Rev. Ted Huffman

Gearing up for the game

It’s probably no surprise to people who know me that I’m not a great sports fan. I pay attention to the football playoffs and the Superbowl because it is important to people that I care about. I want to be able to talk with some intelligence to the people I know about the things that matter to them. But my life doesn’t revolve around the game and I don’t really have a favorite team. Rapid City is a big town for Broncos fans. We don’t have our own professional football team. There is no NFL team in our state, so local loyalties drift toward the teams who are closest and Denver is the closest to Rapid City. I’m sure that team loyalties are more complex than distance and I have a good friend who has vanity license plates declaring his loyalty to another, more distant team.

That said, I’ve commented on the Superbowl in blogs in previous years - mostly about the cost of advertisements and the amount of money that gets spent on the hype that surrounds the big game. I’ve also promoted the annual Souper Bowl of Caring food drive in which youth from our church have joined with youth from congregations across the country to raise money and non perishable food items to feed hungry people at local shelters, through local food banks and other agencies.

For several years I wrote scripts for a member of our conjugation who like to do pseudo-theological reflections on the big game. Some teams, like Bears and Lions and Giants have names that are easy to find in the bible. Saints, of course, make it easy. Others, like Buccaneers and 49ers, present a larger challenge.

This year might be a good year to make some kind of comments about the teams’ choice of colors. The Denver orange, which is sported in lots of places around town this weekend, isn’t one of the best colors for dressing up. On the other hand that neon green worn by the Seahawks doesn’t do much for me either. Then, again, I really don’t care much about colors and who wears what.

I’ll probably watch the game, or at least parts of it, so that I can have some knowledge in discussing it with others. But the truth is that I’ll be distracted. I’ll be thinking of a funeral on Monday for a guy that was a much bigger fan than I will ever be.

We often called Dick “coach” because he had coached middle school, high school and college teams, but also because he was the coach of our church’s softball team. The years that he organized and coached our group were winning years for our church in the local church softball league. And Dick got into arranging for shirts and equipment for the team as well as making every practice and game to cheer on the team. He wasn’t just a good coach, he also was the team’s biggest fan. He was a loyal fan for other teams as well. You never had to ask him about his favorite college team. His “Go Jacks” cap and the yard sign in his lawn displayed his loyalty.

But there was more to this saint of our church than sports. He was a teacher who was also an excellent student. He loved to talk about history and government - two subjects that he taught.

The true love of his life, however, was people. What he really loved about coaching were the members of his team. What he really loved about teaching was being with students. Our son took one class from him during his high school career, but Dick never failed to ask about him in every visit. It wasn’t some kind of act that he put on. It was genuine care and concern.

And today’s blog isn’t really about him. There will be more time to think and to tell those stories at another time and in another place. And it takes time to process the grief and loss and find the right words.

What is clear to me, however, is that there are things in life that are more important than which team wins the game. You might not know that from watching television or reading the news online. The game trumps lots of other things that are happening and show up in the news. Maybe we need a bit of distraction from stories about crime and politics and the grinding war in Afghanistan. Maybe we need a place where we feel we have a common footing instead of complaining about the one percent. Maybe we are drawn to a “battle” where no one gets killed.

The problem is that the Superbowl is not without its victims. As the youth remind us, the money that is spend on the game has great potential to do good in the world. If each fan donated just one dollar to help end hunger, the impact would be tremendous. But there are other victims.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the New York Police Department made arrests of members of a huge prostitution and drug ring in New York just days before the tourists all flock to the city. It seems they were gearing up for a bit more business than the ones that advertise during the big game. I don’t know much about the details, but one news story I read said that clients pay up to $10,000 for drugs and sex. There is human trafficking that keeps unwilling women trapped into a lifestyle from which they cannot escape associated with these illegal businesses. The tragedies of the lives of the victims are enough to make one weep.

Of course such illegal activities are not endorsed by the organizers of the game and there are plenty of fans who would not consider patronizing such businesses. But there is big money in the illegal side of the game as well as on the legal side and where there is money, there are people who will try to get their hands on some of it. There is a lot of money around the Superbowl.

The game won’t have my undivided attention over the weekend. There are simply some things that are more important.

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.

Blessing and merit

There are some ideas and values which are deeply imbedded in me. I probably learned them from my parents, but in all likelihood they were also consistent with the values of the community, so they were reinforced in the homes of my friends, at school, in clubs and throughout my life. One of those ideas is a kind of adapted meritocracy. The ancient political philosophy that arose in Greece basically was a belief that political power should go to people who have earned it through their merit. The strongest, fastes, best, hardest working people ought to have the most political power.

You see vestiges of meritocracy in contemporary politics. Politicians tout their records and demonstrate their strengths when running for office. Of course, in today’s world, it is difficult to separate the hype from the reality. It is hard to know the true character of a candidate simply because all candidates have undergone “makeovers” at the hands of political handlers. Their stories have been liberally sprinkled with fiction and soundtracks have been inserted into their highly-edited videos to portray them the way that will garner the most votes. At the same time, it is common wisdom in politics that negative advertising works, so there is no small amount of effort invested in trying to paint a negative picture of the opponent. It is hart to tell whether we come close to electing those with the most merit. What I do know is that there are plenty of really good people who never consider setting a foot into politics because the negative pressures of the game are deemed to be not worth the possible rewards.

Still, there are some thoughts deep inside of me that reward follows merit. “If you work hard, you will get ahead.” “The early bird gets the worm.” “Better service makes the sale.” “You’ve got to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” There are a hundred aphorisms inside of me that all reflect that inner sense that the way to get ahead is to earn it. I have lived my life with a sense that it is important for me to get up earlier, work harder, put in more hours and sacrifice more than my colleagues.

Life has, in part born out those convictions. I have one of the best jobs in the United Church of Christ. It may not command the highest salary, but I get to live and work in a most beautiful part of the world, among some of the best people one can imagine. This congregation really understands what it means to be a church, living out an extravagant welcome, serving others, reaching out to neighbors, forming community with genuine care and worshiping with enthusiasm and joy. I get to lead worship in a magnificent sanctuary with glorious music and work with a staff of loving, caring people. I have been blessed.

It doesn’t take much looking around, however, to have holes shot in that theory.

I have a conversation with a couple about the end of life decisions that they have made and about their fears about the dying process. The doctors have described the process to the best of their ability. The hospice nurses have been gentle and supporting, but there are still fears. It has been quite a while since the reality of death has entered their home. They have accepted that the illness is beyond treatment in the conventional sense. They know that time is being measured in days and weeks, not months and years. And it is hard. It is really hard. Despite great faith and a lifetime of living spiritual disciplines there is genuine doubt and fear. When the drugs get out of balance and it is hard to focus there seem to be voices. Are devils trying to pull one away from embracing the love of God. The books speak of the light at the end of life, but some days seem to be more darkness than light. Dying is a once in a lifetime experience and there is no way to know exactly how much longer this will take or how much more hard things must be endured on this journey.

And I sit and listen and we talk and I am thinking, “There is no way these people deserve this.”

It is a thought I’ve had before.

When I delivered the news of the death of a son in a car accident in the middle of the night, the look on the face of the parents as they opened the door is forever etched in my mind. I went away from their home knowing that there is no way that those people deserved what happened to them. I’ve since seen that look on the face of the father of a soldier, the boyfriend of a suicide victim, the brother of a hanging victim, and countless others.

If life is as simple as good things happen to those who work hard and bad things happen to those who have lived bad lies, there has got to be something that I am missing.

So I read again Jesus words: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Despite all of the language about spiritual disciplines and spiritual warriors and strengthening one’s spirit and putting on the armor of God. Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are the people who pray every day.” He doesn’t say, “Blessed are the people who have their spiritual act together.” He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” I’ve spend more than a small amount of time with people deep in grief. Trust me, it doesn’t seem like a blessing. Sometimes it seems awful.

And I don’t even need to go into  “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You see what I mean. Jesus has a way of turning what seem to be curses into blessings.

I’m pretty sure that we aren't yet seeing the whole picture with our notions of who gets rewards and who gets hard times.

And I’m pretty sure that the one with the most merit isn’t always the one who gets put in charge. Then again, the one who appears to be in charge may not be the one who is really in charge.

I’ll put my faith in the one who is really in charge.

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.

Words

I live in a world of words. I write every morning and then continue to write throughout the day. In addition to this blog, I write letters, e-mails, articles for our newsletter, magazine articles, training documents and lots of other materials. When I am not writing, I am often reading. I read books and articles and on-line research and lots and lots of other words. I don’t know how many words I use in a day, but it has to be in the tens of thousands.

And then there is talking. I am, after all, a preacher. I use words as my primary instrument for leading worship. Often I rely heavily on the words of the ancients. There is great beauty in words that have revealed meaning for many generations of people. At other times I try to create fresh combinations of words to prove expressions that are unique to our circumstances.

My world is so filled with words that I often become confused about the meaning and power of words. Sometimes a simple trip to the dictionary can ease the confusion. The other night I was working on some training materials for the Sheriff’s Office. In a document that I had previously written I found the word “diffuse” when I meant “defuse.” The difference in the homonyms is fairly easy. Defuse means to make more safe. The classic example is defusing a bomb. In the old days of bombs with fuses that were lit and burned toward the concentrated explosives, removing the fuse from the bomb prevented it from being ignited. In a more modern setting, defusing a bomb involves understanding the electronics and preventing the electricity from getting to the ignition. Diffuse means to spread out. The document on which I was working was discussing defusing as an informal process that surrounds the formal process of debriefing after a critical or potentially traumatic incident. We defuse to increase safety. The process helps to avoid potentially dangerous physical and psychological symptoms that come with stress that is not properly managed.

Then I realized that both defusing and diffusing are helpful in the process. By spreading out the knowledge of the incident and its effects, the community is able to absorb more violence than any individual. Defusing is also diffusing - spreading out the knowledge and information within the community.

I could keep going on and on but I think I’ve made my point that clarity and meaning can emerge when we think about and wrestle with words.

But there are other errors I make with words. Probably the biggest mistake that I make on a regular basis is to think that words can contain the truth. I was reminded of that fact last night when I read an essay by Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, one of the world’s leading big cat experts and a leader in habitat conservation. It happens that Dr. Rabinowitz is a stutterer, a reality that in no way diminishes his contributions as a scholar and researcher. He wrote, “the truth of the world, the reality, is not defined by the spoken word.”

It is critical for theologians to remember this important truth. There is an external reality that is beyond our words. God is not contained in our writings about God. We can use words to seek the truth, but the truth is never captured by our words.

Another stutterer taught me a great deal about truth and words. I first met this particular colleague in one of my first classes at theological seminary. I had very little experience with stutterers although in those days I often stammered when trying to express myself in words. At first I misjudged my colleague. I thought that words themselves were more difficult for him - as if his brain somehow couldn’t come up with the right word to express the meaning he wanted to speak. After learning and sharing with him for a while, however, I realized that stuttering is not a matter of not having the words. He had all of the words, they just wouldn’t always come out. When he stuttered, he knew exactly what he wanted to say and did not need my help in finding the word.

He taught me a more important lesson as well. We too often use too many words. In some ways the challenge of getting the words out made him a more effective speaker because he had to limit the number of words and use his words with care. I often treat words as if there was an unlimited supply. When I am not being clear, I add more words in an effort to explain. I craft sentence after sentence when perhaps silence is a much more appropriate response.

It is this economy of words that the poets know best and for which I am convinced that reading poetry is an important discipline for one who writes essays. Sometimes fewer words communicate better than many words.

While the truth cannot be captured by our words - it is always beyond - it does not follow that our words are somehow unimportant. Words can make all the difference in the world. Words may fall sort of capturing the glory of God, but God is incarnated in the beauty of language. The prologue to the Gospel of John says it best: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Words that are embodied - that become flesh - carry truth. We, of course, embody our words in actions. Even for a preacher it is insufficient to speak the truth. We are called to live the truth.

It is true that actions speak louder than words. But saying those words does not constitute telling the truth. To engage the truth we must reach beyond the words.

The best our words can do is to point toward that which is beyond.

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.

Four Fools

I have been told that I do not suffer fools gladly. It is probably true. I don’t have too many prejudices, but I am a bit of an intellectual snob. I have never been much of an athlete, but I was academically competitive in college and graduate school. I have little tolerance for people who don’t do their homework, are too lazy to do the research, and can’t get their facts straight.That bit of trivia is one piece of background for today’s stories.

A second piece of background is this: In the last couple of years our city has suffered a stretch of bad weather. We’ve had several roof-destroying hail storms in the past two summers. We had a devastating October blizzard that not only took down trees and power lines,it also did considerable damage to many area buildings. These natural disasters have brought on a flood of storm chasers. Hail dent removal companies have set up in tents on the corners of parking lots. Out of town roofing contractors patrol the streets trying to get you to sign contracts. We have a brand new roof in excellent shape on our home and we get door hangers, cold calls, and are approached in our yard by salesmen for roofing companies. They always offer a “free roof inspection.”

With that background behind us my first fool story came last week as I was participating at a meeting at the church. A man I did not know appeared in the doorway and kept looking in, so I got up and greeted him and asked if I could help him. He stated that he was a roofing inspector and that he would be glad to offer the church a free roof inspection. I stated simply that we did not need to have our roof inspected. He persisted, stating that he had seen several broken shingles from the ground. I said I knew about the shingles and that wood shingles are different from asphalt shingles. I also said that we had our own process for inspecting and planning our roof repairs. He gave me his card. I said I could pass it on to the committee. He pushed and offered to inspect the roof so I could have the results of the inspection for the committee. I told him that we had already had our roof inspected. He wouldn’t give up. He started to tell me that many insurance company roof inspectors don’t know what they are looking at. I gave up trying to reason with the man. I stated that I needed to go back to my meeting and asked him if he needed me to show him the way to the door. He called me a “piece of work,” insulted me further, suggested that we couldn’t trust our insurance company and demanded to speak to the pastor. I informed him that I am the senior minister of the congregation. He proceeded to tell me that I had bad breath. It is possible that he was right in this observation. I informed him that his behavior wasn’t the way to make sales, tore his card in half and deposited it in the wastebasket. I few more insults were hurled over his shoulder on the way out. I don’t know whether or not the guy is a competent roof inspector. He certainly didn’t seem to be a good salesman.

A second fool story: Several people in our congregation have been generous in offering support to a man who lives out of town who seems to be in a bit of a bind. We have delivered firewood and groceries to him to help him survive the harsh winter. Sometimes he calls me on the phone just to talk. Often in our phone conversations he seems to be out of touch with reality. He expresses fears when I can’t believe that he is at risk. The county officials who are trying to do him in do not, I believe actually exist. And I don’t think anyone is out to get him. I try to be calm over the phone and reassuring. He can be a troubling interruption to my busy days and a bit of a nuisance when I have much to do, but I try to be as supportive as I can. He doesn’t do any harm that I can see and I think that it is possible that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, though I’m certainly not qualified to make a diagnosis. Mostly he is a bit silly. I guess it isn’t too foolish for him to talk to me. I wouldn’t intentionally do him any harm.

The third story is similar to the second. I know a man who has done multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan as a member of the US Marine Corps. He is having trouble holding down a job since his discharge and he sometimes speaks or writes e-mail to me about “dangers” and “threats” that I simply cannot perceive. I don’t think that angry Afghan civilians, no matter how devastating the war has been in their country, are targeting our church. I don’t think anyone is spying on my home. I’m pretty sure it is safe for me to walk in my neighborhood at night. I’m pretty sure that the next terrorist attack against Americans won’t single out a Pennington County Sheriff’s Chaplain who drives a 15-year-old Subaru and likes to go canoeing at the lake. But I lend an ear to this veteran and i try to do what I can to help him. I’ve helped him with yard chores and I continue to try to be as kind as possible.

Which brings us to the biggest fool of all: me. Why would I possibly make a distinction between any of the three people mentioned above. Each is trying to make it in this world. None poses any danger or threat to me. Why did I get angry at the first one and seem to have more patience for the other two? I seem to be a bit inconsistent in my approach to people.

For a guy who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, I sure can act like a fool at times.

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.

Big Doings on Friday

It seems like Friday is going to be a big day. It is the last day of January, which means payday for some folks. Our church will be serving the meal at the local rescue mission that evening and the arrival of pay checks for the workers, unemployment benefits for those who haven’t found work and assistance for those who receive food support all have an effect on how many people take in the meal at the mission. It is hard to predict how many people will show up for the meal, but I’m confident that the folks from our church who are preparing the meal will have enough food for all to eat their fill. It is an important outreach. It is a good thing to feed hungry people. But it is also a reminder that there are large inequities in our community and in our world. The contrast between the working poor and those who have more than enough is stark.

