays this month. It is fun the way that birthdays sometimes cluster in groups and in our family that means that we sometimes can get together to celebrate more than one occasion.

February is also the birthday of Facebook. I don’t know the exact day that the social media network first went online, but it was started in February of 2004, which means that it is 10 years old this month. It started in a Harvard University dorm room and was initially open only to Harvard students, but soon expanded to other colleges in the Boston area and then expanded to other universities, corporations and within a couple of years it was available to everyone over 13 with a valid email address. Of course, it was soon evident that a few who were under 13 simply lied about their age to log on. The Internet is still filled with people who create identities that are distinct and different from reality. It is a place to pretend for some people and knowing who is pretending and who is not is a bit of a challenge. When I first became involved with Facebook, I noted several people I knew who were in their teens appeared on Facebook in their 20’s. Some of them reported relationships on Facebook that didn’t seem to exist in their life outside of the social media. Whether you call it play acting or having fun or lying the bottom line is that you can’t trust Facebook to be telling the whole story.

As the phenomenon spread, making its founders rich beyond their wildest imaginations, I began to receive “friend” requests from people I had never met. It was obvious that some people were trying to collect incredibly large numbers of Facebook friends for whatever reasons I do not know. I soon found the site to require more time than I was willing to give it. I make a few automated posts to the site and allow it to remind me of friends’ birthdays. I also use the site to read about some of my relatives who are less than disciplined about keeping in touch with family. But I don’t spend much time on the site. I try to make sure that people know that it isn’t a good way to get a message to me because I don’t give it much of my time.

We know, however, that there are some people who are almost constantly on the site. We keep a mental list of the best ways to contact the youth in our youth group. Some respond to text messages but don’t ever check their voice mail. The best way to get a message to some of them is to post it on Facebook. We try to use whatever media works for the individual.

So it was interesting for me to read the summary of a study by psychologists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor about the relationship between life satisfaction and the amount of time spend on Facebook. The researchers teemed with scientists at a University in Belgium checking to see how lonely people felt, how they felt about life in general and the like. They also checked on Facebook use. The study found a correlation. Basically a low sense of well-being correlated with a lot of Facebook use. “The more people used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.” Facebook is suppose to increase a sense of connection and enhance well-being, but researchers have some evidence that the opposite may be happening.

I think it has something to do with the difference between the illusion and the reality. Not only does Facebook allow users to assume fictional identities, it forms fictional communities. While a large number of Facebook friends might mean that there are many messages posted on one’s wall. The high activity doesn’t correspond with real human interaction. The posts of some stranger’s vacation photos probably does nothing to make one feel rested. The activities of people who are mostly strangers probably doesn’t hold much interest for the average user.

In the early 1960’s researchers began to observe a similar phenomenon with television. People who watched a lot of television seemed to be less joyful than those who didn’t watch as much. Poet and essayist T S Eliot, then nearing the end of his life, wrote, “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

His words proved prophetic as the 20th century gave way to the 21st and technology provided more and more ways for people to have the illusion of connection and networking while remaining isolated.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I invest a lot of energy in technologically-assisted communication. I maintain multiple web sites. I blog every day. I love to Skype with my grandson. I pull out my phone to look up words and send text messages to check on friends. I’m all in favor of the use of devices in ways that help to enhance relationships.

But I am no fan of relationships that exist only in cyberspace. I have no energy to pursue connections with people that I have never met face to face and that I am unlikely to ever get to know in other contexts. This doesn’t mean that those people are somehow less important than others. It just means that I only have a limited amount of energy and I prefer to invest it in people that I can get to know face to face.
So happy birthday Facebook. Congratulations for your success to its founders. But it isn’t one of the big occasions in my life. I far prefer to celebrate the birthdays of people whose eyes I can gaze into and whose conversation captures my attention.

And if I haven’t responded to your friend request, I mean no offense. I just don’t spend much time on Facebook. On the other hand I have a rich and deeply satisfying life and I rarely feel lonely.

Copyright © 2014 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 think that I overreacted to the weather in yesterday’s blog. Yes, we’ve had some cold and there has been some snow, but it really isn’t that bad. I knew it not long after I finished the blog yesterday as I was in my driveway shoveling show. The sunrise was filled with pinks and purples and even a powder blue. These are the sunrise colors of winter and they are quite different than summer colors. It was beautiful. The fresh snow flocking the pine trees began to sparkle and glisten and the day was beautiful as long as you kept bundled up or were looking out from inside a warm vehicle or building.

