We measure the passage of time in so many different ways that every day is an anniversary or occasion of some sort. In general terms, today is the last day of the first quarter of 2014. I’m not sure how it got to be this day, but it sort of catches me by surprise. It seems like we just started 2014. I still have to be intentional about writing the correct year when I write a check (though I confess I don’t write too many checks these days). Tomorrow we start the second quarter.

The measuring of quarters of the year is imprecise. We generally call three months a quarter, which ends up being off by a little bit. A year has 365 days (or 366 in leap year). Technically, then a quarter is 91 1/4 days (or 91 1/2 in leap year). But if we count months, the first quarter is only 90 days (91 in leap year), while the second is 91 days and the 3rd and 4th quarters are each 92 days long. So the first quarter goes by a little more quickly than the other ones, though I don’t think that it necessarily feels that way.

I do understand the sensation that time is speeding up as we age. A year to a two-year-old is half a lifetime. It is a significantly smaller percentage of my total experience.

Actually precision might not be the best way to measure the passage of time anyway. Of course there are all sorts of very accurate ways of measuring time. Scientists use very precise time measurements to make observations about the world. Precise time measurements are essential to the operation of GPS navigational devices, for example. For most of our purposes, however, precision isn’t required. In human experience different times have different qualities. A minute waiting for a traffic light to change feels different than a minute saying good bye to a loved one. A day of manual labor passes at a different rate than a day of traveling on the airlines.

The difference between the quality of time and the quantity of time has been the source of disagreement and argument for as long as humans have inhabited this planet. The ancients struggled with the concept of Sabbath. They observed that there is a natural rhythm of work and rest and that the failure to allow for rest results in a decrease in the amount of freedom. This observance was formally placed into law with Moses on Sinai, but the people struggled to make the concept work for them. Thousands of years later in the time of Jesus, people were still struggling with the concept. The idea of Sabbath and which activities are and are not allowed on a “rest day” figures in the healing of the man born blind in John 9. It figures in many of the encounters between Jesus and various religious authorities in the narratives of the Gospels. Jesus seems to be saying that getting technical and using human methods of measuring the passage of time might bring one into compliance with the technical requirements of the law, but being in compliance with technicalities doesn’t make a person truly free.

We like to have formulas to measure our lives. Even though every child development expert and parent knows that children are different and develop at different rates of speed, we have established standards. Children go to kindergarten at age 5. 18 years of age is a good time to graduate from high school. Add four more and a first college degree can be earned by age 22. Allow a couple of years for changes of direction, volunteer service, or other events and we expect young adults to be engaged in their careers by 25. Then they can retire after 40 more years at age 65. We set up all kinds of numbers and measuring sticks. There is some value in recognizing anniversaries as milestones. But we are all different and trying to establish set patterns that apply to all people simply doesn’t work very well.

Some children aren’t ready for kindergarten at age 5. Some adults aren’t ready to retire at age 65. The numbers are, in many ways arbitrary. Even if we did come up with a good set of numbers, the world changes. When the age of 65 was set as the standard for retirement, life expectancies were much shorter and people who had reached the age of 65 were considered to be old. People live more years now than was the case in the 19th century. There are plenty of people who work into their seventies and eighties and find work to be meaningful. When the concept of retirement, as opposed to working unti the end of life, was put forward in Germany, the proposal initially was for some kind of public benefit or payment at age 70. Despite the story that is often inaccurately reported, the chancellor of Germany at the time, Otto von Bismark was himself 74. The old story that is often told is that the age 65 was chosen because that was Bismarck’s age. That simply isn’t true. The German program was established with an age 70 retirement that was lowered to 65 27 years after it was adopted. By that time Bismarck had been dead for 18 years.

Retirement programs have often been seen as benefits to the entire society because people retiring from paid employment creates jobs for young workers trying to establish themselves. Most societies have found the cost of government-supported retirement programs to be lower than government-supported unemployment programs.

The reality is that there is no perfect age for retirement. And there is no perfect age for any major life event. Our way of measuring time in years is arbitrary. Health and wellness might be better standards. Some people need to quit working at age 50. Others might work into their mid eighties. Different jobs also provide different working conditions. The risk of injury goes up with age, but there are many jobs where risk of injury is not significant.

So we head into the second quarter of 2014 with the refrain from the old song by the band Chicago in the back of my mind: “Does anybody really know what time it is?”

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

One of the fun things about being a pastor is getting to see all of the “behind the scenes” work that occurs at the church. Our congregation is busy enough that no one person could participate in all of the activities. There are always more things going on than meet the eye. The big events - public worship services, classes, discussion groups, fellowship groups, and the like - make the newsletter and are chronicled in annual reports and other records. You can read through the calendar on the web site to see the events. But the list of events is really only part of the story.

In many ways, yesterday was a good example. Our church office is open six days a week. We have posted office hours for every day except Saturday. Saturday is an official “day off” for our administrative colleague and pastoral staff are encouraged to focus their energies on preparation for Sunday worship. But Saturday is usually a busy day at the church - it is a good day for volunteers who work five days a week to participate in the life of the church. Saturdays are often times for wood splitting parties, firewood deliveries, work days to clean up and repair things at the church, lawn care, and a host of other activities. We have an off-again, on-again men’s fellowship group that meets on Saturdays. Yesterday was a bit busier than typical because of a funeral, but we encourage families to plan funerals around their own needs and the church is available for funerals on any day of the week.

Over night, before I arrived at the building, a volunteer had come in and folded worship bulletins and prepared the large-print bulletins for Sunday worship. Early in the day, around 8 a.m., there was a small repair project going on in the fellowship hall. A ladder was set up and tools were brought in to change the mounting of a projection screen that has seen heavy use since it was installed. I was working in the office getting information into our monthly newsletter that will be delivered to the post office and distributed electronically on Thursday. Church volunteers stopped by in the morning to pick up a mover’s dolly as they were helping move furniture out of an apartment to help a family. The phone was busy with inquiries about the afternoon funeral, including requests of directions to the church for those who had never visited, inquiries about upcoming weddings, and a helpful bit of information from a family who had a member being admitted to the hospital and needed to organize support for other family members. Before noon the kitchen was buzzing with volunteers who were preparing the lunch to be served after the funeral. Those volunteers have been really busy recently. I stopped by for a cup of coffee in the kitchen and watched as they made sandwiches, set out plates of bars and prepared the meal so that they would be free to worship during the funeral and still have a nice lunch to serve afterward. One member of the group was commenting about another member, who though nearly shut-in always prepares dessert for funeral luncheons. “I always make the same kind of bars for funerals,” the woman commented, “She always has a new recipe for each funeral.”

Worship services are fairly complex affairs at our church, so before the appointed hour there were ushers preparing the sanctuary, musicians rehearsing, pastors fiddling with their robes and checking their notes, and a lot of activity. After the service as people were watching pictures, sharing a meal, greeting the family and telling stories, more church business was being conducted. A plan was made to deliver a lift chair from one home to another to assist a church member, Sunday school teachers checked in about classroom resources and room set-up. Barriers were removed from around new concrete to allow access to the new doors for worship tomorrow. Information was exchanged about members in the hospital and under hospice care.

After the service, I made two pastoral calls and along the way stopped by my home to change my clothes and by the time I got back to the church, the building was relatively quiet, but dramatically transformed. The dishes were done and put away. The kitchen was ready for today’s activities, the projection screen in the sanctuary was taken down and stored. The bathrooms had been cleaned and the fellowship hall vacuumed. The projector in the fellowship hall was ready to share church announcements today. Classrooms were set up for church school and the mission cart and name tags were returned to the entryway for todays’ activities. The official church schedule had listed one funeral as the day’s activity, but there had been ten hours of continuous activity at the church and quite a bit more activity that occurred in other locations. Five members of the church’s paid staff had performed official functions during the day. In addition, the janitorial service had two of its employees working in the building with clean-up following the funeral.

And that was what we do on a day when our office isn’t open.

Our friend and teacher Ross Snyder had a lot of pithy statements to describe the religious lifestyle. “To be a church is to exist a culture.” He understood that a church is so much more than an institution with a schedule and a list of services. It is a complex web of relationships. People learn to trust one another and to work together for the common good. Volunteers and paid staff coordinate their efforts. People are motivated to help on a another simply because a need exists side by side with the ability to respond to the need. Genuine care develops. It is more than a dogma, a theology, or a set of beliefs. It is more than tradition and ritual. It is more than activities and events.

Some people, of course, only participate in a few events. Others only come to the church for specific services. There are lots of folks who see only part of the story of the church. But in order to be there to serve those people, a much larger story unfolds behind the scenes every day.

And then we get up the next morning and do it all over again. Church is far more than what we do. It is who we are.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

When I worked at the radio station, we ran a number of different contests to stir interest in the station. Some of the contests were typical of radio stations of the day. The prize might be an album or a single record and it was awarded to the person who called in at the right moment. Our station broadcast at 1490 on the AM dial, so we often awarded the prize to the 14th caller. The DJ’s didn’t have the patience to wait for the 149th caller. And our market wasn’t big enough for the 1490th caller. It is easy for the DJ. You wait for all of the phone lines to light up and then you start answering: “You’re caller number 1.” Push the next line, “You’re caller number 2.” The routine goes on like that until you get to caller #14, who you put on hold until the end of the record and then put on the station live to award the prize. Then the contestant has to come down to the station to pick up the ir prize.

We had a few bigger contests. One year we sponsored a competition where a new van was driven down the center of the high school football field during half time. Contestants had special forms from the radio station on which they put their names and contact information and then they folded their forms into paper airplanes and threw them at the open sun roof of the van. Had anyone succeeded in getting their form into the van, they would have won. No one won the van. We had purchased insurance to cover the cost of the prize if someone had won. I don’t know how the insurance company figured the odds on the contest to set the premium for the contest.

These days the media is full of contests. There’s Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You can Dance, The Biggest Looser, The Amazing Race, Top Chef, Survivor, Project Runway, Big Brother, The Apprentice, The Mole, the Bachelor, America’s Next Top Model. There are cash prizes as big as a quarter of a million dollars. Prizes also include a job running a company for Donald Trump (I’m not sure that is a good thing.), a chance to be a friend with Paris Hilton (I guess they actually got people to enter that contest), a chance to marry a rich bachelor (no guarantees of wedded bliss, however), and a lot of other prizes.

I have watched one or two episodes of survivor when visiting family, but other than that, I haven’t watched any of those contests. I read somewhere that there are actual schools that charge tuition for people to train for competing for spots in television competitions. I don’t know if you can get federally insured loans for attending those schools, but it seems to me like a rather unwise career choice. Then again, I don’t watch the shows.

I grew up in a family that wasn’t much for contests as a reliable source of earning a living. We were taught that the way you get money is to work at a job and that any work can be meaningful if you give a fair share of your effort and energy in exchange for the paycheck. My parents rarely bothered to buy chances, enter raffles or fill out forms for drawings. They didn’t expect to win. I’m in the same category. I don’t expect to win, so I never buy lottery tickets and rarely enter contests. One year, however, I did manage to win an unexpected bonus. There was a Christmas giveaway at a car dealership where I had work done on my car. The guys in the shop were pushing me to enter, so I wrote down the name of a Habitat for Humanity homeowner who was about to move into a new home. That was the winning ticket! It couldn’t have turned out better, in my opinion. You might think that I would be encouraged by such a turn of luck. However, it seems to me that you can only beat the odds once, and i’ve already done so, so there is no point in entering future contests.

I had a brother who thought just the opposite on the subject. He entered every contest offered and was convinced that he would someday win big. He never did become a millionaire by winning big. He never did any harm by entering the contests, either.

There is one competition that has caught my eye, however. If I lived closer, I might consider going to one of the shows. Each Year in Melbourne, Australia, the International Comedy Festival names the year’s top Australian class clown. The contestants have to be students and they prepare comedy sketches, stand-up routines, or comedy songs and present them live on stage in front of a theater audience. There are professional comedians who serve as judges and each year they pick the top class clown in the country. There is a small cash prize. I think it is $2,500 this year. The big prize is the chance to perform on stage in front of the national audience. Some previous winners have gone on to pursue careers as professional comedians.

It seems like the kind of contest I might have been interested in entering when I was in high school. I aspired to be a bit of a class clown. The problem, in retrospect, is that I really wasn’t all that funny. I guess there is a bit of humor in teenage angst and the awkwardness of trying to survive the crazy social order of a high school, but I don’t think I ever had any material that was particularly unique or wonderfully funny.

I do, however, favor supporting the antics of class clowns and giving them a venue to perform. Sometimes if you can get a laugh it is enough affirmation to survive another day. It’s a tough world for teens becoming adults. Although we can laugh now from our perspective, there are days that aren’t all that funny to the teens themselves. Laughing together at a well-timed joke sure beats being the butt of a joke, which is the way that most high school attempts at humor end up.

I’m still not much on contests, but this one sounds better than some. I still can’t imagine why someone would think that being friends with Paris Hilton or working for Donald Trump would be a prize worth pursuing.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I have colleagues who go to quite a few popular movies and who are far more qualified to comment on film than I. I have never found movies to be my favorite form of artwork. The truth is that I am not the world’s biggest fan of the visual arts when it comes to interpreting the Bible. I could write paragraphs about how attempts to portray Biblical stories in visual arts limits instead of expands religious imagination. There is something distinctly powerful about language as a vehicle to explore religious truths that is fully engaging.

Having said that, I am aware that there is a powerful connection between art and religion. The years that we worked on The Inviting Word project with its deep appreciation for the visual arts have been formative in my understanding of faith. And I put a lot of effort and energy into the selection of visual images for worship bulletins. Additionally the relationship between music and worship is worthy of many blogs.

So I am not sure what makes me so skeptical when approaching a movie that attempts to portray parts of the Biblical narrative. It is accurate, I think, to say that I don’t expect much from movies when it comes to telling religious truths or interpreting the Biblical narrative.

I’ve watched the 1956 epic movie, The Ten Commandments, a couple of times, and I’ve watched portions of on many occasions. The movie now fails to capture my imagination when it comes to understanding the Bible. Maybe it never was much on that score. It is still interesting to me that so much effort, expense and passion was invested in a particularly narrow interpretation of the Bible. I guess I just don’t imagine that the voice of God would sound like Charlton Heston. Nor do I imagine that so many people of European descent would have inhabited Egypt in the time of the pharaohs. They spent a lot of money and they made a lot of money but it doesn’t seem that the movie really added anything to the deeper understanding of faith.

I had a similar reaction to The Passion of the Christ. I finally went to see the movie because so many people were watching it and I felt that I was at a loss to comment about something I had not seen. I guess I contributed to the whopping $612 million that the 2004 movie hauled in. I don’t think that it had much of an impact on my faith or my understanding of Biblical religion. Passion plays are a particular niche of religious drama and we in the hills have some experience with such productions, with the home of the Black Hills Passion Play nearby in Spearfish for so many years. For me personally, the reading of the actual biblical texts each holy week has had a much deeper impact on my understanding of the nature of faith than any movie. Quite frankly, I was distracted by the many and frequent deviations from the biblical narrative in the movie. The personality of Hollywood box office stars and the heroes of the Bible are not very similar and it takes more than good acting to mask the differences between called by God and out to make millions. King Solomon is perhaps the Bibles greatest seeker of fame and fortune, but it is impossible to understand his role in the story of the relationship of God and the people of God without a careful reading of the great prophets who call the people away from his excesses into a deeper relationship with God.

But it seems that there are big profits to be made from Biblical stories and the latest attempt is the just-released studio-made, mass-audience Bible epic, “Noah” staring Russell Crowe and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The stir of criticism that usually accompanies such movies has already started. Like any work of art, it strays from the Bible by filling in all kinds of details that are not part of the sacred text. As such it is easy to criticize such a venture as having strayed from Biblical truth. I don’t have to have seen the movie to have doubts arise in my mind. The press photos of Crowe with co-star Jennifer Connelly are enough for me to know that the way the movie portrays the story is distant from the way I read it. Despite copious amounts of black coloring in Crowe’s beard, the double fail to have the ethnic heritage of the residents of the ancient mideast.

I don’t know if I will even watch the movie. Frankly, it isn’t very appealing to me. But I often end up reading popular books or going to popular movies just to be able to intelligently discuss them with the people who have seen them, so I’m not ruling out a trip to the theatre at some future point. I just don’t hold out much hope for movies to extend the understanding of Biblical truths or contribute to the deepening of faith. The same applies to “Son of God,” “God’s Noe Dead” and the soon-to-be-released “Heaven is for Real.” It also applies to the much hyped prequel to “The Passion of the Christ” movie about Mary Magdalene co-produced by mega-church pastor Joel Osteen.

There is something about the intersection of religion, art and commerce that seems to lean too heavily on commerce and too lightly on religion for my sensibilities. I suspect that deep biblical faith leads one way from profits instead of toward wealth. And making money is a huge part of the process of making movies.