At $7.25 and hour, a minimum wage earner has to work more than half an hour for a gallon of milk. A meal for two at a mid-range restaurant in our city is nearly a day’s wages for a minimum wage worker. A modest three-bedroom apartment in our city costs more than half a full-time salary at minimum wage. That makes the oil fields in North Dakota seem attractive on the surface. Fast food restaurants are paying $15 an hour up there. But there is no housing available and what might be found isn’t affordable at fast food pay rates.

But the mission meal is only one of the things that is occurring on Friday. Friday is the opening of the big annual Black Hills Stock Show and Rodeo. We really do up our mid-winter farm and ranch show here with the civic center crammed full of displays and vendors, the fairgrounds hopping with all kinds of activities and, of course the rodeos. I think there are at least 7 PRCA rodeos plus the Xtreme Bulls Tour, team roping events, and more. There are special shows for all of the major breeds of cattle, horse shows and sales, art displays, concerts, trick riding shows, sheep dog trials and the west’s best auctioneer contest.

Big doings in the Black Hills all next week with the stock show in town. Time to polish the boots and get out the hat and head down to the civic center. You can sit in a pickup that is so fancy you’d never consider buying it, ogle the tractors that cost more than your house, take a look at a saddle that is worth more than horses sold for at the fair when you were a kid and watch demonstrations of ranch equipment that you didn’t know existed.

We’ll be so busy with the stock show that we might not notice that Friday is also the lunar new year, sometimes called Chinese New Year. It isn’t one of the big festivals around here, but it is usually noted with celebrations and a parade in Deadwood. The Chinese New Year is traditionally a time to honor ancestors and to get folks together for dancing, parades, and other events. Because the Chinese calendar doesn’t traditionally use continuously numbered years, there is some controversy about what year is coming. Those outside of China often number from the reign of the Yellow Emperor. That date is somewhat in question as well, so I don’t know if this new year is 4711, 4712, or 4651. It isn’t a big area of debate in our town anyway. There is more agreement that this week marks the last week of the year of the snake and Friday begins the year of the horse.

The beginning of the year of the horse seems appropriate for the opener of the Stock Show. There will be plenty of horses in town, and some will be pampered like royalty. With custom horse trailers topping $100,000 on display, you could spend a lot of money pampering your horses. Of course you can also look at a $65,000 pickup to pull that trailer.

What I don’t think you will see at this year’s Chinese New Year/Stock Show Rodeo is a Korean tradition for new year. In Seoul, South Korea, people are busy shopping for gifts as the Lunar New Year approaches. One favorite gift choice is a tastefully wrapped box of specialty foods. Gift boxes sport imported wines, choice cuts of beef, rare herbal teas, and, of course, Spam.

Yup, Spam. That gelatinous canned meat in the blue and yellow can is considered to be a gourmet gift item in South Korea.

What do you want to bet that there won’t be a Spam vendor setting up a display in the Civic Center this year.

I think that the tradition of Spam in Korea dates back to the Korean war, when there were food shortages all around that country. Meat of any kind was a luxury available only to the rich and well-connected. At the same time, US troops were being fed with food that was shipped in. Military rations aren’t particularly noted for their culinary appeal - just simple nutrition. So the soldiers had Spam. The excess pork shoulders canned in Minnesota traveled well half way around the world to Korea. And even after the journey, the soldiers preferred other foods when available. So Spam became a luxury item for sale on the black market in Korea and a tradition was started.

Young people in Korea probably don’t know the origins of the food. They sit down to a meal of budaejjigae (stew with Spam) in a restaurant, or order a large breakfast of kimchi and pan-fried Spam and eggs thinking that they are indulging in a luxury.

So there you have it. Luxury dining at a reasonable cost. Spam goes for about $3.50 in the grocery store, but you can sometimes find it for $2 a can at the dollar store. That’s three cans plus change for an hour’s work at minimum wage.

I guess you have to be in Korea for Spam to seem like a luxury, however. And an airline ticket to Seoul will set you back about $1,400. That’s a lot of work at minimum wage.

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.

Annual Meeting Day

People who have been around me know that I don’t put a lot of faith in conventional planning processes. It isn’t that I don’t believe in making plans, it is just that I think that most things that are labeled planning in the world of non profits are simply ways to have more meetings and wast time. For all of my career, various forms of strategic planning have been at work in the church. I was on a strategic planning task force in my college church and another in my seminary and I was trained as a church planner in strategic planning methods early in my career.

It is amazing that a process that was developed for the industrial world, adopted by the Rand Corporation during the Vietnam War and then filtered down to a variety of different organizations is still popular among churches. It is old theory. It didn’t work when it was new theory. People developed goals and strategies and benchmarks and then didn’t follow through. That has been the story since the beginnings of the strategic planning movement.

Yet is persists.

And I have suffered it again and agin in the church. After all it is not my role to tell the church what to do, it is my role to walk alongside the members of the church and enable them to lead - even when their leadership style is different than mine.

The truth is that I’m not much interested in planning. I’m more interested in producing.

Having said that, today is the day of the annual meeting of our congregation. I have a good 120 hours invested in the annual reports alone. I spend a lot of time doing page layout, choosing pictures, writing sidebar articles, printing, collating, and binding the reports. They are very important to me. I’d say that our annual reports are among the most attractive annual reports of any organization regardless of its size. They are important to me because they constitute the permanent record of of our life together. Every once in a while there is a geek like me who comes along and actually reads old annual reports. I read a lot of them when I first became the pastor of this congregation. They had a lot to say about what kind of church this is.

And today, at our annual meeting, we will once again have discussions about our vision for the future. This is the 135th annual meeting of the congregation. We’d like to make sure that the 185th comes along. And we’d like to invest in some things of lasting value that might support the ministries of 50 years in the future.

2014 is the centennial year of one of the buildings that was home to our church. It is now occupied by Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, but it has been in continuous use as a church serving this community for a century. Our forebears had great vision and insight.

The church we now occupy is 55 years old. The people who envisioned, raised funds, and participated in building this church made some good decisions. They did a lot right. They created a beautiful building that is clearly capable of serving for more than a century. But we are past the half way mark of that 1st century and the time has come for us to invest in a legacy that has a similar life.

Being the geek that I am, I’ve been reading some reports from 40 years ago in preparation for the meeting. I haven’t made any startling discoveries, but it is clear that there are a lot of things that I recognize in the reports of 40 years ago.

40 years ago, they wrote: “There appears to be a general lack of interest in church activities including indifference of many members in attending church services on a regular basis.”

They complained that: “During church activities we tend to visit with people we know rather than becoming acquainted with strangers.”

Hmm . . . it might appear that some of the problems of 40 years ago haven't been completely solved in our time.

There are a lot of other similarities and difference in that report. There are many places where it reads as if it might have been written for the congregation today.

But there is one goal in the document that really caught my eye: “Among other goals, we should consider making young people a more responsive part of the membership and be more cognizant of the needs of the older members inasmuch as they make up a large percentage of our membership.”

In other words, they thought that youth should serve the elders and stay in their place. It is as old as the church itself. We want young people in the church and we want them to do things our way. We want youth, but we don’t want them to change anything.

There are several references to young couples in the report. Since I was a newlywed 40 years ago, I think I have some expertise on what interested young couples back then. The report missed the mark entirely. It suggested that young people should do the activities that appealed to their parents and grandparents.

Allowing leadership to emerge is never an easy process. Existing leaders tend to be jealous of their power and often are unwilling to share. Again, this has been the story of the church for generations.

As we face our annual meeting, it is my fervent prayer that we might adopt a different attitude toward youth, young adults and the transition of leaders. I pray that we allow emerging leaders the authority to make their own mistakes and to do things their own way. I pray that we might recognize that the new thing that God is doing in our midst is truly different from the way we’ve always done it. I pray that we will not give way to fear, but dare to proceed in faith.

Fifty or a hundred years from now, those who follow us won’t remember our fears. They will remember what we had the courage and faith to accomplish. May God grant us the faith to explore the new road ahead.

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 Comics

After scanning the headlines and reading a few paragraphs of the front page, I turn to the comics next. Our daily newspaper has a relatively small comic page and I read them all, including the boring soap opera ones, the ones that don’t seem to have any point, and the ones that seem to be a lesson in bad drawing. It doesn’t take much time at all to read the comics in our paper.

In my own defense, I don’t read the newspaper for news any more. The process is simply too slow. I begin my day with a visit to top news sites on the Internet, many of which come from newspapers. I also scan our local new’s paper’s web site for news from my home town. By the time the newspaper arrives, there isn’t much in it that comes as news. I know that the daily newspaper is rapidly becoming a thing of the past and it is likely that we’ll see the end of receiving a local newspaper in my lifetime. I also know that I can get all of the comics I want online. Most comics now have their own websites and the Washington Post features 81 comics in its online version.

I don’t really think that reading comics is worth too much of my time. How much intellectual stimulation can one obtain from Mary Worth where the story unfolds so slowly that you always know the plot and dialogue for the next few days before they are printed? What can you learn of compassion from Rex Morgan’s medical practice that sees only one patient at a time? Actually there is a fascination in counting the examples of medical malpractice that spring up in nearly every case the Morgan is involved in. So far he hasn’t been sued for malpractice a single time, however Like father, like daughter seems to be the case. The preschooler is already engaging in blackmail. I guess those who share Bruce Tinsley’s political perspective might occasionally find Mallard Fillmore to occasionally have a repeatable gag, but the day after day ad hominem attacks don’t come off as funny or even intelligent most of the time.

Maybe I read the comics so I have something to complain about.

And I know that I’m becoming an old codger when I start to talk about how I miss comic strips like Lil’ Abner and Pogo and Dick Tracy. Do you know the words to the Pogo Christmas Carol? OK, I’ve only got the first verse memorized:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo! Nora's freezin' on the trolley, Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

There were, after all five more verses that appeared in the strip, though the first was most repeated.

Don't we know archaic barrel Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou? Trolley Molly don't love Harold, Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo! Donkey Bonny brays a carol, Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly, Gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through! Chollie's collie barks at Barrow, Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley, Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo! Chilly Filly's name is Chollie, Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof! Tizzy seas on melon collie! Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!

But if you want real Pogo trivia, did you know that Churchy LaFemme once sang “Good King Wenceslas?” It started like this: "Good King Sauerkraut, look out! On your feets uneven..."
But I digress.

I miss some more recent dropouts from the world of comics as well. Calvin and Hobbes was a favorite of mine when Bill Watterson was drawing it. Reading that strip illustrates the reality of comic strip art for me: High quality comes at such a high cost that it cannot be sustained over the long haul. Watterson retired after just 11 years of the strip that often wasn’t just fun and good art, but surprisingly philosophical and often reasonably theological.

As much as I enjoy Peanuts, the unending repetition of the strip is getting old. I wonder I they could intersperse it with reruns of Calvin and Hobbes from time to time.

I miss Gary Larson’s “The Far Side.” That was always a cartoon for a slightly twisted sense of humor. Sometimes I would just marvel at his drawing and captions and wonder how he came up with his ideas. I’ll never forget the split frame comic with St. Peter handing out harps under a banner saying “Welcome to Heaven.” In the bottom frame, the devil was greeting those going to hell by handing out accordions.

I know that Lynn Johnston decided to start over with “For Better or Worse” in order to re-tell the stories of younger children and correct some of the distracted sidelines of the original strip, but I really think that the quality of that strip wasn’t improved by starting the story line over. I miss the old strip with two little sisters. I sort of miss April. I know Johnston didn’t have a second daughter in real life, but I never bought into the real life side of the comic in the first place. I’ve always been a fan of fiction.

So I read the comics each day, usually over breakfast. It’s a habit. I have a lot of other habits. I wait until after breakfast for my first cup of coffee. Who knows why I do it that way? I’m pretty sure my dentist would prefer that I would drink the coffee and then brush my teeth instead of the other way around. But I like to take a hot cup of coffee with me as I head to the car to drive to work. I read poetry while I’m waiting for the espresso machine to warm up.

And, truth be known, the comics are the only thing that keeps me subscribing to the newspaper these days. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be motivated to walk to the end of the driveway and pick up the stack of ads that go straight into the recycling bin every day.

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.

Rules of Order

It may be a sign of some kind of mental instability, or perhaps just a type of creative thought, but sometimes the strangest ideas come to my mind. Yesterday was a long day with an early start and an evening meeting. For some reason, as I was driving home, I began to wonder, “Do anarchists have conventions?” and “If they do, do they use Robert’s Rules of Order?” Actually I know next to nothing about anarchists. It just seems that they might tend toward disorder and not want to submit to any sort of rules. Such things might make for a rather chaotic and perhaps humorous situation if they were to ever attempt organizing. Maybe that is why you don’t hear much about anarchist conventions.

When I got home, I told my wife what I had been thinking about on the way home and she looked at me a little bit funny and laughed. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something like an expression of surprise at the strange thoughts that i have.

She’s a wise woman. I’m pretty sure that normal people don’t think the way I do.

When we first moved to South Dakota, I used to tell a joke about the places where we had lived this way:

I grew up in Montana. Montana is a democracy, with elected legislators and state officers. Montanans hold to the principles of one person, one vote; the secret ballot; rule of the majority; and the like.

Then I moved to Chicago in the days when the first Richard Daley was mayor. Richard J Daley ruled Chicago with an iron fist. The city council always approved his proposals with the same vote. If you attended a council meeting there were no surprises about who would vote which way. It was my first time of living in a dictatorship.

From Chicago, we moved to North Dakota. I hadn’t realized until I got there that North Dakota is a socialist state. The North Dakota Mill & Elevator? It belongs to the state. The Bank of North Dakota? It belongs to the state. It is an interesting place.

Next, we lived for a decade in Idaho, where there are a lot of people who don’t believe in government. Mostly they hide out in the mountains, but you can see evidences of anarchy all around. “I don’t care who painted those stripes on the road! They have no authority over me. I’ll drive where I choose, thank you very much!”

So, when we moved to South Dakota when Bill Janklow was governor, it was my first experience of living in a monarchy.

OK, so it is a joke and it isn’t very accurate, but it is interesting how people organize themselves and conduct their business.

They way I learned the story, and I think this is accurate, is that Henry Martyn Robert was an Army officer who was asked to preside over a church meeting. It might have been a city meeting, since town meetings were often held in churches in New England. At any rate, he agreed to preside at the meeting only to discover that he did not know how to keep order. People spoke out of turn and it was hard to keep the group on subject. After the meeting he began to study ways of organizing meetings and eventually wrote a set of instructions for running meetings that came to be known as Robert’s Rules of Order. The first edition was printed in 1876 and the rules are now in their 11th edition.

The rules seem to work fairly well when weaving the way through disagreement within a group of people. These days we get through a lot of church meetings without needing to refer to the rules. We mostly conduct our business by listening carefully to one another. We roughly follow the rules, with motions made and seconded, discussion held, and votes taken. But it is rare to have significant dissent at a church meeting. Usually when there is disagreement it is best to ponder and pray about the decision rather than make a decision with a group that feels disenfranchised or upset.

In general at a church meeting when someone goes for or quotes Robert’s Rules of Order there is some kind of an attempt at creating disorder rather than order. A complete knowledge of the rules provides enough tricks to disrupt an assembly and to subvert the will of the majority. The rules are used more often to create disorder than to keep a meeting flowing in an orderly fashion.

Still, the rules come in handy.

A few years ago Robert’s Rules of Order came out at an annual meeting of our congregation. There was an individual who wanted the vote on the budget to be by secret ballot as opposed to the simple voice vote that is usual in our church. I’m not sure the reason why, but I suspect that the person didn’t like some part of the budget. At any rate, the rules were consulted and it was determined that we had to vote on whether or not to take a secret ballot. The vote was taken and there were only a couple of other people in the room who wanted a secret ballot. It was a clear illustration of the will of the majority of the group. The meeting proceeded without disruption. The budget was adopted and served the congregation well that year.

But it always makes me nervous when the book comes out. It seems to be a sign that there is some disruption in the works.

I’m no fan of anarchy, however. We do need some structure when we gather together to make decisions. I guess we’ll stick with Robert’s Rules of Order. After all, there is a phone app for that.

A quick Google search of Anarchists’ Convention reveals that John Sayles wrote a short story by that name. I don’t know much about John Sayles. I read a novel he wrote: A Moment in the Sun. It was very well written and the characters really come alive. I think I’ll pick up a collection of his stories one of these days. He sounds like the kind of person I might like to get to know better. I like the way he thinks!

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.

O Canada!