The clear skies meant that it got even colder over night. The thermometer here is somewhere between -11 and -13. But it is dead calm. So far there is no wind to make it any worse. It is a good day for some of the youth in our community to learn about dressing appropriately for the weather. There is something in the youth fashion scene that tempts kids to run from houses to cars and then into heated buildings with far too few layers. Our cars are, for the most part, reliable, but venturing out without proper clothing and precautions is risky.

I don’t worry much about fashion when it gets cold. My heavy parka is long enough that I can sit on it and it has a good hood that seals tightly around my face. It is rugged and looks appropriate for feeding the cattle or doing chores. We’ve got no cows to feed, but the parka has been worn for lots of firewood hauling and shows some signs of having been worked hard. But it is warm and I’m all into warm in this weather.

Mind you, we’ve got it lucky. The hills give us some protection. The arctic blast is covering the upper midwest, but our neighbors off to the west have it colder. It’s -29 at my home town of Big Timber, Montana this morning. Add in the 10 mph wind and the official wind chill is -52. They’re looking forward to a high that gets up to or maybe even a degree above zero today and a relatively warm -4 overnight tonight.

That wind can get to you. It is only about -4 on the thermometer in Williston, ND this morning, but the wind is steady at about 15 mph. That gives a wind chill of -22, which is nothing to mess with. Williston is a place there there are a lot of jobs that are out of doors. In addition to those working on the rigs, the truckers have to deal with the cold. Diesel turns to a gooey gel without the proper additives. It won’t go through filters and injectors and engines don’t run. The grease in differentials and transfer cases is thick after a rig has been sitting outside. And thing break in the cold. But the demand for oil doesn’t pay attention to the weather. Each oil well takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 semi truck visits before it starts producing. That’s a lot of trucks.

And they are short of housing in Williston. That means that there are folks trying to keep from freezing in recreational vehicles without proper skirting and insulation. There are some campers that are going through more than 20# or propane every day keeping their residents from freezing.

And having a RV is better than sleeping in your car. There are folks sleeping in their cars in the Williston area. Hopefully they have plenty of warm clothes and blankets and sleeping bags and will survive to tell stories to their grandchildren.

North Dakota winters are good at giving stories to tell. We lived in North Dakota for only 7 years, but I won’t run out of North Dakota stories in this lifetime.

But I am not a poet, so I am condemned to using way too many words to talk about life in the place where I do live. When I get to telling stories the words pile up even deeper: “How old are you? Seven, you say? Why when I was your age I was already 9 years old!” Stories lend themselves to a bit of exaggeration. When I lived in North Dakota it got so cold that we took the battery out of the car and brought it inside so it would be warm enough to start the car in the morning. Oh wait! That last one isn’t an exaggeration. We did do that.

I’ve been blessed with many exceptional teachers in my life. One of those exceptional teachers was Ross Snyder. He was already in his 70’s and well known as a writer and teacher before I met him. He and learned a few life lessons and one of those lessons was that we seem to always want to use too many words. In most cases fewer words can be more articulate than more words. I remember when I would turn in an assignment and get it back with the comment, “It’s pretty good. Now cut out half of the words and keep the meaning.” It’s not an easy task. And I never got good at it.

So I won’t attempt to describe the beauty of yesterday. I’ll just remind you and myself that there is beauty in every day.

I think of the generations of people who lived in tipis on the prairie and when it got good and cold limited their outdoor activities. They huddled around small fires, sometimes pounding the cloth of the inner tent so that the ice would break free from the canvas and fall to the ground. They could run short of food in the winter and even when there was plenty of food, there wasn’t much variety.

The settlers huddled in their sod homes, small, tight and nearly buried in snow. Those shelters weren’t much for windows.

The plains used to be a land of isolation and separation. These days we check the interntet, listen to the radio and have our cell phones constantly with us so that we can talk without any notice to people.

Yesterday I got a call from Antigua. It turns out it was a wrong number. Still it warms me to look at the list of “recents” in my cell phone list.

Hang ini there. It’s bound to warm up one of these days. In the meantime, dress warmly when you head outdoors.