Having said that, I don’t think that the various movies are much of a threat to genuine biblical faith. I don’t think that the movie will turn non-believers into believers, but I also don’t think it will corrupt the faith of people who see it as only one source of interpretation of the Biblical narrative.

One cannot help but wonder, however, if the $130 million they spent making the movie might have had a deeper impact on the faith of people if invested in feeding hungry children or seeking justice for victims of human trafficking. That much we’ll never know. The people who invested in the film have no reason to seek my advice about what they should do with their money.

So far, that has worked out pretty well. We have not needed such big amounts of money to practice our faith in our little corner of God’s world.

The real question is whether I’ll spend the money on a ticket to see the movie or instead add it to my gift to the next Habitat for Humanity project. Right now, I’m leaning towards investing in the house.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There are a lot of terms that we throw around and frequently use in a rather imprecise manner. Recent conversations with colleagues have involved discussions about the liturgy of worship. We think that we know what we mean by the use of the word “liturgy,” but we might benefit from a more precise definition.

In general use, there are many who make the distinction between “liturgical” and “non-liturgical” churches. The general use of this distinction has to do with the degree of traditional, and often ancient, elements present in worship. Liturgical churches use common elements in worship that have ancient roots. Elements such as doxologies, glories, ancient formal prayers and the order of the celebration of the Eucharist are seen as liturgical elements. Obviously, this definition allows for a wide range on a spectrum from congregations who always employ the same elements in worship to congregations that use innovative and new elements in every worship service. Most congregations fall somewhere in-between the extremes.

Conversations with my colleagues often assume basic familiarity with traditional forms of worship. There are elements in our worship services which have been present in worship for hundreds of years. But we also speak of crafting new liturgies - using new words and expressing ancient traditions in fresh ways. We often have a common meaning when we speak of liturgy.

However, I was momentarily confused by a conversation with a member of a popular congregation in our town. This person used the word “liturgy” to mean a set order of service. In the mind of this person “non liturgical” churches, a category to which he considered his own congregation to belong, improvised worship. There was no set order of events and what occurred was unscripted. For this person, “liturgical,” meant having a prescribed order of events. It was almost as if this person thought that planning and preparation somehow inhibited the experience of the holy in worship. The notion was foreign to me. I have invested much of my life in careful planning of worship. To simply “wing it” is not an appropriate approach to such important work in my mind.

The general definition that we use for liturgy in our part of the church is the “work of the people.” That is a fair translation of the original Greek term. In English we often use the word “service,” which is appropriate, it seems to me.

Technically the term leitourgia was applied to the obligation of the financial burden carried by rich citizens and the honors that were awarded to those who paid for elaborate public ceremonies. In ancient Greece, these were not so much religious ceremonies, but rather public events. Certain festivals were so elaborate that they required benefactors. The wealthy who sponsored and paid for the festivals were given honors during the festivities as well as public recognition in other spheres. To have a leitourgia was to have a large financial obligation, but it also meant having a privileged place in society.

We don’t use the term in that sense at all. We speak of the liturgy as the service of all of the people. We gather regularly for services of worship in which the people focus their attention on God and offer our liturgy. The liturgy is composed of words, music and other elements that come from both ancient and contemporary sources. Crafting the order of this service is one of the major focus of my work and of my life. I take the job seriously and there is no small amount of work that goes into decisions about which songs to sing, what order to place the events, how to manage the elements, connections with the traditions of the church, use and interpretation of the bible and many other elements. I see the liturgy as a conversation between the congregation and God. In that conversation, we are deeply aware of the history of that relationship and so we take seriously historic prayers, songs and other elements. Those elements, however, take place in the midst of the present realities of the community. When a member of our congregation dies, we grieve together. When new members are baptized, we celebrate together. The events of the world influence the choices we make about our worship. It is a continuing conversation.

We never get worship perfect. We work hard. We follow disciplines. And we remain human. Sometimes we try things that work better than other things. Sometimes our new ideas fall short of our expectations.

It is work. And it is meaningful work. It is worthy of time, energy, and effort.

I have no idea whether or not others see our congregation as a “liturgical” church. I guess we are seen as such by congregations that don’t recognize the seasons and colors of the year. I think we are seen as less so by congregations that use specific prayer books and more highly stylized orders of worship.

What I do know is that worship creates a context for other service that we do. A church is not a social service agency. We do help people who have needs. We do try to contribute to the well-being of others. We do provide services for those who have needs. But we do so in the context of trying to provide opportunities for people to connect with God. Our primary motivation for delivering firewood to our neighbors, for example, is not simply that we have recognized a need. It is that we have recognized that God is working in the lives of those with deep need and when we join in that work we ere drawn closer to God. There is a liturgy of a splitting party or a firewood delivery. We do employ prayers. We do have our own rituals. But no one would confuse such work with the celebration of the Eucharist as described int he Book of Common Prayer.

What is deeply meaningful, it seems to me, is that we practice a deep hospitality in the service or liturgy in which we participate. We are careful about extending an invitation to others to join in our work. We are deeply aware of how new members shape and transform our community. We are committed to continually exploring how we involve others in the on-going story of the relationship between God and the people of God.

For what it is worth, the English word based on the Latin for servant, minister, is a reasonable title for all Christians in my mind.

Servants serve. If that means ministers engage in liturgy, that’s fine with me. I belong to a congregation that is filled with ministers and I am honored to be one of them.

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.

Mayhaps the canker-blosoms distracteth thy attention on the Sunday most recently passeth. Twas anniversary numbered 450 of the birthing of William Shakespeare and celebrated with pomp, with triumph, and with reveling in Chicago, wherewith Mayor Rahm Emmanuel didst proclaim “Talk Like Shakespeare Day.”

We missed it entirely amidst all of the activities of the third Sunday of Lent in our congregation. The 450th birthday of the Bard on April 23 seems like an occasion worth noting in an English-speaking church. We have been told that Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible were two of the major factors in the standardization of spelling and grammar within the English language. Even though we no longer speak the language of Shakespeare, the popularity of the plays he wrote over four centuries ago has contributed to our being able to speak with the majority of the world’s citizens in a common language.

Happy birthday to thee!
Happy birthday to thou!
Happy birthday William Shakespeare!
Let us partyeth right now!

OK, perhaps there is more to writing a memorable couplet than having caught, albeit a few days late, the birthday of the famous poet and playwright.

One of the realities of life in the church is that we have a small sense of our place in history. We know that the story of God and the people of God didn’t start in our generation and we know that it does not end with the end of our lives on this earth. But our ability to imagine the vast scope of history is very limited. We focus most of our attention on the present. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that we focus most of our attention on the recent past.

There seem to be two competing forces that remain at work within most communities and virtually all institutions. On the one hand, there are voices that want us to remain trendy and on the cutting edge of culture. There is a certain lag in those voices in most institutions. Most of the time I hear something like “why can’t we be more like . . .? The request really isn’t for us to be innovators, but rather somehow more like the places that are considered to be trendy or innovative. Staying on the cutting edge of popular culture is not one of the things that we in the midwest do with any grace at all. We were pleased, recently, to finally get Starbucks coffee shops in our community. The Starbucks stores in Rapid City are popular meeting places and the frappuccinos and vanilla macchiatos are being dispensed at a high rate. The warm décor, the gentle music, the faux-Italian lingo, are all the rage in my town right now.

We don’t realize how passé, how utterly banal, that has become in more trendy places like San Francisco. And, trust me, by the time we have a Blue Bottle in Rapid City, that will no longer be considered to be trendy in Silicon Valley.

The truth is that the best coffee in Rapid City - not to mention the best toast - is still being dispensed in private homes, not in commercial establishments with names that are recognized in the cities.

We don’t do “cutting edge” very well.

And that is part of the charm of this place. But it can be frustrating when someone suggests that our church ought to imitate someone else who is imitating someone else who is imitating someone else who doesn’t realize that Willow Grove hasn’t been the most innovative thing in Christianity for decades now if it ever was.

At the same time that we find ourselves far from the forefront of innovation, we also discover voices that resist change of any kind. We joke about “We’ve always done it that way,” being the motto of the church whose seven last words will be “We’ve never done it that way before.” But there is real truth in our resistance to change of any kind within the institutional church. From my perspective this is more obvious in the Conference and national settings of the church than it is at the local level. Our church is constantly growing and changing and doesn’t do things at all the way we did them 20 years ago, but at the Conference level, we organize ourselves with the same structure and conduct our business so much like the way we did it 50 years ago it is almost compical. Our congregation is hosting the Conference Annual Meeting this year and the resistance to innovation is incredibly striking to us. The schedule of the meeting can’t be adjusted. We have to have workshops. Business sessions must take up a prescribed amount of time although no one can tell me what business there is to come before the group other than election of officers and passing of a budget. We tried to change the workshops from talk sessions with a single leader to hands on experiences, but each week I receive several more suggestions for “workshops” that are opportunities for someone to tell us about something that person has done. We tried to introduce the style of graphics and visual images that we’ve been using in our congregation for a decade now and were told that no one had the software to handle our graphics and our computer files were too large for the technologies available. When we offered to do the printing we were told that it wouldn’t work. I’ve been lectured about why we need paper meal tickets and why the only way to organize those tickets is to put them in plastic pockets attached to string lanyards and worn around the neck. Our attempt to change the type of name tags was rejected without a conversation.

The meeting won’t be different from last years. Which may be all right because the people won’t be changed very much, either. This isn’t a gathering that is good at attracting or welcoming new participants, which might explain why the attendance has dropped rather dramatically since the last time we hosted the event.

Maybe if we went back to the King James Version of the Bible and all talked like Shakespeare . . .

We humans are funny creatures. We want to change, but we don’t know how. We sense that we belong to something bigger than ourselves, but we can’t conceive of it. Our default mode is the familiar and whenever we feel threatened we retreat to the way we’ve always done it.

The good news is that God’s Spirit isn’t restrained by our human silliness. God isn’t worried about what is trendy or the way we’ve always done it.

My advice is simple: When you attend the Annual Conference, make sure you catch the worship. God has a way of breaking through and touching us in spite of our silliness.

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.

We keep a compost pile in our back yard. Years ago I constructed two bins next to our garden that I keep filled with all sorts of organic material. The idea behind the two bins was that our yard produces a lot of pine needles and other organic material that is very acidic. Breaking down some of that material takes time and it works best if mixed with grass clippings, food waste and other materials. In practice, however, the two bins aren’t managed in a systematic way at all. I’m sure that a master gardener would manage the compost better than I. Despite the lack of management, however, the compost piles produce lots of humus that I shovel out of the bottom of the piles and place on the garden each year. And the piles attract the deer in the neighborhood who snack on some of the food waste that we put onto the pile. It seems that the process works even without a careful and systematic approach. It is part of a natural cycle. Some of the waste from the foods we eat is put back into the soil and helps to raise more food. The nutrients in the soil are not lost, they are recycled and reconfigured into more food.

Yesterday morning I took some more food waste and coffee grounds out to the compost pile and it was obvious that the process was working because of the heat that the pile was producing. While there still was quite a bit of snow in various areas around the yard, the compost pile was dark and free of snow. The surface of the pile was moist with liquid water even though the air temperature was below freezing. The pile generates quite a bit of heat, which in turn helps speed the process of turning waste into garden soil.

I have been thinking of the compost pile as a metaphor for the style of writing that I do, though the idea isn’t completely formed. That’s typical of much of my writing, especially in this blog. I play with words and ideas and often my ideas aren’t fully formed. The process of writing refines the ideas and helps me to work towards clarity. Sometimes, when I get things right, as I struggle for clarity in my writing the ideas and concepts mature and I become better able to express them. What was a partially-formed idea becomes clear and might be expressed in my preaching at a later date.

Other words - many of the words of the blog - become a sort of verbal compost. They get stacked up and become the bedding for the next round of growth. The pile of words is really fairly large. I add a little over a thousand words to the blog archives each day. I don’t have all of my blogs archived online, but there is a daily blog online for each day since July 16, 2007. That means that the “compost pile” of words that have been written is more than 2,000,000 words and getting close to 2.5 million! There was a time when I thought that I would go back and re-read the words, select the best essays and create a kind of “best of the blog.” That hasn’t happened. Even though I have some skills as an editor, so far I haven’t applied them to my blog writing. Instead, I just keep adding words to the already huge pile of words in the archive.

There are some themes that have emerged over the years. After a couple of years of writing a daily blog, I decided that I would discipline myself to not write about the antics of our cat. There were quite a few cat blogs int he early years and I decided that the subject was getting a bit boring. I have also tried to steer away from writing about the process of writing too much, but I haven’t given up on that subject as today’s blog clearly illustrates. There is a whole category of blogs about nature, especially reports on the process of paddling and experiencing the world from a canoe or kayak.

When I started the process I intended to coordinate my words with my photographs. The early blogs were mostly essays about topics suggested by the photographs that I had taken. I still take a lot of photographs, though unlike writing, I don’t take photographs every day. I tend to go in bursts with my photography, taking dozens some days and none on others. And my photographs tend to be like my words - in need of sorting prior to publication.

I think that I am driven to write more by what I don’t understand than by what I do understand. I write not so much as an expert, but rather as a seeker of some sense of order. Often I am baffled by the events of my life and I write as a way of processing experiences into meanings. I often write in a rather muddled state. Unlike what I try to do with my preaching - clarify one or two ideas and speak with clarity - my blog writing usually starts with something that is not clear in my mind. I don’t wait for clarity, but rather write in search of it.

The process does seem to help me understand the world in which I live. It satisfies a need inside of me to play with words and ideas in search of a few great words and a few great ideas. I don’t think I’ve come close to those great words and ideas yet, but perhaps they will emerge if I keep looking.

Unlike the voices that seem to dominate the public media, I don’t claim that I am right. I have no need to shout that I am right and others are wrong. I have no fear of apologies when I make mistakes. I prefer ideas that can be floated and then re-visited and revised.

In that, my blogs are a kind of compost heap. If tomorrow I find that I am wrong, my words aren’t wasted - they become compost for new words and new growth through the process of writing.

After all, I haven’t written two and a half million distinct words over the past seven years - I’ve been using far fewer words over and over. I just put them into a fresh order each 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.

I am not completely sure of the origin, but I associate the concept of “thin places” with Celtic spirituality, a variety of Christian devotional practices coming from Ireland and Scotland. The rise, in recent decades, of the popularity of Celtic spirituality has much to do with the influence of the Iona Community in Scotland. I don’t really have a bucket list, but a visit to the island of Iona and a period of living with the community there is definitely an attraction for me. Music, spiritual practices, and concepts that have arisen from that community have influenced the way that I think about and practice my faith.

A thin place is any place where the presence of the divine is experienced. The word “thin” refers to the boundary between heaven and earth. People experience this boundary as especially thin in certain places. I have a problem with the language there because I think that describing the distinction between heaven and earth as a boundary is itself misleading. We have been raised with concepts like the gates of heaven that lead us to believe that there is some kind of fortress with guard towers that is especially hard to enter. I suspect that the true nature of God’s realm is much different. It is a place focused on the power of hospitality and the joy of entrance. Thinking of a boundary between God’s realm and the experiences of this life creates a false notion that God is limited to a particular place. From my perspective, the entire concept of incarnation - God become flesh - is the elimination of any boundary or barrier between God and human existence. In Christ, God is human. In Christ this life we experience is very much God’s place.

That said, I do know that there are places that exhibit great power for me. There are places where I feel the connection with the divine more easily. Natural beauty seems to be a part of my experience of thin places. When I watch a sunrise from my canoe in the midst of a lake in the hills, thoughts of God’s creative power come naturally. My mind flows towards hymns of praise. The beauty so surrounds me that I feel immersed in God’s glory. The reality is so wonderful that I have no ability to imagine anything more beautiful.

I suppose I have that feeling more often on the surface of Sheridan Lake than any other place simply because I go there more often. But I have felt it in many different places. The majesty of the peaks of the North Cascades in Washington, the power of the spine of the continent in the string of parks from Glacier in the US to Jasper in Canada, the rush of the sea air coming off of the Puget Sound, the lush vegetation of Costa Rica, the green-upon-green layering of the English countryside, the trickle of water coming off of the snowmelt in the high country in Montana, the flow of the Yellowstone River through paradise valley, the rise of a trout on the Boulder River - I could list hundreds of places that seem to me to exhibit God’s glory to anyone who experiences that place.

In 2006, we invested a sabbatical in exploring the concept of thin places, starting with Lakota sacred sites close to home, continuing with an exploration of sites in British Columbia, and concluding with a trip to the center of Australia and a pilgrimage to Uluru. We experienced overwhelming beauty. We were torched by the sacred. We discovered many places where we felt close to God and experienced God’s awesome creative power.