If you had asked me, I would have said that I learned the lyrics to “O Canada!” in grade school. Montana shares a border with Canada and we often went to the southern parts of Alberta for business. The Hutterite colony north of our town had a special relationship with a colony in southern Alberta. The stores exchanged Canadian coins as if they were US currency.

The problem with that memory is that none of my brothers or sisters seem to have learned the song, and they went to the same grade school as I. And I don’t think that my classmates know the song, either.

So it is a mystery where I learned the song. There are a lot of songs that I know that I can’t tell you where or how I learned them.

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

I learned the song with the last line repeated.

Here is the strange thing about the national anthem of our neighbor to the north. It has two official versions. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The nation has two official languages. What is surprising to me is that the official French version is nowhere near the English in meaning. While Anglophiles sing of patriot love, Francophones are singing about a glorious garland of flowers. The English come awfully close to quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson with “The True North strong and free,” while the French speakers sing about ready to carry the cross. While English singers pray to God to keep the land glorious and free. The French are singing about valor steeped in faith protecting homes and rights.

You have to admit it is a fairly strange country.

So what is it about Canada that holds such an attraction for me?

I love my home and the nation of my birth. And I have seen far more of the United States than of Canada. Our country is home to spectacular natural beauty and incredibly diverse landscapes. And there is so much more that could be seen if I had time to explore.

But I find myself reading brochures about driving the Dempster Highway from the Yukon up to Inuvik on the Makenzie River delta. I’d like to drive it in the winter so I could extend up the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk. The road is named after the dogsled trail of the same name. the dogsled trail was named in honor of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer William John Ducan Dempster. A true mountie, Dempster was lost trying to make a winter rescue in the far north. At Tuktoyaktuk, you can get face to face with the true natives of the north.

I bet I’ve watched 30 or more videos of sunrise off the point at St. John’s Newfoundland. I’d love to rise in the dark and hike out the point to be the first on the North American continent to see the sunrise for the day. You have to love a province that is so sure of itself that it has its own time zone. the hour in Newfoundland is the half hour in most of the rest of the world. And how many cities can you name that have an apostrophe in their name?

I’ve driven across the Saskatchewan prairies from Regina to Saskatoon and up into Edmonton. I always wished I had taken a short detour on that trip and gone to Moose Jaw. A place with a name like that ought to be interesting.

I’ve drive up north from Great Falls, Montana through Lethbridge to Calgary.

And we took a glorious trip one year when we crossed the border between East Glacier and Waterton and then went up through Banff, took a jaunt on the Columbia Ice Fields and made our way to Jasper. I could do that drive again and again.

We love Kelowna BC with its gorgeous lake. I’ll never forget the trip up Canada 101 and the various ferry crossings to Powell River - the end of the road on the BC coast.

O Canada! What is it about that place that holds such allure for me? I keep a copy of the Milepost handy to study the route of the Alaska Highway. Dawson Creek, Delta Junction, Whitehorse - all of those are places I’ve seen in my dreams but never visited.

I can get sappy reading Robert Service poems - an affliction that my wife does not share. The Call of the Yukon seems real to me. I never saw the movie, and I don’t really want to. The poem and my imagination are enough to keep me attracted.

O Canada! What is it that makes me long to get in a bush plane and fly north from Lake Winnipeg all the way to Hudson Bay. The name of Nunavut is enough to attract the adventurous. Did you know that the Cree call the bay Kangiqsualuk ilea? That’s the same name they have for Lake Winnipeg. They aren’t confused by having two great northern bodies of water sharing the same name.

We spent an afternoon in the Hudson Bay Company archives in Winnipeg once and I couldn’t get enough of the old photographs of the distant places that the voyageurs visited in the summer. the northland in the center of Canada is more water than land. With the right canoe, you could paddled from ice out to freeze up and not run out of places to explore in a lifetime.

And then there are the ice roads. They used to use sleds and dogs to travel the ice roads. Now they use sophisticated pumps and snowplows to create ice roads that carry semi trucks over the water to take supplies to remote locations. Imagine driving on a road that is floating on the surface of the water.

O Canada! What is it that makes me want to go to Hay River and board a Buffalo Air DC3 bound for Yellowknife?

It may be that we all need to have a bit of fantasy in our lives - the dream of a place we’ve never been.

I still have no idea where I learned that song.

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.

Old friends

As I begin the journey through the seventh decade of life, I have discovered that my books have become my friends. In a way that wasn’t the case a few decades ago, I run my hands along the shelves, feeling the spines and pulling out volumes that I have previously read, sometimes pausing to read sections, other times re-reading a book that I had once thought was familiar. Perhaps it is a test of my memory. More likely, it is the desire to recover a feeling that I had known discovering the book in a previous phase of my life.

I know that paper books are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I am aware that libraries are now the places for the distribution of electronic records and e-books. I have a copy of the brochure on e-readers that comes from our local library.

I belong to another era to be sure. When I graduated from seminary, every seminary student was wondering how to become the owner of a set of The Interpreter’s Bible. The 12-volume set of hardback books, together with the four-volume Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible filled up an entire library shelf in most pastors’ offices. They were pulled down and consulted weekly in the process of sermon preparation,even if the text of the week was one for which the pastor had prepared an exegesis for a seminary class. Reading the scholarly commentaries and refreshing one’s memory of the translation notes gave the impression that you knew something that was not general knowledge. Just having the books in one’s study lent an air of intellectual superiority, or at least a sense of having access to information that wasn’t commonly available to lay persons.

These days a seminary graduate has access to more commentaries, translation notes and various versions of the Bible on their cell phone and those who possess iPads use them for sermon preparation and delivery as naturally as we used our typewriter back in the day. Those who do not have tablet devices are busy saving for the item from their paychecks, whenever the stiff student loan payments don’t consume the last penny.

Mind you I am not complaining. I love the technology toys as much as the next person. I am impressed by the quality of education that is available in today’s graduate theological seminaries. I love to discuss the books read and the titles recommended by recent graduates of seminary.

Actually, I think that part of my love of books comes from the very fact that I know that they, in some ways, belong to the past. Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Barth all died before I began reading their books. Even the Niebuhr brothers were both gone by the time I made it to Seminary. Reading their books was a window on the past. Having their books is a reminder of how much the past is a part of the present - how much the present belongs to the past. Even my seminary teachers are now gone. Their books in my library remind me of those who have gone before: Ross Snyder, Phil Anderson, and Perry LeFevre have all died. Andre LaCocque has been retired since 1996. His commentary on the Book of Daniel is now completed - it was a work that at one time he deemed “worthy of a lifetime,” and unlikely to be finished. But since he finished that book, he has produced excellent commentaries on Ruth and the Song of Songs. He was the teacher who ignited the book of Ruth in my mind. We spend an entire semester in the first two chapters of Genesis once, translating word by word, and I remember his lectures as if he were still speaking. But I haven’t had a conversation with him since 1978, the year before the commentary on Daniel was published.

It is not only my bookshelves that are filled with friends from the past. So, too is my brain.

The truth is that I should be thinking about how to give away some of my books. Now on my 12th trip through the three-year cycle of the lectionary, the commentaries and translation notes of The Interpreter’s Bible are no longer fresh. I don’t pull the books off of the shelf every week like I once did, and when I do so these days, I am deeply aware that there are fresher and more educated commentaries available. Like preachers who are much younger than I, I check out the online commentaries available from theological seminaries and other resources far more often than I consult books to inform my preaching.

I still read a lot of books. I like the heft and feel of a paper book in my hands and I begin and end each day with my book-based disciplines. I have the entire Bible in a half dozen translations on my cell phone, but I prefer the old, tattered Oxford Edition of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible with the covers held on with duct tape and the pages worn and tattered. It seems to fall open to the right places and it feels at home in my hands. I know how to read the footnotes and my pencil scratches in the margins provide a sort of history of the development of my ideas and my theology.

But what preacher worth his salt could be content with just one Bible? I have my grandfather’s Bible in its cedar box. I think that the Bible came from the time when he was counsel for the Methodist Church and attended a national convention. The box came later, I’m sure. I have my father’s burgundy RSV bible with the taped up spine. I even have a brand-new, leather-bound bible that was a gift. It seems like it might be just right for a preacher, but it sits mostly unused on my shelf while I have another, with the pages worn and the spine torn that seems to fit the bill much better.

My library and my mind are populated with many characters from the past. They are not gone - indeed they are present in my life and in my preaching.

It is good to have friends.

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.

Of spacecraft, frogs and naps

I try to keep up with some of the news of space exploration. I grew up in a family that didn’t watch much television, but where the television was on non-stop when a space launch was about to take place. I had pictures of astronauts in my room and I still have my autographed portrait of Alan Shepard. I am among the minority of people who believe that he was misquoted when it comes to what may have been the first prayer ever uttered by a space traveler. You can google “Shepard’s Prayer” and you will get a different word than the way I say it: “Dear Lord, please don’t let me mess up.”

Actually there was quite a bit of theology in the early years of the space program. John Glenn, first US astronaut to orbit the planet was fond of saying, “Godspeed.” The crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the moon, read from Genesis during a live TV broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1968. Almost no one remembers that NASA got sued over that one. It was alleged that it was a violation of the establishment clause of the constitution. The Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction since it occurred outside of the boundaries of the United States. In 1970, when Apollo 13 encountered life-threatening problems, President Nixon led the nation in prayer for the safe return of the astronauts. Pope John Paul II prayed for the spirits of the seven killed in the Challenger explosion.

If you have been following the news from space, however, there has been no news about the European comet-chaser Rosetta for months until yesterday. The spacecraft has been in hibernation for 31 months. It was all part of the plan. By allowing the craft to travel with its systems shut down, engineers were able to conserve battery power for the exciting things that are set to occur this year as the craft joins the orbit of Comet 67P. The comet has a second name, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but I can never remember that name, so it is just 67P to me.

The controllers didn’t know exactly how long they would have to wait to hear a signal back from the spacecraft once they sent the signal for the craft to wake up. They figured they would allow an hour. In 45 minutes they had their answer. The spacecraft is performing as designed. Now controllers will fine-tune the trajectory of the spacecraft so it will rendezvous with the comet in August. In November it will deploy a small lander to the surface of the comet, which will return the first photographs from the surface of the comet. Then the spacecraft, lander and comet will continue toward the sun, passing inside of the orbit of the Earth and coming cosset to the Sun ion August of 2015.

It is an amazing exploration and an amazing feat of engineering.

So I know what you are thinking, “What does that have to do with frogs in Australia?” Funny you should bring that up. It has been raining in central Australia, a phenomenon that doesn’t happen every summer. Thunderstorms have drenched the ground and made the giant rock Uluru glisten with moisture. And there is an eerie sound coming from the area. Thousands of Sheep Frogs have emerged from their underground homes to begin breeding. I guess they really do sound like sheep, although no sheepherder would be fooled by the audio clip that ABC Australia has on its web site. The remarkable frogs have the ability to go underground and lie dormant for years, if necessary, waiting for the rains to come and when the rains come they emerge and the cycle of life begins again for them. New frogs are born and as the ground dries, they go underground and eventually become dormant to wait for their time to emerge.

There are plenty of examples in nature of creatures that use hibernation or dormancy to survive harsh conditions and to extend their lives until milder weather returns.

If you have ever observed a massive grizzly bear in the Bob Marshall in August, it is hard to believe that in February researchers would be able to crawl into her cave to weigh and tag her cubs, but that is exactly what they do. They don’t have to fear the 4-inch long claws of the mother bear because she sleeps through it all.

I can’t help but believe that the engineers who designed the Rosetta spacecraft didn’t get part of their idea from nature when making a ship that could go dormant and conserve energy.

I am also intrigued by the name they chose for their spacecraft. The Rosetta Stone is an inscribed rock, found in Egypt that has a decree of Ptolemy V inscribed in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script and Ancient Greek. Prior to the discovery of the stone archeologists were unable to read hieroglyphs. Using the information learned from the translations, they have been able to decode the meaning of other hieroglyphs.

Perhaps the spacecraft is able to make the connection between the lessons to be learned from giant hunks of ice orbiting the sun and the nature of the universe through which we are traveling. The spacecraft will be looking for clues to help us understand the nature of our universe.

Whether it be exploring the vast expanses of space or studying frogs that are normally very difficult to find burrowed beneath the surface, those who look closely at this universe discover amazing feats of resilience and small clues to the nature of this grand and glorious universe. It is, at its core, part of the quest of a grant theological question posed in Psalm 8: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” “Who are we and what is our relationship to the creative force of the universe?”

Somewhere on the fringes of those grand questions is an observation about the role of dormancy in the grand scheme. Dormancy gives rise to resilience that allows things to live longer and survive harsher conditions.

So here, in the midst of a South Dakota winter, with work piling up all around, I seem to have the urge to take a nap. Who knows? It might make me more resilient.

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.

A dream

I have been dreaming of canoes. In the past I have dreamed of paddling at times and of building at others. Last night’s dream was of the detail of the construction of the gunwales of a very intricate canoe.I have no idea why I would dream of such decorative features. The canoes I build have functional gunwales and my system is remarkably similar from canoe to canoe. I use a simple out wale and a series of small spacers as I glue the inhale. After the glue has dried, I use a hand-held router to curve the edges leaving the spaces for easy draining of water from the canoe and handy places to attach a rope if needed. I use those spaces when tying loads into the canoe. The system is light weight, functional and reasonably attractive.

Last night I dreamed of a canoe that had pony beads laced into the lashing on the gunwales. Lashing with spruce roots is done on genuine birch bark canoes and some skin-on-frame kayaks. I’ve never built a boar with that kind of lashing and I doubt if I ever will. I don’t have ready access to the materials and I don’t possess the knowledge or skills in building such boats.

I have admired those canoes in museums and in countless books and articles that I have collected on the subject. Tappan Adney was a man obsessed with bark canoes. He single handedly preserved the heritage of North American Bark canoes by building 110 incredibly accurate and finely detailed models of native canoes. John Jennings has produced a wonderful book of photographs of the models and I have poured over that book again and again. There are many decorated gunwales, some have the lashings dyed or painted. But I have never seen beadwork in gunwale lashings. I got out a couple of books to look after I woke this morning. My dream is of something that I have never seen.

I guess that it is not uncommon for me to dream of paddling and canoes, especially in the winter. I develop a hunger to be out on the lake in the season where my exercise is mostly walking, hauling firewood and rowing on a stationary machine. I long for the view of the sunrise from the surface of the water and the gentle sound of the craft slipping in response to the dip of my paddle. I hunger for the sight of the beaver and the eagles and osprey. I even miss the raucous noisiness of the geese.

But I am not a person who remembers his dreams often. I go many nights in a row without any conscious recollection of what I had dreamed. I am content to let the dream world fade into the dark recesses of my mind. There are too many wonderful and exciting things to learn and think about in the world of my awake hours.

The head of the psychology department at our college was also the organist at the church we belonged to during those years, so we stayed in contact after graduation more than was the case with some of our teachers. Dr. John Bross had started recording his dreams in a journal when he was a graduate student. Over the years he had developed a remarkable skill at remembering his dreams, often being able to record a half dozen or more dreams upon awakening. It was a bit of an obsession, I suppose, like me writing essays in the wee hours as I begin my day. At any rate, his experiences didn’t produce a major volume on the meaning of dreams, just lots and lots of dream narratives. He got so good at remembering his dreams that he never found the time to fully analyze them.

I have tended toward the opposite. I am so interested in the meanings of things that I have not invested time and energy in remembering my dreams. Remembering a dream is an event that occurs only once or twice a month for me. My dreams tend to be fantastic combinations of events that would never come together in my waking hours and are at best amusing.

So it is strange to me that I would wake not just once but twice in the night with a vision of the details of how to string pony beads onto the gunwale lashings of a canoe. The detail of the dream is fascinating to me. Three beads per lashing. Five rounds of lashing so close that the beads touch, then a space of a half inch or so and another five rounds of lashing. I don’t even know if the decorative feature was for the entire length of the canoe or just at the bow. My dream was focused on the beads as the gunwales bent up and in toward the bow.

I can’t explain why by brain was developing such a picture. It was a pleasant experience to think of how beautiful a canoe could be made, but it seems to have no connection to reality. Maybe such flights of imagination are a way that my mind takes a vacation when I sleep.

Maybe I should pay more attention to my dreams. The ancients believed that God was talking to them in their dreams and that their dreams revealed what God intended them to do with their lives. Dreams, of course, required a certain amount of interpretation. I’m pretty sure that God isn’t calling me to spend the rest of my life decorating canoes with pony beads. Maybe God is calling me to open my eyes and look for the beauty of small details. Maybe God is reminding me that the art of canoeing is a gentle blend of design, naval architecture, craftsmanship, and paddling technique. Maybe I am simply being called to appreciate and express gratitude for the beauty and grace of paddling a hand-made boat.