Copyright © 2014 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.

Christina Rossetti might have had reason to be depressed. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti was a political exile.His poems were supposed to be patriotic and display his love for his native Sicily. His patron was Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, but in 1821 the Italian king revoked the constitution and those who supported that constitution were forced into exile. He fled to England where he met, wooed and wedded the sister of Lord Byron’s physician, John William Polidori. His sister Frances, now wife of Rossetti, was mother of two boys and two girls. Christian was the youngest, and so she was eyewitness to the decline of her father and the deterioration of the family’s means. Her father contracted persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis and his eye site became too weak for him to continue as a writer and a teacher. His physical ailments were followed by severe financial difficulties for the family and bouts of depression.

As she reached adulthood, there were three suitors. She was engaged to the painter James Collinson, but the engagement was broken off when he reverted to Catholicism. Charles Cayley proposed, but she declined. The painter John Brett also proposed marriage, but she turned him down as well. She remained single.

Her life hadn’t been all that wonderful, all things considered. She did have the benefit of an education. As far as we know her childhood was mostly happy. Her mother was her primary teacher and had her study the classics, religion, fairy tales and novels. They lived near Madam Tussauds, the London Zoo and Regent’s Park.

But her poetry has a definite dark side. She is probably most famous for the long poem, “Goblin Market,” in which a pair of sisters learn the hard way about the dangers of eating the goblin’s fruits. The poem is set at the beginning of winter and the sister who does eat the fruit suffers from disease and depression. This is a poem that I would not recommend reading to your children.

Her most famous poem, however, is the one that has been in my mind the past few days as the temperatures hover on the negative side of zero, the snow falls, and the skies are a persistent gray.

You probably know the poem as a Christmas Carol. It was set to music by Gustav Holst. But there is another musical setting, by Harold Edwin Darke which is more famous. The Darke setting is frequently one of the carols for the service of nine lessons and carols held each year at King’s College Choir. Darke was conductor of that choir during World War II. In those days, it made sense to have a carol with these words:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

You have to get to the second stanza of the poem to tell that it is a Christmas carol:

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Most hymnals include only four of the stanzas of the poem, omitting the middle one:

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

The fourth stanza paints a simple and beautiful picture of the mother Mary:

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air -
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

The final stanza is an invitation, appropriate for the season of Epiphany:

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can, I give Him -
Give my heart.

I don’t want to be critical of the hymn settings of the poem, but what works as a Christmas carol, works even better, in my opinion as a dark and brooding poem. The occasion of Christmas seems to call for celebration and loud hymns of praise. The poem, however, reminds us that the season of Christ’s birth is also a season ini which there is plenty of darkness,, grief, regret, and sorrow. Life isn’t just good times and good feelings. There is more. And the poet can speak to the deeper levels of life’s realities in ways that we prose writers fail to imitate.

So it seems as if we might be in a bleak midwinter. The snow is not clean alongside the roadways. It is dirty and gray and dingy and the cold weather is getting a bit old. The gray skies make us long for our usual sunshine and the fog is at berst a challenge.

Indeed we find ourselves in the bleak midwinter. We know the bite of the frosty winds, the iron hardness of the ice and the build up of snow on snow. She repeat it to make sure that we understand that there is plenty: snow on snow.

Christina Rossetti suffered from Graves Disease and later from breast cancer. Though the tumor was removed, the cancer recurred. She died on December 29, 1894, in the bleak midwinter. She wrote a poem for the occasion:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant you no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree;
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

She is not forgotten. The place where she died, in Torrington Square, is marked with a stone tablet and there is also a marker in Highgate Cemetery. J.K. Rowling named her latest novel with a line from Rossetti’s poem, “A Dirge:” The Cuckoo’s Calling.”

If you want a more traditional Christmas Carol, Rossetti also wrote “Love Came down at Christmas.” The final stanza of that poem is a more fitting memorial than “In the Bleak Midwinter:”

Love shall be our token,
Love shall be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

The bleak midwinter is only one of the seasons of our life. It too will pass. Love, however is forever.