I in no way want to diminish the power of place. I know how people can be moved to deep religious experience and experience God’s presence by a beautiful place. I seek out beautiful places with great intention. Our people have named spaces as sacred for our entire history. The Bible speaks of Eden as a thin place. Mt. Sinai is a key place in the story of our people learning about God. From the burning bush to the covenant of the law, Moses finds Sinai to be a place where the encounter with God is inescapable.

But out people also have had incredible experiences of God in motion. God is not attached to a single place. It seems to almost have come as a shock to Abram and Sarai that God was in the new place when they journeyed away from family and familiar. The pillar of cloud by day and fire by night taught us a lesson about God calling us not to linger in one place, but to keep on the move. For generations our people worshiped in the tabernacle and tent of meeting precisely because we were on the move and we needed to be reminded that God calls us away from the familiar and guides us in the wilderness.

So, in 2011, a half decade after our explorations of thin places, we invested a sabbatical in the exploration of the concept of “thin times” or “thin experiences.” When we think of our relationship with God in terms of key experiences rather than key places we also discover God’s presence easily in events. The birth of a child or grandchild, the experience of baptism and marriage in the community of the church - these are certainly experiences of God’s presence. And, that year we discovered God’s presence in the journey of grief and loss. That feeling was so powerful during that particular year that we even experienced a sense of increased distance from those who had not shared the journey of grief with us.

It is probably a misquote, but I believe that Kierkegaard said something like, “Life must be lived forward, but it is best understood looking backward.” We have the option of both. We live our lives in their own pace and are called to new places by the power of God, but we are possessed of memories that allow us to look back and reflect on meaning.

These days, I think that I am quite comfortable with experiencing God in places that aren’t famous for their beauty. A hospital room, the hospice house, the home of a family who has lost a loved one - these are sacred places where God’s presence is close indeed.

When we look back, it seems to me, the wonder is that God has been close all along - everywhere. Perhaps every place is a thin place - especially the place where we find ourselves right now.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I think that the weather around here is typical for this time of year. We get a few warm days that really set off spring fever and then it snows. Yesterday was a snowy day and from where I spent much of the day it was really beautiful. The snowflakes drifted down through a nearly windless sky and the moisture content was high enough to make the snow pretty heavy when I was cleaning the driveway in the early afternoon. It continued to snow off and on throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. It is about 10 degrees out there this morning, which is cold enough to keep the snow around for a while, but once again the forecast is for highs near 60 by the middle of the week. The rapid changes in the weather are one of the charming features of the hills, though not everyone appreciates the way that spring teases us around here. Just when you think that you might get out and till the garden the snow covers it up once again. When it does warm up, it takes a few days before the mud dries out anyway when we have the kind of snow we’ve been having.

I’m grateful for the moisture, so I won’t complain about the snow. It is too early to rearrange the tools in the shed. And I try to remain flexible myself. I had planned to fire up the grill and cook outside on Friday, but it wasn’t hard to change my mind and menu plans to cook inside. The grill will wait for a warmer day when I have a few extra minutes.

One thing that is nice about the slow spring is that it allows me to put off some of the outdoor chores that will need to be tackled once good weather is in store. And the snow does a lovely job of covering up the undone work so that I don’t have to worry about it.

The up and down weather seems to suit my mood this Lent as well. The signs of hope seem relatively small. As we near the mid-point of Lent there is no denying that it has been a rough season in the life of our church. We have already had four funerals and I have spent more time with people who are nearing the end of their lives than is typical. It isn’t hard to imagine that we will have more funerals before Easter comes.

Of course people do not control the timing of their deaths and there is nothing inherent in the seasons of the church that makes for more deaths in one season than other. I know that we can have funerals in Eastertide as easily as during Lent. I can remember the deaths of ones in our congregation that have occurred in other seasons. One year we had a death on Christmas Eve just as we were preparing for our celebration of the birth of Christ. Birth and death are often very close in this life. But for those of us who live inside of the cycle of the seasons of the church, Lent provides an opportunity to focus our attention on loss and grief and to understand its role in the lives of everyone.

Here is the amazing, if quite obvious thing: live goes on.

Yesterday I was sitting in front of the windows at hospice house visiting with a friend. It happens that we joined this congregation on the same day. For him it was a return to Rapid City after having been away for some years. For me, it was my first time of living here. In the years that we have know each other he has experienced initial and then subsequent cancer diagnoses. He has had heart bypass surgery. He has seen almost every kind of cancer treatment you can imagine. He has experienced remission and then re-diagnosis. He has become friends with the cancer doctors from having spent so much time with them.

But what I remember most isn’t the doctors or the treatments. I remember working on Habitat for Humanity houses together. We’re both early risers and we used to be the first ones on the job site most days. He’d be sweeping or cleaning up when I arrived with the coffee. We’d sit and drink a cup of coffee and talk about life and the tasks for the day. They were precious times for me. You can learn a lot about life from listening.

Yesterday we were very aware that death is near. The hospice house gives you permission to talk about death. The choices he has made in terms of his care in the past week all are based on the simple fact that he is not able to recover and return to his life. One of the things that he has said to me on both of my last two visits is, “It is a whole new experience.” That is, of course, like many other things he has said over the years, an understatement. Facing your own death is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Our conversation, however, wasn’t about death. We talked about the gray juncos at the feeder and the deer in the yard. We talked about the beauty of the snow on the pine trees. We talked about the Habitat for Humanity house that our church is helping to build this spring and summer. We talked about a house he built in Texas and several on Oklahoma. He explained why the added cost of building a hip roof can provide savings in the long run if it is done right.

There is something inside of us that longs for life and even when we are deeply aware of the reality of death, we can think about it only in limited doses. In a room where there is no fear of death and no one is afraid to speak of its reality, our conversation continued to drift into the stuff of life. The joy of being together is deeper than the reality of death. In Corinthians, Paul asks, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Even though we will all one day die from this life, life continues.

It isn’t Easter yet, but we can’t ignore that it is coming.

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.

Andrew Przybylski is a social scientist who works at the University of Oxford. For several years now he has been studying the way that people use computers and other devices and their ability to regulate their use. Electronic games may not lead to addiction in the same ways that alcohol and drugs so, but the overuse of games can cause major problems for those who allow the games to disrupt normal social interaction. And there are some people who seem to lack the ability to control their use of games. Przybylski’s studies led him to examine the use of social media as well. With the rise of smart phones people have access to sites such as Facebook nearly everywhere they go. Some people find it difficult to disconnect from constant checking of social media.

Last year Przybylski collaborated with three other social scientists to coin the term “FoMO.” The letters stand for the fear of missing out. It is a condition experienced by an increasing number of adults when they take a break from social media. FoMO is not yet recognized as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The official manual used by mental health providers and insurance companies in diagnosing mental illness does, however, formally recognize Internet Use Disorder. The authors of the DSM say that internet use disorder needs more study. However, according to the American Psychiatric Association, producers of the DSM, preoccupation with the internet or internet gaming does parallel other addiction disorders. Those who suffer the preoccupation exhibit withdrawal symptoms, tolerance (the need to spend more and more time to experience the same “high”), loss of other interests, inability to quit and other addictive symptoms.

It isn’t that we somehow need another psychiatric disorder. There are plenty of existing ways for people to become addicted and unable to function in their daily lives. But there is little doubt that extensive use of the Internet and social media can become disruptive of healthy living.

I happened to catch a blog post by Rebecca Sullivan, a regular contributor to news.com.au. She writes of being on a dream vacation on Bali when she was overwhelmed with an overwhelming sense that she was missing out. Her experience of the social anxiety came as a wave of fear that everyone else is having more fun than you. In her blog, she described relaxing beside the pool in a private villa in a lush hotel watching a beautiful sunset when she checked her Instagram feed. She spotted a photo of some of her friends in a bar, another picture showed colleagues having a laugh in the office. Those pictures somehow gave her an overwhelming feeling that she was in the wrong place and that she needed to be back home with her friends and back at work.

Her description seems extreme, I think. Most people wouldn’t have much trouble enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for which they had planned for months or even years. I don’t know if it is a psychiatric disorder, but there is something definitely wrong with the inability to enjoy the present.

It isn’t just extreme cases like the one reported by Sullivan. Millions of people report that they experience FoMO after using facebook. The scale developed by Przybylski and his colleagues asks ten simple questions:

1. I fear others have more rewarding experiences than me.
2. I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me.
3. I get worried when I find out my friends are having fun without me.
4. I get anxious when I don't know what my friends are up to.
5. It is important that I understand my friends "in jokes."
6. Sometimes, I wonder if I spend too much time keeping up with what is going on.
7. It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.
8. When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online (e.g. updating status).
9. When I miss out on a planned get-together it bothers me.
10. When I go on vacation, I continue to keep tabs on what my friends are doing.

Now I have to admit that I seem to be nearly immune to FoMO. I have a facebook account, but I don’t check it even daily, let alone hourly. It often seems to me that checking social media takes more time than I am willing to give, so I do other things instead. But I observe others, primarily teens, who find it really difficult to disengage from constant use of social media.

We have teens in our church youth group who find it difficult to set aside their cell phones for even an hour. The thought of giving up social media for even one day seems threatening to them. Many of the teens in our church would find it difficult, if not impossible, to give up all forms of social media for a week.
There are several practical skills that all users of social media need to learn. One is the skill of limiting the amount of time one engages in the use of the social media. I believe that it is necessary to set limits. Eventually each individual needs to be able to set his or her own limits. However, parents should assist teens in setting limits as they are learning how to incorporate social media into their lifestyles. At church, we have named some sacred times when the devices are set aside: prayer, worship and other group activities. I believe that family mealtimes are also times when the devices needs to be set aside. A second skill that needs to be learned is the ability to find internal sources of validation and meaning. It is not uncommon for people to look to friends and other people for a sense of acceptance and value. Becoming overly dependent on others to determine one’s worth, however, leads to a loss of control. Individuals need to develop an internal sense of worth and validation.

I took a day off from work yesterday. Well, not completely, I did do one errand that was church-related. But for the most part, I allowed others to do the work of the church while I took a break. I don’t remember any sense of anxiety. I didn’t check facebook or instagram or twitter. I received one phone call and initiated two other calls. I don’t think I missed out on anything.

I’m going to leave the treatment of FoMO to the professionals.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll start practicing JoMO. At least, from time to time, I really enjoy the joy of missing out.

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.

Some days a particular hymn plays in my head. Yesterday the hymn was “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” It is also known as the “Navy Hymn” in the United States, Great Britain and France. I know why the hymn came to my mind. I have been visiting a US Navy veteran daily as he travels the journey of the end stages of years of living with cancer. Here’s my problem. It isn’t a hymn that I have sung very often. Whereas I have memorized dozens of hymns, I only know one verse of that particular hymn:


Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!


Perhaps no branch of military service has changed more since World War II. Of course the use of navies in battles between countries goes back millennia. The Persian Gulf where the US has a strong naval presence now, was the site of naval battles before the birth of Christ. Early naval battles were waged by the crew of one ship boarding another vessel and engaging in hand-to-hand combat for control of the ship. On occasion, fire was also used. Since the predominant building material for building ships was, until relatively recently, wood and ships carried many yards of flammable canvas sails, they were targets for primitive fire bombs. One of the biggest factors in early naval battles was speed. The design of a ship to be both fast and maneuverable meant that it could escape attack by outrunning the opponent. Conversely being fast and able to sail at all points relative to the wind meant that a ship could pursue and catch a slower opponent.

The advent of steam-powered ships transformed naval battle. Along with that development the advent of armored ships in the 19th century combined with more accurate cannon to provide for more defensible ships. Another advance was the development of submersible ships. Submarines played a critical role in the fighting of World War II.

Since that war, the United States has become the dominant naval power in the world by a huge margin. Naval battles are no longer fought ship to ship. In fact the advanced defensive systems that accompany US naval ships makes them safer from attack than many land-based locations. The advent and advance of nuclear power has transformed both submarines and aircraft carriers.

Here is what hasn’t changed over the centuries of naval warfare. The process is still very labor intensive. It takes a lot of people to run a ship of any size and most of the jobs are relatively menial labor. In the days of tall ships it took a lot of seamen to handle the sails. A relatively small number of officers commanded a large number of seamen. That is still the case today. Enlisted personnel vastly outnumber officers on virtually all naval ships.

A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, of which the US has ten, has a compliment of 3,200 personnel just to run the ship and another 2,480 people to support the aircraft. That’s over 5,000 people to launch and retrieve about 50 airplanes for combat duty. The carrier itself is defended by other ships, both surface and submarine when it travels. The closest most personnel on a modern carrier come to combat is dropping bombs from an airplane if you don’t count the occasional flaring temper and fistfight that is quickly resolved. After all the ship carries its own police force and jail cells. It also has its own medical staff and hospital. There are a lot of mundane jobs on a ship that size. Just keeping the vending machines stocked is full-time work. There are cleaning and garbage crews, laundry crews and a lot of jobs in food service.

The vast majority of those serving in the navy are enlisted and most of them are very young. It is another naval tradition. In the days before child labor laws, children were sent to sea at very early ages to serve as cabin attendants, cooks and other labor positions. The vast majority of the US Navy is staffed by 18 to 24 year-olds.

That has long been the case. It was true in World War II. The young age of those who served is one of the reason that we have survivors of those ships who are alive 70 years later.

The Naval Veteran that I have been visiting served on a submarine that carried 60 people. Only 6 were officers. The other 90% of the crew, 54 men (and they all were men in those days) were mostly in their late teens or early twenties. Those 54 served in tight quarters without windows or access to natural light when the ship was submerged. They traveled at just over 10 miles per hours when submerged. Top speed on the surface was around 25 miles per hour. That meant that the majority of time on board was spent getting to and from the scene of battle. With only 24 torpedoes on board, a battle was quickly over for the submariners. Their primary job was hiding from the enemy.

On the other hand 54 seamen serving together for months at a time had the opportunity to form some pretty strong bonds - bonds that are still strong.

As I hummed the hymn yesterday, however, I was aware not only of the time spend on the ship, but also the family that stayed back at home. My navy friend is traveling a lonely journey right now as he is in medical isolation and only allowed a few short visits. He is aware of the journey and in charge of care decisions. His family, however, is playing a really tough waiting game. His wife of over 6 decades is at home most of the time wondering what it will mean for her to become a widow. His children are struggling with the failing of their father.

Although our hymnal only has four verses of the hymn, the Navy has many other verses for special occasions such as commissioning or decommissioning a ship. They have specialty verses for pilots, female sailors, arctic exploration and even astronauts. The verse I need to memorize, however, is the one for families:

God, who dost still the restless foam,
Protect the ones we love at home.
Provide that they should always be
By thine own grace both safe and free.
O Father, hear us when we pray
For those we love so far away.

Families continue to be critical in the lives of those who serve in ships.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

My teacher and mentor Ross Snyder was fond of saying “Two is the sacred number of creation.” I know what he meant. Both the biblical account and the stories of origins from science are filled with dualities and dichotomies. Light and dark, water and dry land, male and female. Most plants and animals begin with the combination of two specific cells from two parents. Two is a very important number in mathematics. An integer is called even if it is divisible by 2. Two is the smallest and first prime number. It is the only even prime number. Two is the base of the simplest numeral system and the basis of the binary system used in computers.

Two is a very important number in the Bible. God ordered Noah to put two of every animal in the ark. The ten commandments were given on two tablets, and they are recorded two times in the Old Testament. Two candles are used to usher in the Sabbath. Two witnesses are required to validate marriage, divorce, or a serious crime.

However, I would like to speak up for the number one. I know it isn’t the favorite number of some and I know that we don’t all share the same vision or interpretation of one, but it is a very important number to me, and, I think to the way that I see the world.

I know that there are churches that practice multiple baptisms. The primary cause of a repeated baptism is the failure to acknowledge a baptism performed by another congregation. Some churches where members are baptized only once they have reached the age of consent and have chosen baptism for themselves will not acknowledge the baptism of an infant. Other churches do not recognize baptism that involves the sprinkling of water as opposed to total immersion. I have been quizzed by some Christians brothers and sitters about the exact words that we use when we baptize in our church. There is a belief that if the trinitarian formula isn’t said in exactly the right way the baptism is somehow invalid. However, I believe that one baptism is enough. Baptism is sacrament. It is the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. It is not subject to the control, whims, or even the understanding of humans. If we don’t use the right words, or if we don’t agree on the exact moment, baptism still occurs. God is capable of making up for our human failings and shortcomings. The words and actions of the officiant don’t have to be perfect. It is the power of God claiming an individual that is present in the baptism. Once baptized a person can never become unloved by God, who of course is also capable of perfectly loving the unbaptized. Once claimed by God as a child of God, you are always a child of God, even if you do not understand or even acknowledge God’s claim on your life. Baptism may be more of a reminder of the truth that already exists than the establishment of the relationship, but once is enough in my opinion.

One is a good number for baptism.