Maybe God was just giving me a topic for another blog.

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.

A Good Crew of Volunteers

The church that I serve continues to amaze me. We put out the word that we needed a few volunteers on Saturday morning to help us remove the slate fem the entryway of the church. The slate had been set in a cement grout and the the grout needed to be chipped away before it could be stacked for storage. It is unclear how the removed slate will be used in the future. It is possible that it could be used for a church project or sold, but for now it is being stored. The slate is heavy and the process of removing the grout and cleaning it is dusty work.

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16 volunteers showed up and made short work of the process. The slate was stacked on wooden pallets in two trailers and a pickup and within a couple of hours the crew was drinking coffee, munching on donuts and cookies and congratulating itself for a job well done.

There could be a delay in the project at this point. We had rushed to get things done because the concrete contractor will soon be ready to tackle our work. However, there are repairs that need to be made to the steel posts in the area and the metal contractor is reportedly working a bit behind schedule. At any rate, things need to be done in the right order. First remove the slate, then weld in new metal to replace rusted steel, then remove the old concrete, make sure the base is proper and pour new concrete.

Of course all of this work is being done in South Dakota in a season with less than predictable weather.

We, however, are not the reason for delay.

Our volunteers turned out in force and got the work done.

It was very windy in the morning, and the wind made things chilly. Some of our volunteers were wearing insulated coveralls. But the work warmed us and the wind began to die down and by the time we were finished, we were down to sweatshirts.

The camaraderie and good natured joking of the group made the work fun for everyone involved.

I read a fair amount of articles about the church and religion in general. There have been major shifts in religion in America in my lifetime. Participation in churches is declining and established churches are growing older and older. I hear lots of complaining about the fact that our churches don’t have the number of children and youth that they once had, but there aren’t many solutions. Churches of all sizes and theological perspectives are experiencing the same phenomena. While the age profile is slightly younger in some of the more fundamentalist churches, they too are experiencing a similar aging of their congregations. A church with a rock band instead of a traditional choir is not likely to be filled with youth. Its membership is more likely to be primarily people in their ’40’s and ’50’s.

There are many complex dynamics at work.

In the case of our congregation, family size is a factor. The average number of children per family is lower than was the case when our congregation was at its height of membership in the 1950’s. This is complicated by the simple fact that the congregation has aged. People got together in the church, formed strong bonds, and stuck together as they grew older. It happens to all of us. I myself am 18 years older than when I was called to be the pastor of the congregation. As much as we describe ourselves as a congregation that wants to be a place for all generations and all ages, there is a tendency for friendships to form within one’s age cohort. People our age are likely to invite other people our age to become involved in the church.

All of this is taking place in the context of a community with an increasing number of churches and a decreasing number of people who attend church regularly. Say what you want about free market and supply and demand, something else is operating in the arena of churches. While Rapid City’s population is growing modestly, the number of people who are active in church life is declining. The fastest growing religious group in our city is “no religious preference.” People claim the title of Christian, but do not feel a need to participate in a church to hold beliefs that are Christian. More and more frequently I hear people speak of religion as a private matter. Those who do participate in churches spend less time engaged with church activities than was the case in previous generations. So not only is the number of people in church declining, but the number of hours they spend at church in a month is declining.

Instead of the number of churches declining to reflect this social trend, however, the number of congregations in our town is expanding. There are nearly double the number of churches and para-church organizations in the Black Hills than was the case when I moved here and more than 4 times the number of churches than was the case when our congregation built the building that is its current home.

In that environment, there are occasionally congregations that experience growth, even rapid growth, in short bursts. The largest Lutheran congregation in town, for example was about the same size as several other Lutheran congregations 20 years ago. Its dramatic growth as it moved into a new multi-million dollar building was impressive - almost as impressive as the decline in a couple of other Lutheran congregations. The size of the congregation nearly tripled while the number of total members of Lutheran congregations in the city declined.

Three different non-denominational congregations have held the title of the fastest-growing church in the city in the years I have lived here. All but the current record-holder hit the ceiling in therms of membership and stopped growing. One of those congregations experienced a split and is significantly smaller than it was a decade ago. Another seems to be experiencing a slow and steady decline.

There is plenty of volatility in church membership in our community.

In the midst of all of this, it is comforting to be involved in a congregation that has been the same size, plus or minus 15 members, for 60 years. And we are riding near the plus size of that range at the moment. We’re big enough to raise the volunteers we need to do our work. We’re big enough to pay our bills. And, fortunately, we are small enough to form close relationships and build community that lasts.

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's windy

Once again we can hear the wind howling outdoors. We’ve had several very windy days this week. It really isn’t that unusual for this part of the world and, for the most of my life I have lived in windy places. According to the National Weather Service strong northwest winds will continue throughout the morning hours with winds of 30 to 45 mph and gusts up to 65 mph. If I remember quickly it takes sustained winds of more than 40 mph or gusts over 60 mph for the weather service to issue a high wind warning. I guess we qualify.

I’ve experienced lots of windy days in my life. My home town, Big Timber, was noted for its high winds. Located on the east slope of the Rockies, the distance from the mountains was just right. The Yellowstone River acted like a funnel and winds channeled into the valley and accelerated as they moved downhill from Bozeman and Livingston. After all the wind farm project at Livingston was abandoned because the winds are simply too high. A common pastime for locals in my town was salvaging motorhomes, campers, trailers and even mobile homes that had blown off of the highways. There were plenty of them.

My father loved to study the weather and made several attempts to install functional weather stations in our community. The problem was that the anemometers (wind gauges) that were available at the time would blow apart and break at wind speeds of over 100 mph and we occasionally got a gust that did them in.

100 mph isn’t anything compared to the 253 mph wind that was recorded at Barrow Island, Australia. But then that wind was measured during Tropical Cyclone Olivia. In the US, the highest wind speed ever recorded was 231 mph at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. They had to design and build a custom, heated, anemometer to record the gust.

Tornadoes may have wind speeds that are higher than those, but so far, those winds are impossible to measure because of the spiraling effect. 302 is the highest wind speed ever measured in a tornado, but the particular technology used is notable for giving inaccurate readings, so there is some debate about what the real speed might be.

Having avoided tornadoes and cyclones in my life thus far and having no particular interest in being caught up in either of them, I have, however, experienced some high winds.

The published stall speed of a 150 hp Piper Super Cub is 43 mph with the flaps down. We could reliably sustain flight between 45 and 50 mph in our cubs. I have flown backwards in a Super Cub. All it takes is to turn into the wind when it is going faster than the stall speed of the cub. In really high wind, we could land the airplane with little or no roll out on the asphalt pad in front of the hanger. What we couldn’t do was taxi cross wind in the cubs.

I drove home from Chamberlain, SD, one day when the winds were so high that we saw two semi tractor-trailer rigs that had blown over on their sides. We had our old pop-up camper on our pickup and our gas mileage was down to 7.8 mpg at one point heading into the wind. We had slowed to under 50 mph to protect the camper. at 50 mph, a 75 mph wind gust on the nose of the truck makes the airspeed 125 over the top of the rig.

We designed a high wind tetrahedron kite when I was a kid. We used 1/2 inch oak dowels for rods and aircraft Dacron for the sails. The sides of the kite were 3 feet long. After experimenting with the basic kite, we made three more and joined them into a 9’ kite. It was an interesting concept and we did fly it a few times, but we didn’t weight enough to hold it down. On the day of our windiest trial, we had to wrap the nylon parachute cord we were using for flying line around the bumper of a car to hold it down. In lighter winds, the cord weighed too much for the kite to fly with more than about 50 yards of line out. The cord would eventually sag so much that it would touch the ground between us and the kite and the effective maximum altitude of the kite was reached. We never got to test it in the highest wind because we couldn’t figure out how to do so. I always believed that it would produce enough lift to pick me up off of the ground if the conditions were right,

But I know stories of the wind that exceed the reality.

I’ve probably told you about the days when it is so windy up along the North Dakota/South Dakota line that the wind blows the state line down south of Lemmon and the merchants have to charge North Dakota sales tax until the wind dies down.

The wind in my home town is so strong that the cattle build up the muscles on one side in order to be able to stand up in the wind. When you take them inside out of the wind they fall over because they don’t have wind to hold them up.

It’s so windy in my home town that people take buckets of sand outdoors and throw them up into the air. The process sandblasts their homes so they don’t have to scrape before painting.

It’s so windy that the firemen had to park the truck two blocks upwind to get the water on the fire.

It’s so windy that the flag pole in front of the Legion Building had to be mounted at a 45 degree angle so it would stand up straight in the wind.

It’s so windy in my home town that one day we drove down to Billings and arrived an hour before we left. Then when we got into the car to go home the speedometer went backwards.

It’s so windy that it raised whitecaps in the toilet.

It’s so windy that we could grab a chicken and hold it up and it would be plucked before we wrung its neck.

It’s so windy that the weather service asked me to stop preaching.

There are a thousand more, but something tells me I need to save some for another windy day. This probably isn’t our last.

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.

Religious Hostilities

The Pew Research Center is one of the largest and most reliable sources of information about the sociology of religion. Religious leaders have turned to the reports of the center for decades to get information about trends, data on growth and decline and other information. Recently, the Pew Center’s Religion and Public Life Project released its report of a major ongoing study of hostility toward religion around the world. The Center has now compiled information for six years and so has enough data to make some comparisons and detect some trends.

At first look, the news isn’t good. While government restrictions on religion stayed roughly the same over the study period, social hostilities toward religion have reached a six-year peak with no sign that they are diminishing.One third of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, compared with 20% in 2007. 74% of the world’s population live in areas where levels of religious hostility are high or very high. In general, places with more people have higher levels of religious hostility.

The most dramatic increases in hostility toward religion have occurred in the Middle Ease and North Africa. the 2010-2011 political uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring have contributed greatly towards hostilities shown toward religion. An earlier Pew study, released last summer, noted this trend.

There were also increases in religious hostilities in the Asia-Pacific region. China edged into the “high” category for the first time in 2012. North Korea, a country believed to have extreme government restrictions on religion, was not included in the study due to a lack of available data. One of the challenges of studying governmental restrictions of the practice of religion is that countries with the most extreme restrictions tend to also restrict the study of religion.

The Pew study uses two indices to study the level of hostility toward religion. The Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices. The Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. Of course researchers are aware that there are relationships between the two indices. Governmental policies and laws both reflect and influence social attitudes and actions. The study shows that levels of social religious hostility are higher than levels of government restriction.

There is no evidence that there is any decrease in hostility toward religion. Only about 4% of the world’s population enjoys the low levels of hostility that we take for granted here in the United States. Those low levels of hostility are most prevalent in the Americas. Most of the world’s people (76%) live where restrictions on the practice of religion are high or very high.

The use of violence or the threat of violence to compel people to adhere to religious norms is not restricted to any single religion. In Egypt, where the majority of the population is Muslim, attacks on Coptic Orthodox Christian churches and Christian-owned businesses are on the rise. In Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, monks attacked Muslim and Christian places of worship, including focally occupying mosques and churches and converting them to Buddhist temples.

Which religious groups are harassed generally follows the number of adherents the groups have. Christians and Muslims, who together comprise more than half of the global population, are most likely to be harassed for their beliefs, followed by Jews, Folk Religionists, Hindus and Buddhists. Jews, who comprise less than 1% of the world’s population suffer disproportionately, experiencing harassment in a total of 95 countries.

After reading a portion of the report, the bottom line appears to be clear. We don’t get along with people of other religions very well and in most areas of the world we aren’t getting better at living with those who have different faiths than our own. It is also clear from the report that the level of freedom from religious harassment we enjoy is a rare commodity.

Before we get to patting ourselves on the back, however, it is important to note that the United States was ranked by the study as having moderate levels of social hostilities toward religion. Our neighbors in Canada have low levels of social hostility. While we pride ourselves in the separation of church and state in our country, the study also notes moderate levels of government restrictions of religion in the United States - levels similar to Mexico and Columbia, but higher than the rest of North and South America. Because we Christians belong to the dominant religion in our country we sometimes are unaware that those who practice other religions experience harassment and governmental restrictions on the practice of their faith.

Like all major studies, this one is so packed with data and information that reading the summary doesn’t give enough information to draw conclusions. I will need a lot more time with the study to be able to absorb its meaning for the ways in which we practice our faith and reach out to our neighbors.

It is all food for thought as we continue to practice our faith. Occasionally I hear a colleague argue for more restrictions on the practice of religion in our country. On a relatively regular basis, I hear comments expressing hostility toward other faiths from within the ranks of American Christianity.

The Christian concept of evangelism at its historic roots is a simple process of observing, responding and telling. It does not require harassing, pressuring or converting others. But there are many instances of abuse of the concept. It is clear that we need to recover the root meanings of some of the core values of our faith. We do not need to impose our faith on anyone. The good news of the Gospel is that we best influence others by living the faith we have found.There are no shortcuts to living a life of faith and some attempts at shortcuts lead to violence.

It is clear that we still have much to learn.

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.

Contrasts

Ours is a nation of contrasts. Perhaps this is true of any place where human beings gather, but this is the country I know best. There are plenty of stark contrasts when you think of what is going on around us.

On the one hand, January 14th was National Dress Up Your Pet Day. It wasn’t a big celebration around our house. Our cat prefers her own coat to any external garnets and that’s OK with me. I have no intention of trying to squeeze that animal into some kind of costume. She is sharp at every turn and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind making me bloody were I to try to put her into clothing. But I guess that there are plenty of people who put costumes on their pets and took pictures to display on Instagram and other sites. My guess is that the day was more popular with dog owners than people who have fish for pets.

The next day, January 15 is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although the official celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. day isn’t until Monday in keeping with the pattern for national holiday recognitions, it made sense to at least think of Dr. King on his birthday. He is, of course, best known as a civil rights activist and events surrounding the recognition of the holiday focus on community service, working for justice and keeping alive the dream of a country that is not so racially divided. I remember that Dr. King was also a pastor. His work had its foundation in his call to serve the people of God in worship and pastoral care. His first honorary doctorate was awarded by the school where I earned mine. His passion for the Bible and theology were at the core of his work for justice.

You have to admit that there is a stark contrast between National Dress Up Your Pet Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

There are many other contrasts.

Last night the youth in our church were working with a contrast to which they have been drawing our attention for several years. On the one hand ours is the richest and most successful nation in the world. On the other hand an estimated 672,000 people sleep on the streets every night in our country because they have no home. Of the industrialized nations of the world, ours has the highest rate of child poverty. 15.9 million children live in food insecure households in our country. If you walk into any supermarket in our land you will be overwhelmed by the amount of food choices we have - the most choice of any nation in the world. And yet children in our communities go to bed hungry. Perhaps nowhere in the nation is that contrast more evident than in our corner of the world. Last week I visited partners on two different reservations and witnessed the stark contrast between rich and poor communities in relatively short distances.

The contrast of which our youth remind us every year, however, isn’t between the rich and the poor in our own community, but rather the contrast between the amount of food needed to feed hungry people and the amount of money spent on junk food in just one day. Last year over 108 million Americans watched the Super Bowl. Most of them did so surrounded by chips and dips and drinks and excessive amounts of finger foods. Each year newspapers devote more space to recipes for Super Bowl parties than to coverage of child hunger in our nation.

The youth in our church, joining with youth groups a lll around the nation simply want to remind us that a small adjustment in the formula could make a big difference. If everyone watching the Super Bowl would donate just $1, that would mean over 100 million dollars to feed hungry people. $1 per person wouldn’t make much of a dent in the mounds of snacks and appetizers, but it would make a huge difference in nutrition for hungry children.

Our youth challenge us to be aware of this contrast and to participate with them in doing something to make a change. Change starts with awareness. With the cost of running advertisements during the broadcast of the game, you can be sure that agencies serving homeless and hungry people won’t be putting their resources into that method of getting out the news. At $4 million per 30-second commercial, the companies behind Doritos and Bud Light will spend more money on a single game than the total operating budget of Church Response in Rapid City since its founding in 1972.

At our church we have embraced the contrast. We have worked for years to encourage fans of the game to make worship an integral part of the day. We do a lot of fun activities that acknowledge the big game and encourage those who watch to include prayer and scripture in their day as well as statistics and game clothing.

Once again the youth of the church will be standing at the door with soup pots to collect contributions to support local agencies that feed hungry people. While any size donation is gladly accepted, the emphasis is on small gifts - the kind of gifts the youth themselves will make. $1 per person can make a huge difference on Super Bowl Sunday.