Copyright © 2014 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 was a time, not too long ago, when I could really get worked up about the Winter Olympics. In 1988, the Winter games were held in Calgary and I had been planning for several years to go and witness the olympics first hand. We had a lead on a place to stay with a relative and we studied the various event tickets carefully because we knew that money would be tight. We made a plan to take our children with us and my mother as well so that we could have some child care during some of the events. I wanted to watch skiing, but knew that the outdoor crowd scene wouldn’t be the best place for the children. Tickets were expensive for us so we couldn’t do everything that we wanted, but we did want to see some of the stadium events, especially figure skating, so planned to be a part of the crowd for some preliminary rounds.

Then we received a letter informing us that we had gotten caught up in an elaborate ticket scam and our ticket orders had not been placed. Fortunately for us, the scam was discovered and our check was seized before it was banked, so we weren’t out any money. However, there were few tickets left and we might be able to get to see a couple of outdoor events, but not much. We knew that we would see more by staying home and watching the games on television.

Still, those games were fun to watch. Being in the same time zone as the Olympics means that you are watching in real time and that is a treat.

I still enjoy winter sports, but my enthusiasm has faded considerably. The next time the Winter Olympics were in our time zone was 2002 when they were hosted in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake is a reasonable drive from Rapid City it might have been possible for us to attend, but we never seriously considered making an appearance. I got turned off by all of the advertising and hype and the controversy that occurred before the games. I really don’t remember the details of the controversy, but several members of the International Olympic Committee resigned. The games were so commerce. It wasn’t just that the telecasts were frequently interrupted by commercials. We expected that. But the venues were covered with advertisements and the whole thing seemed to be more about selling products than about pure athletic competition.

What I do remember about 2002 was that the opening ceremonies were on my wife’s birthday. After the games I bought a recording of the music that John Williams composed for the event. It is not bad to have a theme song presented by an orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in honor of the day of your birth. I call the song Susan’s birthday theme song.

This year, I’m barely paying attention.

For the athletes who are attending, it must be an incredibly exciting time. The anticipation of the opening ceremonies must be exciting. Being in Sochi might be an incredible experience with guests from all over the world, hundreds of languages being spoken, and a spirit of hope and competition all wrapped up in warm winter clothing.

4 years ago, when the games were held in Vancouver, we were only one time zone away and many of the big things like opening events were available in real time just an hour later. I watched a little bit of the games.

Watching the games has changed a great deal over the years. It used to be that there would be one US channel that covered the games and most of the coverage was live so which events you got to see depended upon what was going on during the time of day that you could watch. Of course they taped and delayed big events like the opening ceremonies and the hockey finals and we got used to watching events with highlights from the preliminary rounds between the actual runs. There was a lot of production in what we were able to see.

Now the network has a whole bunch of different channels and is broadcasting different things at the same time. We don’t have cable, so we’ll get only on stream of programming on the TV. NBC is taping the opening ceremonies and will air them at 7:30 p.m. Easter Time, which is 5:30 in the afternoon here. Canadian Broadcasting is starting their coverage at 10:30 am Eastern, 8:30 am Mountain time. So I could catch the opening ceremonies on the radio before they are broadcast anywhere in the US. Sochi is 11 hours ahead of Rapid City, so it is possible to be up at 5 am to listen to something that is going on at 4 pm there, but it is unlikely that there are too many fans who are so dedicated that they want to listen in real time. I’ve heard that NBC plans to delay most of their programming, so you can find out results before watching the television program. For those who insist on knowing what is going on in real time, the BBC always broadcasts in real time, so you can follow the games on BBC radio online.

But I am just not as excited. I don’t know the names of many of the athletes. I haven’t been following the qualifying events. I will be traveling on Friday and plan to spend the evening with family and the opening of my sister-in-law’s art show, so probably won’t even watch the opening ceremonies at all. I’ll probably listen to a podcast of the events if for no other reason than to see what music they are creating for the event.

I know it is a big deal for the world to get together for peaceful competition. I know that the eyes of the world are focused on the games. I know that it is a time to be paying attention. But the energy and enthusiasm I once felt are just not present this year.

Maybe I can get up more enthusiasm for the rowing and paddling events in Rio in 2016.

Copyright © 2014 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 is something in our imaginations that seems to be attracted to thinking about the big sins. When Jesus prays from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing,” our minds immediately go to the executioners who nailed him to the cross or at least to the officials who handed down the death decree. It seems that it is as likely that Jesus was praying for his disciples who fled the scene fearing for their own lives. Maybe he is praying for forgiveness for the clumsiness of the soldiers who taunted him or the ineffectual weeping of some who gathered at the foot of the cross.

