OK, a short history lesson on an item of church trivia. The Feast of the Visitation is a Christian holiday that dates back to pre-Reformation days. After the Great Schism, some of the orders of the Christian Church began to organize their lives around the gospel story. The Gospel of Luke tells of Mary visiting Elizabeth when they are both pregnant. In the Gospel, Mary leaves immediately after the Annunciation and went “into the hill country . . . into a city of Judah.” The story is not clear about the specific location. Perhaps it was Hebron, south of Jerusalem, or Ein Karem. Elizabeth is expecting the birth of John, a bit of a miracle child in her aging years. When she sees Mary and hears Mary’s greeting, the gospel reports that the baby leapt in her womb. Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months and then returned to here home. Although the Gospel doesn’t report it, the tradition is that she stayed for the birth of Elizabeth’s son and attended her at the birth.

The dates of all of these things are less than precise. And, of course, this was before the time of Gregory and our modern calendar, so there are adjustments in timing due to the differences between calendars. At any rate, the Franciscans were already observing a Feast of the Visitation prior to 1263. The Franciscan Breviary spread to many churches. Pope Urban VI inserted the feast day into the Roman Calendar for celebration on July 2. He was trying to form a new calendar that would pave the way for an end to the Great Schism.

But July 2 doesn’t really work out in the overall calendar of the Roman Church because in that calendar, John is born on June 24. To get the events in the right order, the date should fall close to the annunciation and before the birth of John. So Pope Paul VI moved the date of the feast to May 31, today, in the Roman Calendar. Of course, Pope Paul VI’s calendar was significantly after the Protestant reformation, so it was not universally adopted by the various churches. To make matters more confusing, some Roman Catholics didn’t like Pope Paul VI’s calendar and continue to use the pre-1969 calendar.

The Feast of the Visitation is today. Unless you use the pre-1969 calendar; or unless you are in Germany, where the Vatican has allowed all congregations to celebrate the feast on July 2. Then if you are an Anglican, it might just be a commemoration rather than a feast day.

So in our corner of the church, which doesn’t adhere closely to the calendar of feasts, we tend to let the day pass without any ceremony or recognition.

At our house, however, it seems like a day to think about unborn babies. We have a new granddaughter who will be born any day now and she seems to be, if not leaping, engaging in some sorts of gymnastics inside of her mother that keep her mom from getting a good night’s sleep and keeps the entire family in alert mode. Being the parents of the father, our visit to the new one will be after the birth to allow space for the mother’s mother to be there for the big event. We have a busy schedule, so it will be a little more than two weeks before we arrive to greet our new granddaughter face-to-face.

In an age of technology, however, we are following the events closely. We receive regular updates by text message and video conference over Skype regularly to keep up with the events of the household and the adventures of our grandson, who is now 3 years old.

So, I am thinking that rather than observe the Feast of the Visitation today, we might enjoy our day as a day of reflection on Joseph and Zechariah. While Mary was off visiting Elizabeth, Joseph is back at home, significantly removed from all of the action, and probably wondering about what he’d gotten himself into. Conversations with angels, a child by the Holy Spirit - there is a lot to take in. Meanwhile Zechariah is literally struck dumb by all of the events and so he isn’t saying a word. He regains his speech at the birth of his son and issues a famous poem according tot he Gospel of Luke. Perhaps he spent the period of his wife’s pregnancy composing the poem, since he wasn’t doing much talking. And he was a priest at the temple, who was not only used to talking, but also to having people listen to what he was saying.

Of course the Bible doesn’t speak much of grandparents. Becoming grandparents is a luxury of longer life expectancies. In our mobile society, however, children often make their homes many miles distant from their parents. And people keep moving around, so that families are spread across the globe and many grandparents, like us, become observers from a distance as the really big events of life continue to roll on.

There is no escaping the realty of the excitement of a birth, however. I find myself thinking about it more and more as the days draw closer.

I’m sure that other families have different experiences, but becoming a grandfather has given me a deepened appreciation for our children. Our son is a truly amazing father. I love to watch him play with his son. Our daughter is an incredible aunt. She has done more than a little bit of shopping for her new niece already. In my memory the days of babies in our home was a time of being a bit distant from my siblings, but in the case of our children they have drawn closer together despite the physical distance that separates them.

Perhaps it is a a triumph of modern communications technology. I’m thinking that Joseph was pretty much left in the dark and without any news whatsoever during the time that Mary was visiting Elizabeth. And we know that old Zechariah didn’t say a word. I prefer the modern rhythm of my vibrating phone announcing the latest update.

But like all of the players in Luke’s report, we are in a time of waiting. There are lots of things in life that are worth the wait. Sometimes the waiting is a pleasure in itself. Joy is coming, and a bit of it has already arrived. Today is a good day for a celebration.

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 suppose that it was suspenseful on television. I didn’t watch. I’m pretty sure that had I watched, I would have become annoyed with the frequent commercial interruptions. It would have been an annoyance to have been in the audience as well as prime-time live television means that the actual event has to be interrupted for all of those commercial breaks.

The crowd had a clear-cut favorite. Jacob Williamson of Cape Coral, Florida would pump his arms and utter screams of joy each time he successfully advanced to another round. He pounded the stage floor when he advanced to the final round. It was the climax of three days that started with 281 spellers in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Jacob, however, didn’t win. He correctly spelled “rhadamanthine” and “carcharodont,” but missed on “Kabarogoya.” My computer’s spell checker, on the other hand, couldn’t master any of those words.

The event was a nail-biter in the end, however, After the competition was down to only two spellers, both made a mistake in the 16th round. 14-year-old Siriam Hathwar missed “corpsbruder,” but he got a reprieve when 13-year-old Ansun Sujoe missed “antigropelos.” That forced the spelling bee into extra innings. According to the rules, the bee goes to a special 25-word championship list.

The two continued, correctly spelling word after word. The final word on the list, “feuilleton,” fell to Ansun. He got it correct and for the first time in history the national spelling bee ended in a tie.

It didn’t get the audience of a college basketball game, but a lot more people notice the national bee after the 2006 movie Akeelah and the Bee was released to critical acclaim.

There is something inspiring about a room full of teenagers who spend their free time studying the dictionary.

OK, I’m a bit of a nerd. But I do love dictionaries and am delighted to see a new generation of youth who enjoy them. Of course every one who made it to the national spelling bee received a Microsoft tablet computer as part of their recognition, so those young people aren’t using paper dictionaries to study - they are using electronic dictionaries and probably have specialized computer programs to quiz them on a regular basis. Hmm . . . I wonder if I should try to get one of those applications for my phone.

I didn’t start out life as a good speller. When I was in my early teens, I thought of myself as a very poor speller and had no interest in spelling bees. It was only when I got to my late teens and early twenties that I decided that I could learn to spell. Since that time, I’ve become a decent speller, though nowhere near a champion.

On the front page of the Washington Post web site this morning, alongside the story of the national spelling bee there is a chilling story about two teens who engaged in systematic bullying and abuse of an autistic classmate.

The boy, who is high functioning and was attending high school, was abused by two girls, one 17, the other 15. They used their cell phones to record holding a butcher knife to his throat and luring him into a partially frozen pond, then refusing to help him when he fell in. The videos and statements that were given to the police are so ugly that the judge asked, “Why would any human being treat another person like this?”

The 15-year-old girl was sentenced in juvenile court in April to a maximum of six years in a secure juvenile facility after pleading guilty to second-degree assault and displaying of an obscene photograph of a minor.

The 17-year-old was originally charged as an adult, but the judge ruled that the case should be moved from adult court to juvenile court. Had she been convicted in adult court she could have faced up to 80 years in prison. Now she will be incarcerated in a juvenile facility for four years after pleading guilty.

Law enforcement officers expressed disappointment at the judge’s ruling. They had been seeking the maximum penalties for the high-profile case.

I am simply not qualified to comment on the judge’s decision. Here is what I do know. The victim will not have healed from the damage caused by the abuse by the time the offenders are released from incarceration. He will struggle with the effects of it for the rest of his life. You don’t get over something like that - you get through it. Hopefully he will have the counseling support he needs to get on with his life.

What is shocking about the case is the lack of remorse and empathy. The abusers were successful high school students. One was a cheerleader. And yet they had failed in the basic human task of learning to care for other humans. Who knows what kind of adults they might have become had they not been caught and convicted for their crimes. Such ruthlessness is beyond imagination.

The girls statements to officers after their arrests were very troubling. “We should have erased the videos. We were stupid. We’ll be smarter after this.” Is it possible that they were already thinking of more abuse and torture of another human being. One girl, when authorities came to her home to arrest her said, “I have a project tomorrow. I can’t go to jail.” It is about as self-centered as a person can get.

Side by side in the newspaper stories of the best and the worst of teenage behavior. Like people of all ages, the good and the bad are often closer together than we might imagine. I have no idea how good the abusers are at spelling. I don’t know much about the capacity of the spellers for empathy.

The thing that gave me hope from the stories was a little note in the report of the spelling bee. It said that during the final round each speller who missed a word and didn’t advance received a standing ovation from the other spellers.

And the two who tied for the victory had both missed one word. They know how it feels. The empathy for other spellers at least was clearly illustrated.

I can only pray that the abusers can learn empathy for the victim without having to be victims themselves.

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 was 18 years old, I made a list of life goals. One of my goals was to become a published author. I imagined that I would publish multiple books during my lifetime, and I set the goal of having published a book by the age of 35. I am an avid reader and I like to write, so I thought that I could put those things together and come up with a book, maybe even one that someone else would like to read. I had written academic manuscripts that were nearly book length.

Of course there is more to publishing a book than coming up with a manuscript. And the publishing business has gone through an enormous change and is still in a time of great transition.

Over the years I have published in academic and professional journals and have contributed to several curricula projects and have managed to have my name listed as author in several different projects. Some of them even look like books.

The truth, however, is that whereas I think I have found my voice as a preacher, I am not so sure that I have found my voice as an author. I guess it would be fair to call myself an essayist. I write a lot of blog essays. And I am a decent contract writer. I can produce the right word count that stays on topic and meets the editor’s specifications. I meet deadlines and can produce the words that are needed for someone else’s project. But although I consider myself to be a competent storyteller, I have yet to produce much fiction that is worth reading.

And you can forget about my poetry. Billy Collins once said in an interview that everyone has a supply of bad poems. The trick is to get as many poems out as fast as possible so that one day you will run short of bad poems and begin to write good poems. I haven’t approached that state, yet. I can only produce bad poems.

Then again, one perfect poem would be sufficient for a lifetime, I think.

There are, however, poets who have produced many poems that stir the heart and make the reader think and plumb the deepest depths of human meaning.

Honestly, however, it can take time for a poet to find his or her voice.

Marguerite Annie Johnson had a really harsh childhood. Her parents split up when she was very young. She and her older brother, Bailey were sent to live with their father’s mother, Anne Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. With dark skin, she experienced firsthand racial prejudice and discrimination in the American south. During a visit with her mother, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Then, her uncles killed the boyfriend. The trauma was so great that she stopped talking. She returned to Arkansas as a virtual mute and didn’t utter another word for five years.

She became pregnant after a short-lived high school romance and gave birth to a son.

She did not begin her adult life as a speaker, or even a writer. She earned a dance and acting scholarship to the California Labor School. Working to support herself and her son, she became the first black female cable car conductor in San Francisco.

She met and married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos. It was by blending her childhood nickname and her new surname that she came up with the stage name that marked her career as a performer, a poet, and a public icon: Maya Angelou.

She found her voice:

“The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still”

Fifteen words that speak more deeply than thousands written by others.

“You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You matt kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I rise.”

Dancer, actor, singer, political activist, friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., author, playwright, poet, friend of presidents, university professor - there is a lot that she packed into one lifetime. As a reader, I owe a great deal to James Baldwin just for the words he wrote, but so much more for the simple fact that he encouraged Maya Angelou to write about her life experiences. Her 1969 memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” may be one of the most influential books of late 20th Century America. She continued to write her own story with successive books: “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die” (1971); “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (1986) and “A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (2002).

There have been more hard times in her life. She has known more than just the pain and trauma of her childhood years. Martin Luther King died on her birthday, April 4, 1968. She stopped celebrating her birthday for years.

But she didn’t lose her voice.

She sent flowers to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, on that day for the rest of her life, more than 30 years.

When she returned to celebrating her birthday, she had become friends with Oprah Winfrey, who was able to put together some memorable occasions, including a week-long cruise for her 70th birthday.

She read the poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration on January 20, 1993. President Barak Obama called her “a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman.” He said she “had the ability to remind us that we are all God’s children; that we all have something to offer.”

And now her life has reached its conclusion and she has taken her place among the greats of the story of this great land. I received the news yesterday morning as I was arriving at the church to start another day. Her family’s statement said, in part: “Her family is extremely grateful that her ascension was not belabored by a loss of acuity or comprehension. She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace.”

Thank God she found her voice.

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

A phrase that is often printed in the magazines I read goes something like this: “There is no feeling like taking to the water in a boat that you made yourself.” It is true, I suppose. I’ve been paddling and rowing handmade boats for more than 20 years now. My first homemade boat, a 17’ canoe, was a project started simply because I couldn’t afford to buy a boat. I bought cedar boards from a lumber mill, cut them into strips on my table saw, and fitted them together around a set of frames to craft a canoe. I followed a set of plans that I bought through the mail from an advertisement in the back of a magazine. My results were acceptable. There were a few uneven spots in the milling of the cedar. I used butt joints because I didn’t have a router to put cove and bead edges on the planks. I used a knife, a chisel and a small block plane to get the edges to fit and sometimes they didn’t fit quite properly. My mistakes were covered by a single layer of fiberglass cloth embedded in epoxy. I built the canoe outdoors on a covered patio. I still paddle that canoe occasionally.

It was a thrill to paddle that canoe for the first time, but there was also the sense that I could have done better. I saw mistakes that others didn’t notice. And I learned quite a bit about the shape and design of boats in the process. By the time I built my second canoe, I had obtained a router and a table so that I could mill coves and beads into the strips. They fit much better and even though that boat is made out of the lowest grade of fence cedar, so it is full of scarf joints, the results were very gratifying. That boat was the lightest and most nimble of the craft that I have made. I suspect that as I age I will begin shedding boats. That second canoe might be the last to go as it is the lightest and easiest to get to and from the water. It is, however, strictly a solo canoe and part of the joy of being in a boat is sharing it with someone else.

After the second canoe, I guess the bug had bitten and I just kept making boats. I swamped a canoe in the Puget Sound, with no injuries or trauma. I just got wet. The result was my first kayak. An expedition kayak was my first venture into skin-on-frame boats and I made enough mistakes with that one that I’m eager to make another to correct those mistakes.

Along the way, I have obtained some boats that were made in factories. I have two moulded plastic kayaks. One is a very inexpensive little boat that I don’t have to worry about encounters with rocks and gravel and other things that scratch the varnished surface of my wooden kayak or would tear the fabric of my skin-on-frame boat. The other is a play boat designed for floating in creeks. It is fun in the surf at a beach as well. And I have a treasured 1960 Old Town canoe that was headed for the garbage dump when I rescued it and restored it. It is a beautiful boat and paddles wonderfully. I have nearly as many hours invested in that restoration as I might have put into building a new boat.

I seem to run in streaks. Last year was a summer of paddling canoes. I made a few paddles in kayaks, but most of the time I paddled my canoes in the lake closest to our home. I was working hard on my freestyle paddling and each adventure in the canoe was filled with lots of things to learn. I bought a new paddle and made my first paddle from local spruce. I’ve still got a lot to learn about paddle carving, but it is a new challenge for this phase of my life.

I haven’t made it to the lake as much this year. As I mentioned yesterday, I have a cluttered calendar, but the boat that is out and ready to go is a small rowboat that I made a couple of years ago to celebrate the birth of our first grandchild. The boat is named “Mister E” after Elliot. I like puns and all boats are a bit of a mystery.

The Mister E was constructed from plywood according to a design by John Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft. It is similar in shape to the Whitehall boats of New England with a plumb bow and a distinctive wineglass transom. The boat feels light and nimble under oar and makes good time in the water. I have two moveable seats and foot braces and set oarlocks in three different places so the boat can be rowed solo or tandem. The boat carries 450 pounds, so I can take a couple of other people with me. After all it was made to take a grandson out for messing about in boats.