I have friends and family members who have experienced romantic love as a series of relationships. marriage, divorce and another marriage is a common pattern in our society. There are lots of really good people who have experienced the breakup of a marriage. There are lots of meaningful relationships that aren’t the first relationship. People who are widowed are not condemned to live alone for the rest of their lives. I officiate at plenty of second and even third marriages and I don’t doubt the sincerity of the promises that are being made. Still, in my particular case, one is the right number for marriage. I was blessed to meet the love of my life early in my life and given the joy of a marriage that is strong and nurturing and supportive and creative. I know that this is a gift that is not given to everyone. I know that this blessing wasn’t earned, and that those who haven’t received it are not somehow less than those of us so fortunate, but I feel privileged to have been given the gift of a single marriage.

One is a good number for marriage.

There are serious religious thinkers and people of great faith who belong to many churches. We have a lot of good people in our community who participate in more than one church at a time. They search for the places and events that carry the most meaning for them. They express their faith by worshiping in multiple communities. They spread out their commitment to be supportive of different congregations. But I haven’t ever felt the need to belong to more than one congregation. Our beloved United Church of Christ is far from perfect. We are quirky and prone to all sorts of problems and differences of opinion. But it is the church of my birth and growing up years. It is the church of my ordination and service. And one church is enough for the expression of my lifetime of faith.

One is a good number for a church.

I have met those who believe that humans get more than one opportunity at life. They believe in a cycle of life and death and rebirth and life and death. Some believe that we go through this cycle again and again. Some even believe that what we do with this life isn’t of critical importance - we can always start over again. Make a major mistake, you’ll get another opportunity to make a different decision. They do not fear death, and even welcome death in some instances because they see it as an opportunity for new life. I don’t see the world that way. One life and one death seems to be sufficient for our human experience. After we die we go on to something that is entirely different.

One is a good number for life and death.

I’ve also always found myself in the camp who believe in one God. More gods, it seems to me results in lesser gods. One is a good number for God.

Of course, there are plenty of people who see the world differently than I do. But for me, the best stories always begin “Once upon a time . . .”

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.

Tomorrow is the spring equinox. It is the day that we usually name as the official beginning of Spring. I remain a bit confused on how we know whether spring begins on the 20th or 21st, but since the Old Farmer’s Almanac is online - a rather curious use of the word “Old” actually - I check it from time to time for such matters. The equinox is the day when the dividing line between day and night becomes nearly vertical. Because the axis of the earth is tilted, the southern hemisphere is a bit closer to the sun in the season we call winter and the northern a bit closer during our summer.Twice a year, the tilt aligns with the sun in such a manner that we all get roughly the same amount of day as night. OK, it doesn’t technically come out to be exactly 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark, but it is as close as we get. Sunrise tomorrow will be 6:54 am and sunset at 7:07, so we actually get a few minutes more day than night. The earth is constantly in motion so the vertical axis relative to the sun doesn’t hold for the entire day.

In Costa Rica, closer to the equator, the effect of the difference between day and night is much less dramatic. 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night is the norm. The sun rises and sets at the same time each day. When you are in Costa Rica you learn to expect sunrise at 6 a.m. and sunset at 6 p.m. It isn’t exactly on the hour. Today’s sunrise is 5:40 and sunset is 5:47. They get 6 minutes and 36 seconds extra day today.

Now if you want to confuse yourself a bit more, Costa Rica is on Central Standard Time. Which is the same as Mountain Daylight Time. So it is the same time on the clock here as in Costa Rica, but they get their sunrise first because they really are a bit farther east than we are here in the black hills. That is pretty much trivia unless you are planning frequent travel between the two places.

I pay attention to Costa Rica because we have a sister church there and I think about the people there in my prayers each day.

So we are at the turning point of the seasons. From here until the autumn equinox, on September 22, our days are longer than our nights. That extra sunlight translates into extra warmth and it won’t be long before snow becomes a memory for a while. I don’t go by the calendar or the official days of the seasons, but for me the beginning of spring is marked by the day when the snow blower and the lawn mower trade places in my shed. You always want to have the tool you need closest to the door.

Of course there are other tools for spring. The garden needs to be tilled. The compost pile needs to be stirred. I’ve got some firewood that needs to be hauled and a bit more tree clean up from the October blizzard that remains unfinished in my yard.

We have decided that this spring is a good time to focus a bit of our attention on planting trees. The October blizzard was especially hard on the trees in our lawn. We lost two, one of which was the largest tree in the yard. And the storm got us to thinking about the one tree that leans toward the house. It probably needs to come out before it falls on the roof and does a bunch of damage. So spring 2014 needs to be a season of planting new trees for us.

There are some challenges for new trees in our yard. We need to be especially attentive to watering the trees as we live in an area where the natural moisture is a bit short. And we have discovered that we need to fence off new trees to protect them from the deer. The deer rub and munch on trees and the young ones need a bit of protection to get going.

The place where our house sits was originally forested with Ponderosa Pine trees. Before the land was subdivided for homes it was pasture and there were ample areas of open grassland around the trees. Some of our neighbors’ homes are really set in the trees, but our place has quite a bit of open space with just a few trees. We had to have some of our trees cut down when the co-op ran a new power line through the neighborhood, so we’ve planted a few trees. We planted Black Hills Spruce, thinking that it would be good to have some diversity in the trees in our yard. If you look around the hills you’ll notice that the spruce prefer low-lying areas where the snow drifts deep and the runoff is generous. We live on the top of a hill, not the most natural habitat for spruce trees, so ours need a little help with the water.

I love apples and eat them nearly every day, so it is natural for me to think about planting a few apple trees. But I know that if I were to get any of the apples, the trees would have to be fenced off completely from the deer and that means an 8’ fence in this country. Our yard is open and more fences don’t exactly enhance the landscape plan.

Another tree that I like that grows in the hills is birch. We won’t be producing any trees big enough to skin a canoe, but the smaller birch trees that grow naturally in the hills are beautiful and add that bright yellow color to the autumns around here. The birch also like a bit more water and they tend to propagate from the roots so clumps and groups of trees are the best way for them to grow. And the birch really break hard in the heavy autumn blizzards. There are a lot of broken birch trees all throughout the hills right now. That doesn’t really recommend them for landscaping around a home.

So I haven’t made up my mind just what to plant. It is still a bit early to get spring fever around here anyway. I can wait a bit before digging up the yard.

Time to dream and plan is a good thing anyway.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There is a lot going on in our community. The process of saying good bye to one member of our congregation involves a family prayer service last night, a committal this morning and and a funeral this afternoon. There is another funeral tomorrow morning. I take funerals very seriously. They are definitely once-in-a-lifetime moments for grieving families. I am careful to coordinate with musicians and other leaders so that nothing is left to question. I conduct funerals from manuscript to decrease the possibility of mis-speaking during the event. And funerals take a lot of energy. In a congregation the size of ours, I do not work alone. There are others who assume leadership roles and if something were to happen to me, others would step in and take over. Still each funeral seems to me to be a unique opportunity for ministry and I enjoy the challenge of working with diverse families and opening the doors of the church to people who don’t have much religious experience.

People who have almost nothing else to do with the church still turn to the church for funerals. There are a few who chose to do their own thing, but the vast majority of folks want the services of the church at the time of the death of a loved one. It is an opportunity for entrance to the church for some who have been on the outside and re-entry for some who have drifted away. Even if it had no impact on the on-going membership of the congregation, it would be worth our best efforts because we have a chance to serve people that we don’t often get to serve.

As such, funerals demand a lot of energy. When I officiate at a funeral, I am very tired by the end of the ceremony. I used to say that a funeral was all that I was able to do in any given day, but life isn’t paced around my convenience and there are often times when other duties such as meetings, cannot be scheduled and need to be undertaken even when i am tired. Then of course, there are other funerals. Each deserves equal attention, time and focus.

The key for me, however, is not just focus and hard work. It has taken me a long time to learn that there are times when just focusing on work and spending more and more time immersed in work make me less, not more, efficient. There are times when the way to get the most work done is to take some time away from work to allow my mind and body to recharge. It is one of the ten commandments: “Remember the sabbath and keep it holy.” The commandment goes on to say that taking a day for rest is built into the very nature of creation. God rested on the seventh day of creation. It is also a reminder, that we often become so puffed up with pride that we think that we can do more than God. We try to make ourselves more important that we really are. Not honoring the sabbath is, among other things, an act of idolatry.

But try finding a day off in the midst of the life of a busy congregation!

So I am learning to take part of a day when the whole day is not available. I took an hour on Sunday to take a walk. And yesterday I went paddling in the morning. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the snow falling outside this morning. There is a fresh, white blanket on everything and the snow is still coming down. The forecast says it might snow as much as 4 inches before the clouds blow off to the east and the day warms to about 50 degrees. We do live in South Dakota.

Since the reservoirs in the hills are sill filled with ice, I paddled on Canyon Lake, a small reservoir in town that is quite shallow and through which rapid creek is kept flowing at a pretty good pace. I don’t often paddle in that lake because it is very small. Even though I paddle small boats and like small lakes, there is only so many times you can paddle around the same lake without having a sense that you’ve done it before. A second reason I don’t paddle in that lake often is that it is surrounded by a busy park and so lacks some of the sense of getting out and away from others.

Still, there were interesting ice patterns along the shore and the geese and ducks were having quite a day on the lake. My paddle gave me an opportunity to watch the geese, who raised quite a ruckus at my presence, and complained very loudly as they paddled or flew away from me as I made my way around the lake.

There are a lot of geese at the lake. Not long ago, feeding the geese was encouraged and many people enjoyed tossing food to the geese. Feeding encouraged more geese to hang out at the lake and pretty soon there were so many geese that they created problems. They now discourage feeding the geese, but those who hang around the lake all winter long have a pretty easy life. There is plenty of nearby food and the lake keeps open water most of the winter. The cycles of the population of geese, like other birds, are dependent on factors over a wide area. The number of geese is affected by the amount of summer nesting habitat, places for feeding along the route of migration and populations of geese in other areas that spend part of the year in close proximity to the geese in our area. There have been many efforts to control the population of geese that have not had the desired results. I recently read that the geese population in South Dakota is about double the desired amount. Hunting does not seem to have had a significant impact on population.

I have no expertise on how many geese are too many. For yesterday, they were entertainment and a distraction from the busy days that lie ahead. It was good to paddle and to share the lake with the geese. Images of geese will give me a way to take a short break in the midst of the busyness as the week progresses.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It is nearly 50 degrees this morning. Less than a week ago we awoke to snow on the ground and now it didn’t even cool off overnight. Yesterday morning the ice was so thick on the windshield that it was a real chore getting it scraped. And the forecast is for snow tomorrow. But today it is warm. That’s what the weather does here in the spring. It surprises you.

I needed to get outside to clear my head yesterday and so we took a quick drive and a short hike in the hills. The ice is beginning to recede in the reservoirs - it isn’t back far enough to put a kayak in the water yet, but it won’t be long. As soon as there is enough open water it is kind of fun to play with a plastic kayak in the lake. The kayak will slip up on the edges of the ice. If the ice is too thin and i break through, i can float. and I can paddle wherever I want because the open water tends to run along the shore enabling me to paddle around the lake while there is still too much ice to paddle across it. Of course the ice doesn’t hold a fixed position. The wind can blow it up against the shore moving the spaces where the open water exists. It’s good to have a plan “b” when paddling when there is ice in the lake. Plan “b” often means being willing to pull the boat out on the shore and walk across the land to get it back.

Canyon Lake, right in town has rapid creek running through it and is ice free, so even though it is a very small lake without too much to see as I paddle, it will be a good place to paddle until the lakes in the hills melt more of their ice.

Of course misjudging the ice is a kind of spectator sport around here. The fishermen who go out regularly have learned where the ice is still thick. We saw a few hearty fishermen on the ice yesterday. But it can turn into a risky business in the spring. I don’t ice fish and I don’t trust the ice. It makes me nervous to see them out there when there is open water around. They know the thickness of the ice because they have drilled through it to make their fishing holes. Still, they walked out on the ice to get to their fishing spot. And they have to walk back across the ice to get to land.

The fishermen who take a few weeks off from the sport are the ones who get caught by surprise. Most years there is an ice shack that takes the plunge. This year the sinking ice house is straight out from the north shore marina at Sheridan Lake. About half of the structure is still visible as it slowly sinks into the ice. It wont’ take too many 60 degree days for it to disappear beneath the surface. Then they have to wait for warmer conditions to launch a boat and get someone to dive down and hook a line onto the shack. Sometimes they can get it to come up in one piece. Sometimes it breaks up. Waiting for it to sink out of sight is the spectator sport part of the process.

Here is a strange thing that can happen with ice on the lake. Snow can actually speed up the process of melting. The spring snows that we are likely to get have lots of moisture in them and even though the precipitation falls as snow, it puts a layer of insulation on the ice of the lake and traps the heat from the warmer water below. This speeds the process of melting. As the snow melts from the sun above, a layer of slush forms on top of the ice and softens its surface. A spring snow like the one forecast for tomorrow can actually result in quicker breakup for the ice.

I’m no fool. I know that mid-March is too early for spring fever in the Dakotas. Our son was born on March 15. We were living in North Dakota at the time and I froze two different sets of tomatoes that spring by setting them out too early. Spring fever doesn’t usually result in quite that much craziness, but it rarely does much good, either. Still, for a dedicated boater, there can be some fun days of paddling and exploring even when you know that colder days are still possible. A Kayak is a warm place to sit. If you put a spray cover on the boat, your lower body naturally warms the pocket of air that surrounds you in the boat. Since heat rises, it naturally travels up the trunk of your body as you become a sort of natural chimney sitting in the boat. The upper part of your body is getting some good, gentle exercise. The motion of paddling with a double-bladed paddle is very similar to the natural motion of stretching after a nap.

And there is plenty to see on the lake all year around. I didn’t have time to check out the beaver lodges yesterday, but that is always a fun activity for the spring. We’re probably more than a month before this year’s pups are born and then we aren’t likely to see them until late May or early June. But if there are pups in any lodge there can be some fun activity almost as soon as the ice is gone from the water. The two-year-olds have to move out of their birth lodge in the spring. They are often a bit lost at first. Because there are beaver lodges in the creek upstream from Sheridan Lake, a few of the two-year-olds wander into and around the lake. They are probably a bit disoriented because they have just been driven from their lodge, and beavers aren’t too friendly to start with. I suppose my kayak looks strange from the bottom to a swimming beaver and it is twice as long as them, so it might seem like a threat.

This years if a beaver wanders out into the middle of the lake, there will be an ice fishing shack waiting for him on the bottom - not a good home for a mammal, but an interesting thing to explore all the same.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I guess I should start by wishing you happy St. Urho’s day. I like to keep track of the holidays and have the proper greetings for each occasion. Since my Irish relatives (who were likely more Scotts than Irish) were protestants and didn’t get into the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations all that much. It is hard to really celebrate St. Patrick’s Day properly when the family is made up of teetotalers and members of the WCTU. An St. Patrick’s Day is tomorrow anyway.

But today is St. Urho’s Day. Now before we get too far, it is important for me to confess that I don’t know much about saints in the first place. I come from a long line of people who tend to believe that every faithful Christian is a saint and who don’t pay attention to the official lists of saints and saints’ days. I don’t even know who St. Cloud is! So telling you everything that I know about St. Urho won’t take too much time.

According to the legend, many years ago, grasshoppers invaded Finland and threatened its grapes. I suppose it was quite a crisis in that wind-scoured archipelago known for beer and herring without so much as a single grape in sight. Now I know about as much about the grape business as i know about saints, or perhaps a bit less, but I think that to make wine in Finland, they use apple juice or currants or some other type of fruit. Just for fun, the next time you are in the liquor store or a fancy restaurant ask the sommelier about the various vintages of Finnish wines and the grapes that are used to make them. If you happen to get someone who knows about Finland they might be able to teach you about Lakka, made from the cloudberry fruit. I guess the full name is Lakkalikööri. The little dots over the o’s in Finnish mean “English speakers cannot pronounce this.” It is a guttural language.Try inserting a snore into the middle of the word and you’ll come close enough.

But I digress. As I was saying, when the grasshoppers invaded Finland and threatened the grape crop, St. Urho stepped in and saved the day. Hooray!
Here’s how he did it: He’s got a big mouth, and he yelled really loud and the grasshoppers all ran away.

Now there is a saint a person could believe in! Big mouth, loud yell, instant fame.

Well, perhaps not instant.

I’m not sure that they know much about St. Urho in Finland. The place to go if you really want to get into the spirit of St. Urho’s day is Finland, Minnesota. There are quite a few Scandinavians in the town of 300 and some of them have ancestors who came from Finland. How else do you think they came up with that name for their town about four hours’ drive north of Minneapolis.

I could direct you to Butte, Montana, which is where I first heard of St. Urho’s day. But it is hard to get much clarity on the source of the holiday in Butte. Butte attracted quite a few Finns in the early days of the mine. It also attracted quite a few Irish folk. It seems that they didn’t like each other all that well. Or at least both the irish and the Finns liked their beer more than they liked the other folks. At least they had separate bars and different sides of the street, which provided an outdoor space for the fistfights that tended to break out around this time of the year. The Finns took to not participating in the St. Patrick’s Day parades.