It isn’t just Jesus on the cross. When someone mentions sin our minds seem to quickly go to all kinds of big things like murder and theft and incest and unfaithfulness. These are sins, to be sure, but they aren’t the only ways that we hurt one another and fail to live up to the best that is in us.

Most of our sins are defined by the things we do not do rather than the things that we do. We fail to listen carefully or fail to do a small act of kindness that would have benefitted another.

We are, after all, human. And human mistakes and failings mark all human institutions. The church is not immune from the kinds of things that injure. Over the years I have heard many horror stories about how people were mistreated and abused in the church. Although there are the horror stories of sexual abuse and misconduct by church officials, there are far more stories of people whose feelings were hurt by smaller acts of insensitivity. I know too many people who have put their hearts and time and efforts into their church and then later felt pushed out of their churches by leaders who took the church in a different direction.

There are plenty of sad stories of people and their relationships to organizations and the church is no more often guilty than other organizations, but it is sad to know that we often fail to liver up to our ideals.

The Gospels are full of stories of Jesus disciples - the ones closest to him - not fully understanding him and the meanings he seeks to communicate. There are plenty of times when they simply don’t get it. It is true of contemporary disciples as well. People live their lives immersed in the church and dedicated to Jesus Christ and still don’t get it when it comes to the basic teachings about loving one another, welcoming outsiders and serving those in need.

This failure to live out our faith is often labeled as hypocrisy by critics of the church. They are accurate in that much of their assessment. There is plenty of hypocrisy in the church, though it is not the only place where you will encounter human inconsistency and the gap between ideals and reality.

I’m not very interested in countering the criticism of outsiders, but I do care about learning to treat others better. When I hear harsh words flying in the church, or listen to someone unfairly criticizing another, I am bothered by my ineffectiveness as a teacher of the Gospel. I ought to find the words to gently intervene and change the course of the discussion. Sometimes I can deflect criticism and sometimes I defend one who is being picked on. But too often I am silent or inarticulate in the face of less-than-Christian behavior

One of the most common sins of those of us who live our lives in faith is a kind of selfishness. We forget what we are doing and try to claim recognition or honor or even control for ourselves.

It is not about me.

But too often I forget that simple truth.

Worship is about offering praise and thanks to God and expanding the welcome so that more people can participate in this spiritually renewing and life-giving activity. It is not about whose name is printed in the worship bulletin in what order. It is not about who gets credit for an idea. It is not about showcasing my talents. It is about God. But we forget. This is especially true when our feelings get hurt.

A funeral is about coming together to offer thanksgiving to God for a life well lived, about comforting one another in our common loss, and about opening our lives to the presence of the Holy Spirit that can move us from despair to praise. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes we think it is about who is in charge or who controls the seating chart or who gets to sing the solo.

Weddings are about coming together before God in the presence of the gathered community to make sacred promises and begin a life-long covenant. But too often we are distracted by dresses and attendants and decorations and the menu at the reception and forget to focus our attention where it belongs.

Mission is about serving others, not about who is in charge.

I could go on and on with other stories of how we who claim a life of faith and live with intentionality about following Jesus fail to live up to the promise of our faith.

Henry Nouwen reminds us that we are “wounded healers.” It is not the fact that we have our act together that makes us ministers, but rather that we are deeply aware that we cannot do this by ourselves. We need to rely upon the grace and assistance of God to live the lives to which we are called.

And so we say “I’m sorry” again and again. We pick up the pieces and move forward as best as we are able. There is much that we have yet to learn.

And when I picture Jesus in a moment of deep pain and anguish crying out to God for forgiveness, I understand that his prayer is equally prayed for me. I, too, do not know what I am doing and am in need of forgiveness.