I’ve found that there isn’t much appreciation for rowing craft in our area. People have asked me why I don’t mount a motor on the little boat. I guess they have never known the thrill of rowing a nicely-designed boat with plenty of glide. I can row all day long at a moderate pace in that boat. Even this spring, with my body out of shape and carrying a few extra pounds from the winter, I can row for an hour without the need of a break. I guess that when I’m out on the lake for recreation, I have no need for speed and I enjoy the peace and quiet. I’ve watched others with their speedboats and jet skis and I’m sure they are having fun, but I don’t have to mess with fuel other than an occasional sandwich. I can launch my boat and row halfway across the lake in the time it takes them to fuel, launch and start up their boats.

It does feel good to be out on the water in a boat I have made with my own hands. But it also creates a bit of a desire to start building a new boat. After all, we have a granddaughter due to be born in the next couple of weeks. And I think she deserves a boat with her name on it as well.

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.

Years ago when I imagined what life would be like at this age, I was fairly confident that I would have achieved balance ini the critical areas of my life. I don’t think I imagined that I would continue to struggle to keep all of the different elements of life coordinated and balanced. Now, as I approach the years that some would call senior, I find that I am no more balanced with my priorities than I was twenty years ago. From this point of view, it seems that I had my act together in my twenties better than I do these days.

I do not have an unpleasant life. I have a wonderful marriage and family. Our children are healthy and engaged in meaningful lives. We have a grandson and a granddaughter who will be born soon. I have a meaningful career and a wonderful job. We have a lovely home and enough security to feel stable in our living. There is nothing in my life to complain about, really.

Yet I still struggle with setting priorities of time. I still wrestle with too much accumulated clutter. I still have work to do to achieve balance in my life.

Yesterday I went rowing at the lake. It took about two hours by the time I drove to the lake, rowed an hour and then drove back home. The exercise made me feel good. I topped that off with mowing our lawn. We have a large lawn and a walk-behind mower, so that was a bit more exercise. I cut off a couple of stumps, worked on a furniture refinishing project, put a coat of varnish on a wooden kayak and cooked a healthy supper on our outdoor grill.

I didn’t check my e-mail all day long. I didn’t check in at the office. It was a holiday and the office was closed. I didn’t make any hospital calls. I didn’t do anything that was work-related, really.

I can do a pretty good job of keeping up on a day off. But there isn’t enough of that balance. In general, I find it hard to take a day off. If we have a funeral scheduled for a day off, I usually can’t figure out how to take off a different day that week. When I rearrange my work schedule, it seems like there is just too much to do.

I don’t mind the long days or even the infrequent days off. But I can’t seem to build into my working life the amount of physical exercise that I need to remain healthy and maintain optimal endurance. I understand that two hours for exercise is a bit excessive. I usually can get in a few minutes. Parking at the distant edge of a parking lot, using stairs instead of elevators, and taking a short walk during my lunch break all help, but don’t give me the workout that I really need.

I’m beginning to understand why people join health clubs.

But I’m just not a health club kind of person. The forms of exercise I enjoy, and therefore am able to maintain, all take place outdoors. I like to ride a bike on a trail, but I am so quickly bored riding a stationary bike that I would never keep a discipline. I love to paddle and row at the lake, but the rowing machine, while a discipline that I can maintain at times, seems to become a chore when I am tired and going full steam ahead.

Summer gives me the gift of mowing the lawn, but frankly, that is a chore and I too often don’t recognize the gift that it is.

I’m quite sure that I would be more efficient in my work if I worked a little bit less and exercised a bit more. It is a matter of balance and nuance. I’m not talking about a major lifestyle change, just a minor course correction.

I know I think more clearly when I have had enough time outdoors. I know that exercising helps me focus my attention when I am doing important work. I also know that just putting in more hours at the office doesn’t mean that I will accomplish more work.

I guess I thought somehow, that I would have this all figured out by now.

The clutter in my office serves as a good analogy for the clutter in my life. I’ve been working in the past few weeks to reduce the clutter. I’ve cleaned off the bookshelves, removed items from the office and cleared and sorted files that I hadn’t looked at in years. I still have a long way to go, but I’m making progress. The problem was that I had accumulated too much stuff. I collected books and devotional items and resources for teaching. I collected reports and files and forms for weddings and funerals and worship planning and much more. When I was just getting started in the ministry, collecting the resources and tools to do the job was important. Somewhere along the way I over collected. Now I am discovering that less is more. Too many resources means that I am unable to use the resources I have. It is time to get rid of some of the things I have collected.

My schedule is as cluttered as my office once was. I have collected volunteer assignments and community involvements and a host of other responsibilities. I have collected projects and consultancies with other congregations and other areas of the church.

The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson spoke of the stages of life and named the task of older adulthood as integration. It is the time in life when we draw together the various different experiences and fashion them into a meaningful whole. I suspect that he left out an important stage for someone like me. I can’t begin the task of integration until I do some preliminary sifting and sorting. I need to declutter my life of some of the things and also declutter my schedule of some of the obligations.

I’m quite certain that we never get things fully figured out in this life. That is a joy as well as a challenge. I just wish I could find a slightly more balanced approach to the tasks of this phase of my life.

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.

Memory is a powerful force in human lives. Many of our meanings come from the ways in which we process our memories. A day set aside for memories seems an appropriate response to some of the world’s great tragedies. Memorial Day has its roots in a devastating period of our nation’s history. More than 750,000 Americans lost their lives in the Civil War. That was more than 2 percent of the total population of our country. The nation was deeply divided. If we think that politics are polarized in our time, we need only to remember our history to understand that the effects of polarized politics can be devastating - and also to remember that our democracy has the resilience to endure great struggles and disagreements.

The period of history leading up to the Civil War has some elements that are similar to our time: sharp regional differences over the power of the federal government; advocates of slavery relied on “constitutional” claims to justify the continuation of the practice; the refusal of pro-slavery forces to accept the outcome of the 1860 elections; fierce disagreements over the definition of important concepts such as “morality,” “patriotism” and “freedom.” People argued over what the Founders really intended and over the authority of the Supreme Court. Many church organizations couldn’t stand the strain. Divisions within churches over the issue of slavery gave rise to new denominations and divergent claims as to what the Bible teaches.

It is good to be reminded of our history. It is good to remember. Even the history of Memorial Day is filled with disagreement. The process of decorating graves and publicly grieving the loss of war dead arose spontaneously in many locations after the Civil War, but it wasn’t until after World War I that Memorial Day was established as a holiday for the entire country. Even after we agreed on a shared date, we couldn’t agree on where the tradition started. Students of the holiday believe that General John A. Logan, commander in chief for the GAR and Republican vice presidential nominee in 1884, set May 30 as the date because flowers would be in bloom throughout the country.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, N.Y. as the official birthplace of the holiday, but that didn’t settle the arguments.

Somehow, however, through all of the conflict and disagreement, our nation has found a way to come together. The simple fact that we share in the recognition of Memorial Day in all of our states is a sign of a basic unity that underlies the divisions that endure.

Memorial Day may be the most important of our patriotic holidays. Whereas July 4 is a reminder of the Declaration of Independence and a call to celebrate and protect freedom, Memorial Day is a reminder that politics have dire consequences. Real people die. Real families are left bereft. Distorting history and political realities can have deadly consequences. A true patriot never forgets the cost of political decisions.

Since 2001, I and many others in our country have carried a heightened awareness of the deep costs of war. Suicide rates among war veterans have reached alarming levels. We are currently losing 22 military veterans each day to suicide. What we once called the “invisible injuries” of war are now too great to ignore. A massive Army study focusing on records from nearly a million soldiers discovered some alarming realities: About one in four soldiers int he Army suffer from at least one psychiatric disorder and one in 10 have multiple disorders.

It is important to realize that not all mental disorders lead to suicide. But it is equally important to recognize that mental illness is as real an injury suffered by some who go to war as is the loss of a limb. The war is not over for the soldier who comes home.

Each Memorial Day weekend for more than a decade now, the TAPS program has held a national conference for the families of fallen soldiers. TAPS stands for Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. The TAPS program has specific resources to educate the families of soldiers who have died by suicide. Most of the TAPS managers and volunteers are themselves victims of suicide, having lost a family member to death by suicide. The weekend conference is an opportunity for families to come together for mutual support and healing.

It also may be one of the most important gatherings in our country for the prevention of future suicides. Their educational programs have enabled military leaders and others in our country to recognize the serious nature of mental injuries and recognize the warning signs of suicide. Not every death is preventable, but appropriate intervention and treatment can save lives. We wouldn’t ever deny the best medical treatment available for those who have received physical injuries in war. We must extend equally compassionate treatment to those who suffer mental illness as a direct result of their wartime experiences.

Providing such care is a basic responsibility of every citizen. As a nation, we rely on a very small percentage of our fellow citizens to assume the risks of combat. Since 2001, we have leaned extremely heavily upon these fellow citizens, with repeated deployments to war and often inadequate opportunities for recovery between deployments. We have fostered a culture that encourages the hiding of psychological injuries and illnesses.

A holiday to remember the high cost of our way of life seems essential. But it will take more than tears shed at gravesides to provide the healing that our nation needs. Just as we rely upon a military of volunteers, we need teams of dedicated and trained volunteers to assist those who are returning from war and support their families. The TAPS program is an excellent example of how people can reach out to others with strength and healing and provide education and information that can make a big difference.

Memorial Day stands as a reminder of the immense cost of war. For those who are caught up in war, the war is never completely over. They deserve our unending commitment to their care. We owe nothing less to those who have died.

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 word college didn’t always refer to an educational institution. In ancient Rome a collegium was any group of people that had legal recognition. There were collegium of social clubs, political groups, professions, even burial societies. Over the centuries, however, collegium took on roles of training and educating members. The English word college began to refer to an educational institution. Early colleges were residential places of learning. The process of going to college was both an educational and a social adventure. People were taught not only how to learn together, but how to live together.

By the time we graduated from college and went to graduate school, the words had taken on new meanings. College was used to refer specifically to a degree-granting tertiary educational institution. A university was a collection of several colleges, and a collegium was an intentional community formed within a college for the purpose of living and learning together.

Christians and members of other religions have long formed intentional communities for practicing faith together. Often these are called monasteries. They are places where faith is lived and the practices of faith are intentionally built into the routines and schedules of life together.

In seminary, we sought to form a different kind of Christian community. We didn’t want to live lives isolated by gender or age and sought a community that included families with children. After a year of practicing our faith and learning together in separate apartments, the opportunity came to rent a house together with two other families. We didn’t have children at that time, but the other families did. We would share the kitchen and living spaces, have a dedicated room for study and private areas for family members. It was our dream to be colleagues - people who not only learned together, but who lived together in community and practiced our faith together. Each meal would include prayer and be a time of communion. Sharing chores and working together would offer opportunities to grow in faith.

It was a wonderful time in our lives. We grew close to our colleagues. We pushed and challenged each other in our learning. One of my roles was as baker for the house. Each Saturday morning I would bake a week’s worth of bread for nine people plus our guests. I would braid whole wheat and white doughs together to form special loaves for communion.

And now it has been nearly 40 years since we shared that particular adventure in community. We have lived apart for decades. Four of the members of our collegium - a student, a spouse and their two children - returned to their native Australia to serve the church there.

The bonds of Christian community are deep. We have remained close even though years have passed and distances have been great, we have lived as colleagues ever since. On the rare occasions when we were able to be together in the same place our conversations began as if we had never been apart. Through letters and occasional phone calls and other means we communicated the important events of our lives. We knew that we would always be there for each other.

The last time we were together in the same place as families was in 2006 when we traveled to Australia. By then our children were adults, but they were able to travel with us. Their children lived nearby and we were able to get together. It was as if we had never been apart. It was as if we belong together.

We have been anticipating with great joy the visit of the parents of our Australian family scheduled for August of this year. It will be their second visit to our South Dakota home. We were hosting them as we moved to South Dakota and they shared the miles of driving and the unpacking of boxes in our new home. There aren’t many friends who would do as much. There aren’t many people we would invite into the midst of the disruption of moving. This summer will be different.

Then, yesterday, which was the day before yesterday in our time zone, our beloved Leanne died. The daughter of our Australian family had suffered many different illnesses over the years. Two years ago a stroke left her teetering on the edge of life and death for a long time. But her recovery was miraculous. In may ways she had been freed from some of the pain and other health challenges she had endured over the years. The bright sparkle in her eyes returned. We felt so blessed. The power of the international community of prayer was evident.

But we do not control the timing of our lives. And this time, recovery was not to be. She had the best of medical care and the most compassionate of doctors and nurses. Her Australian family gathered and shared communion at her bedside. The final moments were peaceful and calm. A sort of shock entered the lives of the witnesses and shortly thereafter the lives of those of us who were keeping vigil from a long distance. It still seems a bit unreal. We have to keep reminding ourselves that this has really happened. The next day, Sunday, in the late morning, which was Saturday evening here in the states, we got together on the telephone to share a few stories and a few tears and to be reminded once again that our colleagues are very real and somehow coping with this new tragedy in their lives. There are some things that e-mail cannot convey. Sometimes you need to hear a voice.

Over and over again I have had to learn the simple truth that community is not about place. God’s love transcends the distances that we experience. We are every bit as connected and sometimes more close than when we shared the same house in Chicago.

Then it should not surprise us to realize that Leanne isn’t lost at all. The distance between this life and what is to follow seems like a barrier only from this side of the divide. Love is stronger than death. We have already been taught that love can span continents and oceans and physical distances.

Years ago, in Chicago, we used to sing a table grace: “For these and all your blessings, we give you thanks O Lord; for people who have come by us to be so adored; for food and friends and family - the ones who’re gathered here; for these and all your blessings, we thank you Lord so dear.”

Gratitude is still an appropriate response.

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, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A jew and a muslim and a Christian go on a trip together. . . Oh, this isn’t a joke. It is another sign that the leadership of the Roman Catholic church is very different than once was the case. Four popes have traveled to the mideast in my lifetime. Pope Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI all visited the Holy Land and all met with leaders of the Orthodox Church. Pope Paul VI’s historic trip was the first meeting of the heads of the two churches in over 900 years of separation between Eastern and Western Christianity. It was an historic trip Pope Francis is scheduled to meet with Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew. The two are set to sign a declaration of friendship.

But there is more to the visit than that. Pope Francis has a long history of pursuing friendships that cross religious boundaries. He really is traveling with a rabbi and an imam. They are friends that he has had for many years, both are from his native Argentina where Francis was active in reaching out to members of other religions in mutual recognition and friendship.

The Pope’s first stop is Jordan. Regular tourists who visit the Middle East often schedule visits to Jordan, if they visit there at all, at the end of the trip because security officials are known to pay special attention to those who travel from Jordan to Israel. Something tells me that they can trust this particular traveler. While in Jordan, he will meet with King Abdullah II, celebrate a Mass in a stadium in Amman and meet face-to-face with Syrian refugees.

You can count on this pope to be as genuine and open when he meets refugees as when he meets with a king. That is the kind of person that he is.

On this trip he will visit the West Bank. That is where Jesus is believed to have been born. He will visit the al-Aqsa mosque, the Dome of the Rock and pray at the Western Wall. His pilgrimage intentionally includes sites that are sacred to Jewish and Muslim faithful as well as those honored and revered by Christians. Remember he is traveling with a rabbi and an imam. This pope takes relationships with other religions seriously.

It is a very different kind of visit than ones made by previous Popes.

Of course the tragic history of the region is reflected in its current difficulties in achieving anything that looks like peace. I don’t expect the visit of a Pope, even this extraordinary man, to work some kind of magic and bring peace where so much convict and strife has left so many bitter feelings. Just a few weeks ago the latest round of Israeli=Palestinian peace talks collapsed. Israeli police are on high alert and several Jewish right-wing activists are under restraining orders because of tensions that have preceded the Pope’s visit. Yesterday offensive anti-Christian graffiti was painted on the wall of a church in the southern city of Beersheba.

Still, symbolism is important and people do pay attention to the Pope, even those who have no connection with the Roman Catholic Church. Among my colleagues we joke about Francis being “the protestants’ favorite Pope.” He is an amazing man and his first year has demonstrated an entirely different style of leadership for the church. His simple style has won him praise. He shuns the trappings of Papal power. He takes the bus with his cardinals and lives a very modest life. He kisses the feet of criminals.And he has brought change to the church that is deeper than simply style. He talks about social justice more than sexual morality. There is serious reform of the church’s central government going on. He has appointed a cardinal to provide strict financial oversight to the operations of the Vatican. Rolling Stone Magazine called him a superstar Pope. Francis wants no part of such titles and he shuns the praise. He does not seek attention and lives as simply as possible. After all, he chose the name of a saint who dedicated his life to poverty. He urges clerics to lead frugal lives and demonstrates that commitment in the way he lives his own life. He invites all to join him in resisting worldly temptations and concentrate on life’s essentials.