We live in a nation of contrasts. The contrast between rich and poor is stark and real. This was also true in Jesus’ day. The disciples of Jesus have been following in his footsteps into the places of poverty and hunger for as long as the church has existed. The Gospels Matthew, Mark and John all report that Jesus once reminded his followers that poverty is not going to go away. “For you always have the poor with you,” he said.

The youth of our church are not asking us to fix all of the problems of the world. They aren’t asking us to end poverty.

They are, however, reminding us not to ignore this reality. They are asking us to be aware of those among us who have real needs.

Quite frankly, their reminder is the best part of Super Bowl Sunday for me.

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.

Tico Times

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I’ve been eagerly awaiting my first look at the computer this morning. The Tico Times has a whole new web site. They’ve been talking for months about the new web site that was coming. Like our church’s re-designed web site, launched last year, the Tico Times wanted their site to display well and be easy to read on smartphones as well as computers. The Tico Times is a name known to most gringos who visit Costa Rica. Since its founding in 1956, the Tico Times has been the best source for English language news of Costa Rica. Until just a few years ago, they were primarily a print newspaper. Then, in 2010, they re-designed and expanded their web site so that they became my go to place for Costa Rica News when I was out of the country. Not long afterward, the realities of the decline of print journalism and the costs of printing forced them to drop the print edition. I haven’t visited Costa Rica since the print edition disappeared, but I’m sure that it is different than the days when we would pick up a copy just for the opportunity to make connections in our own language in a place where you learn to dream in Spanish because that is the language the people use.

Costa Rica being Costa Rica, the old Tico Times web site was a bit clunky. The ads were awkward and pop-ups were annoying. Since the site is geared primarily to people from the United States who travel to Costa Rica for vacation, and a few who have second homes in Costa Rica or retire to the country, the ads were for products that don’t really interest me. I’m not planning to travel to Costa Rica for cosmetic dental surgery or luxury hotels or other products advertised on the site.

I do like to keep up with a bit of the news. The presidential election is heating up and it looks like it is possible that Jonny Araya might be able to win without a runoff. At least he has a healthy lead in the polls. The current president, Laura Chinchilla has not been the most popular president ever, but she has made a Costa Rica-sized splash on the international scene and been a strong promoter of Costa Rica in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

I guess that part of my heart is always in Costa Rica. Pastor Dorota Yucra is a colleague who serves the Community Christian Church of los Guido, our sister church. Our congregation has been involved with the Community Christian Church since 1988, but I didn’t meet Pastor Dorotea until 2001. I was able to visit her church in 01, 03, 05 and 07 and learned to respect her gentle but firm style of pastoral leadership in a situation that is very difficult.

Her ministry doesn’t work like mine. My salary is predictable, and sufficient to afford a home and reliable cars and regular trips to visit our children who live in different states. Dorotea discovered the depth of her call to the ministry after she was widowed and made the choice to travel with her family away from her native country to Costa Rica in search of ways to keep her family together and provide for them without the benefits of any savings or insurance or other support. If there is a glass ceiling in the United States, it must be a lot higher and be full of windows compared to the situation in Latin America where the macho culture devalues women and their contributions. It is a real struggle for a single mother simply to keep meals on the table all across Central America and Costa Rica seems to attract single mothers and their children as they seek an acceptable standard of living. There are plenty of forces in Costa Rica that threaten to drive families apart.

It hasn’t been an easy path for Dorotea. He children have struggled with marriage and divorce, employment and unemployment, and raising children in the country they have known as home with less than reliable resources. Dorotea has steadfastly worked to keep her family together. There have been more than a few tears over the events in her children’s lives. But there has never been any question that Dorotea was there for them all along.

Her congregation might be best described as quirky and unstable. People come and go. Sometimes you can’t tell if they are there for the worship or the free food. You become attached to individuals and invest in their future just to see them seduced away by predatory evangelical churches that report the number of baptisms to their USA-based funders without noting how many people are baptized over and over again. At least “until their souls become wrinkled” according to Pastor Dorotea.

In the midst of all of this Dorotea has sought to be attentive in her studies of the Bible, disciplined in her prayer, and faithful to bringing Christ to the people she serves in tangible ways.

Today’s coincidence is that the new web site for the Tico Times arrived on the day that our friends Chuck and Sybil Rounds are leaving for Costa Rica. They have faithfully traveled to Costa Rica for Vacation Bible School every year, strengthening the ties between the two congregations, getting to know the children and families of our sister church, and keeping open the lines of communication with Pastor Dorotea. I am really hoping that next year I’ll be going with them, but that remains to be seen. A year is too long to predict the future in Costa Rica, and I’ve never been good at predicting the future in the first place.

Of course part of my heart is with colleagues in England and Australia and South Africa and Canada and in other places around the world. Ours is a worldwide church and the people that we have grown to know and love serve God in many places.

So if you see me staring at pictures on my cell phone, it is likely that I’m scrolling through the stories about the new national police tourist security campaign; or the search for Costa Rica’s golden toad, once thought to be extinct, but which may have survived deep in the rainforest; or the horseback riders at the Palmares Festival; or the latest delay in getting the new bus routes up and running; or the rumors surrounding the giant shopping mall that may someday dominate the space between the airport and downtown.

My heart, however, isn’t in the Tico Times news from Costa Rica. It is in a tiny church with an attached parsonage where Dorotea is cooking rice and seasoning it with the stories of Jesus as she serves it to her hungry neighbors.

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.

Thinking about cancer

Sometimes the language we commonly use doesn’t work for us. This seems to be especially true when we use battle language to speak of illness and its treatment. Cancer is often described as a battle. People talk about winning against cancer and losing the fight. Strategies in the war against cancer include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The more I visit with those who live with cancer, however, the less appropriate that language seems.

Cancer is not an invasion by something that is foreign to the human body. Unlike an infection or a virus, which can be introduced from external sources, cancer is the body’s own cells. Through processes that are only partially understood, cells begin to divide and grow in an unregulated manner. Researchers can name many things that increase the risk of cancer, but they don’t know all of the dynamics of why some people develop cancer and others don’t. Most of us know the story of the person who smoked tobacco for a long period of time and lived a long life without contracting cancer. Although cancer occurs in people of all ages, the risk of cancer increases with age. And none of us can avoid getting older.

The problem with the battle language for this devastating disease is that the cancer is a part of the victim. Whenever we speak of cancer as the enemy, the distinction between the victim and the enemy doesn’t exist. To battle cancer is to battle oneself.

My experiences walking alongside those who have cancer have included many situations where the cancer was effectively treated and became a part of the story of a longer life. But I have also spent plenty of time with people whose cancers couldn’t be controlled and eventually became the cause of death. In both cases, the word “endure” comes to mind. People endure treatments with unpleasant side effects. They endure periods of nausea and discomfort. They endure loss of hair and changes in their physical appearance. They endure days of loss of energy and enthusiasm for the promise of the possibility of remission and in many cases cure.

I have been witness to great displays of human strength and power in the midst of dealing with disease. At the very moments when individuals feel the most powerless and the weakest, they can appear to be strong and inspirational to those of us who look on from the outside. Cancer may not be a battle, but it does bring out heroic behavior.

Another reason why war and battle language doesn’t work when talking about cancer is that those who die are not losers. It is my conviction that those whose lives are ended by the effects of cancer are often victors. They succeed in having lives that are not described by the word cancer. They discern meaning and leave an impact that reaches far beyond the particular disease with which they learned to live. Many cancer sufferers learn to accept and live with their cancers and continue to engage in meaningful living in the midst of the disease and its treatment.

It is hard not to think of cancer in our church community this year. We find ourselves in the presence of some people who have lived with the disease for long periods of time and whose bodies have become frail. We know that some with whom we just celebrated Christmas will not be physically present next Christmas.

Sunday morning when I placed my hand on the shoulder of a dear friend I could feel that he is just skin and bones. There simply isn’t much left of a man who was once muscular and powerful and could be intimidating. But make no mistake about it. I experience him as being as powerful as ever. His cheerful attitude and his caring presence demonstrate without a doubt that there is far more to his integrity and character than cancer. His best qualities are as clear and evident as they were a decade ago. In some ways they shine more brightly in the midst of the disease.

Yesterday afternoon we sat in the living room visiting with dear friends, one of whom has been told that there is no further treatment for cancer and that comfort care is the only medical intervention recommended. We were all aware that death is relatively close and will likely occur within the coming months. But cancer was hardly the focus of our visit. We had stories to tell and memories to share. We had pictures to share and the precious communion of food shared in love. As we got in our car to drive home I was thinking of the marvelous discussion in 1 Corinthians 15: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

Paul’s letters and on-going conversation with the people at Corinth took place in a society where death at younger ages was more common than in our society. On average, we live much longer. But we do not go on forever. Each one of us will one day face our own death. We cannot escape the death of those whom we love.

Accepting that reality does not erase life. In fact, it enhances life. Knowing that our time together in this life is limited makes it more precious. Knowing that time is short keeps us from wasting the time that we do have. We might have delayed our visit to our friends yesterday had we not been experiencing a sense that the timing is short. And had we not visited, we would have missed the richness of conversation, the generosity of spirit and the warmth of hospitality that so enrich our lives. It can be very helpful to be reminded that our time is precious and the decisions about how we invest that time are important.

So I prefer not to think of cancer as the enemy. It is a condition that is a part of life - a reality that is present in a world that is far from perfect, yet nonetheless deeply meaningful and rich with genuine experiences of love and community. Life does not need to be free from cancer to be triumphant.

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.

Angels

I don’t know if medieval scholars really discussed how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. Thomas discusses questions about angels ion Summa Theologica including, “Can several angels be in the same place?” These may have been hot topics in the lake 1200’s, but I suspect that such speculation has never drawn much of a popular following. Most of the time, when the Biblical narrative includes angels, the stories are about events that are unique in history.The angel who spoke of Joseph and Mary and the multitude of the heavenly host that attended the angel making the announcement to the shepherds are parts of stories of events that won’t be repeated. Visions of angels by John of Patmos in his famous revelation are parts of an experience that truly defies the power of language to express.

I have no special knowledge of angels. I don’t know how many can sit or dance on a pin. I don’t even know if their preferred dress is white as often depicted in European and American artwork or red as show in many paintings from Mexico and Central America. I have a hunch that the costumes we use for those playing the role of angels in Christmas pageants is not completely accurate. But then, I am suspicious about the preference of ancient shepherds for bath robes, too.

Here is what I do know: God’s message is often carried by simple folk who don’t seem to have wings to fly. I may not have seen an angel, but I know a fireman who gets off his shift and instead of heading home, first goes to deliver firewood to warm his neighbors. He might not ever say, “Do not be afraid, for behold I bring you glad tidings,” but his actions speak of the presence of Christ in the world.

I’ve looked at the tips of needles and the heads of pins without being able to count the number of members of the heavenly host. I don’t even know if they are sitting or dancing. But I do know a couple who spend their own money to travel to Costa Rica to volunteer in the Vacation Bible School of a tiny church on the eye of the city where children of displaced and dysfunctional families attend in part just to get the food that is dispense. They live an important message about God’s love that cannot be easily expressed in words.

I’m no expert in the color preferences for angel clothing, but I know a woman who faithfully comes to her church and tends its plants, who works behind the scenes to put up and take down banners to collate and fold newsletters and whose cheerful tone speaks of the love of God without any thought of recognition or reward. A good, faithful and cheerful servant is a blessing that carries a message from God every day.

I have no idea whether the angel Gabriel is best portrayed by a male or female actor, but I know a man who faithfully visits other church members, often taking a few homemade cookies and sometimes just taking the time to sit and listen and demonstrate the love of God and the support of the church to those who are not able to attend church. Sometimes he pays visits to people who are not the easiest people in the world to visit. Always he brings God’s message of universal welcome.

I can’t tell you whether all angels have perfect pitch or if some angel choruses have a tendency to go flat when singing without instrumental accompaniment, but I do know a man of very modest means who always finds a way to share whatever he has, be it a meal or warm clothing or the contents of his wallet when he encounters other people who have needs. His incredible generosity reflects God’s generosity and carries a message of salvation to people who don’t spend much time listening to sermons.

I can’t tell you for certain if demons are angels who have misbehaved or a different sort of character entirely. I do know, however, a couple who cheerfully give rides to church to a man who would not be able to attend if he didn’t get rides from volunteers. They work hard to help him make friends in the midst of the congregation and they even arrange for others to give rides when they have to travel and be away on a Sunday.

I’m a bit unclear on whether angels can change from being invisible to visible and then become invisible again. But I know a guy who spends most of his days off working on projects around the church. Without recognition, he cheerfully repairs broken items, checks the electrical system, adjusts doors and hinges and can be seen cutting firewood for others when it is below zero outdoors.

I don’t know if angels argue over who gets to play the trumpet and who has to tune the harps, but I know a dozen people who show up to help load trucks in response to a simple request from folks they’ve never met for a little more firewood to heat cold homes and supplement small budgets for home heat.

I don’t know if the angel who brought the ram to substitute at the near-sacrifice of Isaac bought, borrowed or stole the animal. I do know, however, a group of people who are working on Friday afternoons to make beautiful stained glass for a church that has none and they aren’t even members of that church.

I can’t tell you if Gabriel and Michael are brothers, or if God has an angel named Theodore (adored by God seems like a good name for an angel). I don’t know if angels generally are multilingual or if they prefer to speak Hebrew or Latin on their days off. But I do know a congregation that cares more about mission and outreach and serving others than about status and position.

There is no shortage of messengers of God in this world. And the ones I know are well-occupied serving others and don’t spend much of their time dancing on pins.

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.

Bullies and leaders

I am not qualified to provide more insight into the current scandal that is surrounding the administration of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. The basic story seems to be that Christy was angry with the mayor of Fort Lee for not having endorsed Christie’s re-election campaign. Or perhaps its wasn’t Christie, but some of his aides. It is unclear. What happened next was a series of e-mails. Someone in the port authority issued an order to close two lanes of a highly-traveled bridge, a huge traffic jam occurred, and the community of Fort Lee was snarled in traffic for days. They’ll be arguing about who knew what and who said what and who did what for months. Governor Christie held a news conference at which he announced the firing of one of his aides and declared that he felt betrayed by those who worked for him.

It is clear that there is a culture of bullying in American politics. Regardless of who is directly responsible for the scandal, regardless of what Governor Christie knew and when he knew it, someone thought that bullying and intimidation was the way to get to a political end. Then, when the scandal broke and the media surrounded the Governor, he responded with another act of bullying. Instead of examining the culture of an administration and asking how such a thing could happen, he found someone to blame, someone to fire, someone to get rid of. His reaction to the incident was a demonstration of his power. It was as if he was saying, “See, I can make this problem go away. I can fire people. I’m in charge.”

The model of politician as bully is demonstrated daily throughout the United States. Here in Rapid City we have a young and dynamic mayor. He has a reputation of getting to the bottom of things and not worrying about who gets hurt in the process. As a councilman he decided that there were problems at the city landfill. He made intimidating visits, threatened lawsuits and arrest and probed again and again. A company went bankrupt, one of its employees died by suicide, people went to trial and there were no convictions of criminal charges. Cases were thrown out of court for lack of evidence. The councilman got the headlines and was elected mayor. The company’s owners lost everything including their retirement savings. And the public doesn’t know the truth of what was going on. There is a general perception that someone was cheating, but no one knows who was cheating and how big the fraud really was.

Now that mayor has been working to pressure a developer and the developer’s backers to speed up the pace of a proposed $50 million project in downtown Rapid City. The city council voted unanimously to acknowledge the developer’s complaints and request that the Mayor “cease and desist” from contracting and questioning potential funding sources for the project. The Mayor has already declared that he doesn’t plan to back off one bit. The developers are uptight, the council is uptight, and the only way that the Mayor knows how to proceed is to display power. He has seen plenty of models of leadership by bullying. It has worked for him in the past. He intends to continue to use that style as he proceeds.

He, like a lot of other American politicians has never learned the difference between appropriate use of power and bullying. What he thinks is exercising the power of his office is seen by others as bullying pure and simple. You can bet that this mayor has further political aspirations. He can imagine himself as governor.

It is the use and abuse of power that is one of the reasons that we have to return again and again to the familiar stories of the Bible. Today is the day of the celebration of the baptism of Christ. In Matthew’s telling of the story, there is a simple exchange between Jesus and John. John doesn’t think it is appropriate for him to baptize Jesus. He understands power and he thinks of the heavenly order in earthly terms. He states that Jesus is above him, that Jesus should be baptizing him and not the other way around. He is uncomfortable with a disruption of the chain of command. He sees the power of God as coming from the top down. God is above Jesus and Jesus is above John and John is above the people that he baptizes.