Copyright © 2014 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 is going to be a busy day in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways. In Costa Rica, voters head to the polls to elect a new president and legislative assembly. There is a host of candidates running for president and a runoff election is likely.The candidates have all been quick to declare their faith - all are members of the Roman Catholic Church - and how faith is informing their social policies. Perhaps it is fitting the election day is also the Feast of the Presentation in liturgical churches. The fest of the presentation doesn’t always land on a Sunday, but this year the timing works out. It is the time of remembering when the infant Jesus was taken to the temple to be presented as was the custom in his time. There he and his parents met Simeon and Anna, two elders who spent most of their time in the temple waiting for particularly significant moments. Luke’s gospel reports that both recognized the child as the messiah and Simeon’s song, recorded in the gospel is a declaration that the elder can now die ion peace because he has witnessed the fulfillment of the prophecies and the faithfulness of God. We read the Song of Simeon at nearly every funeral that we perform.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the main focus of the day will not be the Eucharist services celebrating the feast of the presentation for most of the candidates in the Costa Rican election. In a country with a state church, faith is often assumed more than it is acted upon. The church is one among many state institutions. Buildings are generally well-maintained with taxpayer support, but often empty from the apathy of the people.

Not that church will be the event of the day here in the United States. There is something about a football game that seems to be a bit of a distraction for many folks. And when we say football here in this country we mean a different game than the one that holds that name in most of the rest of the world. I have heard it said that “if baseball is America’s pastime, then football is its passion.” With the clustering of college games around national holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years and the huge spectacle of the Super Bowl, the sport certainly carries a lot of symbolic baggage along with a hierarchical and highly gendered game. Like many sports it has vaguely militaristic concepts - the battle between two sides, strategies and officers directing the play. In many ways, however, the game has evolved less than the military, which is largely a gender-integrated profession these days. Don’t elect that for football any time soon.
Football trails other sports in terms of the number of high school and college students who play the sport, but the sport often is the largest source of income for collegiate sports programs. The game is part of a huge marketing and entertainment structure. It is the fans that bring the money to the sport. There are high school games that draw crowds of 100,000 fans and being associated with the games is critical to marketing many items. The association of Budweiser beer and Doritos chips with the Super Bowl haven’t hurt their sales one bit.

I’m sure that there are plenty of social scientists who will study the game, the advertisements and their impact on our society. It is clearly a cultural phenomenon in our country. Visitors from other countries can easily see that marker of our national identity.

My attention won’t be primarily focused on the game, even though it is so much a part of our culture it would be foolish of me not to know who is playing and to pay attention to the outcome. I probably need to know something of the advertisements that will be as much a topic of conversation in the week to come as the game itself. Fortunately it is easy to watch the advertisements without watching the game. They’ve been available on the Internet for a couple of weeks now.

It would be a huge mistake, however, to say that my day isn’t influenced by the sport. This afternoon I’ll be attending the viewing and family service for a man who we knew as “coach.” And I’ll spend part of the evening putting the finishing touches on his funeral service that will be tomorrow morning. It isn’t possible to talk about his life without thinking of him both as a coach and as a fan. His turf and territory wasn’t professional sports, but he has as firm a grasp on the dynamics and role of sports in American education as anyone I’ve ever met. Being illiterate about the sport wouldn’t serve him or his family at all as they make their way through this journey of grief. Telling his story requires knowing some of the teams for which he cared.

If the game is our passion, it cannot be ignored at the most important moments of our lives.

Folks in our congregation may notice that another member of the congregation is away on a trip to Arizona this week. For years this other member was the lay reader on Super Bowl Sunday every year and together we compile little tongue-in-cheek commentaries on the game. No such commentary has been prepared for our worship this morning. There are some things that are so dependent upon a particular person that an imitation simply doesn’t work.

You can be a fan of the sport or not, but to ignore its impact on our lives is to fail to understand the culture in which we live and minister.

Down in Costa Rica, there are plenty of folks who will be paying as much attention to the question of whether or not Peyton Manning can dominate the Seahawk’s defense to win his second Super Bowl. It might even be as big a question as to whether or not ex-San Jose mayor Johnny Araya can hold off the challengers in the presidential election.

They’re watching the game all over the world. Even if soccer is their big sport, they are intrigued about how football affects our culture.