I don’t have illusions about what can be accomplished by the visit of one man. Francis himself is humble when speaking of what can be accomplished by his trip. But it can’t hurt for the leader of the world’s largest and wealthiest church to demonstrate how to reach across religious barriers by traveling with friends of other faiths and to greet the leader of the other side of a rift that has been boiling in the church for a thousand years.

It can’t hurt for the Pope to pray at the Western Wall and in a famous mosque. It can’t hurt for him to meet refugees face-to-face and listen to the plight of those who are displaced by the animosities. It doesn’t hurt that he lives and travels simply and has no interest in displays of wealth or power.

We’ve seen the failures of power brokers in the Middle East. We have witnessed that peace cannot be bought with billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid. Genuine humility and a simple love of people bring hope where power and weapons and wealth have failed.

As he left the Vatican for the trip, Francis told reporters, “My heart beats and is looking for love.” There is a worthy vocation - to look for love in a place where others have found pain and fear and hatred and destruction. It isn’t just that he is “looking for love in all the wrong places.” It is that he expects to find it. I‘m confident that he will. That’s what happens when you expect the grace of God to shine through.

Francis is more than a gift of God to the Roman Catholic Church. He is a gift of God to the world.

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.

Although this is my 20th summer in the Black Hills, I have to confess that I don’t really understand the art of mountain carving. The famous sculptures at Mt. Rushmore are clearly our signature claim to fame. People from all around the world will mention Mt. Rushmore when I mention that I hail from Rapid City. The faces are impressive. We take guests to visit them whenever we are able. I enjoy looking at the displays in the artist’s studio and learning about the process that produced the gigantic monument. Over the years I have learned more of the story of how Doane Robinson found the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and Peter Norbeck and William Williamson got the legislation to allow the carving. I have met some of the more than 400 workers who were a part of the project. The main carving took 14 years to be completed. About 90% of the carving was done with dynamite. From there it was jackhammers and other pretty heavy industrial equipment.

These days the monument is lit at night and is the backdrop for politicians. It is an impressive undertaking.

A few miles away, at Crazy Horse Mountain, the scale of the mountain carving is even more impressive. Creating a 3-dimensional sculpture by carving an entire mountain is ambitious to say the least. One story that I’ve been told is that the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski originally wanted to carve one of the Tetons in Wyoming, but was persuaded by Lakota elders to situate the project in the Black Hills. Not long after the completion of Mt. Rushmore, Ziolkowski began the slow process of building roads and preparing for the carving of the mountain. There were times when he was working on his dream alone with very little financial backing. Over the years, the project gained more supporters and the sculpture began to emerge from the mountain. After Korczak died in 1982, his widow, Ruth took over active management of the project and provided the energy and enthusiasm for it to expand. Many of their ten children worked on the mountain. Ruth worked with others to establish a foundation that is a very effective fund-raising and provides lasting support for the project that will take many more years to complete.

Ruth’s death on Wednesday represents a turning point in the project. I am sure that her memorial service will be a significant event in the story of the hills. Now the mountain carving goes fully into the next generation. Perhaps never agin will the project be associated with a single person at the head. The Foundation will continue to elect officers and select new generations of board members. The project will continue to provide jobs and the carving will proceed, but it won’t be the same. Of course people said the same thing about Korczak’s death and that did not stop the work on the mountain. Ruth was a visionary. I’m confident that she put in place what is required for the work to continue.

I am intrigued by the project simply because I believe that there are many things in life that are worthy of multi-generational efforts. Our people have been at the business of forging our relationship with God for thousands of years and it is clear that we do not fully understand all of the ramifications of that relationship in our generation. Future generations will continue to grow and learn and live with God.

American democracy is a relatively new institution. The flood of pilgrims and settlers that began in the 16 and 17th centuries gave rise to the incredible experiment of creating a modern democracy in the end of the 18 century. Now, a little more than 200 years later it is evident that the visions of the founders are only partially fulfilled and that much work remains in forging this “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Perhaps the highest and best efforts of humans are those that cannot be completed in a single generation. Certainly these monumental tasks are worthy of our dedication, commitment and passion.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if time doesn’t somehow diminish the fervor and passion that occurs among the founders. At least it seems like there aren’t many in the present generation who are willing to give up everything in pursuit of a dream that cannot be accomplished in their lifetime. There is such a societal pressure to choose goals that can be accomplished in shorter amounts of time. Success and failure is often judged by what occurs in a single decade. Were we to have judged the Crazy Horse mountain carving by what was accomplished in the first decade, we might have concluded that the project was doomed to failure.

I’m not sure how many volunteers we would get these days for a venture that promised no personal wealth or recognition and that could not be accomplished within one’s life span. I know it isn’t my place to judge the workers currently on the mountain. I don’t know their motives. I’m sure that there are reasons other than the paycheck that keep them involved in the project. But Ruth’s passing does seem to be the end of the era of a particular form of dedication and commitment.

It will take more than the present generation to complete the mountain carving. And it will take many more generations before humans have the historical perspective to evaluate the significance of the effort. Is it worth it? I don’t know. And I don’t think I’ll know in my lifetime. I do know that Ruth Ziolkowski believed it was worth it. I do know that we’ll miss her in this part of the world. But I also know that she won’t be forgotten and that her legacy is assured for generations yet unborn.

I don’t really understand it. But it doesn’t require my understanding. And the carving of the mountain doesn’t diminish my appreciation for mountains that haven’t been carved. It’s hard to watch the sun set behind the Tetons in Wyoming and think that the scene could be improved upon. I’m glad that Korczak was persuaded not to carve the Grand. Still, I keep paying attention to the mountain he did start to carve.

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’ve not lived my life in the places where the trends are set. I have never lived near one of the coasts of the country. People didn’t look to North Dakota for fashion trends when I lived there. There was a small oil boom in the Williston basin during those years, but it was nothing compared to what is going on up there these days. In fact, the big news during our North Dakota days was called the farm crisis. The county where we lived peaked in population shortly after it was opened for settlement early in the 20th century and for the most part experienced a steady decline in numbers from that point on. The decrease in population was accelerated by the Great Depression in the 1930’s and the farm crisis of the 1980’s. Visiting that country today shows towns that are much smaller with many institutions, including schools and churches, that have been closed. We, too left that place following the call to ministry in another region of the country.

Our decade in Boise was a decade in a growing city. The population boomed, the city lagged behind in infrastructure. Traffic became a problem. The cost of land and homes soared. It really was a booming place. But to this day, when people look to see what the latest trends are, they rarely think of checking things out in Boise.

And now, living in Western South Dakota, one has the sense that we live away from much of the news making in our country. I scan the headlines from several world news sources each day, but I rarely see an article about the place where I live. When I do, it is usually is about tourism or Mt. Rushmore. From time to time, Rapid City is nominated for Outside Magazine’s best places to live in America, but we don’t end up at the top of that list, beat out by places that are closer to major metropolitan centers. Bozeman, Montana was named on that list one year and that is only 60 miles from where I grew up, but that occurred decades after I had moved away. We think our community of 66,000 is a metropolitan center. After all, you have to go more than 300 miles in any direction to find a town that is bigger. We don’t seem to win many competitions that require people to vote on the “best.” We’re probably best known for mountain carving, which doesn’t exactly proceed at a rapid pace.

I sort of like being in a place that is not the center of attention. I kind of like not being on the leading edge of fashion or trends. Those who know me are well aware that I don’t put a lot of effort into choosing clothes or keeping up with the latest trends.

I know that the globe is warming. I have read many articles that explain the greenhouse effect and the changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere. I pay attention to disappearing glaciers and rising sea levels. But I don’t have much firsthand experience with it. I guess there is some connection between global warming and our experience of a couple of colder-than-normal winters, but it seems to me to be a bit of a badge of honor to be from a place that is a bit colder as the rest of the world is getting a bit warmer.

As the population of the world swells, people are increasingly moving toward urban centers. There are a lot more people on this planet. But I don’t have to go far to visit towns that are much smaller than they used to be. The plains are dotted with towns filled with abandoned buildings where once thriving main streets are now deserted. Reva and Lodgepole and Ludlow never were urban centers and I don’t believe that Prairie City was ever a city. But old timers can remember when there were more businesses in Isabel and McLaughlin and McIntosh and Lemmon. Cross the line into North Dakota and places line Haynes and Bucyrus and Gascoyne all show evidence of having once had bigger populations.

After the people leave, the prairie will eventually reclaim the land. It doesn’t happen all at once. Usually the wood gives out first. Roofs began to leak and eventually collapse and wood frame walls give way to wind storms. The brick buildings seem to last longer. They fill with dust and a few weeds begin to grow in the cracks and over time it becomes clear that once proud buildings will never be rebuilt. Occasionally a former bank is repurposed as a shop for a few years, with a bit of plywood replacing what once had been windows and a doorway enlarged to accommodate an overhead door. It is a shame to see old buildings simply abandoned and sometimes someone will come up with a creative temporary use, but it usually is temporary. I know of a former church that is now a funeral parlor and another that has been remodeled into a home for a family.

I’m quite comfortable not being in the place of the most rapid growth. I like having a bit more room to spread out and empty places to go walking and exploring. Like others, I feel a twinge when I realize that our children have moved to other states an aren’t likely to ever live in this place. I am excited as the young adults in our church go off to college and new careers and aware that the majority of them won’t be coming back here to live before they reach their retirement. The statisticians tell us that our major area of growth is retiring people. We should be able to sustain some positive growth right in Rapid City as long as people keep coming to the hills to retire. Retired people are good for churches and we welcome new retirees into our community easily and comfortably.

The world is changing. And we are changing with it. But somehow I don’t think I’m going to be on the leading edge setting the trends. I’ll leave that role to others.

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.

Last night we had a few minutes in the fellowship hall before a meeting. It isn’t often that I arrive very early for meetings, but sometimes there is just that odd amount of time and so I was checking some details on the Internet as Susan scanned the large map of the world on the wall. She noticed that there don’t seem to be many cities in South America that start with the letter d. It’s true, there do seem to be fewer cities, but most countries in South America do have several cities starting with d. A quick check of wikipedia turned out several cities, some fairly large, that just didn’t make it onto the National Geographic wall map.

We love to travel. And we love to imagine trips that we probably will never actually take. Easy access to the Internet and the prevalence of YouTube videos makes it possible to view sights that few have seen.

I heard years ago about the road between the Sichuan capital Chengdu and the Tibetan capital Lhasa. It is likely one of the world’s most adventurous bus trips. I suppose that one might attempt driving it in their own vehicle, but the challenges are enormous. It would require a very reliable 4-wheel-drive vehicle and a generous amount of cash to pay for towing when it got hopelessly stuck. It might also require more than a small amount of planning for fuel stops and repairs along the way. The bus trip probably holds enough adventure for most travelers. I am told that passengers routinely are asked to get out of the bus and walk when the road is so narrow that the bus threatens to fall over a cliff. I’m not quite sure what the passengers do if the bus does fall. I guess they are grateful not to have ridden that terrible crash, but they do have miles to go with no visible form of transportation. Passengers also are enlisted to pull the bus out of the mud when it gets stuck. I think the basic trick is that ropes are attached to strong points on the bus frame and the passengers team up, about twenty per rope to pull. When the rope breaks, the passengers are, of course, splattered with mud from the flying rope. Then there are the normal rigors of travel in such a region: altitude sickness, traveling with a bus load of people who go days without access to showers, infrequent stops for restrooms and other facilities and food that is strange to a western palate.

But, Oh, the scenery! Some of the most majestic mountains in the world, Sunrises and sunsets over towering rocky peaks that few have seen, rainbows and mounts with stupas, prayer flags, monasteries, and so much more to see. I’m thinking the trip might well be worth it. I suppose you could fly one direction instead of taking the bus both ways. Flying gives a different perspective. But that particular trip isn’t for the faint of heart, either. The airport in Daocheng is now the record holder for the airport with the highest elevation in the world.

But something tells me that one ought to travel overland to get to Shangri-La, the place of stories and imaginations. It is a real place, an alpine wonderland filled with glacial lakes. Tibetan pilgrims have been making the perilous journey for centuries. I think one ought to plan at least one night in a stone hut before touring the site for sky burials where swarming vultures swoop down to complete the cycle of life while weathered old men turn the prayer wheels that encourage the spirit to soar.

There are several other remote highways that I read about and watch pictures of, but probably won’t ever get around to traveling. The national road, a north-south highway that crosses the island of Madagascar, is known for stretches of soft sand and crumbling bridges. It takes 24 hours to go about 125 miles, unless it is the rainy season (December to March) when it is often impassable no matter how much time you have.

Rohtang Pass in India has an intriguing name that means “pile of corpses.” It is buried in snow most of the year, but opened up from May to November, though it can be buried in snow during any month of the year.

Romainia’s Transfăgărășan Road is said to have the most hairpin turns of any road on the planet. The Eyrie Highway in Australia is said to be the most likely place to strike an animal on the highway. In Nepal, the Prithvi Highway gives great views of the world’s tallest mountain. The Manakamana Temple is said to be a most impressive sight. The M65, also known as the Kolyma Highway, crosses Siberia - probably not the best road for a winter trip - is supposed to be the world’s coldest highway, though I’m not sure it could be any colder than the ice roads in Canada, which would be fun to drive at least once. The Guoliang Tunnel Road in China has some spectacular scenery, is decidedly short on guard rails, dangerously narrow for passing oncoming traffic, and a real adventure. There have been several busses that have fallen over the edges of that road as well.

I’ve traced the intercontinental drive from the Arctic Ocean at the end of the Dalton Highway in Alaska or the Dempster in Canada down the spine of the continent, through Central America on the Pan-American Highway and all the way to the tip of South America. Chile extends farther south than Argentina, but you can’t drive to those remote islands, so the farthest south to drive on a road is in Argentina. Trust me, it is a long way from Alaska.

There is far more to see in this world than one person could possibly view. And many of the adventures I can imagine are probably best traveled in my imagination. After all there are plenty of unexplored roads (and plenty of places to get stuck) right here in Western South Dakota.

And we have been granted beauty at every turn and enough adventure to keep us interested. We live in an amazing world.

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.

Sometimes people are reluctant to tell me about their thoughts and beliefs. They think that because I am a Christian minister I might somehow be offended by beliefs and thoughts that are different from my own. Maybe is isn’t the fear of offending as much as it is a desire to avoid attempts to convert them from their beliefs. I’m not much at trying to convert others, really. I do not mind sharing my beliefs. In fact, I enjoy the opportunity to speak of faith with others. But I don’t feel especially called to change the beliefs of others.

Recently, I visited with a member of our congregation who was attracted by belief in reincarnation. I was tempted to go into a long discussion of the history of philosophy, but what was needed at that particular moment was listening, not more information. It does, however, make a difference how you view time. And there are multiple perspectives on the nature of time reflected in the Christian bible.

Although nothing is ever as simple as a simple dichotomy, It helps to think in terms of two basic ways of viewing time: either each moment of time is unique, having never before existed and never to be repeated, or time has an ability to repeat: what is now has been before and will be again. These two ways of viewing time are referred to as linear and circular. Right away there is a problem with the common titles. Those who believe that each moment is unique, do not always see the flow of time as a line with a set order. Those who have a sense of repetition in time do not always view time as a circle that comes back to the same point over and over again. Furthermore, there are plenty of people who see time as possessing both qualities.

Different parts of the Bible make reference to both ways of viewing time. The creation stories that begin the book of Genesis are fairly linear in their interpretation of time. There is a beginning and the events of creation are all unique and occur in a specific order. The two narratives (Genesis 1:1-2:3, and Genesis 2:4ff) don’t have all of the details in the same order, but both present a few of time as moving from one unique moment to the next.

Wisdom literature takes a different perspective. The beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes makes it seem as if the author has a circular view of time: The sun rises, the sun goes down; the wind blows to the south and goes round to the north again; what has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done. The author even states boldly, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

It is a remarkable feature of the Bible that it has the ability to present a wide variety of perspectives. Whenever I hear the Christian faith presented as a set of “either/or” decisions, I wince a little bit. I know that there are those who believe that they possess the truth and that the world is best seen from their perspective, but such an attitude seems to stand in contrast to the Bible, which is gentle and subtle in presenting a wide variety of perspectives and beliefs in a single volume that wrestles with the relationship between humans and God and offers great truth and insight without intimating that there is only one way to be a person of faith.