So if you want a celebration that looks a bit less like a fight, head to Finland, Minnesota. They’re not to particular on the actual ethnic origins of the celebrants up there. In the cold north woods everyone has cabin fever by this time of the year and they’re looking for a party and anyone who can pronounce the name of their state, “MinnisOHTAH,” is welcome. Grasshoppers and grapes make for green and purple, the official colors of the celebration.

I think the official celebration also involves alcohol, not unlike St. Patrick’s Day.

There is even an official website devoted to the talks of St. Urho. According to that site, the tales date way back to the 1950’s! and could have been originated in Bemidji when Sulo Havumaki was telling stories, or maybe in Virginia in the stories of Richard Mattson. Either way the legend has grown in the stories of Finnish-Americans who, like their ancestors in Finland, seem to congregate in places with long winters and lots of snow.

So on this day, the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, I wish you a happy St. Urho’s Day with the words to the song by Sally Karttunen:

St. Urho was a Finnish lad,
A blue eyed, blond hair poika,
St. Urho, bashful suomalainen
Ate grapes and kala mojakkaa.

He chased those big green bugs away,
"Heinäsirkka, mene pois!"
He said it loudly, just one time ---
Tose 'hoppers had no choice!

And so the Finns are here right now,
To celebrate Dear Urho,
And sing and dance in temperatures…..
It's always way 'plo zero!

Then in snowbanks deep and rivers iced,
To our saunas we will go, oh!
Cuz' Urho is our hero, now,
As all good Finns must know!

An tats vhy Finss sill ‘mmeber tat guy, St. Urho. The problem, of course, is that I don’t really have a Finnish accent. I don’t even have a Minnesota accent. I did spend seven winters in North Dakota and so can pronounce the name of that state correctly and know that the Dakota is pronounced differently up north than it is down here in the balmy southern state that shares the name.

I guess that the story of Sinikka, St. Urho’s wife, will have to wait until another time. There are Finnish women who claim that the mother of 12 is the real hero of St. Urho’s Day. After all, someone had to pick the grapes and crush them to make the wine, though she probably was thinking more of making jam and jelly at the time. St. Urho, after all was just opening up his big mouth and yelling.

Heinasirka, heinasirka, mena taalta heiteen! So all the praise has been going to the boys again! Have a wonderful 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.

OK so this is not the news. That’s no surprise to those who have read this blog more than a few times. There are a lot of other places on the Internet where you can get the news. And this is definitely not the news.

I do pay attention to the news. Before I write my blog each morning, I scan the headlines from a half dozen new sites from BBC to the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. I also check out the news from Costa Rica and Australia as well as scanning the headlines from our local newspaper’s web site. When I was in seminary, it was taught that Karl Barth once said, “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” With the advent of computers to check quotes, we now know that there is no documented evidence of Barth actually saying those exact words. He did, however, frequently mention the connection between the news and Christian faith. In 1963, Time Magazine published an article about Barth that said, “[Barth] recalls that 40 years ago he advised young theologians to take you Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

Let’s see - 40 years before 1963 is 1923. Yup, the newspaper would have been the way to obtain the news in those days. These days newspapers are dim reflections of things you have already learned from other sources. We still subscribe to a daily newspaper and i still read a fair amount of it, but I don’t really consider it a source of the news.

But this blog is not the news.

Occasionally I comment on the news - more often on some trivial story I found than on the things that are garnering national headlines. For example did you know that at 8 pm tomorrow they are going to close the Des Plaines Oasis forever? I guess you have to have driven to Chicago to know about the Des Plaines oasis. It is a really cool rest stop built into a highway overpass. On each side of the Jane Addams Tollway there are ramps to gas stations and parking lots. From those parking lots you can walk into the oasis, which has a food court, shops, vending machines and games and floor to ceiling windows from which you can watch the freeway and the cars and trucks racing below. In the days when we lived in Chicago there was also a row of pay phones, but I’m pretty sure the phones have disappeared by now.

It is a real icon of Chicago. When we drove under the oasis it seemed like we were really getting to the city. When we stopped there, it was as much fun for me to watch the planes flying in and out of O’Hare International Airport as watching the freeway below. I guess I’ve always been looking up.

They are closing the oasis. And that might be news for some of you - especially those who have no idea what the Des Plains Oasis is in the first place.

I bet that many of you didn’t know about the closing of the Des Plaines Oasis. So maybe sometimes you read something in this blog that is news to you. But this blog is not the news.

I guess I should add that this blog is also not “Not the News.” A quick check of Google reveals that WFXB television in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina has a show called “Not the News.” This is not “Not the News.”

And this isn’t Snap Judgment, a Public Radio podcast hosted by Glynn Washington, who often closes an episode with a disclaimer that describes in a brief story how far away from the news the podcast is. I enjoy listening to Snap Judgment. It is a great example of word art - stories told to the beat of music. I’ve become a bit of a fan of word art and have been privileged to collaborate with pianist Justin Speck in a couple of carefully crafted word art pieces for our church. Sometimes I am inspired by the word art of others, even though Snap Judgement pieces are much more highly produced than the live art we share in worship.

So it is possible that Glynn Washington is correct in his claim that Snap Judgment is farther from the news than a lot of things - maybe even this blog. But this blog is not the news.

Obviously you’ve read this far without any mention of the missing Malaysian Jetliner, the upcoming Crimean election, the protests in Venezuela, the shift in deportation policy in the administration, or peace talks in Syria. You should check out other sites if you need the news.

At one time I had the subheading, “reflections of a pastor” on the blog page in my web site. But those words have been gone from my site for nearly 5 years now. The blog is, obviously, reflections of a pastor. But it is not really stories of my work as a pastor. Too many of those stories aren’t mine to tell. I spend much of my time witnessing the stories of others.

The truth is that I don’t really know what this blog is. It is an expression of my drive to write. I enjoy writing and it gives me an excuse to write every day. It now is a collection of essays - I am most comfortable writing essays. It is a bit of commentary about the intersection of faith and life. I’m not afraid to talk about faith or even discuss theology in my blogs. It is a bit of personal reflection - a sort of on-going memoir of the life and times of a preacher in the Black Hills.It is occasionally a demonstration of the wide range of topics that capture my interest. I’m an eclectic thinker and I enjoy musing about a wide variety of topics. From time to time this blog is a demonstration of my rather twisted sense of humor.

But it is not the news.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I have been told that the salinity of our tears is roughly the same around the world. That is, all humans cry with roughly the same chemistry. That same salinity is roughly the same as the waters of the world’s oceans. We carry inside us the waters of creation and when grief overwhelms us and he tears flow, we express our common connection to to the waters of our birth.

I was thinking of salt water yesterday for a very strange reason. I was meeting with a family to begin making plans for the funeral of a husband and father who died Wednesday on his 85th birthday after a short struggle with a very aggressive cancer. I was rushing from a meeting at Black Hills Works where we were wrestling with a rather complex balancing act of providing reasonable and adequate support for adults who live with disabilities while insuring their basic human rights to privacy and personal choice. It is always a challenge to achieve a fair balance and I always feel a bit out of place when defending the rights of another person who doesn’t need me to speak for them. So I was rushing from one meeting to another and I wanted to arrive at the funeral home ahead of the grieving family. I made it in time to go to the restroom and there in the very clean and tastefully decorated restroom of the funeral home was a copy of the famous Currier and Ives colored print of the 1857 schooner Magic.

Magic is a very famous boat. It was the first defender of the America’s Cup, which in those days was still known as the Queen’s Cup. In 1851, the yacht America defeated 15 English yachts to win the cup. 1870 was the first challenge and attempt by England to win back the trophy. If you are a fan of sailing, you know that the US successfully defended that and every subsequent challenge for more than a century until the Australians captured the cup in the 1983 challenge. Since that time New Zealand and Switzerland have also temporarily held the trophy, but the USA continues to dominate the sport. The queen’s cup, now known as the America’s cup, has never gone back to England.

Magic was a very special boat. It struck me as a bit silly for this famous yacht to be sailing across the wallpaper in a funeral home rest room in western South Dakota. We are people of the prairie and not known for our sailing expertise and acumen. Both the owner of the funeral home and the man whose funeral we are preparing have ties to Aberdeen, South Dakota, which unlike its Scottish namesake is far from the ocean and the business of sailing.

I was tempted to give a brief lecture in the history of sail racing to the owner of the funeral home, but the family arrived and there was other business at hand.

For some the connection between sailing and creation is as obvious as the saltwater in our tears. Both of the languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek, use the same word for wind and breath as is used for spirit. In both languages our spirit is literally the air that we breathe. Sailing, of course, is the art of working with the wind to propel a craft across the water. Our bible begins with the famous sentences, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and the spirit of God was moving across the face of the water.” That word spirit, in Hebrew, is “Ruah,” which also can be translated wind. Before there was anything else, there was wind and water.

In my mind yesterday, another connection, though distant, was being made between the picture in the rest room and the grieving family. Although the schooner Magic wasn’t a yacht from the Herreshoff yards, there is no doubt that Nathaniel Greene Herreshoff is the most famous boat designer in the history of America’s cup. You can’t tell the history of the cup without telling the story of Herreshoff. What is less well-remembered is the story of the rest of Nathaniel’s family. He would not have had the means to produce the fantastic boats that he built were it not for his brother John. John was the older brother who taught Nathaniel how to sail. John also taught him how to use tools. John founded the largest of Bristol’s boatyards and grew it into a complete shipbuilding center. The Herreshoff boatyard had foundries to make the fittings and fixtures, lumber mills to produce the wood, and even a steam engine manufacturing plant. It was the product of the genius and leadership of John Herreschoff. John was one of four of the children of Charles and Julia Herreschoff who were blind. In a time before special schools for visually disabled people. In a time when a visual impairment usually meant a life of dependency, the Herreschoff children who were blind were amazing successes. John was the founder of the greatest shipyard for racing yachts. Julian was the inventor of baking powder who went on to develop a language school. Sally was a prodigious knitter who produced sweaters, hats and mittens for countless residents of Bristol. Lewis was a long distance swimmer and musician.

None of them would have gone blind had they lived a century later and met the man whose funeral we were planning. Glaucoma is hereditary. It is also treatable these days. And the ophthalmologist whose funeral we were planning had once presented a fascinating discussion of the recovery of sight for the blind for a bible study group in our church.

The family will never make the connection between tears and loss and blindness and sailing that somehow leapt from that historic print into my brain as I prepared for our meeting. But I will never be able to look at that print without thinking of the doctor with the big white mustache and his love of liturgy and worship.

We are more connected to one another than we realize. The water of our tears, the wind of our spirits and the vision of our eyes and imaginations are all precious gifts of the same Spirit that moved over the face of the waters at creation.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I love to paddle a canoe or kayak in the fog. At the pace of paddling, the features that surround me are slowly revealed and they emerge in forms that aren’t always immediately evident. There is a mystery to the fog. There are surprises in the fog. Sound travels in different ways in the fog.

But I know that there are limits to my capacities in the fog. The pace of a canoe or kayak is just right for maneuvering in the fog. I don’t like to drive in the fog. Even at reduced speeds, there are just too many things that might be lurking in the fog. One drives with a heightened tension and is continually aware that the next surprise might be a bad one. An animal might be lurking on the road. Another driver might be going slow or even stopped. One has to be very careful and the process of driving in the fog always results in being more tense than one would otherwise be. I am no fan of flying an airplane in fog. In a three-dimensional environment one can become quickly disoriented. I’ve only had vertigo in a simulator, but I know how quickly one can lose an accurate perception of up and down and how dangerous this can be when flying on instruments. Pilots do it safely every day, but I have never developed a sense of comfort flying in the midst of a cloud.

Operating in the fog is a matter of pace, I think. I’m OK with a little fog in a canoe on a familiar lake. But I wouldn’t be happy beyond the sight of the shore on Lake Superior in the fog. I wouldn’t be comfortable out on the Puget Sound and lost in the soup.

I and sure that there are differences in personal tolerance for operating in the fog. An old salt might be quite comfortable out in the fog in the midst of a great lake or on the ocean. A very experienced pilot has no problem flying through a cloud with modern equipment and reliable radar. My tolerance is much lower.

I have an even lower tolerance for mental fog. Once, when I was burned, I received morphine. I did not like the way it messed with my thinking at all. I was reacting irrationally and I was aware that I was making poor judgments. I developed fears that I knew were irrational, but I could not suppress. After a conversation with a doctor, I have decided to always put down that I am allergic to morphine on my medical forms. My general physician tells me that my reaction is a very mild psychological reaction to the drug and that it still might be administered effectively, but that there are other medicines that could be used should I need pain medication. And then she added, “you probably are at low risk for any type of opiate addiction.”

I enjoy a glass of wine with a meal from time to time. I’ll drink a beer on a hot summer day. But I don’t like the feeling of being drunk. I suspect that I have a pretty low tolerance for alcohol simply because I could never keep up with the rate that some of my friends drink. And I don’t hang out with drunks. When I have had a bit too much I have resolved to never do that again. And I’m pretty good at keeping that resolution. I don’t like it when my thinking is foggy.

It may be a bit like paddling. A little fog at a slow speed has a certain charm. Too much fog and too much speed simply induce fear. And I’ve never been one who enjoys being afraid.

So I was alarmed to find myself in a fog yesterday. I’m still not sure what was going on. I tried to rule out some of the obvious possibilities: low blood sugar, high or low blood pressure, dehydration. I don’t think that any of those things was going on. My body was probably reacting to some virus or bacterial infection, and fortunately the results were short-lived, but there was definitely something that was just not right about me yesterday. I was having trouble focusing on the tasks I needed to accomplish. I was having trouble remembering things that I normally keep in my mind. And I kept wondering if I was making any sense to those with whom I was talking. Since I couldn’t remember what I had said, I wondered whether or not I had been talking nonsense to my colleagues and members of the congregation.
I spent most of the day, including several meetings, wandering in a bit of a fog.

It was not a pleasant experience.

When I paddle in the early morning on the lake on a clear day I know that if I were to become disoriented, all I would have to do is paddle to the shore and I would recognize where I am. Alternately I could sit in my boat and wait and the fog would lift by itself.

When my mind is foggy, I develop fears about what it might mean. What if the fog never lifts? I have a tendency to panic.

Without my mind - without my ability to remember things, I wonder if I would be able to do my job. My preaching style is based on my ability to remember. My work with people is surrounded by my ability to remember. If I were to have to rely on my written notes from a meeting, I would never know what had occurred.

And I don’t know if you have ever experienced it, but trying to force yourself to remember makes it worse. By 8 a.m. yesterday, I couldn’t remember the focus of my blog. I re-read it repeatedly to remind myself and then I would forget it. I began to worry that what I had written was gibberish or nonsense because it definitely wasn’t memorable for me.

Maybe I should make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Maybe I am losing it.

Today the fog has lifted. Whatever was going on was temporary. I have an appointment with my doctor and I’ll make sure to have everything checked out.

Today feels a bit like I feel after having made a drive in the fog. I made it without a disaster. But I didn’t like the feeling and I hope I don’t have to head into that fog again anytime soon.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

“I see we’re into black, now,” said a member of our congregation after worship on Sunday. It was the first Sunday of Lent. I was wearing a black robe. So the obvious answer to the question was, “Yes.” And that is what I said. I would have loved to give a more complex and nuanced answer, but sometimes the brief conversations we have after worship as we head to the fellowship hall for coffee and the parlor for adult discussion and all of the other places that members of the congregation go don’t have much space for depth or nuance.

I’ve never put a lot of time or energy into vestments. Susan made us each a simple robe for our ordinations and that is what we wore for our first ten years as pastors. Most Sundays we didn’t wear robes in our rural North Dakota congregations. We had a simple set of stoles in the four liturgical colors that we received as ordination gifts. Sometimes we would wear the stoles without our robes when serving communion or officiating at a graveside.

When we moved to Idaho and were serving a larger and mostly urban church we began to wear robes every Sunday for worship. On the occasion of our tenth anniversary of ordination our congregation presented us with new robes. They were simple choir robes in an off-white color. By then Susan had made a few stoles for special occasions, but we continued to go very simple when it came to vestments.

Over the years we have acquired a few additional vestments as hand-me-downs from retiring clergy. On the occasion of the 35th anniversary of our ordinations I splurged and bought a new robe for special occasions. We have collected a few more stoles from various places as well.

The black robe served for the entire career of a colleague and when he moved to the nursing home it was still in very good shape and we are very similar in size, so it moved from his apartment to the closet in the church. I don’t wear it very often, but it seems to fit the mood of Ash Wednesday and much of Holy Week. I wore it for the 1st Sunday of Lent without making any decision about what I might be wearing on the subsequent Sundays of the season.