Jesus doesn’t spend much time with John’s argument. “Let it be so for now.” he says and then plunges into the water - into the midst of humanity - into the lives of the people - into the common world where we live.

Jesus never engaged in power politics. His ways weren’t the way of the world.

There were plenty of people who had been praying for and preparing for the coming of the messiah for generations. They thought that the messiah would mean a return of political power to the religious authorities at Jerusalem. They thought and dreamed and wrote poems about a new political leader for Israel who would return Israel to a position of glory and power over all of the nations. They weren’t big fans of Roman oppression and prayed for the day when the tables would be turned and the Romans would have to take their orders from Jerusalem.

God sent the messiah. But the messiah didn’t play politics by the rules of the world. Instead Jesus plunged into the waters of humanity. Jesus stood alongside all of the other common people. He visited with the lowest and most marginalized in the community. He didn’t curry political favor. He didn’t work like a “take charge” “get ‘er done” kind of guy. He loved and cared and healed and walked alongside the poorest and most lowly of the people.

He was a servant to all.

The term “public servant” has fallen out of favor in politics. Politicians instead surround themselves with servants. They call them aides. They issue orders. They claim authority.

As John’s gospel says, “He came into the world, but the world did not know him. He came to his own people and his own people did nto recognize him.”

Suffering servants don’t win mayoral elections. They don’t get to live in the governor’s mansion.

But in the end they do more good for the world than the bullies.

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.

Retirement

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines retirement as “withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from active working life.” It falls short of defining retirement as the point where a person stops employment completely. There are a lot of different factors that can influence retirement, chief among them being physical illness and disability. The concept is quite a bit more complex in contemporary society.

To begin, retirement is a relatively recent idea. For most of the history of humans on this planet, life expectancies were relatively short. People reached adulthood and began doing the tasks required for survival. They continued those tasks until they died. In the event that a person was injured or had a severe illness resulting in a disability, the time until death was quite short. If they couldn’t gather food, they starved. End of story. Some communities developed capacity to care for those who couldn’t care for themselves, but those abilities were limited, especially for those living in harsh climates. The result was that when one became old and infirm, one soon died.

The rise of complex economies, where people work for wages and the wages are exchanged for commodities is a relatively recent development in human societies. The concept of retirement from work is even more recent. In the late 19th and 20th centuries the concept of retirement with support from the wider community was introduced. Pensions were created to provide income for retired persons. Wikipedia reports that Germany was the first country to introduce a standardized retirement in 1889.

After the Great Depression, the United States developed the Social Security Act to provide support to aging and disabled persons who are not able to work. I am not certain of the original intention of those who created the program, but I’m sure that their concepts and motivations were complex. The system we have in place now is a tax assessed against the wages of active workers that supports financial assistance to those who are no longer working. There is a portion of the system that supports those whose disabilities prevent them from earning a living wage and support for minor children of workers who die prematurely.

Retirement has another important function in the economy. It encourages experienced workers to move out of the work force and creates jobs for young people entering employment.

Our system in the United States functioned fairly well for one or two generations. After the Great Depression, those who were young adults received great financial support from the government in the form of generous GI benefits for those who served in World War II and a functioning Social Security system. Most of the World War II generation were able to retire between the ages of 62 and 65 and with the combined resources of personal savings, investment income and Social Security were able to live in reasonable comfort. Many of them lived 25 to 30 years beyond retirement.

It is still possible for people to retire, but the concept of universal retirement is being questioned in contemporary society. One of the factors is the high cost of health care and the reality that the vast majority of all health care consumption in our country is invested in end-of-life care. To put it simply, it is incredibly expensive to die in the United States today. The fear of high medical bills can be a big factor in retirement.

The design of the Social Security system did not take into account the rises and falls in population levels. Because the birth rate was high at the time that the system was established it assumed that the number of people actively working would always exceed the number of people who are retired. Throw in long life expectancy and mix that with a decrease in family size and the so called “Baby Boom” generation threatens to overwhelm and bankrupt the system.

Although you would hardly come to this conclusion by looking at the web sites devoted to retirement, money is only one of the factors involved in decisions about retirement. People work for income, to be sure, but they also work for a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of contributing to society and a way to remain actively engaged with others.

There are a lot of people who are “semi-retired” or “partially retired” these days. And age seems to be only one of the factors that go with the label “retired.” I have a neighbor who is in his mid-forties who introduces himself as retired from the United States Marie Corps. He considers himself to be retired only in the sense that he draws benefits earned from 20 years of military service. He is not interested in having no job at all. He plans to work for many more years before he stops working for a salary. Last night we were at dinner with friends, one of whom is in his early 50’s and is eagerly looking forward to retirement this spring. His financial circumstances are different from those of my neighbor, but it seems unlikely that the things he speaks most excitedly about right now - golfing trips, mountain bike adventures, and the like - will take up all of his time when he isn’t working for a salary. Other close friends retired at a comparatively early age and have developed a very full and busy life with a lot of volunteer activities and personally doing a lot of work that others might hire done. To describe any of these people as “not working” would be inaccurate. They may have figured out how to earn income from investments, live frugally off if savings, draw pensions from years of honorable service, or in other ways have a different financial situation than wage earners, but they continue to engage in meaningful work.

It is clear that we are moving toward a future where there is no single model of life for aging and elderly people. We have many options, including continuing employment beyond the traditional “age of retirement.” I suspect that our grandchildren will find a common age, such as 65, to be a foreign concept. People won’t think in terms of a standard age for the end of their employment.

In the meantime, I get letters every day urging me to plan for retirement. I am invited to pre-retirement seminars. I am urged to engage in retirement planning and recommit to retirement goals. I receive retirement money guides and no small amount of correspondence from people who believe they can manage my money better than I. And in the midst of all of this, I really don’t know what I am going to do. I am fortunate to be in a vocation were there is no “magic” to the age 65, and I belong to a generation whose health means that active employment can continue for many more years. I try to be responsible, but frankly, I am confused.

It is another opportunity to listen and pray carefully to discern God’s call.

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.

Takini

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The H.V. Johnson Lakota Cultural Center is operated by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. It is a unique building on highway 212 in Eagle Buitte, South Dakota. The main room has eight sides with a high ceiling with skylights in the center. Around the top of the room are murals that depict important scenes from history. Other murals show important cultural and religious traditions. We were there for a funeral yesterday and it didn’t seem appropriate for me to be taking pictures. My descriptions in words, however, fall far short of the powerful art of the murals. We were sitting across from the mural that depicted the massacre at Wounded Knee. At the bottom of the picture were the bodies in the snow, familiar to those who have studied the history and seen the few photographs that were taken after the killings. But instead of the sepia-toned images of the photographs, the mural depicted fresh, white snow without the mess of tracks and the litter of a community destroyed. Standing off to the left in the picture was a man who was translucent, with the background showing through his body. He had already entered the spirit world and was watching over the scene. About midway up the painting was a small line of silhouetted carts and walking people with a couple of horses.

What captured me about the mural, however, was the top half of the painting which depicted a winter sunset as only someone who had spent time looking at one could have painted. It was filled with blues and pinks and purples the way the sky in this country gets when it is cold in the winter.

The picture exudes the grief of the people. I don’t think you can look at it without grasping a little of the sorrow.

The journey of the first generation of the survivors of that terrible day led them north, away from Wounded Knee, away from Pine Ridge, and out of the sight of the Black Hills. I don’t know if that small band of survivors knew where they were going. North was generally the direction of Canada. They were headed to the Wakpa Waste Oyanke - the good rive reservation. Wakpa Waste seems like a much better name than the common name, Morequ. No matter, that band of survivors didn’t make it to the Wakpa Waste. They followed the Cheyenne River to a place not far from where Cherry Creek enters it and there they stopped traveling. They were exhausted. The were cold. The were so overwhelmed with grief that just putting one foot in front of the other seemed nearly impossible. It isn’t that easy keeping from freezing when all you have to keep your feet warm are strips torn from old blankets. And the reason to keep walking is hard to find when all you can think of is the grief of the loss of so many who have died.

They call the place where they stopped walking Takini.

Some translate that word “survivors.” Others say it means “barely surviving.” One wise elder told me it means “We’re still here.”

The mural seemed appropriate for the mood yesterday. We were there for Rosemarie’s funeral. She was only 42. She had spent her last Christmas in the hospital in and out of consciousness - mostly out of it. Her husband Leroy was not unfamiliar with grief. He had spent a Christmas season in the hospital before watching his mother as she came to the end of this life. Rose was well-acquainted with grief herself. She had known the death of her father, her grandparents, her sister, Leroy’s parents and three of her children.

Rose died the day before the anniversary of Wounded Knee. The riders were preparing for the annual trek from the place of the massacre to Takini.

Ever since that awful day in 1890, the community of the survivors has been too acquainted with grief. There have been too many illnesses and diseases, too many accidents, too many suicides, to many deaths.

It is a community that is well-acquainted with grief.

We observed the rites in full. The ministers offered their consolations and words of faith, the singers offered their songs. The congregation wound its way around the room for a last viewing and hugs and handshakes with the family. The casket was placed int he funeral coach and a meal was served. The give away proceeded with more hugs and tears. We got into our cars and made our way out to Green Grass for a brief committal service in the church before going up the hill to the cemetery. It wasn’t that cold at the cemetery, but the ground was icy and slippery from the bitter cold of days past. We could have been standing at Takini in the midst of the graves of loved ones with that beautiful view of the Moreau and the Missouri River breaks in the background. Prayers were said, the casket was lowered. No fancy vaults or lowering devices for this funeral. Just strong pall bearers who slid straps under the casket and lowered it into the ground. Just men with shovels who filled the grave with the semi-frozen dirt. We worked up a sweat in the cold afternoon.

And then it was time to go home.

I gave Leroy one more hug. “I’ve buried so many here,” he said. “I never thought that I would have to bury Rose.”

There are no words for moments like that.

It is another winter of grief for the descendants of generations of grief.

But as I stood their on the hilltop with tears freezing to my cheeks I noticed that from our vantage point the horizon is low. The picture is far more sky than earth. Like the mural in the cultural center, it is more about the world of the Spirit than the world of this life.

Maybe a bit of the true meaning of Takini is being revealed. The real story is not the story of a people with a tragic past as much as it is a story of a people with a future. We don’t turn and walk away from those who have died. Rather they support us as we reach for the sky. However painful the past, the future has not been taken from the people.

We did not need words for that moment because we know it is not the end of our story.

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.

Living with animals

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I grew up in a family with pets. We had several different dogs and quite a number of cats. I liked the pets we had as children. I don’t, however, remember every identifying myself as the sole owner of a pet. We had a cat, for example, who was clearly my brother’s cat. Everyone in the house knew that she and he belonged together. I don’t remember having a dog or cat that was exclusively mine. That knowledge doesn’t come as any kind of disappointment to me. I’m sure that I could haver claimed one of the pets as my own and that others wouldn’t have objected. I just never felt a need to do so.

Our family had mostly outdoor pets, though the cats and dogs were allowed inside of the house at least some of the time. On the other hand, we also had donkeys that knew their place was outdoors.

And then there were the chickens. Chicks were delivered by the post office in those days and in the spring the boxes of squeaking chicks were brought home. They started out in a stock tank lined with bedding and a heat lamp. As they grew they graduated to the chicken coop and were allowed to run outside when they matured to full size. I’ve heard people refer to organizations about which they aren’t particularly fond as “Chicken Sh__” outfits. Well, I know chicken sh__. I’ve scooped it, shoveled it, cleaned out the coops. I’ve spread it and tilled it into the ground. I’m not a big fan of chicken sh__.

Actually, I’m not a big fan of chickens in general, though I don’t mind eating them once someone else has raised them, nursed them through the various illnesses that affect fowl, fed them, cleaned up after them, butchered them and plucked them. I’ve butchered enough chickens to last a lifetime and I doubt that I will ever want to butcher a chicken again no matter how long I live.

I like pets. We have a cat that lives with us. She is amusing to watch, occasionally nicely cuddly, and has a quirky enough personality to make telling stories about her fun. I feed her and clean her litter box and make sure that she has a warm bed on cold nights. But I always refer to her as “our daughter’s cat.” It was our daughter who adopted her and brought her home. Even though our daughter has now grown up and moved out and lives in her own home, I still refer to the cat as belonging to her.

Both of our children have dogs that live in their homes. They are genuinely nice animals and I like both of the dogs very much. I am grateful for our daughter’s dog who is a great companion when her husband has to work at night. The dog gives our daughter confidence to come home to an empty house and to live in a rural location without fear. I love to watch our grandson with his dog. The pair have formed a special bond that is a joy to witness. But I have no particular need to have a dog.

I can’t imagine my sister without a dog. She has had a dog that was hers, generally a yellow lab, for most of her adult life. When one comes to the end of its life she mourns and then, before long, there is a new puppy in the house. It seems to fit, to be natural, and right. I, however, don’t seem to need to have an animal that is exclusively mine.

I guess I prefer to have animals as neighbors. I love to watch the deer in the yard and in the spring when the fawns are coming, I check eagerly for spots in the grass. I love it when the moms get confident enough to show off their fawns and I like to watch the fawns run and chase as they gain strength and confidence in their legs. There are some deer in our neighborhood that I recognize as individuals and I fret over the dangers of the road that runs behind our home.

Although I’m sure that “love” is too strong a word for turkeys, I don’t mind having them as neighbors. I guess there are a few too many similarities between turkeys and chickens for me to form emotional bonds with the birds, but I find myself taking pictures of them from time to time.

Yesterday there were about 20 turkeys and a half dozen deer in our back yard all at the same time. Our yard really isn’t that big. It seems rather nice to me that the critters have allowed us to move into their neighborhood and since we’ve lived here through several generations of the animals, I guess that they just take it for granted that we’ll be around. The deer hardly run at all when I go out into the yard, though the turkeys scatter and run about as if they’ve never seen a person before. Just look at the size of the brains on those birds. They’re all instinct and no memory.

There is a beaver at the lake that I can’t wait to go visit. He spends most of his time in the lodge with occasional swims under the ice these days, but as soon as the ice starts to go out of the lake in the spring, I’ll be there checking on him.

There is an osprey nest at Stockade Lake that I’m eager to check out as soon as spring arrives. I got to witness the chicks fledging in the early fall this year and it seems like such a good place for the birds that I am eagerly anticipating the eggs of next spring and the chicks of summer.

Still, I don’t seem to have the urge to own any animals. I’m happy with others being the owners. I like having animal neighbors. I’m lucky to live in this place that so many critters call home. It’s just that none of them seem like they are exclusively “mine.” That’s OK by me.

If you happen to want a turkey, we’ve got plenty to share.

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.

Our crazy world

The other day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that has been around for many years. It said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you.” Maybe others don’t react to bumper stickers the way I do, but I see a lot of bumper stickers that are senseless or that make me wonder about the thoughts of the person who put them on the car. On the surface, the sticker is just a bit silly. The more I thought about it, however, the more I felt like telling someone what I thought. And you, readers, are the recipients of my rant which I am sure holds no interest for the person who put the bumper sticker on the car.

First of all, the statement is factually untrue. Paranoia is an irrational fear where no real danger exists. So if a person is paranoid it actually does mean that “they aren’t out to get you.” If there is a real danger, then the fear isn’t irrational.

More importantly, paranoia isn’t a joke. It is a serious mental illness that is very difficult to accurately diagnose and for which treatment is difficult and often involves medicines with nasty side effects. People who suffer from paranoia experience disruptions of their social lives, loss of ability to work and income, and untold amounts of suffering. The bumper sticker might have seemed funny to someone, but it isn’t funny to those who suffer from the illness or those whose lives are disrupted by the illness of their loved one.

Ranting aside, here is a story that I heard years ago. I can confirm it by Wikipedia, but don’t have all of the details. It seems that Guglielmo Marconi, often credited with the invention of the radio, conducted pioneering work in the development of long-distance radio transmission. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinard Braun “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.” He went on to found The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in Britain and made a commercial success of his inventions.

Marconi started his experiments at an early age and had trouble raising funds to purchase materials for his inventions. Once he had devices capable of carrying signals over hills and at distances greater than a mile, he needed additional funding to develop a device that would span even great distances. He wrote to the ministry of Post and Telegraphs, which was under the direction of Pietro Lacava. In the letter he explained his wireless telegraph machine and asked for funding. The letter was never answered. Later it was discovered that the minister had written “to the Longara” on the document. “To the Longara” was a reference to the insane asylum on via delia Lungara in Rome. In other words the minister thought that Marconi was crazy.