What is even more interesting about the Bible and how time is portrayed is the way in which the Bible acknowledges that human ways of perceiving and talking about time are not the only whats of seeing time. Psalm 90 states, “a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.” The ways in which we count and measure time are not the same as the way time appears from God’s perspective. I have heard this difference in view described as horizontal time and vertical time. Those who interpret this way say that we humans look at time in a horizontal fashion, stretching from beginning to ending, whereas God sees it in a vertical fashion with beginning and ending occurring simultaneously. Such a way of thinking may be helpful to some, but it seems to me to be incomplete. Certainly God shares human time. God is present in the long moments of anticipation and waiting. God is present in the times of great joy and great sorrow. God’s perspective on time might be different than ours, but the horizontal and vertical planes seem to me to be inadequate to describe that difference.

Time can also be viewed as variable. In our experience the length of an hour spent waiting for news of a loved one is different than an hour spent reading a novel. We frequently experience time as passing at different speeds. It all depends on what we are doing and what emotional weight coming events hold for us.

Like many other things, the entire notion of time is a bit artificial. We have come up with systems of dividing time into years, hours, minutes and seconds. It helps us to understand the passing of time. To assume that our way of counting is somehow universal is mistaken. We know that the transformation of geology on our planet moves at a much slower pace. We know that the distances in space strain our notions of time. Einstein demonstrated that motion changes the passage of time. To assume that the days of creation referred to in the Book of Genesis comprise of 24 hours each, measured by the same clocks that we use in our everyday life seems absurd to me, but there are plenty of people who interpret that portion of the bible exactly that way. They have come up with a timeline that places the moment of creation at a specific point on the human calendar.

I’m fairly certain that we don’t understand time very well and that we use different frameworks to speak of time because no one framework is adequate in its description.

Like many other areas of life, there is more to be discovered.

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.

Muzio Clementi was a child prodigy. By the age of 13 he hd already composed an oratorio and a mass. By 14 he was principal organist of a church. When he was 16, Sir Peter Beckford, a wealthy Englishman visited Rome and was so impressed by the young Clementi that he arranged for the youth to come to England. Beckford agreed to sponsor the boy’s musical education until he reached the age of 21. It has been reported that the young Clementi would spend eight hours a day at he harpsichord, practicing the works of Bach, Handel Scarlatti and others. After his sponsorship by Beckford, Clementi moved to London and began a distinguished musical career as a performer, composer, conductor, music publisher and even a maker of pianos.

On Christmas Eve 1781, during a European Tour he agreed to enter a contest with Mozart for the entertainment of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and his guests. In the Viennese court the two composers performed and improvised selections from their own compositions. The Emperor declared the contest a tie. Some have portrayed Clement and Mozart as rivals, but it is more likely that their meetings were very cordial. Clementi frequently wrote of his admiration for Mozart.

Unlike many musical geniuses, Clementi was also a successful and brilliant businessman. He secured full publishing rights to all of Beethoven’s music in England. He directed a thriving pianoforte manufacturing business. He used his concertinos to demonstrate his pianos and sales soared. He earned an elegant and luxurious lifestyle with his many business ventures.

Clementi published 110 piano sonatas. These days some of the earlier and somewhat easier to play sonatas have been called sonatinas. The later sonatas are extremely challenging, perhaps more difficult to play than Mozart.

Sonatina Op. 36, No 1, may be the most famous of Clementi’s works. It has been published in numerous books of piano studies for intermediate students.

I didn’t know the story of Muzio Clemnenti when I was a child. What I did know were the the opening melodies of his Sonitina Op. 36, No. 1. I didnt’ know the name of the piece. I didn’t know the composer. I knew that it was a piano piece that our mother practiced frequently. She could play all three movements of the sonatina and it was a regular piece that we would hear as we came into the house for lunch from school. I learned to run home because as soon as everyone got home she’d stop playing the piano and we would have our noon meal. Sometimes she’d play the piano in the evening as well.

As an adult, that piece always brings memories of mother, home and childhood joy to my mind. I love to hear it. I never learned it myself, though I suppose that if I would dedicate enough time to practice it is still not beyond my reach.

Yesterday, however, was a special treat for me. I had done the research on Clemeni and the other composers to prepare for my role as mc of a benefit concert. It was fun to read about a man who had composed a piece that has such a prominent role in my memories. Then, near the mid point of the concert I sat and listened as an eleven-year-old played the sonatina. She clearly had mastered the piece and played it at a very challenging tempo - probably nearly the tempo intended by its brilliant composer. It was a bit faster than my mother used to play. But it was delightful and it brought a tear to my eye.

It seems that musical genius is one of the great gifts that shows up in most generations. What a delight it brings to our lives! What a tremendous impact it has on the well-being of so many people.

Yesterday’s concert, as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, was a benefit that was conceived and planned by two remarkable youth. The bother and sister read about the Congo initiative in the regular resources our church used to promote One Great Hour of Sharing. They wanted to do something to help advance the initiative and so came up with the plan of having a benefit concert. it was difficult to find a time for the concert in the midst of many busy lives and the actives of a church that always has something going. But a date and time were chosen. The crowd was a bit smaller than I would have wanted, but that didn’t dampen the spirits of the two performers.

They raised nearly $1,100 through the power of their music!

There have been times when I have wondered about the amount of money that we spend as a church on music. We own expensive instruments. In a way they are a luxury for our congregation. We love the music and we have been generous in providing instruments for our worship, for education in the community, and for concerts. Sometimes, however, I have wondered about our priorities. The cost of our piano could have build a home in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. The most recent expansion of our pipe organ probably would have provided two or three homes.

Then I have experiences like yesterday. The inspiration of the music from the instruments provides for on-going mission and outreach. Using music to expand the mission of the congregation is just one of the ways that this ministry goes forth. The life of the piano is probably a couple of centuries. The pipes in the organ will last five centuries or more. Both will be providing music long after our generation has drifted into history and new generations have come to be in charge of the decisions of the congregation.

A song from my childhood that had been around for 150 years before I was born, has flowed through history delighting audiences in so many venues. Yesterday it became a way to deepen the connections between our congregation and the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The music keeps flowing. I, for one, hope that the song is never stilled.

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’ve been looking forward to today for quite a few weeks. Today is the day of our annual Sunday School recognition. I remember being a child. Sunday School Picnic Day was a big deal. We would have the picnic in a local park and there would be lots of food and games and it marked the end of the school year and the coming of summer. The transition probably always was different in different places, and time has changed the way we celebrate as well. In our church, we will have a potluck lunch. There will be some small appreciation gifts for teachers and an opportunity to celebrate the year of learning for the children.

I don’t know if children feel the rush of freedom with the coming of summer that we experienced. They go from their school routine to a different routine that is heavily scheduled. Many of the children in our community these days have rigorous summer schedules with daily commitments. We went from school with its set schedule into three months of very little schedule. Of course there was a week of Vacation Bible School and perhaps a week of summer camp, but the bulk of the summer was filled with days with no schedule. I used to start my summer vacation by going to the library and checking out the maximum number of books allowed by our somewhat stern, half-glasses-wearing librarian. We’d spend our summers building tree houses and exploring the river’s edge. We’d fish and tube in the river and lay in the grass and read books. It was wonderful!

The world is more complex these days. Dual career families, larger cities, different kinds of danger for children and a thousand other factors mean that parents feel the need to fill up their children’s time with scheduled and structured activities. There is simply less free and unstructured time in the world of today’s children.

The end of the school year potluck, however, is only part of the day’s excitement for me. Mostly I am excited about the beginning of our summer music schedule. Our congregation is blessed with a terrific music program and good music attracts good musicians. Our choir loft is filled with dedicated singers and we have had a string of outstanding musicians at the keyboard of our pipe organ. We also have beautiful pianos in our sanctuary and this who can play them well. We do, however, tend towards classical music. That isn’t a problem, really. I love classical music. And classical music tends to appeal to the widest age range of all genres of music, a feature that fits the profile of our congregation that seeks to be a place for people of all ages. Once in a while I will get the comment that our music is “old fashioned,” but it doesn’t come from those who have attended the high school honors orchestra when our sanctuary is filled with 350-year-old music played by 15 to 18 year-olds. Still, I love lots of different kinds of music and that is true of the majority of our congregation.

This summer, we have a wonderful schedule of musicians from our church offering solo, small group and special music for our worship. We kick off today with a trio of piano, guitar and percussion. The music is a combination of folk and gospel with a delicious beat and rhythm. Like other music in our congregation, it is of high quality and well rehearsed. I’ve had the opportunity to hear all of the music in rehearsal. It will be a treat for all of us. We’ll still have some of our traditional music with the organ, including a brilliant 15-year-old at the console for the postlude. Our choir will be singing responses and I guarantee our congregation will be moved by the benediction response, which is a tribute to our choir director who died mid-week, after a brief and awful illness.

Then, after the potluck, the music scene in our church will change again for an afternoon benefit concert. Two youth of our congregation a 15-year-old and his 11-year-old sister, read the information about the Congo initiative in our church bulletin when we were preparing for our One Great Hour of Sharing offering this year. They were moved to do something to raise more money for the project. They have prepared an outstanding concert for this afternoon. The music features everything from Bach to Michael Jackson with several stops in-between. They play digital keyboard, classical piano, organ, harps (yes, two harps played together!), flute and violin during the concert. Their talent is breathtaking!

Yesterday’s rehearsal brought tears to my eyes a couple of times. The Clementi Sonatina op. 36, no. 1 might just be a another piano piece to some, though I think most would count it as a challenge for an 11-year-old. But it was a piece that my mother loved and whenever I hear it I can picture her at the piano in our living room. What a personal treat!

The afternoon concert will conclude with the playing of the United States National Anthem followed by choices of national anthems from the audience. The conclusion will be the anthem of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yesterday at the rehearsal, we were calling our random anthems for the 15-year-old to play. He didn’t miss a beat. He has memorized 244 national anthems!

Oh, and he also is completing his freshman year at an engineering college at age 15. And he speaks a half dozen languages fluently. He is beyond brilliant.

More amazing than the incredible talent we will witness today is the motivation and generosity that inspired the youth to prepare and present the concert for the benefit of people living half a world away whom they have never met face-to-face. One of the most important dimensions of the Congo initiative is deepening relationships between people. It is evident that this is occurring as we watch.

It will be a day filled with music and a delightful upbeat day in a season that has seen more than its share of sorrow and sadness.

Resurrection is real. Easter is dawning.

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

I’m not sure when I first was aware of the significance of the Bible in my life. My father read the Christmas story from the Bible that belonged to my grandfather as we sat around the piano and sang Christmas carols on Christmas Eve each year. My younger brother was born on Christmas Eve and I suspect that the tradition may have been related to making a kind of transition from the celebration of my brother’s birthday to the celebration of Christmas.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.”

When I read or recite those words these days, I hear them in my father’s voice in my mind. I don’t know how many years of my life that tradition played out, but is is implanted deeply in my memory and identity.

I have mental pictures of the parade of ministers who served our church in my childhood. Rev. E. Brentwood Barker wore a black robe and read from the big pulpit bible. Rev. Ben Knopff had a smaller bible with a burgundy cover that he held in his hands. Rev. Joe LaDu read from several different translations of the bible and often had his text typed into his sermon manuscript. Rev. Steve Rolhoff was a return to reading from the pulpit bible.

I remember bible stories from Sunday school and Vacation Bible School. David defeated the giant Goliath with his slingshot. Moses carried the giant tablets of stone and he also parted the water of the red sea. Joshua played his trumpet and the walls fell down. Walls fell down again when Paul and Silas sang hymns in jail.

I remember the excitement and joy of discovering the academic study of the Bible as a college student. Dr. Dicken could present an entire lecture while filling and tamping his pipe. He’d light the lighter and hold it to his pipe and then at the last minute stop and make an important point. I don’t remember him smoking much in class, but he used the pipe as a way to draw our attention to what he was saying. I was a student of philosophy and enjoyed seeing how biblical themes informed great thinkers throughout history.

In seminary, Dr. Andre LaCocque ignited a passion for the words of the bible, their translation, their patterns, their sometimes hidden meanings. We spent a semester immersed in a word by word study of the first chapter of Genesis. The class was to be about the first two chapters, but we went for depth instead of breadth and didn’t make it that far. Every word received our full attention. We would be talking about how a word might be translated from Hebrew to English and Dr. LaCocque would start lecturing in French or Flemish. We had to remind him we did not speak those languages.

It was a heady and exciting time.

I graduated from seminar at about the same time as legionary preaching was experiencing a revival in mainline Protestant congregations. The Revised Common Lectionary was a tool for worship planners, cycling through the texts in a three-year pattern. I undertook the lectionary as a discipline for my preaching. The pattern stuck. I’m on my 13th trip through that cycle of texts and the readings seem as fresh and exciting to me as they did when I first began.

But there is a sense in which those ancient texts are coming alive for me in new ways as I experience this chapter of my life. I have officiated at funerals and sat at the bedsides of ill people for all of my career, but these days I notice that it is more common for the patient to be my age or younger. In recent months, I have been walking the journey of grief with two widowers who are about my age - one a little younger, the other a bit older. During that time there have been two life-changing accident injuries among the members of our church.

I went to bed last night thinking about a friend who will have surgery today to address injuries received when she literally had her feet knocked from under her. She has a concussion and a serious neck injury. I woke up this morning with 2 Corinthians 4 in my head:

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.”

I’ve been reading those words over and over for years, but somehow they have fresh meaning as life is teaching me much more about my own mortality. Illness, injury and death are not somehow things that happen to others to which I am immune. They are part of my human nature. But these words are deeper than that. In them are the seeds of the answer to our “Why?” questions. Why do the ones we love have to die? Why do bad injuries occur to good people? Why?

Of course, there are no easy answers to our “Why?” questions and sometimes we have to learn to live with the question rather than the answer.But part of the answer comes in the contrast between immortality and resurrection.Death is not some enemy to be escaped in the hopes of just going on forever. It is a deep transformation - a glorious change - an entrance into an entirely different realm that we are not able to imagine.

Knowing that we are mortal increases the value of the time that we do have in this life. Knowing that we are frail and easily broken heightens our joy in the things that we can do. Just thinking about death makes us more appreciative of life.

“Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

Even when the afflictions don’t seem to us to be slight or momentary, they are an invitation to look beyond for the things that are unseen and eternal.

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 need to raise more money.” The declaration was made at a meeting I attended last night for a local arts organization. The interesting thing is that the statement didn’t generate much discussion. I have sat on a lot of board of non-profit organizations and I’ve spent my share of time serving on arts organization boards. I guess the statement, on the surface, makes some sense. The organization did spend more last year than it took in. There are adequate reserves, but when spending more than the income becomes a habit reserves are quickly depleted and a crisis ensues.

I’ll grant the organization this much, at least the idea of addressing the problem by talking about income was raised. I’ve sat on other boards where the only technique employed to balance a budget is to decrease expenses. The real solution lies not in which side of the ledger you are dealing, but rather in the balance.

What frustrates me about these boards at times is the general inability to see the difference between investment and expense. And that brings up my question about the declaration that “we need to raise more money.” “What for?” is my initial question.

Do we need more money so we can have more concerts? Do we need more money so we can hire different artists? Do we need more money so we can throw lavish receptions? What is the purpose of having more money?

The question is important because it helps to determine how we go about raising more money, if in fact that is what we need to do. For an organization like the one whose board meeting I attended last night there are two streams of income: donations and ticket sales. There are small amounts that come from grants and sponsorships as well. So one way to get more money is to increase audience size and ticket revenue. In that case advertising is a simple cost/benefit decision. Does advertising produce enough new ticket sales to justify the expense? If so, spend on advertising and the gain in revenue will result. The problem with this particular organization, like many others, is that advertising doesn’t yield measurable results. Advertise a lot and concert audiences seem to be largely unaffected by the ads. Don’t advertise at all and audiences remain constant. Increases in audience seem to come from word-of-mouth and in response to particular artists.

Choosing which artists to book may be the best way to increase audiences and boost revenue. There is a problem with this approach for this particular agency, however. It is a group that promotes chamber music. Chamber music is an acquired taste and appeals to a limited audience. A few years ago, the group left classical music behind for a season and booked popular acts. Ticket sales soared. The group produced substantial reserves for future years. But the traditional audience was displeased. They hungered for classical music. When we returned to the usual format, audiences declined and revenue went down with the audiences.