I’m not big on show. I think that what goes on on the inside is far more important than what robe I wear on the outside. And I know that most of the members of our congregation understand that as well.

Recently a book club to which I belong read “Pastrix,” a memoir by Nadia Bolz-Weber. It is the story of her call to the Christian ministry and the founding of the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver. In the book she briefly tells the story of Rick Strandlof. He achieved notoriety in the summer of 2009 when the FBI investigated an Iraq War veteran named Rick Duncan. Duncan had been seen in TV ads endorsing political candidates and telling his story as an antiwar vet who had also been present at the Pentagon on 9/11. He had started a nonprofit fund dedicated to helping returning war veterans receive their benefits. But his name wasn’t Rick Duncan. It was Rick Strandlof. And Rick Strandlof never served in the military. He was charged under the Stolen Valor Act for claiming to have been awarded a Purple Heart for wounds he received. The Stolen Valor Act was ruled unconstitutional and Rick was released. His false identity and claims were reprehensible, but not illegal.

In the summer of 2011, Rick appeared in Denver as Rick Gold, convincing those around him that he was born in Tel Aviv and had served in the Israeli army, none of which was true.

I don’t know this man at all, only the things I have read in news reports and the brief information in Bolz-Weber’s book. But it seems that has false identities were, in part, an attempt to distance himself from a childhood of neglect, mental illness and alcohol abuse. Sometimes the real person is so filled with pain that what shows on the outside is far less than the whole story.

Most people are not con artists like Rick Strandlof. But you can’t really know the truth about them from what you see on the outside. If you were to attend Bolz-Webber’s church you might recognize Strandlof because his face was, for a short time, all over the media. But if you were to attend our congregation, you might see a retired couple, well dressed and looking like the community leaders that they are. You would never know by their appearance that their stories include the post-traumatic stress from surviving the horrors of the Vietnam War and then returning home to lose a fiance in the flood of ’72. You might not recognize that the death of a parent on Christmas Eve forever colored the celebration of Christmas. You might not know the struggles of children, now adults, who have suffered divorce and family reconfiguration and alcoholism and cancer and conversion to a religion that seems quite different from the church in which they were raised. A casual observer might only see part of the story. The story that is being projected isn’t a con. It isn’t made up. It is just not as complex or nuanced as one might get from first impression.

I think that the discipline of Lent is, in part, about going beyond the first impressions. It is a season of coming face to face with the reality of human life. And human life isn’t always pretty, or neat, or smiles and laughter.

There are plenty of television preachers who proclaim that Christianity will make you happier. Some claim it will make you more financially successful. Some talk on and on about blessings and benefits. Millionaire mega church pastors are known to provide entrainment without ever mentioning pain and suffering and broken lives. And when they do, those things are always in the past.

But we emphasize a different side of the Gospel of Jesus in our congregation. We preach Christ crucified. Yes, Jesus so human and broken and filled with anguish and dirty that his own followers can’t recognize him - and many of them abandoned him. Our faith doesn’t give us some special ticket to get out of the pain of human life. Instead it offers a companion who has been there in the midst of the pain and sorrow and sadness and who will never abandon us - no matter what.

It really doesn’t matter what color robe I wear. But there is nothing wrong with allowing some of the grief and sadness to show. It is who we are.

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 weather in the hills has the capacity to surprise, but the weather forecasters are getting pretty good at giving us a hint of what is happening. Just as predicted, I woke to a bit of snow on the ground this morning after a beautiful weekend. Yesterday we were outside in our shirtsleeves, reveling in one of the first jacket-free days of early spring. This morning the world is white again. It isn’t supposed to last. Some areas in the high hills may get more snow than we are likely to have, but the rest of the week is supposed to be sunny with highs in the 50’s and a slight chance of rain on Saturday.

The good weather is a blessing as the folks at the church are preparing for a rummage sale on Friday and Saturday. The added confusion of concrete construction around the front of the church and a couple of large funerals looming means that we’ll be busy. Not having to deal with a lot of snow will help.

It looks like the Forest Service crews got the weather right. There was a 60-acre controlled burn near Pactola Reservoir yesterday. The snow overnight should help to cool down the hot spots and keep burning to the assigned territory. I understand the reasons for the burns, but can’t help feeling a bit of alarm whenever I see a smoke plume over the hills.

The hills are fairly unique in terms of how water is handled. We have a tendency to have some big storms with lots of moisture, like the big blizzard last October. We can have similar wet storms in the spring and have seen considerable snowfall even into May. The hills get more benefit from the snow when it melts slowly or when it follows the pattern of snow and melt that we often see. When the moisture is released slowly, more of it penetrates into the soil and some even makes it to the aquifer to replenish our underground stores.

But we also have seen plenty of big thundershowers with lots of rain that runs off. The steep terrain doesn’t hold the water and it tends to rush toward lower ground in a sudden burst of energy. Flash flooding seems to be a normal part of the cycle of weather around here. The ability of forecasters to give more accurate predictions and the preparations for flooding that include lots of green space in the center of town in the low-lying areas along the creek all help to minimize the damage. Folks around here remember all too well the flood of 1972 with its death and destruction. We hope we have learned a better way of living with the harsh realities of nature.

We’ve seen enough big floods since ’72 that we know the power of water.

I associate water with spring weather. The place where I spend my childhood summers is on the inside of a curve of the river. In the late summer, when the river was low, there was an area of rocks wider than the river that we had to cross to get to the water. In the spring, the entire area filled with water and often the water would seep up into the lawn and other low-lying areas. High spring run off was part of the cycle of life alongside the river. In the spring when the river was running at its highest, we often would see massive cottonwood trees that had been washed away by the water. Sometimes they would get hung up on something and divert the water into new areas. We also noticed how the stream bed changed from year to year.

There is a big difference between the way that water flows in places with lots of vegetation as opposed to how it runs in the desert. In the dry places, when it does rain, the rain tends to go in straight lines. In the mountains, the runoff tends to be forced to wander around vegetation and rocks and other obstructions. The more water wanders around the more can sink in and be absorbed. In the desert it is can be completely dry an hour after a rain shower.

Landscape architects know about the path and pattern of water as if flows across a property. They often will take advantage of the topography and add plants that cause the water to meander as it crosses an area. This allows the plants to absorb more of the water than it it flows in a straight line and travels fast. They call the planning of such watercourses “induced meandering.”

I recently read a short meditation by Erin Dunigan that compared the meandering of water to the process of spiritual growth. Often we are in such a rush to get from one thing to another that we choose the shortest paths and go through our lives at the quickest pace. The rush of the holiday seasons often feels this way in the church. As we get ready for all of the services of Christmas and Easter, we are working constantly and trying to get as much done as possible in a short amount of time.

Perhaps, however, we are able to absorb more of the meaning of our faith when we have a bit of induced meandering. Slowing down and making time for prayer and contemplation can be deeply meaningful when we step aside from the rushing. Lent offers the possibility of a season of replenishment in contrast to the rapid pace of other seasons. We take a full six weeks to prepare. We focus on our spiritual lives.

And when we think we have everything mapped out, life throws us obstacles and forces us to change the path of our flowing. Last week was filled with the need to get out of the office to spend time with people who were experiencing crises. This week promises more of those kinds of visits. It isn’t the time in the lite of the church for well-designed schedules and rigid appointments.

I believe, however, that this “induced meandering” offers great spiritual promise. Maybe I need to slow down in order to take in the richness of the season.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

One possibility is that we will never fully understand what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. What we know at this point is not much. The Boeing 777 was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. About two hours into the flight it vanished from radar while flying over the South China Sea. Although there has been some speculation about the possibility of some kind of attack after it was discovered that at least two passengers were traveling with stolen passports, there is no evidence that gives any real clue about what has happened.

It is possible that some wreckage will still be found. They’ve been searching for three days now. In 2009, when Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 plunged into the Atlantic killing 228, it took five days before searchers found any wreckage. Eventually, after years of careful analysis of the wreckage that could be recovered, investigators believe that icing was the cause of that accident. Ice crystals blocking the pitot static system could cause all of the airspeed indicators on the plane to cease functioning and leaving the pilots without sufficient information to prevent a stall. It wouldn’t be fair to say that investigators found enough evidence to have a positive explanation of what happened.

There have been other accidents that remain unsolved. In 1962, Flying Tiger Line Flight 738 was carrying 90 US military personnel from Guam to the Philippines. No wreckage or other evidence has ever been found. There was a report from a Liberian tanker of an explosion in the sky, but it has never been confirmed that what the people on the tanker saw was the airplane. It is assumed that it went down somewhere in the Western Pacific, but that is a huge area and the cause of the accident will probably forever remain unknown.

A similar story surrounds the fates of two different British South American Airways planes that disappeared in the Bermuda triangle in 1948 and 1949. There was no wreckage found and there is no hard evidence about what happened.

In 1947 another British South American plane was lost, but not over the ocean. The airplane sent a Morse code transmission four minutes before its scheduled landing time: “ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC.” The beginning of the message eis clear. No one knows what “stendec” means. The controller responded that he did not know what stendec meant, but there was no response. The plane seemed to simply vanish. More than 50 years later, in 1998, Argentinian rock climbers on Mount Tupungato found what appeared to be wreckage and engine parts. It took a couple of years to organize an expedition to search, but in 2000 enough additional wreckage was found to identify the plane as the one lost in 1947. It appears that the plane crashed into the mountain and set off an avalanche that completely buried the wreckage.

It must be excruciating for families. As long as there is no wreckage, there is hope, however slim, that someone could have survived. There might be an inflatable exit ramp with survivors on board. There might be some possibility of life. And even if everyone on board has died, there could be some evidence that could prevent such a tragedy in the future. Based on the evidence about the ice crystals in the pitot static system of the Airbus plane that crashed in 2009, the system was redesigned in all Airbus A330s and other airplanes with similar systems to provide back up systems to prevent a total loss of airspeed information for pilots.

At minimum, investigators hope to learn something from the tragedy that might contribute to preventing future tragedy.

Airline accidents are rare in the first place. Accidents with no survivors are even more rare. Accidents where no wreckage is found are among the most rare of all.

Airline travel is one of the safest ways to get from one place to another. Around 100,000 flights land safely every day. Each year more than 3 billion people fly safely on more than 37 million flights. And even when there is an accident, the most likely outcome for a passenger is survival. Contrary to the public perception, more than 95% of people involved in airline accidents live to tell of their experiences.

MIT Professor Arnold Barnet is a statistical expert. He analyzed the statistics of flying and calculated the odds of dying in an airplane accident as 1 in 14 million. That means you could take an airline trip every day for 38,000 years before being involved in a fatal accident.

The incredible safety record of airline transport, however is no consolation to the family members who are longing and hoping to learn something about what happened to their loved ones aboard Malaysia Flight 370. Statistics and odds mean nothing to them. It is probably more meaningful for them to know that more than 40 planes and two dozen ships are out scouring the South China Sea for any sign of what might have happened.

The search has been frustrating for the searchers. A Singaporean search plane spotted a “strange object” but it was determined that the object is not debris from a plane. Reports of an oil slick on the water have proven to be not related to the missing plane. Each report that there may be some evidence has resulted in no substantive information so far.

I assume that if you are waiting, you are both hoping for and dreading the next bit of news. The questions far outweigh the fragments of information that has been released so far. If you are a family member you begin to realize that you may have to live not only with your grief, but also with a mountain of uncertainty about how your loved one died. When there is no body that can be recovered for a funeral, the process of grief is unique and distinct from other forms of loss. And sudden and traumatic loss is always a big challenge for those left behind.

So we pray for the families. We pray for the safety of those involved in the search. And if we cannot have understanding then we pray for the courage to accept what we cannot understand.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It is about 54 degrees this morning. That means that the mud is still soft and it is not a good time to drive anywhere on the lawn. I had hoped to sneak the trailer into the back yard one of these days to load up wood from a tree we had to remove, but will have to wait until either we get a cold morning with frost or the ground dries out a little.

We saw plenty of mud yesterday when we delivered firewood to Eagle Butte. The thaw had left a rather soupy mess in the yard where we leave the wood for distribution to churches and homes. Our woodlot at the church is just as muddy and we are trying to avoid driving back there until things dry out a bit. We have delivered most of the firewood that we had split, which is a good thing. We have a small reserve in case of an emergency and we are ready to start splitting and stacking for next year’s deliveries as soon as things dry out a bit.

It was a beautiful day to deliver firewood yesterday. A bit of morning fog around the creeks burned off to reveal a bright, sunny and warm day. It is rare for us to make a trip without lots of wind, but the weather cooperated fully with our little caravan of five trucks and trailers. We estimated that the haul was about 9 cords - more than the total delivery the first year of our project.

Well, we’ve banked our extra hour for the summer. It isn’t much of a savings plan, really. In the fall when we set our clocks back we won’t get any interest on the time that we have put into “daylight savings.” On the other hand, I am a morning person and so enjoy getting up a bit earlier. If we didn’t change our clocks, I wouldn’t be able to catch the sunrise on the lake and still make it to work on time during the summer. Today, however, it feels a bit like I got up in the middle of the night and it is very dark outside as I write my morning thoughts.

Since I’m rambling on about random topics, I was looking at some of the pictures I’ve taken over the past few weeks. Here is a picture I took in our local grocery store on a day when it was -5 outside. I had rushed across the parking lot from my car and stamped the snow off of my boots as I entered the store. I had just a couple of staple items to pick up and knew that Susan had stew in the crock pot for a hearty supper. And there, in the produce department, I saw that they had a selection of honeydew melons and watermelons. It made me wonder, “who develops an urge for watermelon when it is -5 outside?” I just didn’t feel like buying one on that particular day. A friend later told the story of his wife craving watermelon when she was pregnant and how there were not watermelons to be found at the time. It seems unlikely, however, that there are enough pregnant women in our community who happen to crave watermelon to justify keeping the fruit in stock all winter long.

Let’s see, if a 53’ reefer trailer can haul 10,000+ pounds (the limiting factor with watermelons isn’t weight but space), and the tractor is getting 5 - 7 mpg on the 1,250 mile trip from the Mexico border to Rapid City, and the refrigeration unit takes more fuel, and diesel is running over $4 per gallon these days, let’s say it takes 2 1/2 days and $800 worth of fuel to get the truck one way with the watermelons. Of course the real way that groceries are distributed doesn’t work that way at all. Trucks cary mixed loads to warehouse where the loads are reconfigured and distributed. The truck that reaches Rapid City has all sorts of different refrigerated goods in it. And because of the hub system, the watermelon may have actually traveled another 800 miles or more getting from wherever it was grown to our grocery store.

I guess if times get rough and we need to cut back a little, I might be able to forego watermelon in the winter to save a little fuel. Of course the watermelon were probably hitching a ride in a truck that was carrying lettuce and tomatoes and I haven’t completely given up those foods even though the weather here doesn’t support those crops at this time of the year. It just seems possible that we may have become a bit attached to the luxury of having whatever we want to eat all year round.

There was a time when the folks living in the hills and on the plains had a rather limited choice when it came to fruit during the winter. The crushed chokecherries in the pemmican was about all they had all winter long. And when winters were long and harsh like the one we’ve been having, the food supplies sometimes ran short. Hunting might provide some fresh meat, but other foods were often in short supply by the time the weather began to warm up.

Unlike the watermelon, I do buy apples year round. Apples are probably one of my favorite foods and these days you can find good apples in the store each trip. I am not a fan of the really large and carefully polished apples that greet you when you enter the produce department. I see little value in a piece of fruit that contains more than one serving. I prefer the smaller apples that they keep in bags, but these days I can always finis apples when I stop by the grocery store. We are a bit spoiled when compared to the people who endured the winters in this part of the world centuries ago. Truth be told, we’re spoiled compared to most of the people in the world.

Spring is coming. We’ll be dreaming over seed catalogues before too long. The mud is a sure sign of things that are yet to come.

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 has become a bit of a joke with my friends who say that I am culturally deprived. In the musical, West Side Story, Action has a line in the midst of the “Gee, Officer Krupke” song that goes, “Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” I don’t think that I am actually depraved or deprived really, but the cultural deprivation to which my friends refer is that I don’t watch very much television and I rarely go to movies. I have no objection to these forms of entertainment, I just find that I have other things that I enjoy. I like to read books in the evening instead of watching television. Much of what is played on television bores me. I find myself not paying attention to the television at all and engaged in something else around the house. When we do go to movies, i enjoy myself. I just don’t go very often because I don’t think about it. I always have other things that I’d like to do. We enjoy concerts and community theater and events at the church. Our lives are full and busy and we rarely have any time when we are sitting around thinking, “Gee, what should we do now?”

So I never know the characters or the story lines from television programs and I rarely have seen the latest movies. I never know who has won an oscar or what performance inspired the award. I just don’t pay much attention to those things.