Real breakthroughs in human thinking are often that way. They are so filled with imagination that they challenge the old ways of thinking about the world. They challenge old visions of the nature of reality. In a way, you can understand Lacava. After all Marconi was claiming that he was sending and receiving signals without wires. The idea did sound extreme at the time. It was something that was generally considered to be impossible.

And yet, I’m using a wireless keyboard to type these words and a wireless modem to upload them to the Internet. Most readers will use wireless devices to read the words. Today we take Marconi’s ideas for granted and don’t question his sanity. It is just the way our world works.

Consider, however, for a moment, if Lacava was right. I’m not asking you to think about what might have happened had someone put Marconi in an asylum and his ideas been suppressed. It would only have been a short time before someone else discovered those ideas and continued the work. After all, Braun was conducting similar experiments at roughly the same time as Marconi.

Instead, think for just a moment about the possibility that the minister was right and the idea really is crazy. That would mean that we live in a crazy world. That it is crazy for someone to build a computer with built-in wireless capabilities and support for multiple operating systems that fits on a single SD card, about the size of a postage stamp. That is what the Intel Edison Quark mini computer that was released at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is. It is crazy, really.

Consider some of the other crazy inventions that were announced at the show: The Goji smart lock reads fingerprints to allow access. It also takes photos and sends them to the smartphone of the owner if someone attempts to activate the lock. There was a bit of confusion about who had the largest TV. Samsung introduced their 105-inch curved TV, vision showed off a 120 inch TV (that’s 6 feet by 9 feet!). You might think that it is crazy to think that anyone might pay $152,000 for a television. It’s crazy!

Hyundai was sporting a collaboration with Google Glass that allows people to access information about their car to be displayed on their eyeglasses. There is an all electric Formula 1 Race car is capable of reaching 110 kph in less than three seconds. It’s crazy!

There is a heart monitor that sends signals to your smart phone, from which you can forward the information to the smart phone of your cardiologist to review so the good doctor doesn’t have to actually be in the same place as the patient. How about a harness with 17 body and head sensors each containing a magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer to translate body motion into action by gaming characters. The person wearing this harness can control the motions of characters on the screen. How about an electric toothbrush that analyzes your habits and reports on your smart phone where you are brushing adequately and where you might need a little extra attention. That information can be forwarded wirelessly to your dentist. It’s crazy!

There are robot toys controlled by phones, a crock pot that you can monitor and control with your phone, and arial photography drones just in case you want to take pictures of your neighbors from the sky. There are wearable cameras, solar chargers for phones and televisions that double as computers. It’s crazy!

The more I think about it, that minister might have been right. Marconi was crazy and his discoveries have launched us into a crazy world.

Then again, I may just be getting a little paranoid.

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.

Time

January is a busy month for us. There are some year-end reports that need to be made to keep the business side of the church flowing and our congregation has its annual meeting at the end of the month. The annual meeting means annual reports, which is the biggest print and on-line document we produce each year. Our annual reports usually run over 30 pages and we put a lot of work into the reports to make them visually appealing and easy for members to find the information that they want. I believe that visual appearance is important. Annual reports aren’t exactly “first impression” documents. Visitors and guests rarely ask for a copy. But they are a statement of who we are at a particular moment in our history. When I first became minister of this congregation, I went through past annual reports to get a flavor of the congregation and to get a sense of possible new directions for the future. Looking through past reports gives a thumbnail sketch of the progress that has been made.

Sometimes it feels as if things aren’t changing very quickly. However, looking through the stack of annual reports reveals that a lot has happened.

Another reason that January feels busy to us is that we shift gears and emphasis from the Christmas season. Epiphany seems like it might flow naturally from Christmas, but behind the scenes there is a lot of taking down decorations, storing candles, putting away figures, figuring out what to do with leftover poinsettias and such. The team of dedicated volunteers at the church usually makes light work of these chores, but there is a certain level of organization that is required.

And then there is the weather.

You don’t need another blog post about the weather. However, the recent “Polar Vortex” that has been making news across the U.S. is a good example. The truth is that it never really got all that cold. Except for people suffering from illness or those for whom mobility is a challenge, there was no need to limit many activities. Dress warmly and head out. But the news made the storm sound much more dangerous and threatening than the reality. So people stayed home. Attendance at church last Sunday was one of the lowest that I can remember. I don’t blame folks for staying home. It is just one of the realities of living where we do - it is more challenging to plan events and activities when you don’t know how many people will attend.

Cold weather can make things take a bit more time, as well. Shoveling snow, chipping ice off of windshields and other activities mean that getting from one place to another simply takes more time. Just layering up with coats and hats and gloves takes more time.

And our business is always the business of interruptions. A phone call from someone who just needs to talk is important. Special events like funerals often cannot be predicted. We don’t know in advance what new challenges and opportunities will be put in front of us. I am often asked, when giving a reference for a colleague, about organizational styles. Pastoral search committees often think that their position requires the pastor to be very organized to balance the myriad of tasks that are before the pastor. I suppose that organization skills are important, but the truth is that there are too many factors that can’t be controlled for anyone to be truly organized. A far more helpful question, it seems to me, is, “How does this person deal with disorder and chaos?” I can plan in advance to do my exegesis and scripture study first thing Wednesday morning, but all it takes is a phone call from someone with a family member in the hospital or a funeral to mean that I have to find another time for that chore. I can say that I will keep office hours at a particular time on a particular day, but the number of hours in the office has to be balanced with the need for me to be engaged in ministry in many other locations. The need to juggle many different challenges at the same time isn’t unique to the pastoral ministry, but it is very real in our vocation.

The good news is that boredom is a foreign concept in the kind of life that I live. There are always more things to be done than there is time to ge them done. When I have a few spare moments, there are always multiple things that can occupy the time.

The challenge is that there are too many things that have to do with quality and life and quality of ministry that cannot be measured in time. Genuine prayer is not a slave to the clock. I don’t know how many conversations I have had with members of the congregation about the length of quiet prayers in our public worship services. Sometimes it seems too short for our people. Sometimes it seems too long. The truth is that if I am paying attention to the time, I’m not really praying. Being distracted by the clock detracts from the focus that is needed for genuine prayer. The same could be said for many other aspects of the ministry. How long or short should an ideal hospital visit be? While I am absolutely convinced that quality is more important than quantity when visiting people struggling with illness, each situation is different. One of the most important factors is how much I pay attention to the other person. If I am in tune with their feelings, I will know when it is time for me to make my exit and leave them to the business of recovery.

People ask me, “How long does it take you to prepare a sermon?” The amount of time varies greatly depending upon the particular text and what is going on in our community at the time. Sometimes I struggle and struggle with a text and never feel that my sermon is finished, but we have to go ahead anyway because the time of worship has arrived. Sometimes I feel confident that I have a very strong sermon and it doesn’t require much time beyond the middle of the week. I sometimes wish that I could predict how much time I would need to prepare, but it just doesn’t work that way.

The concept of time is worthy of several essays that have yet to be written. I think it was Einstein who said, “Time is an illusion.” He might have been right.

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.

Cold

I suspect that it is little consolation for some folks, but so far it simply hasn’t gotten as cold around here as has been forecast. This morning it is about 11 below zero here at our house. But there is no wind. It probably felt colder yesterday when temperatures hovered around zero and the wind was blowing.

A quick scan of the weather map shows that it is cold across much of the US. The polar air that has been trapped in Northern Canada for weeks has now moved south and pretty much covers the US except for the extreme southeast. I suppose that people in San Diego think it is cold with overnight lows hovering in the mid 50’s, but I’m not sure that folks in Duluth, Minnesota are that worried at 29 below. Much of North Dakota is reporting temperatures in the -20 range.

This blast is expected to be relatively short-lived. Because the dense air is so widely disbursed it will move rather quickly off to the east and the air will warm as it crosses the Atlantic. The forecast for Rapid City looks for highs in the teens today, thirties tomorrow and forties by the end of the week.

I’ve lived my entire life in cold weather country. Montana, Chicago, North Dakota, Idaho and South Dakota are all places where the weather can turn severe and cold temperatures are not unknown. I an my three younger brothers all had paper routes and so we learned how to get up, get dressed and prepare for the weather. The paper we delivered, the Billings Gazette, recommended that paper routes be about 60 customers each. I quickly found out that I could handle two routes and our enterprise grew to about 150 customers. Sometimes I delivered all of those papers alone. Sometimes I had one or more brothers to help. We had “rules” about the weather.

Anything above 50 degrees meant that you could leave your jacket at home unless it was raining. Keep moving and you won’t get cold. From 50 to 20 a light jacket will do. If you keep moving and working, you probably don’t need gloves, but it is good to have a pair of cotton gloves in your pocket or paper bag for riding your bike, especially if the wind is blowing. At 20 degrees it is about time to switch to your winter coat and you’ll need gloves all the time. By 10 degrees you should be wearing long underwear and you might want to consider switching from gloves to mittens. You can’t use your pliers with mittens and even folding the papers is a pain, but once you’ve got them folded, you can learn to get them to the doorstep with mittens. At zero degrees we wore our overshoes even if there was no snow for the extra layer of insulation. We wore double layered mittens with wool liners and leather outers. A wool scarf was a good addition, as it could be pulled up over the face as needed without icing up your glasses. When the temperature made it down to -20 you added another layer of caution. Things started to break. We generally didn’t ride our bikes at -20 or colder because they didn’t seem to save us that much time with chains tightening on sprockets and bearings being stiff. Most of the time if it was colder than -20 our father could be talked into helping us with the car, at least to shuttle the bundles of papers and reach the farthest customers. We’d take two blocks worth of papers and then switch off in the car with another brother who would take the next two blocks.

We didn’t get that much weather that was -30 and when we did it rarely lasted for more than a few days. You can feel the difference between -20 and -30. At -30 you need to wear a full face mask and make sure that you don’t have any exposed skin. Borrowing a pair of overshoes that are too big for you and stuffing them with newspapers helps with the cold feet at -30. As I became a teen Mickey boots became available from military surplus stores. I don’t know how cold those will go, but I’ve never had cold feet when wearing the big white boots. But they are heavy and they slow you down.

So from my experience here is something that I know. It is weird to drive on wet pavement when the temperatures hover near zero. But that is what it is like in Rapid City. The main defense against ice in this town is chemicals. The intersections are so heavily salted that they remain wet. Had they not put all of that salt on the road, it would plow easily in the cold temperatures. I was able to shovel even snow compacted by the cars in my driveway yesterday because the cold snow doesn’t stick as much as when the snow is warmer. And drivers who have become accustomed to the city keeping the ice off of the streets need to be wary. Another ten degrees that wet pavement turns into a greasy slush that lengthens stopping times and makes it difficult to steer.

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Here’s how you’d expect the roads to look when it is zero degrees.

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Here’s how the streets looked in Rapid City at -4 yesterday.

At -20 even unplowed snow gives more traction than the chemically treated goo that ends up in the intersections around town. Actually it isn’t that hard to drive on snow. There’s quite a bit of traction if it isn’t too deep. Compacted snow is a reasonable surface for speeds below 40 or so. And you can drive at near normal speeds on ribbon ice as long as you have good visibility and there are strips of dry pavement. For the most part, sand is an effective treatment for ice on roads.

But our city engineers prefer a slurry of potassium chloride that can be sprayed from the back of the trucks. There are plenty of arguments about costs and benefits, but no one seems to be taking in the costs of damage to vehicles, pavement and surrounding vegetation when estimating the cost of treating the roads.

We’re not going to see -20 from this weather system, however. We’ll leave that for our northern brothers and sisters.

Still, I’m glad I don’t have to deliver papers this morning.

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.

On unrelated topics

You might have missed it, but yesterday here was a great race event in Rapid City. The Extreme Indoor Enduro was held at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. The arena was filled with trees, rocks and logs - all kinds of obstacles similar to what one might find out in the woods. The course was prepared for special four-wheelers to race at breakneck speed. It probably was interesting. But the main event was the opening. Before the main event with the motorized (and noisy) off road vehicles, the crowd was warmed up with heats of 2- to 5-year-olds on their Strider bikes. Striders were developed by Rapid City entrepreneurs. They are small bikes without pedals that teach children as young as 18 months to balance a bike and have a whole lot of human-powered fun. If you haven’t seen a preschooler on a Strider bike, you’ll be amazed at how fast they go. I didn’t make it down to the civic center. Actually, I’m not that interested in the racing 4-wheelers, but it probably was worth the price of admission to watch the preschoolers on their striders.

In other news . . .

The Battle of Enfarinats has concluded in Ibi, Spain. It is an annual festival just after Christmas that is a bit hard for outsiders to understand. The battle takes place between two groups: group of married men called Eis Enfrainats - who take control of the village for one day, pronouncing ridiculous laws and firing those who infringe them - and a group called La Oposicio, whose members try to restore order. The battle soon erupts into the streets where exchanges of firecrackers, flour, and eggs contribute to the general messiness an mayhem. I guess you have to be from Ibi to understand the nuances of the battle. Presumably by now the combatants have all had a chance for a shower and the money collected from the fines has been donated to charity. Order has been restored . . . until next year.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Hogmanay new year celebration in Edinburgh attracted people from more than 60 countries. I suppose there is some attraction to seeing a torchlight parade at night. But to my eyes, the outfits those Scotts wear are ridiculous. I guess I just prefer to wear trousers. And no, I don’t care what they wear underneath their kilts.

The Hubble Space Telescope continues to return amazing images to the earth. One of the newest images is of spiral galaxy ESO 373-8, located some 25 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy began life as a huge ball of slowly roaring gas. Collapsing in upon itself, it spun faster and faster, until a disc started to form. It is appropriate to use the past tense, since it took 25 million years for the light from the galaxy to travel to where the space telescope could capture it and make an image.

And the weather has been making news.

There was enough snow in Mexico last week to prompt the evacuation of the Nevado de Colima National Park in Zapotitan de Vadilo. Three days of snowfall is fairly unusual in Mexico and the sticky stuff piled up more than a foot deep.

It is snowy and cold all across the northern hemisphere, something that shouldn’t be a surprise, but folks around here are bracing for record cold during the first part of the week. A funeral that we plan to attend scheduled for Tuesday in Eagle Butte has been moved to Thursday. Forecasters say that the temperatures should be much warmer by the end of the week.

Folks in Chicago are bracing for record cold after getting mostly dug out from the blizzard that struck the city at the end of last week. The snowfall hit a wide swath from Chicago to the east coast. Arctic cold will follow this week to keep the weather in the headlines across much of the United States.

It isn’t as cold as was predicted for our town this morning, but the temperature is hovering near zero here at the house. I’m sure that the cold will keep some indoors, and I hope that people use common sense and realize that there is danger out there. On the other hand, we’ll be holding church as usual this morning. Although it is a day early, we are celebrating the festival of Epiphany, a great time of fun and games with actors playing the part of the wise men from the east and the “evil” King Herod. There are special treats for the children and fun for all as we celebrate.

Chances are that attendance at church will be light. People are still in a bit of a holiday mood, many attended extra services to celebrate Christmas, and the cold is a special threat to those who are suffering from other health conditions.

Cold didn’t often keep people away from church during the years that we lived and served in North Dakota. In fact, we used to say that 30 below raised church attendance. People didn’t want their neighbors to think that they couldn’t start their pickup trucks. Those who missed church because feeding cattle took longer in the cold weather almost always made it for the coffee hour following worship. Another thing that they say in North Dakota is that 30 below keeps the crime rate low. That’s a good thing, too, because a fair number of those folks who got their cars started in the frigid temperatures would leave them idling outside during the entire worship service. It is a bit hard for me to remember the days before cars had fuel injection, but we used a lot of little bottles of additive to keep moisture in fuel lines from freezing and we had plug-in head bolt heaters on our car. One winter, I kept taking the battery out of the car and bringing it inside the house just to keep it warm enough to power the extra cranking required to get the car going.

So stay warm and take lots of extra clothing when you head out.

But rest assured, church will be open as usual. It’s not THAT cold.

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.

Calendars

1986 was the second year that we lived in Boise, Idaho. Our son, Isaac attended Boise Cooperative Preschool for the first half of the year and began Kindergarten at the school near our house in the fall. Our daughter, Rachel was eager to begin at the preschool in the fall. I was working hard to expand youth ministries at our church with the Western Regional Youth event on the schedule for the summer. The plan was for youth from the Portland, Oregon area to take the train to Boise where our youth would join them for a ride to Denver where we would switch to vans for the shuttle out to the camp. I hiked the Barr trail up Pike’s Peak with youth from around the Western United States that summer and learned a little bit about the treatment of altitude sickness as I helped a young man from Hawaii who probably would have been much happier had he chosen another one of the options for that day. There were a lot of other events and milestones that day, and I’d have to do some checking to think of what else we did that year.