For this particular organization it appears that attracting and nurturing donors might be a more sensible solution to the budget. There are people in the community who value living in a place with such cultural offerings. They are willing to donate funds to sponsor concerts motivated by their love of the music and their commitment to community. These genuine gifts are the lifeblood of the organization. But like many other gifts, you often need to ask in order to receive. And there are plenty of organizations that have refined their skills at asking.

Another possibility, however, exists. What if our organization doesn’t really need to raise more money? What if the best way to enjoy chamber music is in a small venue with a small audience? What if the organization doesn’t need to grow in order to contribute to the quality of life in the community? Larger isn’t always better.

I have witnessed other organizations that became obsessed with growing and all that happened for the board was that the numbers got bigger. Not only was income and expense increased, but so too did the gap between them. Bigger for an organization that runs an occasional deficit might mean bigger deficits.

I said very little at the meeting. My input wasn’t really needed as the board discussed find raising events and raffles and direct donations and grants. There was a part of me that was sad because the same board has never invested as much time or discussion in choosing artists for the next year’s season. The board will approve a season’s program in a few minutes with little discussion. And I’ve been around long enough to know that long discussion doesn’t always result in action. If those in the room would have each reached in their wallets and donated $10 more money would have been generated than will be generated in a couple of months of selling raffle tickets. If we had each found a way to donate $50 the organization wouldn’t have an operating deficit for the year. The idea occurred to me that if we allowed board members to pay $100 for the privilege of skipping a meeting, there would be times when I’d rather pay the money than sit through the endless discussion. Fortunately, I bit my tongue and kept the idea to myself. I have plenty of ideas that are not worthy of wasting the time of others.

The experience did, however, remind me that we need to be careful about how we talk about money in the church. Of course if we had more money we could engage in more mission and outreach. If we had more money we could make some investments in our building and infrastructure that would allow us to contribute to the next generation just as we have received much from the generosity of previous generations. But the truth is we don’t need more money. God has worked through the generosity of our people to provide us with what we need. All we need to do is to learn to live joyously and abundantly with what has been provided.

I resolve not to use the words, “we need more money,” in my conversations about the church and its budget. I prefer to say, “God has blessed us.” Maybe if we are careful and wisely invest the resources we have been given we will be blessed with similar generosity in years to come. It might be considered heresy by some, but it seems possible that we don’t really need more money.

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 intrigued by the way that I get information these days. Sometimes, when I am doing research I go directly to the studies and professional journals. Google Scholar makes this process a lot faster than it was in the days of going to libraries for access to journals to which I do not regularly subscribe. But it is as likely that I will read an article on a website that leads me backwards through a bit of a maze to the original research. For example, I recently read an article in the online version of the Washington Post about a study that showed that millennials are not as narcissistic as they have been thought to be. The article referenced a science web site. When I went to the web site, I found a reference to the study which was published in a professional journal. It is possible to get to the original source eventually, but the route is a bit more convoluted. The problem is that many people never go to the source and often the information becomes significantly twisted and reinterpreted.

My blogs, however, aren’t exactly research papers. They are, for the most part, opinion pieces. Still, I like to credit sources and be as accurate as I can.

So, the research conducted by Emily Bianchi of Emory University was published in the journal Psychological Science and that article was referenced on the science site, Science and Us. That is where Mark Berman picked up the study and crafted some of its information into an op-ed piece he wrote for the Washington Post. I don’t subscribe to the Post, but caught the article on the Post Nation web site.

There is a fair amount of information recycling before it gets to you.

Anyway what caught my eye about the study is that it discovered a direct relationship between the economy and the level of narcissism. The study starts with what is an obvious observation to those of us who have worked with our elders. People who were born during the Great Depression are less selfish and less narcissistic than some of the folks who were born later. The study then tracks levels of selfishness in relationship with the economy and comes to the conclusion that people who enter adulthood during recessions are less likely to be narcissistic later in life than people who start working during more financially comfortable times.

The study would lead one to believe that despite the assertions that the millennial generation is viewed as one of the most narcissistic generations in history, the opposite might be true. I was heartened to read the article. This fits well with generational theory, that posits that the generational cycle repeats every four generations, or about every eighty years. That would make the millennial generation another society-building generation like the World War II generation. The problem with social theories, however, is that social relationships are rarely as clean or consistent as sociologists predict.

I am, however, inclined to believe parts of the study. It does seem to me in my experience that young adults now entering the work force are more interested in serving others and less narcissistic that some of the folks of preceding generations. I think there is a small resurgence of leadership for community organizations and service groups being led by recent college graduates. It seems to be a very good trend.

Another study, however, set of alarm bells for me. Paul Tough, writing for the New York Times Magazine recently published an interesting case study that cites several other studies showing that the students currently graduating from college are from the most economically advantaged families in our nation. Despite what we want to believe - that college education is the great social equalizer - high performing high school students that come from low and middle income families are far less likely to graduate than those whose families are wealthy.

The obvious is part of the problem. College is expensive. Students who have adequate financial resources are less likely to get detailed by family obligations that keep they from attending college, complicated financial-aid forms, problems meeting daily expenses, and an overwhelming burden of debt. But the situation is even more complex than that. Low and middle income students who do perform well in high school and who are admitted to college are less likely to finish college. More than 40 percent of American students who are admitted to college have not earned a degree after six years. If you include community college students in that statistic the dropout rate is more than half - worse than any other country except Hungary.

Not graduating and leaving college with the added burden of student debt is a double challenge for economic success. It is an age old story: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The economic mobility afforded by a college degree is well documented. What is not well documented are studies of comparative graduation rates of colleges and universities. The research on that one is beginning to be clear as well. Families with plenty of financial resources can afford to shop for prestige when shopping for colleges. For the rest of us, paying attention to the college’s graduation rate may be a critical factor in the success of a student.

That information isn’t easy to find on college web sites. South Dakota Colleges love to tout their acceptance rates. Black Hills State University, for example, is quick to report that 94.2% of applicants are accepted. What they don’t report is that 38.5% of freshmen do not enroll in a second year. I got that number from the US News College Compass ratings. I still haven’t found the actual graduation rate, but suspect that it is less than 50% based on the freshman statistics.

It takes more than being accepted to college to reap the advantage of increased economic mobility afforded by a college degree. We have no small amount of work to do to reform support systems and improve graduation rates.

If financial struggles produce less narcissistic adults, it seems that the opposite might be true. Colleges that specialize in graduating only wealthy students might be a recipe for leaders in business and industry who are more self-absorbed than others.

The research is not yet complete, but there some alarming trends are appearing.

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

A few years ago, I wrote a series of resources for Faith Practices, a United Church of Christ online faith formation resource. I had previously written and edited for the resources on the Faith Practice of hospitality. This time I was writing worship resources on the practice of blessing and letting go. As is often the case when writing resources, there is a lag between the writing and the publication and in that time, one moves on to other adventures and projects. I allowed those resources to remain on the back burner for some time as I worked in the midst of the day to day life of a busy and exciting congregation. I have returned to those resources several times in recent weeks as I have prepared and led worship in our congregation. Easter is, more than we realize it, a season of blessing and letting go.

This has been particularly true in our congregation this year. We have had an unusually high number of deaths in our congregation. It seems that there is a funereal every week and this week is no exception with the death of one of the elders of our congregation. The liturgical cycle of Lent and Easter has a natural rhythm of blessing and letting go, but we often fail to follow through with the complete process.

Lent begins with a growing awareness of the reality of death and loss. Our faith does not go lightly with the pain of grief and sorrow. We invest 40 days each year in the practice of direct contact with the realities of loss. It is a most uncomfortable season for those who take their faith practices seriously. We do not enjoy pain and loss. Lent can be a time of coming into full realization of the process of loss. Often we think of loss in its meaning referring to the absence of something to which we were attached. “I lost my wallet” is an example. There is something we once had that we cannot find. The item is missing, but you still know where you are. When a death occurs, we speak of the loss of the loved one. But this is only one dimension of the experience of loss. Loss also refers to the experience of an environment that is larger than your knowledge of it. One can become lost in an unfamiliar environment. One gets lost in the woods, lost in a strange city, and lost in life when the familiar landmarks are not visible. Both types of being lost involve loss of control. they are events that happen to you. During Lent we practice loss - both kinds of loss.

After 40 days of Lent we enter into the season of Easter. The Easter season is 40 days long and is divided into two parts. The first 40 days, the same length as Lent is devoted to thinking seriously about the reality of resurrection and the difference between resurrection and resuscitation. Our faith is not based in a near-death experience in which a person is revived through the ministrations of health care professionals or the good fortune of circumstances. Jesus really died. All the way dead. The realization that life extends beyond death is not an easy concept to grasp. The reports of Jesus’ resurrection almost all involve a lack of recognition. The presence is real, but it is often not recognized. The shift of perspective is dramatic. It is as if at one moment you are facing the back of a car, watching the world recede as the car races forward and suddenly you are turned around looking at the approach of a new world through the windshield. The grief and sorrow and loss of Lent involves a lot of looking back. Faithful Christians remember the actions of Jesus. We recall the stories. We remember that which we grieve. Then suddenly, at Easter, we embrace the reality that Jesus has gone ahead to a place that we are approaching. It is mind-boggling and can be disorienting.

40 days into the season of Easter our faith asks us to take another step Ascension is the focus of the last ten days of Eastertide. That is the “letting go” part of the adventure. We release the need for physical presence and realize that that our sense of distance and direction are not the only perspective.

Quite frankly, we aren’t too good at the letting go part of the process. We are inclined to want to hold on to that which is familiar. We feel the warm glow of remembering pleasant times and experiences and we want to hang on to the positive feelings. Letting go can leave us feeling lost once again in a whole new way.

The process, however, remains incomplete until we are able to both bless and let go. We release that which we have loved and trust that process of changing prospective. That which is truly released is no longer a part of our past only. It becomes an invitation to a new future. Letting go does not always feel like a blessing. Thus, like other faith practices, it requires continuing and repeating practice to embrace this gift of faith.

Ascension Day is still a week away. We still have much to learn and practice as we go through our annual journey of blessing and letting go.
Today I offer a prayer for the process that I wrote for those resources years ago. It remains a prayer to which I need to return regularly:

O God of all times of my life, you are with me in the times of letting go and the times of recognizing the blessing. Sometimes I recognize your presence even in the moments when I wonder why you seem so distant. Open my heart that I might perceive your blessing in the midst of letting go. Free me from the slavery to the way things used to be, so that I might embrace the future to which you are calling me. Keep me ever mindful of your people and the gifts they bring to worship each week. In Christ I pray, Amen.

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.

Each year, at my annual physical, my doctor asks me about my sleep. The question is usually simple, “How are your sleeping?” Sometimes I am asked, “Do you get up in the night?” My answer is usually fairly light-hearted. “I’ve never been a particularly good sleeper,” is a typical and only partially-true answer. Actually, I was a better sleeper when I was younger. The time with the doctor is too short to discuss all of the details of my sleep patterns. I’m not much of a night owl. I tend to go to sleep earlier in the evening than many people and do not stay up late with social events very often.

On the other hand, I am an early riser and I start my day before most of my neighbors are stirring. And I do wake in the night. It is not uncommon for me to get out of bed and sit in another room reading for a while. I get more of my reading done that way, but it does have an effect on my sleeping. Sometimes I am tired during the day and I’ve been known to take a nap.

I don’t really experience my sleeping patterns as a problem, however. I am awake and alert for the things that matter. I drink a little coffee, but much less than I did when I was younger and much less than many other people. I don’t have trouble staying awake to drive or engage in other important activities.

Researchers tell us that many people in industrialized nations sleep significantly less than their forebears. Russell Foster, a professor at the University of Oxford in England, recently wrote that people are getting between one and two hours less sleep per night than was the case 60 years ago. He sees this as a society-wide problem. Some of his other words struck a chord in me: “We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-dark cycle. What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems.”

I know that it isn’t particularly scientific to comment on our arrogance, but I think that he has put his finger on the problem. We are arrogant.

The ten commandments, reported in Exodus 20, put it slightly different, with a very similar meaning: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the sevent day is the sabbath day of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor try son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Some of the commandments are short sentences like, “thou shalt not kill.” But this one gets a paragraph. The reason for observing a day of rest is spelled out - and it is that even God rests.

It is certainly an act of supreme arrogance to think that we can put in more hours than God.

Of course the commandment refers to a day of rest each week, and not to the number of hours of work in a day. There was no particular need for such an admonition at the time of the commandment. In a pre-industrial society, there are very few options for artificial light. When it is night people sleep. The natural rhythm of sleep and waking. In the land where the people of Israel were wandering toward the promised land days and nights were roughly equal. Near the equator days and nights are nearly equal in length. Of course there was some sitting up around the campfire, times of telling stories and other activities after the sun had gone down, but there was less temptation to be awake and facing bright lights.

Researchers said that one of the factors contributing to the decrease in sleep is over exposure to light at the blue end of the spectrum. Energy efficient light bulbs tend to be more blue in color and electronic devices such as television sets and computer screens emit more shorter length light as well. Over exposure to light, especially short wavelength light, can contribute to disrupting circadian rhythms and postponing the release of melatonin, a sleep-producing hormone.

increasingly it is common for people to have television sets and computers in their bedrooms exposing themselves to the kind of light that makes sleep more difficult in the room that should be dedicated to sleeping.

Studies have demonstrated a link between decreased levels of sleep and increased occurrences of chronic illnesses.

We are an arrogant people, however. The threat of a chronic illness years in the future probably won’t deter people from their habits.

The problem is especially evident in youth during their teen years. The increased popularly and societal acceptance of energy drinks laced with caffeine allows teens to use chemicals to further alter their natural sleep cycles. They deprive themselves of sleep and the drink a few red bulls to increase their energy levels in the morning when their bodies are trying to signal the need for additional sleep.

We live in a 24/7 society. There is constant activity all hours of the day every day of the week. There is a temptation to believe that we can somehow overcome the natural rhythms of sleep and wakefulness. We have all kinds of devices to wake us in the morning, lots of options for chemicals to increase our alertness and even medicines that make us sleep when we want to.

It probably would make more sense to turn off the television and computer in the evening, find a good lamp with less blue light and read a book. Then, in the morning, it wouldn’t hurt to allow one’s body to sleep until waking naturally.

It sounds simple. But we are arrogant. Change will require effort.

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.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died five years before I ready anything that he had written. He was a lover of words. He was Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford in England. His specialty was Old and Middle English. He was a custodian of words few spoke in modern times. I suspect that I would have found him to be a stuffy and somewhat boring professor had I encountered him in my college years. But that is not the way I first learned of him. I met him through stories that he might have considered to be a hobby or an amateur side of his writing. He earned his living as a professor and his stories enjoyed only moderate success in his lifetime, although they had become wildly popular by the time of his death.

I read The Hobbit and shortly afterward The Lord of the Rings trilogy during the time between my father’s cancer diagnosis and his death. I was a brand new pastor serving in southwest North Dakota and making the trip back to my hometown in Montana as often as possible to visit my father. Somewhere along that road we learned that we were to become parents for the first time. It was a busy, exciting, and full time of my life. Tolkien’s stories provided a bit of escape from thinking about the big issues of death and birth and the passing of generations. Those themes figure large in Tolkien’s stories, but they are all sent in a world that is pure fantasy.

The world of Tolkien’s stories is an imagined pre-historic land occupied by Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs and Hobbits. It also contains snippets of his made-up languages.

Sometime after I read the Tolkien books, I decided that I should follow-up with a reading of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The books, more directed at juvenile readers a than Tolkien’s tales, also come from the time of World War II and its aftermath and have vaguely Christian themes. Some faithful Christians have applied similar methods of reading meaning to the texts of Lewis’s stories that they apply to biblical texts. I can see the stories as illustrations of biblical principles and the characters as metaphors, but I must confess that I was less entertained by Lewis’ books than by other things that I have read.

That would be considered heresy among some of my colleagues who rever the books and find them to be on-going sources of meaning.

The truth is that I never got into the world of fantasy much. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books fit into a particular time in my life where such a huge portion of my imagination was occupied with just keeping up with the hectic past of my life and adapting to so many major life changes all in one short period of time. I graduated from school, left my academic work behind, started my first job in my new career, adjusted to my father’s death as the oldest son of the family, became a parent myself - there were a lot of things that occurred in a very short amount of time. A little fantasy helped to balance my thinking and remove me a few steps from the intensity of everyday life.