As is true with most teases, however, there is a bit of truth somewhere under the humor that we share. I do feel that I missed out on part of my cultural education somewhere along the line. We were talking about it today. There are so many classical books that I just haven’t read.

I think that I got behind in my reading when I was in high school. In those days, our school didn’t have any “advanced placement” courses. There were AP classes offered int he larger urban schools in our state, but in the small town where I lived we took the same English classes as our peers all the way through high school. There were only 4 English classes offered: 1, 2, 3 and 4. There might have ben a literature class offered to seniors, I’m not sure. I only attended three years of high school and missed out on all of the “senior” classes.

I was in what was called the “college path” in my high school. That meant that for electives I took Latin and typing. I also signed up for band and chorus each year. I made my way through “Latin Grammar and Exercises” books one and two in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I got reasonable grades in Latin. I assumed that we were learning Latini as it had been used by the Romans. It is, after all, a classical language. Little did I know that the Romans never had grammar books. They didn’t even know the concept of grammar. There was no Latin grammar for students to learn in ancient Rome. The grammar that we were learning had been translated from the German, and developed in the 19th century. It was a system of rules that were developed to explain the usage of the language centuries after its height as a world language. Real Romans didn’t employ good grammar at all. The speeches of Cicero that we read and translated had been heavily edited in the 1800’s. Cicero himself said and wrote all kinds of sentences that didn’t have verbs. He had no knowledge that the pluperfect tense even existed, let alone tried to employ it.He probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke we used to make in Latin class about the imperfect tense being my strong suit.

But I digress.

The point is that there are many classics of English and American literature that I simply have never read. Give me a paragraph of Jane Austin and another by Emily Bronte and I might not be able to tell you who wrote which. I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights. I know that Emily Bronte had a sister Charlotte, but I don’t know anything about who wrote or edited which texts.

I’ve been meaning to read those books to catch up with the texts that others read when they were 17, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I guess once you’re 40 years behind in your reading, you shouldn’t expect to catch up in a few weeks.

So while I’m on the subject of reading the classics, I suppose it might make sense to speculate on what makes a book a classic. Italo Calvino wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” In his book The Uses of Literature he speaks also of books that people are re-reading as opposed to the books that they are reading. There are a few books that I have re-read, but not that many really. I haven’t caught up with the ones I haven’t yet read.

I re-read the Bible, of course, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Thoreau’s Maine Woods. I’ve re-read Matthew Goldman’s Journals of Constant Waterman and, of course Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The urge to re-read a tale of two cities or David McCullough’s biography of Truman has not seized me, however. I love reading Dave Eggers and David Sedaris and John Sayles, but I want to read their new stuff more than re-read the books I’ve already read. The same probably goes for much of the philosophy and theology that I have read as well. I pull the books from the shelves to find quotes, and re-read sections, but the desire to start at the beginning and read to the end captures me with very few books.

It may well be that I am culturally deprived. At least there are a lot of books that I haven’t read. But that gives me the best sense of the meaning of the classics that I know. Classics are the books on the list that I want to read that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading.

That is a list that I never want to complete. I pray that I will always have a stack of books that I can’t wait to read.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There is a verse from Isaiah that has been in my head for the past couple of days. It is in the 53rd chapter, a section known as the song of the suffering servant. There is a scholarly argument as to the identity of the servant. Prominent Jewish scholars argue that this section is not and cannot be a reference to Jesus of Nazareth. The prophet is not one who predicts or even speaks of the future. Writing well before th time of Jesus, the prophet’s attention is focused on calling the people of God back into relationship with God. The suffering servant section is, rather a painful description of the human condition.

On the other side of the argument are Christian scholars, often some of the more fundamentalist Christians, who believe that the passage is a direct reference to Jesus. Some Bibles, like the New International Version, even make a cross reference between Isaiah 53 and Mark 10.

With all due respect, the argument doesn’t interest me very much. Isaiah is the master poet of the Old Testament. His poetry rivals and even exceeds the poetry of the Psalms in my opinion. Perhaps better than any other collection of words ever written, he describes God, humans and the relationship between God and humans in ways that are so vivid that the words fairly weep with God’s grief over human injustices. This exquisite description of the human condition rings true to my own experience, and the experience of our people over so many generations.

And, from my perspective, the incarnation of Jesus, described in the Gospels, perhaps most poetically in John, is the reality of God taking on human form so completely that there is no distinction between God incarnate and any human. Written long before Jesus’ birth, the description of human nature is so real. In Jesus God’s taking on human nature is so complete. As such, it cannot be two different topics, but at once different and the same.

But I am no scholar.

I am a pastor, often unequal to the tasks God has placed before me. And this has been a week of being overwhelmed by the reality of a congregation that I love deeply and the pain that lies within our community.

So I have been thinking of Isaia’s song. I know it in the King James Version: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:3)

“A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief . . .” I have needed a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief to walk with me this week. We have four members of our church family who are journeying through the end stages of various forms of cancer. The remaining span of their lives are now measured in days and weeks.Such occasions are not rare in this life and not foreign to our congregation, but it is a bit unusual to have so many at once. I have visited with the families of three of the four face-to-face and missed the fourth only because another death in the congregation necessitated that I reschedule one visit to instead plan a funeral with three sons grieving the death of their mother, who they lost so very slowly that there were at least three years of not knowing how long she would continue to live having forgotten so much of her life that she did not recognize her own children. And I know that there are at least five other faithful members of our congregation whose span of life is likely measured in weeks and months, not in years.

We begin Lent weighed down with grief.

My own personal faith is so tied up with the experience of grief that it is impossible for me to separate them. I understand well and acknowledge the joy of a personal relationship with Jesus. I revel in the celebrations of the high and holy days. But I find something almost generic in our celebrations. Anyone can be happy when things are going well. My experiences of the depth and power of the Christian faith come from the way that we face loss and grief.

We do grief very well in the church.

Our faith is so intimately acquainted with grief that Jesus’ tears at the death of Lazarus run down our cheeks when our friends die. His anguish in the garden on the eve of his own death is felt by every one of us when we seriously contemplate our own death. We are so in love with life that death shakes us to our core.

And there, at our core, “troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (I Corinthians 4:8-9) . . . there at our core we remember that love is stronger even than death - more powerful than the weight of the multiple griefs that we bear. “Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

It is so deep within me that I have no understanding of how someone can walk the journey of grief without faith.

Walking this journey, however, does mean walking alongside people who have little sense of the power of the community of God’s faithful. Frequently, most often in the children of those who are dying, I encounter people who have left the community. They may have grown up in a church, but as adults they drifted away from the church. They don’t know the dynamics of the ebb and flow of the community. They see the church - and my role in the church - as a service provider. They call us on the phone like the call doctors and nursing home staff and hospice workers. They make their case that their grief is more important and a higher priority than the grief of others. It would make no sense for me to explain to them what their parents know - that there are over 600 real, living people in our church community. I often am dealing with multiple families at the same time. I don’t sit around the office waiting for the next call and we don’t earn our living by providing services for a fee.

The midst of grief is no time for intense lectures or lessons in the nature of the community. I try to respond to each call with the love and attention that is due to every child of God.

But I am weary. And I get tired.

A few years ago I read several of Jan Karon’s novels about Father Tim of Mitford. Part of what I loved about Father Tim was that he was a nearly perfect pastor. He visited on time, he kept his temper, he served his people well even when he was personally filled with turmoil. He also was a character in a novel - a pretend person in a pretend community. My world is not so perfect. And I am far from that perfect pastor.

These days I find it comforting to walk alongside a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Jesus is very clear. In the Gospel of Matthew he warns: “Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them” and a bit later: "And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. . . . But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

I’m no good at any of that. And Ash Wednesday is a day in which I indulge in too much show even for my own comfort. I don’t often wear a clerical collar. I wear one on Ash Wednesday, and on Good Friday, and sometimes other days during Holy Week. I wear a collar sometimes when I visit in the jail. Sometimes I wear a collar when I am doing other duties as Sheriff’s chaplain. Most of the time, I wear street clothes. And which clothes I wear has changed fairly dramatically with the times. I remember well when I used to wear a white shirt and a tie almost every day for work. This wasn’t the case when I lived in North Dakota, where I dressed up for church on Sundays and for weddings and funerals - I was mostly like the other people in the churches I served. When we moved to Boise, a bit larger town with a bit larger church, I started to dress up for work more often. When I started in this congregation I wore a tie almost every day.

Then, after a while I started wearing colored shirts. And then I stopped wearing ties except on Sundays and other special occasions. And then I wore a t-shirt to work one day. I wasn’t the only one who was changing my clothing choices. Bankers started wearing jeans on Fridays and then the traditional banker’s suit was replaced with golf shirts with the bank logo. The times change. We change with them. Most clerical clothing is simply a hold back to the way people used to dress. Robes were adopted because it was the garb of common folk. Chasubles were first worn by clerics because it was the garb of a working man. But we are generally slower than the general public at adapting to change and following fashion.

In the early days of the church, clerics were directed to distinguish themselves by their learning and their faith and not by their dress. Later, in the 6th century canon law began to describe appropriate clothing for clerics. The early rules called for clothing that was closed in the front and free from extravagance. A wide variety of colors were adopted and discarded and vestments for special ceremonies became more and more extravagant. The simple black shirt and pants with a white band at the collar was an attempt to simplify the clothing worn by clerics.

During the Protestant reformation, most Protestant clerics abandoned the Roman collar, with the notable exception of Anglican priests. There is a whole lot more history to the clothing worn by clergy, but the practice of the United Church of Christ minister wearing a collar only appeared within the last 30 or so years and it still is not a common garb.

As I said, I don’t wear it often.

So why do I choose to wear it on Ash Wednesday? It is already a day when I go around with ashes on my forehead. I am not unaware that some see my choice of clothes as the kind of hypocrisy that Jesus warned about. I am, after all, going about in clothing in a way that marks my identity - that shows to others who I am and showing before others the choices I make in this season.

For me, however, it is not about showing off for others. It is about claiming an identity. The roman collar says to those who see it “Christian minister.” People who are not active in churches might not see a distinction between Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist or Luteran. They probably put all people who wear that kind of collar in the same category. And that is OK with me because it is a category to which I belong. The collar is, for me, a kind of shortcut. It doesn’t reveal the inner disciplines of prayer and fasting and study which are important in my relationship with God. Rather it is an open and public acknowledgement of a lifelong commitment to serve God as a minister. Most of the time I don’t feel a need to identify myself. I’m perfectly glad to just be another person.

Some days, however, I don’t want to have to start at the beginning when I tell my story to a stranger. I’m perfectly happy to have the people I meet start with their assumptions about ministers - even if those assumptions are inaccurate. And I want to make the statement to the people in my congregation that these days are important to me. I have cast my life into the forms of the seasons of the church and I choose to live in those rhythms.

When I wear my faith in my choices about clothing, however, I am not completely comfortable. There is a part of me that understands and respects the choices of those who do not go about with ashes on their foreheads.

As is often the case, it is the children who help to put things into perspective. Last night I was visiting with 2 year-old Elsa and her parents. Elsa didn’t seem to notice the collar on my shirt. She didn’t have any trouble recognizing me. Elsa is at home in her world and at home in her church. She knows who I am and calls me “Pastor Ted” because that is what her father calls me. But Elsa was impressed with the ashes on my forehead: “Pastor Ted, do you have a tattoo?” she asked.

I was giggling on the inside as I tried to be calm on the outside. “It will wash off, I said.” The answer was good enough for Elsa. She was just checking to see how much I had changed. She won’t be surprised the next time she sees me and there is no ash cross on my forehead.

Maybe that is the most important part of Jesus’ message. It isn’t what is on the outside that matters. I can change my clothes. I can wash my face. What matters is what is on the inside. As Samuel was advised by God when searching for the one to anoint as king of Israel: “People look at what’s on the outside, but God looks at the heart.”

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I am not unaware of the power of touch in relationships between people. A reassuring hug can go a long way to remind a person that she or he is loved. A firm handshake can communicate a lot. Unfortunately, however, there is a sad history of inappropriate touch in the church. Church leaders have caused pain and tragic results have marred the story of the church. I have no doubt that there has been more abuse outside of the church than inside of it, but any abuse in a community that is based on trust threatens to undermine and color all that we do. It is a tragedy that is undeniable with repercussions that are not yet fully revealed.

As a result, I am very careful about establishing reliable and safe boundaries for everyone within the church. It is not that I am cold or unwilling to provide a reassuring touch. It is that I believe that we need to establish and maintain safety for everyone who participates in the church.

To be fair, I’m not a super touchy-feely person to begin with. I come from generations of men who were a bit standoffish and slow to touch anyone. We have a long heritage of not being the best at expressing our emotions, but we have been working at it.

But today is a day that I will touch a lot of people. The touch is simple and straight forward. I dip my thumb in ashes that have been moistened with oil and smudge the sign of the cross on the forehead of believers who come to me for the ancient ritual of Ash Wednesday.

The words are simple. “Remember that from dust you have come and to dust you return.” But there is more to it. As is often the case the symbol carries far more than the words.

As I reach out ant touch the people who come, I am thinking, “(Name), you are a child of God. Like every child of god your body is made form the elements of this earth and will one day return to the earth. The ash on your forehead is a sign of the simple reality of your mortality. But you are more than the elements of your body. The cross on your forehead is a reminder that you belong, body and soul, to Jesus, who is Lord of the living and of the dead. If you would be united with Christ in a death like Christ’s, you will be united with Christ in a resurrection like Christ’s. For there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

That is too wordy to repeat over and over and the line would progress too slowly for the patience of the worshipers. And, as I have said before, there are moments when actions speak louder than words and in the balance of silence and speaking, silence is often the better part.

Last year a small group of mainline clergy with whom I share weekly bible study spent a couple of hours on a prominent street corner in our downtown on Ash Wednesday and offered ashes to those who wanted them. I was there for an hour and I will invest an hour of my day today in that venture again. It is something that I don’t fully understand, to be honest.

The offering has almost nothing to do with evangelism - at least evangelism for our particular congregation. I doubt if Ash Wednesday will be the entrance point for a person to join our communion and if so, it would more likely come from that person visiting our church than from a chance encounter on a street corner. Most of the people who choose to receive ashes on the street come from church backgrounds and have some previous experience with Ash Wednesday. Many of them have drifted away from their church homes and though they like a few rituals and an occasional sign of faith, they have no particular interest in becoming active in church life right now. Regular church members will go to their own congregations for Ash Wednesday services. And those who receive ashes on the street miss out ot on the whole of the liturgy. One small and visible symbol is hardly the entire story of God’s grace.

Still, there is something about the church stripped from its institutional structures - no offering plates, no budget, no building, just people sharing faith with other people - that is very appealing to me. I know that we spend too much energy on institutional maintenance. I know that we often get too caught up in the trappings of faith without simply allowing our faith to shine.

And I know that simple exchanges between Jesus and strangers he met could be life changing events. Who am I to say that God’s grace cannot be communicated through a simple touch of ashes on the forehead of a stranger?

There have been hours of my life that have been invested less productively. It isn’t like I never waste time in the first place. And perhaps, just perhaps, what we are doing has almost nothing to do with ashes or the people who come to receive those ashes. One thing we have to offer the community that the community doesn’t often witness is the simple fact of showing in public that though we are pastors of different congregations of different denominations we are close friends who enjoy spending time together and who are absolutely convinced that we are engaged in the the same faith and serving the same God. Whatever tensions have existed in the history of the church, whatever excuses we have made to divide from one another, I am absolutely certain that these colleagues and friends with whom I join are about the ministry of Jesus Christ and are called to serve the people of God. We may have different liturgies. We may have different structures of governing our churches. But we belong to the same Christ.

As we walk away from Main Street Square, no one will know who is sporting Methodist ashes and who is wearing Episcopalian or UCC or Lutheran ashes.

Maybe the reminder of our mortality is a reminder that we are all in this together.

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.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am not immune to errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Sometimes there are sentences that simply don’t make any sense at all because a word was left out or because an idea started out in one direction and then I became distracted as I wrote. Although I do use a spell checker on my computer and I try to be careful, there are several problems with this type of writing. The main problem is that it is unedited. I’ve spent enough time editing the writing of others to know that a second set of eyes can be good at catching mistakes.

Even very good editors can miss some mistakes. We run all of our official publications at the church through a second set of eyes before printing. The weekly bulletin and our monthly newsletter are read by two different people who are good at catching mistakes. And we still have errors that go uncaught and get printed.

A second reason for the mistakes is simply the pressure of production. I write a thousand or more words (as counted by an automatic part of the software) each day. The pressure to produce means that I need to get words on the paper. OK there is no paper involved, but you know what I mean. I accept this discipline freely and most of the time joyfully because I want to become a better writer and I know that the way one becomes a writer is to write. Getting words out and expressing them in writing helps me to move on to other parts of my day. Often those other parts involve a lot of listening. I suspect that my writing contributes to my being a better listener. But production can lead to mistakes and there are days when I make mistakes simply because I am pushing myself and not giving enough time for the process.