That year began with the Challenger disaster. Images of the exploding rocket and spaceship were forever etched into our minds as we watched the footage in horror over and over again on the television. Seven astronauts dead. One of them was Christa McAuliffe, the teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. We had been following the teacher in space program closely in part because Barbara Morgan, a teacher from Idaho was the backup for McAuliffe. Morgan went on to become a mission specialist, but it was six years before she made her trip on the Endeavor and several more years before the teacher in space program was back on track.

1986 was a year with a fair amount of political turmoil. Haitian President Jean-Claude Duvalier ended up fleeing to France in February. Shortly afterward President Ferdinand Marcos left the Philippines and Corazon Aquiino became president. The world marveled at the size of the shoe collection that Imelda Marcos left behind. The excesses of the president and his family make headlines day after day.

The Chernobyl power station disaster in Russia made the headlines in the US. Later we learned that the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory worked hard running simulations and providing possible solutions for the their colleagues in Russia.

The reason I’ve been thinking about 1986 is that I caught a news item in the Daily Mail about 1986 calendars selling like hotcakes on the Internet. If you happen to have saved a calendar from that year, this might the the right time to get it out and list it on e-bay. The reason those calendars are hot this year is that the days of the week line up perfectly with 2014. New Year’s Day 1986 was a Wednesday and Christmas landed on a Thursday. According to the story in the Mail, a 1986 Baywatch calendar went for $50. The Hulk Hogan calendar only brought $22, however, so you might not want to base your entire financial future on selling old calendars if all you have is a Teddy Bear Collection calendar. On the other hand, I’d hold out for at least $100 if I had kept the Pirelli tire wall calendar from our shop. The company’s 2014 calendar is a blast from the past and features the same black and white photographs that they printed in 1986. The John Deere calendar for 1986 sported a really small Deere logo and 12 gorgeous landscape pictures with the words, “The Beautiful Land Around Us.” The 1980’s weren’t good years for farmers or farm machinery dealers. Deere and Cat were the only major manufacturers of farm equipment that didn’t suffer at least partial bankruptcy in that decade.

Alas, I don’t have any of those calendars from 1986. And I don’t think that anyone is going to get rich selling 1986 calendars this year. After all calendars from 1997 and 2003 will also work this year. They all will work in 2025, too, if you want to plan ahead.

Having said that, the calendars just won’t work for me. Even though the days of the week line up correctly, the formal by which Easter is determined isn’t as simple. In 1986, Easter was March 30, but this year we’ll be observing it on April 20. The 1997 calendar won’t work for Easter, either, but you could have used the 1986 calendar that year. If you want Easter to line up on your calendar and want to re-use an old calendar, go for 2003 in 2014. Easter was April 20 in 2003 and will be April 20 this year.

If it all sounds confusing, it is probably because it is. In the church we have a tradition that dates at least back to the 2nd Century about what day to celebrate Easter. Since the Bible is clear in stating that Jesus death occurred sometime around the Passover, which is celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox, some Christians began celebrating Easter on Passover. Others felt that it was important to celebrate the resurrection on a Sunday so they celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Well, that is except for the Quartodecimans, who celebrated Easter on the day of the full moon, 14 days into the month. So we hardly had agreement about the date of the celebration in the early church.

Then came Pope Gregory, who decided that the calendar was getting messed up. The failure to include leap years and so the calendar wouldn’t keep aligned with the seasons. Gregory instituted a new calendar to replace the old Julian calendar. In the Great Schism, the eastern churches stayed with the Julian calendar and the western churches went with the Gregorian. We’ve been celebrating Easter on different days ever since. These days folks from the Eastern Orthodox church transfer the dates from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar so that the rest of the calendar lines up, with only Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter being aligned differently.

To avoid confusion, I’m just using a 2014 calendar this year.

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.

Money

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We think about money a little bit at this time of the year. We have a budget to develop for our church that will go to the congregation at its annual meeting at the end of the month. The annual budget will be modest when compared to most businesses. We’ll have a financial plan just a little over $300,000 for operations. There are additional special mission projects and capital funds that raise the total significantly, but we handle well less than one million dollars each year.

Compared to most other organizations, our church budget is very simple. We have no debt. We pay no interest. We operate as a cash business, which means that we operate the church on the amount that people give each year. When gifts go up, we have more to spend. When gifts go down, we have less. People are amazingly generous. I’ve only experienced one downward year in my career as a pastor and that was 2009, after the majority of our families experienced losses in 2008. It is a tad more challenging that it might first appear because most of our budget is invested in people. Adjusting salaries downward is a real challenge and our staff is so small that layoffs would be traumatic.

The core business of the church, however, isn’t money. Even though we invest energy in making our financial plans as accurate as we are able, the election of officers is more critical to the shape of the year to come than the budget. Who we elect to monitor our expenses and income and to make the decisions in the month-to-month operation of our church is far more important than how well we are able to predict income.

Elections and budgets are opportunities to express our faith. When we are faithful to God’s call, the resources to do our work will be provided. That does not mean that we won’t have to worry about money, but that the money we have will go to the things that are most important when we proceed with faith. It has been my experience that God is less interested in institutional maintenance and more interested in mission and outreach than we might expect.

Being an employee of the church and caring deeply about its work, I, like many others, invest heavily in the church. I think that it is typical for leaders of organizations to invest heavily in their enterprises. The richest man in America, Bill Gates, has wealth that came from the company he held, Microsoft.

Other than a fair salary, I am not expecting any financial rewards from my investments in the church.

As a result, I prefer to paddle homemade canoes rather than cruise in luxury yachts. It fits into my lifestyle much better. I do, however, read articles about yachts in magazines and I follow the yachting news a little bit because of my interest in boats generally. So I did pay attention when Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup. It certainly didn’t seem like the team was going to bring home the cup this year. They were behind 8 to 1. That meant that they had to win seven straight races just to tie and then an eighth in a row to win. The competition, New Zealand, seemed to have an advantage in tacks that were close to the wind. The big catamaran wasn’t doing well upwind. New Zealand was running as much as a knot and a half faster, which is significant in boats with 45 knot top speeds.

But they started to win. And they won again and again and then they were tied and the final race looked to be a real nail-biter. In the end it wasn’t even too close. The victory was convincing. It still is exciting to watch the races on YouTube.

The owner of the American team’s boat, Larry Ellison, wasn’t on board the boat. He was watching the races from his luxury motor yacht Musashi. I suppose that that particular boat was also a rather expensive purchase. No worries, Ellison can afford it.

Let me put it in a little perspective. The winning team was Oracle Team USA. The name Oracle is the name of Ellison’s software company, and Ellison was the sponsor of the team. Their opponents, Emirates Team New Zealand, while representing the country of new Zealand, was sponsored by the richest country in the world. Neither team seemed to have significant problems raising the cash for the race.

Larry Ellison isn’t the richest person in America. With a net worth estimated at 41 billion, he falls well behind Warren Buffet ($58.5 billion) and even farther behind Bill Gates ($72 billion). These people play ball in a league that is significantly different that the world in which I live. According to Forbes, Warren Buffet, for example, lost $530.88 million yesterday alone. Not that you should worry. He’ll make it up in days to come. It is just that he handles far more each day than our church handles in a decade.

Ernie Cassiday, a Canadian who plays with boats that are more in my league than Ellison’s explained it this way: “Let’s say I came to like you a whole lot, decided to give you one dollar per second and kept giving you one dollar per second indefinitely. [Don’t get distracted by reality. Cassiday doesn’t have enough money to give it away at that rate, no matter how much he might come to like you.] At that rate you would be receiving a handsome $86,400 per day. You would be a millionaire in no more than 12 days and by the end of the first year you would have accumulated $31,536,000. At this rate how long would it take for me to turn you into a billionaire? It would take another 31 years!

Of course Ellison isn’t just a billionaire. He is worth 41 billion. He can afford any boat he wants to buy and a crew to sail it well.

I sincerely hope that Ellison has a church where he feels at home and where he experiences Christian community, but, frankly, I am glad that he isn’t a member of the church I serve. I clearly am not capable of even understanding his world, let alone serving those who live there. It would be OK to stop by his yacht to toast the America’s Cup victory, though I probably don’t own the right clothes for such an event, but how do you console a guy that lost $487.79 million dollars yesterday?

It might not be as hard as it appears. He doesn’t seem worried.

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.

Messing about

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Years ago, after a wonderful summer water sports camp that involved, in part, loading canoes onto a trailer over and over again to facilitate small group activities of campers, loading and unloading sailboards and sail boats and a lot of other activities, I woke up one morning with muscle spasms in my back. Having never experienced anything like that before, I felt like a character in a sitcom or a cartoon. I was on the floor of the bedroom and couldn’t figure out how to stand up without excruciating pain. A quick call to our family doctor resulted in a prescription for muscle relaxants and a pain medication. My wife picked up the medicine and I took a single dose of each and crawled into bed.

About 20 hours later I woke up with the vague notion that perhaps the dosage on the medicine had been a bit off. I didn’t feel a need to take any more of the pills and just struggled through a couple of months of recovery with an occasional aspirin. I learned to sit properly and to be very careful about how I lifted things. Once healed, the condition didn’t return for several years. I forgot what I did that set it off again, but I ended up in the clinic and after x rays revealed that there were no structural problems ini my spine there was another prescription, this time for a lower dose of the medicines.

More years passed with an occasional flare up of the problem until one year I obtained a prescription for some physical therapy. It was wonderful! The therapist taught me how to exercise the muscle without causing damage and I learned exercises to strengthen my back. These days, when I feel a twinge in my back I have learned to stop whatever I was doing that was aggravating the condition and do my exercises. The days of back pain sending me to bed seem to be over.

When conditions get icy, I need to be careful to shovel our driveway standing in the same direction as the slope. When I try to shovel sideways the twisting motion is not good for my back. We’ve had plenty of ice this year and I’ve felt the twinge. So I’ve tried to be diligent in my exercises.

Rowing is one thing that I am able to do to strengthen those muscles and avoid discomfort. I have a wonderful rowing machine in my basement. Whereas other machines use rubber straps or hydraulic cylinders to create resistance, this machine has a tank of water with a large paddle that goes around in the water. Along with just the right amount of resistance, I get that soothing water sound. The machine has a comfortable sliding seat and rocking foot braces to keep my body straightly aligned as I row.

I don’t have a sliding seat in my boat, but the motion is not that dissimilar to using the sliding seat. People who haven’t rowed much might think of rowing as an exercise of the arms and shoulders, but it is truly a full body exercise. There is a beautiful and fully engaging symmetry to the motion of rowing. The power behind a stroke starts starts in the legs, flows through the core and out the shoulders and arms to the finger tips holding the oars. Of course my rowing machine doesn’t really have oars, just a simple t-handle that is the right size to feel like oars in the hands.

In a boat, the tension on the oars isn’t always equal because one doesn’t always get the depth just right on both sides at the same time, but when you do get a few perfect strokes, they are very gratifying. The boat slices through the water with just the smallest ripple with each stroke. The energy propels the boat farther and faster than you expect. Of course that perfect, fully fluid stroke is elusive and requires practice, but when it occurs, it is a thing of beauty. Working out on the machine is a bit easier and each stroke seems to be balanced and just right.

Rowing is good for my mind as well. It gives me a break from confused thoughts and yet isn’t so mentally demanding that I can’t let my mind wander. Many creative thoughts and good ideas have come to me while I have been rowing. I have practiced sermons and memorized scripture while rowing.

Kenneth Grahame got it just right in a conversation between Mole and Water Rat in Wind in the Willows:

"Is it so nice as all that?" asked the mole, shyly...

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat Solemnly, as he leaned forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

"Simply messing...about in boats -- or with boats... In or out of 'em it doesn't matter. Nothing seems to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

"Look here! If you've really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together and have a long day of it.?”

Simply messing about in boats seems to be good for the spirt, mind and body and has been an important part of my quest for balance in life. The problem right now right here, of course, is that the lake is full of ice. I have a few intrepid kayak paddler friends who get out and play in their boats on the ice, but this simply isn’t the season for rowing in the Black Hills.

So I’ve been rowing on the machine these days. Sometimes I look at pictures from last summer as I row. Most of the time I don’t need pictures to remember and be inspired. After all, I don’t have a destination in mind. I’m simply messing about in boats. And as Ratty said, "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

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.

A New Year

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A little after 7 pm last night I stepped out on our front porch and heard what I initially thought were gunshots. Quickly, however, there were simply too many blasts for that explanation to make sense. Then I remembered. Last summer, the 4th of July fireworks were cancelled due to the weather and possible fire danger. The city had arranged to save the fireworks for New Year’s Eve. As I scanned the sky to the north, sure enough I could see the fireworks, low on the horizon from my front porch. They were pretty impressive and went on for nearly 20 minutes. It was a fine celebration for a city of our size.

On the other hand, I wondered how many other folks had failed to remember that the display was set for last night. On the 4th of July we would have had an ice cream social and folks would have gathered on the church lawn for fellowship, refreshments, and a great place to view the fireworks. There would have been lawn chairs and blankets and a sense of community. Somehow that same spirit didn’t carry over to a 15-degree evening with snow on the ground. It might have been fun for those who were skating in Main Street Square, but there probably weren’t too many who remembered the celebration.

I didn’t grow up with a tradition of fireworks as part of the celebration of New Years, though around the world it may be the most common time for big fireworks displays. Although we don’t share the same date for New Years as the Chinese, it was probably in China where the tradition of fireworks to ring in a new year began. Around the world, there were some impressive displays.

Sydney Harbor, in Australia is an incredibly scenic place with the massive arch of the harbor bridge and the iconic opera house. Those folks know how to put on a really big fireworks show. It’s worth a look on YouTube if you’ve never seen it. The views from the professional film crews are probably better than anyone who can’t afford a yacht could get anyway. In Melbourne, the fireworks are blasted over the city from building tops and reflected in the Yarra River.

Manilla has a grand ferris wheel and enormous crowds gather to celebrate and watch their largest display of the year.

In North Korea, a country with challenges finding enough food to feed its people, no expense was spared to light up the sky over the Juche Tower and the Taedong River in Pyongyang.

Victoria Harbor and the Hong Kong convention center put on quite a display. There are multiple barges in the harbor which make the fireworks seem to erupt from the surface of the water.

In Indonesia, the central business district of Jakarta is the place for their display.

The Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan adds height to their display.

Singapore blasts their show over the financial district.

It is Red Square in Moscow; the Port of Marseille in France; the Ferris Wheel in Edinburg; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; The Thames River, London Eye and Big Ben in London; the Parthenon and Acropolis in Greece; the Coliseum in Rome; Cathedral Square in Vilnius, Lithuania; Copacabanba Beach in Rio de Janeiro; and Times Square in New York City.

The biggest display, however, was in Dubai. In just the first minute, Dubai shattered the previous world record for the biggest ever New Year’s Eve fireworks display according the Guinness World Records. Ten months of planning, over a half million fireworks spanning 94 kilometers of the Dubai coast with its man-made islands, 100 computers and 200 technicians. Around $6.7 million was the price tag for the show designed by US firm Grucci Fireworks. To put the blast in perspective, the previous world record was set by Kuwait in 2011, where they took an hour to ignite 77,282 fireworks. In Dubai this year they were blasting them off at rates near 100,000 per minute!

OK, so we weren’t spending a million dollars a minute and we were only getting eight or ten blasts per minute. But we had Grucci Firworks design and set up the display in Rapid City, and our show lasted 20 minutes, over three times as long as the one in Dubai. Not bad for a small town in the midwest.

I guess big celebrations are OK, but I’m not sure that fireworks are the most important part of a new year. I’m not much for drunken renditions of Auld Lang Syne, either.

Our celebrations tend to center around a few simple gatherings with friends. We share a few snacks or eat a meal, play a game, do a jigsaw puzzle or just sit and talk.

It is a bit early to tell that the days are getting longer and we know that we probably have some significant winter yet ahead of us, but there is a sense that something new is happening. Like the dormant bulbs under the ground, we know that the coming of new life sometimes takes time. Instead of a million-dollar-a-minute blast that can’t be sustained for more than just a few minutes, we have discovered that the real new life takes time and rarely is revealed in a single sudden moment.

There is a sense that something big is coming. I am anticipating that 2014 will be an important year in the life of our congregation. We’ll do some good ministry together and perhaps grow spiritually. It will be a big year in our family. There is already the promise of a new grandchild and other big events in our lives.

The real newness of 2014, however, is yet to be revealed. It will take time and hard work. The new year isn’t the product of a sudden blast, but rather a day-by-day construction that will emerge slowly.

It will take us a whole year to discover what God has in store for us.

Happy New Year!

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.