For the most part, though I enjoy novels, I am not attracted to fantasy writing. I don’t remember fairy tales being very important in my childhood. I know that TV shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood, Grimm and Once Upon a Time have become hits, but I have yet to watch a single episode of any of those shows. It just doesn’t seem all that attractive to me.

When I am looking for a bit of fantasy, I prefer to travel back in time a few years and north in direction. I read about early settlers in Alaska, about the tribal peoples of the far north, about kayaks and caribou and cold weather survival in a harsh climate.

Scholars tell us that fantasy stories are important in human development because they give our minds contexts in which to encounter and develop major human dynamics that are essential to human living. By encountering fear in a story, we can practice our fear response before we find ourselves in a situation of real life-threatening fear. Other major life themes like hope and endurance and love and sacrifice can be explored in the context of a fantasy story in ways that are less immediately life threatening than real world experiences. It is a safe way to wrestle with big concepts that later will become essential life skills.

I’m not totally convinced by these arguments. I think that real life can be an even better teacher than fantasy. Perhaps I was learning hope from the stories I was reading, but at the time I would have told you that my father’s cancer and death were more hope inspiring than anything I read in the books. I still have that opinion.

Still, I wonder whether there is any real difference between reading stories set in fantasy worlds and fiction set in geography that might be recognizable if I were to travel to that place, but often are in settings that I will never actually visit. I’m thinking that I will never really paddle the full length of the Yukon or spend much time in a kayak out of side of the shore in Hudson’s Bay.

There is a role for our imaginations in developing the mental framework that enables us to live with grace and dignity in this life. We have been given the gift of our minds to think beyond the scope of actual experience. Jesus was aware of this capacity in his teaching. The issues presented in parables are beyond the scope of personal experience. The Good Samaritan is a story about how we could treat our neighbors more than it is a report of an actual historic event. Teaching in parable is using the story to stretch the imagination.

So I’ll leave the fantasy stories and worlds to others for now. There are plenty of ways to stretch my imagination in the midst of the life I live.

After all I have a garage filled with acquired items that need to find their purpose. That’ll take a fair amount of imagination.

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.

In our society, we often confuse wealth for abundance. We think that having a lot of things is the same as living abundantly. That, however is not the case.

Anna Jarvis, the founder of the Mother’s Day holiday intended for us all to honor the sacrifices women made for their families. Jarvis’ mother, Ann, dedicated a large portion of her life to setting up Mother’s Work Clubs across the United States. The clubs were originally a place for young mothers to learn the skills required to care for children. After the Civil War, the clubs were places of unity in a badly divided country. With so many families having the experience of fathers and husbands being gone for extended periods of time during the war, their return was often less than easy. The clubs promoted reconciliation between divided families and restoration of family life.

After Ann died, her daughter Anna was overwhelmed by all of the letters and cards and messages of support that were received. The tributes were significant and deeply meaningful. Anna decided that all women deserved recognition. She knew of many holidays dedicated to male achievement and felt that the work of women often went unnoticed. She started the observance of Mother’s Day in the Methodist church where she taught Sunday School. As far as we can tell she was touched and appreciated deeply the gift of 500 white carnations donated by Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia to decorate the church for the event. Carnations were her mother’s favorite flower.

It wasn’t long, however, before candy makers and department stores and greeting card printers embraced Mother’s Day with all kinds of special sales and promotions. Telegraph companies promoted the sending of wires home. The price of carnations, the symbol of Mother’s day when up in price when the annual holiday came around.

Anna jarvis was outraged by the crass commercialism that soon surrounded the holiday. She called those who sought to profit from the recognition “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truste movements and celebrations.”

By 1924 Anna Jarvis was so annoyed by the commercialization of Mother’s Day that she began to speak out in public about the problem. The conflict between her and those who would profit from the holiday became so intense that she was arrested, thrown out of meetings, and was requested not to speak in front of groups that had previously supported her cause. She eventually became so agitated and outspoken that she was admitted to a psychiatric ward. She died alone in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in November of 1948.

The irony of the story is that despite what may have been a diagnosable mental illness, Anna Jarvis got it right.

Spending a lot of money is probably not the best way to recognize and honor the sacrifice of women. A few flower can be nice. Overdoing it can detract from the meaning of the day.

We confuse wealth and the possession of many things with abundance.

It wasn’t too many years ago that church attendance went up on Mother’s Day. One of the ways that families celebrated was to go together to church and offer thanks for the contributions and sacrifices of mothers everywhere.

Judging from the advertisements in the paper and other media, one might be led to believe that the holiday consists of purchasing expensive gifts and going out to an expensive meal in a restaurant.

Quite frankly, it never occurred to me to buy personalized jewelry or artistry diamonds for my mother when she was living. I did purchase small gifts like flower and books, but our family never got into appliances, smartphones or vehicles as ways to honor our mother.

In John 10:10, Jesus tells his disciples, “I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly.” He contrasts his behavior and the gift of abundant life with the work of a thief that comes to rob. He says his purpose is different. The analogy might have worked for many generations of his disciples, but somehow we get hung up with the fact that thieves often steal possessions. We seem to think that abundant life consists of having lots of possessions. Generations of Christian preachers have quoted John 10:10 as support for the idea that Christianity leads to physical prosperity.

We fail to see that abundant life is not for sale. It is a free gift.

We fail to understand that true joy does not come from possessions or wealth.

I don’t really know the full story of Anna Jarvis. It is possible that she suffered from a brain disorder. She might have been the victim of a mental illness. But it is also fairly easy to read her story as the tale of one woman who was the only sane thinker in a world gone mad. I can’t help but think of her story on Mother’s Day as we are buried in advertisements that promote the purchase of any number of items and merchants who seem to see the holiday as a way to transfer wealth from families to their own pockets.

There are so many other ways to honor the sacrifices of women. There are so many other ways to celebrate a holiday dedicated to mothers.

The way I understand the Bible, wealth, prestige, position and power in this world aren’t’ exactly at the top of God’s list of blessings. Jesus didn’t seek any of it. His disciples didn’t end up among the elite and wealthy of their day. A Christian life is deeply meaningful, but seldom leads to excessive wealth.

Abundant life comes from an abundance of love, joy, peace and the other fruits of the spirit as enumerated in Galatians. Expressions of these gifts, it seems to me, are far more appropriate for the celebration of Mother’s Day than jewelry, appliances, and other possessions.

But the, I may not think like the rest of the world. Neither did Anna Jarvis.

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 writing from Hastings Nebraska this morning. It takes about 7 1/2 hours to drive from Rapid City to Hastings, so I left early yesterday to drive down here. I am teaching a seminar down here. Eight hours of classroom time this weekend, a month of assignments and online contact and then another weekend with eight hours of lectures and classroom experiences in June. The course is part of Cotner College’s Education for Lay Ministry program (ELM). This is the fifth time I have taught a basic Christian Education class for ELM students. I vary the lectures quite a bit from year to year, so the course remains fresh for me. The field of Christian Faith Formation is a rapidly changing area of the church’s life and my keeping up and ready to teach the course is a good investment of my time for the congregation I serve as well as for the students, most of whom will serve congregations in Nebraska.

The road trip yesterday was good for clearing my mind. From time to time I enjoy a good road trip. It has been quite a while since I have driven across the Rosebud Reservation. I get to Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River on a regular basis, but they aren’t the only indigenous communities in our state. It is worth the trip to check up on things in other places. Although Nebraska now only has only small reservations for the Santee, Omaha and Winnebago tribes and all are in the Eastern Part of the state, the land once was home to Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, Ponca, Yankton, Pawnee and other tribes.

It was good to drive through the Sandhill country as well. There is plenty of water this spring and the country was remarkably green. The great crane migration has already passed and the swans have moved north as well, but the country is beautiful and I had a wonderful spring day for my drive.

One can’t drive across central Nebraska without being aware of the great coal trains that are continually traveling across the state. The mainline across the center of the state is operated by the Burlington, Northern, and Santa Fe. The trains are loaded at the Thunder Basin Coal Mine near Wright, Wyoming. It is the largest surface coal mine in the world with 6 draglines operating as well as dozens of big shovels and nearly 150 haul trucks bringing to coal to where it is loaded onto trains that are continually in motion as they load. A typical coal train is 5 locomotives and 115 hopper cars and stretches more than a mile. The mine loads over 30 miles of coal trains every day. For all of this decade they have mined over 100,000,000 tons of coal each year, which means that about 4 tons of coal is extracted per second from the mine. The coal goes to 25 states and the permitting process is underway for a giant coal loading facility to be located in Oregon or Washington to transfer coal from trains to ocean going ships for export to Japan and China.

Driving across central Nebraska the scale and scope of the operation is evident as I passed train after train. The eastbound trains were full, the westbound trains were returning empty. Trains are crossing the state day and night to provide coal to power plants to provide electricity to cities and towns.

Trains are a relatively efficient way to move heavy loads. A train can move a ton of freight nearly 450 miles per each gallon of diesel consumed. Still, it takes tens of thousands of gallons of diesel to transport coal across several states to deliver it to the power plants.

Our desire for more and more electricity results in consuming even more fuel than just what is required for generation, because we also have to transport the fuel to the generators.

You might think that the most efficient use of the limited energy resources we have is to produce the electricity as close as possible to the mine site, thus decreasing the amount of fuel required for transport and the not insignificant amount of coal that is lost during transport. Coal is shipped in open top carriages and the coal dust blowing off the top of the cars means that the amount received by the power plant is less than the amount shipped from the mine. However, the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction. Transporting electricity through high voltage lines is not completely efficient. It seems that significant amounts of electrify are wasted through the process of transmission. Because the United States lacks a truly smart grid, the electricity is not always where it is needed. Thus power plants tend to be located nearer to the places that use the electricity. Mines tend to be in rural and isolated locations. In addition to that factor, the fuel used to generate electricity is changing in the United States. Because of air quality issues, it is unlikely that the United States will see very many new coal fired generators constructed. Natural gas is the preferred alternative for power generation. This is not the case in China and Japan. After the Fukushima disaster in Japan, that country is returning to coal as a fuel for power generation and the rapidly increasing demand for power in China combines with decreased west to east shipping costs to make coal an attractive fuel in China. The high number of consumer goods that are manufactured in China and consumed in the United States means that there are thousands of empty shipping containers in the US that have to be returned to China. Filling those containers decreases shipping costs.

The dynamics of world electricity consumption and distribution are far beyond the scope of my expertise, but the continuing flow of coal across the State of Nebraska occupied my thinking as I drove yesterday. The distraction of thinking about something other than the day to day business of the church provided a much-needed break for me.

My lectures went well last night and we have six hours of class and I have eight hours of driving on the agenda for today. Like the coal trains, I’ll be returning somewhat emptied, ready to be filled tomorrow with the joy of worshiping with my home congregation.

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

When we began our ministry in small town North Dakota, there were fewer distinctions between church life and community life. I often met with parishioners at the City Cafe for a cup of coffee and conversation that ranged from the weather to farm prices to church business to a dozen other subjects Talk of the life of the church was mixed into other conversations on a regular basis. In a similar manner, our youth ministry was, for the most part, ministry with most of the youth of the community. Although youth had primary affiliations to their own churches, an event at our church might draw Catholics, Lutherans and members of the Assembly of God and Methodist churches. In the smaller of the two towns were we served, virtually all youth ministry events were staged for all of the youth of the community. There was no attempt at proselytizing and we knew that each congregation had its own membership and confirmation programs. Actually, people switching from one congregation to another was a fairly rare occurrence. For the most part, people remained with the congregation in which they had grown up.

Members of our congregations expected us to have a high level of visibility in the public schools. We attended concerts and sports events and graduations in part because we knew and loved the youth, in part because it was expected of us. It was not an uncomfortable arrangement. We didn’t need to have rigid distinctions between when we were working and when we were not. Our identity was as important to our ministry as was the list of tasks we performed.

For some of the years that we served there, I drove school bus. Mostly i was a substitute driver and didn’t drive a single route. I did a lot of driving the activity bus for school games, field trips and other events. It being a small town, we knew all of the kids who rode on the buses and discipline simply wasn’t a problem.

When we moved to a larger city, things began to shift. In Boise, as in Rapid City, the youth in our church went to different schools. They often didn’t connect with each other outside of church events. The distinctions between churches was more rigid as well. We didn’t often have visitors from other churches and sometimes when that happened, it raised a few eyebrows. I have never felt that it was appropriate to grow the church by taking members from other congregations and I may be more sensitive to appearances than others, but I was careful to respect other congregations and their work with youth. Visiting youth in the school setting became more difficult with increased security in public schools and we learned to contact our youth in different ways. The advent of cell phones as constant companions for most youth changed how we contact and communicate news about church events and activities and keeping up with technology has become a challenge for all who work with youth.

There is a part of me that misses the school setting. So when I get the opportunity to participate in a school event, I am likely to respond positively. Freshman Impact Day at Douglas High School is a big production that requires a lot of volunteers with special skills. Even though I am very busy with church responsibilities, it seemed to be an appropriate investment of my time yesterday.

It was an intense day! Freshmen from Douglas, New Underwood, Wall, St. Thomas More and Rapid City Christian High school participated. A total of 338 9th graders went through our learning station in seven groups. They heard our presentation on suicide prevention and at least six direct referrals for counseling occurred as a result of our portion of the program.

The day focused on many choices that high school students make and has information on many potential dangers they face. There were learning stations where youth experienced fatal vision goggles, fire and medical rescue operations, sexually transmitted diseases, suicide prevention and responsible help, seatbelt education, texting and driving, a rollover simulator, youth leadership, and drug and alcohol abuse. About half of the day was dedicated to an elaborate simulation of a youth party scene, followed by a drunk driving accident with injuries and fatalities. there were wrecked cars int he the parking lot, with youth with simulated injuries, real ambulances and police officers responded to the accident with the teens watching. They filed by a closed casket, and witnessed a simulated sentencing hearing before a real judge for the drunk driver.

There was a presentation by a young adult who had been convicted of vehicular homicide about the series of bad decisions and wrong choices that brought him to his fatal accident.

Seeing their peers play roles in the process was and emotional experience for youth and even for the adults who work with them.

I suppose that the process might be considered by some to be emotional manipulation.But the whole point of impact is to reach the students in places where they can learn. Without them being both intellectually and emotionally engaged, the required learning might not take place. In group after group the majority of the youth present had first hand experience with someone who had died by suicide. In group after group 30 to 50 percent of the youth said that they had no adult that they could trust if they had a serious problem. The reality is that there is much in the culture of our high schools that is a recipe for disaster. Teaching youth the numbers of suicide prevention services and hotlines might be critical to saving a life. Referring youth with problems to appropriate help is literally a life-saving maneuver.

Police officers, firemen and emergency medical technicians save lives in visible and direct ways. We who are suicide prevention advocates do our work in less visible and sometimes in ways where we cannot know the results of our work. But we are all engage in saving lives and that is what freshman Impact is all about.

From my point of view, it was a worthy investment of my time. I hope it was a day that the freshmen will remember.

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 probably isn’t going to make much of a splash in United States media, but it seems worth noting that Farley Mowat passed away yesterday just one week shy of his 93rd birthday after a remarkable life. Canadians are more likely to recognize the name and not his passing. But there are a significant number of us who don’t live in Canada who are nonetheless fascinated by the north country. For some of us, travel to remote and isolate locations may never occur, so we make our journeys into the lands of the Cree and Inuit and other people of the north by reading the writings of others. Mowat made his first trip above the arctic circle at the age of 18 and traveled extensively across much of Canada’s north country.

And the wrote and wrote - more than 40 books sold more than 17 million copies in 52 different languages. Perhaps most famous of his books is a work of fiction called Never Cry Wolf. The book is credited with shifting public opinion in Canada away from the irrational fear of wolves.Critics noted that the book is not a work of science. Mowat noted that the fear of wolves also came from a work of fiction: “Little Red Riding Hood.”

I don’t think it came from the debate over wolves but one of my favorite quotes of Farley Mowat comes from one of many environmental debates in which he engaged. He is reported to have said, “Never let the facts get in the way of the truth.” I suppose it is just another way of saying “Anyone can lie using statistics,” but it has such a noble and poetic ring to it. I keep looking for the opportunity to use the quote in the midst of a discussion or debate.

Mowat served int he Canadian Army in Britain, Sicily and the Netherlands during the Second World War, entering the service as a 2nd Lieutenant and retiring as a Captain after the war in Europe was concluded.