Copyright © 2014 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 sure that the trivia buffs among my readers, should there be any trivia buffs among my readers, know that the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars has to do with leap year. But for those of you who don’t remember this difference. The Julian calendar assumes that a year is 365.25 days long and therefore there needs to be a leap year every four years. That basically works, except that it is off by 11 minutes. The actual earth year is 364.2425 days. So, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII (not to be confused with Pope Gregory I, the guy they named the chant after) issued a Papal Bull changing the calendar so that there would be no leap year in centurial years (years that can be decided by 100). The problem was that people had been using the Julian calendar for a long time at that point, so that the vernal equinox had slipped backwards in the calendar to March 11. So not only did they change the leap years, which most people wouldn’t have noticed, but they also corrected the slip from all of those years by leaping forward, adding 10 calendar days to make the vernal equinox March 21. They had been adding that extra day every century for ten centuries and so had to skip 10 days to make up for the difference.

It must have been confusing that year.

But, of course it gets better. By the time Gregory XIII came around, the Great Schism was old news and the split between the Eastern and Western communions was well entrenched so the folks in the Eastern Church had no intention of following papal bulls issued from Rome. So large areas of the Christian world, most notably Russia and the Ottoman Empire, didn’t go along with the calendar changes until after the 1st World War ion 1918. Some countries stayed on the Julian calendar until 1924. The Eastern Orthodox church, of course, has not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar, which means that most years Orthodox churches celebrate Easter later than the celebration in Western churches.

OK, it really isn’t quite that simple.

The Eastern churches didn’t all adopt the Julian calendar and some adopted local or regional calendars, so they haven’t always celebrated Easter on the same day within the Eastern Church. AND, because if they made no calendar adjustments, Easter would wander around the year, as is the case with purely lunar calendars, the Orthodox Church periodically adjusts the date of the beginning of Lent to line things up again.

Of course the Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect, either for two reasons. It is accurate only to the day, not to the second and so in order for things to work out scientists who are sticklers for measuring the length of a year have to periodically adjust the calendar by adding leap seconds. We usually don’t notice those changes. And, of course the earth is gradually slowing in its rate of revolutions which means that sometime in the next billion years or so we are going to have to decrease the number of leap years and some day way out in the future the need for leap years at all will disappear.

Which isn’t the point of this blog in the first point. I just wanted to note that the Gregorian and Julian calendars happen to line up this year so that Lent and Easter are celebrated on the same days in both the Eastern and Western churches. Actually, that isn’t a very rare occurrence. It happened in 2010 and 2011 and will happen again in 2017 then take a break until 2025. In a little over two thirds of the years the Eastern churches celebrate Easter a week after the Western churches.

That means that good Greek Orthodox grandmothers in Chicago can take advantage of the after Easter sales to purchase Easter candies for their grandchildren at bargain prices most years.

The Great Schism, of course wasn’t an argument about the calendar. The calendar was just one of the practical results of the aftermath of the split in the church. I guess that I should clarify that when I refer to the Great Schism, I am referring the the 1054 split between the Eastern and Western churches, not the split within the Roman church that lasted from 1378 to 1417. Both of those splits had to do with questions of authority and who is in charge of the church an argument at which we are still quite practiced to this day, having found several other reasons to divide and split from other Christians.

At the time of the Great Schism it wasn’t just the role of the Roman pope, but also the role of the church at Constantinople, decisions about which language should be dominant. The New Testament was, after all, written in Greek. The use of Latin was viewed as a deviation from the original and argument that was repeated in different ways when individuals and congregations began to read the Bible in modern languages. There also was a convoluted argument about the source of the Holy Spirit, which I have never gotten straightened out, a disagreement about the use of leavened bread for the Eucharist (as opposed ot unleavened bread). At any rate, the arguments grew more and more heated, the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople. That was followed by the papal legate traveling to Constantinople, but it might not have really been the papal legate because the cardinals were fighting over the legates. At any rate he didn’t get what he wanted which was help from the Byzantine Emperor for help in opposing the Norman conquest of southern Italy. And bingo! Two churches. The split never healed.

And you can read the history of the split and it still doesn’t make that much sense. Which is true of the other splits that have occurred in the church since. It keeps happening. There was a somewhat dramatic split in a local Baptist congregation recently in our town. The parties to the split are passionate about their reasons and the rest of us don’t quite understand.

So arguing about the calendar seems mild in comparison to some of the other arguments we have. But I like the way things turn out this year. Let’s all celebrate the resurrection on the same day. From time to time we need to set aside our differences and celebrate the things we have in common.

Copyright © 2014 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.