There are, as well, wider cultural pressures that have an impact on spelling and grammar. I am a reader and I can remember when I would read a dozen books before I would discover a mistake in spanning , grammar or punctuation. But the world of publishing has changed. Publishers are reling more and more on software to check for theses mistakes and less and less on human eyes. Human editors are expensive. Add to that the fact that most of the books I read these days do not come from major publishing houses. Far more common are books that are self-published. Many self-publishers forego the paid editor simply because of the cost. Last night I was reading a well-written book and finding a small error about once a chapter. And the chapters are short in this book.

Beyond that, the use of standardized spelling rules is fading in our culture. With the advent of instant communication, text messaging, tweeting and other social media spelling is not a high priority. In fact there is a large set of accepted alternate spellings that delete letters to save on character count. A capital U replaces you. A capital R replaces are. But R can also mean other things as in ROFL - notice that they even leave out the article “the.”

These ways of communication are having an impact on the use of language in our culture. Spelling is no longer a subject taught in elementary schools. Actually there is still a lot of spelling being taught, it is, however, taught in context in the midst of other language arts. And just as calculators are used in school for mathematical manipulations that we did in our heads or on paper, so too computers with spell checkers are being used at the earliest levels of teaching and learning.

The practice of standardized spelling had a relatively brief career in the English language. The advent of the printing press made it possible to work toward standardized spelling and the Authorized King James Version of the Bible, first printed in 1611 included an attempt to set the standards of spelling for the language. Anyone reading the King James version these days will notice that the way we use language in our speech has changed considerably since 1611.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 wasn’t the first dictionary ever published, but was one of the most influential dictionaries in terms of producing standardized spelling. It was almost 175 years later when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed. Johnson’s Dictionary was pretty much considered the standard for that period of time. Johnson’s Dictionary also included a basic grammar and a bit of the history of the language as well.

Even if we go back to before Johnson’s Dictionary to the publication of the King James version of the bible as the start of standardized spelling, that is really only a little over 400 years. If what we are witnessing culturally is the end of standardized spelling, it will be a tiny blip in the history of humanity and our languages. Of course most of my life occurs within that blip, which adds to its significance from my point of view. Furthermore, I am not convinced that we have come to the end of standardized spelling and grammar. It is possible that the evolution of the language, like so many other things, is accelerating and change is coming so fast that it seems to be totally out of control. That rapid pace of change might itself be a bubble and a season of less change in language may be on the horizon. It certainly appears that English is going to emerge as one of the most common languages on the planet. With China embracing English as a second language for nearly all of its people, the influence of other languages is guaranteed to continue to influence the English vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It is clear that other word orders will emerge as acceptable in our language.

Maybe what I call mistakes are the wave of the future. I am able to read the book and quite frankly am more bothered by the choice of words than I am by the mistakes in spelling and grammar. If we are going to have a standardized language, there are a few words that I’d like to have left out. Cursing that once was considered unacceptable in polite society has made its way into the spoken language and now is appearing in print with more frequency.

So, I apologize for the errors in this blog. I’m solely responsible for them. As for the expletives? They won’t find a regular place in my blog for many years to come.

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.

Mardi Gras simply means “Fat Tuesday” in French. It sounds better in French. Traditionally Fat Tuesday was a day to consume all of the butter and other fat in the house because it was the last day before the season of Lent, a six week period of fasting. Lent is the most somber season in the Christian year. Fat Tuesday isn’t an official holiday in the Christian calendar. It is, rather, a celebration that grew out of anticipation of the period of preparation for Easter that lies ahead.

One of the places to see Fat Tuesday as a huge communal holiday is New Orleans. The folks in New Orleans have been observing Mardi Gras since at least the 1730’s. The size of their celebration simply couldn’t be contained in a single day with all of the music, picnics and parades snaking their way through the city. This year the official celebration began on February 15. That’s three weekends and nearly two and a half weeks of reveling and engaging in everything that you might think one might give up for lent. I’ve never been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but I’ve heard that it is something worth seeing. I’m not prone to all of the excesses that are on display, but I think I’d like the music.

There is a more ancient way to recognize Martedi Grasso. Notice I’ve switched languages. In the northern Italian town of Ivera, there is a really quirky festival. If it ever happens that I have the opportunity to attend, I will definitely don a red had and head out into the streets to see what is happening. The day is devoted to a “battle” with those on foot throwing oranges at the “knights” in horse-pulled carts. The knights catch or pick up the fruit and throw it back. The city is divided into nine teams, on e for each of the historic neighborhoods of the city. At the end of the “battle” awards are made to the team that performs the best. I’m not sure who does the judging or what criteria are applied to determine the best fruit throwing performance. I don’t even know where they get all of the oranges. They probably don’t know the full story. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Perhaps since the 12th century when Ivrea rebelled against a ruling tyrant.

Oh and the red hat? It is to signify that the person wearing it is not an official combatant and not a fair target for a lobbed orange. The real battlers get split lips and broken noses in the fracas. I’d rather avoid that, but have heard that a read hat is only partial protection and bystanders do occasionally get hit. I guess there is collateral damage in every battle.

There is another March holiday that interests me. On March 15 this year, Jews around the world celebrate Purim. The holiday commemorates the courage of Esther and is often accompanied with a reading or telling of the book of Esther, complete with cheers for Ester and Mordechai and boos for that nasty and evil Haman, the villain advisor to Ahasuerus. Say Ahasuerus quickly five times in a row!

I think the best place to observe Purim might be Tel Aviv, where you could attend a formal reading of the scrolls in an orthodox synagogue and then head outside for a massive street party with live music.

If you’d like to switch religions and travel to another part of the world, March 17 is Holi, observed in several places in India and other places where there are groups of Hindu observers. According to the legend the god Krishna had a dark complexion and worried that fair-skinned goddess Radha would not accept him. Krishna’s mother told him to paint Rada’s face however he wanted. These days Hindu observers paint one another’s faces in bright colors and spray colored water and powders on the heads of other revelers in the street.

If I were to attend this festival, I think I would head for Dehli, where there is a boisterous street festival complete with music. They call it the Holi Cow Festival. I’m not making this up. They really do. Now that is not bad in English. I wonder what it sounds like in Hindi?

Of course, March 17 is also St. Patrick’s Day. You need to find a city with a large Irish population for that festival. Chicago seems to do up the celebration pretty well. When we lived there they dumped dye in the Chicago river to make it bright green and repainted the stripes in the city core green in honor of the holiday. Parades are big on St. Patrick’s day as well as drinking large amounts of Guinness and wearing green.

Dublin might be another place for this celebration. They have performances in Gaelic, another language that I don’t speak.

If you head to Spain, Valencia is the place to celebrate Las Fallas from March 15 to the 19th. The final night, the night of fire is when they shoot off all of their fireworks. They also burn paper mache figures, alled ninots, in huge bonfires. The figures often portray less than popular politicians. If you prefer flowers to fires, in the midst of the celebration is the Ofrenda de Flores a la Virgen de los Desamperados (Floral Offering to Our Lady of the Forsaken). I think the place I’d like to observe that festival is Desamperados, south of San Jose in Costa Rica. I’ve never been inside of the big catholic church there, but I have friends in the neighborhood. They don’t do the bonfires there, just the offering of flowers at the church.

For the Zoroasterians, Nowruz on March 21, is the festival of the new year. When you think of it, the first day of spring isn’t a bad day for the celebration of a new year. Persians around the world celebrate by ritual house cleaning, buying new clothes, visiting family and he “Wednesday Festival” which is celebrated by singing a traditional song while leaping over a bonfire. I don’t think their bonfires are as big as those of Las Fallas. It is Iran’s biggest holiday, so Tehran might be the place to visit. As one who doesn’t like crowds that much, I might prefer a Bedouin camp out in the desert someplace. We could still sing and jump over the fire - hopefully a really small one.

In Bali Nyepi, March 31, is observed as a day of silence. They also have parades and festivals leading up to the actual day.

With all of the craziness in the world a day of silence seems appropriate. Not a bad way to observe Lent. A little self-reflection is worth the investment of time.

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 local paper had a headline yesterday that read, “March roaring in like a polar bear in the Black Hills.” I hadn’t heard that saying before. I know the saying, “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” I wondered what the parallel ending for the Polar Bear analogy might be. “In like a polar bear, out like a penguin?” I know, I know, polar bears live near the North pole, penguins live near the south pole and never the twain shall meet.

We certainly had winter weather for the first day of March. I was at the church and doing a few errands and the thermometer was overing in the -5 range at mid day. We got a few of inches of light, powdery snow and it fell in such a manner that the cleared driveway I shoveled at noon was under the snow by 4 pm. We decided not to make a firewood run to the Cheyenne River reservation yesterday. It’s too risky to have trucks and trailers on the road when the blowing snow reduces visibility so much. We’ll try tomorrow.

Of course, this isn’t Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Club believes that spring can begin in February some years and in a bad year it begins in mid March. This is the Black Hills where we know a spring blizzard can dump a lot of snow in Late April or early May. That doesn’t mean that we don’t ever get spring-like weather in March. We can have pleasant, above-freezing weather in any month of the year. We had some nice 50-degree days in February, though some folks will be quick to forget those days while they are shoveling snow this week.

Here in the hills, I think that if it were announced on February 2 that there would be only six more weeks of winter, we’d all raise a cheer. Not bad to have winter over by the middle of March!

Alas, most of there sayings about the weather are just that: sayings. The ancients believed that gods or spirits ruled the weather and that bad weather was a kind of punishment. They also believed that the good and the bad achieved some kind of balance. So if the beginning of the month brought bad weather, the end would bring good. They also believed that if the beginning was good, the end would be bad. “In like a lamb, out like a lion” was as common as the opposite.

About the only truth to the old sayings is that the weather in March can be pretty varied. We can see spring rains and blizzards in the same week. We can have wonderful kite-flying days alongside snow shoveling days. There have been years when the ice is out of the lake in March and others when it remains frozen for the entire month.

There are some other sayings about March that you’d probably find in the Farmer’s Almanac: “A dry March and a wet May? Fill barns and bays with corn and hay.” Of course corn doesn’t grow all that well around here, so I’m not counting on any full barns. A few ears of good sweet corn at the end of August is sufficient for me. And a wet May with the weather drying out at the end of June might produce a good first cutting of hay in July.

“As it rains in March so it rains in June” doesn’t seem to work out all that well around here, either. At least I hope it isn’t “as it snows in March so it snows in June.” I don’t think the amount of precipitation in March says anything about how much precipitation we will get in June. In general late springs bring shorter fire seasons around here, and that is a good thing. With all of the trees killed by bark beetles in the hills, we’ll take all the moisture we can get and we’ll still be sniffing the air for smoke by the end of July.

I think the saying, “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers” might be true. We usually have a few flowers around here by May.

Generally the sayings we have in the back of our heads have some kind of basis in observed reality, but they rarely work for prediction of anything.

But I don’t get the reference to polar bears in yesterday’s newspaper. If they think that it is polar bear cold around here, they’ve never been to the arctic. Of course I haven’t either, but I have not trouble putting on my insulated coveralls and working outside at -5. I know that I wouldn’t be doing that at -40. There is a big difference.

We always used -40 as the standard for super cold weather when I was a kid. I’m not sure it ever got down that cold, but I do remember -30 days. The magic about -40 is that the thermometers we had in those days didn’t go any colder. Since mercury freezes at -38 Fahrenheit, a mercury thermometer won’t work at any temperatures that are colder. Also for you trivia buffs, -40 Fahrenheit is also -40 Celsius. The two scales cross at that point.

Polar Bears can withstand -40 temperatures with 40mph winds outdoors. They don’t hibernate. And they can swim in open water at any temperature. But we don’t have any polar bears in our neck of the woods.

I think that the reference to polar bears might have been a veiled reference to global warming. Polar bears have become a kind of a symbol of climate change. The melting of arctic ice has meant some big changes in the habitat and behavior of polar bears.

There remain, however, a few folks who don’t believe the evidence of global warming and who cite the cold winter as evidence that global warming isn’t occurring. The observation carries about as much wisdom as the old weather sayings that we quote. It might be an interesting observation, but it isn’t a good predictor of the future.

So I’m not making any predictions about the overall weather patterns of the month. It’s still below zero outside this morning. I won’t be worrying about polar bears when I go out for the paper, however.

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.

Growing up near the mountains, there were lots of tales of avalanches and slides. In the summers, we could see the places where dramatic slides had occurred. One of the most famous slides in our area was devil’s slide, near Gardiner. The chute had rock walls on both sides and the bottom of the chute was bright read from all of the iron in the soil. While neighboring chutes in the side of the mountain had trees growing in them, the slide area remained free from trees. I often saw the area in the winter, but I don’t remember ever seeing evidence of an actual avalanche there, however. It was just assumed that the snow would slide there nearly every winter.

When we traveled in the mountains in the winter, we learned to keep clear of certain areas. Living on the east slope , or downwind side of the Rockies, we knew about cornices forming in the snow near the tops of the mountains and the destructive power of the slides that might occur. There were rumors and tales of old timers, miners and explorers who put their cabins in the wrong place and were killed by winter avalanches.

The basic wisdom of the time was that if you were caught in an avalanche, you wouldn’t survive. Folks would have to wait until spring or summer to dig out your remains.

For the most part, however, we thought of avalanches as things that occurred in the backcountry and wilderness areas. The ski patrol used canons to blast away any potential avalanches so that they slid free from victims and resort skiing was considered to be safe.

The scene was dramatically different yesterday in Missoula, Montana, however. An intersection right in town, the corner of Van Buren and Holly streets, was the scene of a frantic rescue attempt where first responders, neighbors and volunteers dug for more than three hours to extract victims from an avalanche that roared down Mount Jumbo in the middle of the city and buried three people.

It turned out to be a good day for the rescuers. About an hour after the slide, an eight-year old boy was dug out of a space between a fence and a house alive with no broken bones. Nearby rescuers continued to ding where the remains of a home destroyed by the slide jutted at odd angles from the snow. the remains of the house at 1440 Harrison Street at the foot of Mount Jumbo was the site of the rescue of Fred Allendorf, a retired university professor. A fallen chimney had created an air pock roughly 5 feet by 2 feet that saved him from suffocation.

Night fell and portable floodlights were brought in as crews continued digging in search of Allendorf’s wife, who also had been in the home at the time it was crushed. More than three hours after the slide, they pulled her from the ruins of the house. Incredibly she was breathing and had no broken bones.

Everyone had been safely rescued.

The apartment next door to the Allendorf home was also occupied at the time of the slide, but escaped major damage. A closet and room at the back of the home filled with snow, but the occupants were uninjured.

It has been an unusual winter in Missoula. The University was closed yesterday due to the blizzard conditions. But it takes more than cold weather to keep folks in Western Montana indoors. Outdoor recreation is part of the reason they have chosen to live in the beautiful country surrounding the city that is home to the University of Montana as well as the nation’s first smokejumper base. There was a report on the website of the Missoulian, the area’s newspaper, that snowboarders were seen near the top of Mount Jumbo shortly before the avalanche. Skiers, snowboarders and snowmobilers can unwittingly set off avalanches by traversing cornices and other features of unstable snow. If the snowboarders were the cause of the avalanche, they are extremely lucky. Had they ridden the snow down from the top they would have almost certainly been buried beyond timely rescue.

The avalanche took out power poles and the gas main under Van Buren had to be shut off because of numerous gas leaks caused by the slide. A huge pile of debris lies at the foot of the slide.

The Sheriff has issued a warning for all of the homes that lie at the foothills in the city including Mount Jumbo, Mount Sentinel, Waterworks Hill and other steep slopes. A shelter has been established at First Baptist Church and a local veterinary hospital is sheltering animals for those who choose to move out of their homes. No mandatory evacuation orders have been issued, but officials warned that any slope steeper than 30 degrees has potential for slides in the snowy and windy conditions that persist.

21 years ago an avalanche on Mount Jumbo killed a hiker. The student at Rattlesnake School was hiking with friends. Three of the boys were buried. The fourth was able to dig out two of them, but the fourth perished.

We pay attention to Missoula because we have family and friends in the city. With the university closed yesterday was a good day for a few phone calls to make sure folks were safe.

Learning the risks of severe weather is part of surviving in the mountains. Even so there is plenty of potential for surprise. I remember one spring when we discovered a fresh avalanche scar with hundreds of broken trees on the side of West Mountain. The valley below is unoccupied in the winter, but a place where the trees were a hundred years old that hadn’t experienced a slide in at least that much time had on one winter day become the site of a major avalanche. I’m sure that the people in Missoula felt that their homes were safe and free from avalanche zones. There have been houses in the Missoula foothills for as long as people can remember.

I’m glad that our home isn’t at the base of a steep slope. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be surprised by severe conditions. It is just one less thing to worry about on a cold winter’s 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.