After the war he became vocal as a spokesperson for the Ihalmuit, a Carabou Inuit band whose lives and way of life were threatened by a total lack of understanding by European settlers in Canada. He penned People of the Deer, which became a best seller and still provides a view of a group of people not widely known south of the arctic circle. After receiving great literary acclaim for that book, the stories continued to follow. He wrote of Newfoundland, where he lived for eight years. He wrote about Viking voyageurs who came to the North American continent. He even wrote a biography of Dian Fossey. He wrote for children and teens and adults.

He was more than a storyteller.

It was Elie Wiesel who once said, “Sometimes in order to tell the truth you have to tell a story.” Like Wiesel, Mowat seemed to understand that perspective is incredibly important when trying to communicate a message. It takes far more than a list of facts to convey the truth of a situation. Mowat excelled in seeing life as a story.

Four major themes seem to have emerged in Mowat’s contribution to literature: World War II, environmental concerns and advocacy, the earliest interactions between Europeans and Americans, and life in the far north.

The story of a writer, of course, never ends with the person’s death. Some writers who are very famous and well-known during their lifetimes become obscure quickly upon their death. The subjects of their writing belong to a specific time and place and their words are quickly forgotten after the span of their lives. Other writers are obscure for all of their lives and their words are discovered and become popular only after their death. I suppose that every writer wants simplKy to contribute something of lasting value - some story or set of words that is worth reading more than once.

I have a sense that Mowat’s books will continue to be popular for many years to come. We always have a need for a reasonable perspective on the events of our past that make us who we are. The world was shaped by the events of the Second World War. The interactions between indigenous and newcomers in Canada givs us a perspective on native/non-native relationships that is helpful for understanding our culture and identity.

And some of us are always up for a good adventure story. There is something about the far north that stirs the imagination. Not everyone appreciates the poetic style of Robert Service, but his adventure poems tell fascinating stories. More interesting are the stories of Margaret Murie, Nancy Lord, Nick Jans, John McPhee, Seth Kantner and John Sayles. It seems like I can never get enough stories of people who defy the odds and learn to survive in a harsh environment where life requires incredible self-reliance and courage. Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer certainly ranks up there with other great writers of the far north.

The book is a tragedy. In 1886, the Ihalmuit people numbered seven thousand. In 1952, when Mowat wrote People of the Deer there were only 40 left. The destruction of the indigenous cultures of North America is a tragedy. For the Ihalmuit, the were able to endure bleak, interminable winters, to suffer shortages of food, and to travel huge distances by food and kayak. But they couldn’t survive the devastation of outsiders bent on exploiting their land and and its animals.

It is a story that we dare not forget, lest we fail to understand who we are and how we came into the possession of the land that we call our own. Mowat has told the story in a way that is unforgettable and, I suspect, even more than Never Cry Wolf, People of the Deer is his most enduring book.

He lived a full life and shared a long marriage with his wife, Claire. But none of us can go on forever and the time has now come for him to die.

His words and his passion, however, continue to enrich the lives of others and will do so for decades 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.

Keeping up with the practice of writing about a topic where I have no expertise, there have been some interesting happenings in the world of art lately. There was a rare painting by Claud Monet, one of his series of paintings of water lilies. It has rarely been seen. The painting was completed in 1907 and was displayed in various venues put until 1926. It was then acquired by a private collector and put up for sale in 1930. It was purchased by Huguette Clark. I don’t know the price it brought at the time, but Clark could afford it. Her father was a billionaire - a rare feat in those days. He was one of Montana’s copper barons and served as Senator from my home state. He was also an art collector. His daughter was only 23 when she purchased the Monet.

When the father died in 1925 he had left his art collection to the Corcoran Art Museum in Washington, DC. Later his daughter helped to pay for an addition to the building, located near the White House, to display her father’s art collection.

Meanwhile the Monet was hung in a sitting room in one of three apartments that Huguette owned in New york City. She also owned homes in Greenwich, Conn. and Santa Barbara, Calif. She apparently had a somewhat quirky personality that continued to become more so as she aged. She had no children, but lived to the age of 104, dying in 2011. Much of the last 20 years of her life was spent in a nursing home. She was known for writing huge checks to her caregivers, a practice the led others to question her judgment. When she died, it was revealed that she signed two distinctly different wills within six weeks of each other in 2005.

The result was a kind of legal brawl. More than 15 law firms joined int he battle over her $300 million estate. Last fall a settlement was reached. Last night her Monet went on the auction block along with 3 Renoirs and 50 other works of art by Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Giacometti and Dali.

The Monet, with a value estimated at between $25 million to $35 million, sold for $24 million plus a $3 million buyer’s premium that goes to the auction house. The terms of the estate specified that the Corcoran would share in the proceeds if the painting brought more than $25 million, so the art museum didn’t get any of the proceeds. No worries, the Corcoran received $11.25 million in cash from the estate.

Thje buyer is listed simply as “Asian private.” No further details were released, but at this time it appears that the painting is heading for another place where few will get to see it. It seems a bit sad to me. I have had the opportunity to see Monet paintings several times at the Art Institute of Chicago.

It seems like some paintings simply belong in museums where more people are able to see them. On the other hand the really big sums of money are in the hands of private collectors and one way that museums raise funds is to sell works of art to private collectors.

Other issues around private art collections have come to light in the recent death of Cornelius Gurlitt. The 81-year-old son of an art dealer had a private collection of more than 1,400 works, including pieces by Picasso and Matisse. The works were kept in two homes that Gurlitt owned, one in Munich and the other in Salzburg. Gurlitt went to his grave denying that any of the works were looted from victims of Nazi persecution, but several groups have claimed otherwise. Gurlitt, whose father was said to be a friend of Adolph Hiltler, refused to release an inventory of the paintings to the public during his life.

His death may set off another round of lawyers fighting lawyers to see who gets control of the pieces of art. Gurlitt’s collection might even top Clark’s battle of 15 law firms. Don’t expect a settlement anytime soon.

The predictions had been that art prices would be up this spring, but Christie’s first spring sale, which featured the Clark paintings, marked lower than expected prices. Two works by Degas were left unsold. Whether the estimates were too high or the bidding too low, the reserves were not met and the works were not sold. That isn’t to say that there is no money to be made on the art market. A Modiogliani portrait that sold for $8.4 million in 2002 was sold for $17.6 million last night - not a bad return on investment.

The sale last night was clearly dominated by Asian private bidders, especially from mainland Chiina. The $285.9 million dollar sale transferred a signifiant amount of cash from China and a significant amount of artwork to China. Artwork travels all the time. There are a lot of works of European artists in the United States. I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that a portion of the wealth of China is being invested in art. Still, one cannot help but hope that some of the pieces will find their way from private collators to public museums where they can be viewed rather than tucked away.

An example is a Renoir painting from around 1887. It had been in the private collection of Mrs. Clark who purchased in in 1958 for $125,000 from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She did, however, loan it to the Corcoran, where it was on display. A single buyer paid $10 million ($11.3 million with fees). Once again it leaves a gallery for a private owner. Perhaps this owner will one day be generous to loan it to a museum.

I didn’t attend the auction. I didn’t phone in any bids, either. It seemed a bit beyond my means. I’ve got some pottery by Jeanne Berry in my private collection and an original Peggy Lynn acrylic painting. The total value of my art collection may be approaching $500. But the Lynn painting is on loan at the moment. Art belongs out in the public where it can be seen.

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

I’m not too good with languages. I studied Latin in high school, French in college and Hebrew in seminary. I took a single class in Greek and can sometimes decode that language with the proper lexicon at my side. I have been through an elementary Spanish course in an audio format and my travels in Costa Rica have given me a bit more of that language. I have taken some lessons in Lakota, but not enough to know more than a few individual words. I would not judge myself to be fluent in any language except English and regular readers of this blog will know that even that language is a challenge for me at times.

I do, however, read a lot and because I read the news from other countries, I get a smattering of foreign language words from the things I read.

I’m no expert in languages, but I’m pretty sure that Ali Iezid Izz-Edim Ibn Salim Hank Maiba Tahan is not a traditional Portuguese name. Even in tis shortened form Maiba Tahan doesn’t have the lilt of the official language of Brazil.

In the headlines of most newspapers Brazil is most noted for sports these days. There are numerous articles about Brazil hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup for fans of Soccer and Brazil will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. If you press folks for what they know about Brazil they might remark about Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue. They might speak of Samba and parties and the reputation of the country as a place to go on vacation.

I’m not sure how many people realize that today, May 6, is the National Day of Mathematics in Brazil - a holiday that begins with a story set in 13th Century Persia: “"In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, The Most Merciful! I was on the Baghdad road, returning at my camel's slow pace from an excursion to the famous city of Samarra, on the banks of the Tigris, when I saw a modestly dressed traveller, sitting on a rock, who looked like he was recuperating from a voyage.”

The traveller is Beremiz Samir - a Persian mathematician - who joins the narrator on a journey that involves dozens of episodes in which he solves problems using his skill with numbers. Thus begins the second book by Maiba Tahan. The first, published in 1925, was written in Arbic and translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market. The book was a huge success and was followed up in 1932 by one of the most successful books ever published in Brazil: “O Homem que Calculava” (The Man Who Counted).

The rest, as we say, is history. The tales of the travels of Persian mathematician Beremiz Samir are to the Portuguese like One Thousand and One Nights (known also as the Arabian Nights) are to readers of English. The somewhat exotic tales of adventures with viziers and camels, sheiks and princes and kings and traveling Bedouins captured the imaginations of Brazilians.

In one tale the mathematician impresses a Vizier with an unusual way of counting camels - he counts the number of hooves and ears, then divides by six. The camels are to be a gift for the father of the Vizieer’s 16-year-old wife-to-be. The mathematician notices that one camel is missing one ear and suggests that the camel be culled from the herd. That would leave a herd of 256 animals, a far better gift, noted the mathematician. 257 is a prime number whereas 256 is the square of 16 - the square of the age of the beloved - a mathematical perfection as a gift to the father.

In another tale, he solves “magic boxes” prepared by a calligrapher. We would recognize the magic boxes as Sudoko puzzles requiring simple arithmetic to solve.

The stories made Maiba Tahan famous in Brazil. There was just one problem. Maiba Tahan never existed. The books had never been written in Arabic and translated. They had been written in Portuguese in the first place by a Rio de Janeiro math teacher named Julio Cesar de Melio e Souza, who never set foot in the Middle East. The book was, in a sense, a literary hoax. Only the publisher knew the identity of the author for years and by then his books were so popular that it didn’t make any difference.

He went on to write more than 100 books that sold more than a million copies. Most of his books had an arithmetic or mathematical theme and most were set in Islamic Middle East, though he also wrote stories about rabbis, Greeks, Chinese and Babylonians. The Man Who Counted is the most famous and was translated (for real this time) into Spanish, English, and German. The book is still in print and available worldwide.

Melio e Souza died in 1974. He was called the “Brazilian of Arabia” and the “Pele of numbers.” He never became a fan of soccer, or football as it is known in Brazil. He found it “a bit boring.” Maths, islam and collecting ceramic toy frogs were his passion.

And now his birthday, May 6, is the National Day of Mathematics in Brazil. It is an annual celebration of mathematics and those who teach math to students. It seems an appropriate honor for the man who arguably became the most successful math teacher of his generation. By using a pseudonym and tales of an exotic foreign land he inspired countless people to solve mathematical puzzels.

His greatest asset, however, wasn’t his ability to solve mathematical problems and to craft ingenious mathematical games and puzzles. His greatest asset was his imagination. A man who can write eloquently about a place he has never visited deserves to be remembered long beyond the span of his life. He didn’t travel much. He left Brazil only twice, once to visit Portugal and another time to visit Argentina.

His imagination took him much farther than his physical travels. And his imagination continues to carry us beyond the confines of our own geography.

Happy Day of Mathematics. If you aren’t in Brazil, use your imagination!

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 hardly ever go to movies. That isn’t a boast, just a brief detail about how I choose to spend my time. I’ve seen some movies that I enjoyed and I understand the power of the media to tell a story. But for the most part, I find it much easier to suspend disbelief and get into a story when reading a novel. There is something about the setting of a movie theatre and the tendency of American movies to be filled with fantastic special effects and annoying product placements that gets my mind to wandering. Instead of getting into the story on the screen, I have a tendency to turn into a critic, aware of how the entire process is made up and, to me, fake.

So if you love movies, you should solicit someone else’s opinion. I really don’t know what I am talking about when it comes to movies. I read reviews and then decide not to go to the movie after all. I think that people who actually watch movies might be a better source of information about them than I.

But people ask me my opinion about movies all the time. I think it is because they assume that I must watch as many movies as a typical person my age in this community. Most of the time I simply admit that I haven’t seen the movie. Occasionally, when I am asked often enough, I go to the movie and watch it. When I do, I am usually disappointed and find myself in an even more difficult situation. Then when someone asks my opinion of a movie that was deeply meaningful to them I respond with less enthusiasm and probably a bit of skepticism. Sometimes it is better for a person who loves a movie to hear that I haven’t seen it than to hear my criticism of a movie they enjoyed.

One of the movies I have been asked about a great deal lately is the Sony release, “Heaven is for Real.” I haven’t seen the movie and I am not particularly eager to see it, but several people have asked me what I think about it.

Here are a few things that I know. A four-years-old boy in Nebraska had emergency surgery and during his surgery he had a near death experience that was very real to him. In the months following his surgery, he had many conversations with his dad about what had happened. He was able to describe his experience with enough detail and clarity to inspire his father. Of special interest to his father were details such as the description of a great grandfather who died 30 years before the boy was born, that the child had not known before his experience.

I have no reason to doubt that what happened to the boy was a genuine religious experience. His reporting his experience to his father also was likely a genuine religious experience for the father. I suspect that the experiences of son and father might have inspired many people had they told the story first hand and then perhaps the father fashioned a sermon or two in which he told the story and reflected upon it.

But that isn’t what happened. I don’t know the process that occurred for sure, but somehow, probably through the publisher Thomas Nelson, a company that is owned by Word, Inc. a conglomerate of companies that is expert in marketing to conservative Christian audiences, the father got together with Lynn Vincent, a professional writer who published a New York Times best selling book in 2008 and has been for years a “go to” co-author for conservative writers. There is no small amount of partisan politics and bias in here writing. She has a point of view and she expresses it.

The co-authored book was an immediate commercial success. It went to the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. It spawned a host of related products, including children’s books, computer applications, and spectacular stadium events. It produced a lot of profit quickly and some of the profits were invested in ancillary products and activities that in turn were successful.

Sony motion pictures knows a good thing when they see it and they paid a lot of money to obtain the rights to make a movie based on the book. The movie was released in mid-April and has been a box office success. A movie edition of the book is selling well, with pictures from the film illustrating the original co-authored text.

Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but I have read that Sony did a great job of product placement, having the little boy in the movie emotionally attached to his Spiderman toy.

To summarize. A child has a genuine experience. He tells his story to his father, whose own faith is strengthened and expanded by sharing his son’s experience. The father writes up his experiences and submits the book to a publisher. The publisher senses potential profit and hires a successful professional author to re-write the story into a best-selling book. The book is picked up by a movie studio that knows how to make money and they work their magic on it. It is all successful. The story reaches an audience that is far bigger than a four-year-old’s report could have otherwise reached.

But I can’t help but wonder if anything in the movie bears the slightest resemblance to the actual experiences of the boy. Would the boy even recognize himself and his experience in the movie? Will he even be able to tell as an adult which had the greater impact on him: his surgical experiences, or the wealth that followed?

Of course those questions aren’t for me to answer. I tend to be a bit immune to the emotional impact of movies and I am a bit too skeptical to be a good movie critic.

Heaven is for real. I’ve got no argument with that. But I’m not sure that the way heaven is portrayed in the movie has any connection to the reality of God’s love that never dies. I wonder if it has any connection to the experiences of the boy whose story it purports to tell. I hope that those who find the movie inspiring discover a faith that is deeper than momentary emotional manipulation.

I guess I’m just more inspired by the stories of the people I meet than I am by a multi-million dollar box office sensation.

But you really shouldn’t turn to me for advice on which movies to see.

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 no question that our church is changing. We are especially aware of the rate of change in our congregation during this season of Easter as we continue to have a larger than usual number of funerals. Our beloved elders are passing and our congregation will need to turn to the leadership of a new generation to move into the places that God is calling us to go. Change can be both energizing and frightening. I see both sides of it in our congregation as we travel through this season of our lives together. There are people who respond to the rapid pace of change by waxing nostalgic about the past. Some even try to reclaim the past by suggesting that we go back to some of the old ways of doing business. They find comfort in the songs and stories and events of their childhood. There is truth in what they say. We do belong to the past and we are shaped by the events and people of the past. We ignore the past at our own peril.

There is nothing, however, that can be done to go back to the way things were. While we are surrounded by the witnesses of the past and immersed in the results of the events of the past, the future always beckons. We belong to our own era and the leadership of the church in this generation falls on our shoulders.

Change, however, can be exciting and energizing. I am struck by how dramatic the effects a gentle remodeling of our fellowship hall have been. For more than 50 years the fellowship hall of our church looked essential the same. Metal folding chairs on a tile floor in a large room with block walls and a high ceiling. There was a booming echo to the sound int he room. It was typical of late 1950’s and early 1960’s construction. In some ways our sanctuary has a timeless look, but the fellowship hall dated our building each time you entered it. Then, last year, we painted the walls, hung quilts, and capered the room. The room was transformed. Sounds softened. People sit at round tables to share fellowship and refreshments. The colors are more contemporary. And we began to use the room in different ways. A projection system at one end of the room offers a great place to view video presentations and have study group meetings. We set up our stage and theatrical lighting for concerts and special events. There are different sizes and shape of tables that can be arranged in different ways for different events. We find ourselves choosing that room for more meetings and gatherings.

Critical to a season of change is honing the skill of listening to each other. It is a continuing challenge of life in the church. As I seek to provide leadership for the congregation, I am reminded of a small volume by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who died in a Nazi prison. He died before I was born. But the small volume, “Life Together,” continues to be a source of inspiration for many as we think of forming community.

Bonhoeffer wrote: “The first service that one owes to others in fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as God beings with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us his Word but also lends His ear.”

So often we think of the job of evangelism and outreach as a ministry of speaking. We feel a need to tell the story of our church - to let people know what we are doing - to proclaim the good news we have found in our life together. We forget that many of the people who come to us are looking for an ear that will listen - truly listen to what they have to say.

I place listening among the other spiritual practices that require our attention. Perhaps it is especially dangerous for a preacher to fail to engage in this practice. Because part of what we do is speak, we sometimes feel that we need to be prepared to speak at any moment. We keep words dancing in our heads ready to come out at a moment’s notice. When I was a student, I saw several awkward conversations at gatherings of ministers trying to figure out who would offer a table grace or another prayer. I resolved that I would always say “yes” when another person asked me to lead prayer. I have tried to keep that resolution. But doing so means that I always have to be thinking about what I will say. It is only many decades later that I have found that sometimes the best prayer is a moment of silence - an invitation to listen. Often I have to lay aside the things I was planning to say in order to be fully present to another and to truly listen to what is being said.

Good words can become only so much chatter when I am talking beside the point. Speaking meaningful words requires that I hone the skill of listening. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.”

It is a challenge for me as I prepare to lead worship. Have I invested enough time listening to really have something to say to these people? Do I understand their stories well enough to discern the connection with the Gospel story? Like many others I am tempted, when I get busy, to focus on the tasks I am accomplishing and the activities I am pursuing and forget that the only thing that separates me from a life of selfishness and my own follies is the investment in listening.

In a season of change, I must be willing to listen to those who react in fear as well as those who respond with excitement. I must be willing to listen to those who wax nostalgic and also those who dream big. True leadership may lie more in the quality of the listening than in the words that are said.

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.

Determining distances for some biblical locations is a bit of a challenge. Where the actual locations of events are known it is sometimes as simple as measuring the distance between two known contemporary locations. In other cases, time has erased the landmarks and we don’t know the exact location of Biblical sites. In the case of the report near the end of the Gospel of Luke of two disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, we do, of course, know the location of Jerusalem. The location of Emmaus is a slightly different matter.

First of all, the story is only reported in Luke. Although a similar story is in the longer ending to Mark, it is widely accepted that the longer ending is a later addition derived from the gospel of Luke. There is also a reference to an Emmaus in 1 Maccabees, which would come from within a couple of centuries of the Gosspel story and therefore might represent a reference to the same town. Over the years, many sites have been suggested for a possible location of the town. The name Emmaus means warm springs, and there are several different areas with warm springs. One of the keys to the identification of the location is that the report in Luke gives the distance of the walk of the disciples. That, in turn, is a bit of a challenge, because the Greek text reports the distance in stadia (sometimes translated leagues) and there are different definitions of the length of a stadia. What we do know is that the disciples were walking a distance that could be covered in a single day and most scholars agree that the distance was somewhere between 10.4 and 12 km (roughly between 6 and 7 miles).

The distance isn’t excessive. There are plenty of people who have active jobs such as package delivery, some warehouse work, and the like where they walk that much each day. It is an easy day’s journey for backpackers except in the most rugged terrain.

I plan to walk about half that distance this morning. It will give me an opportunity to think more about the disciples’ experience. It is one of the keys to understanding resurrection. And resurrection is not an easy concept to grasp.

I will be walking with friends and fellow survivors of suicide in the annual Front Porch Coalition 5K walk and fun run. I’ll leave the running to others this year.It is a gentle and beautiful walk from Old Storybook Island to Canyon Lake Park and back. Some years I walk to the end of the path at Cleghorn Canyon adding another bit to the walk. It is an opportunity to talk with other survivors, to remember the ones who have died, and to raise a few dollars for suicide prevention. This is the 12th year of our local walk and I’ve participated every year, though a couple of years I didn’t walk. I prefer to walk over having other assignments, but volunteers are needed for all kinds of tasks.

If the two hours that I walk are typical, there will be approximately 10 deaths by suicide in the United States while I am walking. Each of those persons will leave behind devastating grief, stigma, and a host of unsolved questions for family members and friends. Each will represent another failure of our system of mental health care to deliver the care needed. Suicide is the fourth most common cause of death among U.S. adults, though you will find that statistic hard to find because it is often excluded from lists of causes of death. It is a public health issue that does not discriminate by age, gender, ethnicity or socio-economic status.

The annual walk, however, is not about wallowing in grief or dwelling in sadness. The event is filled with joyful reunions of friends, gentle conversation and a sense of having a good time. It is about hope that is stronger than grief, life that is stronger than death. We walk because we believe that we can make a difference. We walk because we believe that many suicides can be prevented.

It is very much like the walk of Jesus’ disciples. They started in the dark and gloomy thoughts of the death of Jesus, the rumors over the disappearance of his body, the devastation of lives torn asunder and dreams dashed. The future wasn’t working out the way they had imagined. They didn’t know what to do next, or where to turn. They were heading out of the city to get away from all that had happened, but the sadness of the previous days dominated their thought as they walked. You can tell it in their answer to Jesus’ question about their conversation.

Understanding resurrection does not come easily. A day of walking and talking and they were nearing their destination without recognition of the reality that was in their midst. It was only when they stopped walking and shared a meal that their eyes were opened and they recognized the risen Christ.

So we walk and then share light refreshments and conversation in the park. The distance between despair and hope is sometimes bigger than a physical obstacle.

In our life as a church, we travel through the 50 days of the season of Easter every year. It takes time and repetition for us to come to grips with a very complex and important reality of the nature of life. Love wins! Life is stronger than death. Death is not the end of the meaning, the purpose, or the dignity of human life. It is challenging to embrace fully the intellectual truth and emotional reality of resurrection. So we repeat the process every year.

And I walk every year. I’ll keep doing it for as long as I am able. I dream of the day when we no longer need to raise funds for suicide awareness and prevention. I dream of a day when the number of families devastated by suicide is much smaller. But I also walk because once suicide has touched your life it is always a part of your story. You don’t get over the death of a loved one. You get through it. Sometimes that takes a lot of walking.

These days I look forward to the walk.

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 will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I often don’t see things the way others do. I’ve been mulling the right answer to make to an e-mail for a couple of days, now. I know that e-mail is supposed to be instant and that one ought ot respond right away, but e-mail can also be harsh and sometimes delaying an answer can make the answer more kind and caring. When I am puzzled or having an emotional reaction, I am learning to use those events as a sign that a small delay might make my response more compassionate.

The note wa absolutely well-meaning, offering sympathy for the many deaths that our congregation has experienced in recent weeks. It is true that we have been traveling through an unprecedented season of grief. The looses in our congregation have been real and hard to take. There is no shortage of grief in our congregation. And the losses have been relentless. They keep coming. There is a funeral today and another on Monday, and there are other members of the congregation facing grave illness and making end-of-life decisions.

My reaction, however, has not been one of depression and despair. I don’t feel at the end of my rope. In the first place, the church is a wonderfully supportive community that has deep experience with grief and with reaching out to others. The task of offering comfort in the midst of loss is assumed across the width and depth of the congregation. Some people visit those who are ill, others bring food when it is needed, others volunteer for jobs within the church to support grieving families. We have ushers and hosts and those who prepare food. When I visit a grieving family I almost always run into another member of the congregation who is making a visit with equal care and concern. This may be a season of grief, but we are not alone in our grief.

The writer of the note appropriately referred to a psalm of lament. Knowing that we are not the first generation of God’s faithful people to experience the pain of loss can be reassuring and I have read lament Psalms myself at funerals and with the congregation as we travel through especially hard times. But frankly, I haven’t been dwelling in the Psalms very much these days. Part of it is that grief work takes a lot of energy. I’ve been feeling tired frequently during this journey. And poetry is, for me, a literary form that takes a bit of focus and energy. I never read myself to sleep in a book of poetry. I reserve poetry for times when I can pay attention. So it may be exhaustion that keeps me from diving into the poetry of psalms and prophets right now.

Instead, I have been reveling in the Easter texts, especially the prophets. The stories of Mary at the tomb, of Tomas and the disciples in the upper room, and the disciples journeying to Emmaus with Jesus all are sources of energy and strength. I love the transition that takes place in Jesus’ friends as they experience resurrection. Almost none of them recognize Jesus right away. Resurrection is not the same as resuscitation. Jesus is transformed by the experience of death and resurrection and so too is the community. These stories open up a whole new future - one that could not be imagined before Jesus’ death. The readings of this season are so rich with hope that I find it impossible to dwell in despair for much time at all.

My “go to” section of scripture this week has been the 11th and 12th chapters of the letter to the Hebrews. Chapter 11 is an eloquent and succinct account of the history of Israel. Hero after hero of the faith is named and celebrated. It could almost be read as a catalogue of fallen leaders. It is a list of those who have died. The writer is not unaware of the past.

But if you continue reading into the 12th chapter there is a wonderful and exciting transition at the cusp between the two chapters. Having acknowledge the past, dwelling in a deep awareness of those who have died, the author turns our attention to the future. “Since, therefore we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. . . .”

The future is calling us and the path to the future is a course for us that will demand our highest and best and more than a small amount of grit. It is a challenge, perhaps the challenge of a lifetime. We didn’t choose the path - it is a curriculum - a racecourse designed to test our skills and abilities - and it is set before us.

And like the journey of grief, we do not run this race alone. We have one who has gone before. We are following in the footsteps of our pioneer.

Those disciples on the road to Emmaus were not denied the expression of their grief and confusion. The stranger they meet on the road allows them to tell their story - in fact he asks the question that gets them talking. But while they dwelt in their grief they could not recognize their companion. Even as they struggled to make sense of what had happened, as he taught them all about how their experience fit into the teachings of scripture, as they felt their hearts warmly stirred, they could not recognize what was really happening.

It was only through the sacrament - through the act of giving thanks, breaking bread and sharing - that their eyes were opened and they saw what had been true all along. Theirs was not the story of death and loss and grief only. Theirs was the story of resurrection and new life.

They had thought that they stood at the end of the story and suddenly realized that they were at the beginning of a much bigger story.

So I will continue to pray and I will find words as gentle and kind as I am able to respond to the writer of the note. And I won’t forget the past. But I for one am encouraged by the vision of the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who goes ahead and reminds us that this course we travel leads to a destination worth all of the perseverance we can muster.

Onward!

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.

Over the millennia, people have prayed to God from many different places. Moses seemed to prefer the top of a mountain, Jesus is said to have gone off to a “lonely place” to pray. Incredible efforts have been invested in building monasteries and cathedrals to be places of prayer. I know that God shows no preference in listening to prayers. The prayers uttered from urban slums and remote locations are as honored as are the prayers uttered from pulpits and places of power. I have prayed in many different locations. When I was a teen and a young adult, I had a preference for our church camp in the Mountains in south central Montana. When we lived in Chicago, I was probably more at home walking along the lakeshore as in the big urban churches. Our seminary had a small chapel that was a favorite place of mine, but I also learned to pray from our tiny apartment and even the cubicles in the library. Location doesn’t matter very much when you are praying.

The somewhat recent revival of some Celtic traditions has brought with it an increased awareness of thin spaces, where it seems that one is closer to God than other locations. God, of course, is equally close no matter where the prayer originates. God is with those who are in prison and those who make pilgrimages to places of prayer. But we humans are not always equally aware of God’s presence and action in our lives. Sometimes going to a special place to pray can increase our awareness of God.

Yesterday afternoon I slipped down to the basement of our church for my prayers.

Our church is mostly built on one level. Our basement is partial, under just a bit of the building. It was constructed specifically to contain mechanical systems to support the building. One large room contains the air handlers for the heating systems for the sanctuary and fellowship hall. Around the edges are some shelves that provide a bit of storage and a few areas where we can place items that are temporarily not in use. The second room in our basement is the boiler room. Our building is heated with a single large boiler that is placed in its own room with thick concrete walls that would contain any possible explosion from a situation of over pressure in the boiler. The boiler is equipped with all kinds of safety mechanisms to prevent an explosion and is inspected annually, so there is little danger, but the room was constructed to comply with building codes and sports a large red shutoff button outside the steel door. The boiler room can be accessed through a doorway from the other room in our basement or through a steel exterior door that leads to a set of outdoor stairs.

Along the wall in the boiler room is a small work bench with a chair. There is a toolbox under the bench and a pegboard with a clutter of hand tools, wires, tape and other items. A utility sink is next to the workbench and there is a cabinet with small drawers for tiny parts and shelve filled with all kinds of repair items from parts for the outdoor sprinkler systems to plumbing fittings and electrical boxes. There is even a small rocker-recliner sitting on the bare concrete floor. It is rather typical of a church basement and reminds me a great deal of the basement work area that I occupied when I was the janitor-handyman in a city church in Chicago while I attended seminary. It is just the right balance of clutter and organization, comfort and utility.

For years we have called that part of the room “Dick’s office.” Over the years that I have served as pastor a string of dedicated volunteers have spend countless hours in that space working on projects and organizing the general maintenance of the boiler, air handlers, pumps and motors that keep our building going. It has been the place of Reuben and Oscar and many others. But in recent years it has been Dick’s office. Dick often would come to volunteer at the church most days of the week. On Mondays when our administrator is often the only employee in the building, Dick would stop by the office for coffee and a chat. He’d drop by my office at least once a week to explain something that needed repair, ask for authorization for a small expenditure, or seek advice on funding a more major project.

Dick was a “doer.” I often would find him digging in the church yard to repair sprinklers when I arrived at the church on a summer morning. I often get to the church early, but it wasn’t unusual to find Dick hard at work before 7 am. Dick volunteered for all kinds of mission projects and work days and other adventures. One of the treasures of my memory are the trips that I took with Dick in my pickup to deliver firewood. I especially enjoyed driving home from Wanblee through the badlands with Dick. He had worked as a telephone installer and he knew where every dirt road in the region led and had stories of the people who lived there and the challenges of providing telephone service to people in remote and isolated locations.

I didn’t sit in the soft char as I prayed yesterday, though I know it would have invited me. I chose, instead, a small metal stool, salvaged from a rummage sale, sitting by the wall. Sometimes I used to sit on that stool and talk to Dick while he sat in the other chair. He would occasionally take a short nap in that chair, but was rather embarrassed if I came down and found him sleeping. Dick’s hearing aids didn’t always work properly and I occasionally unintentionally surprised him.

An aggressive and fast-acting cancer ended Dick’s life yesterday after a period of intense pain and discomfort. He simply got to the point where his body wouldn’t let him go on any longer. It happened faster than we expected and caught us a bit off guard.

Sometimes the best way to feel close to God is to go to the places that we associate with those whose lives have been received by God as complete. There is no doubt in my mind that Dick’s office is a holy place and as good a place for prayer as the fanciest chapel. I don’t expect many brides will chose it as the location for their weddings, but it would be a great place for a men’s Bible study.

Sometimes the strange ideas that come to my mind are just that: strange ideas. Sometimes they are the seeds of new life that God is planting. I think I’ll do some more praying form Dick’s office in the days and weeks 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.